The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Writing for enemies, not for social reasons, searching for concealment. Ensuring the survival of the Argentine writer. The pageantry of this class (and not of this generation). Graduating class: advancing, groups that appear on the same date.

  Thursday

  In Florida, 6:30.

  I am waiting for Szpunberg, about an open letter in support of the guerrillas of the EGP, who are on a hunger and prisoners strike. Are they or are they not political prisoners? They cannot be treated as common delinquents. An afternoon with several meetings. Néstor García Canclini is going to Paris to study with Ricœur. A possible interview with the philosopher about the act of storytelling. Then, Héctor Alterio will possibly record his performance of my story (“Mi amigo”), and I add to it “La pared” (the monologue of the Beckettian old man). Afterward, I meet with David Viñas about a possible collaboration in the magazine.

  Friday

  We are interested in American literature because it allows us to see how great artists (Salinger, F. O’Connor, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers) are also popular. A unique case in contemporary literature. There are three reasons, I think. The breadth of the educational system, which places works on the obligatory reading list, and a very developed literary industry. The third reason is the great narrative tradition, which incorporates formal experimentation into the novelistic tradition.

  The impossibility of accepting convention, the sharp feeling of embarrassment that forces me to listen to myself when I speak “intentionally,” throwing my possibility of adopting stylistic nuance into disarray. Calling a woman on the phone represents an action founded on certain standards that cannot be named and are implicitly understood. Recently, H. said, “Sleep well,” and I waited for her laughter, but she was serious… As at the same time, I said to Elena, “The princess is sad,” in my best ironic and antiromantic style, and she took it seriously and asked, “How did you know?”

  Note. A language is an arbitrary system through which members of a community interact with each other and thereby learn a particular way of living. Reality as we know it is conditioned by the grammar and syntax we use (they decide the order, the continuity, the verbal tenses—that is, our awareness of the distinction between present, past, and future). Grammar organizes the organization of the world and proposes a morphology (which is responsible for the structure of the words) and a syntax (which responsible for the ways in which the words are combined into clauses and sentences).

  Friday

  Last night I got drunk, without realizing it. I found out this morning when I woke up with an unknown woman in my bed. “Hola, precioso,” she said, and I looked at her (she was blonde, with pale eyes and large breasts) and asked her, “Where did you come from?” She was offended and left, so I never figured out what her name was. I have fleeting memories, the taxi or the elevator, the pillow. The rest is silence. The memories were erased as though they had been written in tears.

  A while ago, walking down the arcade in Bajo from Plaza de Mayo to Viamonte, talking by myself, I became sure of everything again, convinced about my future once again and the star watching over me, and I was happy and blind.

  There is no narrative method that is not artificial—that is, that is not imposed onto everyday language as an unusual usage. Because of this, I was surprised by Germán Rozenmacher’s statement that narrating in the present tense was artificial, by which he meant affected, and yet the people you hear on the street use the present as the basis for conversation. “So he tells me… and I say to him… and he says”; a fairly “natural” way of recounting one’s own life.

  (On the same subject.) A man who, in order to overcome his wife’s past, leaves her and thus becomes the past for her. A past more novel or more valuable than her previous one (which had made him jealous). In love only the present, the time of pure passion, is truly important. In certain cases, however, the ardor of the imagined past can be as interesting as the present (as in Othello, for example). We must occasionally make the leap, leave the present behind, and reenter the past in order to exist on equal footing with our lover upon our return to the present. This regression is akin to finally seeing the faces of unseen enemies that have been hurling insults at us from afar. That is the point at which Othello smothers Desdemona with a white pillow, so that he does not have to hear the cries coming in from the room next door (all in his head).

  We must insist: escapism (in escapist literature, for example) is neither a defect nor a virtue in itself. Everything depends on how we return from the escape: whether our attitude facing the world is strengthened or we deteriorate and our life is diminished.

  Now, with the book almost ready, I see the approach of my real encounter with literature, almost ten years after having made the all-or-nothing bet. Will I be able to overcome a failure?

  The competitions at the College are also telling, and they define the real possibility of a concrete job.

  The chances for the magazine. Is there a team? How long can I deal with the matter and how long will it interest me?

  The negation of the real as a way of life…

  “I don’t read the reactionaries, to avoid becoming embittered,” said Perón.

  Wednesday 29

  I have an incredible amount of papers on the table, which constitute the book; I am trying, as they say, to make a clean copy. Last night Inés left to visit, according to what she said, her mother. I am at home alone, with two clean and empty days ahead of me. It feels like being in this city again, but in 1958 and 1959. I see the same panorama from this window.

  The difference now is that I have finally written a book. Perhaps more defined and more personal than any of the best books of stories that have come out in recent years (Las otras puertas, Las hamacas voladoras, Cabecita negra), which are close to other books also unitary in their poetics and their narrative world (Los oficios terrestres, Palo y hueso), but I do not compare myself to anyone: I compare the written book to the book that I imagined I was writing or meant to write.

