The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Now I am in the kitchen of the house, full of light. I prepare myself coffee as it goes on raining. I am tired and content with being alone.

  Monday, January 25

  I went to Buenos Aires and then to Piriápolis to meet Inés at her house. We ended the night at the club with ships anchored on the dock; strangely, all the people there know everything about everyone else, and they see me as someone whose story still needs to be told. Inés’s friends and old classmates came up to the table where we were to investigate who she was with and who I was. The past arose and then she became, to me, a stranger; many of the people there knew secrets about her, of which I was still unaware. Inés laughed happily when I tried to explain something about being jealous of the past. “The past doesn’t exist now,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.

  Wednesday 27

  “Herzen’s moral bankruptcy…” and the whole discussion about those years in Russia correspond with our situation here since 1958 (I am reading Lenin). The notion of moral bankruptcy is a political category that must be taken up again.

  Telling the story of an old-fashioned commander. My uncle Gerardo, who kept proud and serene even though he was already broke and lived off his wife’s money.

  Saturday 30

  As always, an aggression arises suddenly within me, rising up from some unknown place. Today I got in a fight with an employee at the library who was talking back to me, and I was about to hit him, but Inés put her hand on my back and that calmed me down instantly.

  I have thought a great deal about my assumptions concerning Inés’s past; they have to do with the fact that she is from Uruguay. It makes no sense to think in this way, but I am not really thinking so much as expressing what she means to me. In the end, I can only conclude that I am experiencing the loss as if she were a stranger, about whom I only know the present. Nevertheless, there is only one “solution” (if there is a solution): I have to understand that only my literature matters, and that I must set aside and abandon whatever opposes it (in my mind or in my imagination), as I have always done since the beginning. That is my only moral lesson. The rest belongs to a world that is not mine. I am a man who has gambled his life on a single hand.

  Two disputing tendencies exist with respect to the avant-garde and politics. On one side, the Lenin-Gramsci version: they revive everything from the cultural tradition that seems useful and productive to them (Tolstoy for Lenin, Pirandello for Gramsci); on the other side are Fanon and Sartre, who propose direct opposition to and destruction of the other culture (see, for example, Sartre’s writings against Flaubert). One, the former, speaks from inside of tradition, while the latter acts from the outside and stems from the scorched earth of antagonistic cultures.

  Sunday 31

  A story narrated in the future tense as though the narrator knows the events before they take place, through some unexplained mechanism that transforms the story into a science-fiction text. “I can guarantee that he will die within five seconds. Within five seconds he will collapse down the escalator with a bullet in his head. He is crossing the hallway now, and death is already beside him, etc.”

  Tuesday, February 2

  The worst part of last night’s dream was the possibility of that woman I did not know staying with me. She was insecure, and so any gesture on my part was decisive. And I was so trapped by the situation that I could do nothing but make hollow and meaningless gestures.

  In Los albañiles, Vicente Leñero’s novel, technique is such a perfect clockwork mechanism that it becomes affected, too visible, and it detracts from the action. But his ruptured way of telling the story of Jesús C. (in which he tells how he was murdered) is remarkable and works very well.

  Wednesday 3

  Once again, as always, I can’t make my mind up to break through what is overwhelming me, to take off the weight of this constant sensation of failure. It will be something that Inés does, one day or another, something I do not yet know, that will bring us to the end. What we fear most secretly always comes to pass.

  Monday 8

  In the library. Leñero has attempted, in Los albañiles, to “distill” Faulkner’s technique; it is the characters who narrate the story, mixing together the time lines. He writes with an ascetic prose, not at all baroque. For that very reason, his technique is too “noticeable.”

  Friday 12

  Losey’s The Servant, with a script by Harold Pinter. Menace and things unsaid create a claustrophobic atmosphere. A cinema of the absurd (that is, with strange motives and reversed causality), a Kafkaesque allegory.

  Saturday 18

  A short story. Connecting the story of the immortal with the subject of a man five minutes ahead of his time. The state of the universe at any instant is a consequence of its state in the previous instant. That is the reflection of the man ahead of time, who once studied physics but has abandoned the profession.

  “The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one alters one’s past,” Oscar Wilde.

  I have to think about whether that character—the man who has broken through time and lives outside of it, displaced ahead by five minutes—is able to know his fate or whether he has been sentenced only to exist ahead of reality. Either of the two alternatives is cruel; one condemns him to the lucid state of knowing what is to come, the other demands that he live in the void, in a life not yet his own.

