A little old man lives next to Amanda’s place and asks people to visit him every day because he’s afraid of dying in his empty apartment without anyone noticing.
Series E. Maybe the best way to use these notebooks would be to successively transcribe notes from the same day over the course of twenty years, without explicitly providing the context or variations.
Sunday 24
I spend Christmas Eve with my parents at a Chinese restaurant; I’m grateful for their gesture in coming here to be with me, but at midnight I say goodbye and go for a walk around the city, alone, as I have always wanted.
Monday 25
Amanda and I spend the day at home and see Fellini’s Roma at night.
Tuesday 26
I go out to dinner with Carlos and Oscar Landi at Bachín, and we talk about the Chilean rugby players whose plane crashed in the mountains; they survived for almost a month until one of them finally decided to head out over the peaks and managed to find a local guide, who rescued them. Of course, they ate the flesh of their dead companions, and that cannibalism has led them to a sort of mysticism that allows them to move past the taboo they transgressed.
I wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible nightmare. In a barren place, a partially devoured human silhouette, the face half-eaten, visible holes and the texture of the face. An effect of the conversation about cannibals and corpses.
Wednesday 27
I spend the day with Amanda, we have lunch at Pippo, go out in the city, end up going through Bajo to Plaza de Mayo, and then to Dorá. Scenes of the past. One night she came up to my room in the attic, in the boarding house in La Plata; we slept together, and in the morning she wanted to take something, a sheet of paper. I gave her a little flat white stone and she still has it and always carries it with her. She found me once on the street, on a diagonal; I showed her a piece of paper with everything I had to do, and she was fascinated by someone trying to organize his life. Another day I found her on her way to take an exam at the College. She was wearing a hairband. “You look like an Egyptian sphinx,” I told her, and then I write down the dialogue on a piece of paper. “What is it?” I asked. “Don’t you see I take notes of everything?” She stayed at the College waiting for me to leave. I invited her to get a glass of something at Don Julio, the bar around back of the University, and once again I’m fascinated by this woman who gets drunk every day.
During our walk she tells me about her descents into madness, into alcohol, her suicide attempts, her phobias. She speaks about it with some pain, afraid, she tells me, that I will stop loving her. Sitting on a bench in Plaza de Mayo, facing the palm tree that divides the flower beds, Amanda passionately reads my story “Tierna es la noche” and, of course, recognizes the character of Luciana, who is, in a sense, inspired by her. Beautiful, she ties a shawl around her head to make me compliment her and talks about me, “certain of this love.” For my part, I am afraid, but of what? Of her insanity (or mine?).
I was in bed with Amanda when the doorbell rang, and I silently turned down the volume of the record player. It was Lola, who slid a beautiful print under the door for me showing Don Quixote overcome by his readings. A lovely note with references to my dream archive, with a sorrowful goodbye for her absence. A reversed reprise of the first day, when Amanda came over and found herself with Lola. A predilection for love triangles.
Thursday
We stay together until noon, then she leaves quickly, fleetingly, to see her friends lost in the past, chased. I finally manage to finish the passport process and go back to pick it up. Then I have a meeting for Los Libros. She comes with me. We go out to buy cookies and maté, she talks ironically about us while I call and make a date with Lola for tonight. A strange certainty, at times, that I’m going to be with Amanda for years to come.
