Yesterday was the first class in the course on Borges and Arlt at the CICSO. A full classroom, many enrolled, great interest. A divided audience: Iris, José Sazbón and a group of initiates, a group of literature students, some not paying attention (like the redhead who works for Crisis). Everything turns out well. I end the night with Iris, José, and other friends eating dinner at Hispano on Avenida de Mayo.
Saturday
Last night a barbecue at Vogelius’s country house. An incredible place, a large library with an extraordinary periodicals collection, some very good paintings, a vast park, a Fitzgerald atmosphere (melancholy). Galeano, Conti, Asís, Pichon-Rivière, Perrone. I go there with Schmucler and dedicate myself to drinking and smiling in the face of the arrogant stupidity of the—young—Argentine writers. I drive back with Haroldo, who suddenly seems to have grown old, always with an expression like someone who just got out of jail.
Economy and literature
Assumed Name: five hundred thousand pesos (September).
Arlt anthology: five hundred thousand pesos (June).
USA short stories anthology: the same (April–June).
Borges: one million pesos (November).
I spend the afternoon working on the course on nineteenth-century literature, we’ll see if I can find a solid foundation: Mansilla and Hernández.
Sunday 20
A condemned man on a perpetual chain, locked up in a cell over the river, enjoying certain privileges (films, bars with friends, a woman). That is what I am. I can expect nothing but what comes from that very solitude.
“Things may, however, be condemned to be lost without their value having suffered any diminution—when, that is, there is an attempt to sacrifice something to fate in order to ward off some other dreaded loss,” S. Freud, C. W., volume II, 2166.
“Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long [that man] fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence,” Karl Marx.
“A patient made a comparison that fits the case. He said it was as if he had fallen into the water with a towel in his hand, and someone were trying to dry him with the towel which had become wet along with his body,” S. Freud.
Monday 21
I have to let everyone at the publishing house know that I arranged to publish my book at Siglo XXI.
Sazbón comes over, I have trouble paying attention to him because I’m half finished with the outline for today’s class on death and religion in Freud. In that group, the psychoanalysts talk about painting while the youngest of the women, Estela, tries to seduce me.
Thursday
Under pressure from the courses, but happy because I have lots of free time. Every day, I arrive at nine and work until five in the afternoon; at noon today I made grilled beef with tomatoes and then gave in, waiting for the future.
Friday
Excellent “performance” in the courses this week. An experience more akin to theater than to writing; speaking in public fills me with uncertainty for hours before I begin and gives me some nerves at the beginning of the talk. Then I forget who I am and let myself be carried off by the words. Now it is seven in the evening and I am drinking whiskey and reading Conrad, sitting in the leather armchair, killing time before I go back to see Iris. Amanda called me, we’ll meet at her place tomorrow. Two years ago, she read my notebooks one day and everything ended. I am tempted to go; it isn’t advisable, but I always find a way to get myself in trouble. I’m bringing Assumed Name to Siglo XXI on Tuesday, so I will try to correct it tomorrow. Today I saw Estela, who attacks psychoanalysis because she cannot find her place within it.
Monday, April 28
Tomorrow I will go to Siglo XXI to sign the contract. I have to correct the short stories (“Luba” especially) and decide whether to include “The Price of Love” or not. I hope they will pay me the five hundred thousand pesos.
An interview tomorrow with television producers who are offering me a spot on an afternoon program on Channel 13, five hundred thousand pesos per month. (I will say no.)
A competition for detective stories is announced in Siete Días magazine. Borges is one of the three judges. The prize is a week-long trip to Paris for two people. I would like to win it, but I don’t know what to write.
May 1
An event in Plaza de Mayo in the light rain. Isabel Perón is inclined to affirm her personal leadership. I spend the morning reviewing my answers to the interview, Lafforgue is coming to get it in a while. At the Obelisco, young unionists start some trouble.
Sunday 4
Now I am alone in the evening, watching night come over the river. A long lunch with Julia and Mario Szichman (who has arrived from Venezuela), with them is Pelín N., a Trotskyist student. It is impossible for me to feel comfortable in that company, as though I can only feel comfortable with my closest friends or when talking about literature, otherwise I’m inattentive and detached.
A strange era, leaving no mark. On Tuesday, getting off the bus that brought me back from Channel 13, where I had gone to turn down the job, I saw the issues of Crisis magazine with my short story being distributed on the corner of Callao and Córdoba. I sat down in the bar on Corrientes and Rodríguez Peña and flipped through the magazine. On Friday at Norberto Soares’s house, Andrés Rivera calls on the phone, praising “Homage to Arlt,” excessively, as always. Strangely, I am drifting farther and farther away from the book.
