In this way, there are personal stories in which you are the protagonist, which are never too interesting for the one living them, and there are also personalized stories in which you participate without anyone seeing, as though you were only a guest, an intruder, but you feel the defining emotion in your body. Because narrating, he said, my dear, is transmitting an emotion. That’s what narrating means, he said, suddenly furious; transmitting a personal emotion from the stories that you have lived through, intimately and barely. Just barely, he said, you don’t need much for the emotions of a story; it’s enough to find your mother kissing a stranger to then write Anna Karenina. Is that clear? he asked, now smiling. Yes, it’s perfectly clear, he said then; you have to live and not live, to be there and pass unseen, to be able to narrate a story as though it were your own.
Now, for example, I have a Mexican muse, a friend I love a great deal, with whom I shared some years at Princeton; she was my colleague there, and I did many things with her in those days, and we write to each other every so often. She, Lucía, mailed me, if you can say it like that, sent me, one of her daughters, just as beautiful as her, bella como ella. He paused: “bella como ella” is a verse, a poetic alliteration, rather. And her daughter, María, came to Buenos Aires because her mother couldn’t put up with her there any longer, and she really did it all—said hurtful things, made rude gestures, was indifferent and sarcastic—until her daughter, offended, tired of her mother and her mother’s gloomy suggestions, decided to escape and come to the most extreme point of the continent, all the way to the south, and ended up in Buenos Aires, intending to carry out a field study examining the singularity or personal nuances of language use in distant territories. In Mexico, said Renzi, who seemed to have begun to diverge slightly, as had been happening more and more frequently with him since he became sick—not “sick,” he never used that word; he was, to say it in his way, “in a bit of a fix,” or he would say, while mad from panic, “I don’t have any pain, just a bit of a disruption in my left hand, which is my good hand, or rather, was my good hand, as I’m left-handed; other than that, and a fatigue that seems to have come from the beginning of time, I am perfectly well.” For that reason, he had to hire an assistant to dictate his diary, the notebooks he had accumulated over years and years. He thought that dictating his life just as it was written in those miserable notebooks could entertain him, but above all might help him search for the cause, the motive, the reason for which he had started to feel that his body was alien to him. That expression, “my body is alien to me,” abounded in his diaries; ever since his distant youth, he had lived in someone else’s body. “That is why I became a writer,” he said, “to keep it at bay and carefully observe the stranger who had taken ownership of my body.” I will use a metaphor, a simile: There are so many idiots in the world now, with their little cell phones, who walk down the street, talking alone. It has happened to me many times, where I think a passerby has gone insane and is talking, alone on the street, and sometimes laughs and often says, “I’m on my way there,” and even, sometimes, provides his coordinates, as the idiots now seem to do to prove they are in some place, and then they say, I’ve heard them say “I’ll give you my coordinates, I’m at fourteen hundred on Malabia and going that way, give me two.” Renzi was outraged because those idiots, instead of saying, “I’ll be there in a while,” said, still say, because this goes on happening, “I’m two,” to say, to mean to say, “I’ll be there in two minutes.” They say, “Give me two,” because the decadence of worldwide culture has reached its end. I know many places, I am a sedentary man and for that same reason have traveled constantly, always indifferently; the more sedentary a man is, the more he travels. In the same sense, a nomad only wants to have a place to live, a site of his own, but you see, the nomads only want to keep still, while the sedentary ones like me go on traveling. I am distracted by what they call cultural tourism, and also academic excursions; therefore, a writer like myself, who only longs to be alone in a room, travels a great deal, because there are international congresses, colloquia, keynote addresses, visiting professors who are always on planes, looking over those lowly papers that they will read in the classrooms, lecture halls, amphitheaters, which are always the same, there is a platform and a microphone and a poster that says, for example, “Emilio Renzi,” because there are so many lectures that it is necessary to give them a distinguishing mark, it is often a laminated card with a photo of the delinquent who is about to speak, and below the photo his name and origins. I have been around many cities on those trips as a visiting professor or invited lecturer, and in all of them have come across people who go down the street talking alone, gesturing and smiling. It surprised me at first; I have thought they were talking to me and paused in the middle of a sidewalk and said, “Excuse me?” as if they had said something to me or knew me, but no, they went on, walking quickly, with their smaller and smaller little devices, usually with a microphone over the lapel that lets them continue the phone conversation while making gestures with both hands as though the person on the other end could see them, or as though they could remain in the old culture, when people spoke in person. Maybe they don’t think that it’s a metaphor and that when I say, “I’m living in someone else’s body,” it is just so, just like that; they are literal, take everything at face value, so I mean to say that I have the sensation that my body does not obey me, that I am not sane, lucid, to put it that way, but my body is out of order. Nothing serious; you don’t need to be alarmed, I tell my friends. I am a casualty of war, a veteran; I have lived in Argentina and many of us, my friends, my comrades, have died on the battlefield, young, their lives ahead of them, gravely injured or killed because writers in this country, but not just writers, are always in the danger zone; we set ourselves on the psychological frontier of society and from there report back what is happening. We send messages, write books, are the correspondents of an imaginary, brutal, bloodthirsty war. My friends—Miguel Briante, one down, Juan José Saer, one down—on the long list of those killed in the charge, in that no man’s land where battles have been fought for years. “We have to strike straight inland / towards where the sun goes down,” Renzi, touched, said, reciting the verse from Martín Fierro. Waiter, he said, then, and with difficulty raised his left hand, made a very imperfect circle in the air—it turned out closer to a square, or rather, a parallelepiped—and said, “A bit more,” looking toward the counter of the bar. “In Mexico,” he resumed the sentence he had left hanging, suspended, like a trapeze artist waiting, stunned, for his partner’s signal, to throw himself though the air without a net, in a fatal double jump that comes to a climax when he grabs his assistant’s waiting hands, suspended above, from whom he hangs, as they say, in the air. And that is what narrating means, he said then; to throw yourself into the void and trust in some reader to catch you in the air. “In Mexico, as I said a moment ago, the women are more intelligent than the men. Much more,” he emphasized, “more intelligent and faster and more astute than the Mexican individuals of the opposite sex.”
