The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  “Bella ciao, Bella ciao, ciao,” sings my grandfather in the sunlight, sitting on the canvas chair in the flowering garden.

  Monday

  Standing next to the bed, Lucía removed her earrings and began to undress. Blonde, her breasts firm, her nipples dark, the fuzz of pubic hair almost shaved off, as though she were nubile. She had white marks on her skin, a slight pale tattoo that traversed her body. They were signs of childbirth, traces of her past life, which rendered her even more beautiful.

  “You want it like that, pichón?” she said, and leaned in toward me.

  “I don’t need anyone to teach me anything.”

  “I like men who do what they want.”

  It felt like she was always laughing at me. I came close and started kissing her. A feeling of intimacy like none I had ever felt.

  The next day, the brightness of morning kept us up and we could not fall asleep. We had been awake the whole night; we had foregone dreams to talk, to do it (as Lucía would say). We are going to do it now.

  “My daughter has these marks, too, and won’t forgive me for it.”

  Her body had a lunar glimmer, it seemed to disperse when I entered her.

  “When I was a girl, I also had a complexion, but I’m proud now. My mother doesn’t have it, but my grandmother does.”

  “Pale-skinned women.”

  “My grandmother said we had Eskimo ancestry. Imagine, an Eskimo, in the whiteness of the Arctic… They paint their skin with whale oil, lines and lines of black and red. They never say their names; they are secrets, only revealed when they sense they are going to die.”

  “Because, otherwise, their souls are not at peace,” I improvised…

  “Want to smoke?” she asked afterward.

  “I am smoking.”

  “A joint, dummy.”

  She had it prepared in her purse. Closed on one end and with a very fine cardboard filter on the other, which she had surely made herself with great patience, so that the weed would not get wet when it was smoked.

  “Rovel’s nice. When Vicky fell asleep he had a face like he was about to die.”

  “He aspires to being perpetually heard… but how does he know you’re married?”

  “We saw each other a few times in Buenos Aires.”

  I did not say anything. The air moved the white curtains; the light was soft and warm.

  From below, a solemn music reached us; it was Bardi, the nocturnal one who studied engineering and spent his hours listening to music. A perpetual student, very introverted, sending a telegram every now and then to his home in Chaco, saying that he had passed a subject, but after years and years he had never done well in any. [While I was explaining,] Lucía finished dressing. We went down to eat; the house was calm, still. She went out to the patio, looked at the hanging clothes, the flowerpots, the sign for Club Atenas.

  I remember she cooked liver with onions. We had no wine, so we ate lunch with gin. She put in soda.

  “I don’t need to drink alcohol,” she said. “I’ll stop tomorrow.”

  Bardi approached very ceremoniously and, after some hesitation and several apologies, he sat down with us to eat because it was already too late for him to go to the dining hall, which closed at two. He spent his time in Fine Arts, sneaking into musical composition classes. He was very systematic and passionate, the first person to make me listen to Olivier Messiaen and the first to talk to me about Charles Ives. He would reconstruct the history of the music by following an order, listening to all of the works of the musicians who interested him from Opus 1 to the last. He played no instrument, but more than once I surprised him by conducting in the air along to the orchestra playing the work he was listening to. Now he had returned to Mahler. He took out discs from the University library’s music room, three LPs every week. He wanted to forget everything. He hated his father, a politician in Chaco: “A real bastard,” Bardi would say in a soft voice.

  Bardi never graduated, and he got work in Casa América the next year, in Buenos Aires, and I remember one night when, getting off the train, I ran into him at the Constitución station in the area near the bathrooms where casual hookups happen, and he was still very inhibited. Two or three months later he locked himself up in his apartment and never left, and they say that he threw some papers from his window into the street that said “Help,” but no one paid him any attention or read his cries for assistance, and they found him dead.

