The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Monday 19

  On Saturday night, after the magazine and I gave a collective lecture at MAPAM, in a garden near La Plata, we returned, walking along the edge of the road, and suddenly a body grazed my legs and there was a muffled sound. A car had hit Vicente Battista, who lay strewn across the ground as if dead.

  A visit to Vicente at the hospital where he is confined.

  Wednesday, August 28

  Last Saturday, they debuted an event at the New Theater called Festival de Buenos Aires, which included several short sketches by Enrique Wernicke and also my story “Mi amigo,” adapted into a terrific dramatic monologue by Héctor Alterio. It is strange to see something you have written performed on a stage; there is also the curious sensation of seeing the public, out in high numbers on the night of the premiere, responding with laughter, excited silences, and applause at the words of a fiction you have written. Graciela and I went together, but indifference always claims me and I never manage sufficient happiness from what I have received.

  September 2

  I spend the afternoon with Dipi Di Paola, a very good time. He, like Miguel Briante, has a powerful command of style and writes with great elegance. We form a kind of tercet, opposing everything that we see in contemporary literature. At the magazine, Briante and I form a sort of anti-conservative front. Essentially, we dislike the imposition of anti-avant-garde poetics.

  Other discrepancies. What does it mean to be in the present? In any event, it is not something a writer needs to define. I do not like the emphasis with which people at the magazine self-define and shield themselves inside a sense of generational membership. It ends up being rather comical to me, the way in which they all cultivate a juvenile and anti-intellectual brilliance.

  September 17

  Ludovico il Moro: “He took leave of himself with a bar to his beloved servants, so that they had to scream to make him hear them.”

  In Machiavelli, virtue is the affirmation of man’s autonomy in the face of natural forces (or human nature… much of the time) and chaos. Therefore, we must understand it, this virtue—but as necessity or as possibility?

  September 21

  We went to Mar del Plata to read stories from the magazine. Always strange, the experience of reading a text aloud. There is a certain false eloquence in the act. True reading, on the other hand, is silent, personal, requires isolation and a secret passion. Reading aloud in front of a crowd is different from the literary experience.

  I meet Alcira in the hotel on the coast. Everything goes on in the same way, yet everything is different. On this trip, I did not go to visit Antonio.

  October 3

  Elsewhere I have already written the reasons for ending things with Vicky (I crossed paths with her today at the College). I have tried to tell that story some other way, considering that it started (by mistake) with her reading one of my notebooks. For that reason, I have tried to keep her separate from these notes.

  A difficult and lethargic meeting at the student center.

  October 19

  An unexpected definition by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada: “The socialist system is, of all political and economic models, the most rational and equitable and concordant with the advancement of technological civilization and humanist culture.” Marcha magazine, May 1963.

  December 10

  Maybe, in the end, it is about telling the family history. Cholo, whose wife left him for a conscripted soldier of twenty, also abandoning her son, just a few months old. And before that, Marcelo. And then Antonio. Each one of these an individual world. The clan pushes them into a bad lifestyle, through women. The men rebel and break with convention, dragged along by a passion (vile, as they say).

  Someone, a superior man, may choose a life outside the law. He is not an artist and therefore does not employ creation as an alibi to justify his vice. The damned poet is already a consumer good, allowing his readers, vicariously, to have an exceptional and dangerous experience. In this instance, by contrast, the point is to remain anonymous. No one, save for his intimate circle of friends and accomplices, knows of his perilous adventures, that man aspiring to sainthood. One may decide to become a thief and potential murderer, just as someone chooses a degree or a profession to which to dedicate his life. I met Cacho Carpatos when the two of us were high-school students in Mar del Plata. He was in trade school and I was in my fifth year at the national school. We thus belonged to two different planets, separated by galactic distances, but our orbits collided by chance in Ambos Mundos bar. We had friends in common, and he was exactly the same as me and my friends. He was interested in everything and had a brilliant intelligence, but he had placed all of his energy in high-powered motorcycles. He would go down Boulevard Marítimo like a maniac, trying to break I don’t remember what speed record or what suicidal personal best. He was the same as us: arrogant, ambitious, avidly living life, never paying attention to the limits. I stopped seeing him when I came to La Plata, but I ran into him again this year. He still goes to that bar, but his interests have changed. Walking around the small streets of Playa Grande together, crossing through the tunnel, he told me that he had decided, after completing high school, to become a professional thief. He thought he was a superior man—intellectually superior and even, he added, morally superior. Laws and the protection of personal property did not, he told me, form part of his experience. He had no intention to work and wanted to live well; therefore, thirteen years ago, as soon as he finished secondary school, he had dedicated himself to studying and delving into the means of appropriating the fortunes of men and women who, in turn, had taken hold of the riches and land and the fields and the fruits of society over the course of decades. I thought he was hoping to impress me, but with a gesture he showed me his hands and forced me to see the truth of his condition. He is a young man—blond, skinny, with pale eyes, dressed with blasé handsomeness—but his hands could belong to a laborer. Broken, deformed, with a rather brutal appearance because, as he told me, he enters the houses of the rich to steal from them by forcing open the bars and the windows, and that effort has left its trace on each of his hands. Some exceptional men, he concluded, and some very beautiful women, could live outside the law because their qualities surpassed the social norms. We had made it all the way to Torreón and there, unexpectedly, he called a taxi with a wave, smiled at me, told me he was late for a date, said goodbye, and was gone. He was living in Buenos Aires, and we might meet in the city or even in La Plata. And we made plans to see each other. He is staying in Mar del Plata through the summer because everyone comes here for the season, he told me. He seemed like a hunter, following his prey when they migrated, and was therefore doing his work now in the chalets and the residential houses of La Loma, the wealthiest neighborhood in the area.