And so, he continued after the waiter served him another glass of white wine, and so I am now working with my Mexican muse. I dictate, and she of course writes something else, improves what I say, barely understands. She speaks a pure Spanish, and to amuse me will sometimes say phrases or make jokes in Nahuatl. She, María, daughter of Lucía, understands what I tell her in my Buenos Aires slang, made worse by a certain alcoholic pronunciation, because nowadays I can’t work if I’m drunk at all, so she writes down what she thinks I’m saying. Not so fast, she sometimes says, but I can’t speak slowly, have to hurry to be able to put up with what I am saying, and she gathers my words and writes them as she feels them, so that, when I ask her after a while to read what we have written, she, in her clear Spanish, reads some pages in which what I’ve said is barely a gray shadow amid the pure and precise words with which she has improved my narration of things written by hand in my notebooks, from many years before. Where I say �
�poems,” she writes “problems,” where I say, referring to my Alfonsinist friends, “civics,” she very properly translates it as “cynics.” There does not always need to be a synonym; sometimes María, my Mexican assistant, transforms and improves what I say. For example, I have dictated, “In those days of creative loneliness…” and she, who cannot stand those self-praising expressions, stifling a smile, corrects it to “In those days, a lonely criminal…” and I am enchanted by the solution she has found, go forward from there and dictate: “In those days comma a solo criminal is worth more than two hundred grieving Argentine writers colon in italics with a capital: That is how it is.” But there are other times that she, a qualified typist who writes without looking at the computer keyboard because she is watching my mouth to be able, as she says, to read my lips and so, as she moves at top speed, sometimes looking at the screen, sometimes at my face, and sometimes at the window that opens on the garden, all without stopping her rhythmic typing, some confusions occur. For example, if the nurse who takes care of me is in the room next door and I say, “Margarita, please put a blanket over my legs,” though it sounds strange but not impossible, could without batting an eye become a paragraph with a surrealist tone in the diary of an Argentine writer who is a bit of a snob. The exclamation “Come in” also often appears in my diaries as well as the sentences “It’s raining outside” or “Isn’t the phone ringing?” They are all copied down promptly; since she’s a vocational linguist, nothing surprises her. On the other hand, María, daughter of Lucía, has a contagious laugh and laughs sympathetically at everything, at me in the first place, and also sometimes at herself or at what is happening in the world. Therefore, within my diaries, in which I try not to put people’s real names, I call her “the Thracian woman,” a reference to the young peasant girl who laughed when she saw the philosopher Thales walking, lost in thought, observing the firmament and trying to capture the hidden truth of the universe, and falling into a well. And many have said that there is more philosophy in the cheerful laughter of that girl washing her hair in the water of a spring than in the profound thoughts of the philosopher who fell into the bottom of a hole for failing to look where he was going.
