The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  In order to think, you must stop making decisions. You must strain your intelligence in the useless exercise of pure thought. Indecision is now an illness of thought. And that exercise is the origin of philosophy. Therefore, thought is of the same order as illness and paralysis. I understand this illness as supreme indecision. After thirty years of practicing perfect thinking, my body was won by thought and took on the form of thinking in place. My entire body transformed into the pure thought of the homeland.

  I am the final Argentine thinker, but still I have not been annihilated; I was on the verge but managed to save myself.

  Once he understood the theoretical meaning of his illness, he managed to enter that world populated with material and death with its incredible and varied transformations, clearing away from the materials of civilization the prejudices, the cruelty, the interests that have accumulated like detritus, like white ashes, amid the engineering and bricklaying, and there remained the work of the man interred: earth, water, winds, and dear voices. They survive on a plain of ashes, just enclosed in transparent capsules, a dreaming crystal lost in the great salt mines.

  Now he thought about woven patterns. Do you know the criollo weave? Thread, knot, cross and knot, red, green, thread and knot, thread and knot. Sarmiento’s mother, under the pear tree, weaving on the loom of sorrows. That phrase from Fierro: “the life of every gaucho you see is woven thick with misfortunes.” It is chilling to see the way things are woven into the looms of mysterious spiders. His primary concern was to uncover those secret processes. Just there, in the book he would write in exile, the final book of the final thinker, which he had begun to call The Book of the Looms, he would try to sketch out the machine of impersonal events. The mechanical spinning and bookkeeping of fate! Before, it had been believed that it was essential to know something of mechanics, of physics, in order to explain social phenomena; today, biology, cut off from the physical world, is the only thing that can assist us. Can you imagine what the meta-mechanics of colloids could be, for example? Of course you can imagine it. He had discovered the great social embryos that were once called looms. They are weaving somewhere; he must find out where! And our lives are patterns, woven into the plot. It will still cause an institution to take the form of a wasp, another that of a crab, another that of an eagle, and there is no more than a single factory for everything! Ah, if he could break through, even if for an instant, to once more see the workshop where all the looms work. Would he then waste time watching the weave under a magnifying glass? The vision lasts a second. Then I fall into the brutal dream of reality. I have so many terrible things to tell.

  I am the last anarchist and the deprived thinker par excellence. No one is more deprived than I (of everything). He worked on his definitive book, which would be a detailed exposition of his discovery, superimposed and woven and intermingled with a musical history of his life.

  Out of pure testamentary willpower, he had decided that his book would not be published until a date he would leave in an envelope, which was to be opened twenty-five years after his death. Not before or after. True legibility is always posthumous. We write for the dead, and also for the secret police. Because they read everything, record everything. Deep down, we write for state intelligence. How could we prevent them from reading us? He would like to become an unpublished author. In his Address to the University, he was going to hint that he was thinking of publishing his book under a pseudonym, but not just under a pseudonym, under a name that no one could even remotely associate with his own. Nobody would know what name he was thinking of using. For example, he had thought of publishing it as an anonymous book, but that would draw attention. Wouldn’t it be better to publish it as a previously unpublished book by a well-known author, to attribute it to another, allow it be to read as if it came from another? He would like it if any book published after his death could be read as his work. That was his bequest to the stupefied youth of Argentina. That was the enigma that he left to the inquisitive. No better act than to change his name and be lost in the plains like Fierro’s children. A book lost amid the sea of future books. A riddle launched into history. A work envisioned in order to pass, so to speak, unperceived. So that one might discover it by chance and understand its message. That was his strategy in the face of the politics of ignorance, isolation, menace, and warfare that the dominant intelligentsia had initiated.

  Where all grow rich and shower themselves with honor, I construct a plan to annihilate myself. The decision was symmetrical to one he had made when he got his start: just when he received the highest honors and was recognized as Argentina’s greatest poet and the most virtuosic master of the language, he had stopped writing poetry. The willingly unknown masterwork, encoded and concealed among all books.

  Sometimes, he said, he would imagine that night, when little time remained before his Address to the University; he was already walking toward the podium and had, resignedly, already listened to the praise from his enemies. He was going to climb the steps with grace and ease. Standing before the multitudes, when the applause quieted down, with the light of the lamps on his face, seeing no one, dazzled and lucid, he would begin by saying:

  I have come here tonight, ladies and gentlemen, to speak to you of a unique discovery, and also to bid you farewell. I thought of giving you a little musical performance on my violin. It would have been an excellent means of synthesizing my thought, if I performed before you a discourse made of music. You would be able to see my mastery in the art of violin as a reprise of my mastery in thought. But I have cast that possibility aside, because I would not have been able to make one of the announcements I wish to make tonight—strictly personal announcements. We are at war. My combat strategy can be summarized by two principles. First, I only attack those things that triumph; sometimes I wait until they succeed. Second, I only attack when I find no allies, when I am alone, when I compromise myself alone.

