Tuesday 23
Meeting for the magazine, we are organizing the next volume.
News from Manuel Puig, who has installed himself in Mexico and proposes a variety of options for me to come spend some time there. According to Puig, Mexico is “his first love.”
Thursday 25
My course with the psychoanalysts is off to a good start. We read a few pages of Wittgenstein. One of them says to me: “With this class, I’ll be able to work for five years.”
Tuesday, April 30
I make progress on the article for the magazine. I spend several days with Iris. Everything is going well.
Wednesday, May 1
While working on the essay, I listen to Perón’s speech: frontal attack of the Peronist left (“idiots,” “immature”), defense of the union movement. The left is leaving its position. It is unclear why the Montoneros call themselves Peronists and then want to question Perón’s leadership.
Friday 3
Today is Iris’s birthday, we go out to eat and then go to the Unión bar and listen to tangos sung by Edmundo Rivero.
Sunday 26
I’m writing a piece on Hemingway. León appears at the end of the day and stays with me until three in the morning, chatting and recalling the past.
Wednesday 29
I say to Andrés: “Don’t worry about my silence, it goes back a long way. I spend weeks mentally composing paragraphs, and then I forget them just as slowly.”
An action in Plaza Flores. Anniversary of the Cordobazo. Few people. Police provocation, gunshots, gas bombs, scattering. Another regrouping. I see many friends.
Saturday, June 1
I see sinister shadows, leeching on my heart. Drifting, delirium, despotic dissidence. Dangerous alliterations, he said. Once more he thinks about killing himself, jumping over the balcony railing.
Monday 3
At the publishing office I find B., who has spent the weekend imprisoned, accused of psychological violence by his ex-wife. She is surely right. The women are fighting back against masculine disrespect. Anyway, I offer him advice. You have to live alone, my brother,” I say, as though in a tango song.
Tuesday, June 4
I make good progress with the essay on Borges. I received the money for the course, seventy-five thousand pesos.
Friday 7
At the theater with Iris, a play by Lorenzo Quinteros at the Payró.
Wednesday 12
I go to Plaza de Mayo. Perón convenes an event to combat the crisis and the pressure from the military. Few people there.
Thursday 13
Last night, before I fall asleep, some ideas like daydreams, maybe write the story of Pavese’s history. A dialogue between the narrator and a stranger on a train throughout the plot.
Friday 14
I go to Sudamericana publishing, the prologue for Mad Toy will not come out this year. I take a walk through San Telmo and, in a bar, plan a book of essays: Trabajo Crítico, including Manuel Puig, Borges, Bioy: the detective stories, Onetti: “A Dream Come True”; Roa Bastos: the telling of history; Mansilla-Arlt: chronicles. Working with criticism as narrative. Making arguments using examples and cases (the false case).
Sunday 16
I fell asleep at seven in the morning after having breakfast and reading the papers. I enjoy the city at that time of day, shifting between people who have spent the night awake and people who rise early, opposing figures; the ones who haven’t slept seem more awake.
I’m in a sort of strange inert state, maybe I’m waiting for someone I don’t know to appear or for something to change. Amanda is being erased, fading away, persisting in a weak nostalgia with no certain object.
I get up at three thirty in the morning and go down to eat a sandwich (oh, these repetitions).
Saturday 22
I go to Galerna, Issue 35 of Los Libros still has not come out, several times delayed. I eat lunch alone at Pippo, predicting meetings that do not occur.
“I work toward my own ruin,” I tell Iris. “Get out, don’t tease,” she says, “that pathos doesn’t work anymore.” That woman’s irony instantly clears my mind.
Wednesday 26
I sleep in until noon, my essay on Borges is almost ready. A persistent nightmare in the night, there was a man who was the president and his eyes, respectively, were the black sun and the alchemists. Then some women on a round wooden stage, they danced and played castanets, instantly hallucinating that they were already dead.
A book of only short story analysis. The impossibility of writing: “Failed Writer” and “Pierre Menard.” The lost scene: “A Dream Come True” and “Instructions for John Howell.”
Sunday 30
Money in Arlt. Money and desire. Money as means of circulation: displacement, metonymy. Money as measure of value, metaphor, condensation. Money as universal equivalent, “fictitious,” conventional, a generalized convention, imaginary. Treasure. Credit. Debt: temporality, promise, belief, postponement. Gold: standard of value (absent), its “shine,” aesthetic quality. Exchanges, transactions. Robbery, ability, gift. Money, counterfeit currency. Infinite power of money, can be transformed into any living or dead object. Chance quality of exchanges, uncertain destiny. Savings, luxury, inheritance. “Pathological” effect of money: covetousness, avarice, fetishism. Frenzy—unruled and restrained—for accumulation.
Subjects for the course. Money in “Rat Man.” Money in the facility, economy among patients in an asylum: inflation. A cigarette is worth one peso in the morning and two hundred pesos at night. Delirium and fortune. Money in the psychoanalytical contract. Money in Freud’s life.