Tuesday 6
Subject: the Basques from Tandil. Siglo XXI. The “messiah,” a witch doctor who mobilizes a street gang and cuts the throats of the Basque immigrants in the area. It coincides with The Gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872. A play could be written, along the lines of Brecht.
Wednesday 7
Last night I stopped to see Amanda at her house, melancholy and withdrawn. Bad and getting worse, espousing “seriousness,” she has lost who she was, her seductive and charming ways. We had dinner at Arturito and she accompanied me to the subway, pulling her dog Bolero by the leash.
The issue of Los Libros comes out with my letter of resignation and the response from Carlos and Beatriz. Some sadness, but also the relief of breaking free.
Friday
A strange impression of finding, or rather, discovering the central axis of my work ten years after I started. Fiction tied to my passion for Argentine history.
There is a point at which a certain distraction is imposed as “legal currency,” one acts in a strange way because it is better according to convention. For example, last night I met Alberto in the theater. I thought “he is here with another woman” and so I acted accordingly. I left the theater and it turned out he was with Clara, his wife; so I had been rude, evasive, etc.
Monday, May 12
On Saturday a party at Norberto Soares’s house, I got mixed up in a disrespectful argument with Pancho Aricó that prompted the angry intervention of a beautiful and hysterical ballerina (we agreed that she only danced in order to be seen). Germán García, conspiring with me, got caught up in an easy speech to prove to the ballerina that she didn’t understand. Aside from that, more praise for the story about Arlt. Aricó and María Teresa Gramuglio insist that I publish it on its own. Iris and I got back at four in the morning, walking along Callao, the street damp from the light rain.
Tuesday 13
It is raining, and I am working peacefully, not wanting to go out.
Yesterday a good class with the psychoanalysts about negation in Freud and negativity in Hegel. Before that I met Oscar Landi, who agreed with my resignation from Los Libros. We’ll have to see how to put together a group of intellectuals (Landi himself, De Ípola, Menéndez, etc.) in the planning of “another” magazine.
/> Friday 16
After eating with Carlos Altamirano in the restaurant next door to the place where I lived for some happy years (on Calle Sarmiento, next to the entry door), I go to Siglo XXI to sign the contract for Assumed Name. Schmucler gives me a copy of a reading report with lots of praise, especially for the story about Arlt.
Saturday 17
I spend the afternoon reading Argentine literature. I discover Holmberg and the path of fantastical literature, which, through positivism, opens itself to the occult sciences and in a sense—via Lugones—will lead to Roberto Arlt. I read Eduardo Gutiérrez’s melodramatic novels with great interest as well (Moreira and Hormiga Negra).
Saturday
At night I put some sugar in a yellow nylon bag and bring it to Iris because she can’t get any. I wait for the subway, calm and exhausted, while a woman shows a man the tiles decorated with the picture of the Virgin of Luján. I play chess with Fernando on a wooden game board that scrapes when you move the pieces.
Sunday 18
It has been three months since I’ve written; all I do is read and prepare for classes. I have started having “bad dreams”.
Tuesday 20
At noon José Sazbón comes over and we talk about my essay on Brecht; José is thinking of putting together a volume for Nueva Visión and including it there.
In the late afternoon I go to Martín Fierro and find Roa Bastos, who is signing books. Many people from Siglo XXI are with him; Marcelo Díaz, Tula, also Lafforgue all agree that I will win the Siete Días prize for detective stories if I enter. That certainty is enough to block me, and I can’t think of writing for it.
Wednesday 21
Mario Szichman comes with a proposal for me to write two pieces per month for a Venezuelan newspaper for fifty dollars (which is almost two hundred thousand pesos). I tend toward dispersion and prefer not to make commitments.
Friday 23
I make progress on my theory about the relationship between the fantastical and the detective story at the end of the nineteenth century as two threads present in Roberto Arlt. Last night’s class at CICSO was suspended because of the increase in repression following Numa Laplane’s appointment as army chief and the strengthening of the most reactionary wing of the government (via López Rega).
Saturday
I am reading excellent political stories by Cabrera Infante, written in the style of Hemingway. I watch evening fall beautifully over the river.
I don’t know how I can find a subject and write a detective story for the competition within a month. Plot: Almada takes photographs, Antúnez says goodbye to Larry. I have to construct a story in the midst of that, perhaps the two never meet.
Sunday 25
I dispassionately reread articles about the mass media for my class tomorrow. The uncertainty between truth and falsehood comes from the media (Enzensberger). Yesterday I went to the theater twice: alone, to free myself from the void, I saw Los gauchos judíos in the theater across the street from here and at night, with Iris, Losey’s version of A Doll’s House.
