The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Thirty thousand idiots and despicable tourists milling around on Calle San Martín. It’s easier to swim across the sea and go down a street with no one around.

  Sunday, February 28

  My little cousins (once little cousins) Erika and Elisa want to go dancing. We are planning to go out to Gambrinus tomorrow or Tuesday. I ended the afternoon in a sort of jam session at Julio’s house, listening to several records of the Hot Club Quintet of France with Django Reinhardt on guitar.

  Monday 29

  I went to Maxim’s with Elisa and Erika; music, dancing, conversations. A while later Jorge arrived; he took Elisa for a dance, and I went to the bar with Erika to drink Manhattans. We remembered the beautiful times past. She studies linguistics at the University of Salvador; she’s interested in the original forms of language: metaphors, sayings, riddles, grammatical forms. Afterward, we went to have dinner at the Taberna Baska and finished the night in the casino, where I won fifteen hundred pesos. Unlucky in love, luck in the game, I said to Erika, who immediately turned protective and wanted me to tell her my sorrows. I told her about Lidia with the air of a man who is very accustomed to going out with girls who are getting married the next week. Erika is still single, likes men but not marriage; she is waiting, she told me, to get a doctorate “abroad.”

  Wednesday, March 2

  I went to the beach with Erika. Her sister kept going and went to the Lighthouse with Jorge. We had an unforgettable summer with Erika a long time ago, when we went on vacation in the town of Bolívar. She was from there, and for me she justified leaving my friends behind and spending a season in the country. She was—and goes on being—amusing, intelligent, slightly obscene, and always funny. We talk now as if we were a married couple that has lived together for many years after getting divorced. She takes my decision to study history and dedicate myself to literature very seriously. It seems natural to her and much more intelligent, she tells me, smiling, than to bury myself in one of those “serious” disciplines that aren’t good for anything. She said something very sensible: “Disciplines don’t matter; what matters is the percentage of intelligence of the person studying. For an intelligent and first-rate historian, things will go much better than a mediocre, second-rate attorney.”

  March 3, 1960

  Abstract desires to go on writing in these notebooks despite the fact that—in essence—there is nothing to say. I spent two months doing nothing and have no desire now to relate what happened. I sustain myself with the delusion of Lidia’s return; private fabrications, as if I didn’t know that, as I write this, she is living her own life parallel to mine, also hoping for something else. How to continue a diary that has as its object the delusions of the one writing it and not his real life? First possible reflection: How can we define real life?

  Friday 4

  At the beach today, along with Jorge and my two cousins. When I “think” about Lidia everything is alright; I establish a rationality in which events have an order. If I pause for a moment and cease to be alert, everything falls apart and I miss her. I explained this, more or less, to Erika, the two of us spread face down on a sailcloth, speaking from very close. She sat up then, taking her knees between her joined hands, and said, “You are lost, Emilio; you fell in love with a married woman.” Well, not married, I said; when I met her she was single. She smiled with a treacherous air and said she understood me perfectly. After the beach, we spent the late afternoon on the terrace at Maxim’s listening to Carnevale, a very good piano player who, when there aren’t many people around, plays jazz in the style of Erroll Garner.

  Saturday

  I think it was lucky that I was not at home when Lidia called: I would have run to see her with the predictable result, since she had surely come here with her husband.

  Monday 7

  At Alfar yesterday from the morning onward, with Jorge and the cousins. Long walks along the beaches that extend endlessly to the south. Afterward among the trees with Erika, waiting for the bus to return to the city.

  Wednesday 17

  The greatest pretense is in the very fact of writing these notebooks. Who am I writing them for? I don’t think it is for me, and nor would I like anyone else to read them.

  Sunday, March 27

  I went to vote. Ambiguities of the conscience. I entered the school, determined to cast a blank ballot like the Peronists and my father who follow “Perón’s order.” When I was alone in the dark room I felt the certainty, or rather, had the conviction that I was a socialist, and then I decided and voted the ticket for the left.

  Tuesday 6

  The surprises that I set out for myself. Inventing a causality, a destiny made out of fateful encounters, coincidences; choosing the future, inventing the days that must follow this afternoon.

  Repeating my “methods,” leaving the field open. All because I am caught inside the trap that I knew how to set: inventing a woman, suggesting some history between her and me. Living ambivalently under that illusion, so determined not to let it disappear that I set aside the woman, forget her, determined to watch out for others.

  Since I had that realization, I set out to walk in circles around the center. I found Rafael and Raúl C.; we went to visit Professor Jiménez: always so understanding. “You put too much on yourself, Renzi, and afterward you feel you have the right to ask everything of people.” He stressed the “everything.”

  She is clearly the reason why I went back to writing in these notebooks, in February, when I saw her. From those incidents we could extract a poetics. In order to write, it is necessary to feel uncomfortable in the world; writing is a shield to confront life (and to explain it).

  It is ten at night, and I am listening to Lester Young with Oscar Peterson. The night is cool and clear, I float in a sort of neutral existence. In the window, the branches of the tree are a refuge.

