The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Wednesday 13

  Work to do, several matters. Plan for the novel. American and Latin American anthologies. Series with Editorial Estuario. Projects with Editorial Tiempo Contemporáneo. I make my living as a publisher, or rather, as a director of collections, which means I am a professional reader.

  Friday 15

  Yesterday a surprising call from Francisco Urondo, announcing an invitation from Casa de las Américas for me to travel to Cuba. There is already a ticket in my name. Desolation with Julia. According to Pirí, the book is coming out today.

  December 17

  The book is finally in my hands, and also the issue of Crónicas de Norteamérica. I can’t travel with Julia, and it makes no sense for me to stay with her either.

  Monday

  Jorge Álvarez book. Then Germán at Florida. Then Ludmer at noon. Sara, expecting the meeting at the publisher’s. Passport today at six (call Paco). Conti.

  For the better, this month has turned out to be very Argentine, and I’m reading autobiographies of writers and other heroes to organize an anthology centered on first-person narratives. I’m going to include a variety of texts, letters, confessions, fragments of personal diaries, and I’m working with a very wide register that includes politicians, adventurers, writers. The I. That will be the title of the book. The idea is that the autobiography is a genre that we all practice at some point, deliberately or not. We can’t live if we don’t pause from time to time to make a narrative and tangential summary of our lives. Finding those moments, wherever they are written, will be the concept of this anthology. Catching the protagonists in the moments when they refer to themselves.

  Tuesday

  Introduction to the book of stories by Torre Nilsson.

  In the National Library. I spend the afternoon looking over old books, creating a new version of the concept of the autobiography. New, because I imagine the writings connected by genre and not by the incidental notion of “literature.” Personal writings surpass that category and, in fact, put themselves forth as testimonies. The other issue is that, usually, only fictional texts are considered literary (whatever their direction may be).

  Argentines for themselves. An anthology of autobiographical prose. “It seemed to me that they all committed a great error: they conducted themselves very well with the erudite class, but disregarded men of the lower classes, those from the country, who are men of action. I noticed this from the beginning and thought that, during the critical points of the revolution, the same parties had to account for that class conquering and causing the greatest damage because there is always a known willingness in which there is nothing against the rich or upper classes. It seemed very important to me, then, to gain significant influence over this population in order to contain it, or direct it, and I resolved to gain that influence at all costs, for which I had to work with great perseverance, with many sacrifices, to become a gaucho like them, to speak like them and do as they did, protect them, make myself their representative, look after their interests, in short, spare no work or methods to win their opinion.” Juan Manuel de Rosas, December 9, 1829, the day he is elected governor of Buenos Aires.

  (Peron thought in exactly the same way and did the same thing as Rosas, in another context, but with the same paternalistic popular concept.)

  Tuesday 26

  The situation is like this: I will travel with León R., Rodolfo W., and Paco Urondo; París–Havana route.

  Buy

  Agenda. Black notebook. Shirt. Buttons. Canvas shoes. Gillette. Shaving cream. Toothpaste. Shoes. Suitcase. Clothes. Handkerchiefs. Books (Álvarez).

  See: Miguel (boots).

  Ticket (Tucumán seven thousand).

  Vaccine.

  ‌19

  Who Says I

  As linguistics teaches, the I, among all of language’s signs, is the most difficult one to control, the last that the child acquires and the first that the aphasic loses. Midway between the two, the writer has developed the habit of speaking about himself as though referring to another.

  In spite of it all, one tries, in some books, to forget that mask; in these, a concrete subjectivity shows its face, is accepted.

  Exorcism, narcissism; in an autobiography, the I is all spectacle. Nothing manages to interrupt that hallowed area of subjectivity, someone tells himself about his own life, the object and subject of the narration, the only narrator and only protagonist; the I also seems to be the only witness.

  Nevertheless, by the simple fact of writing, the author proves he is not speaking to himself alone; if he were, “a kind of spontaneous nomenclature for his feelings would suffice, for feeling is immediately its own name.” Forced to translate his life into language, to select the words, the problem is no longer lived experience but rather the communication of that experience; the logic that structures the events is not that of sincerity, but that of language.

  It is possible, having accepted that ambiguity, to attempt the task of deciphering an autobiographical text—trying, in short, to recover the meaning that one subjectivity has let fall, illuminated in the act of telling oneself. Mirror and mask, that man speaks of himself when speaking of the world and, at the same time, shows us the world when speaking of himself. It is essential to corral these elusive presences into all corners, to know that certain prestidigitations, certain emphases, certain linguistic traditions are as relevant as the more explicit “confession.”

  Like no other text, the autobiography requires the reader to complete the circle of its expression; closed in on itself, that subjectivity is blinded, and it is the reader who breaks the monologue, who bestows meanings that were not visible before.

  It is enough to review some of the pages included in this anthology (the ways in which Borges or Macedonio Fernández tackle the problem, Mansilla’s attempt to establish a natural dialogue with his reader, etc.) to understand that, behind the tone and rhythm of a voice, behind a circumstantial reference to money or to literature, behind the narration of a political incident, it is possible to glimpse not only the density, the climate, the dreams of an epoch, but also the speaker’s level of awareness (of himself and of the world), the way in which reality has been experienced, internalized and remembered by particular people under particular circumstances.