Series E. Stylistic analysis of these notebooks. The essence of the method, the key to what is written here: their function is to relieve life of its absurd and incoherent appearance, converting it into a sort of “comprehensible” event. Imaginary coherence, with dates: a diary is a diary because it follows a chronological, temporal, formal logic (and only that logic). One day and then another day and then another. Thus, the possible importance of my book based on the diary.
I meet Miguel Briante, cordial conversations, measuring ourselves against each other like two fighting cocks. We go from bar to bar, getting more and more drunk, always stating the same truth in the same way, first in a whisper, then in a low voice, and finally in a shout. In him there is the myth of natural talent. “There’s no need to say that,” I tell him, “it’s taken for granted.” “Talent,” he tells me, “is always shocking.” I tell him I agree, but you have to be careful with bumper cars. In his desperation, he incarnates the myth of the creator. That specter, asking him for vengeance, is the ghost of Onetti. He thinks that at age thirty Onetti was just like him, but by then he had already—or nearly—written A Brief Life.
Monday, July 1
Let’s begin with the death of Perón. On Monday, after alternate versions, stories, improvements. A meeting at home in the morning with Rubén and Boccardo, delusions with Sadovsky and other gentlemen who have discovered Lenin (what? Lenin?) because of his “prestigious names.” The melancholy as Perón lay dying, at least while the story of his death emerged, which I remained ignorant of until after four in the afternoon, when I left home and started to grow worried about the lines in front of the shops (I thought: “I have oil,” I thought: “The lines are coming, just like in Chile”) and about the Galerna library being closed. In the bar I find out about the death of King Lear: general astonishment at my ignorance of the news that had moved everyone in the world. “Where were you?” etc. Even worse, I find out from Saúl Sosnowsky, a depoliticized escapee who lives in the United States, whom I meet to give him a chapter of my essay on Arlt for his magazine Hispamérica. The city is quiet, people piled up at Congreso, at nightfall, waiting for the line to begin so they can see the dead man.
I visit David, furious about the telegram from the PCR with condolences for Isabelita.
Tuesday 2
I get up at two in the afternoon. An unexpected appea
rance from Amanda, who comes with Anita Larronde (Luppi’s wife), bringing me a novel by Pavese that, according to her, I had lent her. Trivial conversation, no great tension, a pleasant ending: I give her a copy of Los Libros magazine. Ana says: “There’s an excellent article in here.” She looks for it, it’s mine, and she is amazed. “I’m going to tell Federico I’ve been around important people.” That’s what we call displacement, saying one thing in place of another.
I move through the rainy city, the endless funeral lines, and no one seems to want the goodbyes to end, no one wants to go home; I remember wakes in my childhood that lasted all night and continued on after noon, but now they are expanded, crowded, with serious gestures that are repeated on every street. Some have waited for thirty hours to see the dead man, the venerated man, one last time.
Wednesday 3
I walk through the empty city, street openings blocked off, people wandering with a sorrowful air, and I end up on Carlos Pellegrini, where (without seeing it) I feel the effects of the funeral procession that crosses Avenida de Mayo carrying the corpse. Men cry, I see a policeman with his face damp from weeping, the soldiers in procession cry as well. Sorrow weighs down upon the city like a shadow. The Montoneros sing out their slogans. I lose myself in the multitude and make it to Congreso. On the way back I pass down endless streets, skirting along a persistent row of men and women lined up to see the corpse. The long procession continues along Carlos Pellegrini until Retiro. The people’s pain.
I return home and observe the city in darkness from high above. The lines go on in spite of the rain.
León R. comes over and makes history personal, saying: “What has this man done to us.” It isn’t a question, it’s a complaint, as though he were referring to the ghost of Hamlet’s father. León’s personal view refers everything to himself and his own feelings. That is his philosophical viewpoint. What does the world mean for me? More deep-seated and extreme than Descartes: the subject is the truth of reality.
Iris talks about the relationships between life and writing—between living and writing—with the same words I have used for years: “Leave everything behind. Live to write.”
Thursday
Perón’s death has erased all meaning, the despotic signifier has vanished; the mourning is endless and stories proliferate. I register some of them as I walk through the streets: “A regiment from La Tablada rose up” (they say on the first day). Or rather: Perón is dead, the officers are making their comeback. Cámpora appears to be the only political figure from Peronism who has some backing and support. The right sees him as an enemy and wants him to disappear. And so, news has been circulating all day about an attempt on Cámpora’s life. Balbín is the only one who can unify the dominant classes: he is the lower-ranked, imaginary substitute for Perón. In front of the coffin in the incandescent chapel, the empty speeches went on until the Chinese man with round eyeglasses appeared, standing beside the dead man, and said, inspired with a high Latin rhetoric: “Today, an old adversary comes to say goodbye to a friend.” Everyone cried except for him; proud and serene, he spoke for the first time as an equal to the Man (as my father and all of the Peronists called him during the Resistance years) who had defeated him and imprisoned him and humiliated him. I remembered the unmatched tone of Quevedo’s prose after the murder of Julius Caesar: “Marcus Brutus was a severe man, a man who reproached other’s vices with his own virtue, not with words. He had an eloquent silence, his intellect keen.” Epic emotion lies in a man’s praise for the rival who has defeated him, or whom he has conquered. It takes the form of a challenge, transforming anger into admiration. The heartfelt requiem uttered by the defeated, now free of hate. All of the politicians and the whole of the public pointed to Balbín as the dead man’s heir.
