We went on talking a bit longer, and I was distracted and embarrassed and sort of numb. Borges showed me Groussac’s circular writing desk, which he passed over with his magnificent pale hand, the hand with which he had written “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader.”
I realize that Borges has always been a classical story writer: his endings are closed, with everything explained clearly; the sense of amazement is not in the form—always plain and clear—or in the organized and precise endings, but in the incredible density and heterogeneity of the narrative material.
He kindly accompanied me to the door and before saying goodbye added one last thing, as if to stop me from forgetting his lesson on well-closed stories:
“I got quite a good deal, didn’t I?” old Borges said, amused with himself.
In short, he buried me, but he recognized me as a writer, didn’t he? said Renzi. I had written two or three stories, horrible, poorly ended, but in short, hope must be confirmed once in a while, even if it’s by way of humiliation and fright. Therefore, the young—and the not-so-young—go around with their writings, looking for someone to read them and to say, “Ah, you write, too.” Of course they put them up on the web now, but they lack qualification in the same way, for someone to say to them—personally—you are on this side, too…
I talk too much, I get judgmental and apodictic, as is fitting for a man of my age, he kept thinking. Now we were at the door of the building on Calle Charcas (ex-Charcas) at number eighteen hundred. Maybe he thought he was going to die in that war, my grandfather, but he went all the same. An act of heroism, to go. I would not have driven myself to it, said Emilio as he opened the entry door, held it with his body, and turned around, smiling.
“One of these afternoons I’ll finish the story for you… We’ll see each other, dear,” he said, and with an uncertain walk he entered the hall in search of the elevator.
It was already completely dark, and I saw him go up, enveloped in a yellowish light, his eyes beaming and a smile of satisfaction illuminating his face, as if he were still thinking about the girl who had asked him to borrow the book by Albert Camus.
2
First Diary (1957–1958)
Wednesday
We are leaving the day after tomorrow. I decided not to say goodbye to anyone. Saying goodbye to people seems ridiculous to me. Wave to the people coming, not the ones leaving. I won at billiards, made two nine-point shots. I had never played so well. My heart was frozen still, and I shot the cue with perfect precision. I felt like I was constructing the hits with my thoughts. Playing billiards is simple; you have to stay cool and know how to look ahead. Afterward, we went to the pool and stayed until very late. I dove off of the high board. From so high up, the lights from the tennis courts floated on the water. It feels like everything I’m doing is for the last time.
Saturday
The move, in the middle of the night. “We left at dawn, furtive, ashamed.” There was a light on in the Yugoslavs’ kitchen, on the other side of Calle Bynon. The truck weighed down with furniture, the house dismantled. The stupid docility of the plains; a falcon in the sky, its talons stretched forward like meat hooks, almost sitting in the air, captures, in its low flight, a guinea pig and carries it off with the slow, deep flapping of its wings. We pause at noon in a stand of trees, the dog runs round and round in the field. My father says, “Look, a tramp made a little fire in this well,” and he touches the ash with the back of his hand. In the shade, he makes a note in his black notebook, sitting in the weeds, his back against a poplar. He raises his eyes from the notebook, and off in the distance, a dark point amid the immense brightness, I see the far-off figure of the tramp moving on foot through the country toward another stand of trees where he can light a fire and make yerba maté. This tiny event (and my father’s words) comes to mind many times over the course of the day, with no relation to anything happening in the present—clear in my memory, unexpected, as if it were a coded message hiding a secret meaning.
Monday
We spend Christmas Eve in Carranza’s house; he is a friend of the movement, my father says. All rather cheerless. Mom barely speaks and does nothing but read novels and use unexpected words (as she always does when she’s unwell): “This salad’s a bit dilapidated.” At night she gets up two or three times to see if I’m sleeping or if I need anything (she wakes me up!). She is nervous, rarely goes out, suffers but never complains. Her world collapsed (her sisters, her friends), but she traveled with Dad for “solidarity” more than anything else. (“She wasn’t going to leave this good-for-nothing on his own.”). At Christmas Eve dinner she refused to drink at the toast because she said it would “unsettle her.”
Tuesday
The house has two floors. The office is downstairs, with the waiting room in front, and to one side is a large room that opens onto the street, two bedrooms, the kitchen, and a patio. My room is upstairs, along with a living room, a little kitchen, and a balcony. I settled in there and brought up the few books I had brought. The window of my room opens over the blue flowers of the Jacaranda tree on the lane. In a tight spot, I could climb out onto the branches.
Thursday
I think I must go back, live with Grandpa Emilio. I write to Elena to cheer myself up, and I announce my plans to her, but she does not believe me. (“If you’re going to come, come and I’ll be ready, but don’t tell me about it every five minutes.”). It isn’t every five minutes; I write to her every night (not today) with the day’s news and my states of mind. At the end of the letter she draws Landrú’s cat and writes, “I miss you and miss you. I cry all the time in the corner, like the silly little flower that I am.”
Monday
At the beach, yesterday and the day before yesterday and today. It’s not the same swimming in the sea as swimming in a pool, the same as the difference between living and reading. “Which do you like more? You, you, which do you like more?” (stressed). Elena’s questions.