  But he was calm that day and seemed happy that we were eating with him. He was listening to Mahler’s Fifth, very loudly as was his habit. I think that on that day I was advising him to go to Mar del Plata for the season to work in a bar, in a restaurant, in a hotel; during the summer months, one could save money and live on it for the whole year. He was very serious and listened with great attention, and I offered to recommend him a place where he could stay and live for some months. Lucía also gave him advice, and they agreed straight off that one could live with no money, with almost no money, like Trappist monks or tramps. And we were there in the kitchen, talking, drinking coffee, when the telephone rang. Lucía turned pale and stood.

  She went out to the patio. I did not pick it up either. Lucía, off to one side, near the staircase, stood with her back turned and smoked. Bardi went to the telephone and did not explain when he came back… [It was nobody, he clarified, a man, wrong number.] He was discreet and had understood everything without speaking. She returned to the kitchen and leaned against the wall. How could they have known I was here? I thought. She remained motionless, as though absent.

  It was an example of what Lucía called the symptom of the broken cup. [One of those little porcelain cups that has lost its handle and had it glued back on but with you still able to see the white line at the edge.]

  “I have to conduct myself carefully,” she said, and moved her elbow, as if it were a wing. “It comes apart.”

  We were in La Modelo, spacious and calm at that hour of the afternoon, and it was there that the metaphor of the broken china arose.

  “I was very young when I had my daughter, and she’s more attached to her father than to me.”

  At age five, the daughter was already taking horseback-riding lessons. It seemed elegant to her husband, according to Lucía.

  She told me she had a feeling that time was slipping through her fingers, and the lost hours weighed her down. Not that, she said, that’s backward. How long had we been together? One night and it seemed to have been weeks. If only we could stop time, she said suddenly.

  She took everything seriously, except for her own life. She wanted to do her thesis with Agoglia on Simone Weil. I was thinking of leaving to go live in Buenos Aires; I was working with my grandfather, but I could get a position at El Mundo. I am contributing pieces now and have a friend in the editorial office…

  “What are you writing?”

  “Something for the literary supplement…”

  “Pornography of the middle class,” she said.

  She always spoke the truth, said what she was thinking. We had already related our personal histories, the summaries of each other’s lives, the events one believes to have been decisive. I had started to write stories during that time, and was a bit lost, nearly about to finish my degree without many possibilities except for that work at the paper. The story of that era, which I make for myself now, does not go like that, but that was what I thought of my life in those days.

  “I’d like to have been with only one man, so I wouldn’t have to go back and tell my life over again,” Lucía had said to me. Everything she said made me suffer. And she realized it. She grasped my hand.

  “Why don’t we go to Punta Lara for a few days?”

  “Of course, sure, let’s go. Now that summer’s starting…”

  “By the river. I know a place there.”

  Once again I felt the fires of jealousy.

  “No, let’s go to Dipi’s place. He has a house, he’ll lend it to me.”

  So we went to Dipi’s house, ne
ar the station, a long corridor and two towering rooms with almost no furniture but with books piled up everywhere. Dipi was in bed, drinking yerba maté and reading with his new girlfriend, a Japanese girl who looked like she was thirteen, same as all of Dipi’s girlfriends.

  “She isn’t Japanese, she’s Eurasian,” Dipi said. “Her mother is from Kuban, the Tartar desert. Isn’t that right, nena?”

  The girl smiled and nodded. Dipi, from time to time, between one yerba maté and the next, drank gin but also smoked and caressed the girl.

  “Lucía, come, lie down with us,” he said, and made room in the bed. One on each side. “You can leave, nomás…” laughed Dipi.

  He gave Lucía a yerba maté.

  “Hard to drink maté lying down,” she said, and sat down with me in the armchair.

  “Trilce is her name—well, not her name. I gave it to her because she’s beautiful and mysterious. In the desert—listen to this—in the desert, the Tartars sit around the water’s source to talk, like the gauchos sit around a fire.”

  “What gauchos?” Lucía said.

  “The bums are the only gauchos left,” said Dipi, who was laughing as though his jokes were coming from someone else.

