The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  I am reading Virginia Woolf’s diary.

  In the novel that I intend to write, I would like to recapture that same slightly irrational impulse with which I wrote the short stories, all in one sitting. The closest thing to inspiration I had was that night in the house in Boca, where I wrote three stories, one after another.

  After finishing the book, my relationship to books written by others has changed. More and more, it has become difficult for me to read “disinterestedly”; it’s impossible not to start editing them or thinking about how I would have written them.

  Wednesday 13

  A list

  Call Noé Jitrik (book of criticism).

  Sara Goldenberg (rights for “Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo” by GGM).

  Juan Gelman (piece about the new world for the magazine).

  León Rozitchner (message Sra. de Jorge).

  Miguel Briante (he’s calling Martini about publishing Hombre en la orilla).

  Marta Gil (prints ready tomorrow).

  Juan de Brasi (cancel the meeting).

  Finish going over the Rozenmacher recordings.

  Version of Salinger story.

  Correct the proofs.

  Prepare for lecture.

  I can’t figure out what it is that bothers me in “The Pursuer”: all of Cortázar’s themes are there, but the contrasts between Johnny’s mysterious genius and the biographer’s pettiness, between Bruno’s greed and the artist’s insane brilliance, seem too demagogical and trivial, and irritate me.

  Tuesday 19

  I stop at Beatriz Guido’s house to look for materials about Salinger. She is kind, amusing, not painting due to a cold. She tells me that they’ve offered her one hundred thousand pesos at the magazine Atlántida for a report with or on the jockey Irineo Leguisamo, New Yorker style. As for me, satisfied with the corduroy pants I bought this morning in Giesso.

  A recent phantom apparition of two policemen looking for the thief. It isn’t clear what was stolen. They rang the bell, talked to me, but raised their heads to see the layout of the place. The uncomfortable, knowing way in which the officer addressed me, to which I responded dryly. We have always distrusted the police and have always felt ourselves to be offenders of the law (no matter which), so that any encounter with someone in uniform turns into a complex scene. This leads to a possible meditation on “conditioning.”

  “The Robbery” is, we might say, a messy story, because everything changes in the escape. Narrating it in plural, with a chorus, but without anyone who decides the meaning of the events. They plan the robbery of the armored car in collusion with the police and then escape, breaking the deal.

  Hemingway’s iceberg theory doesn’t suggest a poverty of information, but rather an absence of explanations. To put it better: the facts are there but the nexus is missing.

  Thursday 21

  According to a sudden call from Marta Gil, the cover for the book is ready. It is yellow, with white lettering. Last night, paper proofs of La invasión.

  Sunday 24

  I correct the proofs and let myself embark on the ambiguous attraction of my own stories, trying not to see their deficiencies. Kafka says, “How much time the publishing of the little book takes from me and how much harmful, ridiculous pride comes from reading old things with an eye to publication… In any event, now, after the publication of the book, I will have to stay away from magazines and reviews even more than before, if I do not wish to be content with just sticking the tips of my fingers into the truth.”

  In some way, the central story of the novel has come to be the characters’ process toward insanity. A madness that could be called heroic; excess, surplus, hubris was a mortal sin for the Greeks.

  Monday 25

  “El laucha Benítez.” Plan. His face contains the story (describe it), show something he keeps under his clothing, a newspaper clipping. Boxer. Archie Moore. Never falls. His handsomeness. The first time they threw him, he fell to the ground out of surprise, shook his head, and moved his face without understanding. After that he started looking around strangely. Fighter. El Vikingo. Club Atenas. El laucha Benítez.

  I woke up with Julia at six in the morning. I let the day gradually light up the room while I drank maté, bathed, and then read the paper.

  I will never manage to understand where these things come from, but the fact is that just now, suddenly, I found what I was looking for in the story of El Vikingo. Everything hinges on Laucha’s death, which he wanted, and therefore it is told again and again. Just now, I can say that I resolved how to write the story.

  Tuesday 26

  Last night the launch of Walsh’s book. Many people piled up, great confusion, too much whiskey. In any case, I want to remember the friendly and warm conversation with Rodolfo W. and Haroldo Conti before I left for the city and came back home.

  Novel. It has to be narrated by the chorus, that is, it must be viewed from its destiny (“I told him that if he was leaving, etc.”). The voices of the chorus (witnesses, friends, accomplices, police) are superimposed on the investigator, the reporter and the narrator.

  Wednesday

  The facts could be listed. 1. He started boxing. 2. The highest point of his career… Look for an objective, informative tone.

  It is two in the morning. I’m fairly tired and decide to leave the end of the story for tomorrow. The furtive feeling bothers me, writing at night with the machine echoing in the silence, creating a strange relationship with the people who live in the room next door in the boardinghouse, whom I sense are awake and alert.

  Thursday 28

  After ten days of work, I have the first version of “El laucha” ready. I makes me remember the cold and distant way that I worked on the story about Urquiza.

