The only comfort left to me is knowing that everything was foreseen and that, even as I began writing in this notebook, the dice were cast but I didn’t know how to make myself receptive in time. Who knows, however, whether I could have held back and not gone looking for her. You need great courage to retreat before the fire alarms sound. To decide, beforehand, that it will be impossible.
I am going to finish this notebook tomorrow and, as always, magically, my life will change as soon as I start to write on blank pages. Anyway, I will go to Gotán tomorrow, I will sit down at a table with Julia and reveal the social “experience” of the ending with Inés.
Thursday
Our last meeting was a somber one at El Foro. Inés, in white, flustered and sad. Both feeling some desire to cry and not speaking. We exchanged cherished objects as though they were words. Then I watched her go and set out on the street to walk the opposite way.
Cacho’s address. Dolores Prison, Calle 3, number 526, side entrance.
I go to Gotán with Julia; my friends are used to these changes and don’t ask for any explanation or reasons.
Saturday 20
The imbalance of “The Pit and the Pendulum” comes out of an error in perspective; this story, told in the third person, requires (like almost all of Poe’s short stories) the first person in order to reify the horror of the experience. Poe’s best stories are always confessions.
Wednesday 24
Deep down it is always about the same thing, rebuilding the collapsed structures so that we can live in them. The only thing that matters is the strength of the buildings and not the means used to raise them. And yet, it is also true that the methods determine the durability of the structure.
Poe’s cruel stories are grounded on this sentence from “The Premature Burial”: “What I have now to tell is of my own actual knowledge—of my own positive and personal experience.” The other technique lies in the scientific, nonliterary quality, which legitimized the events (the plots seem extracted from publications or are prefaced with meticulous theories).
Thursday, October 6
An unexpected period of happiness, which has lingered since the start of spring. On one hand, a great physical, intellectual, musical closeness with Julia. And also the irresistible, ecstatic way in which I wrote “Mata-Hari 55” in two days. In that story, I microscopically employed the method of storytelling truth that I am thinking of using in the novel. Perhaps some news from outer space adds to the good humor. Recently, Samuel Amaral told me that in an issue of Análisis magazine dedicated to Argentine literature I appear as the most read among young people aged eighteen to twenty-two. They are readers of my own generation, barely younger than myself.
I have to recall the way in which I left the universe of Inés and entered the world of Julia, coldly and without regrets. Everything changed; love is also a language that you must learn again each time, to forget breakups and separations. As though the language of passion were a single one, which transforms along with each person, so that you forget the words of the past and learn the words of the future. A single language, whose syntax and verbal content changes according to the circumstances of love.
Monday, October 10
In the middle of the afternoon I see Inés by chance in El Ramos, the same table on the sidewalk where we were talking in February, in the middle of summer, she with her hair very short and some yellow earrings, very beautiful. I had forgotten the words to speak to her with, so that today’s conversation was interrupted several times by misunderstandings. An unhappy meeting for both of us. Each one now starting to be forgotten.
I resist correcting the stories, am certain that they are well written in the first draft. As though style were decided in one go and any (conventional) “improvement” would destroy the effect of the whole. Either way, I have to close the book and forget about it so that I can begin writing the story of the criminals who flee to Uruguay. So close to me that I have to write it as though it were taking place now.
Wednesday 12
Why doesn’t anyone talk about the reactionary and archaic meaning of Columbus Day, the so-called “día de la raza?” I imagine it derives from the Hispanicist tradition: when they lost the last colonies with the war in Cuba in 1898, the Spaniards invented the myth of a common culture between the mother country and what they called Hispanic America.
When, by chance—like someone finding attractive and slightly perverse photos in a forgotten drawer of the family house—I reread some of these notebooks, in which days of intense happiness run across intense spells of sorrow. I perceive, in an unexpected lesson from life, an emotional relativism, a fluctuation of emotions that obeys no visible logic. When they are set down in writing, states of mind turn into physical spaces that are repeated here and there, the same way that someone in his childhood home—where he found some disturbing photos of his mother in a chest of drawers—happens by chance to pass once more through the bedrooms of the house, some dark and dismal, others illuminated in the full light of the morning sun. We could describe a landscape, modeling it on the rooms where we were happy (or wretched) in far-off childhood.
Within the same day, I see Diary of a Chambermaid by Buñuel, in the early afternoon, at Normandie, and Pierrot le fou by Godard, close to sunset, at Loire.
Thursday 13
There is a lack of gravity in these days of waiting; nothing significant seems to happen, and yet something I cannot imagine makes itself known.
Why does everything always come from so far away? For example, yesterday Inés leaving the theater with G. at the end of Godard amid the drizzle, a stranger, as I got into the car with Julia, with Nene and Alberto, already in another territory, speaking another language, abroad. Am I not an image as well, and don’t I, too, have strength and sense? So, why should I think about my importance from a single hostile place, where I am invisible?
