Prologue to the Latin American short stories. The encounter with the spoken language of each country (Cabrera Infante, Rulfo, Cortázar, etc.), even as it separates us from the supposed mother tongue (Spanish), refines and unifies the literature of Latin America. Tendency toward linguistic realism and the mimesis of orality.
Tuesday 9
Perhaps the initiation rites should be institutionalized in Argentina; at least that’s the impression I have after seeing how a juvenile culture develops, connected to rock music in certain styles of dress, defined by their own laws and codes.
Regarding the relationship between life and literature, you have to pay attention to where you put the positive sign: to look at literature from life is to think of it as a closed and airless world; in contrast, to look at life from literature allows you to perceive the chaos of experience, the lack of form and meaning, allowing you to endure life.
Wednesday 10
After Cacho’s arrest in February of last year, I went into a spiral, or rather a confused whirlwind, and hit rock bottom; in August “The End of Something” led me to move in the darkness and search for the light, which only now has started to shine. When you think about yourself and attempt to recreate naturally what you have lived through, you use a narrative and link the events with causal logic—but life doesn’t obey those rules, and everything comes about confusedly, at the same time.
Monday 15
I worked all weekend long, half-sick with the flu, but just a little while ago today I finished the note on youth for Extra magazine, in exchange for five thousand pesos.
Tuesday 16
An affectionate meeting with Haroldo Conti and then an interview for Venezuela; they asked me about authenticity, and I answered, “To be sincere, you have to be insincere, think about technique, avoid confessions. You have to be genuine with the reader by means of a convincing style (but it isn’t necessarily sincere, or spontaneous). Technique, as Ezra Pound said, is the test of the artist’s sincerity.”
I am working on the anthology of Latin American literature. Old themes are rewritten but given another setting. The creation of a manifold literary language has begun, connected to the breakdown of Spanish predominance.
Briante’s second book is written in a borrowed language that never becomes personal. That doesn’t stop his book from being very good, but I think it hinders him—or will hinder him—in moving forward and writing other books.
Saturday 20
In Florida bar, always an oasis in these places, at once anonymous and familiar. I regain some peace after the confusing turmoil today with Julia; neither of us have any money, and she is now alone in the place. I am reading a book about American film noir. Narrating a police interrogation as though it were a scene of jealousy (in general it happens in reverse: What were you doing last night? Where were you? Who is the other woman or other man? Tell me, admit it… ).
She devotes herself to a ferociously exclusive love and dedicates all of her energy to tying him down forever, but, of course, her efforts only serve to lose him.
As night falls. A woman, almost crippled and tied to her bed, isolated in a vast and empty house, makes a telephone call to the outside, trying to find her husband. It is ten at night. By chance she interrupts an anonymous conversation: two men, two voices really, are planning a crime that will take place an hour later. After many calls to different places, each time more anxious and more frightened, the woman comes to realize—or imagines—that the murder will be her own.
Tuesday 23
Long travels since Sunday. At six in the afternoon, with forty pesos to my name, a call came from Pirí Lugones inviting me to a meeting at her house. I put together some books and sold them at a used bookshop for three hundred pesos. Then I went to her house in Flores and stayed there all night. A meeting with Rodolfo Walsh, Ismael Viñas, Horacio Verbitsky, arguing about the police, based on Paco Urondo’s sentimentality. Returning at six in the morning with Carlos Peralta, some conclusions. According to Carlos, the invitation may have to do with the idea of producing a version of Marcha magazine in Buenos Aires.
Carlos shares some information with me and I copy it down here, somewhere between surprise and embarrassment. For Ismael Viñas, “E. R. is the most brilliant, the only writer from the new generation who matters.” According to Urondo, this year Casa de las Américas, in Cuba, will invite me to Havana at a request and recommendation from him, Noé Jitrik, and César Fernández Moreno.
After so much whiskey, I get up at noon and go to the pawnbroker. Two hours of waiting, my attempts to pass out. I went twenty-four hours without eating, plus the sleepless night with whiskey. In the end, surely after looking at my face, a policeman stops me to interrogate me about where I got the camera that I have gone there to pawn. Nothing serious, just arrogance. Finally, around three in the afternoon, I order a piece of chorizo with fried potatoes at Pippo, after a scattered and extremely lucid vision—due to hunger, exhaustion, and alcohol—of the city: everything seems vast, the sky is made of glass, and the buildings all have blinds and locked shutters. Vision modifies reality, the crisis of urban certainties. Now I want to work, all in one go.
I worked fairly well all afternoon, ended up with the prologue for the anthology almost ready.
Friday
No money once again. Now I’m working on the mini-biographies of the writers I selected for the anthology. Since it is coming out in Buenos Aires, I didn’t include Argentine writers. León R. reproaches me for it when I mention the criterion: “You did that,” he says, “so you wouldn’t have to include David…” “Well,” I answered him, “I’m not including Borges either.”