  October 2

  Sometimes I think I should publish the book under a different name, thus sever all ties with my father, against whom, in fact, I wrote this book and will write the ones to follow. Setting aside his last name would be the most eloquent proof of my distance and my resentment.

  I caught up with delayed commitments: letter to Daniel Moyano, interview with Rozenmacher, translation of the Hemingway story.

  Wednesday 4

  I cannot, of course, write anything about my book; I spent a few days turning over the back-cover text that Jorge Álvarez asked me for, but in the end I found the solution, helped by Haroldo Conti’s friendship and enthusiasm. He will write the introductory text. I’m going to Di Tella in a while, and then I’ll get the photos for the book.

  Tuesday 10

  Greetings from Pirí Lugones last night. Martín Fierro on television. A meeting with friends: Miguel Briante, Dipi Di Paola, Vicente Battista. Talking about money, mandatory work, the excuses that each of us invents.

  Friday 13

  If it’s true that they killed Che Guevara in Bolivia, something has changed forever in my friends’ lives and also in mine. A messy week, confusing news. It did not stop raining. I remember going down Calle Libertad with Ismael Viñas, jumping over puddles of water, crossing improvised bridges, when we heard the news. Great commotion.

  Monday 16

  Fidel Castro confirmed the death of Che Guevara. The issue now is why Guevara left Cuba and why he went to Congo and then, without any support, launched guerrilla warfare in Bolivia. The other issue is why the Cubans didn’t rescue him from the field when the army started to uncover the whole plot and their contacts in La Paz fell, their only source of provisions. It’s obvious that a special group could have rescued him and taken him to the border, but we won’t know anything until we have direct news from the two or three guerrillas who survived the trap and saw when Che was arrested and, subsequently, coldly executed.

  Monday, October 23

  Ramón T. called me just now; it has been almost a year since that afternoon at the taxi stand on 1 and 60 in La Plata, when we said goodbye and I realized, without either of us saying anything, that he was going to Cuba to prepare for a new guerrilla adventure, which
I now see was connected to the contacts in Argentina that Che expected to follow him in Bolivia. We said nothing of this, but I noticed that Ramón was troubled and distant.

  Wednesday

  Plan: finish “El Vikingo.” Prologue for the book about Hemingway and the anthology of Latin American short stories. Letter to Daniel Moyano. See Beatriz Guido, Jorge Álvarez (Sartre).

  Sunday

  A recent call from Pirí, a preview of the book in two magazines, expectations, plans. I’m not thinking about a book launch and I don’t want one, I told her.

  The novel about the heist will be called Among Men.

  An oppressive day; only a plate of noodles in oil, because there is no money.

  Tuesday, October 31

  I suddenly remembered, as always happens to me, an image of myself, newly arrived in La Plata, six years ago, sitting at the París café with Alvarado. Memories, in which there is something in play that I can’t glimpse, always take the same form: a snapshot, a flash that passes before me like a bolt of lightning, and I see myself in the scene of the memory. As though I were simultaneously viewing the scene and taking part in it. It isn’t Proust’s involuntary memory, instead it seems more like a sort of private cinematography; from time to time the projector starts running and I see a few scenes from my life. It happens when I’m not prepared and don’t know what has given rise to the appearance of the image.

  Today I earned twenty thousand pesos from Jorge Álvarez, with which I will be able to survive until December with some security and without too much stress. Meanwhile echoes of the book arrive, news of the publication of La invasión in Havana, Andrés Rivera comes from Montevideo bringing me a pamphlet from Casa de las Américas with news about the book, a review and photo in which I see the cover of the book printed in green. The first book is the only one that matters; it takes the shape of an initiation rite, a passage, a crossing from one side to the other. The importance of the thing is merely personal, but you can never forget, I’m sure, the emotion of seeing a book of your writing printed for the first time. After that, you have to try not to turn into “a writer.”

  Thursday, November 2

  On Guevara. The commotion around his death is dissolving the purpose that brought them this far. His critiques of the Soviets and, therefore, certain lines of the Cuban Revolution resolved him to renounce his position and return to the struggle once more. Some of my friends (Elías, Rubén, Ramón T.) have that same conviction, as though they took responsibility for an ethics of their own, or rather, an ethics that finds its meaning in the future. After so much time suffering from secularization and the end of transcendent ideas—or the death of God, as Nietzsche said—some have found a way to restore this lost sense in history. The possibility of that meaning, which in another way defines life itself, obviously justifies their risk of death.

  Tuesday 8

  A confusing weekend at Pirí Lugones’s house. She suggests that we come to live there; her house is large and she rents out one of the rooms to offset her spending. Ismael Viñas, who has been living in the house, announced that he was moving somewhere else and she is offering us the free room. On Sunday, Walsh interviewed me (between liters of whiskey and ridiculous discussions) for his notes about new writers in Primera Plana.

  Now, leaving behind the excitement of this time of great festivities, I set out once again, writing about Hemingway’s stories.

