At the publishing house, I try to get the rights to the detective novel that Boris Vian wrote under an American pseudonym, that is, as though he were an American writer. It is called: J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. B. shows up and then Mario Szichman, who is trying to reestablish ties with me, in spite of (or thanks to) his relationship with Julia. My friends and I can only look at the women in our tribe and we circulate among them like cards in a rigged deck; no one can complain because we all do the same thing. For example, I am with Iris, who was with Osvaldo L. before me, who in turn used to be with… endogamy and cyclical passions. Sitting beside each other at La Moncloa, we make predictions about the political situation while our friends (David, León) plan to take flight abroad.
More and more interested in the project of writing a novel of (sentimental) education, based on the diary. “Without realizing it,” I can see the narrator I have always sought appearing in these notebooks: furious, ironic, desperate, elliptical. Thus emerges the tone of a protagonist who is not me. There’s nothing like autobiography to confirm that the writer is not who he is. (But who is he? A stupid question.) I think about that other writer along the lines of the imaginary writers I know well: Stephen Dedalus, Quentin Compson, Nick Adams, Jorge Malabia, Silvio Astier. The life of the hero before defeat.
Tuesday, October 8
I feel very well now, he said. A calm morning; I am writing notes for a possible future book (ultimately, they will be nothing more than the preliminary notes, the outlines). That’s how the work would have to be, in progress, unfinished, fragile, its only subjects being the imminence of something that never comes and the joy of inspiration. The apartment is full of light. I got back at ten, after reading the paper and having breakfast with Iris. The process of creation matters more than the work itself.
After cooking roast beef for myself in the oven (with French fries), I went down for a walk around the Botanical Garden. Sitting on a bench under the trees, I finished putting together the reading report for the Centro Editor and brought it to the run-down main office of the publishing house (I earned twenty thousand pesos). I met Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano: Los Libros received a letter—containing threats—from the Triple A. My friends go into exile for less than that, but we won’t let ourselves be intimidated and will go onward (toward the abyss).
At night, class with the group of psychoanalysts. Language scenarios, the—non-verbal—conditions that make utterance possible. On my way out they pay me for the month: a hundred thousand pesos.
At the theater with Iris: Morir en familia, a detective story that makes you think of a clumsy reading of Faulkner. In the theater, you can clearly see when the methods of an author are stolen and adapted without citation. For example, The Wrong Man by Hitchcock, an illegal version of Kafka. Taxi Driver by Scorsese, based on—or rather, stolen from—Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky. Adaptation as plagiarism.
Wednesday 9
Memories of childhood. The plaza with aromo trees, the church under construction, my grandmother donating her copper pots (which she brought over from Italy) to forge the bell.
I stop by the editorial office of Crisis and drop off the piece about Brecht, earning seventy-five thousand pesos. (In fact, I have earned almost three hundred thousand pesos from extra work this month.) Several proposals from Galeano, for me to bring in a short story, for me to prepare something to be published in every issue. A freelancer can’t reject any offer out of fear that the well will run dry, and so he loads himself down with work. How can I get the cash I need to clear away five or six months’ worth of obligations and be able to write in peace?
Thursday 10
Reality insists. A professor comes from the University of La Pampa. A proposal for a course on Arlt and Borges in the first week of November. Three days in exchange for a hundred thousand pesos (which straight away doesn’t seem like enough money to me). I (a desperate man) accept and start to prepare the course.
Saturday 12
I’m happy and free when I’m not writing, and if I write I can’t be happy or free.
León came over, drowsy and melancholic. He has been left several times by the same woman, crying. A good discussion with him about Borges. His is the classic Sartrean reading, which does not read but applies existing molds.
Monday 14
Andrés comes over and I spend the morning with him. His son is dying, and it’s as though he couldn’t see him. Andrés goes back and forth about publishing a story in Crisis because he’s afraid of drawing the attention of the Triple A. He is a great detector of dangerous places and situations. He situates himself far from here, along with the right.
A dream. Borges dies drowning, I cry for him but then he appears alive, reborn with a clean appearance, white hair, round eyeglasses (I can’t identify the hair).
Wednesday 16
On Monday night my father appears unexpectedly in a dream, almost like a hallucination, and when I see him I realize that it was his hair that I could not recognize in that dream. In fact, I have the feeling that I myself “hallucinated” my father in order to be able to understand the dream and so not have to go to the cemetery because of him.
Last night I dreamed that I had to pick up Dad’s old Underwood typewriter (which had belonged to my grandfather Emilio) from someone whose name I don’t remember. It was the machine I learned to write on, using two fingers. The chain of generations.