Tuesday
My father, from the office, asks me every time I go out to the street whether I have my papers. Mom, who is on the patio, always reading her novels, raises her eyes: “They’re going to arrest you just for being descended from him.” Descended, I think, in free fall.
Friday
Elena, oh Elena… She writes to me: “I dreamed about you twice, a dream the night before last and another last night. We would leave the house to take the San Vicente bus, but something would always happen and we wouldn’t end up going (you braided my hair, in the garden). In the end, as we were going out to the street, I woke up. I drank some water, my hair was in my face. Last night I dreamed again, and this time we were together on the bus! Isn’t that funny, two dreams, one following the other? Andrea says it’s a good omen, but it scared me. This morning I woke up very sick (Emilio, am I pregnant?).”
Thursday
False alarm (Galli Mainini test).
I am reading The Seven Who Were Hanged by Andreyev. The condemned in the book are all freethinkers, nihilists. They will be executed at dawn; time does not pass, and yet it is always later—or earlier—than they imagine. Impossible to describe this waiting. “Death was not there as yet, but life was there no longer.” A revolutionary, the heroine, thinks, “I should like to do this—I should like to go out alone before a whole regiment of soldiers and fire upon them with a light revolver. It would not matter that I would be alone, while they would be thousands, or that I might not kill any of them.” (Isn’t the realism incredible? But “light revolver” is perfect.)
Monday
My father still recalls some fragments of the letters that his father would send from the front, when he (my father… oh the pronouns) was a boy and his mother would read them aloud to him by the fireplace: “I was crying, General Gialdini was crying, all of the soldiers were crying,” which leaves me intrigued as to the content of the letter. It makes sense that a boy would always remember that passage; it is unforgettable to discover
in childhood that your father cries, that men cry, and that even a veteran general in the army could cry…
The wonderful thing about childhood is that everything is real. The grown man (!) is one who lives a life of fiction, trapped by delusions and dreams that allow him to survive.
For this reason, the shards of past experiences leave the sort of impressions that one remembers without entirely understanding; they are light and sharp, like a foil thrusting forth to pierce the heart. For this reason, these memories are so clear and so incomprehensible, because then, now, in youth, one becomes lost. In my case, I am in the middle of the river, I have lost the sense of total certainty of childhood and have no illusion that it sustains me.
Tuesday
We move a library to the upstairs floor because Mom has set up a loom in the living room. She is going to weave a red and yellow bedspread, with fine wool. “So your father wakes up,” she says. She learned how to weave when she was young, in the nuns’ school. “These handicrafts,” she likes the word and repeats it, “these handicrafts, hijito, you don’t forget them, it’s like riding a bicycle or making the sign of the cross, they don’t leave you…”
Sunday
I’ve written my daily letter to Elena; the postal workers’ strike has the effect of a raised drawbridge. So I’m outside of the besieged city…
Monday
My mother has a personal witch doctor. She calls him Don José, but I call him Yambó to tease her. I don’t like the guy at all. Pale skin, fish eyes—he must be half Umbanda (a pai do santo). Mom already saw him in Buenos Aires; the guy warned her back in September that Dad was going to get arrested, but he didn’t pay any attention, and she never forgave him for it. Now he comes to Mar de Plata specially. He has clients there and stays in the vacation cottage close to the house, on Calle España, almost at Calle Moreno. The guy speaks and diagnoses. He doesn’t use tarot cards, doesn’t look in a crystal ball; he says whatever occurs to him. At night, eating dinner, Mom says he told her she was going to go live in a cold place. In Ushuaia, while Dad would be behind bars, I tell her. She laughs. “Don’t talk hogwash.” (Whenever she’s acting odd she uses these strange words). Now she’s reading Knut Hamsun (the collection bound in blue from Aguilar on bible paper that holds five or six novels per volume). “Hunger, they’ll have to read it,” she says, not addressing anyone in particular, “so that they (she pluralizes) can see what it’s like to scrounge.” When she isn’t reading novels, she looks nervous and argues with Dad (“Can you tell me why we came to this opprobrious city?”). Opprobrious city, that’s not so bad.
Thursday
There’s a postal workers’ strike, so I don’t get a letter from Elena and can’t send the ones I’ve written to her (I have three). An unsettling interval. Will she know it is because of the strike? (I’m going to call her tonight.) The strike will accumulate so much delayed correspondence that it’s pointless to think the letters I sent will arrive.
