The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Monday 6

  I spend the morning in Córdoba talking about Brecht, facing the young people, once again feeling like a veteran in front of them. In the mid-afternoon, an informal chat with a group of Architecture students. After that I decide to be alone and walk around the city, mentally preparing the evening’s talk, and I go from one end to the other without leaving Avenida Vélez Sarsfield. Finally, I return to the Department of Architecture and, in the Great Hall, pose a series of hypotheses on the relationship between the aesthetic avant-garde and the political avant-garde.

  Tuesday

  A second talk, equally improvised, which culminates in a night staying up with Héctor and Greco at an architect’s house. Then Roberto C. comes over with his usual tone, sententious and long-winded, a type of thinking that I recognize and want nothing to do with.

  Wednesday

  I’m still in Córdoba amid meetings, projects, and talks. Sometimes I have a need to isolate myself, to be alone. Finally I return to Buenos Aires, traveling all night without sleeping, looking at the open country and the lighted towns through the little window, imagining how the other journey will be, the one through which I hope to lose the burden that I carry with me. I arrive in Buenos Aires and am met with an unexpected festival commemorating one hundred years since the publication of Martín Fierro, and I make several calls but don’t reach anyone. Things put themselves back together while I drink a glass of wine at El Olmo, Beatriz turns up for the magazine meeting, and then a while later so do the others. Straight away, Toto proposes that we shut it down and hold the funeral rites; the discussion seems unnecessary to him because we all know our own positions. We try to determine the situation, and I make him see the need to discuss alternatives as well. We know that the core of the debate is Peronism, which Toto has enrolled himself in, and of which we’re all critics. At the end, Beatriz invites me to have a coffee and get dinner. In Pepito, we talk calmly and in a friendly tone, of another time, about Perón’s return. Then she leaves, and I stop by Martín Fierro where I have an appointment with Gelman.

  Saturday 11

  I spend the night with Lola until early morning. We see Esther Ferrán dance at La Potra, get dinner at a restaurant on Calle Viamonte, and go back to her place.

  Monday 13

  It would seem that there’s always a way out. Today, after spending the night with Lola, I find a letter from Amanda and everything is organized. I feel better, calmer.

  Tuesday 14

  In the morning another letter from Amanda, written prior to the one that came yesterday, and more explicit, always passionate and seductive. “In these hard times, it’s easier to give your life than your heart.”

  Wednesday

  Lola comes and stays with me, beautiful in her striped pants and black sweater, dressed like a child.

  Friday 17

  On TV, I watch Perón’s return in the rain after so many years in exile. Surrounded by soldiers with weapons guarding him; the military officers didn’t think his desire to return was real.

  Tuesday, November 21

  My brother comes, and we exchange impressions about family. There isn’t much difference between the things we’ve lived through, beyond the ten years of distance that separate us from one another.

  Wednesday 22

  Beatriz leaves word for me in Galerna to call her. “I want us to talk about the situation with the magazine before the meeting tomorrow on Thursday.”

  After the meeting for Desacuerdo, I thought I had written down Héctor’s address but it’s actually Horacio’s. I cross the city on the 59 bus, get off at Núñez, look for a phone, dial and then realize that this isn’t it, that I’m lost and don’t know where to go. I go in circles trying to find the house by chance, uselessly. In the end I return home alone.

  Thursday

  In the meeting for Los Libros, it’s clear that Carlos, Beatriz, and Marcelo are working together in the PCR line and take the issue to be resolved; I am marginalized.

  Saturday 25

  I waited for a letter from Amanda that did not come. The dark city in Plaza de Mayo, damp and gloomy at nightfall.

  Wednesday

  A letter from Amanda. “At the end of December, once the theater performances are over, I’m coming to Buenos Aires. And I’ll be there to stay.”

  Thursday 30

  A meeting for Los Libros, Schmucler renounces the magazine that he himself founded. Paradoxes in the culture of the left. Toto’s political evolution created tensions over the course of time, until finally he decided to step away.

  I’m in La Moncloa, meeting with Germán, Carlos, Beatriz, et al. David appears, shy, with a humble air, he’s come looking for me, and I plan to meet him at La Paz two hours later. We sit down at a table by the window and chaos soon erupts. David starts complaining because the actors groveled in front of him to get work, and from there we move on to the criteria he uses for his selections, if indeed he can select the cast. The argument grows and scatters and becomes chaotic. David chides me several times, saying he’s the one who always comes looking for me, that I play hard to get, that I judge him from above, etc. Finally we leave, and, on the corner over Montevideo, David starts to cry. During our argument, he’d called me by his son’s name several times. I feel bad, etc., etc.

  Friday, December 1

  Héctor comes over, impassioned, affected by a woman who lives in his building, whom he “loves,” terrified by her ex-husband, a fascist from the Guardia de Hierro who hits her and threatens her. After that, some confusion (between Héctor and me) about childhood and the images that rise from the past while we have maté with cookies and advance clumsily in one of my typical friendships: I am the father, the “mature one,” while the other one takes everything from me, and I’m trapped (other examples, B., S., etc.).