  December 11

  I make a phone call, from Adrogué, from the public phone in López Market and run into Inés, the girl from Uruguay who came to Buenos Aires to study philosophy. We went out together, the beginning of something.

  Thursday 12

  We went together to see Visconti’s La terra trema in an experimental theater—few people invited, an intimate space. Inés is from Piriápolis, on the other side, as she says. We went out to eat at El Dorá and then spent the night together. Strange woman, so similar to me, so over-the-top. “You’re a foreigner, uruguaya. You’re the kind of woman who gets a thrill from finding out something,” I told her. She smiled, malicious. “So you can write a story about it,” she said. The truth is we immediately created a shared language, an idiolect, a private language that only two people can speak, which, for me, has always been the nature of love.

  Friday 13

  I have a fear, stemming from my past, of all rhetorical excesses. For me, it is the greatest of virtue to use language with precision and clarity.

  Saturday 14

  Inés is possessed—according to her—by the past. A past that she always imagines differently. She is always smiling in my memories. We met at Tortoni; she was
waiting for me. “I didn’t know if you were really going to come,” she said.

  Friday

  Inés and I have been together for days in La Plata. For her, this geometric and calm city is a sanctuary. Buenos Aires bothers her and she constantly misses the sea, which is not a sea, she says, but rather a river of giant waves and salty water. She wants to write a thesis in philosophy about the province. She constantly wants to return to Uruguay but never gives in because she respects her convictions, which are, for her, as she says, unstable.

  Tuesday

  I should work on the relationship between Pavese’s diary and The Seducer’s Diary by Kierkegaard. Suffering eludes understanding as long as one is living through it, in spite of knowledge, which cannot transform it or prevent it from taking place. A quote from Sartre may be tied to what I am saying: “Knowing the cause of a passion is not enough to overcome it; one must live it, one must oppose other passions to it, one must combat it tenaciously… Knowing is not a knowing of ideas but a practical knowing of things.”

  Thursday

  Perhaps I should create a summary of my situation, as I have been ignoring these notebooks for several months. This year, for the first time, I have come to realize, as they say, that I am no longer unpublished. I published an essay in the magazine on Pavese’s diary and also a story (“Desagravio”) dedicated to my friend José Sazbón; the subject is the bombardment of Plaza de Mayo, mixed together with a private story (a man who kills a woman).

  These changes have ultimately been the realization, minor perhaps, of my projects or of the fantasies I have carried with me since I was sixteen. This year I even started to earn my living with the two courses in which I work as hired assistant.

  All synopses are sad, and so I will do nothing but leave behind a summary from which, for now, all of the facts and circumstances are missing.

  ‌11

  Pavese’s Diaries

  To earn fame, it has been said, it is not essential for a writer to show sentimentality, but it is essential that his or her works, or some biographical circumstances, stimulate pathos. This epigram serves, no doubt, to explain the presence of Cesare Pavese in contemporary literature. None of his books has added to his ambiguous fame as much as the incidents on August 25, 1950, when a man with glasses and a distant expression rents an anonymous room in an anonymous hotel in Turin (the Albergo Roma, on Piazza Carlo Felice). He reserves a room over the phone—his biographer Davide Lajolo explains it in Il vizio assurdo—and they put him on the third floor. Pavese locks himself in his room. During the day, he makes several phone calls. He speaks with three, four women. He asks them to go out, to have dinner. They all refuse him. Last of all, he calls a girl he met a few days before, a cabaret dancer. Little is known about this conversation between a writer of forty-two, recently consecrated with the greatest distinction in Italian literature (the Premio Strega), and a woman who earns her living entertaining men: it is the last conversation of Pavese’s life and the hotel operator records the end: “I don’t want to go out with you, you’re a boring old man,” the dancer says. Pavese hangs up the phone. He does not go down to dinner. The next day (Sunday, August 27), at nightfall, a waiter, worried about his patron who has not shown himself all day, calls at the door. When no one responds, he decides to force entry. Pavese is stretched out across the bed, dead, dressed immaculately; he has only taken off his shoes. On the nightstand, there are several bottles of sleeping pills, all empty, and a copy of his most beloved book, Dialogues with Leucò. In his spidery handwriting, Pavese has written his last words on the first page: “I forgive everyone and ask everyone’s forgiveness. OK? Don’t gossip too much.”