  Far from wanting to exhaust a literary form that has such a fertile tradition in Argentina, this volume tries to suggest the possibility of a meaningful reading, and, for this reason, texts have been included that, although not intentionally written as autobiography, preserve that aperture, that respiration weighed down by signs and subtexts, that complicity that ultimately cuts down the distances, compromises the cold blood of ideas in the warm density of life. In that sense, they may be read as chapters of an ongoing autobiography.

  ‌20

  River Stone

  Stories proliferate in my family, Renzi said. The same ones are told over and over again, and through being told and repeated, they are improved, refined like pebbles honed by water in the depths of rivers. Someone voices a song, and the song rolls around, here and there, over the course of years. My mother, for example, now lives with my brother in Canada, and if I want to find out something, I have to call her on the phone, and then the story lacks the secret meaning of gestures and, most of all, of my mother’s gaze, her sky-blue eyes, slightly unclear but still very expressive, which comment on events and impart other meanings. My mother was, for years, the most faithful repository of our family stories, and those stories were great because they were held up on personal understanding. There were permanent figures—my uncle Marcelo Maggi, for example, someone to whom the stories always returned, and who could never be forgotten.

  She, my mother, one afternoon, during the time when we were burying my grandfather, suddenly, on the patio under the vines, in the shadows, decided to reveal the secret to me—that is, the truth of Emilio’s life, as she called it, something always slightly uncomfortable because I had the same name as my father’s father, which caused
her a kind of rage, as though she imagined or feared that the similarity of the names would affect her son’s destiny. Because of this, she only called me Emilio when she was angry or irritated and then would modulate my name like someone scratching glass to produce an unbearable screech: Emmiliiio, she would call me until I was deafened. But the rest of the time, before my grandfather died, she called me Em or Nene or simply nothing; she talked, without naming me, in a caring intonation that made my presence inevitable in the sentence directed at me. No one could doubt that my mother’s favorite son was the one she never called by name. Not calling me what everyone else called me, she instead made a slight pause—a silent modulation—in which our intimacy was clear. As soon as my grandfather died, that very afternoon, she started calling me Emilio, with a new cadence, and straight away, as though she wanted to erase the death from the scene, she went on to tell me the reason, or rather, the motive that caused my grandfather to enlist as a volunteer in the First World War. An insane decision that, for years, was the greatest proof of his courage and manhood to me. Because Nono went to the Italian Embassy in Buenos Aires and asked to be shipped off immediately to the battlefront. As he was an educated man, and was at his peak physically, they made him an officer, and he took on responsibilities as soon as he arrived at the front lines.

  Emilio Renzi was, then, in the same bar where he went every afternoon, sitting in front of the same table, in the flat corner against the window that opened onto the intersection of Riobamba and Arenales, and he seemed to have discovered, or remembered, a lost event from his life that better enabled him to understand his grandfather’s experience.

  The worst part of the war, as my grandfather would say, Renzi continued, was the stasis, buried down in the trenches, in those caves, flooded, muddy; you had to keep still and wait. Wait for what, my grandfather would ask, Renzi said, and keep silent, his gaze lost in the flowers on the patio, seemingly attentive, but he had gone astray in the memories. The history of my grandfather, who had gone off to war, was one of the key stories in the family novel, told in chorus, for which my mother was the essential narrator. She had been steeped in the dense collective mythology because she was the youngest of the siblings, the smallest and the one who, in batches, with each new generation, would receive the story or stories. Sometimes one of these histories would be told over the course of months: for example, the actions of her nephew Mencho (her brother Marlon’s son), who, when his father died, had tried to save him from the darkness, stricken as he was that night, hours after his father had been deposited in the family mausoleum in the town cemetery, a crypt, although it was not a crypt but rather the structure destined to be the place where dead family members would be deposited. Mencho left in his pickup truck, forced open the gate to the burial ground, and then advanced along the wide interior streets until he passed next to the funerary structure and, with the key that each relative possessed, granting the right to open the iron and beveled glass door, which was also engraved, that door, with white steel filigree to resemble a tree. My cousin entered, crossed himself, and took out the coffin with his father’s body, bore it on his shoulder, and lifted it with delicate care into the bed of his truck, constantly speaking to the cadaver under the light of the moon. He crossed town with the body, with his dear father, and stopped beside the lake, unable to bear the idea of his father being alone that night. The story of the man who stole the casket and took it down the street for a ride until, at noon, the police found him by the lake, where, sitting next to the coffin, he was talking aloud with no one to hear what he said—it was told with a smile, as though it were a comedy. Because my mother would tell that story with grace and respect, yet also with a certain irony. The boy, my mother would say, knew how to honor the specter of his dead father. Don’t you think so, dear, she would say to me, suggesting with her gaze, full of light, that I also must do the same when, in short, she passed on, as she would say, to a better place.

