I ordered one gin and then another; I felt a strange euphoria, as though I could finally taste the harsh flavor of life. I was eighteen, lived alone, and, the same as every time I had money on me, felt calm and safe touching the bills in my pocket: I could enter the station and buy a ticket to anywhere and travel for days on a long-distance train to the north, I could look for a woman and pay her to be with me tonight. Find a haughty Nastasya Filippovna who would sell her body like in the novel. Myshkin had taken part in the bidding because he wanted to save her, but, in the end, when the villain Rogozhin raises the offer to an inconceivable sum, Nastasya agrees to go off with him. Time seemed to pause in that masterful scene: all are looking at her; she accepts the thick wad of bills, takes a few steps and, with a sweetly wicked smile, throws the money into the fireplace. There were cries, voices, and then a silence that seemed so deeply buried in the plot that I let myself crawl through the madness of the story once more. The men exchange awestruck looks at this deranged act; Rogozhin curses her and tries to recover the money from the flames, while the Prince cries disconsolately. Suddenly the lights went out and then shot back to life; they were going to close the bar, the waiters were placing the chairs on the empty tables, there were no longer any girls in the private booth. It was almost three in the morning; the city was still.
I went out into the cold air of the night and buried myself in my coat to protect myself from the icy wind. Some lights still shone in the station, but I decided to return to my room and crossed the corner toward the diagonal, looking for the taxi stand, and saw one of the girls from the bar taking shelter in a doorway, as if she had been waiting for me.
“Where are you going, chiche? Take me with you?” she said.
She was blonde, petite, with lots of eye makeup, about my age, or maybe younger, and was wrapped up in a white sheepskin coat.
“You’re one of the ones who works in El Rayo.”
“I’m not a one and I don’t work there, I stop by El Rayo. And what’s up with you? You look like a ghost,” she laughed. “Let’s go together.”
“I don’t feel like it, nena.”
“Like taking me with you? You’re boring…”
“Here comes a taxi, take it, come on.” She did not move and the taxi kept going, so I stepped into the doorway.
“I don’t have any paper,” she said, and rubbed the tips of her fingers together. “Gimme a cigarette.”
We smoked under the light, refugees from the early-morning air. I sensed the harsh odor of worn hide from her leather jacket and listened to her talk in her childlike voice, never stopping, as though she were frightened. She told me she was from Chivilcoy, that her name was Constanza, but they called her Coti; she lived in Tolosa, said she had lots of inner energy and was a follower of La Virgen del Carmen. She moved under the light, thoughtful, and seemed to be offering herself to whoever would buy her.
She took me by the arm and squeezed herself against me; if I didn’t take her with me, I would have to sleep here until the station opened and the first train departed at six. She looked down at the little Mickey Mouse watch that she wore on her wrist.
“I’m used to sleeping here,” she said. “Guys do their things and then don’t take me back, but it doesn’t matter to me. I study theater, and Stanislavski says an actor needs to get accustomed to everything and everything is useful for emotional memory.”
Suddenly I realized she was slightly delirious. She seemed younger up close—must have been fifteen, sixteen. Thinking of that aroused me and then, almost without thinking, I moved a step away from her and Coti moved back as though she had seen something dark in my face.
“Don’t hit me…” She threw herself backward.
“What are you saying… You’re so beautiful. Here, take this.” I slid the roll of bills into her coat pocket. “I need to leave. Keep it. Here’s a taxi.”
A taxi came down the street and I waved at it.
“What did you give me?” she asked, and took a step to the side, the pile of money in her hand. “Money for nothing, but what are you thinking, you pervert? Are you trying to humiliate me?” she said, and started to throw the cash to the ground. “You think I’m a beggar,” she said, and headed for the taxi as I collected the bills from off the sidewalk.
“Take it. Let me help you…”
“You’re drunk, who do you think you are?”
She got into the taxi, which sat against the curb of the sidewalk with the light inside turned on.
“But you’re being crazy… Don’t you see, I won at the races… Put down the window.”
She was already inside, as though exhibited in a lit shop window, and she shook her head, though I could see she was laughing.
“Give me a kiss,” I said.
I opened the door and the taxi tore off while I sat with her and started to kiss her and feel under her blouse and the driver watched us in the mirror.
“Turn off the light,” I said. She had curled up against my chest. “Where are you going?” I asked her.
“To the hotel,” she said.
“My place is better.”
We spent the night together. She seemed like a little girl. Really she was a little girl, but she moved and spoke like she had seen it all before. She stood up, naked, and inspected the room, opened up the Dostoevsky novel.
“What are you reading? Uy, you really are boring… He doesn’t understand emotional motivation. The characters all seem crazy; they do whatever, no emotional memory. I study theater with Gandolfo…”
“What? You go to Buenos Aires?”
“No, they come here to Fine Arts; he and Alezzo give a class. I want to do a show in El Rayo. I’m rehearsing—didn’t you see me today? If I had the money I’d go to Buenos Aires, I have a friend who works at Bambú… She’s a contortionist, does stripteases. She’s doing really well…” She looked at the photo of Faulkner on the wall, examined the wardrobe, and I heard her rummaging through the first-aid kit in the shared bathroom down the hall.