  I remember he made us listen to the first Beatles single that night, with “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You.” The Eurasian Lolita had brought it, having spent the summer in London with her father, as Dipi explained excitedly. According to him, all of his girlfriends and friends were exceptional, first-rate sorts of people, who brought him the latest novelties and the latest news and informed him of the movement of the universe without his having to move from his bed or leave his room.

  Suddenly, Dipi stood up, naked, turned his back to us, and put on his pants. Ceremonious, an astute gleam in his eyes, he moved close to the Japanese girl and then said to me, looking at Lucía, “I’ll trade you for her.”

  “Even better, I stay with her and lend you Emilio,” said Lucía.

  “He’s very ugly,” Dipi said.

  “He looks handsome to me,” said the Japanese girl. “So handsome I can’t look at him.”

  “Graziosissime donne,” said Dipi. “We’re always in the Decameron,” accentuating the first e, in the Italian way. “Look what I have here.” It was a guide of Rome. “My grandfather was born here, close to Nero’s tomb.”

  “It’s handsome, that tomb,” said the Japanese girl, and there I realized that “handsome” was one of her expressions, like saying “hello” or “fine.”

  Lucía seemed happy being there, entertained by the Japanese girl with her stilted expressions and that “handsome” in the middle of her phrases.

  “What a tomb, if they’d buried him in the country, in his villa.”

  “They made it in the third century,” said Dipi. “Because Nero’s spirit appeared to Pope Ludovico III and wouldn’t leave him in peace. Isn’t it funny? Che, but what a good thing you came to visit us. Do you want something to eat?”

  “I’ve come to ask you for a favor.”

  “I don’t have any cash.”

  “The house in Punta Lara, can we use it?”

  “But of course, viejo. I’ll give you the key. The motorcycle is here, Ferreyra’s motorcycle, with a sidecar and everything. You can split Patagonia apart with that motorcycle.”

  Lucía sat beside the Japanese girl now, who was still naked in the bed. She spoke to her up close and caressed her hair and brushed it back behind her ear; the girl had very beautiful black hair. “Look what it is,” said Dipi, indicating the music coming from his Winco turntable. “Look at what these guys are doing. They’re working-class, another Perry Como. The musical middle class is over, dears; now we have Chango Nieto, Alberto Castillo, and the ragtime Beatles from the working neighborhoods of Liverpool.”

  It was almost six in the evening and had started to grow dark; I wanted us to go directly to Punta Lara, but Lucía insisted that we stop at the boardinghouse.

  “I left some things there, some books.”

  “We can buy everything again.”

  She looked in her handbag.

  “I left the joint and some pills. So let’s go.”

  The house was silent. Bardi seemed to be sleeping with the door closed; there was no movement anywhere. As soon as we entered, Lucía turned strange, seemed nervous; suddenly I could not see her and realized she had gone downstairs and was talking on the phone in the kitchen. [She had called, and I did not want to listen.] It seemed she was arguing with someone.

  After a while she came to the room, seeming reserved, almost absent as she searched for her things.

  “I have to leave,” she said.

  “How did he know you were at home?”

  “I warned him that I was going to be with you,” she said. “I want la nena to always know where I am…”

  “Weak people make visible the weakness of others,” I said.

  She answered me with a precise and dry phrase, which I will not repeat.

  She had the infallible instinct of intelligent women for penetrating the masculine comedy. That is what I think now. In that moment, I was motionless. I did not want to ask anything of her, did not want her to defend herself.

  “A shame,” I said.

  The terminal was a long platform, with the large buses stationed down the sides, along the street. The Río bus from La Plata to City Bell was leaving shortly. We sat down on a wooden bench. I bought a bottle of beer at a kiosk. She lit a joint and smoked it under the light. Raucous music descended from the loudspeakers, through which the bus departures were also announced. We stood there, motionless, almost without speaking.

  “I can never rest…”

  Did she say that? I am not certain; it was not her style. The only thing I need now is to start hearing voices, I thought, I remember.