Possible careless treatments of loving correspondence: the postman burns them; the messenger is kidnapped violently. The letters that don’t reach their destination, how many will there be? Lovers interrupted by the union uprising: it’s an interesting subject for a novel. Political history does not permit our love…
Monday
The funny thing is that Dad saw one of the delegates for the Internal Commission of Central Post on Calle Luro in his office (the guy signed in as sick and waited his turn in the living room). Surely he parrots Perón’s doctrine (now that we’re reconciling with Frondizi we have to “tighten things up…”). Don’t worry, Doctor, we won’t deliver a single letter to those turncoats, etc. (And my son’s letters, you couldn’t take them to his friends? he might have said). The letters don’t go out until Wednesday…
Thursday
If I’m bored and I spend the day without talking to anyone, I let myself be carried away by murderous impulses. Today I pushed a half-crippled old man I stumbled into on Calle Mitre. “Hey, want to get out of my way?” I said to him, and while he apologized politely I gave him a judo-style elbow and he stood gasping half-bent over on the side of the church. A while ago I threw the kitten against the wall. It bounced like a ball with a terrified meow, all of its hair standing on end and all four feet splayed a meter above the floor, and no sooner did it fall than it dove behind the dresser (and is staying there), and that’s my own cat, Fermín, and I like how he spends a long time watching the cloudless sky. I don’t answer Mom and she gets really angry. Look, Emilio, don’t get funny with me. She says “Emiiliio,” when she’s angry, like scratching a blackboard (Emiiliio); otherwise she calls me “son” or “dear” or “M” and speaks formally (and that infuriates me). In my family, it’s very common to speak formally; it always seems like they’re messing with you. “You ought to send your regards once in a while,” said my Uncle Mario when he said goodbye.
Thursday
Jorge is in Julio’s house; we talk for a while. The narrator, should he be unreliable or distant? Unreliable: Dostoevsky, Faulkner; distant: Hemingway, Camus in The Stranger. Eduardo G. arrives with his experienced air. “I’ve got cash,” he says, and we put together a game of poker. I lose, I lose (with a full house), I lose all evening and finally win a big pile with a royal flush because Eduardo thinks I’m bluffing (he has a pair of kings and bets everything). He leaves furious because it seems to him that I played a trick. I say nothing, he wants me to believe he caught me cheating (we go on with this, out in the street and later in the bar on Independencia and Colón with the jukebox, listening to Frankie Laine). When Eduardo—as Dostoevsky would say—believes, he believes that he does not believe, and when he does not believe, he believes that he believes… and he loses everything. If only I were a liar. A disillusioned young cheater (who knows all the ladies), he travels by train through the provinces, gets off at lost stations, stops in at the plaza hotel, makes a show paying for drinks, with the air of a bored traveler, half-innocent, wakes up all the little widows in town; he accepts a game of poker in the social club the night before moving on…
Sunday
In the Ambos Mundos bar, with the members of the film club, is the Englishman—tall, wearing a hat, in a white pilot suit (a costume); he speaks with a strong accent, is working for an American company at the port that exports fish. He set out from Alaska, and they say he is a well-known writer in New York, Steve M. He’s always joking. Last night he showed off a six-page letter and said it was from Malcolm Lowry. Apparently he wrote his thesis on Under the Volcano at Columbia in ’53 (the first thesis in the world about the novel, he said, as if it were a heroic deed). Here, no one knows this book, even though Oscar Garaycochea, who is a genius, remembered The Lost Weekend, the Billy Wilder film, because there was a reference to Lowry in Sight and Sound magazine. “Yes,” said Steve, “Lowry almost went crazy when that film premiered.” He knew him personally; he visited him in Canada and Lowry spent a week in Steve’s apartment in Brooklyn. He had to hide the whiskey from him, according to Steve, who, at the same time, is getting drunk little by little. Lowry took his bottle of aftershave lotion. Is he lying? It could be. He’s brilliant, very entertaining, and he already picked up all the girls from the national school who came there that afternoon.
I wrote down some of the things he said: “Lowry wasn’t a novelist, he was a pure autobiographical writer. He wrote many personal diaries, a frenetic writer of letters.” He made seven versions of Under the Volcano. He said he would give us the novel if we read it in the bar. “I’m renting it,” he said. “Illegal to lend it out.” The novel takes place in Mexico.
Saturday
Compare Holden Caulfield and Silvio Astier: the two are sixteen years old (like me). One complains, has existential problems, wants to go to live alone in a forest; the other has no money, steals books from a school, wants to be a writer and rebel in the city. See the scene in Mad Toy of Astier with the boy who wears women’s stockings in the one-peso hotel, on Talcahuano and Tucumán, and the scene in Cat
cher of Holden with Carl Bruce in the Wicker Bar at the Seton Hotel. Holden is lyrical, rebellious, sensitive (the little sister); Silvio is desperate, has no exit, and is a whistle-blower. In Salinger the orality is light, lexical, self-pitying; in Arlt it is harsh, antisentimental, syntactical.
According to Steve, Lowry had to change the initial name of the character of the consul, William Erikson, because he found out about the murder of an American with the same name who died in the same way.
Wednesday
News in today’s papers (May 21, 1958). Side A: “A submarine of unknown nationality was attacked by the Argentine Navy in Golfo Nuevo. The damaged vessel managed to disappear.” Side B: “The British Admiralty announced that the submarine Avhros was damaged in waters of the Atlantic Ocean by an unidentified airplane.” The only people who believe the news in the papers, says my father, are the journalists. True, says my mother, only the people who wrote it believe what they’ve read. Lately she is witty, Ida—happier, very clever. The other day she said, “My brain is running cold you know, like it was in the Frigidaire.”
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 4