Friday 14
I continue my resistance to correcting the stories; I am afraid of breaking an unstable equilibrium upon which, imperceptibly, the plots are supported.
I witness an insulting situation. Two German professors speak to a professor who has been condemned by her colleagues. She makes them sit at the table, get comfortable, “break the ice” (they have come to deliver terrible news, and she knows it).
Sunday 16
Like someone testing his own courage or the scope of his chance decisions or using himself as an object of experimentation, I left, walking slowly and disdainfully, not looking at anyone, walked out of the overpriced restaurant with glass walls without paying.
What is valuable in Faulkner is the constant presence of someone telling the story; the narrators circulate, but they all have the same plaintive and furious tone.
Monday 17
A month ago we were living in Dipi Di Paola’s house. I have always felt an attraction to places that do not belong to me, where someone has lived before me and left a mark through the furniture, the paintings, the books. We stayed there, Julia and I, like two furtive lovers secretly inhabiting the house of the friend they are betraying.
I have gone back to the heavy days in which I struggle to come back to life, as though I did not want to wake. How much was I upset by my encounter—that’s what I will call this crossing of two strangers—with Inés last Wednesday, leaving the theater? It seems like I can’t stand her going on, living her life without me there.
Tuesday 18
Now she even appears to me in dreams. Strangely, I have a date with Inés, who shows up with G. I think I made a mistake. What’s more, they have to go somewhere and I don’t want to go with them.
Wednesday 19
I pass the night without sleeping, returning, it seems, to insomnia: I have been prone to sleep loss all of my life. I can’t remember any other night like last night. I thought I was traveling in a long-distance train, I had settled into the upper bunk of the personal cabin in which I was prepared to spend a week. The feeling of forward motion, the sound of the tracks, and the light
of the deserted towns that we swiftly crossed made me fall asleep near sunrise. Light sleep, the stage immediately preceding sleep, has an oneiric quality, and yet we are the ones imagining what we see.
Part of the night I was also scheming about inscriptions for the book I still have not published or finished writing. In these images, when you personally give a book you have written to a friend—or someone—and sign a copy after writing a phrase, isn’t there a distant sense of literature? We always write for particular people, and you could write an essay on the meaning of inscriptions.
The insane lucid state of five in the morning, after the long meeting with Ramón T., drinking gin. He wants to convince me to continue with Literatura y Sociedad magazine. He has a clear notion of what must be done, since it is dedicated to building on what he calls “the revolutionary situation.” A literary magazine or an attack on the headquarters have the same purpose, to him, as long as someone is able to connect one truth with the other. In a sense, it is classic paranoid thought. Like lunatics, professional revolutionaries are convinced that “everything has to do with everything.”
I make a note of one of the inscriptions that occurred to me in the night. To Lucía, guilty of 87 percent of this book. (I like to include a number in an inscription.)
I came out of insomnia with bleary eyes and one certainty: I cannot accept that I decided to lose Inés.
But today, she told me, you can free yourself mechanically from this divided body. In an era, she said, when there are stimulants and sedatives, it’s inconceivable to have love pangs that last more than six hours. She was smiling, young and beautiful, when she went on, cynically announcing the truths of the world, and said, “In an era with cosmetic surgery and beauty schools, it is senseless for you to prefer one woman over another. In an era,” she added, “when there are birth-control pills and artificial insemination, it’s impossible to still pass on our flaws, our angst, and our ugliness to our or others’ children.” She leaned in over the table and asked if I agreed.
Saturday 22
A special time in my life, I can say, without introspection, only facts. I spend the days with Julia in this city where I lived years ago, where no one now knows me. I drink gin with her after we make love so I can sleep. And I have nightmares about Inés every night. A man of habits, a man who does not want to lose anything, not even things he himself abandons.
Sunday 23
The story that has given me the most work is “Tarde de amor.” I keep revising it over and over again. It seems a clockwork mechanism with pendulums that must be balanced. In this rough and final version, there are two possible endings. I don’t know if that is a merit or a fault.
Tuesday 25
The cat died. It was called The Consul (because it always seemed drunk). Yesterday afternoon it was staring at me from a bench where it lay. I thought, This cat is strange, something is wrong with this cat, and it was already dead (with its eyes wide open).
Wednesday 26
An era of underground happiness. Days and days without leaving this vast and luminous room, witnessing the new trials of a passionate love with Julia. For now, we each exchange words in our personal language and the encounters are, more than anything, physical.
I am content with this new history, despite my nostalgia. I understand that other woman, who was the first I truly loved. Reality or cosmic guidance always helps with our burden, and I force myself, so to speak, to follow the path after breaking up with Inés and finding a new intense passion, etc.
