Economic exchange—among friends—is not distinguished from intellectual exchange: it is the same thing, and if one studies one level, one understands the other. Brecht with Fritz Lang.
Monday
I tell Junior about Dumézil’s great theory on the origins of symbolic forms. For Dumézil, there really once existed an Indo-European people that extended itself militarily around the whole world until it disappeared, becoming identified in the network of the defeated, the only remnants of which are the common roots of all languages and the symbolic structure of the trinity; it seems fascinating to me as an historical example of a hypothetical case. Just as fascinating as Bohr’s theory of concentric worlds. No one has ever seen the Indo-European people, and there is no trace of their existence, no archeological remains, no documents. All that exists, isolated in different parts of the Earth from India to the north of Europe, are a few characteristics that allow the inference of a common circumstance. These pieces of information, incidentally, are abstract: certain language roots, certain structures of symbolic construction. These traces allow the reconstruction of a group of people, situating them in the plateaus of central Asia, imagining that they invented the wheel and created the first chariots of war and an army so powerful that they came to dominate the entire world in little more than a century. Like all conquerors, they were assimilated by the defeated and disappeared in the network of their victims until no trace of their existence remained. It must be thought that, before their disappearance, the Indo-Europeans reigned in every culture that repeats a common morphology in language roots and a hierarchical vision of the universe that is, according to Dumézil, always divided into a triangle comprising those who command, those who pray, and those who labor. That trinity was only a royal political form, an institution of the State, for that phantom people; for the rest, it turned into a mental structure. Junior calls that hypothetical evidence.
Friday
Dinner with Eduardo and Juan Mazzadi, the charm of musicians. Eduardo tells of how Bach, a conductor in a country church, was “forced” to write one mass per day. He was there for four years, and “only” two hundred eighty of them have survived. He had to write one Passion per year, two of which have been lost.
Juan—an unpublished poet and tango pianist—can play five different arrangements of El Marne by Arolas. Once the piano was incorporated into the tango—with Roberto Firpo in the twenties—the typical orchestra came to be. He praises Goñi, Troilo’s pianist, with the same admiring and compassionate tone that his brother used when talking about Bach (or Steve when talking about Malcolm Lowry).
Melancholy for the past, but no memory. In 1990 I will turn fifty, consumed by nostalgia for this time, which I won’t remember any better. The anti-Proust: no involuntary memory. I live in the past but do not remember it.
Monday
A patrol car has its windshield shattered by a rock that fell “accidentally” from a construction site on Reconquista and Sarmiento. The police get out with their guns and look up into the sky, surly, furious, while the workers go on working, their yellow helmets against the noonday sun.
In 1926 Eisenstein began to develop a theory of a conceptual cinema, that is, a cinematographic language able to transmit not only emotions and feelings but also reflections and ways of thinking—through images.
Thursday
A quick trip to Mar del Plata to empty the family house, which we already sold. I use my father’s address book to call his friends, his coworkers, his acquaintances. The group comes in, they talk about him, praise him, and leave, taking everything there is: they try on clothing in front of the mirror, wrap the cups in newspaper, put the freezer on a luggage trolley. They are old, uncomfortable, they measure the soles of their shoes against my father’s, they are Peronists, nurses, ex-patients, girls from the cabaret on Avenida Colón, poker players from the Club Vasco, and many gate-crashers taking advantage. May I? says a very well-dressed blonde woman, and she takes the blue vase that my mother bought in Mexico. May I? The consulting room is empty, but in the drawers there are free samples of medicine. The strangers enter and exit, the house is emptying as if in a dream. In the end there is nothing, the little lamps have no shades, the walls now have no pictures; I’m alone, looking through the rooms, and finally I go to the upstairs rooms, which were once mine, and find a fat man (“I’m El Gordo Miguel,” he says) smoking in the window over the street. “I was already leaving,” he says, “I’m taking the doctor’s stethoscope as a memento.” Then I notice it hanging around his neck. “Your father,” he says, “was a great guy. A great guy,” he repeats… He goes down the stairs slowly, and I watch him from above as he crosses the street and turns down Belgrano. He wobbles a little when he walks, and on the corner the light catches the shiny metal circle my father would apply to the naked chests of his patients to listen to their breathing. I stay there a while, leaning in the open window and observing, as I always have, the branches of the jacaranda tree planted in the sidewalk before I was born. Then I close the windows, turn off the lights, and leave.
Saturday
A dialogue between two kids traveling in the seat behind me on the bus, describing their first adventures. One laughs, the two play around and entertain each other. “My first time with a man, I was afraid I’d get pregnant.”
Sunday
Pola comes from La Plata and we wander around the city, eat dinner at Dorá. She doesn’t really know what to do with herself, and I almost always grow tired and separate myself quickly in bed as though trying to pretend she wasn’t there.