Friday 18
Another empty day, and now I want to go down to the bar on the corner and get drunk, erasing the pain in my chest (which will not let me be). Rapid images of a happiness I never had, but one I yearn for more with every passing day. To be with friends, to talk with them, in a house lit up by large windows with blue curtains. Amanda’s face or some of her sayings as mementos of a passion. That room over the garden where I wrote the story about Urquiza. Getting on a train one sunny day with newly bought books and magazines and setting out on a long journey to the south, crossing the corridors of the sleeping car at night and going to the dining car to order French fries and a bottle of white wine, getting rid of the restlessness caused by the certainty that everything is lost and that the best times have already passed, the era of great projects, when hope was possible. Julia would be reading, lying on the large bed in a corner by the wall of the blue room in the boarding house in Barracas, the sun coming in from the avenue through the wall of glass that stretched from the ceiling to the newly cleaned wooden floor. It has been five years since I began to capsize, and it is useless to try to save myself.
Saturday 19
I suddenly found the essence of the novel about the adolescent: his mother has a trunk with pornographic photos that her husband has taken of her over the years; in this trunk there is also a photo of the mother as the spring queen, the most beautiful woman, and also letters from an ex-lover. “Will I become my father’s son?” he asks himself.
Thursday 24
This week, I have earned one hundred seventy-five thousand at Tiempo Contemporáneo, one hundred thousand from the course of the psychoanalysts, and seventy-five thousand at Crisis. Or rather, five hundred thousand pesos. Next month the same work will continue, plus one hundred thousand pesos for the course in La Pampa. That’s how, by scattering himself, a writer—like me—makes a living in Argentina.
On Wednesday I see Roa Bastos, who has written an extraordinary novel (I, the Supreme) and asks me to write a review in La Opinión, but I decline and instead recommend China L., whom he praises: “No one writes better criticism than her.” Then at Ramos I see Eduardo Galeano, who has written a bad novel. With both of them, I create the illusion that I have a finished novel and will give it to them to read.
Saturday 26
A beautiful day, Iris and I spend the afternoon in bed, adventures into fantasy.
A dark life. All the same, this month was one of the most peaceful since I began my descent (1971). All I want is to know more and write better.
Wednesday 30
I meet Norberto Soares, who calls me to ask for an interview about Borges. Then, hung up on my intention to improve the article and the reporting, I hate myself for accepting the proposal from the media. Now I’m waiting for Iris, and I’m going to take her to bed.
Thursday, November 7
Yesterday was the wake for Andrés’s son. Vast silence. Roberto Cossa and Jorge Onetti were there with him. A feeling of helplessness in everyone who was there. The death of a young person is always impossible.
Friday, November 8
Sitting in the dining room of the hotel in Santa Rosa, La Pampa, killing time; in an hour I’ll teach the second class in the series on Arlt and Borges. A curious feeling, time has been confusing for the last ten days. A provincial slowness here, along with the slightly earnest tone that everyone has when they speak.
I’m reading A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
Saturday 16
How can I summarize these days? Back and forth from Norberto Soares’s house, endless alcoholic discussions. On Thursday I went to Adrogué. A return to the past. The old houses, the streets of my childhood. Uncle Mario, accompanying me to the station and showing me the family’s “historic” sites: the house where Mom was born, the McKenzies’ cottage, Queen’s College. Yesterday I bought clothes: shirts, pants, and shoes.
Sunday 17
A condensation of the story about Roberto Arlt. The writer is preparing an edition of unpublished works, he knows a man who has texts but shows no interest, yet after some prodding the man shows him a story by Arlt and the narrator pays him for it. Then, a short while later, the story appears, published and signed (pseudonymously) by the man who sold it to him. The mystery is, why did he publish it?
Wednesday 20
If he had to define this era, he would say that everyone says he’s doing fine, “much improved”; he thinks they say this knowing that he has lately started to die, and they want to cheer him up. Everything he has to do costs him an impossible effort. He passes his days trying to pass the days.
I meet Germán García and we talk about Borges, about his book on Macedonio, about Peronism. He is working on the relationship between rhetoric and psychoanalysis. He proposes that I teach a course at some Freudian school they’re thinking about starting.
Friday
X Series. I spent the whole day shut up in a house on Avellaneda with four workers and Rubén K., a long discussion about Peronism and the current situation.
Sunday 24
I am working on the essay about Borges. I turn thirty-three years old today; my economic future is dark.
Monday
Uncomfortable reading the interview on Borges that Norberto Soares did with me for El Cronista.
Saturday 30
Passage: moving. Last night, Amanda, beautiful as always, calls me and we meet. She had decided to stop being the actress she never was. We end up in bed after having dinner at Hermann, enjoying that romantic atmosphere.
