The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  The Temptation to Commit Suicide

  Deciphering that enigma has produced one of the most beautiful books of contemporary literature, This Business of Living. Hieroglyphics, full of silence and darkness… You could say that in that diary, beginning with his term of imprisonment and ending with his term in a hotel room, all of Pavese can be found. A moral novel, a monologue that proceeds without naming the events, attentive only to the perverse logic of repetition, this admirable book is charged with a tension at once lucid and tragic. “When a man is in such a state as I am,” he writes in the first pages, “there is nothing left for him to do but examine his conscience. I have no grounds for discarding my own firm conviction that whatever happens to a man is conditioned by his whole past. In short, it is deserved. Evidently, I must have been an utter fool to find myself at this point… Only so can I explain my actual suicidal urge in life. I know that I am forever condemned to think of suicide when faced with no matter what difficulty or grief. It terrifies me. My basic principle is suicide, never committed, never to be committed, but the thought of it caresses my sensibility.” There is a dogma and a fatality in that sentence; the emphasis is placed, visibly, on the idea of suicide, and therein lie temptation and terror, what Pavese called his “secret vice.” You only need to review his correspondence to find that same obsession from the start: “I’m thinking about suicide,” he writes on October 22, 1926, and in September 1927, “for the past year I have been thinking about suicide constantly.” A secret obsession, a solitary passion, suicide is a vice of thought, an obsession of the intellectual who thinks too much, who is condemned to thinking.

  The trajectory leading from those letters, written at the age of eighteen, to the hotel room where he will lock himself up to die, is narrated in his diary. This Business of Living (which someone called, with no malice intended, “the business of dying”) is, deep down, nothing more than a slow construction of that journey, a stubborn labor to transform thought into action.

  The purpose of the diary is to make suicide possible; in fact, (Stendhal wrote) “a diary is always a kind of suicide.” This motion explains the technique underlying his writing; Pavese often splits into two, speaks of himself in the second person. He plays with the double; the text is a mirror, and in it there is an attempt to persuade the “other.” From there that frozen passion is derived, that quality like a manual detailing the perfect suicide, which made an optimistic man like Davide Lajolo, in L’Unità, say that This Business of Living “is not a book for reading.”

  It is an empty story, a story in which only the thought (of death) is recorded; yet, at the same time, Pavese is writing the diary in order to postpone suicide. In this sense, his work with the double is, as always, a means of conjuring death. Textual limitation… The desire running through it is one of being dead and, concurrently, being able to write about that death. That contradiction resolves, in the imagination, the myth of the double, fascinated with the idea of suicide. The final sentence of the text, relentless, demonstrates that writing was his only (and last) defense: “Not words. Action. I shall write no more.” Death lies in the future tense of that verb: what shall come when he can write no more.

  A book in which death and writing intertwine, Pavese’s diary is one of those rare documents (like Kafka’s Diary, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, or Michel Leiris’s The Age of Man) of the kind that continues to find a place in literature. Thirteen years after his end, reading that almost perfect book assures the only interesting memory of Pavese. He is that book, and when, in coming years, forgetting erases the biographical circumstances that enabled his writing, or when memory distorts his biography so that even his suicide is transformed into a happy circumstance, Pavese will have to be viewed, surely, as the man who, in This Business of Living, has written some of the most memorable pages of contemporary literature.

  ‌12

  Diary 1964

  January

  A year that began with a walk down La Diagonal, cool under the shadow of the trees, with a few policemen drinking gin from a jug behind a roadblock, and the image of a man with crutches, in the sunlight, and beside him a beggar on the corner watching the little flame of the lighter he held in his left hand, because he was left-handed, and finally two old men, two meters apart from one another, trying to sell the same sweets, carried on trays hanging from their necks, to a group of indifferent people waiting for the bus. I imagined that neither of the two wanted to give up the location and would therefore spend hours observing one another.

  “Language is the immediate actuality of thought,” Marx.

  Sunday, January 5

  Cacho and Bimba come to see me, and he tells me about his clash with the police: he escaped in a stolen car. She is blonde, very beautiful and provocative, but, behind her femme-fatale act, she is a simple girl, says everything that passes through her mind. She has no filter. One of her preferred ways is the expression “I feel like.” What it feels like to her is always rather indecent and unexpected. For example, today while we were chatting at La Boston, she opened up and said suddenly, “That man there in the flowered shirt was a client of mine. I don’t feel like I need to say hello.” She is a prostitute, or rather, as she says, “I work on the street.” She did not say, “I worked”; to her, the business seems like an activity and a way of life that can never be left behind. She did not work out on the street; she was in a fine house, as she says. She was a call girl; the madame received calls from the clients and referred them to the girl, whom the man already knew or would chose based on a folder of photographs. Bimba did not have direct contact; the madame would get her on the phone and tell her that a very discreet man would visit her in her apartment at five in the afternoon, etc. The most boring part of the work, she would say, is that you have to sit and wait for a call. She met Cacho in a bar on Córdoba and San Martín and left with him. I imagine Cacho thinks that his vocation requires that his wife be a whore. To make that life more believable (for Cacho himself).

