The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  I am working on possible topics for my lecture at La Plata, maybe I’ll talk about Puig and Cabrera Infante: spoken language and choral narration of an ever-elusive story. An alternative is to give a talk on Puig, Saer, and Walsh: Walsh’s nonfiction and his pieces in the CGT newspaper at one extreme, and Saer with his writing that tends toward lyricism on the other. Puig in the middle. All three reproduce the experience of Peronism in their own ways. Walsh in Operation Massacre, Puig with the diary of the girl talking about Eva Perón, and Saer in Responso, a novel in which Peronism is the context behind the protagonist’s “player” lifestyle. These are the three who can be read in Buenos Aires today (see Walsh’s short stories).

  Friday 14

  Series E. It is five in the morning, another hollow night, going from bar to bar. I always have the same conversations even though the friends sitting at the table are different. I go out and drink whiskey until dawn in order to erase some fixed ideas that have always pursued me, ones that I prefer not to name. A very cold night; I walked alone until I made it back to this corner by the window, through which the dawn air filters in.

  Saturday 15

  Series Z. I want to record what is happening to me. Slight hallucinations that trouble me. First, I have a feeling of fullness, a ferocious happiness, and then suddenly a veil is unwrapped and pulled away, and I see reality as it is. I don’t know what is happening to me, and all I want is to name these visions. If I can. I don’t know if language suffices to describe these vistas.

  For many weeks I’ve been coming to the library every afternoon and working on Tolstoy, and now I’ll say why I do it. My eyes are exhausted; according to the doctors, I don’t blink at the normal rate and my eyes are dry, like a well without water one of the specialists told me, and he gave me a prescription for tears. Not to help me cry (something that is hard for me), but to use as eye drops. We’ll see.

  Sunday

  Series Z. That dryness may be the cause of my disrupted vision. In the extreme aridity of the desert, mirages appear.

  Notes on Tolstoy (1). In the company of his younger daughter, Alexandra (who will die in the sixties in the United States), and his personal doctor, an ancient Tolstoy sets off—like a King Lear fleeing with Cordelia—on an erratic pilgrimage with an unknown destination. He is looking for Father Albert, he says, a starets, a holy man (the model for his short story “Father Sergius” and for Father Zosima from Dostoevsky’s Karamazov), who has been a sort of Mephistopheles for Good to him and is the one who converted him to Christianity, in a past encounter.

  I must continue onward, recording what happens to me and never ceasing to register my life day after day.

  Tuesday 18

  Series B. Yesterday a long stroll around the city with David Viñas, circular and amusing conversations, maneuvers, estimations, the early stages of a friendship. I don’t let on to him about what’s happening to me, though I take his arm when we cross the street so that I don’t take a plunge. He doesn’t notice anything and goes on talking.

  Wednesday 19

  Yesterday a frustrating meeting for the magazine, Andrés Rivera’s confessions, sadness in the Royal Garden. I see Andrés’s face like a distorted mirror and comment on the Japanese park. I tell him: it was night and the faces distorted, he was surprised.

  Two hours later the crisis has already passed. The memory is funny. Andrés’s face was like elastic, inflating and deflating. Now I’m working on Hemingway for the book Balance de E. H.

  Hemingway saw the same things I’m seeing, and they gave him electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic, but he tried to throw himself out of the car when they took him back home. Funny and unbearable.

  I am well and at peace; it is ten at night.

  The mass media and journalists have found their hero in Hemingway. An image of the writer who doesn’t write and spends his life off hunting in Africa or fishing for sharks. It has to do with a cult of personality, putting literary figures in the place of movie stars, so that what is valued is the picturesque aspect of their biographies. Underneath lies the superstition that life legitimizes literature and replaces it. Soon there will be no need to write; it will be enough to lead a turbulent life and say you are a writer. His early books are, of course, examples of a very intentional writer, close to his experiences on the front lines, who created an extraordinary prose based on brevity and the cult of the unsaid.

  Series A. When Henry Ford built the V8 engine, powerful enough to outstrip police cars, gangs began to develop. The automobile became a weapon of war. Gunslingers practically lived in their cars. In those years, the car replaced the horse as the symbol of the outlaw and, in a sense, Westerns evolved into gangster films. (From a description of the genre by the film director Arthur Penn.)

  A laborious night, as usual these days, fighting against my own visions. It is written in the body, that is, in the posture; exhaustion can be recognized in multiple areas, in the stiffness of the fingers: a pianist with gloves, a hunter with dark glasses. Something about that. What is extreme lucidity worth if your body feels like it belongs to someone else?

  Sunday

  We’re going to set ourselves in motion, and, even though I’m cramped, I won’t think of leaving the table, by the typewriter, sitting in this wooden chair, with its high back. (You also write with your ass.)

  A story. A heavyweight boxer, elegant, charming, who moves with a lightweight’s speed.

  Novel. A tape recorder is hidden in the apartment; the police know the layout. They changed their hideout. In any case, the narrator reports: this is a tape submitted by the police (a fragment of a telephone call can be heard).