  “Wash Jones” (which I will include in the collection of stories). Faulkner’s story anticipates and retells the central theme of Absalom, Absalom! and lends another meaning to Colonel Sutpen’s life. Faulkner’s characters (Quentin, Shreve) imagine what they don’t know, what no one has told them, what hopelessly admits no variations or allusions. They could even predict the death of Quentin Compson. The technique is simple; it consists of attributing knowledge about things a third-person narrator usually doesn’t know to various narrators—distinct in time and space. Not affirming anything as definitive truth, making all of the action potential.

  Monday, November 13

  National Library. In my hands, Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: born on the 24 of November, 1712. (He was born on the same day as me.)

  Wednesday, November 15

  In terms of style, there seem to be two paths (if you want to escape, as I have done in La invasión, from the gravity of Borges’s prose). A neutral, impersonal, transparent tone, not forceful, but full of nuances and false syntactical simplicity. Or a style that copies orality, very subjective. In both cases, there is an attempt to erase the written signifier, through brevity or through a colloquial verbalization. For me, at heart it is about an art that intensifies synthesis and that, on the other hand, signals that it is a book, not a reality, but rather an artificial object that has been proven as real.

  In a surprising way, the story about Lazarus Morell from Borges’s first work presupposes, divines, suggests Sutpen—through his geographical sphere, through his lineage and through his “activities”—before he reaches the territory.

  Friday 17

  A meeting for the magazine. Rodolfo Walsh ponders La invasión, “a very good book, very even, the best ones are: ‘Tierna es la noche’ and ‘Mata-Hari 55,’” “great formal construction.”

  “The very noise of his words, of his sincere declaration, reflected his conviction that language could serve no purpose to him,” J. Conrad.

  Conrad and H. James define a kind of storytelling in which the vision matters more than the story. The imagination doesn’t draw from a conventional story, already completely made, but rather from an ambiguous situation that never ends up being understood.

  Thursday 23

  Now settled into Pirí’s house, in this room over Calle Rivadavia, full of light, with large picture windows. As always, I adapt with difficulty in the face of changes. Yesterday with Jorge Álvarez; final proofs of the book that will come out “at the beginning of December.”

  Thousands of things to do and I’m stuck in a lethargy, as though everything had paused, spaced-out, with no desire to go back one last time to the boardinghouse on Calle Montes de Oca and get the things we left.

  Monday 27

  A furious call from Juan Gelman just now, asking me for a preview of the book in Confirmado. “Excellent book, very well written, dazzling,” he pointed to the phrase from “En el terraplén”—“the chief of them all”—as an exemplar of synthesis.

  It is curious, but Onetti’s best works, always so excessive, so verbal, so Faulknerian, are his short histories (“A Grave with No Name,” “The Pit,” “Goodbyes”).

  December 2

  I have a proof of the book cover here on the table—straightforward, yellow, with my own face.

  December 11

  In El Rayo bar, ancient, dark, and cool, facing the train station in La Plata. I spent many nights here drinking gin and watching the shady life that is amassed in terminals. The girls from the bar—showgirls, entertainers—came to the tables of students like me and immediately established a rapport, because we were separate from the “clients” they went with to turn their tricks in the hotels surrounding the area: business travelers, public employees, people leaving the racetrack. Afterward they returned and sat down to talk with me, at a table reading. “What are you reading, corazón? You’re going to hurt your eyes.” They put their hands over the open pages and invited me to leave with them. Sometimes I would wait for the bar to close and invite them to have a coffee in a Japanese bar on Calle 1, and sometimes I also spent the night with one of them, only to hear them tell their bizarre stories with dignity.

  December 12

  Another day of waiting, reading Carlos Fuentes’s stories, killing time, paralyzed. Sometimes a tranquility in the face of the futility of these expectations, distance from the book and nostalgia for the gentle ease with which I wrote the stories, efficiently and without thinking too much.

  Among Men. These are the first results of a broader investigation I have begun based on the experiences
of Oscar Lewis (The Children of Sanchez, Life). As we know, Lewis has innovated in the field of anthropology based on the use of the tape recorder, with the goal of recording life stories, real events, and at the same time narrating them through the voices and styles of the protagonists. I am interested most of all in raising some considerations here. As we know, the use of the recorder changes the level of exploration of the experience and creates a distance in the way the events are told. We try to strengthen this criterion; in this book, I have reconstructed the events that occurred, basing it on the assault on the armored car from a bank in San Fernando and the criminals’ subsequent flight to Montevideo, where they were finally surrounded by the police in a trap caused by betrayal. My first contact with the protagonists of this story took place on January 11, 1965, after reading news of the assault in La Razón newspaper. After that, I interviewed all of the witness and participants in the events and gained access to a radio amateur’s recordings of the conversations between the lowlifes while they were resisting the police attack. There’s no need to tire the reader by narrating the difficulties I had to overcome to conduct the recordings and achieve a personal rapport with the protagonists. Several interviews were necessary before I could manage to understand the facts in any detail. Finally, I was able to join a group of five witnesses, initiating the first conversations without a recorder in order to establish a level of trust with them, and, by the time we finally began working with the record of their account, we already had a very smooth relationship.