The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Someday I will write a (fantastical) short story in which an engineer (or a nurse?) meets with an immortal, and when he wants to reveal him, they both suffer an accident and only the engineer survives. That event attracts me; he is the only person who knows who the immortal was and his testimony is unique, but he tries to tell the story and no one believes him. The good part of the story lies in thinking how immortals, under circumstances we do not know, can also die in an accident. In one sense, it feels like a ghost story, and, in another sense, it is the story of my relationship with Cacho and the truthful account of that early morning when we nearly killed ourselves entering Bosques de Palermo at top speed, when the car spun out and for an infinite moment we hung on the point of killing ourselves. I remember the things I thought: not only that we were going to kill ourselves but also that I might survive and would then face the problem of explaining why I was with Cacho in a stolen car. The dedication of the story would be “To Enrique Gaona, who decided on that night to come down.”

  We left the College with Professor Edwards, who brought us to meet his lover, an attractive blonde; he has set her up in a house and with her lives a life parallel to the one he maintains with his wife and children. The funny thing is that, in his social-history classes, he describes the double life or, as he calls it, the class schizophrenia in which men of the dominant class lived in nineteenth-century Argentina. Or rather, he experiences the things he explains to us, as though it were a practical work.

  We will see if I slowly manage to overcome this heat and the clumsiness I feel and so double back over the story and finish it. Only one scene remains: at the end of the party, she approaches as he is crossing the garden, and they leave together. I need a violent scene, with action, in which he repeats his flight from the city. He needs to lose his false liberty, his availability.

  Sartre’s Baudelaire is an execution—that is to say, a process in which the poet, in drawing upon his biography, is condemned. It seems that Sartre wants to demonstrate that the choice to be a poet (or to live as such) is condemnable because it involves a choice of the imaginary.

  Saturday

  In literature, I believe, the fundamental thing is to possess a personal world. In my case, the material is secretly autobiographical and depends upon the multitude of family stories that I have heard over the course of my life. In this way, the novel works to diverge from a reality that has already been told, and the narrator tries to recall and reconstruct the lives, the catastrophes, the experiences that he has lived through and the things he has been told (for me, things lived through and told about are the same).

  Sunday 13

  Taking part in the daily experience of someone who, like Cacho, lives in constant risk is a revealing experience. I understand that decisive acts or heroic moments do not exist until after they have taken place, when they are recounted. Before that, they are a confusing succession of small gestures, of chances and emotions. For example, putting on the holster, sheathing the pistol, hiding a screwdriver and a crowbar in the folds of a very handsome white bomber jacket. Going out in a stolen car, which runs because the cables under the wheel have been hot-wired, advancing though the city, knowing that the police are also searching for this car. Heading north down Libertador, letting yourself be led by intuition and suddenly turning down a side street to pause and see if they are following. Staying there for a while with the lights turned off in the darkness. Then continuing ahead at the pace of someone watching the houses, trying to guess which of their owners have left and will not return for a couple hours. Breaking off the bars, searching for the alarms, deactivating them, forcing open a window, and entering the house.

  The funny thing is that danger has now become routine for Cacho; he complains because it is Saturday and “he has to go to work” (the same, for example, as Puchi Francia, who grumbles every time she has to go to her job at La Prensa newspaper). For this reason, I think, Cacho takes greater risks each time, searching for something, though he does not know what it is—“to save himself” perhaps, to pull off the job, to learn some information that will let him get rich in one shot, and then to retire (although I doubt he ever will). Courage is a way of being, something that also appears afterward, when he is describing the events or when he has already lived through them, but it changes the gestures, making decisions, without thinking, guided by instinct and a passion for danger. That, in short, is what defines him.

  At times, I live in another time, not concerning a memory but rather reliving emotions from the past. For example, that night with Elena in front of the high school, or with Vicky in the plaza among the trees and with Amanda at the radio-station exit. It may be delirium, but I see myself inside the scene, and then I see that I remain sane by imagining that I am narrating the things I have lived through. The strange part is that I do not remember—or cannot see—the contents of the situation, do not hear the conversations, do not really know what is taking place, although sometimes I do have a vague recollection. In short, I would like to establish a distinction between remembering and living—or seeing yourself living—in the past. The only true certainties are the feelings and emotions, which in the present seem to correspond to what I felt back then.