  In Pavese there is an opposition between “the business of the classics” and “the dialectical tumult of our time.” There is no language common to everyone now, but was there once? The language of the classics is in reality the literary language that functions as a social model (for us, Borges’s style, copied in the weekly magazines).

  Monday 24

  Series B. An unexpected visit from Andrés R. during an amorous moment. A theory about interruption must be made: who or what interrupts, and which is the situation that is “curbed” and must change direction. For the better, Andrés comes with his emotional misfortunes, so Pavesian (his woman left with his best friend, a poet, for a change).

  For me, the interferences are the vistas (I don’t mean to speak of visions) that lie in wait for me. They are off to the side; I see them in the corner of my eye. Situated on the northeast edge of the room. They murmur like the whine of a taut wire in the night wind. I cover my ears with my hands or sometimes put on music to drown them out.

  “Literature sustains me.” I like Onetti’s early prose, less baroque. I’m reading No Man’s Land, a nervous style, sensitive, tense, which incorporates echoes of Faulkner but above all a certain air of the “hard-boiled” novelists: Hammett and Cain. You can also see the connection to Roberto Arlt there; the Argentine era of Onetti is a bridge, crossing the void of the forties after Arlt. Borges is there like a light dazzling everyone, and Onetti takes many of his stylistic turns from him. Going against the short form of Borges and Rulfo, Onetti seeks to establish a story of longer duration, which doesn’t turn out well for him until A Brief Life, although what he writes in those first novels is very good.

  I’m going along well, and only the altered, arrhythmic beating of my heart keeps me alert while I write so as not to think, seeing nothing more than my hand gliding through the pages of the notebook.

  It is possible to detect the way certain invisible writers embody the tone of an era, later crystallized into what we call “a great writer” or “a great book.” This can be seen with José Bianco, Daniel Devoto, and Antonio Di Benedetto himself, and also with Silvina Ocampo and María Luisa Bombal or Felisberto Hernández, finally concluding with or flowing into Onetti. Of course, it isn’t about someone “consciously” reclaiming a tradition, but rather a sort of contemporary tone or horizon in which several writers, tho
ugh unconnected, seek “the way.” (The one among us, who is it or who are they?)

  Series E. As can be seen, this notebook tends to mark my intellectual biography above all, as though my life were being sketched with no other motion than that of literature. And why not? You always have to choose work over life or, rather, the work creates your way of living. For me, the lonely assailant now no longer demands “your money or your life,” but rather, more light-heartedly: “your work or your money.” Otherwise, in the other register, there are contingent events, which I give some meaning to by writing them down, although there’s a risk of introspection, the nonsense of “interior life” (what could be exterior?), for example, talking about today’s stroll with Julia, tangled up in a rhetorical and circular argument, trying to find a way to get along together. Impossible.

  Series E bis. But, at the same time, there is a simple moral; the point is not to turn literature into a superior world, not to take part in the game where it is considered a sacred territory that only the enlightened or holy can enter. If, on the other hand, life is subordinated to literature, the risk is such that it doesn’t occur to anyone to “become an artist,” there is too much at stake, or too much has been set aside not to take on projects that have classical criteria, coming from Aristotle: the artist is like a carpenter who knows intuitively how to work with the wood and therefore chooses that profession and tries to learn how to make a table. That is all.

  Novel. When I say spoken language, the use of oral syntax in narrative, I refer to the origins of modern Argentine literature, that is, to Martín Fierro, a story that is sung, from its vocabulary to its tone. This was the discovery that Borges made. Conversely, Arlt’s is a purely written language, a language fascinated by literature, translating Russian novels into cultured language. At times it is more “literary” than Borges. You have to wait until Manuel Puig to find their intersection, with his wonderfully fine ear for oral language and his experimental choice to write using techniques and forms that often come from elsewhere and not from the literary tradition in the strictest sense (and in that sense Puig is very Joycean).

  Betrayed by R. H. and Mad Toy are coming-of-age novels. Arlt defines his poetics in the first sentence of that book (“I was initiated into the thrilling literature of outlaws and bandits”). That sentence constitutes all of the books that follow that first novel. In Puig’s case, the constitutive moment is the grade school composition that Toto writes about the movie The Great Waltz, retelling it. Bovarism, which consists simply of preferring fiction to reality, is present in both. That is what unites them and defines their education.

  I spend the night awake, eavesdropping on the noises that come from the apartment next door. Once again come the murmurs that I alone can hear, a woman (a voice like a woman’s, a pretend voice) says something about an uncle who has bought a house in the country. That single mention troubles me. The womanly voice (that is the way I define it, as though it were a moo) keeps repeating the same thing but sometimes laughs with a little worn-out song, am I hearing voices? I have to do something, I don’t want to wake Julia up or tell her what has been happening to me for the last fourteen days. I furtively escape and take a little excursion down Corrientes to the bookshop. I discover the Spanish edition of Gombrowicz’s La seducción, which I had already read in Italian as Pornografia, lent to me by Dipi Di Paola. A little bird hanging from a wire, a sparrow?