At noon we went out onto the patio, and she immediately started seducing the provincianos who lived with me, including the extremely shy one from Bardi. She stayed with us for a couple of days, passed from one room to another each night. I heard her laughing or crying out in her little doll’s voice while I read Dostoevsky. The second part is not as good as the first.
8
Diary of a Story (1961)
Tuesday
I’ve been in Adrogué since Sunday. My grandfather saw me arrive as though no time had passed.
“Hijo, better set yourself up in the back room. We have a lot to do…”
Ever since he started losing his memory (he says), he has been worried and wants to get his papers in order. The doctors have prohibited him from going out, and that is what makes him the most nervous.
“I didn’t lose myself in the Isonzo. See if I lose myself [‘go astray,’ he says] here.” He pauses, thinking. “I already gave you the money, no?”
He gave me the money. He is afraid of losing his maps, the photos, the letters; he hired me to organize his archive, pays me a salary, etc. I learned from him to say etcetera when I want to change the subject, but he pronounces it more emphatically in Italian: echétera, he says, and makes a gesture with his hand as if to say, “I don’t intend to go on with this.” In reality, he is paying for my degree. “I don’t want you to become some erudite asshole,” my son-of-a-bitch father said.
“He was hoping I’d be an attorney…”
“So you could get him out of jail,” Nono laughs, with his fox’s eyes. He would rather I stay and live with him here, to finish organizing his documents. I suggest that he move to La Plata, but he laughs at the idea.
“I’d have to sell the house, buy there.” He paused, thinking. “Moving is always diabolical,” he said. It is a quote, but he does not remember whose. He is losing his mind, he says, but he knows a multitude of poems and songs by heart and sometimes sings them, alone, on the patio, with his beautiful bar
itone voice, now so soft and fragile.
Susy, the woman who takes care of him, prepares us a stew of lentils and we eat on the patio, under the grapevines.
“Colonel,” says Susy, “I’m upstairs, call for me if you need anything.” The old man drinks wine with seltzer and smokes his smelly, one-peso toscano cigars.
We stayed silent for a while. That night was beautiful.
“Hijo,” he says, and reads my thoughts once again, “we are well outside, out in the open… Lucky thing that you came, you are in La Plata, no?”
His memory is captured by the war and he doesn’t know well what to do with this tumult of images and scenes. Sometimes I put on the recorder and save what he recounts, other times I let him talk; he thinks nothing will be lost so long as I am listening.
“Very close to the German lines, little officer Di Pietro,” he says, for example, “was crawling like a Boy Scout to observe and listen to the enemy in the trenches. The white light of the spotlights was like a veil…” he remembers suddenly, and pauses, dazzled.
It is always like this that he narrates short fragments, very vivid, but they are cut off, never concluded. I write them down with the hope that he will resume them and they can be finished… He participated in the great offensive against the Austrians, fortified at the heights over steep ravines between Monte Nero and Monte Mirzli.
“It was an attempt at mass suicide…” He goes on thinking. “Once, in Patagonia, I saw hundreds of white whales that hurled themselves onto the beaches to die; we threw them back into the sea and they returned to swim furiously toward the shore, where they gasped for hours… Something like that…” (He said it in English: “Something like that.”)
They hit him in the chest and he was buried in the snow all night long—lucid, frozen. His blood spread out around him, and the mountainside was red in the morning, but the extreme cold saved him. If I ask him about it, he grows confused and does not answer. They are like shards, brilliant flashes, perfect, without elision. I would have to narrate it in that way, I think sometimes.
Thursday
When I wake up, I see my grandfather in the garden, reading in the sunlight. He is sitting in a canvas chair, barefoot, his slim torso naked, dressed in elegant blue-colored linen pants, the scar on his chest is an ugly reddish serpent. The sun helps him to absorb, so he says, the vitamin E preventing oxidation, and on top of that he takes white pills that fortify, it seems, his brain cells and drain, as he says, the lagoons of amnesia, the mental fatigue. For that reason, he also drinks large doses of Nervigenol and does constant mental exercises: reciting the recruitment numbers of the soldiers from his platoon or repeating the surnames of the sailors who gave their names to the streets of Adrogué—Bouchard, Norther, Bynnon, Espora, Grandville.
“Who would have thought it—they’re all sailors, English, French, European criollos, there were pirates, privateers, they sailed for plunder…” He paused, blinded by the sun. “¿Le trincee dove sono?, domandò el ufficialetto Di Pietro appena arrivato sul San Michele. ‘Trincee, trincee… ’ fu mi resposta. ‘Non ci sono mica, trincee: ci sono dei bucci.’” He looked at me as if waking. “Pits, gullies, those were the trenches.”
Before I could say anything, he stopped, picked up the canvas chair, and moved through the garden, seeking the heat of the sun, still agile.
