The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  I go back to reading Pavese’s “Wedding Trip,” which I read for the first time in 1960. The recently married man leaves his wife in the hotel room on their wedding night, goes down to the street with some trivial pretense, lets himself be swept away by the enchantment of a summer night in the city, and returns at dawn, surprised to find his wife desperate and weeping. In it, you can see the excision of conscience transformed into a story: the man who stays with the woman is also the man who fantasizes about having the freedom to lose himself down some street at night. There are always modern and weak or inoffensive versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (although there is now no shortage of magic potions in contemporary literature).

  Philosophy. The authentic being is the being that cannot be broken up or reduced into other beings, it is the being in itself. In this way, “to be” means:

  1. To exist, to be there, in essence.

  2. Conceivable as being one or being another.

  Ontology responds to the question of who exists, or rather who is the being in essence. The being founded upon itself.

  What is contingency? The self, for others.

  Asking what the self is, in essence, is the same as asking who exists.

  The next step is given by the distinction between things that merely appear to exist and those that exist in actuality. The distinction between essence and appearance. Contingency, the being of that existence, is unnecessary. Here, the difference is contingent, necessary.

  Friday 15

  In Don Julio bar. The competitions begin within the hour; I hope everything turns out well.

  I won both competitions (head of Practical Work in “Introduction to History” and top assistant in “Argentine History II”), which means economic security for a whole year and the tranquility to write. On the other hand, just like every time that I return to La Plata, I find myself surrounded by people and friends asking me to stay.

  Saturday

  Juncal and Suipacha: John Ford’s Stagecoach at 9:45 at the Núcleo film club.

  See: Roa, Romano, David V., Szpunberg, Murmis.

  See: Library of the Goethe Institute (Walter Benjamin).

  Saturday, April 16, 1966

  Literature is the experience and not the knowledge of the world.

  It is four in the morning and, as always, I understand my own conception of literature better while writing. It is the result and not the condition of a writer’s work. Ideas are not the condition, but rather the result of the writing. The meaning of literature is not to communicate a defined exterior objective, but rather to create the conditions for understanding the experience of reality.

  Sunday 17

  I wake up at five in the afternoon. Last night, before I went to bed in the room on Riobamba, I finished reading Vasco Pratolini’s Bruno Santini, which made me strangely uneasy with its melodramatic ending. What constitutes the emotional effects of reading a book—or how are they constructed?

  I went out to the street and walked down Corrientes as far as Florida, watching the profiles of buildings being erased as night fell.

  Monday 18

  It is raining. I got up in the afternoon. By reversing my sleeping hours, I have managed to turn myself into a lone wolf, leaving my lair when night has already begun to envelop the fields of the mind. The day passes by and is lost, me sleeping until nightfall and living with the city in shadow.

  With the habitual changes, facing the window now, indecisive, I understand that experience is always lying in wait and does not depend on our decisions.

  Tuesday

  I left Inés’s apartment for a few days and settled back into my room on Calle Riobamba. I brought my things, my books, and feel safe once again in a place no one knows.

  Wednesday 19

  I fell asleep at noon and awoke at night, as though the day had been erased. I took a short walk a while ago, the light luminous and clear, the men passing hurriedly, and for a while I followed a beautiful girl with long legs who walked slightly bent, as though sailing into the wind. I went with her down Paraguay, until Callao, and when I approached her she answered perfectly naturally that she had already seen me several times at the bar on the corner. She is studying philosophy at the University of Salvador and her name is Flora. She is interested in theology, but not men, she told me with a smile.

  Sunday 24

  Diverse readings (Barthes, Sartre, Edmund Wilson), preparatory notes for a discussion on the issue of realism. Yesterday, I traveled to La Plata to give my classes and returned that night, without sleeping, so as not to delay my return to this room where I always feel sheltered. Powerful, the impression of the bus terminal on Constitución in the first light of morning, the men and women going down into the subway as though someone were pursuing them. At the bar in the station, as I ate breakfast, two young men were drinking gin, surely trying to find the spirits needed to go on living.

  A father. The father commits suicide, or rather attempts suicide but is saved; he goes several months without speaking, and they have to watch him so that he doesn’t try again. They call on the son, who lives in another city, to come look after him. They live together for a week, and the son criticizes him or asks him about certain things that he alone seems to know. The father remains motionless in his silence. The son finally leaves him alone.

  Monday 25

  Dazed in the face of the uncertain reality I have created for myself by superposing the nights and days in abstract and dark circles, casting me outside of the world as though I lived in a society where no one can see me. The lone man, inhabiting a hotel room in the center of the city and making little rounds, searching only for what he needs from one day to the next.

