The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Time is not a concept, it is an intuition; one cannot think of it by means of concepts. It is a mode of our awareness, of our lived experiences.

  Space and time are modes of thought; they are ideas that exist in our minds prior to all observations of phenomena. Molds into which we pour the results of experience. They are subjective, not independent of the observer. Time is a necessity for thought.

  I listen to Marian McPartland, a woman who plays jazz on the piano with an inflection at once lyrical and furious.

  Saturday, May 7

  Antonio, the brother of the boardinghouse’s owner, is a defeated man—celibate, passionate about the Culture (capitalized). He lives complaining about books that he still has not read. He has a girlfriend whom he met when he turned fifty. We have a common interest in Martínez Estrada. He keeps his library in his sister’s house to ensure that he will not lose it if, at some point, he ends up getting married and then, as he says, has to divide up the goods when he gets divorced. He collects programs from the Colón Theater, with absurd annotations that try to grasp the gravity of the music heard.

  Best so far have been the classes with Silvio Frondizi, Enrique Barba, and especially Boleslao Lewin. He speaks with a gravelly accent, an air of an erudite Jew that, according to him, scandalizes the liberals of the left (and others as well, he adds). Erudite concerning rebellions (he has written a great book about Túpac Amaru), he is an active anticlerical. One of his central themes is the horror of the Spanish Inquisition in America. He is full of manias and tics and demonstrates the qualities of a European intellectual: erudition and self-confidence. He is, by far, the best among the “respectable professors,” the only one who manages to ensnare us by being passionate about what he does.

  Furthermore, he tells these stories. William Lamport, an Irishman, comes to America in the sixteenth century. Detained by the Inquisition, he succeeds in escaping; it is one of the most storied cases in history of a man who manages to break free from the clerical chains, as he says. He writes a manifesto and posts it in the central plaza of Mexico. He enters the viceroy’s bedroom, wakes him, and delivers a copy to him. He leaves to live with the Indians; in the end they find him, arrest him, and burn him at the stake.

  Monday, May 9

  Aunt Veronica died yesterday. They woke me in the middle of the night, and I traveled on the bus to be present at the wake. People piled up in Lasalle’s house; I had my hair very short, everyone seemed delighted to see it that way. Roberto embraced me, crying, too sentimental for me not to be moved as well (despite my new brightly colored silk tie, which I put on without thinking and which made me feel uncomfortable the whole time, as if I were laughing while everyone else was grieving). I remembered the afternoon when my mother carried me in her arms to the fence with rounded pickets and told me that Uncle Eugenio had fallen off of a train. And my mother said to me, “Don’t you feel sorry that your uncle is about to die?” I started to cry, of course. I was four years old, I imagine, but that memory came to me like a gust of wind when Roberto embraced me, crying, and said to me in a low voice, “She left us.” Then there was a barbecue and we ate on the patio, very cold. Many relatives whom I had not seen in years, arguments in low voices, altered by inheritance. At the burial, I remember a ridiculous succession of figures removing their hats automatically as we pass in procession.

  I spent that night at home with Grandfather Emilio; he did not speak of the death of Veronica, whom he loved and admired for making her own way, as he said, when Gerardo, her husband, stopped working in order to devote himself to politics, as he would say. In reality, my grandfather explained, he was a point man for the conservatives, a handsome electioneer, a minor commander in Turdera. My grandfather laughed explaining that Gerardo, always fashionable, in a double-breasted suit and a hat, was a player who was always looking after his fame and would say to his wife, when asking her for money, “Veronica, got any little stuff?” Nono laughed, because the man would act like he had large bills in his pocket and just needed change.

  Saturday 14

  I often get together with Luis Alonso; he brings me all of the provincial myths. Natural life, lived experience, political conscience, folkloric campfires. We went to a lecture by Silvio Frondizi. He predicted the economic crisis, spoke of the impossibility of a real way out for the nation, except along the road of socialism. Alonso, sitting beside me in one of the chairs in the Great Hall that face 6th Street, said to me, “I want to work so that I can raise myself up to the working class. I don’t want to be one of the enlightened bourgeois.”

  When I heard this it seemed so ridiculous to me that I had an attack of laughter and everyone thought I was crazy because Silvio Frondizi was, at that moment, giving a very serious answer to a question about the state of the world.

  A while ago I argued with Oscar G., who lives in one of the rooms in the house. Deliberately, and with malice, I destroyed one of his delusions. He is in love with a girl, and with an inflexible logic I made him see that it was stupid to get one’s hopes up prematurely. Immediately, I corrected myself; all hope is premature, I told him, you have to live lucidly. I have now succeeded, I told him, in building for myself a disillusioned and cold way of looking. Nothing more.

  Sunday 15

  I went to the theater to see That Forward Center Died at Dawn by Agustín Cuzzani. A kind of allegorical and sometimes entertaining farce about the world of soccer. I left by Calle 44, dark, among the trees, and went back through the city to my single student’s room.

