The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Friday 22

  Today there is a general strike decreed by the CGT. I am in Florida bar and wonder, once again, why I feel this need to record what happens. I stopped at the publishing house and Álvarez confirmed that my story about Urquiza is going to be published in the Features series. For the first time, then, my literature is moving outside the familiar spheres. I remember the early days, now some years ago, when I hoped that the whole city would be talking about me so that my name would ring out everywhere, spoken by a vast ensemble of strangers. I spent the night with Horacio, with Cacho and Júnior, each of us with his own fantasy and his own realizations as it begins to take shape. It’s impossible to live without hopes, but you have to know that the hopes are just stories you tell yourself.

  It is necessary to isolate the two essential characteristics of Hegel’s conception of history: on one side, the unbroken continuum of time and, on another side, the gravitational pull toward “now” in the historical present. “Custom is activity without opposition, for which there remains only a formal duration; in which the fullness and zest that originally characterized the aim of life are out of the question,” Hegel.

  Sunday 24

  With Julia Constella tonight, a roundtable about violence. About a woman who was thrown from the fifth floor by her husband (or was it her father?). Maybe my better side appears on days like today, when I walk alone though the city, then have lunch in a restaurant with tables outside along Cerrito. The strange feeling of being a passing traveler or tourist in an unknown city.

  A good method for reflection in a narrative is the procedure of the police novel, which consists of the detective’s meditation on events that have already been told; the key, in that situation, is that the character announces what he thinks will happen. In summary, the ideas in a story always have to be directed at what lies ahead, and not at explaining what has already been told.

  Thursday, November 4

  I am on the train to La Plata. Last night the final corrections for the magazine. The cost rose from 110,000 to 190,000 pesos. We’ll see how we make up the debt.

  Tuesday

  Topics for the “Introduction to History” midterm:

  1. Relationships between the progression of the absolute spirit and the concept of progress in history according to Hegel.

  2. Relationships between Hegel’s system of history and the political history of the period in which he taught his classes.

  Subject. Maybe the ending of my novel about Cacho will be in the apartment in Montevideo with those three gangsters trapped there, lasting sixteen hours and resisting four hundred policemen and enduring gas, fire, bullets, water, bombs until in the end they burn the money and yell, “Come get us, guanacos.”

  In García Márquez (Leaf Storm), as in Rulfo before him, I discover the technical possibilities of naïve vision. The narrator is outside of the literate culture and watches the world with amazement. It allows the discovery of almost absurd and fantastical levels within reality. Facts are given without synthesis, events connected by the partial (and magical) understanding of things that naïvety seems to impart. In the novel about Cacho, Bimba must be at that level.

  Wednesday 10

  At the College, taking the midterm exam for “Introduction to History.” Twenty students are writing because I dictated a subject, because I taught some subjects. And they have studied and they have worried, etc. There is no need to state the strange quality that this situation holds for me.

  Saturday 13

  I run into Dipi Di Paola, neurotically sick, always concentrated on the invisible symptoms of an illness that is never manifested. Sympathetic, seductive, he read me a beautiful story, but he speaks about himself and about his writing with an insistence that is excessive, even for him.

  Monday

  After three hours, I went back to writing “La Pared,” a clean, loose story with a smooth Beckettian quality, invisible to anyone: the old man in a hospice laments that they have built a wall and he can no longer see the street.

  Saturday 20

  Cacho just called on the phone, informing me that he is coming to see me and get dinner in Costanera.

  Sunday 21

  In Ramos bar over Corrientes. I see Miguel, who is still mulling over his half-finished book of stories. Very good, from what I understand.

  November 25

  They cut off the lights, the gas, and the phone for lack of payment.

  November 26

  The magazine is ready, wrapped up at the press. I spoke with Sergio; he will go pick it up this Monday.

  December

  Wednesday, 6 p.m. A strange time, very productive (four stories, the magazine), very conflicted (the house, money, misfortune). It will be hard for me to forget it.

  Friday

  Sometimes I can’t forget the image, that image. Yet I still look for it myself, invent it. I need it. It attracts me, in some way, like the low railings that enclose a terrace. How else can I understand this chronic temptation; I am searching for something, and so many different associations summon it, that familiar quality.

  Saturday 4

  Sometimes, after the denouement (with García, Tata, etc.), when things start to happen, there is no time or place to write. That rift has marked my life. Definitions, decisions, should matter but must be reconfigured, historicized, told as though they had happened to others. The delusion of living in the third person.

  Monday 6

  In Florida bar. It’s raining in the city; the sun filters between the clouds, lights up the street, the pavement acquires a yellow color, very pale.

