The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  And so, in order to escape from the chronological trap of astronomical time and to remain inside my personal time, I analyze my diaries according to discontinuous series and, upon that basis, I organize, so to speak, the chapters of my life. One series, then, is that of the political events that act directly on the private sphere of my existence. We can call that series or chain or continuum of events Series A. On that afternoon when we left, covertly, trying not to be seen, like two thieves robbing their own house, loaded down with suitcases and bags and putting them in a taxi while a moving van driven by the doorman from Corrientes transported some furniture, many books, lamps, pictures, a refrigerator, a bed, and a leather chair to a warehouse on Calle Alsina, a new life began for me, very chaotic, with no fixed address, and very promiscuous, because the first effect of that intervention of political fate and the military search was my separation from Julia, a woman I had lived with, by that point, for five years. There, we have a new chronology, a temporal scansion, an incident that changed my life; I separated from a woman not for emotional reasons but because of the catastrophic effects of the military’s intervention in my little personal sphere. Figuratively speaking, an elephant’s foot had crushed the flowers, the thoughts I had cultivated in my garden, Renzi said to the bartender.

  He had often thought of his notebooks as an intricate web of little decisions that formed diverse sequences, thematic series that could be read as a map, going beyond the temporal, dated structure that at first glance ordered his life. Underneath lay a series of cyclical repetitions, equivalent events that could be followed and classified beyond the dense chronological progression of his diaries. For example, the series of friends, meetings with his friends in a bar, what they talked about, what they built their hopes on, how their topics and worries changed over the course of all those years. Let’s call Series B a sequence that doesn’t respond to chronological and linear causality. Or his relationships with women, would they belong to Series B, given that many of them had been his friends, a few of them, the most intimate, his best friends, or should that be an autonomous series, a Series C? Love, adventures, encounters with the women he has loved, would these be in Series B or Series C? However, it might be, that serial organization would define a personal temporality and would allow a scansion or a series of scansions and periodizations, far more intimate and true than the mere order of a calendar. After all, he didn’t remember his life according to the scheme of days and months and years; he remembered blocks of memory, a landscape of plateaus and valleys that he mentally traversed each time he thought about the past.

  He has spent several weeks working with his notebooks, never going out into the street, lost in the stream of written memories, with the intention of organizing the chapters of his life thematically—friends, loves, books, clandestine meetings, parties. He spent months copying and pasting fragments of his diary into different documents, obsessively going through each one and reconstructing, registering a single event, for example all of the family dinners over the years, following the ways that they repeated and changed without ever ceasing to be what they were, or it could be all of the meetings with a single person, how many times did David Viñas appear in his diary? What did they talk about, what was said, why did they fight? He said D. V., but he could just as well have said Gandini or Jacoby or Junior. What did I do with them, what had I written down after our meetings? I worked in that way for months, determined to publish my diaries by organizing them into thematic series, but—there’s always a but in thinking—it would have lost the feeling of chaos and confusion that a diary records, as no other written medium does, because, in being organized according to chronology alone, by date, you can see that a life, any life, is a disordered sequence of little events that seem to be in focus while they are being lived, but then, when they are reread years later, they acquire their true dimension as minor, almost invisible actions, and their meanings depend precisely on the variety and disorder of experience. For that reason, I have now decided to publish my notebooks just as they are, making little narrative summaries here and there that function, if I don’t deceive myself, as a framework around the manifold succession of the days of my life.

  For me, of course, it was never about using the idiotic decimal sequence that is now in fashion everywhere in the world, in sensationalist yellow newspapers and in studies, theses, conferences, and panels of the academic world; now they’ve discovered that every decade means a fundamental change in the ways of things (in the first place), of people, of culture, of art, of politics, and of life in general. They speak of the decades of the sixties or the eighties as though they were separate worlds with hundreds of light-years between them. Since nothing really moves in the world and nothing really changes, the idiots invented the idea that people become other people every decade and the music they listen to changes, along with the clothing they wear, and sexuality, Peronism, education, etc. The culture of the eighties, the politics of the nineties, the stupidity of the seventies, and thus everything is ordered and periodized into these ridiculous timelines. They all believe that the expression is true, and they complain that they’re from the eighties and are being viewed now, shall we say, for example, in the nineties, as romantic individuals and half-hippies, while the people in the nineties are cynical, conservative, and skeptical. Earlier, at least when I was young, time was periodized into centuries; the eighteenth was a century of light, the nineteenth was one of progress, positivity, the cult of the machine. Now, changes in civilization and in our collective spirit are given every ten years—they’ve given us a discount in the supermarket of history. I never saw anything more ridiculous; for example, a person is accused of being a product of the seventies, that is, of believing in socialism, in revolution. Some star reporters, who mark the lowest point of human intelligence and contemporary culture in their hopeless descent into decadence, have invented the terms “ochentoso” or, even worse and uglier, “sesentoso,” or even “setentoso,” as though the decades were categories in thought, the way you would say the Italian Renaissance or Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. The imbeciles reason by using categories, and in this way, they conceal their total lack of gray matter speaking as though they were intellectuals and thinkers.