  I prepare for tomorrow’s course, and in the middle Lola appears, excited, thankful for my telegram, always lost in the thousands of projects she has to do, crazy friends, surprise in the face of events. Later, at night, I was alone and started to work, without any need to go out into the street, to escape into the city.

  Monologue (20). He tries to understand a certain coldness that characterizes this time, the end with Julia and the arbitrary quality in which affection—with no real bearing on the object or the moment—suddenly emerges (with Lola, with Tristana). Being cold, distant, tough against a certain nebulous area that bewilders him, one which he can scarcely name; language that is confusing, too abstract to “explain.” He weeps unexpectedly in front of a painting by Morandi, violating the passage from reason to feeling, but where did this crack begin? He acts out of necessity: being with a woman, having friends, being intelligent, but what he really wants never appears: when it does appear, he grows confused and so starts to babble.

  Tuesday 5

  In order to be unforgettable, you must first have lost yourself, and then you are remembered because of that. The same virtue as immortality (which is reserved for the dead).

  Wednesday 6

  Monologue (21). One who wants, can. He said that and thought that affection was something given (which no one can steal), yet there is a certain unease because he cannot repay it, and when affection is missing, or when he doubts whether it really can exist and be given to him, he shields himself in the shield of forgetting; modesty in an ability to be melodramatic. For him, to be intelligent is to forget affection, because he cannot think if feelings enter. Thus, intelligence serves to make himself wanted, it is the only thing—he thinks—that allows him to be wanted, but his aggressive tendencies reveal a “tough guy” who doesn’t need anything and tries to straighten things out by himself. His intelligence and also his literature are gambled on those fluctuations. In order to break through his limits, he must act by surprise, like a hunter waiting for an unexpected opportunity: the short story that he wrote about Urquiza without really trying. It’s as though he thinks that, if he makes it that far, he’ll lose everything. One who says is one who is.
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br />   Friday 8

  A dream. Several people in a room, just like in La Plata during the student meetings. Suddenly, I start reading a poem, the title: “Tristana Tejera Transita Thames.” In the dream I remember and recite the whole poem. Is it a sonnet? The skill lies in the handwriting; I can clearly see the control of the T and the S because at a certain point the poem makes a lisp, and I think that this spoken first-person is something unusual: a return? I write a comment in the black notebook (where I know I write down all of my dreams).

  Saturday

  I teach my class, go out for a walk, the city always strange at that hour of night.

  I go to see a play by Brecht at the Embassy with staging by Onofre Lovero. I escape in the middle, overwhelmed by the progressive stupidity.

  Sunday

  Monologue (22). He had thought that, in fact, excision was a way of being and at the same time a façade; he hadn’t taken the real moment into account, and his thoughts therefore tended toward mythology.

  Monday 11

  I meet Beatriz, who returns the folder with pictures of the Soviets in the twenties.

  Tuesday

  I correct Gusmán’s prologue, which is being published soon. Dinner with Boccardo, then we go to La Paz.

  Thursday

  A dream. I’m in a circular tower, a terrace on top of a column, I feel vertigo, I’m lying face up on the floor.

  Saturday 16

  I spend the day on the Tigre in Alberto’s boat. A meeting of single men: León, Altamirano, and Boccardo.

  I return late at night. Sitting in darkness by the picture window, I look at the city, the lights, and cannot think about the future.

  Sunday 17

  I spend the weekend with Lola. In the middle of the afternoon the doorbell rings, and it is Amanda, shy but commanding. She comes from the past. The three of us sitting around the table. “Do I have to leave now?” Amanda asked. “I knew I had to leave as soon as I came.” I made a date with her for tomorrow and left her in the elevator. As always, the events decide for me; things hurry along, and I let the days flow by. We have dinner at Costanera underneath the trees.

  Monday 18

  Series C. I meet Amanda at Ramos, her yellow dress, her tan skin. “I told every man I’ve lived with that everything would go well unless E. R. appeared.” I stood up to make the waiter come over. She moved between languor and energy, very erotic, not wearing a bra, and then she drank the double gin as if it was a shot. She insisted on paying. “I pay for my men.” We went out to the city and walked along Corrientes to Córdoba and Carlos Pellegrini to get the bottle of pisco and the gift books that were at her sister’s house. We stopped by Lafinur and I showed her the bar where I come every day, across from the Botanical Garden. We went home and then had dinner at Hermann, and I got up to talk to Julia on the phone. We came back and went to bed. “I’ll stay with you forever, let’s not be apart any longer.”

  In the morning I run into Beatriz Guido, who hands me the things for the passport. She has her usual chaos, this time organized around her obsession with Peronism, the drugs, her brother’s suicide attempt. We have a coffee at Alvear, she takes out some cash while the girl (Marieta) waits patiently for her to leave the money for the day’s expenses. Always kind, charming, very intelligent.