Monday
I walk through Palermo with Pola and, standing by the lake, try to find the softest words to get rid of her, but she clings, talking with the old language that always makes me laugh: “We have to use up the experience.” I watch the water of the lake running among the weeds.
The two of us go to La Plata, where I finish the course on Borges. An argument with Graciela Reyes who’s a Peronist and doesn’t want to learn anything. A symptom, at any rate, of the conflicts that must be endured. She reduces everything to politics, leaving no room for any specific reflection.
At midnight I leave Pola in the bus station, which looks like a market, and travel back here, trying to make sense of these difficult times.
On Constitución an unexpected meeting with Eduardo M., who emerges from the fog that envelops the plaza. He’s a bit drunk, stained with the purple sediment of wine. He tells me about his misfortunes during his trips to Bahía Blanca that leave him scattered. He can’t read, can’t compose; he experiences music—he tells me—like a journey by train, crossing the plains toward the south. When I tell him I’m living alone, separated from Julia, he shows a glimmer of his old intelligence: “So you think you’re moving forward, living like that. Be careful that you don’t keep moving forward and end up back in childhood, living with your mom—like me.” We argue about the magazine, which he finds esoteric, sophisticated; in the end, we go out into the city again after having a coffee in a tiny and squalid bar. The mist has not let up. He is carrying a newspaper in his right hand and walks furtively, and I think “He only came to Constitución at this hour to pick somebody up.”
Tuesday
I write to Andrés: Around here things are going, let’s say, well. I cultivate nostalgia the way Robinson grew tobacco; I have nostalgia because, in my case, it’s the one thing that lingers even before I’ve realized things have already gone. Sometimes, at night, I have bad dreams, the kind in which you see the faces of certain people you love as though they were strangers, but a strong cup of coffee helps me forget them and there are no other faces, no sign until the next morning. In the midst of these nocturnal ceremonies I am able to write more peacefully than at other times, as though I’ve discovered that the best thing you can do in such matters is give yourself time.
Thursday
I meet Manuel Puig at El Foro, and he complains because I never call. He isn’t planning to publish this year. He’s working
on his detective novel. Much warmth and a friendly conversation, so he loosens up, makes jokes, laughs and talks like a girl, and tells me the amusing story of the idiots who punched him in the Cervantes movie theater, “which you shouldn’t go to.”
At night I have dinner with Viñas in the restaurant on Calle Uruguay, and he tells me about his adventures at the Police Department. He was detained when he went to get his passport. Levels of language and pressure. The office with the ex-employee, visiting his son Gastón, whom everyone is celebrating. The car with the fat policemen, the Police Department where they treat him like “furniture” and, finally, the Federal Chamber where Judge Ure lends him his complicity. Going in circles around the city we talk about the same things we’ve talked about since we first met: Peronism, success and failure, Urondo and his enemies, film, politics. Later, he tells me that a girl we passed on Corrientes “propositioned” him. She sleeps with writers, and they pay her expenses. Then Pola appears after David leaves, and I look at her like a stranger or, rather, like a stone.
Saturday
Suspended, shut indoors, while the rain pours outside, I am healing from the pain in my throat, the fever, and bury myself in Ford Madox Ford’s excellent The Good Soldier. I’ve gone back to 1958, at least to the texts I discovered back then, which have a central importance for me: Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, Pavese’s The House on the Hill, a measured, distant, and agile first person. Ford’s narrator doesn’t entirely understand the things he’s narrating.
I reacted violently against Carlos Altamirano yesterday, at Los Libros, when he accused me of having excluded Perón from the discourse of the dominant classes “like an opportunist.” I was furious. Perón doesn’t interest me much, but I would never consider him an enemy; he negotiates with the dominant classes because he’s a populist, but he isn’t part of the bloc of power. Carlos makes himself out to be a man of principle, but his principles change every season.
Sunday
I work in the bar on Lafinur and Las Heras; Macedonio Fernández once lived upstairs.
Tuesday
He often falls back into the melodrama that he detests: just now, he leaned out of the balcony, saw the street a hundred meters below, and thought about how everything would end if he threw himself off. He thought about his mother, thought about how they would go through his papers, would read these notebooks, would look in his desk drawer and find the color condoms that a man at a kiosk recommended to him insistently: they would know who he really was, and so killing himself wouldn’t have accomplished anything. Finally, he thought: if I don’t throw myself off, in ten or twenty years I’ll be able to see whether the things I’ve managed to do would have justified throwing myself from the balcony or not.
Wednesday
A walk last night on Avenida de Mayo and lunch at Dorá, in Bajo, with B. He tells me, with a certain perverse happiness and some skepticism, that he has discovered that Juana, his wife, cheated on him “once or twice.” He’s obsessed, realizing that if she lied to him once, everything might be a lie.