  Sentences must be able to create situations. A sentence condenses an act. The image must be narrative. The narrative image. Wittgenstein’s example, describing discernment from a room: we see a man through the window, walking with difficulty, moving his arms as though rowing. The image changes if we know there is a storm outside and a strong wind is coming in from the sea.

  Cosmic pessimism is a comforting doctrine (see Martínez Estrada).

  The outsider, arriving at some place, incites thoughts beyond what is visible.

  There is no maturity, he said, other than awareness of one’s own limits.

  What is learned in life, what can be taught, is so limited that a sentence of ten words would suffice. The rest is pure darkness, probing in a hallway at night.

  Monday, July 1

  Too often I have preferred the present, a fleeting pleasure, so as not to doubt my project. It may be paradoxical, but improvising things, thinking at the last moment, is a way to reach calm and tranquility.

  Strange, but I discover a certain naturalism in Cortázar; he secures the fantastical effect within the local color and the everyday. I recalled a quote from Aragon: “Only I can know the sacrifice and what I abandon in creating realist literature.”

  Tuesday 2

  Sarmiento: “If you kill people, shut your mouth. They are bipedal animals of such perverse nature that I don’t know what can be gained from treating them better.” In 1863, he decreed that those who destroyed the state’s weapons would be punished with the lash. The constitution had abolished that barbarous punishment, but Sarmiento supported his assertion with some old Spanish ordinances that were still in effect in the army. The measure was directed against the urban guerillas, who cut down guns to adapt them to their style of combat (Sommariva, Historia de las intervenciones federales en las provincias, p. 210).

  “And, in fact, this is the secret of happiness; to adopt a pattern of behavior, a style, a mold into which all our impressions and expressions
must fall and be remodeled,” C. Pavese.

  Fundamentally, to narrate means to take charge of the distance between the narrator and the story being told. That distance defines the tone of the prose and also its point of view. A simple example is (the narration’s) abrupt step into the present, leaving behind the incidents occurring in the past.

  Without thinking, I have decided I will go to the College, to see her. What matters to me is just the present and not the consequences. “I cannot be if I don’t go,” I thought, and saw the sentence written in the air with its dislocated syntax.

  Friday, July 3

  Yet again, no one but me understands what happened. I will know how to proceed next time. That was what I thought last night at the party in the Villarreal house. Because I went. It suggests a methodology, not an isolated error. I was there from ten at night until three in the morning. Clarity came in the end, once everyone had assumed the necessary positions. Gin takes care of that. A blonde and broad girl, lying across the floor, trying to seduce a very affected young man, talking about politics. The failure of avant-garde socialism was employed as a means of erotic conquest. As for her, Celia H., inscrutable, the empty gaze. And, in the end, I was the one who left with her because the other one, my friend, took too long in understanding the coded messages.

  Sunday, July 5

  Captain Ahab is not a character (like Madame Bovary, for example), but rather a verbal force that cannot exist without the white whale. More than an individual, he is a composite of energies, eclipsing all of the other protagonists revolving around him, without free will, tied to Ahab’s obsession. The ship, the harpoons, are also parts of his body. Only Ishmael, the one who narrates the story once it has already ended, has a life of his own.

  Monday, July 6

  The divergence between the Past and Present people in the CP is perfectly understandable through the differences between the Italian and the Argentine CP.

  She only asks to spend one week together. I always repeat the same thing: circumstances change—people, events—but the syntax is always the same. I postpone and wait for life to decide for me. My relationship with V. is just an example. I cling to her, without thinking, or rather I cling to her so that I don’t have to think.

  Wednesday 8

  Everything I do has “public status”; there are no secrets and no reason that there should be.

  December 3, 1964

  In a way, for me, this year has not ended. A strange and fertile year. Perhaps the most important one I can remember.

  Faulkner does not now distance himself from memories, but from a new vision held by someone who remembers. He places a second point of view in the interior of memory. I have lived through something. Then I recall it. But when I return to recall it years later, I modify it. In that sense, Faulkner places two time lines in the same act of remembering. He establishes an intermediate time that has made the memory change and perhaps even the event itself.

  Friday 4

  I am reading Intruder in the Dust, perhaps the most baroque and intricate novel that Faulkner has written. He does not only conceal what has taken place, but what is going to be described: “That smell which if it were not for something that was going to happen to him within a space of time measurable now in minutes he would have gone to his grave never once pondering.” A form of annunciation. The style collages commonplace gestures, dragging them out with the magnificence of an epic poem and making them crash and burn like objects made of lead.

  I will try to narrate what I did yesterday. Since I know that what is important is the thing that defines the day, and that this act will only appear afterward, I have to concentrate on the events. My meeting with Germán García, my conversations about Cortázar in the bar on Callao, my wandering down Corrientes. Briante’s tiresome insistence on his own literature. I must, then, assess what took place or what I thought about the things that had taken place.

  Monday 7

  A great heat, yesterday and beginning Saturday, making turns through places near the river. I spent the night on the Tigre. And yet it was only from the train, while I was returning, that I had a complete panorama of the river’s image, because while I was there I only saw fragments and unsettled remains of something that could only be seen in their totality later, from outside, through the window of the train.

