Saturday 17
You leave those brilliant times when everything seems to belong to you, where nothing is beyond us or alien to us. But, slowly, you learn of others’ gravity, learn of the foolish resistance of things; becoming aware can take all of a lifetime, and you can never know how much there is to learn. The presence of others is a limitation that you must understand as well. Now, here in this house on Calle Olavarría, Alberto Cedrón and Raúl Escari persist in their way of being; they read, silent, and yet I feel myself being observed, as though everything I did had something to do with them.
Chaos is maintained. I took an amphetamine but cannot drive myself to work and waver between the article for the magazine and the nouvelle. I go from one side to the other, doing nothing.
What matters? Everything has the same end. Exerting yourself to prove to yourself and others that you have talent. Why? What is it for?
I am more intrigued than “arrested.” I search for an escape like someone on a sinking ship who imagines an exit. I try to understand what is happening to me. In this way, I turn, submerged, looking for the window that will take me to the open air.
What to do? What single, definitive act can cut this circuit? There is nothing—that is, no one ever knows what is really happening. We can only invent reasons and motives for ourselves. Now, Inés is here and she bothers me too.
Sunday, July 18
It is four in the morning. I spent the night thinking. Everything I think is useless. I go around in circles in the void. How to leave here? Where to begin?
You have to begin from below, not with humility, but with pride.
Tuesday
“It was academic at first. I wrote of silences, nights, I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigos,” Rimbaud.
Inés that night on the sofa. Then we went out to walk and drink beer in the open air.
Thursday
Getting up at noon, going out to the street and seeing the other people like sleepwalkers. The things that must be done (pay the phone bill, shave, write letters) are a superficial organization of personal experience. Today, I want to finish the article for the magazine. Then I have to think about the publishing house. Writing the notes to intersperse between the short stories and articles. I make a note of this here to indicate the constancy of my dedication to wasting time.
Friday
The police took Cacho. They were playing dice in Acapulco, in Maipú and Lavalle—Horacio, Adolfo, Costa, and him. A robbery-and-theft commission came; it only took them away. Someone betrayed them. I spent the day with Bimba looking for an attorney to bring a habeas corpus appeal. We don’t know the police precinct where he is detained and expect the worst.
Saturday
The truth of a story depends on the circumstantial details that seem to serve no purpose. The dull sound of a falling body. Then the blurry image of a pile of rags moving in the darkness.
Sunday, August 1
I write the whole night through. I complete “El calabozo” and then, for the excitement and drive of my own writing, I write another short story, “Vértigo.” It is nine thirty in the morning and I was able to write two stories in a night.
Monday
If I analyze the night between Saturday and Sunday, referring to the two stories written almost at the same time, I am able to discover the means by which they were made. On the one hand, the natural facility for breaking narrative time and avoiding dead points and situations that have no meaning; on the other hand, narrating what is taking place, allowing the prose to be defined as the plot.
Saturday, August 7
Cacho got out of jail today. We waited for him at the door of the police station here in La Plata. He appeared at the end of the hallway, in a suit and tie, made a couple of imperceptible gestures of mutual understanding. I saw him signing the release papers, then, suddenly, an arrest warrant came through from Córdoba. They took him in again, he turned around, and once more spent the night alone in a cell. Meanwhile, I ate with Bimba in a restaurant on Calle 7. She told me her life story, always changing some of the details. How they had met, where she was when she saw him for the same time, etc, etc.
Sunday 8
In La Paz, Inés not understanding the three days I spent in La Plata handling Cacho’s release, jealous of Bimba.
Monday
Two thirty in the morning. I’ve just started working. Earlier I went down Corrientes with Inés, stopping at all of the bars, and we finally sat to eat in Bajo. Now I have to prepare a class on Spengler for the next topic, historical problems of methodology (progress, morphology, causality, etc.).
Tuesday 10
At Fausto, I ran into Constantini, who was secretly buying Mario Benedetti’s book Gracias por el fuego [Thank You for the Fire]. Distrustful, he apologized, as though it were a crime to read contemporary writers.
I got up at three in the afternoon, walked along the edge of the river to the bridge; from here the city always seems to be the same.
Wednesday 11
Last night Cacho finally out once again. Nervous, aggressive. He, a man walking down Lavalle after having been tortured, tells me about “marking people” with a policeman who guards him. In the jail, a prisoner with no reputation who puffs himself up until the guard decides to shut him down with a beating. The letter that Cacho writes for one man’s woman, which all of the others copy. Speaking about women under a blanket of remembrances in the nighttime.
Sunday
“There are strange friendships. The two friends are always ready to fly at one another, and go on like that all their lives, and yet they cannot separate. Parting, in fact, is utterly impossible,” Dostoevsky.
