Thursday 9
I run into David at La Paz; he is thankful and supportive, with a knowing reading of my participation in the roundtable about intellectuals and revolution, which came out last night in Nuevos Aires. I fight with everyone, according to him, and that’s a good thing. “An Argentine fighter.” Touched, he thanks me for having referenced him because he feels excluded, etc. For my part, I look at my participation in that roundtable with irony and suspicion. All of them quickly united in defense of a liberal position while I argued energetically but very much on my own.
Later I go to Análisis magazine for an article about the publication of Sartre’s Flaubert. The journalist is Osvaldo Seiguerman, whom I know by name because of having read him in Gaceta Literaria and other leftist magazines ten years ago. I tell him that Sartre wrote a series of works about the writer as someone who dedicates his life to the imaginary world. He tries to understand the decision that would lead a person to live under the delusions he believes in. He has done the same thing with himself in The Words. Flaubert is the central figure in the creation of literature as a religion.
Friday 10
I go thirty-six hours without sleeping. I write all night long, very engaged and happy, once again trying to salvage what I’ve written. When I go to bed at dawn, I still can’t sleep, so I get up and go down to the street and walk in circles around the city. I could base the novel on that sleepless night. At any rate, in the end, I find Gusmán and Francisco Herrera, who receive me as though they were waiting for me, with great euphoria. I never really figure out what they’re proposing to me or what they want us to do together. In order to record reality, I will say that all I’ve consumed in the whole day and night are three hard-boiled eggs and two glasses of milk. But when I ran into those friends in the bar, I broke the rule and had two whiskeys.
Saturday, December 11
I work on my article about the combative unions attached to the left in Córdoba. I recorded the interviews and life stories when I spent a few days there and was connected with the workers at Fiat. The question is: how was the internal commission that directed the struggle defeated? Or rather: why was it defeated? On that point, the testimonies function as statements before a courtroom, and the question takes the form of an interrogation. Thus, the tension must come from the endless circulation of arguments. It has to do with one case, an exemplum in the classical sense, but what concerns me is that we’re always recording defeat. There’s nothing but defeat on the horizon, which is interesting from the epic point of view, but devastating from the political point of view. The idea of organizing unions by factory would allow the left to direct the movement, but it also isolates combative unionism and that makes it easy to defeat. Peronism is very strong at a union level because it defends rights with the force that comes from a national organization (the CGT).
A quote from Brecht: “The tension did not come from the plot but rather from the excitement caused by the abstract logical demonstration, augmented by pressure of the concrete political events.”
The nonfiction story must have the tension of an ongoing trial, determining who is responsible for the defeat, not the guilty party—which is the leadership—but rather the ethical stance of a group of worker leaders who prefer defeat to negotiation.
On the other hand, fate here is manifested precisely in the dialogue among the workers and the “bosses,” working as an oracle. First, the temptations that the activists are subjected to, with the company offering one million two hundred thousand pesos as “compensation” for the layoffs as long as they consent to sign an agreement admitting that the layoffs were fair. There we have the tragic dilemma. Workers marked by their union activism lose their work and are condemned to unemployment because no one will hire them in any factory in the country. The blacklists circulate in the newspapers. In debt following a strike during which they don’t receive their salary, pressured by their family situations, and at the same time considered heroes of the great worker struggles. But what is a hero good for if he can’t survive? Heroism is an ethics reserved for wealthy gentlemen who can make drastic decisions without major risk. The subordinate classes have another notion of success. For the better, the situation is given in a context of retreat and escape, with the SITRAC cornered and defeated. I’m thinking about a choral book without a narrator, only the voices of the protagonists discussing and recounting the experience. Style of Peter Weiss or Alexander Kluge.
The combative workers, especially the leaders, don’t have the ability that Martín Fierro had to go off and live with the Pampa Indians, to take refuge in the desert…
Thursday 16
I pass the days walking around the city, dying of hunger, fatigue, and exhaustion, with no excitement about anything. I should be careful of obsessing over the stories of failure too much; one is also immersed in the world he narrates.
In the midst of that Shakespearean drama, anonymous heroes fight against the management and against the Peronist union bureaucracy. They have no allies; the left has no politics of alliance, and the activists remain alone with no one supporting them other than morally.
I spend the afternoons in La Paz reading Brecht and see David V. every day; he is doing badly, as though absent, shaken by the rise of populism and by the lessening awareness of his literature among young people. He too feels defeated. To gain some balance, he makes omnipotent plans, novels that take place in seven cities, historical dramas.
On the other hand, yesterday I saw Haroldo Conti at La Paz. He was nominated for the Guggenheim fellowship, nine million pesos that he’s decided to accept in spite of his vacillations and qualms. Evidence that he has triumphed, the Premio Seix Barral, good reviews, etc., yet he is consumed by his family conflicts.
