The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  “Many died, so many every day, the offensives against the Austrian defenses were a massacre.” What task could be more oppressive than sorting through letters of the dead and answering a mother, a son, a sister?

  Incomplete letters, interrupted by death, messages from those missing, shot down, killed in the night, never knowing the dawn, said Grandpa. Pity for those who fell, frozen stiff, alone, sunken into the mud. “How can we give voice to the dead, hope to those who died without hope, relief to the phantoms that wander among the barbed-wire fences and under the white glare from the floodlights?”

  Little by little, after months and months of struggling with these remains, he began to lose his mind: he clung to the letters and stopped sending them; he was, he told me, paralyzed, without willpower, without spirit, remembered almost nothing from that time, and, when they finally sent him home to Argentina with his family, he carried with him the words of those bound to die. I still have a French officer’s binoculars, which Grandpa gave me when I turned eighteen; on the side you can make out “Jumelle Militaire,” but the number of the regiment is scraped off with a knife or bayonet so that their fate cannot be discovered. In the metallic circle of the two smaller lenses is engraved “Chevalier Opticien,” and, when you turn it around, there is a tiny compass between the two larger lenses that finds true north even now. Sometimes I lean out of the tenth-floor window and look out at the city with these magnifiers: a woman with her hair wrapped up in a red towel is talking on the telephone in a lit room; the minuscule and agile owners of the Korean supermarket on the corner move boxes and speak among themselves in shouts, as if they were arguing in a distant, incomprehensible language.

  Why had he stolen these letters? He said nothing, looked at me, serene, with his clear eyes, and changed the subject. For him, I imagine, they were a testament to the unbearable experience of the endless frozen battles, a way of honoring the dead. He kept them with him, like someone saving letters written in a forgotten alphabet. He was furious, and his delusional speech still rings in my ears because sometimes, even today, I seem to hear him, and his voice returns to me in the most desperate moments.

  “‘Language… language… ’ my grandfather would say,” said Renzi. “That weak and frenzied material, without a body, is a thin thread that intertwines the tiny ridges and superficial angles of human beings’ solitary lives; it ties them up, why not, he would say, sure, it binds them, but only for an instant, before they once again sink into the same darkness in which they were submerged when they were born and howled unheard for the first time, in a far distant white room where, in darkness once again, they let loose their final cry before the end, from another white room, although once again, of course, their voices reached no one…”

  In the room at the back of my grandfather’s house was the library where I had found the blue book, which I now connect to Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Giornale di guerra e di prigonia [Diary of the War]. I discovered it back in the time when I was studying in La Plata and would came to visit him. It was an edition of La cognizione del dolore. Gadda had lived in Argentina, and in his novel, which is set in a town in Córdoba, the inhabitants, terrified in a lawless setting, hire a team of private security and it is they, the guardians, who murder those Argentines in their insular community, one after another… A prophet! Gadda had understood everything at once in a novel from 1953.

  How could one write about Argentina? It could be seen clearly in The Seven Madmen, in Trans-Atlantyk, and in La cognizione del dolore. The three are by extravagant writers, untranslatable, who do not travel well. They don’t use much literary language, said Renzi. They look at everything with crossed eyes, obliquely; they are dyslexic, guttural stutterers: Arlt, Gombrowicz, Gadda. As for me, I, who was the son and grandson of Italians, have sometimes felt myself an Italian-Argentinian writer above all; I don’t know if that category exists… but I see that the secret line of my life goes backward from the book, to Heart and to La cognizione del dolore, passing through “Ships arrive at the coast, bearing fruits from beyond.” I would have liked to have been Carlo Emilio Gadda’s nephew, but I have to resign myself, Renzi would say, to being only his voluntary but illegitimate and unrecognized descendant…

  I will have to conclude the first part of the so-called story of the defining books of my life there, yet something remains, a detour, a slight change in direction, a sharp turn that I can share before I leave, he said, as he raised his final drink.

  He raised his hand and made a circle in the air. Waiter, he said, just a bit more.

  A time after the trip to the south, at age sixteen, I was courting, so to speak, he said, Elena: a beautiful girl, much more sophisticated than myself, with whom I studied in the third year at the National High School of Adrogué. One afternoon, we were coming down a street lined with trees next to a wall painted sky blue, which I can still see clearly, and she asked me what I was reading.

  I, who had not read anything significant since the days of the upside-down book, remembered that, in the display of a bookshop, I had seen Camus’s The Plague, another book with a blue cover, which had just come out. Camus’s The Plague, I told her. Can you lend it to me? she asked.

  I remember that I bought the book, rumpled it a bit, read it in one night, and brought it with me to school the next day… I had discovered literature not for the book itself but for this feverish way of reading avidly with the intention of saying something to someone about what I had read. But why? The eternal question. It was a detached reading, directed, intentional, in my schoolboy’s room, that night, under the circular light of the lamp… Out of Camus’s work I’m not much interested in The Plague, but I remember the old man who always hit his dog and, when the dog finally escapes, he desolately searches for it throughout the city.