  I think, and that changes nothing. I am alone. I am comfortable in this solitude. No light thing weighs upon me. I am robbed by the pain. I am here in gratitude. Would it not be opportune, then, to be so bold as to point out the final part of my nature?

  I have lived exposed to the crude light of the Argentine language for too many years not to suffer burns on my skin. Because the light of language is like a chemical ray. That clear light, the purest water of the mother tongue, kills the men that expose themselves to it. The spots on my skin were proof of my alchemical pacts with the national language’s secret flame. That light is like gold. The light of language distills gold from poetry. That has been another characteristic of my illness, which many have considered a symptom of madness. Few have known that excessive exposure to the light of the Argentine language, that clarity, and those who have all pay the price with their bodies, because the light of language martyrs everyone who is exposed to its subtle transparency.

  If I am going to begin and so on and so forth, he told me, I will humbly expose my thoughts to all who have gathered to listen to me in the Great Hall of the University, on the edge of Patagonia, within the bounds of austral thought. And I will end thus: I renounce my seat, which I have referred to as Sociology of the Plains. Does such a suggestive title not call your attention? It is plain space, it is the desert, it is the endless outdoors, as the poet said, and it is there, ladies and gentlemen, where I plan to lose myself. Thank you very much.

  ‌6

  Diary 1960

  March 29

  Tedium, uncertainty. I write sitting in my car, facing a garage that will fix the engine. We came into this town. Morán gives me some accounts of Steve while we kill time in a café.

  March 31

  We arrived after noon. Today I declared a major in history at the College. Everything is still very confusing, the streets too wide. The city very calm. As always, a sensation of precariousness, of only passing through. It costs me something to accept that I will live here, alone, for several years. A voluntary lack of any anchor, which turns into a retrospective nosta
lgia (always: thinking about Adrogué). Close to me, someone is speaking over the phone. Complains about having not been expected and having traveled uselessly. I am empty and neutral—distant, as always. A strange feeling of freedom.

  Yesterday, a reunion with Elena. I felt she was more distant now than when I really was far away from her. I have to cut it short to shake off the feeling that, to her, I am the same person I was at the stupid age of sixteen. I keep the relationship going as though deep down I wanted to change that image of myself.

  All that comes is new. Imposing a code on myself and following it. Making myself someone other than who I am, beginning at zero, without any burden or anger. The fundamental thing is to endure, to try to live through what comes without thinking, attentive to the present. Fixating on the little things: the minute rituals that save me from the experience of emptiness. Being here, transformed into a student, is only a means for me to write for a few years without too much interference.

  April 1960

  I went to my first class at the University, “Constitutional History,” taught by Silvio Frondizi. He recalled the hypotheses of Max Weber on Protestantism and capitalism. The slogan, according to him, ended up being “laborare est orare.” Personal wealth as proof of God’s grace.

  Yesterday, I spent the night in the boardinghouse—a room over a lattice-work patio, a double door.

  Saturday, April 2

  All afternoon spent writing letters. It is my most habitual writing activity, even more habitual than this diary. We could imagine a man who stays connected to the world only through correspondence, who writes letters to diverse and unknown addressees with the same enthusiasm as to old friends. For my part: a letter today to my mother, a letter to Julio, a letter to Jorge, a letter to Helena (with an H). From a public telephone, I spoke laboriously with Grandfather Emilio, who insists that I come to live with him in Adrogué. I dissuaded him with quips, jokes, and complaints.

  Sunday

  I went to the game. Boca 2 – Students 1. Soccer brings me back to childhood once again, the world of my father, of my aunt and uncle, who would go to the field with me on Sundays for as far back as I can remember.

  Monday 4

  At the college, “Introduction to Philosophy.” Eugenio Pucciarelli spoke about the pre-Socratics. In the afternoon, I went to the University library to get a library card (I already have one, querida, I almost said to the woman at the desk). Afterward, a history assembly at the student center. Young people with leather jackets and serious faces. One of these Papaleos asked me about my politics; I declared myself an anarchist and quickly came into contact with the group identifying as such.

  The concept in Socrates. The same as the geometers, who reduce the most complicated modes of existence into the sensible reality of pure forms: polygons, triangles, quadrilaterals, circles. Socrates does the same with the moral world. He applies intellectual intuition to say what constitutes actions, intentions, resolutions, the modes of conduct of mankind, and he reduces them to a certain number of concrete forms—for example, justice, moderation, temperance.

  For the Greeks, to ask oneself what something is means to give the reason for it, to find the reason that explains it. They call this reason that explains it “logos” (from there, logic). In his Latin translation, “logos” becomes “verbum,” which before, for Socrates, meant conversation. The name that is given to something is what we now call a concept.