  The history of my father’s imprisonment also had a principal place reserved in everyone’s official version of the past, even though my mother would tell it with sarcasm, taking away everything epic about it, and, on top of that, the reconstruction of events would take place with my father in the room. But he now no longer worried about denying this version, and let his wife’s narration flow.

  The difference, in the case of my grandfather Emilio and his adventure in the war, was that my mother kept an ace in her sleeve. My grandfather was assigned to the fortified line in the Alps, a series of trenches set into the heights of the mountain range. It was impossible being there—a terrible chill, narrow paths among the frozen rocks—yet, nevertheless, they held the position for months and months.

  That story was told jubilantly behind my grandfather’s back, when he was not around, because his version of events was fragmented and terse; actually, it was centered around his assignment in the Second Army post office, the experience that had scarred him and almost driven him to insanity. But my mother was capable of protecting the secret for many years, because that was her style, always very faithful to her promises. My grandfather trusted her, and I inherited that trust, although my grandfather never told me why he had decided to leave everything behind and enlist as a volunteer in that war. I have told part of his story in one of my novels, disguised under the name of Bruno Belladona. He was the station chief in a desolate part of La Pampa, and he founded a town and was political chief and commander of the place, and he bought lands and grew rich, helped along by his political contacts, and, in the town, his decision to go to war was understood as an example of patriotism and valor. At that time, many young people imagined that going to war was a way to acquire an experience beyond what any of them could dream of in civilian life.

  Renzi paused a moment and looked at the street, almost empty that summer afternoon, and then went on talking with the same enthusiasm with which he had started to tell the story. If I became a writer—that is, if I made that decision that defined all of my life—it was also due to the stories that circulated in my family; it was there that I learned the fascination and power that hides in the act of recounting a life or an episode or an incident for a familiar circle of listeners, who share with you the references behind what is being told. Therefore, I sometimes say that I owe everything to my mother, because for me she was the most convincing example of how to be a narrator who dedicates one’s life to always telling the same story, with some variations and detours. A story that everyone knows and that everyone wants to hear again and again. Because that is part of the logic of the so-called family novel: repetition and knowledge of what is about to happen in the chronicle of life, which everyone began hearing about in the cradle, because one of the most persistent exercises in my mother’s family was telling those terrible stories to the children, about alcoholic and beautiful women, like my aunt Regina, Mencho’s mother, who at some point decided never to leave her house and spend the days smoking and drinking whiskey and listening to a Uruguayan radio station that spun Carlos Gardel records twenty-four hours a day. My aunt listened to the tangos and soliloquized in the house in front of the terrified or perhaps fascinated eyes of her son Mencho. That story, for example, came out of that closed-off nucleus: a beautiful alcoholic woman who does not leave her house and only listens to tangos by Carlos Gardel. Why she never leaves, why she locks herself up, does not become clear, ever, said Renzi. It never would become clear, because he knew very well how a story is told; an event or image is taken—for example, a beautiful woman smoking and drinking in her house and listening to the radio—and that event would be retold and refined like the stones that the water transforms into hermetic jewels, but the causation behind it is never explained. It is only told and left there, in the clear afternoon air, floating along like a dream or an apparition. That was what I learned from the family stories my mother used to tell: the persistence and the lack of reason.

  All the novels I have written come from here, narrate episodes of this family epic. The first one b
egan with the story of my uncle Marcelo, who left everything behind for the love of a cabaret dancer. Then, when I pick them up and tell them again, the plots change; they contain nothing autobiographical, but I could never write a story that did not have a personal experience at its root. Without this, he said, without any trace of my life, it is impossible to write, or at least I can’t believe what I am narrating if I am not personally implicated. Afterward, everything consists of erasing the tracks and blindly following the feelings that come back to me from the stories I have been told.

  The most entertaining part was that you were inside the stories being circulated. You not only listened to them and knew them, but you could even be among them. I have spent some afternoons in my aunt Regina’s house and have talked to her and have seen her move here and there through the rooms without ever going out to the street, while Gardel sang on the radio. Sometimes, she would even sing some tangos in an impassioned voice that I have never been able to forget. That is, it was possible to listen to the story, to know its variations and changes and the conjectures circulated concerning its dark core, and at the same time enter, see them living, see them acting, just as the familiar plot dictated them to do. One spring afternoon, for example, I remember it as though it were today, I went to see her and sneakily started to invite Regina to go to the Plaza with me for an ice cream, and then I watched the curious way in which she eluded the invitation, without refusing, but stubbornly, with trivial excuses. At that moment, just then, she had to wait for a phone call, and even though the call did not take place, she could refuse to leave without giving any further explanation. That unique quality of being inside and outside of a story, and watching it as it took place, left a mark on all of my literature and defined my style of narration. The experience of the plot is unique; the story exists there and you are at once a witness and a tangential protagonist. In some cases, I would take part in the story and I, too, was one of her heroes. For example, I went looking for my uncle Marcelo in Concordia, in Entre Ríos and was, in that way, able not only to participate in her story but also even to transform it.