The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Series A. In this notebook, I leave a record of the sixteen hundred seventy-two (1,672) copies of my book purchased by presumed readers. Mathematical exactitude that was converted into sixty thousand fifty pesos (60,050), with which I settled my account for books at my publisher’s bookshop, books that had allowed me to survive by reading for the last two years. And so, to celebrate, I bought no. 11 of Communication magazine and Libertella’s novel.

  Thursday, October 31

  I saw David going past in a taxi, upset, aggressive, wearing those glasses that look like a mask, suffering from dizziness and headaches, with his touching attempt to “objectify” and distance himself, as though his fear of old age had turned him into someone else. A speculative interpretation, because David looks too much like me.

  Monday, November 3, 1968

  I managed to wake up at five thirty in the morning, and now I sense the engine of the garbage truck below, on Carmen, mingling with the noise of bins hitting the sidewalk and the voices of workers yelling to one another.

  Too much alcohol last night for me not to feel this oppression in my head, slowly clearing away in the crisp morning air.

  Tuesday, November 4

  Confirmation that I’ve been constructing my life against my better judgment. From the time of the photo that shows me smiling timidly at age six (dressed in overalls, short pants, and a shirt behind which you can glimpse my—heartwarming—fleece shirt with buttons, standing to the left of the blooming jasmine, in the open entrance to the hall where you can see the hard chairs of pale wood) all the way to this warm November night: narratively, it would be delightful to seek the paths, the detours, the good decisions, the accidents that lead from one image to another.

  What seems undeniable is my learning of humility—that is, control over my emotional nature in order to face the extreme expressivity of family life. That may be where my interest in skeptics comes from, those elusive figures who conceal sentiments under irony. A learning that may end up in desolation, silence, if I’m unable to retrace my steps and rescue my emotions.

  Wednesday 5

  Series E. In reading my diaries from 1957, some constants appear: an evolving relationship with Elena, getting myself caught in everyday ceremonies (I went to play chess every day. Discovery of voracious reading, three books in one week). Narrative experience, double consciousness, and a schism between who I was in 1957 and who I am now in 1968 as I reread these events. Retrieving the events because of the value they may come to have in the future, an unforeseeable time for one who is living it. I let myself be dragged along by the rare excitement of reading my own life.

  Julia walks and moves around, taking off beautiful dresses, trying on an orange-colored one, holding it against her body and looking at her bare feet.

  My excessive expressiveness in my early notebooks, in my letters to Elena, proves the spontaneous motion of an introspective nature, created in the expressionist atmosphere of my family.

  Friday 6

  Suddenly, like a wind in the night, whispers of my adolescence return: furies, fears, and tears that represent a search for that time when I owned the world in my ambition and imagined how I would conquer the city with my books.

  José Agustín’s The Grave interests me because of his frantic handling of a rough language that captures the vertigo and inescapable world of adolescence. I’m not interested in his use of very dated language, an argot that is too lexical, words that grow old overnight. The best part is how he uses Anthony Burgess’s strategy, inventing a language of undefined territory, without a set timeframe.

  In the detective genre, certain scenes are repeated. For example, the bad women; Marlowe comes across the daughter of a millionaire who sucks on her finger and stares at him, beguiling. In Chase, the detective seduces the invalid daughter of another millionaire, and she tries to make him come in through the service door. In that sense, it’s possible to uncover a certain rhetoric. Millionaires in predicaments, generally married to actresses or ex-ballerinas who abandon them or die and leave them alone with their daughters, crippled, rather dumb, or nymphomaniac. Cynical butlers, very wise, great for creating atmospheres and delivering ingenious retorts. A multitude of secondary characters, all characterized by some singularity. The “other” fundamental element is the often-repeated moral code of the detective. As Molley says in a novel by Chase: “I enjoy my work. Maybe it isn’t very productive, but it’s original enough to inspire me.”

  Thursday 7

  I recall Valéry’s theory: the story must be told from an idea and not from a passion, and I think that, if Discourse on the Method is the first modern novel, then Marx’s chapter on fetishism of commodities in Das Kapital is the Ulysses of our time.

  Friday

  Yesterday I saw Miguel B., the “delights” of the atmosphere, unnamed things that betray our differences, gossip. Miguel, meanwhile, is lost in the brutal world of journalism, or rather, literary journalism, a nest of resentful people, omnipotent mediocrities devoted to proving themselves through injury. I wanted to cover my back by making my code of ethics clear. All the same, he carries his resentment, his youth, his awful, insane father, his brilliant entrance into literature, like a bulletproof camera. Difficulty conversing with me since I come from the other side and find his literature to be one of salvation, of escape from this sinister realm.

  All of this metaphysics in the editorial office of Confirmado with the bold young people (Mario E., Horacio V., Andrés A.) who practice “preemptive journalism.” Amid the tumult, I saw a copy of 62: A Model Kit on a table, Cortázar’s latest novel, a sort of guide that draws its aesthetics from Hopscotch; from what they tell me, it has already sold twenty-five thousand copies.