Running away is an end in itself, Cacho would say. The speed sensitizes, sharpens, intensifies everything. Landscape, woman, ordinary life, friends. Everything takes on a new dimension while you are running and then, once the door of the car is closed, you and the car are the same thing. Man assimilates the motors, feels alone, free, at two hundred kilometers per hour life is purer. He said this after having ridden on motorcycles since a young age, later riding in “prepared” cars (which he takes the precaution of stealing first).
Thursday 27
I have memories of the origins behind the stories in this book.
“En el calabozo”: The first thing I remember is an afternoon in 1961 at the Tiro Federal in Mar del Plata. A soldier, I remember his shaven head; he told me the story.
“Mi amigo” strangely arose when I went to visit Helena with a friend and he amended my high opinion on Bioy Casares. Well, what if you told me you didn’t like it?, he said, making it clear to me.
“En el terraplén”: Lina Flores told me the anecdote in El Bosque in La Plata and I liked the double ending.
“La honda”: Walking down a dirt road one Sunday, I saw some laborers working and suddenly discovered the story.
“Mata-Hari 55”: Manolo Comesaña told me the story, last year. The protagonist’s successive changes in name were suggested to me by Inés, unintentionally, when I discovered her speaking on the phone and saying that her name was Enriqueta.
“Las actas del juicio”: The plot arose in the “Argentine History” class that Beatriz Bosch taught in 1963. There were several versions. A discussion with Julio Bogado made me clean up the excess; a conversation with Inés (who didn’t like that the story was told in plural by a “we”) led me to invent a narrator for it and justify his tone, making him the man responsible for Urquiza’s death.
Monday, October 31
Novel. (The characters make the technique visible, which has some effect on the truth of what they tell.) “Much of what Costa narrated was made known in the presence of his voice on the recording and could therefore contain distortions.”
The purpose of including “ideas” or thoughts in a story is to complicate the motivations. The distorted reflection, slightly arbitrary, is justified in that it is valuable not only as a theory, but also as part of the story’s plot (when it is uttered or thought by characters or narrators implicated in another world—that is, in the relationships that weave together in the interior of the novel).
For me, it is about reproducing—as though I were recording it—the perception of reality in the midst of the action and danger, which define Cacho’s life “philosophy” (it is antagonistic to reality and will therefore “crash” against the stone wall of the real).
Wednesday, November 2
For a while I have lived precariously, with a hundred pesos per day, very little cash. I always feel a slight restlessness caused by hunger, but I never think about the future; economy doesn’t matter to me if I know that I’m going to work all night (one economy against another, necessity and desire, as they say, Laurel and Hardy—the Thin One and the Fat One).
I found a more fluid beginning for my story “La honda”: “I don’t let myself be deceived by boys. I know that they lie, that they are always putting on innocent faces and laughing at everyone underneath.”
Thursday 3
I remembered a goodbye and a meeting. Suddenly came the image in which I myself was present. At first I didn’t see her in that bar facing the station, but later we talked agitatedly about “various things” (a crime the day before in that same place). In the end, the train arrived and we parted, comfortable. Earlier, I had received a letter.
Facing the path of the novel that makes conventions visible and says “this is a novel” and puts belief in its fiction in crisis—for example, Günter Grass, Néstor Sánchez (they say, for example, “It is raining now, or maybe it would be better to say that the sun is high in the novel…”). There is a less obvious but very experimental tradition (Conrad, Faulkner) that justifies the narrator by explaining the reasons why he is telling the story and implicitly signaling the possible distortions. (In Faulkner, there is no narrator who orders and hierarchizes the material; the characters take the floor and tell their own versions.)
Reading Conrad, with his multiple narrators in the same story, with a high and literary prose, Faulkner’s admiration is understandable. In Conrad, the fiction—or rather, the already storied quality of the account that is going to be to
ld (“the legendary tale” in The Duel)—is always present, and then there are the interruptions and commentaries of the secondary narrator (Marlow), which underline the presence of someone who is relating the story, which has already taken place, to a group of listeners. The cutoffs and interruptions and explanations allow jumps in time, lend the story the tone of a lived experience. In The Duel, the established narrator narrates a story that is already partially known, which suffers deformations as a result of being interpreted from the outside by someone who doesn’t know it well (but tells it, fascinated by the mystery of what he does not know about the characters’ motives, although he does record the events that have transpired).
Thursday 17
Certain stories can’t be corrected because the structure and the tone set out directly toward a mistaken denouement. Correcting them involves the risk of juxtaposing several “meanings” that, in any case, don’t enrich the story. I do not believe in “committed” subjects as justification for a story. Because of this, I am not going to include “Desagravio” in the book, despite the fact that its subject is the bombing of Plaza de Mayo by the Naval Aviation in 1955 and it has political resonance. In order to create the tone of Peronism I have to narrate my own experience, or rather, my father’s experience.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 32