  Tuesday 17

  I am reading The Rebel by Camus. Referring to those who place history as a transcendent tribunal that decides the justice of all choices, he writes, “History, as an entirety, could exist only in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”

  Wednesday

  There is a strike; it began in Medicine and the other colleges gave in. I work on Louis XIV.

  The Greek being is a being without time. For Heidegger, the being is with time, where time is not surrounding and almost bathing the thing (as in astronomy). In astronomy, time is there, surrounding the thing, and transforms it, but the thing is what it is, independent of the time that slips away along with it.

  In existence, time is inside of the thing itself; the very being of the thing consists of temporal being, or rather anticipation, of wanting to be, of the ability to be, the limit of which is death. That is nonindifference, the anguish that is the inherent and tragic characteristic of life. Anxiety of being and fear of the void.

  Saturday, May 21

  From reading my journals, some conclusions arise. A certain romanticism, slightly idiotic; an excess of sensitivity and self-justification. At first glance, nothing has happened to me except for the uninterrupted succession of catastrophes. The slogan of the past years has been “I need to change, to become someone else.” To truly confront reality. If I were to think again about what I have written about Grandfather Emilio, how he stayed in Adrogué when we left, I could, in fact, see that I have stayed with him, in any case, spiritually. Of course, he is the one who pays for my degree since the conflict with my father…

  Sunday 22

  I ask to speak in a plaza, in an unscheduled political act, and I align myself with the critics of Frondizi’s government. Curiously, I do it with great indifference, as though someone else were speaking for me, and it were with someone with whom I didn’t entirely agree.

  Today I played poker at the University Club and won forty pesos.

  National euphoria for the one hundred fifty years since the May Revolution. Frondizi cloaks the nation under the nation’s history. We are all Argentinians; why think about the present?

  I go on writing from here, from my bed—a refuge and not a battlefield.

  Monday, May 30

  Once again in La Plata. It rained for the whole trip; I only just found a taxi in Plaza Italia and here I am. A terrible pain in my back, which worries me.

 
A sharp metaphor for my relation to the body: back pain. I go to sleep in a hard bed. In the boardinghouse, I get a plank in the servant’s quarters in the back. I go to bed and sleep; when I get up the pain continues, but I have yellow fingers. An attack of the liver. I stir up the whole house. A while later it is discovered that, in fact, I have stained my fingers with oxide from the plank or possibly with rust; the truth is that I manage to realize that there is no serious problem with my liver and that the pain may all have been caused by the trip on the bus; I recover, the pain leaves me, etc. Myths born from monitoring my body as though it were a stranger, an enemy.

  June

  To speak of the room in which I live; the space always influences the modes of thought. To speak of the light that isolates me and places me in another reality, again the need to trace limits, to install myself in a sacred zone within which it is possible to watch the world. Then to take refuge in a fragile and luminous space—that is to say, to set aside the darkness. I would have to delineate the regions, to make a personal map of the different places in which I live. There are neutral spaces; they are like a continuation of my body, as if my own figure ended in the border between the light and shadows; here, I write: clarity here, and outside, reality.

  Solitude is a kindly moment if there is someone in the periphery; the only unendurable solitude is that of not “mattering” for anyone. For me, the lonely person is not Robinson Crusoe but rather someone no one knows in the middle of the multitude.

  A class with Pouza about mythology and about the notion of excess in Greek culture, of overabundance as evil. In contrast, equilibrium and harmony are the beginnings of philosophy.

  Thursday 2

  I could make an investigation into the inhabitants of this house. To begin with, the landlady’s husband, with his Vincent Price air, who has lost his job as an accountant for a cold-storage business in Berisso. He wanders from one place to another, made uncomfortable by the vacant time; he buys some things at the market, sweeps the floors. We all know that he has been fired, and he knows that we all know.

  Friday 3

  At the College, the philosophy classes are the most intriguing to me. In history, we spend a great deal of time in the archives. As for literature, I have proposed writing my monograph at the end of the seminar on Argentine literature, taking as my subject the stories of Martínez Estrada.

  Monday, June 6

  I spent a few days in Adrogué with Grandfather Emilio. We went out in the car and drove to Pereyra Iraola Park to get a little air. My grandfather is always in good spirits and makes jokes about himself and the rest of the human race. The experience of the war, so distant, persists within him like a dream dreamt the night before. Equally confusing, equally meaningless: he tries in steps to construct a coherent account. What is vivid for him is divided into two stages: the year he spent at the front, where he was injured and where he saw the horrors up close, and the time when he was in charge of the post office for the Second Army. It was there that he really became aware of what was happening. He was in charge of the letters that were to be sent to the relatives of dead soldiers and also of the classification of personal papers and objects found in the backpacks of the victims, killed in combat. My opinion is that it was this second experience that gave him an all-encompassing view of the war and its cruel and unusual development.

  Tuesday 7

  I am reading Socrates by Rodolfo Mondolfo.

  I recall Nietzsche’s critical position, regarding Socrates as the culprit behind the death of Greek tragedy. I have to work along this line for my final paper.

