The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  The essay could be called “Ideology and Fiction in Borges.” Meaning proliferates, the point is to reconstruct the fiction from the origin. The ways writers imagine the material conditions that make their work possible. Sometimes I can’t stand combinatorial analysis, I need some distance, so I go out to smoke a cigarette.

  Wednesday

  I meet her, anyway, and as always there was no party. Even more lost than I am, nostalgic and alone, she says: “She really does want to see you and meet you because, according to her friends, you’re the man of her life, and she wants to be at your wedding ceremony.” Amanda, like me, talks about herself in the third person when she is emotional.

  Saturday 27

  A peaceful, beautiful day. Iris wakes me up at noon, and I spend the afternoon at home with her. At night we see Brecht’s The Days of the Commune at the Payró.

  Publications:

  August: “Roberto Arlt and the Fiction of Money” (Hispamérica).

  October: “Ideology and Fiction in Borges” (Los Libros).

  Deliver these works to Nicolás Rosa, José Sazbón, David, León, Noé.

  Today I woke up at noon, went down to have lunch at the grill on Serrano, and then walked through the Botanical Garden, sitting in the sun beside the plants, feeling some happiness or, rather, the vision of a life come true…

  Friday 2

  An unexpected appearance of the beautiful Kitty (Amanda’s friend), a mysterious request about some materials I might receive. Amanda talks about me to her friends, and they want to meet me and, often, sleep with me. She will call me on Monday.

  Sunday 4

  Last night I waited for the papers to come out and read them at dawn after I had gone to the shop on Canning to eat some pizza among the drunks and other lonely people. Then I went up to bed and had a dream. Lucio Mansilla appeared, speaking—brilliantly, convincingly—so that I would recognize my mother, who was also there, seduced. That’s all I remember of the dream. I think: I should write—sometime—a book that would at the same time be the story of Mansilla and a history of literary language. Mansilla, the fluidity of a kind of writing that reveals the state of a language still safe from the changes that I expect. The angelic Señora Aurora is coming to clean the apartment soon, so I’ll go down to walk for a little while in the hopes of forgetting my worries.

  Tuesday 6

  Maybe once I’ve written the book based on these diaries, I’ll be able to write a novel.

  Yesterday I saw Iris as she approached me, beautiful, on the corner of Anchorena and Corrientes, like a cat in her pale overcoat.

  Friday 9

  I go over the transcript of the talk I gave in Philosophy and Letters about my trip to China. The key is to ask what kind of vision (or truth) the solitary man has of the world. That was my position: amid the unsuspecting multitudes, mixed in with the Chinese masses that all seemed to be moving in the same direction, I had paused in the middle of the road to change a car tire (like in the poem by Brecht). What does the solitary man see in the middle of the street? He sees nothing, or only sees what is written on the maps. In any case, my version has the virtue of being a personal viewpoint. Everything is social; in China there is always talk of social class, and when someone is individualized, it is because that subject is an enemy. Subjectivity is seen as deviation. The only valuable thinking is the kind that expresses the sense of the multitude, the feeling of the social classes, and yet the amusing thing is that it is difficult to guess the difference in China: everyone dresses in the same style, they laugh at the same time, shout out the same slogans, and express the same sentiments. Therefore, the difference between classes is not perceived (or does not exist), but political thought is nevertheless defined by its ability to identify class content in the midst of sameness.

  I might easily be able to put together an article with the last part of my lecture on culture in China, to publish in Los Libros. Here, there is nothing other than the avant-garde, everything that is not moving ahead is retrograde and reactionary. The illusion of an avant-garde composed of millions of people (who faithfully follow the thought of Mao Zedong).

  An example. My visit to a secondary school. The director, a man with an intellectual air, frameless glasses, his hair gray, no more than forty years of age, introspective, draws on a paper. The geography professor uses Mao’s poem about the Yellow River. While one student recites it from memory, another points out the endless line of the river on a map. The English professor waits for us at the front of the classroom, looking at the clock, nervous, insecure, overactive. The lesson is centered on the Vietnam war: “The Indo-Chinese region is composed of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam,” she explains in English, indicating the sentence written on the board. “The American imperialists are soulless killers.” In the Chinese language class, an anonymous poem from the seventeenth century: the old coal merchant with a sooty face and white hair, freezing to death in his cabin in the heartless winter. The professor shows the contradiction between the old man’s desire for respite from the cold and his need for cold weather so that he can continue to sell coal. In China everything is direct and allegorical.

  Saturday 9

  Fiction (disguise) acts with the play of bodies and above all creates displacements and substitutions. “One man in place of another” is the secret logic of the detective story. Thus is a metaphorical system of substitution defined, and also the workings of psychotic equivalency. Money is the sole measure of value.

  Tired, I went down to the street to call Iris from the public telephone in the shop: I could barely hear her, she’s sick, there with her son, and I want her. I walked again along the sidewalks that border the Botanical Garden and then returned home. And here I am, looking at the city through the window and writing this in a notebook.

  Sunday, August 11

  I got up at noon, read the papers, made lunch for myself and sat down to work. It is now seven in the evening and I will leave everything as it is to go over to Iris’s place and get by somehow.