  I try to keep the competition at the College at a distance in order to renew my assistantships in two courses. For now, my economy depends on those appointments. I have had two positions since 1963 and live on that (and on the work in Nono’s archive). I earn my living as a historian but live like a potential writer; in recent months, I have tried to unite the two trajectories, writing stories that have the form of an investigation and working in the archives of Buenos Aires province. The point is not to thematize the things that take place in the bowels of the post office in Galería Rocha, but to bring modes of being into the narrative that draw from other places (alien to the literary tradition).

  Finally, issue I of Literatura y Sociedad is coming out. The editorial that I wrote is an attempt to critique the left’s stereotypes. The inadequacy of these stereotypes represents a particular world view. Peronism seems to be the blind spot of the historic gaze. The second point consists of opposing the notion of “committed literature” because it has an individualist posture; instead, my idea is to think about literature as a social practice and see what function it has in society. For example, what is the purpose of fiction, etc. The Sartrean idea that each individual work must be answerable to the responsibility of art is ridiculous and paralyzes any action. Sartre’s question of what Nausea could do for a child dying of hunger is moralistic and a sophism. Nothing that an isolated individual does for himself, in solitude, can do anything for a child dying of hunger. It is the same logic that the right uses when it mandates more repression and justifies it with the question “What would you do to a delinquent who wants to kill your child?” If the answer were individual, there would be nothing more than surprise and “personal” attitudes (which do nothing but change the subject). What can a man do in the face of the world’s injustice? Unite with others seeking nonindividual means of action. Leaving behind the I and the subjective consciousness, that is the path of Marx and Wittgenstein. In one case, it is about class, and in another, it is about the linguistic games that condition political action. The impact—the answer—cannot be individual.

  The happiness of events: it means both the irony contained in events and the happiness that survives in the face of what has been done.

  If, as Cassirer says, reality can only be experienced by means of symbolic forms, which are always variable, and by means of the innumerable linguistic plays within which we act, culture is the sum of
the learned and integrated norms of conduct (like a second nature), which are fundamentally inherited: these norms are transmitted by means of language (law, contracts, and pacts) and learning (“domestication,” as Sartre calls the education that children suffer), on the margins of instinct.

  Wednesday 8

  Always the feeling of neglect and the “toughness” of the reality ahead. Writing now, alone, in this empty house, with the microscopic series of small decisions that are constantly made in order to survive. One word after another, a word and then another and another, phrasing: that is everything (a music).

  At the same time, culture—civilization—depends “simply” on the unusual breadth and size of the brain. It simply depends on the bone structure that has given rise to the “encephalic mass,” or rather the enlargement of the cranial cavity that developed millions of years ago when prehumans started walking upright in the savannah (the jungles where they had lived had been wiped out by various natural calamities). They learned how to walk and defend themselves with the high gaze of the predators. That posture caused the jaw to have the necessary weight to open and give rise to a new use of the tongue, which allowed the articulation of language. I have, I fear, become a kind of Darwinian positivist in reaction to my abstract idealist tendency. I pass from materialism to material as such, and lose myself there.

  And so, one of two: either everything depends on the formation of the brain (absolute contingency), or everything depends on the spiritual or immaterial reality of learned norms of conduct and codes of comportment (law, prohibition, what cannot be done).

  Thursday 9

  A certain inexplicable happiness, absurdly. It must be left hanging. What can fail is the ending, with the joke of death. It must be left unsolved. Searching for a story of old age (or of a particular old man, for example, old Socrates or old Borges). And nothing more.

  In December

  Writing “El hermano de Luisa.” Who is he? etc. Correcting the whole book. With Haroldo Conti, a conversation about the book’s title. La invasión. Drier, less “stated” (the invasion is one thing and the wars are another).

  December 10

  In Florida bar. I have a headache, it is hot. Today in La Plata, did I make twenty-seven thousand pesos? Incredible. Always the same unreality in relation to material life. In any case, things are a rush between December 21 and 31. The competitions of the College (end on the 24th). A trip to Uruguay? And the magazine? What’s more, my family’s phantom presence continues. Hamlet’s father and Lady Macbeth (“Al lecho, to bed, to bed,” says Lady Macbeth).

  Saturday 11

  In Florida bar. 6:30. I don’t need to look or hope for anything beyond work. A unique moment of fullness; reality is suspended. There are no other “satisfactions.” It is absurd to invent them or ask for them. If I don’t learn this, I will never be able to avoid distraction and insanity. I am seeking equilibrium; without it, I cannot live (suicide). Everything else (except for love) is illusory. But love would be illusory without the bodies we love.