  Dream. I call Montevideo and travel to the south, where I’m supposed to work as a mathematician for fifty thousand pesos per month. Mountains covered with snow, abysses into which I could be silently lost, drawing the buzzards to destroy my body with their talons and then clean their beaks on my beard.

  A certain relationship with women, certain ceremonies, parties in dim light that repeat over the course of time; they are the cipher of my life.

  Saturday

  Last night I went walking near the river, drinking wine and eating grilled steak in the open air. Before that to La Plata and back, collecting an unexpected four thousand pesos.

  Series E. I’m making a place of my own for the first time, somewhere I can put my body and know where the friendly parts will be, a celebration that I discover in the mornings when I get up during the sunrise and write or read at this desk by the window. On the table are Cortázar, Paco U.’s Adolecer, Pavese, and Onetti’s short novels.

  In some places I am slightly sickened by the elegant and contorted prose of Cortázar’s latest book, 62. At first glance, we might say, all of the characters are the same or, at any rate, they correspond to the same “figure,” as Cortázar calls it, a ubiquitous space (city, area) that is all of the characters and none. A novel that should be read in the same corner as Hopscotch along with other passages and stories (“A Yellow Flower,” “The Other Heaven,” “All Fires the Fire”) and Persio’s entrances in Los Premios, because of their kinship, their thematic similarities: a secret theory about narrative causality and motivation that, in this case, tends to be aleatory and spatial. An autobiography (in chorus), sixty-two voices through which each of the many narrators sketches the silhouette of an elusive figure.

  Pavese, a story. I had chosen to go to Italy because that was what I was most familiar with; I was obsessed with Pavese, but it might have been anyone else, Osamu Dazai, let’s say, as long as it was someone half-defeated, an ally who could help me to take action. But I chose This Business of Living and applied for a fellowship at Dante Alighieri and installed myself in Turin.

  Tuesday 12

  The use of pseudonyms is very common in popular literature. In this respect, the detective genre is the highest-quality narrative that I’ve read. I assembled lists and lists of titles for
my project of making a collection of American crime novels. The production is vast, so I’ll have to read twenty books for every three that I select. I’m going to start with an anthology, and then I’ll publish Chandler’s short stories.

  Friday 15

  Yesterday I saw Marcela Milano, whom I mentioned the other day. A judge requisitioned Nanina, accusing it of being a pornographic novel, and I spent the afternoon helping Germán make sense of the difficult ordeal. Finally a meeting for the magazine (Ismael, Andrés, Rodolfo W.), with many ideas circulating about the political situation.

  Series C. “You used to deny your body, now you deny your feelings,” Celina said to me. A woman’s great ability to capture and expose masculine affectations. In slang they’d say she nailed me, the way someone would check a fruit to see if it’s ripe.

  Tuesday 19

  Some tones, the melodies of certain prose (Chandler, Céline), mark the cadence and the rhythm of the story. You have to break yourself free from those tones, the way jazz musicians improvise on the piano over standards, trying to forget them.

  Wednesday 20

  “The Relatives of E. R.” came out, an essay by Beatriz Guido about the writers who published their first books with Jorge Álvarez. We’ll see what happens in the next ten days, remembering that my maturity is slow to come.

  Saturday

  A striking rediscovery of Dostoevsky’s best while I’m revising the edition of Notes from Underground, the first book in my classics collection for Jorge Álvarez. This nouvelle will be a revelation; it has never been published as an individual book in Spanish. Floreal Mazía’s translation does a good job of capturing the irascible tones of the prose; it is based on the English version by Constance Garnett, which I read many years ago in Mar del Plata at Steve’s recommendation.

  If, as G. Lukács notes in the preface to this edition, “Raskolnikov is the Rastignac of the second half of the nineteenth century,” then the man who wrote these memoirs is the antecedent of the great first-person prose of this century. Beckett in first place, but also Sartre’s Roquentin, Camus’s The Fall, and of course there is the atmosphere and acuity of Kafka’s monologues: “Josephine the Singer,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “A Report to an Academy,” etc.

  Series B. Sadness as I say goodbye to David, who is traveling to Cuba and Italy, sympathy with his cutting of ties; he sold his library, emptied his apartment. A feeling that I’m losing the only person I can talk to freely.

  In Puig: the omniscient reader. (The absent narrator.)

  Monday 25

  Saturday was a complex day. A visit from David. My friendship with him is growing, facing the deadline of his flight. His demolished apartment, the sisal twine for bundling books, the helplessness of goodbyes. In the afternoon I have a meeting for the magazine, struggling to complete the third issue, which seems to be almost ready now. An unexpected invasion by Paco U. and Pepe A. at three in the morning like a police raid; they yell up at the window of my apartment from the street, asking for the Bola de Nieve record that I left at Pirí’s house more than a year ago. Hostility that I have no response for, since I’m not going to get into that locker room game, and I have enough education and experience to tell when the “boys” are drunk. One more lesson learned and they’re gone… I have to trust my intuition and mistrust insecure, anti-intellectual, populist associates. U. traveled to Cuba with me last year and we had several conflicts on the trip; for me, the first impression is always the one that matters.