The detective story project has taken me over entirely, but, unable to write, I remain immobile, staring into the void.
Monday 26
I prepare for today’s class with the psychoanalysts; it pains me to accept that I have to work to earn my living. I seek a “solution” to writing a ten-page detective story.
Saturday, May 31
Last night dinner at Carlos B.’s house, a plan to make a film of “Emma Zunz,” Carlos holds himself up in a certain aristocracy of the artist. It is exactly what I try to avoid by “not doing” anything, only working; as for my fantasies, I have the courtesy not to communicate them to anyone.
Thursday, June 5
I meet Andrés and Norberto Soares in the café on Córdoba and Uruguay. Several different accounts of the political situation. Strikes in Córdoba, everything very unstable. A serious crisis following Rodrigo’s economic plan.
Friday 6
I am working on the detective story but can’t find the plot. Maybe I will focus myself on the death of the Chinese bartender. But I don’t think I can write it until I have clarified the mystery. After almost six hours of working on the story, I am at the beginning. Almada is in love with Larry. In any case, I keep going without finding the mystery.
Friday 13
I discovered a new ending for the story. Maybe it is Almada who kills her.
Thursday
Today León R. showed up in the middle of the afternoon after months away; he continues with his ideas about Peronism for the book he wants to write. Very critical, he thinks the working classes support Perón because of immediate interests.
Friday
The political crisis erupts; the Minister of Economy refuses to accept the increases determined by the peer reviews (150 percent increase for the UOM), and the CGT decrees general shutdown. Aside from that it is raining, and so, between the political conflict and bad weather, I shut myself in and after ten hours of work finally manage to write an acceptable story in the detective genre. It will have to be revised and cut down, but I think it can work. I will find a “linguistic” solution to the crime.
Saturday
I have written my thirtieth short story: “The Madwoman and the Story of the Crime.” Apart from that are the nouvelle about R. Arlt and the failed novel about the criminals imprisoned in an apartment in Montevideo. Fifteen years of work, a sad assessment.
In the midst of my passion for writing, Tristana appeared with her tragedies: her husband has started sleeping with the maid again (like a Gombrowicz character), crisis, sleeping cure. She wanders around the city with no place to cling to, stretches herself out on the floor, her way of saying she wants to sleep with me. We spend the late afternoon in bed. Wicked and trivial thoughts at times: the work day cut short.
July
I finish a decent draft of the detective story. Hard work until I managed to establish a double story:
I. Almada-Antúnez (Larry).
II. The madwoman who saw the crime.
I still have to cut it down, bring it to eight pages, but maybe it will be enough to win the competition.
Tuesday 8
A little while ago I finished copying “The Madwoman and the Story of the Crime.” Some stubborn confidence allowed me to write it.
In recent days the political crisis was unleashed, with worker mobilizations all around the country. The whole cabinet resigned, but Isabel supports López Rega.
Thursday 10
I occupy my morning with sending off the detective story for the competition; in the afternoon I go to Siglo XXI, and they confirm that Assumed Name will come out this year.
Friday, July 11
Perhaps studying the art of war is not a defense mechanism?
Couldn’t the transcript of my diary from my trip to China be published as a book called A Sentimental Journey?
Saturday 12
Tristana arrives at midnight, a bit drunk just like every time she comes to see me. We stay together until this afternoon, not leaving bed until the end, before we say goodbye, when she sits in the tub under the shower. A final image I must not forget.
Monday 14
The same as with office workers, Mondays are the worst days for me (my course with the psychoanalysts). Also, I decided to let my beard grow out, but I think I may give that up. All the same, I’ll make note of a superstitious procedure here: I won’t shave my beard until I know the results of the detective stories competition. If I win (?), I will take photos of myself with the beard and then shave. If I lose, I will shave the day after I know the results.
Wednesday
Pay the rent, go to Crisis magazine, see Norberto Soares, write about Bellow, sort out the house.
At noon I go to Siglo XXI. Corrections for Assumed Name (which seems to me to be written worse and worse). It will go to the printing press soon. At Tiempo Contemporáneo, a call from David, who summons me to his house to argue about
“literary criticism.”
Thursday
Too much alcohol last night, I get up at noon, slightly dizzy. I read Laplanche’s book on Hölderlin. Then Pablo G. appears, asking me for three hundred thousand pesos in rent for the apartment, so I offer him two hundred thousand. He refuses, threatening me with a lawsuit.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 50