  We seemed like two living dead. What had happened? I was in the past. The present had hardly lasted. She and her husband did their damage and then went back to being together. A gesture is enough and the whole world transforms.

  Suddenly, from the void, a beggar appeared—tall, young, dressed in an overcoat, without a shirt, his shoes broken, his skinny legs exposed.

  “Have a coin left, mister?” he asked me.

  She looked at him. He was blond, his skin pallid, a sort of Raskolnikov looking for money to buy an ax.

  “I need some wine to drink.”

  Lucía opened her purse and took out a roll of bills. She seemed to give him all the cash she had. The beggar stood still for a moment, shifting in his place and muttering incoherent phrases in a sort of soft crooning. Then he searched in his jacket and held out a coin to Lucía, as if he wanted to offer her charity, too.

  “I found it on a sunken ship,” he said. “It’s a drachma. It brings good luck.” He looked at her seriously. “I’m always walking around here, if there’s anything you need…”

  He moved away, muttering, his two hands in the pockets of his coat, and was lost in the darkness of the night.

  At that moment the bus arrived; Lucía stood and approached the conductor, who was standing and taking tickets next to the open door. She waited a moment and, before stepping on, gave me a kiss.

  “That’s the way things are, pichón,” she said.

  Then she opened my hand and gave me the Greek coin. The bus pulled out and started moving away and I remained there.

  The beggar reentered the station and made a few turns before he approached another pair, sitting at the back, and asked them for something.

  I still have the coin with me. The lucky coin, according to Raskolnikov. I toss it into the air, sometimes, even still, when I have to make a difficult decision.

  ‌II

  ‌9

  In the Study

  The apartment was vast and luminous, and it was filled with books. There was no artwork on the walls, although on the floor of the corridor, leaning against the wall, there was a painting by their friend Freddy Martínez Howard, a group portrait, composed in the style of a sixtee
nth-century Dutch painting, in which Emilio, Beba Eguía, León Rozitchner, and his partner Claudia could be identified, and off to one side of the canvas Gerardo Gandini was visible, pale, wearing a half-smile, holding a red rose in his hand. They were all around a table, on the center of which gleamed a cut of red meat—a kind of still life, very Argentine. They had spent some days in the summer at Costa Azul, a Uruguayan resort near the border with Brazil. The surrealist poets, all of whom were friends with Freddy’s father, habitually spent their summers in that place, so that Enrique Molina, Edgardo Bayley, and Francisco Madariaga were always around, though by the time they would arrive, Emilio explained, the only one still there was Madariaga. One afternoon, Freddy had painted the piece and presented it to Gerardo in trade for the musician writing him a sonata, the Howard sonata. It was no sooner said than done; Gandini wrote the sonata in one night and exchanged it for the painting, which ultimately ended up in the hands of León, who could not stand the image of his face (a blockhead, as the philosopher said) and resignedly passed it on to Renzi, who put it on the floor of his study.

  There were no other decorations save for a framed photo of William Faulkner in which he could be seen walking with a friend past 104 Nassau Street in Princeton, where Faulkner would go, as Renzi clarified. Princeton, because the children of the southern aristocracy had always studied there, or rather their friends, the descendants of their fellow countrymen. While passing through, when he went there, Faulkner would take the opportunity to have his tweed suits made. The books and papers and magazines and folders were scattered in disarray on the tables, on the armchairs, and even on the floor. Emilio would meet me in the bar and sometimes asked me to come up to the study with him because he enjoyed someone’s company when he could not write.

  We went into the room located at the end of the hall, which was, strictly speaking, the office. There was an order that only Renzi seemed to understand. Several cardboard boxes were piled off to one side and photographs could also be seen, dispersed on the shelves of the library. We sat around the work table and Emilio poured two glasses of white wine and then pointed to the folder that lay open on a wire stand and asked me to copy down what he was going to dictate. He had a bad hand and it pained him to write. He read, in a calm voice, an entry from his diary written fifty years before.