Friday 29
Series C. I meet Julia, who had called me yesterday at the magazine. Beautiful, more beautiful than anyone else, and at the same time, as always, intelligent, wary, able to guess what I’m thinking. We have lunch together at Pepito, very nice, in the best style. Promises of love with her as well; she will wait for me, she can come and live with me today. I’m going to leave her the apartment, and when I return we’ll see what happens. I meet Lola and everything becomes complicated. She tells me that I’m growing distant, that she feels left out and that I’m going to abandon her when I go on my travels. She had a dream that I had another woman, and in the dream she thought: “But how can he do this to me now, just when he’s about to leave.” Will I ever find a way to make up my mind and speak clearly? From there I went to see Amanda. I stayed with her all day, sad because she was leaving for Mar del Plata at midnight. At home, around the city, planning the future, she’s jealous of Julia. “Couldn’t she just die?” We go out and have Gancia vermouth with cheese at the bar on Lafinur, and then we go back to listen to music and be together. Finally I stop by to see Ricardo Nudelman and bring her with me, proud of this beautiful woman who sparks interest and suspicion in the men who keep coming in for some meeting, celebrating something I never figure out. We leave there in desperation because she’s going to miss the train and stop by her house; she’s slightly drunk, and the house is in disorder. Her sister is showering, we have to wrap up [illegible], and we bring some bottles of Chilean wine, but they fall in the street, and I have to pick up the wine-soaked package. At the station, we sit down on the wood floor of platform 14, and then “the girls” arrive, her girlfriends, running, hurried, at the last minute. I walk over to the train with her and she embraces me, not wanting to get on. She had stumbled earlier, drunk, and hit her knee. Standing on the running board, she looks at me in a way I will never forget. The alarm went off, signaling the departure of the train, and I was already on the phone talking to Lola. I was scheming about what I had to do to stop by her place and sleep with her, considering the time. If today isn’t a symptom of madness, wrongdoing, desolation, stupidity, then I never will accept that I’m insane, wrong, stupid, or desolate.
Monologue (30). He cannot stop thinking about a nightmare from the other night, with a woman who was devoured. Her face was eaten away; it seems that, when he isn’t isolated and “shut in,” terror rises up and actions disorient him and are fractured. He also recalls the Chileans who ate human flesh. Society protects these “gentlemen,” he thinks, they’re heroes able to practice what is forbidden.
Saturday 30
I spend the night with Lola after having dinner at a table by the window in Munich, the restaurant on Carlos Pellegrini. She too will wait for me “because she loves me.” Three months will go by quickly, etc.
Monologue (31). He has started to navigate among three women, seeming to love them all at the same time. He cannot “detach” himself and, therefore, he cannot choose. Things seem to be given, so that no one can alter them. For that reason, he is surprised by his own violence. He scorns A. when she puts her hand on his sex while he is sleeping. B. tells him how she feels because he’s growing distant and the trip frightens her, and he falls asleep while she’s talking. Finally, with C., the arrival of X when they’re in a bar draws a third person into the game and violence breaks out. Because it is unexpected, anything that comes from outside, whether benign or malicious, shakes up the system in which everything could be anticipated. Then his tendency to create catastrophes and tragedies is exacerbated, making conflicts and difficulties worse, creating a void, although the void really did exist before, he now thinks.
Dream. My mother is ironing clothes and there’s a cord that goes from wall to wall. Pieces of transparent cloth hang like dirty clothing.
Sunday, December 31
León R. comes to see me in the mid-afternoon like a shadow of the person I may come to be in the future. Desolate and sad, “he doesn’t know what to do with his life,” feels he has “failed” with his book on Freud that “no one is reading,” unable to be in a relationship and maintain it. Fixated as he is on Isabel, who rejects him and refuses him. My own traits ap
pear in him, so we understand each other very well. This promiscuity will only cease if I fall in love, because loving is the hardest thing. For the years I lived with Inés, and then with Julia, I was monogamous, didn’t even notice other women, but when I have no anchor, my life is chaos. I can’t focus my desire and so am transforming into a desperate scoundrel, indifferent to everything.
Lola comes over and we spend a night at home, looking at the lights of the city from the balcony. We’d bought food and champagne and listened to the Jimi Hendrix records that she brought. On the balcony, we looked at the city, the pieces of paper that fell from a window like yellow snowflakes. The downstairs neighbors hit a pot, adding to the general noise. The bathroom lamp exploded, the next-door neighbors are partying in the hallway, I poked my head out to watch them. I peed while Lola was in the shower. I felt a temptation to throw champagne on the bald head of a neighbor downstairs. I don’t remember anything else. In the morning, she had to tell me what I had experienced, though I didn’t want to remember. Traces of conversations. “There is less and less that can help me.”