  A familiar story. The sudden flight of my cousin Claudio’s wife. She escaped with a toy soldier, a twenty-year-old conscript, and abandoned her two children. Maggie’s clan is assembled permanently.

  All afternoon walking from one side to another. In Montecarlo I ran into Jorge and Roberto Sanmartino.

  Monday

  When I want to calm myself down, I take refuge in the future: in ten years I’ll laugh at all of this.

  Maxim’s. I became friends with the piano player who makes his living entertaining tourist couples and shows his talent playing jazz for the group of natives who come to listen to him in the winter, when no one is there. Today, with Jorge and the cousins, we are the only ones to clap for him. His name, this piano player, is Juan Carnevale, and they call him Johnny.

  Friday

  Unexpectedly, I escape from the city. I went with Morán, the bookseller who leads the film club. We traveled to Buenos Aires together, and the car broke down in a town along the way and we had to wait about six hours until they fixed the radiator for us. Sitting at the hotel bar facing the main square, Morán started to talk about Steve. I will always remember the tedium of waiting in that ridiculous town, the two of us sitting at a table in the bar, in the hotel where school inspectors and cattle auctioneers would stay, lifting the curtain of rough cloth to see the roads of reddish gravel around the square and the monument to some murderer dressed in uniform.

  We had set out at seven in the morning with the hope of arriving before noon, but the car started to overheat and we had to leave the main route and get on a side street to enter Hoyos, a town less than a hundred kilometers from Mar del Plata. We found a mechanic’s garage where a guy they called El Uruguayo worked; he took a while to come out and, before he examined the car, he went on a tirade about the political situation. It seems he renounced Vítolo, he said, as if we had come to see him to listen to the news. Afterward, he asked Morán to start up the engine and leaned in to listen to the noise, and without touching the car or examining it he said he needed at least four hours of work to get it ready.

  We left to walk around the town, which was the same as all the other t
owns in the province, with roads that get lost among the weeds and little low houses with iron gates. We made some turns and returned to El Uruguayo’s shop, but still more than two hours remained before the car would be ready, so we went to the hotel bar facing the main square and started drinking gin. And a while later, without having anything to pass the time, Morán went back to talking about Steve. He didn’t tell me how he had found out, simply began telling me the facts and his interpretation. The story was so strange that I believed him at once. Morán raised his voice and recounted the same episodes several times over, and it was all crossed with suspicions and sarcasm.

  Monday

  In a few days’ time I’ll be living in La Plata, having new conversations, changing my friends and my address. Today I’ll talk on the phone with Jorge S., who is already in the city and tells me news about the University and this year’s programs. From time to time, I think I ought to study philosophy.

  Monday

  At night, a strange scene with Mom. I got a ticket for the bus at one in the morning. We ate dinner together and were alone because Dad is in Buenos Aires. She talked ironically all night about “new life,” as she calls it, but in the end, a while before I left, she embraced me, crying, and said I was leaving her all alone. It was as if I was setting off for a distant country, and there is something in that, because she knows that I am not going to return home.

  I learn what I want to do from imaginary writers. Stephen Dedalus or Nick Adams, for example. I read their lives as a way to understand what it is all about. I am not interested in inspiring myself with the “real” writers. Dedalus’s disdain for family, religion, and homeland will be my own. Silence, exile, and cunning. He wrote a diary (like me). He read philosophy (Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Vico). He had an extraordinary theory about Hamlet and discusses it in the library chapter of Ulysses. He liked call girls (like me). He went to Paris to escape the world of family (just as I went to La Plata). He wanted to be a writer and wanted his stories and epiphanies to be sent to all the libraries in the world (if he were to die). He admired and went to visit Yeats, a great poet, just as I admire and want to know Borges. That is to say, he saw as his master a writer who could not have been his father but rather his grandfather. Finally, he admired his father’s admiration for Parnell just as I admire my father’s admiration for Perón, even though neither Dedalus nor I are interested in our fathers’ politics.

  ‌5

  A Visit*

  * A classmate from the National High School of Mar del Plata, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s nephew, told me one day that his uncle sometimes came to visit them in the city. I asked him to tell me when, and one afternoon in 1959 the writer received me in a house facing Plaza Dorrego. His frailty and cadaverous air left an impression on me; he entered the living room supporting himself against the walls, but, as soon as he sat down and started to speak, his tone was the same as it was in the extraordinary diatribes that he was writing at the time (¿Qué es esto?, his “catilinarias,” Las 40), which I read with persistent fervor. When I returned home I tried to record what I remembered from the interview, and some years later I wrote the story—based on those notes—which I am revealing here for the first time.