We had returned from the cemetery that afternoon in August or September 1968 and entered the family house where my grandfather Emilio had lived alone for ten years, and where he died, which had been prepared room by room until it was transformed into an archive of the Great War in which he had fought; rather, he had created a personal museum in the house, almost in secret, with documents, cards in glass cases and maps on the wall, with little flags indicating the positions of the armies facing off in the tall frozen mountains of the Austrian border. There were also many photographs; the war of ’14 was the first war to be filmed and photographed, once and a thousand times over by army cameramen and by professional or amateur photographers. In the museum, there was a great store of images of battle, the trenches, the offensives, the no man’s land, and my grandfather curated them with great care, and once brought my cousin Horacio, Susy, and me together to project, onto an improvised screen, scenes from the war, which he explained to us, identifying the places, speaking from behind the projector, behind the white light, as though his were the voice of a ghost, a specter of the war, and sometimes he would read us letters from the dead soldiers or battle dispatches that the confused general dictated and declared, although they never ever said, my grandfather would say from the back of the room, that they had gone too far, that they did not know what to do, because the officers failed, and there were thousands of deaths every time that a general, from his office in the high command, gave the order to attack, that is, to advance cross-country toward the enemy fortifications. In this way, the war, my grandfather would say, was swamped; all the military tactics went to the devil in the face of frighteningly effective modern weapons. The war conquered the generals, who, in the end, did nothing but hold their positions in the infected wells where soldiers died like flies, so that, my grandfather would say as the terrible images appeared on the wall, the war stagnated and transformed into trench warfare, and it was there that the Germans began to experiment with toxic gasses, a new way they found to kill enemy soldiers in the trenches, like throwing poison in a rat’s den or a hornet’s nest.
And that afternoon, once all of my grandfather’s relatives and friends and acquaintances had gone, with that strange and ambivalent sensation that burials leave and the long sleepless hours through which the dead man was accompanied on his first night of death, a certain sorrow but also a certain relief, and the disturbing feeling of happiness at being alive that you feel at such times, and after my father had gone, rather numbed by the pain that his father’s passing or disappearance had caused him, my mother and I stayed there alone, on the patio. Susy came to bring us some tea and sea biscuits so that we might recover from the endless night, and we were there, in that beloved place, under the vine, sitting in canvas chairs in front of a round marble table, and then my mother, unexpectedly, as was her style, changed the calm tone of our trivial conversation and started talking about the situation that had led my grandfather to enlist as a volunteer in the war.
The first sign of trouble, said my mother, Renzi explained, was his idea of sending his pregnant wife off to Italy to have her son, your father; he wanted his son to be born in Italy, can you believe it? And not just in Italy, but, more specifically, in Pinerolo, the town where your grandfather was born and where my scatterbrained ex-husband was born. The Italians are excessive, my mother said; they seem very emotional but are also cruel and Machiavellian. She paused to have a cup of tea and look at the flowering garden, with her beautiful and haughty face turned toward the country jasmine with its white flowers and unforgettable perfume and said, it’s nice here. I’ve missed this garden for years and years, when we had to leave for Mar del Plata so your father wouldn’t get arrested again, the thing I always missed, she said, was the perfume of jasmines in the afternoon air. And then, after pausing, in her swerving way of speaking, she went back to what she had been about to tell me, the secret she was on the verge of revealing. Your father was born in Italy in September of 1915—that’s to say, that if your mother set sail already pregnant, or if she was heavy then, my mother said, because she enjoyed out-of-fashion words, was heavy, she said again in a happy tone, that means, Nene, my mother said, that your grandfather traveled by train from the town in La Pampa where he lived and went to Constitución and from there to Puerto Nuevo so that his wife could set out and have his son, your father, in Pinerolo, that is, if you do the math, in December of 1914 or January of ’15. And she paused, incensed. I mean he sent her on a ship to Italy once the war had already started, months before, and the German submarines were sinking or trying to sink the ships that crossed the Atlantic. He was crazy, my mother said, smiling, completely crazy. Who would think of sending his pregnant wife to Europe once the war was already sparked? Insane, incredible, mysterious—call him what you will. A deliberate decision, because your grandfather, dear, was very intelligent and very rational and would spend his time calculating each one of his moves.
My mother, Ida Maggi, had a virtue as a narrator that I have always tried to use in my literature, because the key, or one of the keys to the art of writing, is not to judge the characters. My mother never judged a family member’s conduct; she narrated the events but did not condemn those who belonged to the clan, whatever they did, and therefore, I think, she waited until my grandfather was no longer in this world to tell his life’s secret. She did not mean to condemn, and now, this afternoon, recounting my grandfather’s incomprehensible actions, so as not to have to judge him, she had waited until he was dead. Or maybe she and my grandfather had made a pact of silence about this crucial issue. And, when she resumed the story, she remained objective and direct, with some ironic footnotes intended to indicate the surprising quality of my grandfather’s decision to send his pregnant wife to war-ravaged Europe. What could his motive have been? She said nothing a
bout that now, limiting herself to narrating the events, and saved the explanation for the end, or rather, the description of the reason why my grandfather had done that, as she called it. She imagined the scene at the port, the goodbye, the woman, young and pregnant, climbing up the ramp to the ship, and my grandfather, waiting on the dock and watching the ship depart and then slowly grow distant and disappear from sight. It was possible, according to her, to imagine the scene and see my grandfather standing on the dock, dressed in an English suit with a vest, thin and tall, very elegant, wearing a thin-brimmed hat that he might have waved in his hand as the ship moved out from the port, a greeting or maybe a final farewell.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 42