Cortázar: when he stops being Borges, he’s a naturalist (the same thing happens with Bioy Casares).
Anyway, the worst thing is always this insane activity that keeps me tied down at the table, tapping away at the typewriter like a sleepwalker, with the idiotic feeling that I can’t stop. Entire days working without leaving the room, and when I lose the thread, I find a series of pages written passionately, which I can’t read again until a few days have passed. I’ve written two chapters of the novel, the biographies of the American writers, the impossible article about what it is to be young, the prologue for the Latin American anthology, the corrections and rewrites of the stories in La invasión. But maybe I am making myself blind and the only thing that matters is the activity itself, without false utilitarianism and without seeking results.
Saturday 27
Ready to draw something from the well of the stories from La invasión, I work them over doggedly, but I have to learn to hold back when I sit down at the typewriter, to stop myself from writing a different story every time I revise what I am going to publish. I am trying to create a progression for the stories in the book, to give them an organic structure.
Sunday 28
A slow walk through the suburbs of Constitución with Julia. The dark little plaza, the cut-off street, the low and yellowish houses, the memories of returning to the station at various points in my life, first from Adrogué, and then from La Plata, and always a feeling of defiance in confronting the city, the insane desire to conquer it. As though literature were also a weapon and a way to stake out my place in Buenos Aires.
The Tower (Diary of a soldier). Sometime I let myself be dragged along by a foolish hope and want to think I am alone on the tower, the sea behind me. You can see the coming night, as though suspended between the mountains, because there is no twilight to the south; the shadows fall and, in an instant, everything is darkness.
Monday
Long walks around Buenos Aries, looking for Historia de la literatura latinoamericana by Anderson Imbert to help finish the articles. I went to the National Library, the Institute of Literature, the College of Philosophy and Letters, and La Prensa newspaper. It felt like I was looking for a nonexistent book and, even if its content is fairly nonexistent, I don’t understand why I couldn’t find it.
I saw a young man running
down Viamonte, crossing through the puddles in the street; he was drenched but didn’t stop running and turned his head back fearfully toward where a woman with a mesh bag in her hand was screaming, and the young man went on running clumsily, now pursued by a policeman, who trapped him halfway down the block.
Tuesday
Yesterday an encounter with Edgardo, a neurotic intellect. What does he mean to say? A kind of thought—thinking—that is sinuous, menacing; he always seems to be on the brink of announcing something he will never say. Circular, self-centered, concentric.
José Sazbón lent me a thousand pesos that I hoped would make it to Friday, but last night six hundred of them got away from me. Now I’m freezing, don’t have the money to turn on the furnace; I put on two pairs of pants and two sweaters, and want to finish the anthology of Latin America.
Thursday, June 1
I am in La Plata, at the library of the University I know very well, where I manage to find everything I’m looking for. Dazzled by the books I have to read, by the magazines and publications lying on my table now.
These places urge me toward old memories, and sometimes I feel that I am several different men, or rather, sometimes it seems as though I were several different men. An intense, intimate experience, which leads me to see alternatives and realities based on who I am in a given moment. Something of the truth about my life lies in that impression, a printed man, as it were, a man who can read his life in different registers, or rather, in different genres. It isn’t a psychological confusion—although those abound in me—but rather an illuminating experience.
Sunday 4
“The greatest magician would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances,” Novalis.
A frozen Sunday, two degrees below zero, the room warmed by the furnace, where we set a stew in the afternoon, while I was finishing the prologue and the biographies of the Latin American writers, and Julia cried from time to time, raging with a cold that held her down in bed for the whole weekend.
Monday 5
I’m working on the book of short stories. Just now, dead from cold, I finished the last revision before the galleys. I have grown too tired of these stories.
It’s remarkable, but every conversation, no matter whom it is with—recently, for example, Pirí—becomes a misunderstanding for me, I misinterpret what they say; nevertheless, conversation is a surprising example of our capacity for using language at a moment’s notice. Speaking over the phone and then connecting with a disembodied voice is a very interesting exercise; by not seeing the gestures and expressions of the person on the other end, you can carelessly misinterpret the meaning of what you hear. It would be best to talk in front of a mirror and practice making the gestures and assuming the expressions that accompany the words we hear. When I speak, on the other hand, I feel myself propelled forward and don’t know where I will go; when I manage to be precise and effective, as I did just now, I immediately have a feeling of happiness because it seems that the language has worked to perfection.
Tuesday, June 6
In Florida bar, with blasts of wind, because this table near the window is right next to the swinging door. I stubbornly tried to warm up the room by force of patience, but the concierge at the hotel took advantage of an oversight to slip in and open the windows and clean and turn my work place into an igloo. That’s why I am now in this bar, so cozy, working calmly on the letter to Cabrera Infante. Yesterday I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, the new novel by García Márquez.
