A story. A woman, walking among the plants in the Botanical Garden, explains her reading of a book, and the narrator imagines what that book is like, a book he doesn’t know, based on his friend’s description and analysis.
Tuesday 10
Series E. I have less and less to say, and that is why I am now able to write. I also want to assume that everything is already known and write only what is left, the remains of common language, the references that I alone understand. That is the style I seek in these notebooks. The writer cannot tell himself what he already knows. If I am faithful to that motto, I will manage to produce some acceptable pages. Emptied of sentimentality and with no concrete information, only emotional information. The speaker seems to be in another world and, though he isn’t talking to himself, he isn’t talking to anyone else either. Journeys of perspective, displacements, conversations with strangers, showing the difference between the place I come from and the place I describe. Therein lies the tension and anger accumulated by the disparity (of the experience) in the city and the country, the metropolis and the province. And so I will travel to Tucumán, Córdoba, and Santa Fe in the next few days. I will arrive by plane or train or bus, at some hour of day or night, and I will be welcomed by an unknown man—or unknown woman—who will talk as though we were friends, greeting me at the terminal and driving me to the hotel, and the impossible conversation continues. He or she will leave me there, in the place where I am to spend two nights. A hotel room with windows that overlook the park and a television facing the bed like a mirror for the sleeper to watch himself dream.
I wrote this down at some point, a few days ago, on a paper napkin from Los Galgos bar, but I can’t understand my handwriting and can only decipher this phrase: “Happiness with Iris, every [illegible] closer to her.”
What, in the end, does free association mean? I ask Doctor C., the man who listens to me talk in exchange for money. A great invention by Freud: the one who speaks has to pay. The solid core of life is that which cannot be associated (with anything). The rift, the schism—I have always lived in two places, ever since I was a boy—the wound. In my case it is (or they are) emptiness, distraction, fixed ideas.
Wednesday 18
It is clear that there is little to be said. I went to Mar del Plata and back, to my mother’s house. I tried to keep myself busy and went up to the attic where my father kept his papers (and his father’s), useless collections of newspapers that no one reads. For example: pieces of news that he underlined in red ink; he would look for information that confirmed his beliefs: he marked out some obituaries, weather reports, fluctuations in the Stock Market, some crimes (especially sexual ones), and also the results (the winning numbers) from the numbers game and the National Lottery. Numbers upon numbers in a mystical circle drawn by a red ballpoint pen, expecting some revelation encoded there (written in those figures). When he got out of jail, my father was no longer the same. He had stopped believing, and he continued to act but only in the theatrical sense of the word, like an actor playing a Peronist who in turn was playing a doctor who in turn was playing a man without hope.
I went to see Susana Campos under the delusion of sleeping with her, but she greeted me along with her boyfriend, both of them very intoxicated. They were drinking from a bottle of cloudy liquid; in the water they had dissolved some amphetamines, an LSD tablet, and a few grams of cocaine, scattered like dust in the wind. They were tripping hard; the boyfriend had climbed into a tree and was speaking from above as though he were a preacher. They said they would smoke a joint to come down, and that would bring them back to reality. They spent almost two hours telling me about their incredible experience going to the movie theater on drugs. The film lasted for years, according to them, and was very intense. They kept having to interrupt it to go to the bathroom and sometimes didn’t know how to get back to their seats.
Then I went to the casino, intending to get rich, and at the end of the night I left with “only” twenty thousand pesos in winnings. I walked along the boulevard, and, in the sea illuminated by the light of the sky, I saw a ray cutting through the water like an upturned crucifix, the fin of a shark gliding eagerly under the surface. Behind me, the illuminated windows of the casino made everything seem more surreal. A shark, I thought, swimming silently and seeking a victim while the stubborn and drunk gamblers comment on the bad luck they’ve had this time around. Maybe the shark is a man eater and always comes back to the beach in front of the Hotel Provincial, hoping to find another gambler—a systematic loser—who has decided to drown himself in the sea, another suicide victim for the great white fish to devour.
I returned to Buenos Aires on a night train, intending to relax and sleep for the whole journey, but it was impossible, and I spent the whole time restless, anxious, watching the darkness through the window of the train car.
When I arrived in the city I was immobilized: there was a transportation strike. So I went on foot from Constitución to Córdoba and Callao, along 9 de Julio, and spent the day with Iris, hoping to able to think “about something else” by being with her. For example, interference at the University, which is now controlled by the Peronist right. That has left her without a job. But, on top of that, a schizoid cousin who believed himself to be Jesus Christ committed suicide.