  Considering the concept (very much in use lately) of a “new generation” as information to analyze. What new quality can each generation have if they all have the same desire to erase the others? And yet, there is a visible aspiration to fit in with the direction of the dominant culture. Meanwhile, the motto has to be “Stay on the margin.” But what is the margin? What characterizes us is a greater education outside of literature; we seek to innovate by means of techniques that come from elsewhere; for example, in my case, the unexpected use of material made available through research. The story is constructed based on a nonliterary experience. The artist’s movement toward “intellectual” artifice, talking about what he does (and not about what he is). The role of the magazine in this process. To speak about a generation is to make a cultural judgment, Gamsci said; discovering your age is a way to determine what you must have read and learned in your youth. The concept of generations ceases to have a purpose: the artist is no longer analyzed in terms of the cultural horizon of his age (that is, of his epoch). More than his opinions or declarations, a writer’s age is a fact of the epoch to which he belongs. Age, in terms of literature, is a symptom. Each generation reads its own pared-down series of books, and that is what identifies it and becomes visible in its writing.

  Sunday 12

  5:30 in El Castelar. Tense, waiting for Sergio Camarda. Ready to redesign the magazine. I need to control myself and dominate the situation. It is essential that I let him talk and let him start with his critiques and then refute him, calmly, because this is not the time to break things up. A valuable meeting last night, especially due to the presence—and ideas—of José Sazbón.

  Anxious tension (the future invading the present) is one of the few emotions that I can recall over the course of my life. It appears suddenly, without exterior changes, in different situations: loneliness, strong emotion, nostalgia, hopefulness (like now).

  Copying and recopying the book of short stories on my keyboard seems, at this stage, to be my delirious and routine occupation. Not writing it, or correcting it, or critiquing it, but only copying each one of its pages over and over again, making mistakes (like I just did), and leaving it half-done. The man who copies himself. Nothing changes or improves; only the same repeats. Searching for what?

  Monday

  Every so often, a sudden confidence in the book—for example, just now, walking in the rain, after drinking a glass of milk and speaking with Briante. We go around in circles and circles about the state of literature. He and I are free from the Cortázar fever that has invaded the majority of current writing. Of course, Miguel is contaminated by Borges (by some idea of “European” style) and by a certain affected use of adjectives that prevents him from finding his own voice. For my part, I advance blindly, through the bushes, without a guide. On the other hand, the work that lies ahead (the magazine, the book, certain ideas or conceits I would like to write about someday) does not give me any time for introspection. On the other hand, the carrying out an action, a series of actions, takes me outside of myself (“gets me out of my head,” an enigmatic expression). Publishing the magazine, for example, demands that I pay attention to external appearances. I have to check my defenses along the ramparts. I can’t accept any weakness; I have my back covered (I am edging along the wall), but I see the traitors in my own troop (Osvaldo denounced me to the Italian), the defectors (Camarda “splitting off,” blaming me for the “flaws” of the magazine, which he “accepts”). My determination must not waver; I have to regain my fortitude, never allow myself to be trapped by despair. No one understands the criterion underlying the first issue: an aggressive conceptual intervention, shaking off the lethargy of culture on the left, which reconciles with the “progressive” prejudices we have broken away from (that is, the culture of the CP). I am referring to the cultural effects of Peronism and its sympathetic myths, but it is clear that I am not a Peronist and will not allow myself to be blinded by pragmatism.

  We have to change the state of things, which seem very chaotic these days. What are the problems? The house, I have to get away from here. Complications with the furniture and books. A possibility of staying in Cacho’s apartment in Ugarteche. But Cacho fled to Mar del Plata and I can’t see him to confirm. I can straighten it out with him at Christmas. I will need to make sure in January; there is also the house in Boca. I have the summer to sort out the move.

  Suddenly, I found the room on Calle Medrano, in the boardinghouse, and saw the image of that barbecue with Haroldo Conti, behind Retiro, crossing the tracks and the avenue that separates the port from the city. I accepted the invitation because I had no money for lunch.

  Tuesday 14

  I sleep too much, as though in these times of conflict I could only aspire to silence and darkness. Sleep is a refuge for the prisoner, Cacho told me one day.

  It is striking to experience the clash between my awareness of myself and the way others see me (Sergio, Alberto Cedrón). The adversarial
gaze is only between friends. Striking, this relativism. Because there is a sideways, uncertain, third awareness (the third eye, as they joke), in which I see myself as though I were another (as though I were the other). Furthermore, almost always with amazement, I gain everything that I want for myself, deep down. The certainty I have about my “virtues” and of the existence of “occult forces” that oppose their development. Because I place too much value on these “forces” (or because I disguise my fragility with them), I actually practice misfortune, as though convinced of failure. You have to establish an ethics and a poetics of the No, of the impossibilities that make life possible.

  The tightrope walker. “It is essential to invent an order. To believe in it, in its value, in its meaning, in its utility. Then, in a leap, to enter it.” Then he (the tightrope walker, on the wire, at the height of the circus tent) said: “I must undergo the change that always occurs in the face of this event. First, an attraction that forces me to lean forward and listen. Then the certainty that as I watch what is happening down there—which is happening to someone else in a different place—I am looking down upon the person I was in another time.”