  Last night, I again ran into Casco (but that is not his name), who a few years ago I saw every day in La Plata. Always lucid, always very radicalized. This time he appeared with Francisco Herrera and told me I was right to insist on the need for specific work on the Cultural Front. The differences are present. On all sides.

  In The Fire and the Vespers, Beatriz Guido tries to narrate Peronism but in reality narrates the history of opposition to Peronism and, in that opposition, a conflict between the traditional sectors on the right and what we might call the liberal intelligentsia. With that as the subject of the book, Peronism appears like a sinister phantom setting fire to churches and hatefully repressing any expression of liberty. In a sense, Peronism invades all of reality and transforms it into the reign of evil. It is narrated well, with a clean and restrained prose, sometimes approaching “objectivism.” Then, when we met in the Falbo bookshop to discuss the book, it was obvious that she, like Pedro Orgambide, operated with many biases that she would not consider as such. Syria Poletti and other writers were also there, and I exerted myself defending Beatriz, insisting that her novel had nothing to do with Peronism because it was viewed exclusively from the opposition, which was actually the subject of the book.

  Writers like Beatriz Guido, Sabato, and Viñas himself view Peronism as a continuous and daily apocalypse; it would seem the nation has reached a point at which there is nothing but theatrics and falsehood. They cannot understand the reasons for which Peronism was widely supported, and they regard corruption and calumny as the explanation for its backing. The Peronist masses are viewed as naïve and wickedly gullible, deceived by power. At one point, they replicate the model that Mármol used in Amalia to narrate the Rosas period; it seems that the model of the romantic and melodramatic novel has been maintained until today.

  I went out with Cacho and when we crossed San Fernando I could not stop thinking about Inés taking in the sun with her friends at the river, which bears the overflow from the sea. It does not concern the past, but something taking place where I am not present and that I cannot control.

  Faulkner’s system of comparison tends to be narrative—that is to say, the relationship is not established with a concept or a static image but rather with an action. For example, “as if he had been lying on an unswept floor a long time in one position without being able to change it.” The simile is a minor action, a micro-story that could be isolated and then joined with others to construct a net of microscopic narrations. For example, as when someone feels around on a table in the dark, knowing that there is a dangerous jumble of broken glass. Often the event one intends to narrate is eclipsed by the power of the comparison.

  Tuesday 8

  A meeting with Szpunberg and Herrera, which may result in a project. Nevertheless, I am skeptical of associations and leagues of intellectuals. It implies the belief that a specific field of study, in and of itself, gives common interests. It would be more logical to organize writers according to their literary poetics and thereby view their political positions.

  Curiously, Faulkner notices a certain aristocracy in the black population of the south that is at odds with the new blacks. In Intruder, Lucas says, “I don’t belong to these new folks. I belongs to the old lot.” And he never takes off his hat in front of the whites. In short, Lucas is punished by society because of this, because he does not comply with the rules that govern black behavior; he is half-black and is actually punished for thinking that he is not the same as the rest of his race.

  Temporality in Rulfo and in Faulkner is not psychological but epic.

  Wednesday 9

  Buried in apathy and the heat. It has been several days since I h
ave done anything more than change my project and subject. Things only take place in my head; I neither read nor write. As always, my basic action is to postpone, to leave things “for later,” so that everything stays half-done, as though reality were a meter away from me.

  I meet Professor Caldwell, from the University of California, who is working on new Argentine fiction. He said two interesting things, that Faulkner is a narrator who creates myths and that he is therefore close to the oral tradition. And then he said that Borges is a seventeenth-century English poet (a definition which would have pleased the subject of that quote).

  Thursday 10

  The excess, avarice, and violent desperation of Cacho Carpatos make him appealing to me, make me attempt to help him. He is an outsider, like me, or like the writers and heroes I admire. He is outside of social matters, does not want to be involved there, keeps himself apart, but the fact that he makes his living with theft places him in a strange situation, and he is always uneasy, not only because of the risks he runs every time he goes out to do “his work” (in general he only “goes out” on Saturdays), but also because of the free time, the tedium that leads him to act impulsively. He is an “alien” (with all of the meanings that the word carries—among others, that of living on theft), and I am attracted most of all to his capacity for gambling his life. That same capacity is what destroys him. I saw him go into curve at top speed on a motorcycle to test if it was possible to make it at more than a hundred kilometers per hour. The same thing when, on Saturday nights, he dresses with style, takes an amphetamine to get himself ready and awake, says goodbye to his band of friends, leaving them with three or four locations where he can be found if everything goes well, and then goes off alone to steal from the large suburban houses in Olivos or San Fernando. The other day, he escaped in a pinch and was able to climb a tree and from there surveil the police, who were searching for him on the opposite corner and lighting up the gardens and parks with their flashlights. The routine danger in which he lives makes him so sensitive that that he can barely sleep at night, constantly remains vigilant, like a man to whom everyone is a potential enemy. He is the quintessential man on the run; at any moment, he could be discovered or killed.