I left to take a walk down Corrientes, planning to spend some time (a lovely expression: “to spend time”) in La Paz bar and look in the bookshops until the afternoon when the subway would start running again. Unexpectedly (as always), I found myself with Amanda; she was sad, desolate, crying, “because she decided to leave the theater.” She sat down at the table with me, in the corner by the window, and I tried to calm her down while she started on “the end of her adolescent fantasies” (the same kind that I cultivate, although in another genre). “You’ll never stop acting,” I told her, “life is your stage.” I didn’t convince her; for her, the theater is a way to forget about her life and, above all, a way to feel—or imagine—applause, recognition. I picture her on a bus, carrying her straight to the asylum. But there is nothing I can do…
Now I am at home, alone. Secretly certain that I am in danger, threatened by demands from outside. Preparing a lecture on Sarmento to give in Tucumán and Santa Fe. Anxious because of reality and loss. I’m giving a talk about Wittgenstein’s language games soon. There are also political demands. In October, I’m going to Córdoba for the meeting of cultural magazines.
Friday 20
I couldn’t take a chance in the casino. I left when I won twenty thousand pesos instead of staying and risking everything to win two hundred thousand.
Saturday 21
Yesterday León R. comes over to combat his loneliness, crying in the dark. What can I do? I console him instead of crying along with him. A woman abandoned him. He can’t think, can’t understand anything about anything. (A novel could be written with the story of the great philosopher who spends the night at a friend’s house, crying over a woman.)
I look at the river through the window, it is five in the afternoon. If I’m unable to assimilate writing into my life, I will come to a bad end. I sustain myself with drugs and justify them with literature, but it isn’t the truth; I use them for themselves, seeking extreme lucidity, and the literature is a pretense. I am a man alone in the city, watching the sunset, the river an ashen color, a pain in my left side. The disorganized writer, notes, photos, papers getting mixed together, a feeling of being smothered. On the table I see María Moliner’s dictionary, Sartre’s Baudelaire, Deleuze’s Proust, Mannoni’s The Other Scene, a Calvino novel, Martínez Estrada’s short stories (a map of the confusion in my soul).
I reread my notebooks from ten years ago. Why don’t I write a story about adolescence based on that material? Does it overlap with Pavese or complement him?
A short story. A woman masturbates on the balcony, alone in the city. The narrator spies on her with the binoculars that his grandfather brought back—as his only trophy—from the war.
I am going to go out and walk around the city trying to cut myself free from this disturbing vision and stop thinking. That is why one walks, so as not to see the lurking images, bloody and pale. Ambulatory obsession. I want, at least, to be able to read something.
I go to the magazine office to discuss the publication of the next issue. A girl started going after me, many games with her. What are you doing tonight? I don’t know which of us asked that question. I invited her to go to the Tigre and see El Tropezón, the hotel where Lugones killed himself. Now they rent out rooms and, for the same price, offer you a guided tour of the room where the poet took his arsenic; they’ve left it just as it was, and it looks like a monk’s cell. My attention was drawn to the blue bottle that they used for water at night, from what the lady told me. And she added: “He dissolved the poison in this glass.” Finally, when I leave the magazine office, the girl comes out after me. “I’ll take you?” she says, we go home in her car. I think: “I’ll let her come up, sleep with her, and then I’ll ask her to drive to the Tigre with me.”
Sunday 22
I am on the Tigre with the girl, and the river calms me. I’ve spent the day going over old papers. I don’t entirely recognize myself in the individual who has written certain events of my life there. That is the paradox: it is my life, we might say, but I’m not the one who writes it. The best part of my literature lies on that uncertain point. That being or not being is transferred to the content of the events, but the one who has written them stays in the margins, safe from uncertainty. That enunciation—so to speak—is what would justify publishing a selection of these writings. The material is true, it is real experience, but its writer—its speaker—does not exist. That is how I define fiction: everything is true or can be so, but the key to the method is that its narrator is an imaginary subject. The construction of this place, and the ability to make it convincing or credible, is the essence of what we call fiction.
I work on the transcription of the notebooks with the same spirit that earlier led me to make lists and lists of favorite or rejected objects, the finest movies, the finest women, the clothing I had to buy, the books I had read that month, the countries I thought of visiting, and the books I wanted to write. Truthful materials, delirious diction.
A curious situation, and once again the feeling of having gone downhill. No interest in “my own” life. I prefer to live someone else’s life or to tell my own life as though it belonged to someone else. Who is writing? That is the great question of autobiographies and diaries. It isn’t true as Foucault says that Beckett says that “it doesn’t matter who is speaking.”
Monday 23
The drafts are now done, they “are up,” they “erupt.”
A certain dispersion, several simultaneous projects. I urgently need a working plan to sustain me and give me the drive to go onward. Otherwise, I worked on rewriting the editorial for the magazine. Political differences; Carlos and Beatriz support Isabelita with the formula of the Frente Único. But Peronism—most of all—will not resist the coup, and the right wing (López Rega and his minions) has already made agreements with the military and is acting covertly, determined to annihilate any last vestige of the politics of the left. Finally, at nine at night, we decide that the issue will go out with no editorial.