  Wednesday 16

  Yesterday, a long tour of the bars. With Beatriz Guido, experiencing the strange phenomenon of a person more lucid in writing than in speech. (But is it so strange? The same thing happens to me in reverse with David Viñas; he is far better than his texts.) I mean to say that the coherence of Beatriz’s novel is greater than what she demonstrates when talking about politics. On the other hand, she always develops her novels to the point of journalism—and, in that, is the same as Viñas. She has the ability to “situate herself” and is completing a novel about the “historical event” of the Pinedo case and the fictitious rise of the dollar. Cambaceres or Martel must have been doing something similar when they “selected” their subjects.

  Together with Oscar Garaycochea, I prepared a script on “Las actas del juicio” in three parts. 1. My story, with the soldier narrating; 2. A vision of the daughter; 3. López Jordán. We were thinking about a kind of semi-historical “Rashomon”; the story passes from one version to another without taking a side on the events.

  Afterward, at Inés’s house, she was relating what Isabel had told her about Rosario, that she has a certain provincial skepticism accompanied by a political stance always bound to personal interests. In Uruguay, Inés said, things aren’t like that. She did not say what they are like, simply distanced herself from the state of things, which is her way of defining reality. The state of the world, she says sometimes, is conceivable, unstable, and at the pinnacle of its existence. Only negativity, according to her, allows her access to the truth.

  The sensation of completeness as you begin an essay, when you enumerate what you are going to write. The blueprint has the same charm that arises in the discovery of the anecdotal core of a story, which seems as though it has already been written. That is the only full happiness of literature.

  You can always imagine that you are helping to correct social injustice without putting your literary philistinism in danger. Literature, on the other hand, must be able to critique the dominant uses of language. In this way, literature might be an alternative to the machinations of language and to the state’s uses of fiction. At the moment, a writer in Argentina is a harmless individual. We write our books, publish them. We are left to live, we have our circles, our audience. How, then, can we accomplish utility with the only thing we know how to do? To say it another way, everything must be centered around the use of language. In this way, the content will have different effects. The subject does not matter so much as the particular type of structure and circulation of our works.

  One example is the thing that happened in the congress of Paraná in Entre Ríos. It was, in a certain sense, a congress of the others. Then someone, Saer, spoke out for all of us. His action was transformed immediately into a scandal and, therefore, was s
een as an individual posturing intended to make himself known. Everything seems to be a spectacle from which no one can escape.

  A dream. I am in the middle of a multitude on a street in an unknown city and am speaking another language, a language no one understands.

  Today is a summary, an abstract of the times. We are without money, without food, and tomorrow Inés will pass an exam and I make turns around the essay I want to write.

  It is fair to consider us a generation, that is to say, a group of people with common experiences (Peronism, for example), who have read the same books and chosen the same authors, because age—or youth—is also a cultural problem. In our case, we are outsiders to the established and dominant forms of cultural development. We break from reading Roberto Arlt, who for us is a contemporary. They want to represent us as petulant young people who rebel and attempt yet again to turn the problem of a new literature into a matter of sociology and the zeitgeist. They presume or imagine a particular “madness” in some young people, in this case Saer; the same method was used with Arlt. Saer is placed into the category of the petulant youth, someone strange, raving, declaring falsehoods. Saer knows, better than anyone, that what took place in Paraná is an anecdote, a detail within a wider reality. We are, stated ironically, a group of writers who toil for a new culture in Argentina. A new culture that rebuilds tradition and chooses its own point of reference; Saer cited and defended Juan L. Ortiz, and he could just as well have talked about Macedonio Fernández because they, those great old men, are our contemporaries.

  Thursday 17

  Last night, with Edmundo Rivero, I went to listen to Horacio Salgán at Caño 14. You hear the tango now in clubs where no one dances to it. The same happens in New York with jazz: rock has swept away all previous traditions of popular music.

  Juan Goytisolo, like Pío Baroja, believes that, in the novel, “the most complex psyche fits inside a rolling paper.” We are close to Hemingway and a kind of narration that develops emotions based on actions.

  One of the paradoxes of this era—and not of the younger ones—lies in the fact that, as artists, we fight for a world that may be uninhabitable for us.

  Wednesday 23

  I am in Mar del Plata, I go to the beach. A dazzling time in the sun and sea, where it is not necessary to think.

  Thursday 24

  I finished reworking and typing up “Las dos muertes.” A good story, well narrated, with a great deal of action. I will give it to Jorge Álvarez. Maybe “Las actas del juicio” would be a more accurate title.

  Friday 25

  In Hemingway’s memoir and in Henry Miller’s Tropic, I am bothered by the attempt to show life as it is, to search for veracity in the hope of telling it without artifice, as though the grammar were not already an artifice in itself. It is like walking in on an intimate conversation between two people and knowing that they are talking about their private matters, knowing that someone is listening to them.