This has been my passage from one year to another, from one place to another, but to what end?
6
Diary 1973
Monday
Series C. When we started, Amanda was studying theater with Agustín Alezzo. I went to Rosario for three days to give some lectures, returned late on Saturday night, and she wasn’t there. She came back early in the morning. She’d gotten work performing a show at the Bambú cabaret on Carlos Pellegrini, near Lavalle. I went to see her yesterday. A kind of dirty striptease, dressed as a man. I sit watching her from a special table next to the dance floor. Then she comes over and sits down with me, kisses, smiles. The waiters in the place talk to me with great respect. The owner, a Uruguayan man with the air of a dandy, his hair dyed brown, says to me: “This is a high-class place, only tourists and wealthy people from the country. Good people.” On the way out, she hangs on my arm. “Go on, Emilio,” she says, “don’t be stupid, the two of us can live off what I make.” “Thank you,” I say, “but I’m not Erdosain.” “More like the Melancholy Thug,” she shoots back. She wants to act, but there is no work in the theater… The artistic vocation… Of course, she works as a bartender and goes out with the customers.
Thursday
Last night I thought about Amanda. “She’s there now,” I thought. She has a dressing room, the Uruguayan man said. “I don’t practice,” she tells me. “I get dressed and go out there.” It’s a joke among actors who study Stanislavski’s method. They went to see Pedro López Lagar, a Spanish actor who lived in Buenos Aires; he was doing A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller that season. “And how do you prepare yourself to act, Don Pedro?” “Well, I put on my hat and go out there.” The same for Amanda. Dressed as a nurse or in a schoolgirl outfit or dressed as a little kid. I get dressed and go out there.
She took all of her things, they fit in a single suitcase; she went to live with her sister. “I only write these things,” I tell her, “I’m not interested in living through them.” “You’re missing an experience,” she says. “I have experiences to spare.” “So long, precioso,” she said, and she rode the elevator away. Now she talks to me as if I were a customer.
On the wall, she left the photo that shows her with me in the doorway of Radio Provincia, in La Plata, in ’64? Very beautiful, skinny, black sweater, long hair, air of Juliette Gréco. We met in Once varas, Julio Bogado’s cultural audition. I don’t look at the notebooks from that time, but I can well remember the night when she came up to my room, without warning, half drunk. “No, don’t, don’t turn on the light,” she said. She reappeared in Peru a few months ago and sent me a letter via José Sazbón, saying to meet her in the movie theater. In time she came to live in Buenos Aires and stayed with me.
I try not to go out at night so that I won’t go looking for her.
I work until sunrise on an essay about the novel. A very wise observation by Brecht about Kafka. He is convinced that Kafka would never have found his own form without the passage from The Brothers Karamazov when the corpse of Zosima, the holy starets, begins to stink. Everyone is waiting for the manifestation of transcendence. The holy man is not going to decay. Then, after a while, a monk goes and opens the window. The smell of death. No one understands what is happening. The natural thing was the miracle. An excellent observation that points to the history of technique, to a writer’s kind of utilitarian reading, and also to a very precise knowledge of Kafka’s work; the key in his stories is the inability to understand what is happening, centered around longing for a transcendence that fails to come. Kafka’s hero seeks meaning and does not compromise or reconcile.
Tuesday
I wake up at noon, go out, and eat two empanadas with a glass of orange juice and a double espresso at the pizzeria on Santa Fe and Canning, and I read Crónica. A Hungarian chess player committed suicide in Mendoza when the police managed to surround him, two days after he had abducted a girl because she looked like his little sister, killed in the war. He was gentle in how he spoke to her and treated her—from what she said—and he wanted to teach her to play chess. In the act of abducting her, he killed one of the young girl’s friends, who tried to stop him. He thought about fleeing to Chile, crossing the mountain range on foot. I go out and make a call from the public phone in the dry goods store on the corner opposite. Tomorrow a meeting for Los Libros magazine.