  Wednesday 14

  Series C. Once again the feeling that I am living like a dead man, passionless. Suddenly, amid the silence and delirium, I start to cry. Why does the crying man cry? Perhaps the crisis alludes to Amanda’s presence in recent dreams. As a result, sympathy mixed with a sense of ridiculousness (it is sad to cry alone). I go to the publishing office and find a message from Kitty (who has left it the way someone would leave a photograph). I come home without energy and lie down to sleep. Julia wakes me up; she has come to blame me because, she says, I didn’t lend her twenty thousand pesos. It’s her right, she says, because she lived with me for six years. And that’s what worried me: how I could have lived with a woman like her for six years. Once more the disturbing equivalencies: six years in exchange for twenty thousand pesos. “That’s what they’re worth,” perhaps.

  A useless pretense, two minutes after I started reading I am already “somewhere else.” Where? A curious state of anxiety and fear. I give up on preparing tonight’s talk, maybe I won’t go, won’t have to face the people. Apart from that, how can I fill the void of the three hours left until 10? The best thing would be to lie down, let myself go. Books surround me, drown me. I am thirty-three, the age of Christ. I am alone in the city. I will be alone tonight and all of my life.

  Then, the way someone might change clothes, I left home, walked to the Institute in Plaza Italia and spoke for two hours about the metaphorical economy that governs literature. A theory about those disturbing equivalencies (bodies for money, words for experiences).

  I sustain myself on fantasies, a letter from Tristana, a secret rendezvous with Kitty.

  Thursday, August 15

  Luna comes to see me in the morning; he got some work at El Cronista and his dubious morals are strengthened. A reactionary, he practices a sort of tautological speculation. He describes what he sees with cynicism but imagines that his conformist vision derives from his political radicalism (he holds himself up in an imaginary elite, self-d
efined aristocracy). The people in the ERP are fascists, the left can’t even put together five lunatics, the SMATA factory can only put together two thousand men for an action. This perception is a result of his fear of being questioned. Connected to that is his fawning to the bosses of the newspaper, his disdain for politics in general. If he goes on like this, in a few months he’ll have turned into a systematic enemy of the left.

  Friday 16

  In class, they suggest that I should publish my lectures. Now isn’t the right time, I tell them, I prefer to wait so that what I am attempting to do now, rather blindly, can be seen with more clarity in the future. I have an insight into how to participate and be heard in a situation as confusing as this one. That’s what I would like to convey.

  I should say: make recordings of the classes, slightly corrected, to be read as the starting point for a discussion.

  I have many plans for short stories and essays; if I manage to write them, I’ll then be able to dedicate myself to the book based on the diary. The short stories or nouvelles I have are fairly far along: a nonfiction novel based on real events but with a freely-constructed plot, which, in fact, is a concealed fiction. The story of Pavese, which develops in Italy during the days when the protagonist is living in Turin with the university fellowship, having left Buenos Aires in order to forget about a woman (but he finds her in Europe). The story of the suicide of a father as told by his son, traveling in the night after receiving the news.

  Saturday 17

  Series E. I return laboriously to the metaphysical reflections of my diaries from 1960 and 1961, an attempt to narrate my disturbed perception. A feeling that I lived through those months in a murky stupor, always with the sensation of being too slow and never reaching the speed necessary to live.

  Tuesday 20

  I am writing the essay on Borges. The notion of the fiction of origins is one I also used in my analysis of Mad Toy by Arlt, and I also have a very advanced hypothesis about the way in which Sarmiento turns into a writer (and how long that state lasts).

  Connected to that, some “incidents”: phone calls from Dipi Di Paola today, the telephone interview for Panorama magazine. My answers are too dry, and I imagine the effect they will produce in a piece that also includes interviews with Bioy Casares, Viñas, and Soriano, as though I were one of them, but I am not. I belong to another breed.

  At Los Libros, I handle myself clumsily in the meeting with Beatriz and Carlos. I make jokes, tell stories about my nights in the casino, but I don’t participate in the discussion of the magazine. Requests for lectures in Santa Fe, and also in Tucumán, which I turn down with unfounded pretexts.

  Wednesday 21

  I spend one hundred seventy-five thousand pesos per month, plus fifty thousand for rent and ten thousand for the woman who comes to clean. Anyway, as long as I continue with the course at CICSO (ten thousand per month), the work at the publishing house, and the notes for Luna, I can keep myself afloat.

  I see Catalina, who comes from the remote past; she is a Spanish friend of Elena, the girl I went around with in high school in Adrogué. She stops by the bookshop to see me: she has aged (like me) and has a son. That was all.

  Fiction. Writing a story, “Roberto Arlt’s Murderer,” another one called “Love Stolen” with the story of a lover who steals a set of silver utensils from his woman (she sees him and says nothing), “Suicide of a Father.” Including them in a volume along with “Mousy Benítez.”

  Saturday 24

  A beautiful day, warm and soft. I walk around the zoo, pausing a while at the lion cage. I go out and spend a couple hours in the Botanical Garden, not thinking about anything, trying to become a plant myself. I had ventured into the street after two days spent shut in. The metaphor of the outsider (the stranger), who does not belong to this place.