Friday, December 24
I spend Christmas Eve alone, reading. I buy myself grilled chicken and a bottle of white wine. I read Fanger’s book about Dostoevsky for hours.
In the early morning I went out to walk through the empty city, the bars all closed, not knowing where to go. I end up sitting in La Paz. I imagine points of escape and make plans on a notepad, drawing paths and exits, escape routes.
Wednesday, December 29
Very hot weather these days as I let the year come to an end. I have lunch at Los Libros. I rediscover friendships that are forced upon me, leaping over the fence I’ve built up around my life. Schmucler, Aricó, Altamirano, Marcelo Díaz. The same with the dinner with León’s study group, saying goodbye to the year, which I’m added to as a special guest, so to speak. Always from the outside, pursued by my own ideas. Calls from Haroldo, from Tcherkaski, from Boccardo, which I receive indifferently. I’m inside a glass box.
Thursday 30
I visit David in his new apartment with many rooms on Calle Cangallo, very big, new furniture, a pedestal fan. I’m impressed by David’s ability to rebuild his life. He destroys himself, sells everything, is left alone in the world, lives in cheap motels, is lost in the city with no money and, suddenly, a few days later, he’s settled down in a home with his books once again. Perhaps that is his greatest talent. We talk about his play, Lisandro; he is obsessed with it, needing it to be a success in order to validate his continued existence. Yet again, he bets everything on a single hand.
I walk through the scorching city. Today I went to San Martín, to the movie theater, seeking refuge in the air-conditioned room. I watch Boorman’s Excalibur and plan to meet Ricardo at Ramos. I change my gray pants for another pair of the same kind, drop off an article at the newspaper, and pack my suitcase to travel to Mar del Plata. In the late afternoon I meet Julia, beautiful after spending the day in the pool.
Nothing remains, not even the illusions I had ten years ago. Or rather, nothing remains because the illusions no longer remain.
Let us end with a line from Brecht: “All of the morality of the system is founded on this issue of the means of life: anyone without money is guilty.”
5
Diary 1972
Mo
nday, January 3
Julia and I sit on the terrace of a bar over Calle Independencia in Mar del Plata. I listen to myself talking to her without any conviction in what I’m saying. The cold air filters in through the sliding glass and plywood window. The waiter is missing the thumb on his right hand. A strange sensation, as though there were an insect moving around the table.
January 4
The end-of-year family party, a tribal, cannibalistic reunion. Roberto is the circumstantial narrator, with the clan as a narrative system. Several recurring archetypes, the gambling uncle, the crazy sister, the drunk cousin, the suicidal sister-in-law. Then he adds nuance to the story: Susana and Agustín, who have been fighting for forty years, only married out of necessity (she was pregnant); they barely speak at all now, except to argue. In the end she threatens to leave him and to go work as a maid, but he warns her: “As long as it’s not in Adrogué…”
Political cartoons. Investigate the first worker organizations, the typographers’ assembly, the early socialist groups (1900). The minutes record that a worker arrived at the meeting three hours late because his wife was in labor. “I want to let my comrades know that I’ve given my daughter the name Revolutionary Socialist.” Make a propaganda comic strip, setting aside the pamphlets and illegible newspapers.
January 5
Series E. The only solution to the problem of style in these notebooks is to determine their tone, nothing to do with interiority. Set aside the illusion of writing. At this point, I should already know that it’s useless to transcribe a life. I could only construct a fiction based on certain real facts, but then, why write novels? I can’t rule out finding plots and anecdotes in these diaries that I can use in the future.
Marcos, my brother, left for Buenos Aires last night, determined to get married and find a job after a year of going in circles. At home, this is experienced like a crisis. Encounters with loneliness and old age, children being lost just like life.
Monday 10
Last night I found Juan Ñ. in a German bar downtown. The usual unraveling conversations, not overly intelligent, out of tune. He, as an intellectual, is my antithesis, the type to secure their social status first, making thought secondary to that position.
Monday, January 17
Everything is suddenly unleashed. On Friday there is an army search operation in the building. They don’t enter my apartment. “They’re looking for a young couple,” on the fifth or sixth floor. A week later, on Friday the 14th, six guys from the Coordinación Federal appear in the entryway, machine guns in hand; they wake up the porter and ask about me and someone named Bordabehere. After I hear about this, the chaos begins, and I pick up all of my papers, the apartment in disarray, make three trips, take out some clothing, the novel, the typewriter, the notebooks, and leave everything in the house of Tristana, Julia’s friend.
I have to move everything, the library, the clothing, the furniture. I transport suitcases, trying not to look at the books I abandon. I gather clothes, papers, come and go several times, look for a taxi, calm in the face of what cannot be changed. Later that night in Tristana’s house, conversations.