  The authority of failure

  There is a beauty at once trivial and tragic in that end—a “turn of the century” quality that has seduced, and still seduces, those who cultivate Pavese’s legend. Solitude, anonymity, the impossible search for a woman, the tedium of a summer weekend and that man, seeking salvation in a dancer who does not wanted be bored—the theatrical dignity of that suicide has everything needed to turn Pavese into a symbol of what someone describing him once called (not metaphorically) “the sickness of the century.” Today, people listen to Pavese, no longer reading him, because he is one of the people who speak (and the phrase comes from Fitzgerald) with “the authority of failure.” His life has become a model because it proves that all writing holds a secret and is the site of some revenge. The secret is always a wound (impotence, alcohol, self-destruction); the revenge is the penance that life makes the writer pay. The poet consumes his life up until the final judgment and, in suffering, pays the price for the beauty he produces. A strange chemistry, requiring pain to purify the words; the writer is the hero who discovers how to use suffering in the economy of expression, in the same way that saints discovered the utility of pain in the religious economy.

  A society that successfully upholds the reasons behind its economy is able to recognize the “aesthetic” qualities of failure. Perfection in death, as we know, constitutes an aristocratic myth; beauty is fed by all forms of erosion and destruction and particularly by the suffering of that priest the consecrated artist becomes. If he suffers as a man, as a writer he is capable of transforming his suffering into art. In this compensatory sublimation, failure is always necessary for the “profound” success of a work.

  Pavese is a martyr for this superstition, and the circumstances of his biography renew the legend of the poet’s loneliness and inability to adapt to the world. Ultimately, his suicide is symbolic because it comes to confirm an ideology (one that has been in fashion, furthermore, since the days of fascism) of the intellectual’s impotence, of his uselessness in face of the simple truths of “life.” Pavese himself, it must be said, made this cliché his own. It is no coincidence that, in his diary, he merges the writer with a woman: a paradoxical affinity originating from a certain misogyny but supported on the idea of the writer’s feminine, passive sensitivity and in the opposition between an active life and a contemplative life. Pavese’s biography really holds little meaning unless his will to failure, his “mania for self-destruction,” is projected onto it, nor if you do not take into account the (romantic) hero who grabs hold of literature, the writer as “man of letters” in a literal sense, like the raté, the frustrated, always failing in the business of living, opposed in everything to the “simple man,” the man of action, possessor of a direct and triumphant knowledge of life.

  This Business of Living

  “In my work, then, I am king. In fifteen years I have done it all,” Pavese writes at the end of his diary. “If I think of the hesitations of former times… In my life I am more hopeless, more lost than then… What remains is that now I know what will be my greatest triumph—and this triumph lacks flesh and blood, life itself. I have nothing left to wish for on this earth—except the thing that fifteen years of failure bars from me. This is the balance sheet of an unfinished year, that I won’t finish.” It is about the balance of a life, clearly: the success that he always sought, and which he celebrates, is worth nothing. There is a metaphor here as well: at the very moment in which literature is recognized, the gratuity and emptiness of that useless work is also discovered. “Which do you like best,” Stendhal noted in a copy of The Charterhouse of Parma, “to have had three women or to have written this novel?” There is no need to say what Pavese’s answer would have been. He knows well that it is those “fifteen years of failure” that have made his triumph: that “one thing missing” is the wound that the writing uselessly tries to cover.

  Pavese condenses his life into the gap from 1935 to 1950; these two dates form the border, the limits within which his life is reflected as in a mirror. In 1935, Pavese is imprisoned in the south of Italy, condemned by Mussolini’s government as a result of the antifascist intellectual circles in Turin. That year, he finishes his first book (the poems of Hard Labor), starts writing his diary, and a woman (“the woman with the hoarse voice” in the poems) abandons him to marry anoth
er man. In 1950, he writes a novel that establishes his status (The Moon and the Bonfires), thus reaching the peak of a dense and varied body of work, within which an ensemble of four short novels stands out (The Fine Summer, The House on the Hill, Women on Their Own, The Devil in the Hills), novels that, as Italo Calvino points out, constitute “the most complex, dramatic, and homogeneous narrative cycle in Italy today.” Affiliated with the CP since 1945, he is actively involved in Italian intellectual life. Director of collections for the Einaudi publishing house, he undertakes intense work as translator, critic, and essayist. That year, another woman abandons him, Constance Dowling, a young American actress to whom the best poems in Death Will Come and She’ll Have Your Eyes, his final book, are dedicated.

  An almost perfect symmetry governs the events. At the beginning and end, a woman is lost, there is confinement and loneliness, writing, failure in life. “The thing most feared in secret always happens,” Pavese wrote at the beginning and on the final page of his diary. This sentence written twice is an oracle, it is the writing of destiny. During those fifteen years, Pavese tries to catch a glimpse of the secret confined in that oracle; he wants to know the thing it most secretly feared in order to be able, then, to accomplish it.