  Saturday 26

  Suddenly, I recall Inés’s words, spoken on the edge of the bed; the things she said return like a blessing but also like something already lost, belonging to the past.

  Method. Someone narrates a story in a confused, almost unintelligible manner; before he can finish, someone walks into the room. The person who had been listening to the story, told confusedly by the other, summarizes it for the newly arrived man who has just come into the room. The method is typical of Dashiell Hammett.

  Monday 28

  Dashiell Hammett narrates action from the outside; he needs to detail the actions and objects, and that meticulousness, that care for transcription, is the only thing he wants. The implicit question is that of why it is narrated in this way. Because everything in that world is in danger; they all feel they are being watched and violence could explode at any moment. The narrative proceedings make this understood without ever stating it. The technique comes from Hemingway: everything is told on the same level without creating a hierarchy among the actions or the events. A murder and a pleasant afternoon in the countryside (which could be more dangerous) are narrated with the same tone. In this way, it is narrated without selection, and it is only afterward, when the action rises up like a gust of wind, that the order of events can be recomposed. Narrating physical action (fights, etc.) is a very useful way to proceed, but it poses problems for showing the relationships between characters, making them dull and similar. Clearly, dialogue is a primary means of representing the people in those novels. They are what they say (but no one believes them).

  Thursday 31

  I am reading Sartre’s The Words. It possesses a pure style, in the best sense, a constantly open syntax that pushes the language forward. The style is made apparent because the ideas too are malignant and are therefore surprising but clear. The book is written against literature, considering it a false representation, something a subject makes of his or her place in the world. For Sartre, a writer chooses the imaginary and dismisses reality. As proof, something he has already used against Baudelaire and against Flaubert, he takes himself during childhood and adolescence, during the years of Nausea, as a sort of sentimental clown trying to please others. In the end, Sartre says that he has saved himself from that sickness (literature). The book is so well written that it does not matter if he says that literature is useless, because his prose refutes it. In any case, and with all due respect, two pages by Borges in his story “Borges and I” say the same thing better and more laconically. I admire Sartre but do not share his moralism and his good sentiments.

  Whenever I am in love with a woman, her past interests me, like a way to see how she and I have ended up meeting each other at a definite and unstable point in time. As if we had traversed a road full of curves and turns from birth to the present, which led us nevertheless to a place where we would inevitably meet. Love tends toward mystical thoughts; you believe you were destined to see and seduce the other because there was no other option.

  I have no interest in making a balance for this year, because I am not a storyteller in the economic sense of the word, but rather a narrator (that is to say, of course, a storyteller who analyzes his story without fixating on dates or changes in the calendar). What has come to an end during this time? I am about to finish being a student to become something I am still unable to decide. In that sense, qualitatively, 1964 is more valuable than previous years and will not, therefore, end today.

  In the story that I am revising, “En noviembre,” a problem has surfaced. The story begins with this sentence: “There is nothing like the start of spring, when the dark days of winter have gone and one may return to the sea.” That is, the narrator is recalling a day on which he went to swim on the empty beach; he is narrating, in the present, something that took place before. However, in the version that I am working on now, the narrator relates the events as they are taking place. He is on the beach and is speaking about the sunken ship that he wants to reach, by swimming, to see if he can find something in the submerged cabins. I will rewrite it, will perhaps include it in the book. It is based on a man I met at the beach who wanted only to live in the water. I changed the title; it is now called “The Swimmer,” and the narrator does not know what is going to happen, that is, what he is going to find on the ship. A narrator who adheres to the present and relates the events as they take place without imposing onto them the meanings they will have in the future. It is the technique Hemingway uses in his first stories: the narrator does not want to remember, so he tells everything in the present as though he has no memory, as though he does not know what is going to happen. The same technique that Camus uses in The Stranger. The narrator has no opinion about the acts he commits. Narrating is like swimming, Pavese would say.

  ‌13

  The Swimmer

  They call me the Polack because I have blue eyes and blond, almost white hair; I sleep anyplace I can and live on what I find in the sea. I come to the beach very early and search for a calm area, between the dunes, on the other side of the long
jetty, on the side of the port. From here I can survey the whole coast and see the sunken ship in the mouth of the bay. It lies some three kilometers offshore, near the last breakers, capsized on a shoal. When the wind comes in from the south, you believe you can hear the soft creaking of the rigging, the rusty noise of irons shaken up by the tides. There is nothing more mysterious than the remains of a sunken ship silhouetted on the horizon, like an apparition.