I switched tables because the woman who was sitting opposite me left and I was able to take the best place at the bar. I have great experience in the layouts of the cafés where I sit down to work. For me they are annexes of the place where I live, a mixture of writing desk and living room. I know the times when the bars are empty and you can stay in them without a problem, enjoying the tranquility and a clean and well-lit place. As always, in such cases, I come only with the novel that I’m reading and a book of notes, and that’s enough for me to pass the afternoon. And so I am reading García Márquez, smelling the unmistakable aroma of coffee, the dull noise of the street behind and a cheerful feeling of happiness with time stopped before me, convinced of the “goodness” of my life these days.
On some level, still undefinable for me, García Márquez’s novel reminds me of Borges in A Universal History of Infamy. Here it is about the universal history of the world’s marvels, an optimistic novel, maintaining the mythical and astonishing perspective and distance between the narrator and the heroes, which is also the case in Borges’s book. The protagonists are heroes, for happiness here and for disgrace in Borges’s stories. They have that in common, characters who are already given and act according to conventions that only the narrator knows. For example, García Márquez relates the everyday as though it were fantastical (for example, the excursion to see the ice) and relates the extraordinary as though it were trivial (women fly without any problem).
Thursday 8
Sitting here now, the same table as four years ago at Teutonia in La Plata. At that time, I was with Susana M., about to take my final for “Medieval History” with Nilda Guglielmi, Hemingway’s smiling face on the cover of Época newspaper. Nostalgia is an almost dreamlike feeling for me. As I have already said a couple of times, the images from memory sometimes come attached to places and other times senselessly, as though someone were sending them to me from the past, the same as a postcard of a German-style bar, and on the back someone has written the note that I just finished writing here.
In order to understand the notion of “figure” in Cortázar (links between different characters coincidentally connected in a shared space), it is enough to sit down for a half hour near a public telephone and listen—by chance, inadvertently—to the most intimate and varied conversations, and, in this way, witness the single-stringed weaving of destinies, meetings, dates, breakups, disagreements. Because it is oral, that fabric is inevitably “literary”: the world is recreated based on the language and the speech of a heterogeneous ensemble of fragmented and unknown narrators.
Friday, June 9
I am at the College to get my salary from the first part of last year, before my resignation due to the military government’s takeover of the University. I receive half of the money they owe me and a promise that they will hurry with “the case,” as they call it. The funny thing is that, except for the high authorities of the University, so to speak, the secretaries and administrative staff of the College are still the same kind people that you meet when coming in as a newly arrived student. My commitments to Jorge Álvarez and my new work with him have come to replace my academic life, which seems to have ended once and for all. I have gone from being a professor to being an editor, in the English sense of the term—that is, an editorial adviser who directs collections, writes reader’s reports, but works at home, freelance, another English term that has no translation in our world.
Sunday, June 11
I have been making notes on One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel everyone is talking about, which I read too quickly and with uncertain feelings. On the one hand, it seems too—professionally—Latin America to me: a kind of celebratory local color, with something of Jorge Amado and also of Fellini. The prose is very potent and also very demagogic, with calculated punchlines for the paragraphs to produce an effect of surprise. I am writing a review of the book for El Mundo and hope to finish it tonight. Yesterday afternoon I killed time at Noé Jitrik’s house; he wants to organize a study group (with Ludmer, Romano, Lafforgue, etc.) on Argentine literature. The point is to create an alternative to the University, now taken over, where all of the professors have resigned, and to build an alternative institution, the Institute of Arts and Humanities. In any case, today I have not moved from this room, where freezing air filters in, trying to finish my pending projects.
I would also like to quickly finish this notebo
ok, filled with so many events and, for that very reason, so strange and elusive to me. Moving, new neighborhoods in which I move like a stranger, renewing my interest in the city. Barracas for a while now; the old factory buildings—Bagley, for example—which abound around here, along with the warehouses near the old port that give it its name. Also nearby is Parque Lezama, which has a serene atmosphere, some very pleasant old bars and restaurants. I always have the experience of having no money and getting to know the city by walking, looking for cheap places, traveling by bus, a more direct experience, more conflicted, not mediated by the magical quality of money that alleviates all unawareness of reality, because there are no mysteries when you can buy everything. (You might think that García Márquez’s novel is appealing because it recounts the life of a large and penniless family whose relationship with reality is archaic, precapitalist, and therefore—for the media—romantic and magical.)
I could make a list of the things I did, which would be a way to recount how I earn my living (for example, the review of GGM’s novel in exchange for two thousand pesos), and see that the novel remains static and that my personal world (my passions) must be financed alone—that is, separately, outside of literature and life as I want to live it.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 38