  Wednesday 27

  Last night at the Teatro Apolo on Calle Corrientes. A Beat concert, Almendra, Manal, Javier Martínez. It’s the music of the future, and I listen to it with the distance that comes with my age, so to speak. I went with Jorge Álvarez, and this seems to resolve the intersections we see in the bookstore, Pappo, Pajarito Zaguri, Miguel Abuelo, long-haired kids who smoke hash along with Jauretche, Pajarito García Lupo, and other birds.

  Thursday 28

  Yesterday, a journey through the city to pick up the 158,000 pesos for Andrés and our secret, or almost secret, publications, on which I collaborate sporadically and anonymously. I finally found several volumes of detective novels that they brought for me at the Costa agency in Belgrano. I’m making progress on the anthology, which will become the first volume of the Serie Negra, beginning this year, onto which I am placing all my literary and economic hopes. I ended up at the publishing office, dying of heat, looking through several boxes of crime books. The production of novels amazes me; authors like Ed McBain, Richard Prater, Chase, etc. write two or three novels per year for a fixed audience that buys for the genre and not the writers as such.

  Thursday, December 2

  Yesterday, with the ephemeral quality of cinema, I was disappointed rewatching The Man with the Golden Arm, which used to be legendary to me but has not stood the test of time. The best part is Eleanor Parker, the hysterical woman who pretends to be paralyzed in order to tie Sinatra down, the striking narrative value of the whistle she uses to call when she is alone. I remember the first time I saw it in Adrogué after reading the novel by Nelson Algren, which I’d liked despite its naturalistic tone. Cinema ages more quickly, but literature is more easily forgotten.

  Tuesday 3

  Manuel Puig came to visit me, describing the passionless brothels for men in Tangier and Roberto Il Diavolo, whom he recalled with fascination on the Paseo de Julio, an unforgettable man, Manuel said; he managed to meet him before his death. Yesterday a conversation with Conti about his first novel, his current projects. I am reading badly, wanting to get the two anthologies over with and have the summer free.

  Wednesday 11

  X Series. David comes to say goodbye to me because he’s leaving; as always with him, it’s hard to write about the reasons for this flight. Later with Lucas T. M. at a bar in the Mercado del Plata, drinking beer from Denmark to give meaning to the meeting. He’s in hiding, and his returns to the surface are always connected to me, visiting me as a way to rest. Despite the heat, he wears a jacket and tie, intending to look like an office clerk, but he is armed. He tells me about a bank robbery to confiscate funds; the cashier doesn’t believe him when he points a Beretta at him, “Get out of here, don’t kid around,” he says. Lucas threatens him, saying “I’m going to kill you” as he backs away and leaves the bank, empty handed.

  A check today from Jorge Álvarez (fifty thousand pesos) for the English chronicles. And twenty-five thousand from Tiempo Contemporáneo for December and the promise of another twenty-five thousand in January. I hope to live comfortably for the whole summer with this money.

  Thursday 12

  A meeting for the magazine and an argument with Andrés and Ismael about the implications of David’s trip. A.’s hatred toward D. is very clear in this. He took charge of passing this judgment, inciting Ismael to betray him.

  Carlos B. tells me a couple of stories. His father, buying newspapers from the revolution in ’55 to “read when he retires.” His mother, institutionalized and weeping. The father steps out into the hallway with Carlos. “I haven’t shot myself because I don’t have a revolver.” Another story, an Argentine man and a Swedish woman look at each other, and he, unable to communicate with her, takes her to his apartment and there, not saying a word, she undresses. The next day, he thanks her and says goodbye.

  Friday

  X Series. Last night with Lucas, transformations—physical as well—of a person who has kept himself in shape for ten years despite successive transitions (rural guerrilla in Taco Ralo, a metal worker, then an ally of Casco, a Trotskyist leader). The only one in my generation who (despite his title as an attorney) hasn’t returned to the fold. At the same time, he has a way of burning bridges, getting caught up in the inevitable whirlwind of unchecked violence around his life. He is learning to have courage, to not run away despite the bullets, to feign the “astonishing calmness” that the newspapers describe. It’s also certain that I’ll have to write about him again, here.

 
; In Gide’s diary (which I always come back to reluctantly), he has a good insight in comparing the museum to the library. He points out what is perishable in literature, the changes in time that become changes in space. The museum, a pure space, confirms the juxtaposition between the way some forgotten painters are reborn and certain fashionable ones come to inevitable ends. Confirmation or superimposition of what seems new and what has been forgotten, which are synthesized in a single space: the museum.

  In Pavese’s admirable “Primo amore,” reticence becomes a tone, a level of awareness, but not, as in Hemingway, a void or a silence; what is unsaid in Pavese turns into something halfway spoken, into a restraint that defines the character.