  Friday, December 31

  Rereading my “notebooks” is a novel experience; perhaps a story can be extracted from that reading. It astonishes me, all of the time, as though I were someone else (and that is what I am).

  It is incredible to realize that I blindly decided my destiny in those two years (1958–1959), here in this room, with a window opening onto the branches of the jacaranda tree, planted on the path, before I was born. Incredible to remember—speaking of destiny—the importance of chance.

  ‌15

  Hotel Almagro

  When I came to live in Buenos Aires, I rented a place at the Hotel Almagro on Rivadavia and Castro Barros. I was finishing writing the stories for my first book, and Jorge Álvarez offered me a contract to publish it and gave me some work at the publishing house. I prepared an anthology of American prose for him, which went from Poe to Purdy, and with what he paid me and with what had I earned at the University, I made enough to settle down and live in Buenos Aires. During that time, I was working on the “Introduction to History” lectures at the College of Humanities and traveled to La Plata every week. I had rented a place in a boardinghouse near the bus terminal and spent three days a week in La Plata dictating classes. My life was divided: I lived two lives in two cities as though I were two different men, with different friends and different routines in each place. What was the same, however, was life in a hotel. The empty corridors, the transitory rooms, the anonymous atmospheres of those places where one is always in passing. Living in a hotel is the best way not to develop the delusion of a “personal life”; I mean, not to have anything personal to tell of but the traces left by others. The boardinghouse in La Plata was an endless mansion, converted into a kind of cheap hotel, managed by a perpetual student who made his living by subletting the rooms. The owner of the house was hospitalized, and every month this guy would wire a little money for her to a mailbox at Las Mercedes hospice. The place I was renting was comfortable, with a balcony that opened over the
street and a very high ceiling. The place in the Hotel Almagro also had a very high ceiling and a picture window that overlooked the back of the Argentina Boxing Federation. The two places had very similar wardrobes, with two doors and shelves lined with newspaper. One afternoon, in La Plata, I found a woman’s letters in a corner of the wardrobe. When you live in a hotel, you can always find traces of those who have been there before. The letters were concealed in a gap, hidden like a bag of drugs. They were written in nervous handwriting, and barely anything could be understood; as always happens when you read a stranger’s letter, the allusions and subtexts are such that the words may be deciphered but not the meaning or the emotion. The woman was named Angelita and was not ready to be taken off to live in Trenque Lauquen. She had escaped from the house and seemed desperate, and I got the sense she was saying goodbye. On the last page, in another hand, someone had written down a telephone number. When I called, security at the City Bell hospital answered. Of course, I forgot about the matter, but some time later, in Buenos Aires, stretched out in the bed in the hotel room, it occurred to me to get up and examine the wardrobe. Off to one side, in a gap, there were two letters: they were a man’s responses to Angelita’s letters. I have no rational explanation. The only explanation I can invent is that I have been drawn into a decoupled world, that two other people had also been drawn into a decoupled world and had, like me, left their own behind, so that, by those strange permutations produced by chance, the letters had coincided with me. It is not unusual to run into a stranger twice in two cities; it seems to me more unusual to find, in two different places, two letters from two connected people whom one does not know. The boardinghouse in La Plata is still there, and the perpetual student is still there, now an old man still subletting the rooms to students and business travelers passing through La Plata along the route from the south of Buenos Aires province. The Hotel Almagro also goes on in the same way, and when I walk through Rivadavia toward the College of Philosophy and Letters on Calle Puán, I always pass through the door and remember that time. Las Violetas café is across the street. Of course, you need a calm and well-lit bar nearby if you live in a hotel room.

  ‌16

  Diary 1966

  Saturday, January 1

  The first thought of the year was a memory of Inés’s childhood, on the beach, playing with a dog that would run into the sea when she threw a ball for it to fetch. Maybe she turns to her past because I lack my own memory. In fact, I am fighting against a confusing series of alien memories. Instead, I have in the present what others have lived through.

  You are only what you are, but how are you seen from the outside by others? There is a piece of evidence that counteracts solipsism: you perceive that you are not alone through the sensation of discomfort that others cause you.

  You have to pay attention to the perceptions of the narrator who is personal but alien to the plot, who is dedicated only to telling a story, appearing in the third person but still only a shadow amid the intrigue. There is a difference between the voice that narrates in Dostoevsky (“But we will not give an account of his thoughts, and this is not the place to look into that soul—its turn will come.”) and the voice that narrates—and writes—in Saul Bellow: “I don’t know why I should write to you at all.” There is greater freedom in Dostoevsky because he breaks the narrative convention of the narrator as invisible figure. D. quickly makes him appear as a witness to the events: we do not know who he is or what his name is, but he is there to show us the conventional quality of the story (someone narrating). In contrast, B. works with a more predictable method: the man writing the story speaks to the unknown reader as though writing a letter to a friend. B. uses the first person, while what is notable in D. is the use of a third-person narrator who quickly transforms into an individualized figure. Arlt uses the technique in The Seven Madmen, but he identifies that third-person narrator, made present in the action, with the name of Commentator (which mainly appears in the footnotes).