  A telephone call, just a short time ago. I am frozen, paralyzed by horror. Sometimes everything is too irrational. Alejandra, Celia’s daughter, has died, crushed under a car, and she was six years old. She had left the house to go to the bakery and buy the bread for breakfast. I have no image, can imagine nothing, see only the wall in front of me. What is there to say?

  A while later. These are the things that reveal the sinister, unexpected logic of reality. Things can always be worse.

  Tuesday

  It is three in the morning, I lay down to sleep. I talked on the phone with Celia, who, as she told me, was still not even crying.

  In any event, I worked on the article for the magazine all night and left it almost ready; in short, there is nothing new, and Sabato’s complaints sometimes seem excessive to me.

  It is six in the morning, and it becomes clear that notions of personal time disappear when you go several nights without sleeping. Occasionally I want to follow the criteria of this notebook and mark the dates, but I never know quite what day I’m living.

  I write several versions of “Tierna es la noche”; piece by piece, I am finding the tone and sense of the story.

  April 29

  I continue with my routine of sleeping through the day. I got up at ten at night today; this system of flight from reality is more dangerous than even I had supposed.

  Monday, May 2

  Things in my life gradually become distorted, and I persist with a stunned indifference. Today I begin the day at four in the morning. Yesterday I woke up at six in the afternoon. We might say that I’m experimenting with time and duration, a bit lost; I have dedicated this sleepless night to gathering some remnants of the reflections I know about time.

  Tuesday 3

  I get up at six in the afternoon after dreaming that I was in a hotel on the coast. My notes continue, written in order to understand the days I am living through.

  I have reached an impasse, strewn out on the bed, inactive, wanting to escape, living by night, insecure in myself, amazed at the power of a man who lives next door and has survived many catastrophes. From what he tells me. I used to see him on the staircase and he stopped me one afternoon, saying he knew it was me because I lived by night. We made plans the next day to meet at the bar on the corner, and he told me about his life. He was a
factory worker but had, from what he said, “several contretemps.” He never explained it to me with any word other than that. His name was Agustín Doncelar.

  At present, what has stayed with me from this conversation is astonishment at the word “contretemps.” All the philosophy I have been able to extract, while dutifully reading the great philosophers in order to save myself, is that none of them has said anything new about contretemps.

  Space and time are forms of thought; they are ideas that exist in our minds prior to all observation of phenomena. Molds into which we pour the results of our experience. They are subjective, not independent of the observer. Time is a necessity of thought.

  Wednesday 4

  Three in the morning. Duration is not time. I can’t sleep.

  Saturday 7

  I can’t understand what it is I’m fighting against; I imagine numerous enemies and confront them one by one, as though dueling. It is impossible to fight them all at once because I must also fight against myself. Everything is simple, he said, if you understand that you must never lower your defenses. You have to be on guard, he said; the rest is illusory.

  Sunday 8

  It was intolerable that he turned back to inner climates; as though my body were a landscape, he said, or rather a building with extreme temperatures within. For three months, he said, I felt reality’s pressure so much of the time that I am not able, now, to seek solace in my inner life or in more or less abstract states of mind. What’s more, I have been trying to resume my “normal” sleeping hours for ten days. And so the nights go by, him lying prone on the bed, not sleeping until morning comes and he arises like a zombie, trying to turn the day around and reach a new morning.

  Tuesday 10

  It is six thirty in the afternoon. I am sick, am I sick? I have shivers, sleep badly, turn over in bed until noon, wide awake—wide awake?—and everything slips away in an exhausting—exhausting?—light sleep.

  Yesterday, I stupidly entered the Self-Defined Man’s game. And I stupidly asked for tickets to see his work of theater. Tickets that he reluctantly offered, offended because I had not gone to the premiere, etc, etc. When I arrived at the theater, of course, there were no tickets reserved. And so I bought one even though I was on the verge of leaving, but Inés insisted, etc. I know the jungle where I live, yet I insist on acting as though I were in an amusement park. What was I thinking, asking the Self-Defined Man for something in this atmosphere?

  Wednesday 11

  My neighbor from the room next door left the hotel sometime this week. I had grown accustomed to eating breakfast with him at any hour of the day and listening to him enumerate his complaints as though they were philosophy lectures. Last night I did no work, just let time pass, looking out from the balcony as in the distance the lights of the city went out. In the end, the only ones left alight were the streetlights and the old lamps of the Palacio de Obras Sanitarias, on the corner of Riobamba and Córdoba. In the bar, as I ate breakfast alone, the waiter informed me that “my friend” had come to say goodbye. “He came in with his suitcase and seemed ready to go, from what he said.”

  Today I discover serious defects in the article I wrote for Issue 2 of Literatura y Sociedad; it’s hard for me to draw it out from the well where it has fallen. On top of that, I have to go to La Plata, and I’m going to lose two days and a night there, teaching the morphological hypothesis on the history of Spengler and working in the archive for the “Argentine History I” course, in which I am an “assistant” (Kafkaesque).