Tuesday 18
I see the attorneys, who offer opposite versions of the future (to move or to come back?), but both agree that it’s best to disappear until the end of the month.
I go back to working in bars the way I did when I’d just moved to the city. Dejected about my library and about being unable to continue with the novel.
Discussions about poetry with Tristana and her sister. They give me a hilarious retelling of the story of a taxi escape, or rather, the taxi driver’s escape; he goes off at top speed after a crash, chased by everyone, and then crashes three more times.
Wednesday
A conversation with Andrés and Lucas in a beautiful house on a street lined with trees. We sleep here after a day spent traveling around the city amid the heat and cracked streets. I’m reading Pound and Joyce.
Saturday 22
I start to work slowly, bit by bit. We keep moving around the city, but at least I have a place now. On Thursday night I ran into Benjamín and came to this ramshackle house in Boedo with him. I remember my houses as a student, the lights that never worked, the broken furniture.
Wednesday 26
I have dinner with Enrique. We talk about Borges. He is capable of a careful disparagement of the Socialist countries, which guarantees him work at La Opinión. Meanwhile, he’s making progress on a story about Aramburu’s death. An excellent style but still weak, not much clarity as a writer.
I spend the night with Tristana and her stories, how she traveled to Europe with her family in the middle of the war.
Thursday 27
Tristana is helpless, clinging on to anyone who will listen to her. She tells her suicide stories. “When I was born, my mother left me behind to go to Europe.” Her husband, caring for her in the hospital.
The same as always at Los Libros magazine. Fatal boredom, news of expanding the committee that catches me off guard.
Sunday 30
Since I moved to this house, with a Spanish patio full of trees, things have become organized. Every morning I go to Benjamín’s place and work on the novel for four or five hours there. I feel like I’m “on vacation,” as though Buenos Aires were a city I’ve only just gotten to know, an effect of simultaneous changes of residence that force me to travel around different neighborhoods.
These “reality checks” have always helped me in one way or another. They force me to adapt quickly and yet dis-adapt with the same speed, like a traveler unpacking his luggage at every stop and then repacking it the next morning. For example, the afternoon walk south to that house where I shut myself in to write, alone.
Monday 31
The waiter sees me reading about the ERP robbery of the Banco de Desarrollo in the newspaper Crónica, when they took five hundred thousand dollars, and he starts talking to me about his life with almost no segue. An orphan since age six, he is raised by an aunt and uncle who make him live in an attic where they pile suitcases, old furniture, things they don’t need. He doesn’t even have a table, and he has to sit on the floor to do his assignments for school. “Even so, I managed to make it a quarter of a fiscal year before I had to leave for reasons out of my control.” He talks to me about books: “And what good does it do me if I read? What do I look like to you? Wearing my white jacket, working as a waiter.” He complains about the political situation.
News, people from the Coordinación Federal visit my apartment two more times. Impossible to go back, etc. A feeling of relief, as though I’d been hoping for that. No idea what to do, really, but anyway I’ll be able to find somewhere for myself for the month. We’ll see in a while.
At midnight I go to visit León, who phoned looking for me at the magazine office and rebuked me for not having visited him. His beautiful apartment on the 17th floor, a great high-intellectual atmosphere. He finished writing his book on Freud and Marx and hopes to submit it this month. Social conversation, and then he recites part of his book for a while. Of course, I ironically recount my own odyssey, etc.
February
Conversations with Rubén, who criticizes me for not putting my ideas on agitprop into practice. He’s right about that, I’m now too bound to my obsession with literature (which I never plan to abandon). The example of Walsh hangs in the air; he abandoned fiction to direct the CGTA newspaper. Walsh had called on me to join the project, but I declined. The rest of the discussion is difficult because of his demagogy around me. Accepts everything, etc.
Later I go to Los Libros, a great commotion. Carlos A., Marcelo, Germán, and Toto are there, talking about David’s psychotic outburst. He came in and asked who published Alejandra Pizarnik’s book of poems at Siglo XXI and why, saying that the book is a piece of trash, that whoever published it doesn’t understand anything, that she’s an illiterate. The matter grows worse, Toto barely defends himself, David becomes furious. He comes right up to Tot
o, takes off his glasses as if he’s about to fight him, and abuses him: “Fuck you, your mother and your grandmother, I’d punch you if you didn’t have your glasses on.” A spell of madness and, at the same time, a demonstration of David’s dangerous spontaneity, so competitive. Why did he go after Alejandra Pizarnik? No way to know, although maybe, I now suspect, it’s because she’s one of Cortázar’s protégés.
Friday, February 4
I am in my new apartment now, a spacious environment with a large picture window, the city eleven stories below. Nervous about possible dangers in this place (the phone being tapped by the people from the ERP). I try to write or, rather, try to get myself going. I discover what a sedative complete solitude is for me, and I plan to rent a studio and live there alone.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 36
