The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Saturday

  At noon I ran into David with Edgardo F., and we went to eat at the restaurant on Montevideo and Sarmiento, talking about Eva Perón, the working girl who held a unique position. Condemned by the middle and upper classes, her rage and resentment transformed into an extraordinary political rhetoric, never before known in this country. Later with Luna, who takes note of the writing he finds in bathrooms and calls the phone numbers written there, and last with B., good ideas for continuing with the script.

  Series E. Danger: replacing memory with these notebooks. Only living the experiences through writing.

  When I’m working, I can’t read. Either nothing catches my interest, or everything seems connected to what I’m writing. The books are trapped by the passion of the novel and transformed into superfluous objects or contagious objects. They are either worthless or they say what I haven’t finished writing better than I can. A strange situation, the writer as the enemy of the reader. You become so sensitized by language that everything that is written seems either personal or personally addressed. A superstitious thought of the artist who feels as if the whole world—not just the books—is speaking to him privately, in service to the subject into which he is pouring the hours, the days, the years.

  My other way of reading consists of having five or six books at hand and burying myself in them, a way to not think and not remember that I owe a debt to what I’ve left unwritten.

  Pavese had decided to commit suicide; he was in the Hotel Roma but paused to write a few letters and entered the dead time of language, leaving his suicide in suspense. “The gods arranged all this, and sent them their misfortunes in order that future generations might have something to sing about,” Homer. Pavese’s suspended time before he killed himself has a likeness to “The Secret Miracle,” the Borges story in which a man asks God for the time to complete his work before he is executed. To finish writing before entering death.

  Popular storytelling, the serial novel. They possess, in particular, a precise functional power and invariably match with their meaning, which is, first of all, the desire to be read. But the point of these novels is not to be read at the level of their style and the typical dimension of language; they want to be read for what they narrate, for the emotion or fear or pity that their words are obligated to transmit, which they must communicate with pure and simple transparency. The prose has to have the absolute seriousness of the narrative, it must be no more than the neutral element of the pathetic. That is, they offer nothing in themselves. There is a fever of expression, an informative language. This gives rise to their complementary opposite, which we would call parody, an artificial expression that employs this language of excessive passions for comical effect. But this effect doesn’t lie in the language but rather in the way it is read. Inversion of the reading, not of the meaning of the text.

  Sunday

  The best part of yesterday was my discovery of Doris Lessing, a lateral writer, the same as us. She was born in South Africa, was in the Communist Party, and had a daughter, whom she took with her to London after she divorced. She looks at English culture obliquely and thus writes what we might call a poetics of the left. First rate: great use of autobiographical material, looking at herself as a dynamo that receives many rays. The protagonist of her stories is always an aspiring writer. Thus, there is always a tension between life and writing. I read her work for hours, as happens every time I discover a writer. I’m going to read all of her books. But now I am turning, as happens with these “excitements” that won’t leave me in peace (but what peace?), and moving away from the true path, as the mystics say. It is dark outside, gray. Ahead lies the end of the afternoon, public relations avec Mr. R.: we’re going to watch Czech films. “La” Lessing distinguishes herself from Andrés R. and all of the ex-communists because she doesn’t place blame on anyone, just observes their reactions ironically.

  Monday

  Series A. My ignorance of the past is clear, my complete forgetting of my childhood days. Because I’m here, I cannot remember them. Yesterday, a flash of the times I would go out with Grandfather Emilio, and his death, so close that it doesn’t seem like it happened. Almost nothing beyond that, fleeting remnants; it’s almost as though Nono conceals everything else, until he alone remains in my past.

  These days I’m rereading all of Chandler, and I very much enjoy the combination of adventure and irony, a sedate epic. Marlowe is always looking for lost objects, facing many obstacles. He experiences this tiresome work (that of a private detective) like one of Kafka’s heroes, with humor, seeing death up close and viewing money as a key that gives meaning to the game. He pretends to accept these rules as a way to conceal his attraction to the constant movement. There is formidable narrative technique, intended to incessantly bifurcate the paths; the action always moves two steps ahead of the hero, who always comes across the consequences of events but never the events themselves. Many times, I’ve felt tempted to write the Don Quixote of police novels. A single protagonist who would have to be Don Quixote and Sancho at the same time, a slightly insane ex-commissioner accompanied by inner voices that talk only to him (or that only he hears) with Sancho Panza’s common wisdom, sayings, refrains, unexpected solutions to the mysteries. He solves them “on hunches.” To have a hunch is to guess at the future, imagining how things will progress. And that is what this investigator’s method should be, out on the edge of the genre.

  I’m interested in the way that Chandler operates with a single hero-narrator in his novels, in such a way that the books can be read as a single, vast novel. I like this technique.

  Tuesday

  Series B. Yesterday conspiracy, commiseration, an affectionate and secret huddle with León R. and David V. They’ve adopted me as the heir to their way of thinking. Why? Maybe because of the editorial I wrote in the first issue of my magazine Literatura y Sociedad.