Wednesday
I gave my first class of the year in front of more than eighty students at the College. I spoke for forty-five minutes about Spengler, said certain unexpected things, and left quickly at the end, not wanting to hear any comments while the students were leaving through the hallways at the same time. I came to Modelo to have a beer and write these notes.
Wednesday, September 1
Yesterday the magazine finally went to the printer. In the afternoon, I gave a good class about Toynbee.
At the end of the afternoon with Antonio Mónaco. We continued with the idea of the apartment. Everything happens during the party, not taking the actors out of there.
Friday
I am working on an article about Alejo Carpentier.
“We do not go to a country funeral to take picturesque notes of everyday life; what leads us to such a place is the desire to know what concept of death is held there,” Alejo Carpentier.
Sunday
All night on Friday, imprisoned in the police station on Calle Maipú. A cell much like a freezing-cold bathroom. With Tata, Jorge, Osvaldo, and old Cedrón. Really, everything is too absurd. We were at El Hormiguero, went to listen to Mercedes Sosa, a folk singer who has recently started and has a voice with a tone like Joan Baez. Tata sang some tangos, we were a bit drunk, and suddenly, while leaving, we started to fight with a group of guys from the country, for some reason that we’ve all forgotten. Suddenly the police arrived and we were arrested. Very unfair because they stayed free. We spent the night talking, and in the morning, Albert Szpunberg, who didn’t really understand what had happened either, also turned up arrested. In the end Bimba, Cacho’s woman, who has a lot of experience springing people from jail, got us out.
Delighted with the albums that Cacho gave me. He found them, as usual, on one of his adventures and made off with them and brought them for me. Also, Cacho telling me about his passion for going to the airport at sunrise to watch the planes taking off.
I have a feeling like being trapped amid objects that shoot past me and must be stopped.
Sunday 11
Unbelievably, I was working on Hegel so I could give a couple of classes at the College on his philosophy of history. The professor learns what he has to teach two days before the students find it out.
“Understanding t
he real, making it plainly intelligible, is the ultimate objective of philosophy; everything must be recognized to be rational, that is, sufficiently knowable through reason,” Hegel.
“To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect,” Hegel. For Hegel, the categories of thought are, at the same time, the categories of being.
Sunday
Nights like this now seem like the nights of another age. I go out to walk down Vuelta de Rocha as I used to do in the area around the train station in La Plata. I try to calm my “abstract rages,” and walking becomes a form of thinking.
Monday
The imaginary. The dream disperses, the fantasy acts like a star—directed at a center, from which it launches new rays. Fantasy is always centered around an object. Remembering the fixed idea.
What can I do to improve this diary? Maybe the time has come to type out a copy of these ten years and find its repeating motifs and tones.
If I think about what I have done over the years besides feeling the euphoria of writing freely and finding a tone, I see few variations. The best is “Las actas del juicio,” an archaic orality, nothing realist, based on rhythm and a collection of little scenes strung together by a narrator who tells them as though he does not understand them. The same technique in “Tierna es la noche,” in which I also recount many situations, in a more personal tone, a written confession that comes from Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. The same happens in “Una luz que se iba” and “La pared”: several plots within a single story told in the first person. The key lies in finding that personal tone but in the third person. The rest of the stories in the book have the same structure, telling one event as it is taking place but secretly telling another. (Best is “En el calabozo.”)
Formally and in its style, La invasión has nothing to do with Borges—or it is a rejection of his way of understanding literature. In that, I differ from all of the other writers, who generally copy him down to the way he spits. Nothing to do with Cortázar either, the other plague. Thematically, the influence is Arlt—too many betrayals.
Analyzing the novels written in the same period: Nabokov’s Sebastian Knight, Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, and Beckett’s Malone Dies. In all three there is double narration, a low, degraded first person, and a prose born out of people forgetting their mother tongues, no longer exercised (exile and language). They are the highest level of writing without homeland, without novel. The first value of the narration is the comical—for example, Nabokov’s sentence that “the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called ‘methods of composition.’” I read Trans-Atlantyk in Italian a couple years ago; Dipi lent it to me in La Plata.
Meeting with Borges. The feeling of standing in front of literature, or rather, seeing the workings of a marvelous literature-making machine. He speaks slowly, with strange cutoffs in the middle of sentences. Absurdly, I felt tempted to give him the words, as though he paused because he couldn’t come up with them. In the end, he always brought out a different word from the one I had imagined, more beautiful and more precise than mine. He touched his head to indicate the scar from the accident that gave rise to “The South.” It was impossible to perceive any mark, but I felt that the act was, in some sense, a ritual for him. The same thing when I left: he held my hand for a while and I feared that I was the one holding him prisoner, but finally he gave it a soft squeeze and smiled again. He is not as tall as I remembered and more handsome: gray eyes, smooth smile. Impossible to make him say anything different from what he always says, which doesn’t change the magic he creates by speaking, saying the same thing you have read. I was moved every time I heard him use a sententious and intense tone to recite his and other’s texts. (Small and ugly hands, absurdly old shoes, and an unforgettable tone of voice.)