  April 8

  We go to the Archives of the Province of Buenos Aires for the first time. It is in the depths of the Galería Rocha. Enrique Barba conducts us among the infinite and numerous documents that cover the walls.

  We learn to copy from the folios, to indicate the turn of a page precisely and to put “illegible” in brackets when a word or a paragraph has deteriorated from moisture or from time or because the handwriting of whoever transcribed or wrote it originally was an incomprehensible graphology. You never know what you will find, Barba told us, by searching randomly, following uncertain clues, guided by instinct, which must be a historian’s primary virtue. We search because we have a hypothesis, but we will never write it down until we have documented certainty. And then he said a sentence that I loved: “Any book of history that does not have five footnotes per page,” he made a theatrical pause and concluded, “is a novel.” (It seemed to me an excellent definition for the genre of the novel).

  Barba lives in the archives, spends more time in that subterranean gallery than in his house, and has specialized in Rosas’s rise to power; that is to say, he has worked as a deep-sea diver within three years of Argentine history, three years only, which he knows better than his own life. Almost thirty years dedicated to understanding three years. Extraordinary. He knows everything from that period, knows whether it rained on Rosas’s camps one day in February of 1829 or how many men formed his personal guard, and also the names of each and how they dressed, what they ate, and how they behaved before the commander.

  Friday 15

  A friendship with Luis Alonso: he declares himself a poet, a disciple of Luis Franco, and comes from Catamarca. He lives in a hotel on 6th and 50th. Our “affinities” are, in fact, arguments. His aggressive politics question my skepticism (which defines me, according to him).

  Monday 18

  I have no interest in recording here my everyday life, my activities and the classes I attend. I have always thought that these notebooks must be the story of an ordinary individual’s pure spirit. The spirit, because what matters exists beyond immediate materiality, because that is the nature of my choice to become a writer.

  In Socrates, logos has morality as its object. Plato extends the field of knowledge, logos, to all of reality, to anything in the world. Plato receives the theory of two worlds from Parmenides. Appearance and essence, falsehood and truth are the two different worlds.

  Idea (neologism): a word invented by Plato based on the root of a Greek verb that means “to see.” Idea = vision, intuition, defined from the point of view of the subject who sees and intuits. Idea is understood 1. as essence, unity of all of the attributes of a thing; 2. as something that has a real existence. Ideas are the existing essences of things in the sensory world.

  Thursday 21

  I get onto the tram after waiting at the intersection, let myself be carried through the city while I read. In this way, I have found a way not to remain still and not to lose my will to read several books each week.

  The Greeks have two terms for time. The first: the period of life, the time span of life, the duration of (individual) life. The second: the duration of time. Time in its whole amalgam of infinite time. Eternity: the totality of time.

  Plato. Time is the moving image of eternity.

  The concept of time is bound to the concept of eternity. Eternity: something that cannot be measured by time because it transcends time. Eternity is always. Thus, it cannot be said that eternity is a projection of time to infinity. Time is an everlasting image of eternity because it moves in accord with the number. Eternity does not negate time but rather bisects it, holds it to its breast; time moves within eternity, which is its model.

  Sunday 24

  Of course, Sundays are ridiculous. On the street, couples pass by with their children; the bars near the College are inhabited by strangers. I return home and lock myself up in my room to write some letters to my friends.

  Wednesday 27

  I have, finally, lost my interior life. I thereby realize a dream that I nourished for years. To live without ever thinking, to act in the simple manner of men of action. Meanwhile, I come and go to the University; I individualize certain faces in the multitude and start to be recognized in turn. That is to say, they have already started to ask things of me: to share some class notes, to attend a student-center meeting, etc.

  May 5

  I place here my established plan of study. I am taking five subjects—in sum, three in history, one in philosophy, and another in literature. I have so many things to do, and I do them with
such frivolity and intelligence, that everything seems simple to me. I try to do several things at the same time to keep myself occupied. Here, I once again make a list to provide a record of my real experience.

  Finish making a clean copy of the notes for “Argentine History.”

  Read about culture during the era of Louis XIV.

  Summary of The Essence of Philosophy by M. Scheler.

  Haircut.

  Library.

  Shave.

  I am slowly discovering the city. I cross Plaza Moreno and take Diagonal 74. By crossing the plaza every day in the same place, I begin to leave a trail marked out on the lawn. One might say that I am making a path.

  For Kant, space and time are forms of our capacity or faculty to perceive; they are forms of intuition. Time is a priori; it does not come out of experience, it is independent of experience, it is not the concept of something real but is, like intuition, a pure form of all possible things rather than something inside of everything. We can conceive of time without events, but not of an event without time.