  First phone call with León, aggressive and hurt because of what happened to him that one Saturday in the German pub before he went to the airport, when everyone (and David most of all) was criticizing the way he lives—too comfortable, he’s a homeowner now and we don’t like that—but also the way he thinks about Marxism, too personal. Several weeks of silence since that day. Yesterday my affection for him returned along with the memory of that month traveling around Europe with León, our long conversations in Havana.

  There was a meeting for the magazine, a number of arguments, full of tension (David and Ismael against León), which I observed with the clarity that comes from understanding three or four levels of a situation. The editorial will focus on the ways that the dominant classes think about and define themselves. What Brecht called “the idealist customs” of the bourgeoisie. Capitalism with delusions; what they’re doing never coincides with what they think about what they’re doing.

  Intense work. I write copy for three book covers (Mailer, Vargas Llosa, and French writers of today) and several biographical notes (Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Le Clézio), and now, tired, I look forward to a long trek: go to the bank, collect a check, pay the rent (very late, with a warning notice attached), see Jorge Álvarez, stop by El Mundo to see the photos, chat with Luna about future articles, and finally come back home.

  Obviously a confusing panorama, what will we do? Overwhelmed, I think about suicide as a way out for me. The scars on my right wrist that I used as a mark of my past life (I got them as a boy by punching through a glass door, but I have always used them for seduction, showing that trace as proof of my decision to have done with everything). The insane order of my life is going to break apart… like the glass of the door.

  Wednesday 18

  I’m rewriting “Mousy Benítez,” it works well because the story is an implicit investigation, and the mystery is not deciphered (who or what killed Benítez?). The love among men in a hypermasculine world: boxing.

  I went to bed with Julia at noon and stayed there all afternoon, until now.

  A note I made on the white ins
ide of the cover of a book by Pavese. I find an annotation dated August 15, 1966: I’ve always wanted to find a style that defines my way of living. Language depends on the way one lives one’s life. That note is there, hanging in a vacuum, so I went to my notebook from that year and found a note from the day before. I am with Julia at El Jockey, I decide to go back to La Plata with her and spend a while there, hidden, writing. Then, on August 16, I wrote that I had already found a room: a house with a patio and rooms that open onto the garden, and on the front side balconies over Diagonal 80. I settle in here with no one knowing where I am. A strange game of mirrors.

  If I decided to admit that my life, shall we say, also changes and “evolves,” I could remember my profound stupidity in the beginning (1957), before I came to the end of that period of learning, ten years later, one year ago that is, when I published my first book. Those ten years could be the living material for my autobiography—if I were to write it.

  A short story, beginning like this: “Later, my father killed himself.”

  Thursday

  Series C. Women viewed as apparitions at distinct points in my life, sharp turns, until I reached that fleeting vision—a woman in a white raincoat—as though watching the form of my own life passing by.

  Luna’s perverse conversation yesterday, a wicked passion for misfortune (both personal and external) that he disguises as generosity, as good intentions. I reject his piety because of the element of spectacle, of bad faith, that finds all of its reasoning in this vicious puppet, with his air of a helpless hippopotamus, jumping up to spy through the window and collecting the juicy news, reading pornographic books, betraying, all with the greatest “good will” and love for his fellow man.

  Just now to David V.’s house and back. Preoccupied with the prospect of work, he critiques the literal line of Primera Plana, the ease of presenting autobiographical writing as an example of experimentation.

  Series E. Rereading Pavese’s diary, I rediscover my old obsession with his self-construction of life (as a work of art), his businesses (of living, of writing, of thinking), his techniques, and his rules.

  Fast bursts of images from the books I’ve lost in the times I’ve moved, in my “separations,” the same books I need to have today, on this table, which are—let’s say—on Jorge Álvarez’s desk or at León’s house or in some bookshop I don’t know. There will always be new (and old) books to read, but there will always be a book I’m looking for and can’t find. My hope is to have all of the books at hand so that I can use them when a practical need demands it, so that I can choose one when it’s the right time for me to read it and I’m ready for that book and no other. Therefore, my library and the books I buy are not meant to be read now, but rather are meant for a future reading, one I imagine will find its place in a volume I’ve bought years before. This idea is sustained by my tendency to see traces of the future in the present (and to be prepared). The library persists as a place I return to: the same books, the same ideas that have been repeated for years and will be repeated in the future as well.

  I think the best things I’ve written in these notebooks have been the result of spontaneity and improvisation (in a musical sense); I never know what I’m going to write about, and sometimes that uncertainty is transformed into style. I defend the perplexed author trying to understand a hostile world. Letting myself be guided by an intuition, a hunch, a pálpito (a beautiful word that refers to palpitation and also to the imagination of what is to come).