October
I pick up Eloy by Carlos Droguett from Temple bookshop. A while ago on Radio Municial with Rubi Montserrat, reading some passages from Borges’s Personal Anthology. Tata Cedrón was also on the program.
Bimba talks about Cacho the way someone remembers a dead man. She is amazed at his perfect and delirious logic, which leaves her confused, but she is also able to describe how she caught him masturbating in the bed, right next to her.
I am in Boca, bothered by Alberto Cedrón’s affaire; according to him, I owe him fifteen thousand pesos. He has the ability to always seem to be the victim of circumstances or of the world itself, and so can make demands and berate others for not helping him.
Saturday, October 2
A beautiful line from Marx: “Death, that revenge of the species over the individual.”
Sunday 3
The difficult part of living in a house with others lies in the different concept of order that each person holds. The result is the fluctuation between the happiness of social life and the desire to be alone and isolated, here in this house where there are always people.
Interesting, Ismael Viñas’s idea that, under Peronism, the army fulfills the role of the hierarchical intellectual.
I am reading Where the Air Is Clear by Carlos Fuentes. He works with a structure similar to that of John Dos Passos, where individual lives and social histories are mixed. He has trouble escaping from a certain superficial schematism. The characters are explained and not narrated. On the other hand, he only describes, or rather, tends to describe exclusively the extraordinary (wars, revolutions, catastrophes). He has trouble finding the short, brief dimension, the meaningful moment, the detail that lends reality. The most attractive thing is the breadth of possibility in Fuentes’s prose, which ranges from the essay (“For the first time in Mexican history a stable middle class exists, the surest protection against tyranny and unrest…”) to poetic, almost surrealistic illustration (“City of motionless pain… city of the violated outrage…”).
Monday
Yesterday I went out with Inés to walk around in the area, calm, unhurried. We sat down to have beer at a bar, watching the people passing as though they were outlandish beings.
Now I have the day in front of me and am ready to write a short story, for which I already have the entire plot. A man has been—or believes he has been—abandoned by a woman; he travels to some city in order to forget her. Calls her on the phone. Settles into a hotel. At a certain point, he sees her at the station in town. He believes she has come looking for him, but when he moves closer he realizes that it is a stranger who doesn’t even look like the women he loves. After that he keeps seeing her—in a bar, in the plaza, in the hall of the hotel. The loss of love has driven him insane, well, not quite insane, it has only changed his way of seeing. Worried about himself, he returns to his hotel room and tries to devise a theory about this resemblance and the “as if.” The story ends at sunrise, when, as he is leaving, he actually does find his wife, who has come to the town looking for him.
Tuesday 12
We woke up with Cacho in Olivos, in front of the river. The country houses on the ravine. We saw a man stealing some railroad ties on the bank, close to the tracks. Bimba left. To walk around.
These days I am working until seven in the morning every night on a story called “Bajo la luz,” which I haven’t been able to resolve.
Thursday
The magazine is assembled, almost ready. Accepting the risk that it will be published in November, on the brink of summer, does not concern me, leaves me indifferent.
Tuesday 19
In Florida bar at noon. For the first time, the book has a harmonic form and a certain structure. In Fichas, a notice appeared announcing the magazine.
I shouldn’t have to think like this, but my friendship with Cacho also has the quality of a novel I would like to write. He knows it and jokes with me about the matter. Those of us close to him (Bimba, Costa, Horacio) are never sure how he can endure that feeling of constant risk. But I am not surprised when he makes unexpected decisions and suggests unbelievable trips or impossible expeditions. A while ago, returning from Olivos, we almost killed ourselv
es because he started accelerating and we entered the woods of Palermo at great speed, far above the speed allowed on such a winding road. Of course, I never told him to slow down, because I felt that he wanted to test me, or at least show me that his relationship with danger and death was very different from mine. The truth is that I barely remember how things went after we passed the tanks of the sanitation works, except that the car spun out on a curve in the middle of the woods and almost went up on two wheels, and for a stretch we could have rolled over, but mysteriously it landed upright and Cacho, without slowing down, looked at me in the rearview mirror and winked.
Wednesday 20
I am in París, in La Plata. I only earned twelve thousand pesos and not the twenty thousand that I expected. I have to give a class in a while, and my attention is always drawn to the fact that the students are my age. I enter the packed Great Hall, get up onto the platform and say to them, “So, in ‘Introduction to History’ we are looking at Hegel’s hypotheses,” and from there I go onward as though walking along the edge of a precipice.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 24