Friday 5
I am reading Marthe Robert’s book on the Freudian family romance as a fundamental root in the history of the origins of modern storytelling. She studies Robinson Crusoe as the figure who negates his father and invents a lineage and a territory of his own.
Julia calls me on the phone, I meet her at Tolón and immediately my peace is gone. She has lost her handbag with her glasses in it—now she can’t see (does she know who I am?)—and her documents. She is broke, alone, and lost, and she weighs me down with everything. (She also fantasizes about getting together with David, who will be alone on Wednesday once Beba goes to Europe after a Chilean man.) Of course I have nothing to say to her, and I tell her as much and give her a thousand pesos to get back home… Oh, those lost loves. It’s like a waning light. The woman we once loved is a stranger, speaking to us and chiding us as though she knew us. She seems insane, talking nonsense. That is how I see her now; love makes people better, and when it ends, oh, it is too late for tears.
Saturday, July 6
On the bus, a chain of associations, the criminal always tells his tale as though it belonged to someone else. He can kill, but he cannot say, “I have killed.” It works the same way as dreaming, where the intensity of the experience cannot be transmitted with words: in order to say it, the killer has to kill again. A grammatical reasoning behind the serial killer: he can only speak through the bodies of others. And who can read his message carved into the corpses, as words written in sand? He cannot say it and so repeats the act.
I go to dinner with Iris at América. León calls after I come back, a melancholy encounter. He speaks from another planet: he analyzes Perón’s death solely through his perspective, as though Argentine history were part of his life. It is the left’s problem with Perón. He has stayed with the working class as though he had abducted them. That’s the issue with León and David. Peronism is seen as a scheme, a tyrannical means of using the subordinate classes through deceit and lies. The personalization of politics viewed as a psychological trap. What has this man done to me, he who governed the country for years and then died without having been condemned? Everything is experienced in first person. Politics as a private drama. That is the merit of impassioned thought and also its self-referential closure.
Sunday 7
A peaceful and happy day. I watch the World Cup finals on television: Germany–Netherlands. Soccer is like life, as my father would say: the better one never wins. Iris and I walk around the city, marked by the absence of the Man. Iris laughs, “he was always controlled by women. First Eva and then Isabelita. The best thing,” she adds, “is that he always got married to fallen women.” Cuarteleras, barracks girls, as military jargon calls the female soldiers who accompany men to war.
Andrés comes over: his oldest son is dying of cancer. The whole succession of catastrophes, no work, his ex-wife living with Juan Gelman, his ex-best friend—he needs to move. Weighed down, at his limit, he raves a bit and I follow, raving along with him. “Is it possible to kill and not be caught?” We speak calmly, analyzing several alternatives.
Tuesday 9
One could say I spent the whole day sleeping. I got up at ten, and Carlos came to visit me. I went to lunch at the tavern on Calle Serrano. I went back to sleep until three in the afternoon. Now I imagine I will go out into the street like a sleepwalker, looking for a woman.
Friday 12
I receive a beautiful letter from Tristana. She announces a delivery of rock for the man with the golden arm. Once more the fantasies are reborn in a corner, what can I say to a woman (married, with two children) in a letter. A Stendhalian theme.
I spend the day at Iris’s house, very good. We go out for dinner in the rain, under the pale lights.
Sunday 14
I listen to Mozart, make myself some tea and prepare to write “The Two Lineages” of Borges. I act as copyist, going over and over the initial pages of the essay. Three pages that barely suggest the tone. An essay depends on the conviction transmitted by the prose.
Tuesday 23
What can be said of a man like me? A simple letter from Tristana was enough to cause the dull anxiety that follows me. Uncertainty brought by the flight of birds; I see symb
ols of fate in the slightest traces of wind among the trees. Reading those signs takes up all of my time and strength. Her letter, on the other hand, reopened a wound in another part of my body. Everything can form part of the novel that I’m writing. The novel and my life, always the same schism. It would be better to say: “the novel of a life.”
A feeling that I’m bound to the barrenness of the times. I see David, who calls me to meet in La Moncloa. A meeting for Los Libros. We have Issue 36 ready. An excellent article on Althusser by Altamirano. Several articles about urbanism. What dangers disquiet me? More than danger it is a discontentment, facing the inadequacy of my life.
The mistake seems to lie in the delusion of expecting validation in the present. Don’t conjugate verbs in past tenses. Forget about the future. This present vision of the future never seems to have been given except perhaps before, in another time. I tell myself once more: “Do not bind yourself to the good times passed, but to the bad times yet to come.”
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 45