  In my case, I work narratively in reverse: imagining, building theories for and versions of a microscopic incident. For example, I found a photo of one of Inés’s childhood boyfriends, by chance, in one of her books. A young boy playing basketball at the Peñarol club. Immediately, I transformed the photo into an event in the present (it became present, the seven-year-old photo, because I found it yesterday). In this way, her past was between us, not far from here, since the photo was now a presence, a third person. That is the logic of delirium. Everything happens in the present, and some people kill to escape that absolute time and recover a normalized temporality; crime is a logical consequence of the nightmare of the present, of the weight of passion. That is the time of tragedy, not the time of narrative. What we want is for this trace of the past to fall back, for the photo to lose its absolute immediacy, for the creation of a story that has a tiny place within a vast succession of lived events. I already said that it is not the quantity (a detail is enough: a young boy on a basketball court), it is not the past, it is a single incident from yesterday preserved in the present as a photo, it is a single moment that persists and cannot be erased. And so—apart from crime—there are two paths: avoidance, removing the images, and losing my mind, or, on the other hand, delving into the figure, not leaving, persisting with the fixed idea. I try, as you can see, to convert my experience into a lesson of narrative ethics. Absorbed in the photo, the narrator constructs a circular story that does nothing more than revolve precisely around a fixed image (it is a photograph, not a film), terrible because it is fixed in place and cannot be narrated, that is, cannot be advanced toward another situation.

  As Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, “I may add here, for myself personally, that I feel it almost repulsive to recall that event which caused such frivolous agitation and was such a stumbling-block to many, though in reality it was the most natural and trivial matter. I should, of course, have omitted all mention of it in my story, if it had not exerted a very strong influence on the heart and soul of the chief, though future, hero of my story.”

  I feel what I feel because a woman’s past is unbearable to me at certain times. Or I feel that a tiny thing (a photo of a young idiot playing basketball) is unbearable because I am reading Dostoevsky and I observe everything I experience through the exaggerated and delirious lens of his novels…

  A start to the year that I hope will not be repeated. Inventing the tragedies and misfortunes myself. Alone, in this empty house (the family house), with no one to visit. I go to the movie theater every day and read Dostoevsky at night, searching for the exit, the escape. Now, at three in the morning, tired, unable to go on reading, unable to sleep, lacking a focal point.

  Tuesday, January 4

  At the beach with Cacho. He tells me his plans, he came to the coast as sneak thieves do, following the people with money. I have some information about one of my father’s patients, a rancher from the area; he has a stud farm and keeps too much money in the bottom of a tall green china vase, the dollars hidden there, he told my father about it one night over drinks and my father repeated it as a joke at home, talking on the phone with his sister Gina. And I heard it. Cacho made a mental note of the house, the layout of the rooms and the vase on the landing of the staircase. In return (but it was not in return, it was not an exchange), I arranged the possibility of staying in his apartment until April.

  I am twenty-four years old, Raskolnikov’s age.

  “I will only tell you one thing: that I will describe everything about this character through his actions and rather than appealing with disquisitions, so that you wait for a personality to result from a piece,” D. letter from October 9, 1870.

  Monday 10

  Facing the trees, above, sitting on the terrace of Cacho’s apartment in Palermo where I may stay this year, in peace. After going in circles around the city, earning seventeen thousand pesos and spending two thousand on Cantar de ciegos by Carlos Fuentes and Herzog by Bellow. I walked through the city, practicing the
tourist’s gaze. I walked to Florida, then down Viamonte, entering the bookshops, the temples of used books on Avenida de Mayo.

  Tuesday 11

  A rare happiness, almost unknown, one afternoon in Mar del Plata. I was going down Calle España toward the sea. A window that opens onto two trees, in the terrible forty-story buildings, at the back. I was walking alone. I wanted to be lying down on the sofa reading Carlos Fuentes’s stories, without thinking, clean, eating peaches, listening to the dull noise of an engine nearby.

  The point is not to foment self-control, but to control chaos.

  “All of those whom we have loved, hated, or known, or only glimpsed, speak through our voice,” M. Merleau-Ponty.

  I have to reread all of Merleau-Ponty this year. But there are too many things I would like to do this year.

  “The purpose of the subject’s years of study consists of him nodding his head and adapting his desires to existing relationships and the relationality of the same, so that he joins the world’s interconnected chain in order to acquire an adequate point of view,” Hegel.