Pola comes looking for me, so good and so foolish that I can’t deal with her, and we have dinner at Hermann. She’s blonde and beautiful, and she talks to me about Freud, about Lacan, as though they were men who appeared in fashion magazines.
Saturday
In the afternoon Héctor comes over, fascinating me with his romantic desire to live “freely,” trying to get excited about a project that is impossible to define. Later, at his apartment, he reads me some texts, puts on a Charlie Parker record, and I give in, tentatively.
At night I’m with Pola, who always has a clear feeling and a certain acuity when she talks about me, clearly seeing what she calls “my radical oppositions.” “You’re this kind of gentleman or that kind.” “That may be,” I answer her, “but either way I’m not a gentleman.”
Sunday
A country house in Martínez. Otto Vargas talks about his trip to China. I see Costantini, Viñas, Luppi, phantoms mixed in with militant young people; the talk is at a low level but has a good tone. “Political progress,” El Gallego asserts, looking like a Russian revolutionary. I end the day alone on a train back to Retiro, watching the city at sunset.
Monday
In the morning I listen, indifferently, to Andrés Rivera’s praise for the chapter of my novel about Almada. I doubt I’ll ever be able to write, let alone read with standards.
Tuesday
All day in the street, I can’t bear to be at home (for the past week). I have lunch with Haroldo Conti, always the same even though it’s been close to five months since I’ve seen him. He’s also obsessing because he’s about to get separated from his wife and is thinking about “the children,” leaving to live with a woman who will doubtless make him suffer. He can’t write either.
Friday
I meet Ricardo Nudelman and El Gallego. We travel to Córdoba together. There is a meeting of the antiacuerdista revolutionary force in a desolate boxing club where we spend the day, discussions of VC/PCR, not many people, I can’t see a good way out.
Sunday
X Series. In Rubén’s house all day, eating barbecue, listening to his everyday life, a “worker’s” tone (dignified hardship… ), great warmth. A certain madness lies behind everything. Coldly, I observe the way they disguise themselves from what they are; the least comfortable in his role is Ricardo N. Finally, Roberto C. gets there; he stages his role as Lenin and carries it out with dedication and efficacy. And Andrés, who never really knows where to stop.
Embedded among revolutionary politicians for two days, these are my conclusions: as obsessive as any of us, they support themselves on each other, and there are large gaps—conflicts and doubts—that they see quickly and exploit: “surprising” schisms, friends who abandon the cause. They are heroic in a microscopic dimension, but they have an incalculable enemy facing them.
Tuesday
Great novels are like cities: everyday places where extraordinary events take place. All possible lives overlap and intersect in their streets, and a city is a fabric of stories.
Leopoldo Marechal accomplished something that had been an implicit desire in Argentine narrative ever since Sarmiento: to write the great novel of Buenos Aires. The beats of the neighborhoods and rhythms of the streets, the overlapping worlds and secret characters, and above all the tones and styles of the city’s voices, make this novel one of the great literary events in our language. Marechal has followed Joyce’s example, conspicuously defining the time and the place of the story. The city determines the sphere of the events, and the temporal limits of the story are established (the action lasts a day and a half, from when the hero awakens until he dies). Within that frame, it is possible for a vast web of themes and motives to unfold. In that sense, Adam Buenosayres is connected to another of the great novels of the century: Under the Volcano. Each begins with a protagonist who has already died and reconstructs one day of his life. Very creative heirs to Joyce’s Ulysses, published almost at the same time, they are twins in more than one sense. They are absolute masterworks of the narrative of the second half of the twentieth century. In a certain sense, they were “outcast” books and had to endure incomprehension. Lowry’s letter and Marechal’s explanation to Prieto are examples of high literary awareness. They are classical artists, founded on Virgil. The only books that can be placed next to the great projects of the twenties (Ulysses, The Seven Madmen). Their relationships with Joyce are central. Preoccupation with Dante for example. An extreme awareness of what is being done. The journey through the city. The city as a novel’s subject. A coded novel. Autobiography is one of the keys. Adam incarnates a certain metaphysical journey made by the author. Literary atmosphere (Bernini). The mousetrap of vulgar life. Transcendence. The hero’s destiny. Adam’s metaphysical awakening. Marechal and the tradition of Catholic nationalism. Sol y Luna magazine, 1947. Adam is a modern Ulysses who follows in the footsteps of the Homeric hero. Others are also inverted counterparts, as Tesler is
to Achilles (not only because of his kimono-shield, but because of his pride). Ruth is Circe, seduction in kitchen garb. Parody and grotesque exaggeration. The walking traveler whose fate is paralysis. A journey of initiation toward the cross. The story of a conversion.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 43