  Monologue (27). He started talking about his distance from things, the glass that separates him and traps him in an uninhabitable place. He looks at everything as though it had to do with someone else and, at the same time, events lead him from one place to another without his choosing. The coming journey, which he cannot experience as real. In that dark center, the corpses were then being arranged, as though he were in a locked room now, with no windows, with the air from the fan circulating as though it were alive. Someone takes note of what I think and writes it down. Women imposing on him, or the stories he would tell of women imposing on him. All in the midst of a great sadness.

  Tuesday

  I miss a date with Julia, angry because I haven’t seen her in days. Then I go to give my classes at MONA, which I bring to a close. Later I see Lola, happy with her flowers. She’s worried about me, and I, in turn, am worried about her. She’d stopped in at La Prensa to buy a copy of the speech by the Commander in Chief of the Army from 1969.

  Wednesday 20

  Let’s look at what just happened: I talk with Beatriz Guido’s secretary, she gives me the name of an officer, I go to the Central Police Department. “He’s in a meeting,” they tell me. I return home, worried about the delays. I write my pieces for the newspaper. I decide to go out, call Lola, stop by to see her. I change clothes and suddenly freeze: I’ve lost my ID card. I look in my pockets, in the desk. I reconstruct everything I did with her. I took it out of the little booklet where I keep it, I had it in my hand when I entered the Police Station, I didn’t put it back in its place, I think: I lost it in the taxi! Vertigo, self-pity, certainty that I caused the catastrophe myself. Everything is ruined, I won’t have time to get the ID too. I go around in circles, stunned, for close to an hour. I go down to talk with Lola, but she isn’t there. I come back. I throw myself into a chair. I decide to go out, meet Amanda. “In this state of mind, everything’s going to be ruined.” I go to the bathroom for no reason, open the medicine cabinet, and there, behind the mirror, was the ID. As though I had hidden it there myself. Do I feel good about this tragedy? Dazed, I let go. For the moment, I create real situations based on an element that has a particular charge for me. What will happen on the day when there isn’t a real lost object (the ID, the prologue for Frasquito, the notebook that I gave to Vicky by mistake), but rather a void that, of course, I will never be able to find? Faced with a chaos that chills my blood and the detailed descriptions that await me if that is so, I pass the days.

  Moved by Amanda this time, in a way no woman has affected me in a while. Passionate in the certainty of her love for me, she has been after me, she says, for years.

  I stopped by the ramshackle house in Córdoba looking for her, and a stranger opened the door for me. I thought: it’s her sister. It was her, however, with her hair wet, wearing striped pants. We had lunch in the pub on Carlos Pellegrini and then I bought her a ring to replace the one she wore. I like her: she’s neither calm nor serious, she’s beguiling. She holds me while I wait for the taxi: “The man tells me stories,” she says, when I tell her about the past.

  We go out for dinner at Costanera. Long stories, especially mine, the same ones as always. She listens to them, fascinated, and I feel that everything is false. On her part, a “crazy” love, fantasized about for ten years. It isn’t me, just her remembering a past that we never lived.

  Thursday 21

  We argue (Altamirano, Beatriz, and I) with Germán and Miriam, distrust of “politics.”

  Friday 22

  Difficulties with the “mandatory” work: the classes, the notes, the reviews, the reading reports. In reality, these are the things I do to earn my living. It would seem that there’s something less clear, less visible in this matter. It isn’t the kind of work that worries me, but rather the concrete result. I try to put together money for the trip to Europe; I have fourteen hundred dollars and many expenses ahead of me.

  Lola comes bearing gifts (towels, a shower curtain). “I wouldn’t have known what to buy for you.” We spend the night together after having dinner and walking around the city. Early in the morning she leaves for Rosario, some repetition of my own goodbyes when I go traveling.

  Sitting in La Paz, killing time before the movie. He had stopped by the large house on Calle Córdoba looking for her along the hallways with facing mirrors. He always had a slight terror of her excesses; Amanda had insisted on telling his future by reading the grounds from the coffee they drank. By then they’d gone over to the table by the window with a view over the street and had watched the city in the rain. He had a secret, perverse inkling of being seen by Julia, as though he guessed that she would also be in the theater, watching the Melville film they were
going to see later.

  Two older women have a conversation in the entryway of Amanda’s building while I wait for her. They look at the gales of wind that heighten the rain, obsessing over the subject of accidental death. “Remember Christmas in ’50?” one asks, her hair wrapped up in cellophane paper. “The roofs were flying off, remember how they flew? I was in San Fernando, and we watched the roofs flying through the air. What a wind,” she said, with a wicked gleam. “Because wind is the worst thing, it brings fire, brings water,” she added. “Yes,” the other said, with the same biblical style. “But I’m more worried about cornices, I’m always walking along in front of brick buildings, and the cornices can fall off and kill a person at the drop of a hat.” She looked at her friend with frightened eyes. “Anyway, in the year two thousand we’ll all be walking around in gas masks because of the smog,” the first one said, excited. “Of course, in the year two thousand we’ll be dead.” Then they started to develop a meticulous strategy for crossing the emptiness of Carlos Pellegrini, along which the city opens, without the wind making them fly away like the rooftops from the Christmas of ’50.