  Meanwhile, in the midst of this unease, I have managed to resolve the story about Lucía, which I have decided will be called “Tierna es la noche.” She is walking in the rain. At the end, Lucía, covering her eyes.

  Saturday 14

  I have three options: 1. Go to Inés’s apartment for the second time, accept it. 2. Stay here, read, and wait for her. 3. Leave, go and have dinner alone, walk around the city.

  Monday 16

  The crisis is confirmed. I haven’t done any work in a month, and I have trouble finding the rhythm. In this age, I let myself be, sleep, try to escape.

  I travel to La Plata. Travel around the city, an ambulatory obsession. Travel to Adrogué. Better put it like this: He understood that some of the decisions he had made blindly at the age of sixteen were the only light amid the darkness, choices he had made in order to be faithful to what he thought he wanted to be. You can have doubts about everything, he thought, but you can’t have doubts about the choices made without motive, without meaning, but with the certainty and conviction that everything that came was a way for him to come closer to the place his guiding light had shown him.

  Thursday 19

  “The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public,” Ezra Pound.

  Waiting for Sergio, we are finishing Issue 2 of the magazine today. It is better than the previous one. We’ll see if Camarda got the thirty thousand pesos.

  Monday 23

  The tone of these days only becomes apparent in rereading this notebook. The sleepless nights, the story about Lucía is almost ready. But everything here in these pages sounds laborious because I only write about myself (in the third person, I expect) and about reality, which seems ever more hostile and indecipherable.

  Anyway, this notebook will be reread in the future as well, and then some sense will be restored, in a few months or, perhaps, even tomorrow. Lived time grows beautiful precisely because it is in the past. These dark days will seem luminous when distance allows me to observe them as though they were landscapes. The landscape of the soul, he said, you understand?

  Tarde de amor. But she had crossed the hallway, as always, proud and beautiful, never imagining that when she saw them again she would be naked and unconscious, lying in the bed.

  Friday, May 27

  I wrote the story “Tarde de amor” in one night. Let’s look at the beginning and end of “Tierna es la noche.” But Lucía is dead now, and everything is pointless. I am halfway through the year and things are not well. Economically, literarily, and emotionally.

  Saturday, June 4

  I am in the professors’ lounge at the College, waiting to give a makeup exam for “Introduction to History,” in a while, at one. The students appear in the door and make gestures after they see me here. I try to convey “I’m with you” by only moving my hands and putting on an expression of solidarity. Malicious weekend, without money. Now I am more tired than hungry.

  Tuesday 7

  The relationship with Inés is finished; both of us go on, anxious, trusting in the power of miracles. The aggression grows frantically. I am always just visiting and then lock myself up in the room over Riobamba, the only place where I feel safe.

  I saw Beatriz Guido. She gave me an envelope with pictures and a thousand pesos inside; it is payment for the summary of the possible film or script for Torre Nilsson’s film about the old house that still survives on Calle Lavalle, near Maipú. Beatriz says that the book stand Arlt talked about in Mad Toy was at that house or in its surroundings.

  “Nigh to the plain a battle they pitched both stiff and strong. But the lord Cid long-bearded hath overthrown that throng. And even unto Jativa in a long rout they poured. You might have seen all bedlam on the Jucar by the ford, for there the Moors drank water but sore against their will,” Cantar de mio Cid.

  Friday, June 10

  At the College. Will I get paid? The secretary is late. A narrative situation: at first I thought would get paid, but it turns out I get paid in July, and I don’t know how I’ll live through the month. And so the real problems appear, which may draw out my relationship with Inés ever further.

  A while later, at the College library. Maybe these absurd months had to end up this way. Few options: asking for borrowed money, asking for a place in the boardinghouse with rent overdue, living without money. I have learned to observe my own life from a distance. Everything consists of assessing those pure instants, at ti
mes when life no longer makes sense. Thinking “in perspective,” which is the advice of people with nothing to lose.

  Now that the motto of “write for the people” has been dispelled, many have decided to “write for the critics at the paper.” Given that the hegemonic critics are Primera Plana idiots, all of them write in the style of Cortázar: torrential autobiographical stories, without form, without style, but “sincere,” conforming with the poetics imposed by ex-surrealists who now earn their livings in executive seminars. As a result, they all seem the same (Néstor Sánchez, Mario Espósito… ).

  Sunday

  His relationship with Inés had ended. He had thought often about the beauty and creation of meaning that comes with endings, and so he wanted only to avoid the rhetoric of stories that stretch pointlessly onward.

  Nevertheless, the sadness did not abate and would not leave, he felt.