  Notes on Tolstoy (2). A shared dream between Anna Karenina and Vronsky in the novel: an old man with a bag says incomprehensible words in French, which—as Nabokov has already pointed out—is tied to a personal memory of Tolstoy’s. An ancient blind man, who had worked on the estate as a storyteller for many years, would come into his grandmother’s room at night, while she was lying in bed, the candle already snuffed out. He would sit on the inside sill of a deep window, eating some of the food left from dinner out of a bowl, and then, in the wavering glow of the nightlights that burned before the icons, he would begin a tale. Long-haired, with a large beard, he resembled other mujiks and wore a black wool tunic, both inside the house and outdoors, following the customs of peasants. He has Homer’s eyes, but how different he is from the ancient bard and his sublime songs, bathed in the blue of the sea! The old man mixes together stories that have not come to him through books (he is illiterate) but rather through orality, dating back along the Volga, coming from the far end of Turkestan, farther even, from Persia. One night, Lyovochka—the Russian diminutive that they called Tolstoy in his childhood—snuck into his grandmother’s room and listened. The mystery of the scene left an impression on him because of the storyteller’s unseeing eyes. He always says that it was one of his first memories.

  Tuesday

  I think about Martín Mejía, who would play the bandoneon for my grandmother Rosa on the dirt patio, behind the country house in Bolívar. I can see myself at age eight or nine, watching Martín’s serious face as he played with his eyes closed.

  Wednesday

  Series B. I woke up at three in the afternoon when David came knocking, as though I needed help from some danger he could perceive in me, though he doesn’t know what it is either. Half-asleep, I received him but, as usual with him, he gave me the sense that he was already talking to himself in the elevator and then continued his private-political-literary monologue without realizing that I was still asleep. He came to help me, but I scared him off despite his visible attempts to stay and chat with me all afternoon. I have to be alone in order to think.

  There came a night when they locked me out of that house, lost in the country, and I jumped over the mud wall thinking the key might be the problem, since I always had trouble getting out: but on the other side of the door I found the padlock, and it was like a robbery in reverse. Above all because my books, my clothing, and especially the original versions of my short stories were on the other side of that padlock. And then I had to jump back over. Filled with anxiety, having nothing more than the front door, no place to sleep, Julia and I went to stay at a horrid hotel near the station, in a tiny little room.

  The initiation. Without trying to prove anything, I found myself making love to a woman for the first time. I was fourteen, and she was a neighbor, the same age as my mother, and was one of her friends. To confirm all of my half-mystical theories, she, Ada, had red hair. I’ve always loved redheads.

  Series E. Another landscape outside: balconies with bars, dark houses, always a different image in the window beside where I sit, writing. Every now and then, I raise my eyes and look off to the left, and I remain still like that while the words come and go until suddenly I start to write them down once again. That tiny room, painted white, on Riobamba, on the second floor; the high-ceilinged bedroom with a picture window that went all the way down to the floor, on Montes de Oca; the room shaped like a cross on Avenida Rivadavia; the wall painted by a Fine Arts student in the boarding house on the diagonal street in La Plata, where I would listen for the paperboy coming from the end of the street at dawn and get dressed to catch the newspaper from the balcony—they have remained fixed in my memory, places that come from a motionless time.

  I do not exist in any place, and fortunately I do not belong to my generation or any classification of current writers. I am saying this because today (Wednesday, July 3, 1968), my absence from the overview of new Argentine narrative presented in Primera Plana is outrageous, and once more I feel the same anger that sustains my writing, the same sensation that I’m writing against the current. There are signs that reach me, even though they are very faint, and I alone can see them, ready to maintain a silence that has already lasted five months.

  Monday

  Of course, I’m trapped in the whirlwind caused by my move out of Pirí Lugones’s house, with her organized system of constant meetings and parties. In the vacuum of publicity, there is always a tendency to set aside more time for promoting a book than for writing it and, as an obligatory reference and measure of value, to put the same people in charge of managing th
at publicity.

  Friday

  I saw the beggar, her face bent to her breast, talking to herself, stubbornly walk past and turn onto Calle Viamonte as though she were escaping. She sleeps in a doorway and I observe her behavior, waiting for the right moment to approach and talk to her.

  The narrative experience of boxing. Verbal description that moves among three planes: a rapid account of what is taking place, a lucid analysis of the technique and strategy of the fight, and, finally, the cries that filter in from the audience around the ring. I could write a novel by using those first two levels: narration and analysis in a single story. This all came to me because I heard the story of the fight between Bonavena and Folley, with ironic and picaresque moments: “Bonavena looked out at the stands, and his rival was furious.”

  The workings of the narration. All of the characters appear as narrators, putting the story, so to speak, on the table. The role of the narrator, that is, a person describing something, must circulate among all of the characters, including the one writing the story. The point is to value the act of telling (conversing) over the simple act of writing.

  All explicit reference made in literature itself to the void, to the absence or end of literature, invades the territory of ethics and is idiotic.

  “The English… kill themselves without one being able to imagine any reason that would cause them to do so, that they kill themselves when in the bosom of happiness,” Montesquieu.