Passion prevents you from seeing details. For example, I remembered just now that Amanda didn’t take off the little chain with the aquamarine stone, which I gave her when she came here from Lima. She also wore it when she was naked on the stage, the same as when she was with me. Imagination is the art of linking the same blue stone worn by two women who are—or seem to be—different. The image transmits the emotion and opens a path into the heart (a pain on the left side). You have to be calm in order to narrate a feeling that has already passed.
Thursday
Detached—detached, cut loose—he looks at reality with the astonishment of an outsider who doesn’t know where he is and must learn each gesture, and every word, without taking anything “for granted.” An unexpected change in the world—in the universe, in the cosmos—that forces him to be alert—in order to adapt—in order to survive. (“Don’t exaggerate, precioso,” she said.)
Let’s also recall that afternoon in La Plata, ten years ago, on the corner of 7 and 50, when I told Dipi Di Paola about a novel describing the life of a man separated from the world… The Wayward, it would be called. What I don’t write, I live.
Tuesday
There was a woman who wrote down her name and phone number in the men’s bathrooms in bars. She went in very early in the morning, when she was unlikely to be caught. She received three or four calls per day.
There was a woman who wrote anonymous letters to her husband in which she told him the truth of her life. The amazing thing is that the husband never mentioned to her that he received that confidential information.
There was a woman who spent half of her family’s wealth paying, out of her own pocket, to publish an open letter in every newspaper in the country, in which she expressed her surprise at the homages and demonstrations of appreciation and affection that all manner of people had sent her on the occasion of her husband’s death; he had been a scientist who came close to winning the Nobel Prize three times. In the letter, the woman said that she finally felt free from the terror she had suffered over the course of almost thirty years of forced cohabitation with a madman, a mythomaniac, and a psychopath. As an example of the husband’s true personality, she described how the scientist kept an archive of photographs with every rival or possible rival or future rival scientist, and he poked out their eyes with little platinum needles that he himself made in his laboratory at night, his aim being to paralyze them in their research, to wound them, blind them, or prevent them from overtaking him in his struggle to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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sp; Monday
Sitting with David for three hours in a bar to combat loneliness (and hunger). He is improved by having no money: indiscriminately—and intensely—his capacity for passion is unleashed. He immediately brings his fixed ideas to the stage; today he went on about the ambiguity of Los Libros magazine, about the Cubans’ obsession with success, about Cortázar’s political opportunism. He uses colorful language, with diminutives (hermanito), archaic expressions (sonaste, Maneco), unusual applications of words (you have to put on a passe-partout); he employs pet words, enigmatic expressions, tending toward idiolect, toward private language. He is much better than his books: he uses a coarse rhetoric when he writes, a simplified syntax; when he speaks face-to-face, whatever he says seems like a confession, always overly sincere and risky—as though he were walking on a tightrope—and protected by a net of subtexts and beliefs, a series of allusions charged with a closed-minded certainty that is never put into question. He refers to the world as though recounting a personal secret (and in that respect, he is very Sartrean): suddenly he is obsessed with the city, because Buenos Aires is no longer the same, it is populated with strangers, with Italians, with austere and gray people. And where do they come from? he wonders, pointing through the window at the people walking along the sidewalk, what do they do? He can’t bear the multitude, the others, who seem to him like inert objects, without desire, disconnected from true life. He sold his library once again; he incessantly detaches himself from everything, over and over. He comes home with me so I can lend him a hundred pesos, which I gather meagerly (in coins!), and I give him a first edition of El idioma de los argentinos—which he had given me years before—for him to sell. While we perform these transactions, there is no explanation and no justification (“Let’s not make a bar scene,” he says). We count coins on the table in piles of ten pesos while continuing to talk about politics (“Cámpora’s going to fold, he’s a dentist with a face like a washing machine”), about literature, he really doesn’t like that I’m reading Mailer (“Novels, old man, there’s no time!”), about Amanda, whom he met, although he looks at the photo very closely, with the scrutiny of a collector (“She’s too skinny for me,” he laughs). He is very generous, very funny, very wise, very original, but he talks to himself (as though trying to convince himself).
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 42