  It is foolish to believe that life is divided into chapters or decades or defined segments; everything is more chaotic, there are cuts, interruptions, passages, decisive events, which I would call contretemps because they bring about both forward and backward steps in personal temporality. And he stopped to drink from his glass of white wine. Contretemps, that’s the word I would use to define the moments of fracture in my life, Renzi said to the bartender in a tone that was unfriendly yet polite and sincere. And he resumed, after a pause. When I was thrown into the street by the Argentine army, my life of course changed, but I didn’t realize it, he added, now looking with suspicion at his own face reflected in the mirror that covered the wall of the bar, behind the bottles of whiskey, tequila, vodka, and Caña Legui that were lined up in front of him, half-empty or half-full. No, I didn’t realize it, and it was only while writing down the events—and above all while reading the things I had written, years later—that I glimpsed the shape of my experience, because, whether we like it or not, we align what has happened into an ordered configuration through writing and reading, subjecting events to a grammatical structure, which, on its own, tends toward clarity and organization into syntactical blocks.

  I realized, then, that something essential had been lost to me by my remaining, so to speak, naked in the city, carrying my papers, my notebooks, and my portable typewriter in its sky blue case from one place to another by taxi or subway. I have maintained the chronological order in the diaries that I’m going to publish, but I want to leave evidence of my conviction that because of that expulsion, or rather, because of that intrusion of political and military reality into my life, a change occurred, one that I can understand only now, in rereading my notebooks from those days, Renzi said to the bartender of El Cervati
llo that afternoon. He also confessed to him about other matters, all of which had to do with thinking about what order, what form he should give his diary in publishing it, if he did decide to print it, if he overcame his qualms and the shame of exposing to strangers the intimate secrets of a happy, but also disgraceful, phase of his life, because, as he told the bartender, happiness can sometimes take on a criminal and despicable tone.

  The thing that changed, after we were forced to abandon the house where we lived, was my emotional life; I entered a vortex with no center, promiscuous, an erotic cycle that had always been a means of flight or compensation for me in days or periods of drought when I was unable to write, and then beloved or unknown bodies would alleviate the void and give meaning to my life. Meaning or a state of being that didn’t last, or barely lasted for a few hours, despite my searching for ways to make desire endure, with rituals and dangerous games that lasted until dawn, like ocean tides helping me to keep going onward.

  When we abandon ourselves to the conviction of the body, we forget reality. In those days, leaving behind the certainties I’d lived with and venturing out into the elements, I lived in hotels or friends’ houses with Julia, forced into a constant sociability, sharing places and conversations, because we were intruders or guests and so had to follow the rites of social convention, until one afternoon Julia suggested that we move into a vacant apartment that one of her friends from the College had offered her. It was a den in a stately building on Calle Uriburu, near Avenida Santa Fe, and during that move, as I’ve remembered now while rereading the notebooks I wrote in those days, like trade or barter, I began an intense clandestine relationship with Tristana, Julia’s close friend, a beautiful and mysterious and slightly alcoholic woman, whom I had observed with interest from a distance because she had an unforgettable intensity. One afternoon, without thinking it through and almost without realizing it, we ended up in bed, Tristana and I, and we began a confusing series of clandestine rendezvous and conversations that reached a dimension I had never known until Julia discovered—by reading my diary, as will be seen—my version of the things I was living through.

  There, in that series, in living, writing, and being read—when an event written in a personal notebook is later read, secretly, by one of the protagonists of the story—I discovered a morphology, the initial form, as I would like to call it, of my recorded life, day after day, in my personal diary. And so, having been discovered once, having been read treacherously more than once, I’ve decided to publish my diaries and exhibit my private life to the public, or rather, the written version of yours truly’s days and works over the course of fifty years, Renzi said that day to the bartender of El Cervatillo. And, as he left the bar and went back out to the street after paying the bill, he added, as though talking to himself: those discoveries, those flights, those confusing moments have been turning points for me, and I’ve used them to construct the periodization of my life, the chapters or series into which I’ve divided my experiences, Renzi thought aloud as he walked upright, though limping slightly and leaning on a cane, toward his usual hiding place.

  ‌1

  Diary 1968

  January 31

  I’m back. I tell stories from the trip to Julia and my friends.

  The end of a month with some news. Jorge Álvarez asked me to manage a literary magazine (along the lines of La Quinzaine) for fifty thousand pesos a month. This proposal would have guaranteed my happiness three years ago, but now it leaves me (like everything these days, except Julia) cold, distant. Maybe it is necessary to work with others. Always working on art for others.

  Series A. A meeting with Virgilio Piñera at Hotel Habana Libre, I bring him a letter from Pepe Bianco. “Let’s go to the garden,” he says. “There are microphones everywhere in here; they’re listening to everything I say.” He was a weak and fragile man. We were already unconsciously growing to like each other. He’d been friends with Gombrowicz and had helped him translate Ferdydurke, which was why we admired him, and Gombrowicz’s touch can be felt in his striking stories. What danger or what wrong could that refined artist pose for the revolution.