  Thursday 9

  It rained all day; I spent the afternoon in the archives. Afterward I spoke with Elena over the phone and finally went to Fine Arts and infiltrated the film students’ group to watch a series of Argentine short films. We saw Los pequeños seres by Jorge Michel, The Binder by Dino Minitti, Buenos Aires by David J. Kohon, Diary by J. Berendt, Lights, Camera, Action by Rodolfo Kuhn, Perpetual Motor by Osías Wilenski. The finest were The Wall by Torre Nilsson, a certain expressionism in the lighting and a fragmented and impenetrable story, and Kohon’s Buenos Aires, a sort of lyrical documentary on the city. Berendt and Kohon were present, and spoke about the need to rejuvenate Argentine cinema and to promote auteur film.

  I come here all the time because the School of Film has opened and they are always showing movies that I want to see. I am friends with Edgar Cozarinsky, a very good critic, and Armando Blanco, who studies editing with Ripoll. Here also I met Eduardo Rollie, who teaches aesthetics and has given several classes on the Russian avant-garde of the twenties. He is a graphic designer very influenced by—or very attentive to the influence of—Malevich, Lissitzky, and Rodchenko. He works at the University with Manolo López Blanco, with whom I have also become friends. Manolo tries to develop an aesthetics based on certain hypotheses from Marxism, or perhaps, put better, Trotskyism.

  Friday 10

  The days are all the same. Now I sit in an armchair on the patio. This morning I went to the College. It is ill-advised to think. One must try to make everything slide imperceptibly away.

  Returning to yesterday’s notes about my new friends, they are divided into several categories. The closest is José Sazbón, who studies philosophy and whom I met on the day I first entered the University. I went to the student center to orient myself a little, and one of the people in charge of the center pointed out a young man who looked like a flyweight boxer and told me, “He knows Leibniz.” I approached José and said, “They told me you know the work of Leibniz.” He smiled and said, “I only know what can be known about Leibniz’s work.”

  Saturday

  I am returning to Adrogué; I am on the train. The meetings with Grandfather Emilio are for me the best part of this era. In exchange for the salary he pays me, he has asked that I dedicate myself to organizing his archives. We have decided that I will spend the weekends with him. What he calls “the archive” is a disorderly collection of folders and boxes that contain a variety of materials dedicated to the Italian campaign during the First World War. When I ask how he acquired them, he answers me: “They were all too preoccupied in the work of surviving in the trenches to occupy themselves with the documents and papers that I took, to stop them from being lost.”

  I spent the afternoon playing cards in Club Adrogué with my cousins from childhood: Horacio and Oscar. They meet on Friday nights and go on playing poker until sunrise on Sunday. They employ a chef who cooks meals for them during the weekend. The funny and unusual thing is that they call this section of the club El Sóviet. It is a servant’s quarters remodeled into a room for chess and billiards, which an accomplice at the club lets them occupy in exchange for some money. I dropped in around ten tonight and they greeted me with a slight gesture, as though I had been playing with them, too. I left around one and they were still going, sitting there with a couple of women from work and some people waiting for their turn to play. They are still there now, going on as I write this note. I forgot to mention that I won one hundred seventy-five pesos.

  I go to bed in the back room of the old house in which we have lived since thirteen years ago, a time now distant and strange. My grandfather maintains what I jokingly call “the army routine.” He goes to bed at ten at night and gets up at six in the morning. I hear him, half-asleep, doing calisthenics on the patio and singing patriotic Italian songs in his baritone voice.

  Sunday

  Once again I spend the afternoon playing cards with Horacio and Oscar, who go on as brazenly as ever. The people who play with them sometimes come in from nearby towns, and the poker games have spectators who often place bets, and they do, too, as though they were watching a cock fight.

  Time. Heidegger: temporality as the interior lived experience of man. Temporality as condition. Existence, within its rule, contains time. One must distinguish between the time that is within life and the time that life constitutes. Within life there is the time of physics, which comes from the past. The ti
me that life constitutes comes from the future. A time that begins in the future. The present is the realization of the future. The present is a future that comes into being. And that is the time of life. The time that life constitutes consists of the inversion of the time that is within life. Existence has the property, in particular, that when it has been it ceases to be. When it has passed and is in the preterite, it transforms into a solid material, into something that has the quality of the being within itself, what it already is, that which is identical. Existence is not that: it is anticipation, eagerness to want to be.

  Monday, June 20

  A patriotic day: there is no class today. A long conversation with my grandfather about the most persistent theme in the letters from dead soldiers. “They all announced the forthcoming end to the war,” he told me, and began a sort of litany: “We will be together at Christmas, expect me by next harvest, the war won’t go on past the end of summer.” They all wanted the war to end, he told me, but no one knew what to do to bring it to an end. The devilish thing about it, he told me, is that we all began to understand that the weapons we used were so deadly that no one among us was prepared to bear them. And the weapons were not, in themselves, going to halt the killing. We dug trenches that flooded and then dug a second line of trenches and a third. But this was useless because, from time to time, we had to go out into the open field. He paused: to die, he said.