First he sits in the open air to gain strength, then Susy helps him with his gymnastic exercises, and afterward he spends the greater part of the day in the rooms inside and I listen to him singing (Bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao ciao) or muttering names and dates in a monotone prayer, so as not to think. I am close at hand, in case he needs me, and thus we pass the day, so I write a story at night, while he sleeps or pretends to sleep.
I met Lucía at the beginning of March, although “meeting” is a figure of speech; I had seen her and was approaching her little by little—obliquely, I would say, like someone following an image in the window of an illuminated house. We were in the great hall of the College of Humanities, in Rovel’s class, and we were moving closer as his lecture on The Great Gatsby progressed.
When Rovel analyzed the [extraordinary] scene of the house open onto the bay, with [the white curtains that waved and] Jordan and Daisy lying on the sofa facing Tom Buchanan’s entrance, I saw her appear, dressed also in white because it was the end of summer and the lindens were blooming. She arrived late, the class already begun. Blonde, beautiful, fair in the light afternoon air. She waited, paused in the hallway watching Rovel, who was drawing a blueprint of Gatsby’s house at Great Neck on the blackboard.
“Everything is moving, and Tom goes to close the curtains as though he wants to stop the disorder,” he said, and turned toward Lucía. “And you, why don’t you sit down? Do me a favor.”
Confused and hurried, she sat down immediately in one of the rows on the side after making her way between the students. The world paused for an instant, because she was too beautiful [and attracted too much attention] and knew, like no one else, the art of interruption [the art of being out of place], like the heroine of a novel about which we barely know the main points, brought along and carried by the narration’s weak movement. Clearly she was not the heroine of any novel because, if she had been, I would have saved her.
Wednesday
Yesterday we worked all day in the room full of letters. He rereads them, classifies them. Before, it had been the dinette, but now it is a room of filing cabinets where he keeps letters in numbered folders. The possessions, sometimes in their envelopes, he has placed in a glass cabinet. When I was a boy, he would let me play with the binoculars of a French cavalry officer. How he got them I never asked. I watched the world through the glasses turned backward and everything, even my grandfather, still young at that time, appeared minute and distant, enclosed in a circle like drawings in a cartoon.
Now my grandfather only wants to talk about his time in charge of the Second Army’s post office. They posted him there after he had spent a season in the military hospital of Trieste, recovering from the chest injury that he received during the hallucinatory offensive of the Isonzo (a million deaths), and he did not then return to the front.
He was charged with writing letters to the families of the dead soldiers, announcing the deaths of their beloved, and with sending them the objects found on their bodies. Especially the half-written letters, never sent or interrupted by death.
Mama carissima, I am all wrapped up tonight, writing to you with my hands warmed by the woolen gloves that you knitted for me—I made a little hole with my bayonet in the point of the index finger and thumb to free up my fingers so I can hold a pencil and write to you. I am wearing many layers of clothing, one on top of another, and with my Alpine hat I look like one of the fat dwarves from Snow White. The trench is deep, and I can nearly stretch out my legs to sleep. It is three in the morning. The night is gray because there is a full moon. We are trying out the new watches, a novelty here. They attach with a little leather belt around the wrist. It has an illuminated dial and numbers, so we can see the time without raising our heads and putting ourselves in danger, like I used to have to do with Papo’s round covered watch, which I keep well protected in my pack to give back to him when I return. The wristwatch is a new invention. The army is distributing them, and I got one in the first round of deliveries; everyone comes to look at it and admire it. It looks like a woman’s watch, but it’s beautiful and reliable. Sometimes I bring it up to my ear to listen to the tick-tock or watch the hour, but I barely have to move. I’m going to give it to Giuseppino as a present when I come back home. Right now I am going to…
They were written in the laborious handwriting of rural people and in several cases were interrupted—and stained with blood—by the explosion of a grenade or an invisible and lethal bullet. In the folders, Grandfather also had copies of the improvised epitaphs that had been scrawled on the wooden grave markers erected over the bodies or the torn-apart body parts of comrades buried haphazardly under the incess
ant enemy fire.
In fond memory of this unknown soldier of the Italian infantry.
And in a common grave, wherein lay the defenders who had covered the retreat of the last line of the Second Army in Austrian territory, was written, “Foreigner, look here and tell the Italians how we have died, fighting until the end, and here we lie.”
Thursday
From then on I started listening to stories about Lucía; they said that she had abandoned her degree and was now retaking the courses, that she had been hospitalized, that she had gotten married to a cousin of her father’s, a wealthy dandy who was twenty years older than her and lived out in the country.
[It was said that she had married and separated from the husband, that the ex-husband lived in the country, that she had been hospitalized—the word “electroshock” was whispered.] Lucía had been married at seventeen to a cousin who was thirty years old.
“It wasn’t her cousin. He was her father’s cousin…”
A man from the country. [She went back to her studies because they had separated. She was a little older than us.] There was something strange in that marriage, a secret detail that no one understood.
She was older than us, had abandoned and resumed her studies several times, had married at seventeen and had a daughter, and now she was nearing thirty and had returned, as she herself would say (“Turned up again like a lost glove”). At that age, she was someone with plenty of experience and everyone walked around her as though she had her own light.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 12