  Everything I’ve thought or tried to think comes from ignorance or from the attempt to write in its place. For example, when I reread Faulkner and wrote a profile of his life, I discovered the novel as investigation. I was only able to think of that because I was led to that insight while preoccupied with working on other matters.

  Series A. I’ve always been afraid of thinking all the way to the end, worried about the effects that this thinking might have on my body. To escape the pain, I avoid thinking about myself entirely. To put it better, I think from myself but not about myself. And in that lies the revelation that it is always someone else—not me—who is writing.

  Viewed from another angle, there is my choice to postpone, to pass on what is troubling me now to another day: to create a pause, a waiting. That’s why the collapse is so unexpected, because it breaks into the ceasefire when no one expects it (the surprise is the catastrophe).

  I began to earn my living at age twenty-two. What did I do before? Nono’s patronage. And before that?

  A discontinuous temporality—never linear, in which there is no progress—can be seen in what I write (and in the way I write): There are raptures, happy moments, inspirations, and I’m always writing in spurts, in streaks, struggling to establish a stable working rhythm, a discipline. It is an incessant search for the perfect moment. I have too much confidence in the future, and that is what defines my life, the way I think and write (and love). What is to come, that imminence, allows me to go onward.

  I’ve started rereading Conrad under the pretense of putting together a selection of his stories for my classics collection. I quite like the way he places the narrator, who is recounting the story, in the center of the scene. He always defines the situation that makes the story possible. For example, the ebb of the river, the calm girl who halts the journey and brings together the idle sailors and the narrator (who is or was one of them).

  “Marlow (at least I think that is how he spelt his name).” This is the distance between the writer and the narrator, but also the relationship between the writer and the narrator, who already knows the story and is telling it in his own way, in conversation, to a group. What fails is his confidence in the spoken tone of the story. What he needs to tell the story is less calm, more narrative confusion, fewer direct dialogues. And that is what Faulkner does, coming directly from Conrad but creating a narrator astonished at the story he is trying to tell.

  Every morning, before starting work, I open the window slightly to let the light of day come in, without waking Julia, and then I clean the table, making an empty space for the typewriter, and begin, without rereading what I have written.

  X Series. A. P., whom I’ve known for years, appears in an article about the arrest of a group of guerrillas in Tucumán, and therefore Lucas T. M. as well. I discuss this with David V., needing to support them “morally” despite the fact that politically we disagree with their methods, etc.

  Monday 23

  Walking around the city with David V., we made it as far as La Noria bridge and went in circles around the slums that surround it, the dumps, Boedo to the south, ending up on Corrientes and then in the Alvear theater to watch Bajo la garra.

  A note about my nonfiction novel. As I have said, I became aware of this story through the newspapers, I thought there were unclear points and decided to investigate, etc.

  Series E. I’m reading Gide’s diary, and I don’t like the self-satisfaction, the way he lives in the spotlight. For me, only diaries written in opposition to oneself are valuable (Pavese, Kafka). In my case, what I most often find are moments that—in reading them today—I would have wanted to live another way. It pains me to reread them because I discover what was undesirable in myself. Not because I may have said so—or understood it—explicitly, but rather because of what can be seen from the present. A gesture would have been enough to make everything different, but in that moment I was blind: we never see what we meant to do until ten years (at least) have passed, and so we live blinded by the events, never finding the way out that we seek, even though it is right in front of our faces; it is not a problem of physical distance, but of temporal perspective. When I reread these notebooks, I can clearly see the moral quality of the man I was.

  Commerce is the motor of the peripeteias in Conrad’s novels; the interchange between distant regions acts, in his stories, like fate in a tragedy.

  X Series. Taco Ralo guerrilla warfare. In the foco theory, the margin of error melts away and is minimal; only total efficacy would
allow possible action to develop in the future. And so they fall too early, due to minuscule errors. In this case, what is new is the Peronist character of the politics (but not its methods).

  Tuesday

  Series B. Last night with David. I went to see him about a meeting with León. He greets me with an enigmatic smile. “You like Borges, no?” I keep on walking toward the middle of the apartment and see a book on the desk. “What trap are you setting for me?” I ask him. David throws himself backward, grabbing the book and hitting me on the arm, offended. “No, old man,” he says. Then a great confusion on my part as I try to exaggerate my thanks and dispel the misunderstanding. He has given me a first edition of The Language of the Argentines as a gift, with an inscription from Borges, to which he adds another, written in large strokes. I realize that he stole the book from José Bianco because I know the way Pepe binds his books, but I don’t say anything. So the situation is multiplied. David steals a book and then gives it to me, and as he establishes a mise-en-scène without telling me anything, I act defensively because I know his tricks. León is late (in the end, he doesn’t come), and David once again shows me his friendship by recalling our trip around the city the previous Sunday. I go back, walking slowly down Viamonte, and León is waiting for me at home, a surprise, a reprise of the previous scene: León offers to give me a bookcase (because I have my books piled up on the floor), and then I try to be impartial.