I am working on the article about Cortázar for La Opinión. The idea of exclusive consumption and the collector as a metaphor for the artist in Cortázar.
Thursday, December 5
It is not true that “everyone” wants to write, some imbalance is needed. It was no accident that I began to suffer from this mournful fever at age sixteen.
Friday, December 6
Beautiful women are tanning in the sun on the terraces: naked bodies, scattered among the geometric white spaces of the city. A surreal quality like that of a dream.
Amanda’s gesture: after making love she holds out her hand and takes my wrist to look at the time. A beautiful, shameless gesture, it is a key, in the end, to the current state of our relationship, and one I have read—for a while—as though it were a caress. I embrace her then, and it takes me a second to realize my mistake.
I’m reading Freud’s excellent work on Leonardo: the meticulous notation of the spending necessary for his mother’s burial. A pathetic poem of the obsessive man’s love.
“A man’s position before the world must be as literary as possible. Any man of a less refined species would doubtless laugh about a race so corrupted that the literary is considered a vice of character. All great men have been literate,” Bertolt Brecht.
The logic of contagion: media outlets copy one another, so that if a person shows up in one place, the others, who have only seen what is visible there, ask for more texts or put out articles. This deadly logic can bring fame to a writer who doesn’t write, or rather, who only writes in the media. A fine way to glorious failure. This comes because I received a call from Crisis magazine (let’s mention, for future readings, that this magazine is directed by Eduardo Galeano and is part of the establishment of the left): they need biographical information to write a profile in the section dedicated to writers. Of course, I did let them give me an interview in El Cronista Comercial and published an essay on Cortázar in La Opinión a few days later. Journalists only read newspapers and take everything they read to be real.
Saturday, December 28
I work for three hours and finish the first five pages of the story, intoxicated by tobacco and coffee. Last night, before going to sleep, I found a solution for how to narrate the father’s suicide (after two years of not seeing the way). The whole story takes place on a bus ride to Mar del Plata. Narrating in third-person, he thinks about his father. At the first stop, he reads a letter and sees a woman who is traveling alone. At the second stop, he begins a relationship with the woman and says goodbye to her in the terminal. And then at the hospital where the father breathes, groaning. He can’t bear it and goes down to buy cigarettes and sleeps with the woman. I worked on four possible endings and, in the end, chose the best one.
Monday, December 30
The best part of the year was the story “The End of the Ride,” which I wrote in ten days at a rate of two pages per day.
8
Diary 1975
Thursday, January 2
A card came from Tristana. At night I go to the theater with Iris: Chinatown by Polanski. Really, the movie seems to be based on a novel that Chandler never wrote.
Friday
Maybe I could write a volume of short stories centered around a single protagonist (“En el Terraplén,” “Tarde de amor,” “En el calabozo,” “Tierna es la noche,” “The End of the Ride,” “Pavese”).
Tuesday 14
The newlywed who interrupts her honeymoon trip to carry meat, milk, and bread in a net bag to feed many people. I had breakfast in a café with a counter over the platform of Once station, and I saw her going by and heard the man next to me tell her story.
Tuesday
A meeting for Los Libros magazine at night in a café on Calle Corrientes. A violent argument with Carlos and Beatriz. I am against centering the next issue around a denouncement of the USSR. In the end they compromise, and I feel worse.
Thursday
I meet David, who left a message for me at the publishing office. Sitting at Ramos, I give him a summary of the general situation. He tells me about his escape from a hotel in Mexico, leaving without paying, and his visit to Trotsky’s house. (According to him, in the end Trotsky raised rabbits, which reproduce quickly, to compensate for his political group’s lack of growth.) Then he tells me about his secret work on the adaptation of Borges’s story “The Dead Man” for the movies, which will be under Juan Carlos Onetti’s name.
Tuesday 11
Carnival days. I think I have more or less resolved the structure of the nouvelle “Homage to Roberto Arlt.”
1. The narrator speaks of the publication of an homage to Roberto Arlt. He puts an announcement in the newspapers. A notebook appears with notes and unpublished pieces, there are mentions of Kostia and a story Arlt is about to write.
2. He meets Kostia in the boarding house. They discuss Arlt.
3. A week later Kostia appears. He brings him the story. They talk on the phone.
4. Kostia comes to see him. He asks him for the
story (as though it were a betrayal). He will not give it to him.
5. A few days later the story appears, published by Kostia in his name.
Alternatives:
a) Kostia publishes the story, gives the money back to him, and lets him know where the original is.
b) Kostia does not publish the story but sends him the original and the money.
Friday 14
The story about Arlt is coming along marvelously, the idea about the notebook makes everything work.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 48