  Sunday 25

  Amanda comes, surely for the last time. She took her sketching board, and I accompanied her to the taxi. All with the greatest distance, neither of us inquiring into the other’s current life. (“How are you?” “Fine,” I said. “And you?” I asked. “Fine, more or less,” she said.) The rest was an exchange of news. “I’m working on Borges,” I told her, “because they’re going to pay me a million pesos for the essay.” She is making good money in an architecture studio, and she is successful in her theater class. Why do I record this? Because I want to retain the final image of her. Beautiful and, perhaps because of that, a bit out of focus. Cold; as always, she wants to show herself to be rational. A strange history coming to an end at the wrong time, leaving me with the anxiety of loss.

  It isn’t her, ultimately, who brings up this nostalgia, but it is her, yes, who opens my old wound from ten years ago, or rather, it’s as though she embodies the other life I could have lived. A life, shall we say, simpler, without literature, working to build something (what?), a family, for example, or something of that kind. It is no accident that she came up from my past, from ten years ago when it was still possible for me to become someone else, and that now she is fading away because I have understood (or tried to understand) that not everything is possible for me. She is associated with a certain ease, and with everyday life. Someone else’s life, it will belong to someone else, as it did before…

  Monday 26

  Unexpected happiness; or; rather, only the unexpected makes happiness possible for me, but yesterday and today were days with no order, with no routine, very improvised. I left Iris’s house in the morning intending not to go to the publishing office, and I went walking down Callao without a fixed direction. Suddenly I was in Martín Fierro bookshop, restoring my friendship with Luis Gusmán after the disagreement with Osvaldo L. about my prologue to El frasquito; the megalomaniac idiot wanted me to quote him in the prologue and tried to engineer it with Germán and Luis. Everything worked out easily, I just told him: “I’ll take the prologue and throw it in the trash. Tell Osvaldo that if he feels insecure, he can find someone else to quote him in whatever he writes.” In the end I went to the publishing office and met with Néstor García Canclini who, according to him, put my name forward for a class at the University of La Pampa. Today I had lunch with Lafforgue in a bar, and he gave me the bibliography of Borges’s work that he made for Beco and me. I finished preparing tonight’s class on Wittgenstein and private language.

  And so, he said, happiness appears and persists unexpectedly, the same as in childhood. Fulfillment depended on the feeling of discovering and becoming familiar with the new. There was a dangerous and off-limits street, my mother said, which led up the slope, and, as you climbed up, under the sun, you could see an unknown reality from afar. Now, instead, there is a freedom that comes like a breeze in the night.

  Sunday, September 1

  A peaceful day, it is raining outside, Iris and I went out last night and went around the clubs in Bajo until sunrise.

  Plan. A book of short stories

  1. Mousy Benítez.

  2. This Business of Living (Pavese, set in Italy). The narrator carries a diary in which he writes down his impressions of Pavese’s diary.

  3. The Suicide. On the bus, returning home, after having stayed with his father who attempted suicide.

  4. Roberto Arlt. A man who met Arlt is looking after some manuscripts. He knows a secret. Does he steal a text from him and publish it in his own name? In that case, I would write that story by Arlt and publish it as a conclusion to this story.

  5. The Adolescent. The atmosphere of a student boarding house, a girl visits the house every two weeks and sleeps with all of the boarders, and rides around the city on a Vespa (“The Girl with the Vespa”), the country boy who falls in love with the prostitute. He steals in order to get the money to be with her (to make her undress).

  6. Sentimental Education. The young man who steals a valuable object from his lover; she sees him and pretends that she didn’t see him.

  7. The Serene Man (a retiree). He is on vacation, then returns home and kills a neighbor for no reason (just to s
ee if his revolver is working). He goes back to work as if nothing had happened.

  Encounter with Arlt. An ex-journalist (or ex-wife) has a notebook with unpublished writings by Arlt. Has his letters. The narrator is preparing a “secret” biography of Arlt. Maybe has an unpublished and unfinished novel? Talks with Rinaldi. Everything is or is not apocryphal.

  Sunday 8

  China Ludmer comes over, then we go for a walk through the Botanical Garden and she tells me her theories about Onetti’s A Brief Life, an extraordinary reading. She wonders, how should she write it? As always, the critic cannot take it for granted that the reader will be familiar with the book she is analyzing. So, should she explain it or summarize it? She seems to have chosen to employ a rather abstract “map” of the novel as a frame for the analysis. Better without that, I tell her; I prefer that it either be understood or not, but without a direct reference to the text being analyzed. A reading without reference, a way of bringing “the fantastical” into literary criticism. Instead of writing a critique of a book that doesn’t exist, write an analysis of a book that does exist but is absent or unknown. She has already written a prominent work about A Grave With No Name, but she reduces the story to a matrix in it so that, more than summarizing the plot line, she rewrites it, or rather, conceptualizes it (all very brilliant and also very psychoanalytical, fashionable. A great deal of Lacan, in the style of Literal magazine).