  And how many books have I read, borrowed, stolen, loaned, lost since then? How much money have I invested, spent, squandered on books? I don’t remember everything I have read, but I can reconstruct my life based on the shelves in my library. Times, places… I could organize the volumes chronologically. The oldest book is The Plague. Then there is a series of two: This Business of Living by Pavese and Stendhal: par lui-même. They were the first ones I bought and were followed by hundreds and hundreds of others. I have brought them and carried them with me like talismans or amulets, and I have put them on the shelves of rooms in hostels, apartments, homes, hotels, cells, hospitals.

  One can see who one has been over the course of time only by making the rounds past the walls of the library: I heard a lecture by Attilio Dabini about Pavese and bought the book (because I, too, was writing a diary). Stendhal: par lui-même I found in the Hachette bookshop on Rivadavia Avenue. I remember the train when I returned to Adrogué and the guard who appeared in the corridor and didn’t let me finish the sentence I was writing in the back of the book. It remained an incomplete sentence, that trace (“It’s difficult to be sincere when you have lost…” what?). I don’t know if it’s a quote or one of my own phrases (the ones that don’t come to mind when we read them again). I can see changes in the marks, underlinings, reading notes in the same book over the course of the years. In This Business of Living, for example, by Raigal Publishers, translation by Luis Justo. It is signed with my initials, ER, with the date July 22, 1957. I annotated it with impressions in the margins or on the last page: “The diary as counter-conquest, or the many ways of losing a woman.” I annotated with “see pg. 65.” And some quotations: “Youth ends when we perceive that no one wants our gay abandon.” And on the first blank page of the book, before the titles, there is one of so many lists that I’ve made, always with the intention of taking what I’ve written for granted: “Call Luis, Latin II (Tuesday and Thursday),” and, further down, one of so many superstitious annotations. In that moment, I was writing my first stories; I was vividly interested in knowing how long a writer takes to write a book, and I reconstructed the chronology of Pavese’s work based on his diary:

  November 27, 1936 – April 15, 1937: Il
carcere.

  June 3 – August 16, 1939: Paese tuoi.

  September, 1947 – February, 1948: La casa en la colina.

  June – October, 1948: Il diavolo sulle colline.

  March – June, 1949: Tra donne sole.

  September – November, 1949: La luna e i falò.

  Back then, a short story only five pages long would take me three months.

  The Plague and This Business of Living were the first books that were my own, so to speak, and my latest book I got yesterday afternoon, The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel by Benjamin Black, a gift from Giorgio, a friend. You must write something, he tells me, Renzi said, he’s like Chandler but missing… What’s missing? my friend asked. The touch, I thought, he’s missing the grit, as tango dancers say when a tango is played just “fine…”

  Renzi opened the book and read: “It was one of those Tuesdays in summer when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving.” So it begins: it’s the same, but not the same (maybe because we know that it isn’t Chandler… ).

  Too many pastiches, old man, this time of year, he said now; too many parodies, I prefer direct plagiarism…

  You could lend it to me, Elena said to me. I don’t know what became of her afterward, but if she hadn’t asked me that question, who knows what would have become of me… There is no destiny now, no oracles. It isn’t certain that everything in life is written in stone, but, I think sometimes, if I had not read that book, or rather, if I had not seen it in the shop window, perhaps I would not be here. Or if she had not asked me, no? Who knows… I exaggerate, in retrospect, but I passionately remember that reading—a room at the back, a desk lamp. What to say to a woman about a novel? Retell the whole thing yourself? The book wasn’t worth much—too allegorical, a heavy style, deep, overwrought—but, all in all, something happened there, there was a change… Nothing special, a trifle, the truth, but that night, speaking figuratively, I was on the threshold once more: knowing nothing of anything, making a show of reading…

  “Oh fortune, flowers, the girls in bloom… I’m seventy-three, an old man, and I go on like this, sitting with a book, waiting…”

  My father, he said later, was imprisoned for almost a year because he went to defend Perón in ’55 and suddenly Argentinian history seemed a conspiracy woven to destroy him. He was cornered, and he decided to escape. In December of 1957 we abandoned Adrogué, half in secret, and went to live in Mar del Plata. It was in those days, mid-escape, in one of the dismantled bedrooms of the house, that I started to write a diary. What was I looking for? To deny reality, to reject what was coming. To this day I still write this diary. Many things have changed since then, but I have remained faithful to this obsession.

  There is no evolution, we scarcely move, fixed to our old shameful passions; the only virtue, I believe, is to persist without changing, to go on, faithful to the old books, the ancient readings. My old friends, on the other hand, aspire as they age to be what they once hated; everything they once detested they now admire. Since we cannot change anything, they think, let’s change appearances. Entire libraries burned in the incinerator and buried in the backyard… It’s hard to get rid of books, but what about our way of reading? They go on as always, dogmatic readers, literal, they say different things with the same haughty wisdom of the old days. We live in the error of thinking that our old friends are with us. Impossible! We’ve read the same books and loved the same women (for example, Junior), and we save some letters that we were not and are not able to send away or to burn in the bonfires of time, and that, then, would be the subject of my autobiography, if someday I decided to write one…

  My grandfather (since I started with him) died in 1968, almost fifty years after the end of the war he had fought in, and the man missing an arm was with us at the burial, but not Natalia. Who knows what became of that woman? She was as beautiful as a goddess and sang, I remember, when she was happy…

  It was almost night now. Outside, the asphalt shone under the warm lights of the city. It was time to leave, to return home.