Tuesday 24
Pablo G., the owner of the apartment, comes over. He asks me to leave. To pay him a hundred thousand pesos. He’s an economist and talks about nothing but money. Possibility: offer him seventy-five thousand per month. Save up, suppress superfluous spending, and live on two hundred fifty dollars per month; I would have savings for two years by doing that. An alternative is to take everything as it comes and live comfortably and easily until April. That is, spend the dollars and live with no savings. I could marry Iris—something I don’t want to do—and shut myself in with her, at her place, living together to combine our expenses. I’m trying to see how I could make more money. In April I either leave the apartment or pay him the hundred thousand that he’s asking for; the best thing would be to spend the money I have and then see.
Sunday 29
This morning I saw an excellent film by John Huston in the series at the Auditorio Kraft: Fat City, set in the world of wasted, poor boxers. I see Máximo Soto, who lets me in and gives me Filmar y Ver. I stop by to see David; everyone is very worried about the assassination of Silvio Frondizi, the escape of Puiggrós, and the political situation. David feels threatened, and he has good reason. He is very exposed. He seems to have grown old and has no energy.
Wednesday, October 2
Today deserves to be recorded because it is like a snapshot of the current situation in the city. I spend all morning at Iris’s house and write half a page about Brecht to introduce a short selection of his essays in Crisis magazine. León R. stops by to see me after calling on the phone. Fearful about the wave of attacks by the ultra-right and the Triple A, and about the repressive laws that the government is implementing in alliance with the military. He feels pursued, and he has good reason too. He has received threats and no longer lives in his house; he wants to leave for Mexico, for three months to begin with. He wants to stop writing. His state of mind is shared by the majority of the intellectuals, who are starting to flee en masse. And what do I intend to do? I’m not on the front lines, I’m not that well known and barely visible, though that doesn’t guarantee anything. Danger can come from being listed in an address book that belonged to someone who was followed, imprisoned, or killed. After that at La Moncloa I meet Julia, beautiful and exceptional. She is going to Venezuela with Mario Szichman. She offers me her apartment on Cangallo and Rodríguez Peña (fifty thousand per month, with telephone); she will leave the furniture, and if they try to evict me, she says, I can tell them “we live together.” Little games, as in the past; each of us, she says, was the love of the other’s life. Before leaving, she tells me this anecdote: Amanda took Alberto Cedrón to my apartment in Canning while I was traveling in China. When he saw my photo there, he asked what was going on. “I’m a woman,” she says, so then he puts on his pants (which he had taken off before he saw the photo) and leaves. After that I go to the publishing office, general panic. Alberto S. wants to sell everything and go to Mexico. I’m dealing with all that when Amanda calls. Just to find out how I’m doing, to tell me to please take care of myself. I finish the day facing a group of six psychoanalysts who pay me one hundred twenty thousand pesos per month to speak to them about philosophy. One of them asks me: “Are you related to the older Renzi?” “I am,” I tell him, startled by my fame coming from an older person. Finally, at Panorama, a series of photos and profiles of writers (myself among them) from Bioy to Viñas. I lie, as always. I have a book of short stories ready, and also a first version of Artificial Respiration.
Thursday 3
At seven in the morning, I take the train and go to Santa Fe. An introspective journey, I read Silvina Ocampo’s—excellent—short stories. A cavalcade of activity when I arrive, reports in the papers and on the radio. I critique the right-wing offensive supported by the government. We’re all in danger if the reactionary terrorists act with impunity. Finally, a short rest and then I give the lecture. Difficult beginning and solid ending. I travel back by night and change trains in Rosario. Traces of Saer everywhere: the bus terminal, the café on the balcony, the open-air grills along the river, the iced wine, the conversations that last all night long.
Saturday 5
Yesterday I got off the bus in the early morning, dying of exhaustion from two lost and sleepless nights on the journey. In front of the zoo, around Libertador in the pale morning, a surreal feeling, the atmosphere of a nightmare or a premonitory dream, because three cars with no license plates suddenly appear (green Ford Falcons), carrying plain-clothed men who show off machine guns and blast the sirens. I
n the stillness of the morning, covert repression and horror emerge like phantoms. The worst thing is the feeling of normalcy. No one seems to notice anything; the military cars, camouflaged, go around the city sowing terror and it seems like no one can see them.
Sunday 6
A beautiful day, an unexpected visit from Iris, always amusing and seductive. My intimacy with her is growing, I see some pages of my notebooks from 1960—they are lying open on the table, and she says that secrets are meant to be revealed and then laughs—and she amuses herself with the arrogant tone of the prose from those years, and finally we go to bed.
Monday 7
I am preparing a project for the course with the psychoanalysts. The notion of private language in W., the analytical situation in Freud, and the Socratic dialogues in Plato, a stage to make words possible (compare the three strategies). First issue: How does speech begin? How to get beyond the “inauthentic murmur?” None of the three seem to want to eliminate insubstantial speech, but rather start from it. One case has to do with questioning, the other has to do with establishing a “setting” (someone speaks to another person whom he can’t see, and he has to pay the price in gold because of what he says and the ability to talk uncontrollably for fifty minutes: because someone is listening to him). Finally, the third form involves rules that determine ways of living, and what is said about life is a muddled record.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 47