  The government’s intelligence services monitored him for months, censored his correspondence, controlled his visitors, and once in a while a nocturnal voice would threaten him over the phone. He would not treat it as a threat; in fact, he kept up a philosophical and theoretical conversation on the meaning of civil duty and moral responsibility with those deceitful voices. Those men were the new intellectuals, the thinkers of the future; any Argentine knows that a mark will be placed on his life if he dissents, which may be invoked at some future moment to track down and incarcerate him. The services had turned into the political version of the Oracle of Delphi; they decided in secret the fate of entire populations. Now they are the witches from Macbeth who control the power! They suppress everything that can threaten mediocre and average life; they attack diversity in all of its aspects, control it and surveil it, write our biographies. Conformism is the new religion, and they are its priests.

  He had reached a point at which he argued directly with the state, with the spokesmen for the state’s intelligence. Smash and grab exchanges in the depths of night; the voices came and went, through wireless circuits. They hounded him, cornered him, wanted to turn him into an intellectual outlaw. They know that I know; they want to destroy my thought.

  He had made the decision to go into exile. Now he was preparing his Address to the University, in which he would announce this decision. They were planning an homage to his work; he was going to use that event as the stage for his final invective. Would I like to attend? I was invited. He had begun to give shape to his speech: “It would not be untimely nor boastful, ladies and gentlemen, if you permitted me to speak about myself for a moment and employ the first-person pronoun,” he would say. He was obliged to take a personal detour; that was what he would say in his Address to the University. He had been very sick, an unknown ailment of the skin, which could be called the white plague. Five years without being able to read or write! Light scabs that gave off ashes like pale butterflies and smelled of death. His body had acquired a gray tonality. The worst of it, however, the most ridiculous and offensive part, had been the continual itching, an unbearable irritation for twenty-four hours each day.

  During the years of his illness, he had been unable to devote himself to anything but thought. Stretched out on the bed, in clinics, in hospitals, in convalescent homes, in his own residence, with his skin in a state of sweet putrefaction, minuscule burning spots scattered down the length of his body, he allowed his thoughts to flow. During those years, he had thought everything; no thought could surprise him now. My situation was much like that of Job, and rather than reflecting on good and evil I fell into a meditation on my country. For if I was suffering from a small illness, the nation was suffering from a great illness, and if I could have committed a small error in my life, it had committed an enormous one. Both I and my country were sick. In those years of pure thought, he had refined his intelligence to the farthest point to which a cultured man could. Several times, he had confirmed that his thought could pierce the purest crystal. Because reality was transparent, clear as the air, invisible. He must pierce through that transparent clarity, never pause to contemplate the enigmas around which dozens of thinkers crowded, reclining upon the air. As he advanced, the reclining thinkers dispersed into the walls of glass. New corridors and transparent passageways opened endlessly before the dagger of his intelligence. The first point on which he had to employ his intelligence, during the deepest throes of his weakness, when he was on the verge of being vanquished, was coming up with a strategy to prevent them from treating him like a madman. Ladies and gentlemen, they thought my illness was mental, a schizophrenic episode, the real realization of a lunatic’s fragmented body. When, in reality, it was nothing more than exasperation at my connection to my country. My body was the explicit representation of my homeland’s general condition, not metaphor or allegory. Economic, geographic, climatic, and historical settings can, under certain circumstances, collude to act upon an individual. He had asserted this and studied it and demonstrated it before his illness. He had dealt with the hypothesis in Sarmiento, his book about Sarmiento, written in eleven days, in a fit of inspiration, at a working rhythm of three pages per hour, in his country house on Pedro Goyena, his feet sinking into the dust of the plains; he says that a man can represent a nation. And I do not mean to describe him as an intermediary here; I don’t believe in mediation, I believe in the collision of analogous constellations, the direct relationships between irreconcilable elements.

  From music, he had learned to think directly. Because he was an eminent performer on the violin. And music is an unmediated art form: tones, rhythms, contrasts, counterpoints. An individual whose life is decided, conditioned, affected—directly and immediately—by the state of a nation. If s
uch a person can crack the cipher to a political destiny in his personal life, he will understand the movement of history. He had said this in many of his books. But he had now decided to treat himself as the object of investigation and in this way to complete his work, begun more than thirty years ago, that Argentinian meditation that the academic community would honor in the final days before his exile.

  The book that I announce to you today will deal with my own life, the life of a reclusive poet and thinker who with his existence replicates the deep tendencies of his country. That book will be at once an autobiography, a treatise on science, a manual of strategy, and the description of a battle. The history of the final anarchist and the final thinker.

  During the years of his illness, he had entered a territory of absolute darkness. A territory given over to witch doctors and neuropaths, but a territory also inhabited by living beings, stuck between inert misery and the vastness of the plain. He had not invented this territory out of superstition but rather from a sense of hopelessness. And coming to be hopeless can be a lifelong project. There is an extreme lucidity in extreme illness, not for its content but for its form. There are unhealthy thoughts that exist because they are false, and there are wholesome thoughts that nevertheless take the shape of an illness. Ladies and gentlemen, knowledge is like an abstract disease, produced by a body that is not fated to think, he would say in his Address to the University. But this sickness is not a metaphor; it is an ailment of the body, the white plague. Like the oyster and the pearl, if you still insist that I express myself through metaphors.