  “We ought to go.”

  We went out to the street and, as we went toward Charcas (no longer called Charcas), walking slowly because Emilio had a little problem with his left leg (“The result of bad habits, the economic crisis, Peronism, rough nights”), we decided to stop for a bit of coffee at the Filippo bar on the corner of Callao and Santa Fe, and at that point Emilio decided to add an epilogue to what he had told me so far, a conclusion, a visit, he stressed as he savored the coffee. An encounter that could be understood, with a bit of good will and favorable wind, as the end of his literary education, or something like that. A bridge, he said, a rite of passage.

  Once at the student center we organized a lecture series and decided, of course, to begin with old Borges. I called him on the phone to invite him and he accepted at once. He met me at the National Library, friendly, with his indecisive tone, seeming always on the point of losing the thread of what he was saying. Immediately he spoke to me of La Plata, where his friend the poet Paco López Merino lived, whom he visited frequently. One Sunday, at home, Borges tells me, explained Renzi, before leaving after they had lunch, his friend insisted on saying hello to Borges’s father, who, as was the custom among the old European criollo class, was taking siesta. After some scheming, they decided to accompany him to the bedroom.

  Doctor, I’d like to say goodbye to you, said López Merino.

  They all felt uncomfortable, but since they liked him they accepted the insistent but friendly request, and Doctor Borges, with a calm smile, gave him a hug… Upon leaving, López Merino saw Güiraldes’s guitar, which the author of Don Segundo Sombra had presented to Borges’s mother before leaving for Paris, and López Merino made it sing, softly.

  It’s out of tune; it never was very good, this guitar, the poet said maliciously, Borges recounted, and Borges added, said Renzi, it sounds hostile, but it was just a joke among friends.

  The truth was that López Merino shot himself the next day, and then they understood the imperative and serious manner of his final farewell.

  Beautiful, isn’t it? said Borges with a tired smile, as if the elegance of the secret goodbye had moved him.

  He had an immediate and warm way of creating intimacy, Borges, said Renzi; he was always that way with everyone he talked to: he was blind and did not see them, and he always spoke to them as if they were near, and that closeness is in his writings; he is never patronizing and gives no air of superiority, he addresses everyone as if they were more intelligent than he, with so much intimation that he has no need to explain what is already known. And it is that intimacy that his readers sense.

  He loved the prospect of going to La Plata, he was thinking of speaking about Lugones’s fantastical stories, what did I think? he said. Perfect, I told him, what’s more, Borges, look, we’re going to pay you, I don’t know quite how much it is right now, let’s say about fifteen hundred dollars.

  “No,” he said, “that’s a lot.”

  I was taken aback. Look, Borges, I’m telling you, it’s not our money, it’s not the students’ money, the University is giving us a fund.

  “It doesn’t matter, I’ll charge you two hundred fifty.”

  And we went on talking, he went on talking, I don’t remember now if it was about Lugones or Chesterton, but the truth is that I felt so comfortable, so close to him, with that feeling of brightness, of clear intelligence and complicity, that a while later, almost without realizing it, while speaking about the endings of Kipling’s stories, I said to him, emboldened by the climate of intimacy and grateful for the sensation of talking to someone as an equal: “You know, Borges, I see a problem with the end of ‘The Form of the Sword.’”

  He raised his face toward me, alert.

  “A problem,” I said. “Hell, you might call it a defect… Something extra.”

  He looked into the air now, cheerful, expectant.

  The story is told with a technique that Borges had
already used in “Streetcorner Man” and would use again later: it is told by a traitor and murderer as though he were someone else.

  The man who narrates the story has a round and “spiteful scar” across his face. At one point in his tale he faces an informant and marks his face with a curved sword. One realizes then that the man telling the story is the traitor, as the scar identifies him. Borges, however, goes on with the story and closes it with an explanation. “Borges,” he says, “I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me.” He listened to my summary of the story with signs of agreement and repeated in a soft voice, “Yes… now despise me.”

  “Don’t you think that explanation is excessive? It’s superfluous, I think.”

  There was a silence. Borges smiled, compassionate and cruel.

  “Ah,” he said. “You write stories, too…”

  I was twenty years old, I was arrogant, I was more of a fool than I am now, but I realized that what Borges had said meant two things. Generally, if someone confronted him in the street to say, “Borges, I am a writer,” he would answer “Ah, so am I,” and the conversant would sink into the void. There was a subtle wickedness and calm arrogance in that sentence: “This rude kid thinks he writes stories…”

  The other assertion was more benevolent and might have meant, “You already read as if you were a writer, you understand the way in which texts are constructed and want to see how they are made, to see if you can do something similar or, ideally, something different.” Writing, he was telling me, above all changes one’s way of reading.