  February 3

  She said: “But who can know how we’ve come undone, what things men have left after the first encounter.”

  Such astonishment, facing the void of this window that looks out at the street. I have everything to live for now, coming back, but always from the outside. These notes as well, their tone more than their style, I’ll come back to them when it is too late, when it is the right time for decisions without motives. A ship’s logbook.

  Series E. In a notebook from ’66, I find the record of a film by Michael Powell (Peeping Tom), with a psychopath who wants to grasp reality through the camera and ends up filming his own death. It seems very connected to Blow-Up by Antonioni. The concept of cinematographic technique as a magical eye used to capture personal reality, the same as the camera for still images. A diary too is a device for registering events, people, and gestures. Live to see, that could be the motto.

  February 4

  A harsh reaction after a family call; what had once been a peaceful, sheltered childhood, is now the experience of an invasion. I would rather not press this too far.

  Wednesday, February 7

  Coming and going, movements of solidarity. David Viñas and Germán García, letters to Primera Plana. I don’t understand their responses. Then yesterday, a report on Channel 11 on TV: you can’t even cross your legs, let alone talk about Vietnam. Then at home with David, another proposal: an article on American literature for the magazine David is trying to publish with the Centro Editor. The project is getting in the way of Jorge Álvarez’s magazine.

  Thursday 8

  A series of meetings yesterday: José Sazbón, Ramón Plaza, Manuel Puig, Andrés Rivera, Jorge Álvarez, Pirí Lugones. Why do I make a note of this? Because I’ve changed my habits, and now I settle in at La Ópera bar and friends come to see me while I remain at the same table for three or four hours, or longer. A long talk with Puig, who gives me Heartbreak Tango to read, a book that follows the path of his previous novel but deepens the poetics and seeks popular feeling and technical experimentation. I’ve always admired his ear for spoken language, his rare sensitivity for capturing each character’s tone. The techniques in the novel are very original: using the melodramatic novel form involves thinking about the cutoff of each chapter like suspense in the classical novel. Once again, it is a novel in which the narrator is absent and can only be noticed in objective and clinical observations. Then dinner with El Quinteto de la Muerte. Pirí is quiet and capricious because of the presence of Andrés Rivera, who acts tender and charming around her, while Jorge Álvarez revealed to me both his intelligence (greater than I gave him credit for) and his turn toward Tercerista political positions, founded, as often happens, upon facts that prove the Machiavellianism and forcefulness of world powers (the USA and the USSR), as they play with the rest of the world. In that way, you end up as an absolute skeptic because anything you do is part of the superpowers’ plans. Beside me, Julia was dazzling, her tan skin rising above a white guayabera dress that I brought her from Cuba, a braid over her shoulder, and all of the qualities of her alarming temptation toward Doing Wrong (capitalized and emphasized).

  One day I’ll have to take a look at my continuous, successive ability to keep up conversations that always seem the same to me, though I hold them with different people, all close to me, as though I were the only one who could unite them and make them coincide.

  “The point is to permit the Germans not even a moment of self-deception and resignation. We must make the actual pressure more pressing by adding to it the consciousness of pressure and make the shame more shameful by publicizing it. Every sphere of German society must be shown as the partie honteuse of German society, and we have to make these petrified social relations dance by singing their own tune!” Karl Marx.

  Friday, February 9

  In literature, we know what we
don’t want to do, because what we do want to do isn’t always accomplished in writing. On the other hand, this negativity allows us to write by casting aside everything that doesn’t interest us. The pressure of fashion (Cortázar), which mires my contemporaries (Néstor Sánchez, the tone of the novel that Castillo is writing, Gudiño Kieffer, Aníbal Ford, etc.), will never draw me away from my projects. I know that it’s something I never want to do, and thus a poetics is already defined. That doesn’t mean adopting rigid guidelines as a defense (the way David Viñas does), leaving out all Argentine writers from all eras, but instead adopting a position that consists of thinking that there is no single way to create literature (and here it is Borges that one must break away from, along with his literary dogmas like “Chesterton is better than Marcel Proust,” which become contagious and are repeated without analysis). Thus, writers who can discover the personal profiles of their own worlds (to reiterate the possessive) have at least secured a tone of their own, a music to the language that is imposed onto the era and not the other way around.

  Some victories, certain circumstances in my life that would once have satisfied my dearest pretensions, are now commonplace, and their current relativity proves to me that my years of learning are now bearing some fruit. At the same time, my firmest certainties come from childhood. In those days, entirely separate from any knowledge that could correspond to my own future life, I adopted or created the convictions that now sustain me. It’s as though my soul’s defenses came before my soul itself, as though I were not allowed any knowledge of my life story until after the catastrophe. I had begun to live, not knowing anything about myself until the moment when I realized that all knowledge was useless when it came to doing what I wanted to do. That is why it’s easy to remember the magic of decisions made in total certainty, with nothing to justify them, when everything came to me naturally. That is why there is no present time that can bring to life something that has survived for itself alone. Hence the perverse coherence that some of these notebooks acquire when they are revised, finding signs that lead to the central highway, unsuspected profiles of myself, which now form my way of being.