  Monday 15

  A subject. (This story suddenly came to me yesterday). An old man in a hospice watches a wall being built, cutting him off from the street, which he used to watch with a mixture of surprise and interest. In the end, he remains sitting alone, facing the barrier.

  Tuesday 16

  I finished the short story; it is called “La pared.” The first character in my book, who is a silent and secret hero. I have to find that form again, the form of the story based on the history of a heroic character (even though he fails, or rather, is heroic in failure).

  The immortal. “Many people let themselves be tricked by typographical and syntactical artifice and think that an event has happened because it is printed in big bold letters.” I received this assertion from a man I met by chance while traveling on a train to the south.

  Wednesday 17

  Last night Inés was talking, like so many others before her, about my distance, about my separation from things, about my indifference toward her. She is right, but there is nothing deliberate about defining a way of being. As a result, she insists on imagining immediate changes. “There’s no pleasure in your life now,” she told me.

  Balzac, at the start of the nineteenth century, already knew how to write by changing the point of view. In “A Passion in the Desert,” the narrator directs his account to someone conversing with him. But the story has been narrated to him in the first person by the protagonist of the events; that is, he achieves several levels. Someone lives through an incident. Then he meets an individual and recounts it. That individual in turn tells it to a woman.

  The immortal. He had been in combat with Güemes, ridden against Urquiza, had told bedroom anecdotes, archaic and outmoded, which he attributed to his friend Lucio Mansilla. He said he was Alem’s man but not Yrigoyen’s, claimed that he had suffered prison during Peronism. In that way, using incidents known to everyone, he told the long years of his life, making himself the protagonist in numerous successive events in time. In the end, he sat in a bar on Las Heras and Lafinur, showing that he knew a lot about the interlinings of Frondizi’s government and that, therefore, he was living in the present.

  “The world is changed… not by what is said, or what is blamed or praised, but by what is done. The world never recovers from what is done,” G. K. Chesterton.

  Last night, close to here, a fire. Above all, the image of a man throwing furniture, suitcases, clothing from the window.

  Inés talked about the scar on my ankle. She stopped to think but refused to tell me what she was thinking about. Another scar on the leg
of someone she knew in the past, I thought.

  A police story. A lucid murderer “scientifically” constructs a crime that no one will be able to solve. The story consists of an account of the event and the successive narration of a series of chance incidents, unexpected pieces of information, footprints that do not belong to him, which end up constructing, unexpectedly and for the wrong reasons, his guilt. The issue is that the crime is perfect, but chance creates a series of false proofs that send him to prison.

  As always, there is something like a mandate (from no one) for me, a mandate I have built for myself (writing and being a writer). I don’t know if that makes sense either. But, just the same, always, it comes back and persists.

  Saturday 20

  A short story. A Peronist laborer is hospitalized in the intensive care ward while, outside, the 1955 revolution breaks out. Convalescent, he is partially aware of the events that have been percolating while he was in a semiconscious state. His dreams and his ideas and convictions have made him think that the revolution was defeated. When he goes out into the street and sees a demonstration, he believes it is a march in support of Perón, who has fled from the city several days before.

  Someone does something but recounts it as though it were something else, and it is the reader who must replace the missing meaning. It’s as though the narrator were ignorant of the names of the things that must be named, so that his tone is one of stupefaction toward what he narrates, but his stupefaction is connected to the difficulty he has in naming the events, rather than toward the events themselves. He is not able to hierarchize the incidents, and describes a crime and the act of drinking a glass of water at a bar with the same distance. In the police genre, all characters are despicable and efficient.

  Sometimes I have visions of Inés as though anticipating her actions, which are always reproachable and take the form of betrayal in my fantasies. Should I think that this way of seeing is a necessary consequence of love, or its opposite?

  Friday, February 26

  This summer ends as well and, like all summers, leaves me with the feeling of a light and luminous time, lasting as long as the span of the sun’s journey toward the end of afternoon.

  For me, 1964 has only just ended.

  Monday, March 1

  In the end, I will always be an outsider to things. Last night in the middle of the dance at the club near the river, surrounded by unknown people belonging to Inés’s past.

  Tuesday 2

  The town once again, the port of Piriápolis, with dive bars and the great bridge over the river, the café as metaphor for the town because it mixes together everything that is separated in the place. Someone has come there with his woman, to the place where she was born and became who she is; he is there as an observer of a far-off time, which survives in the middle of the coast by the sea. He knows that the people there share a common history and that everyone is watching the outsider with interest. That figure, the outsider, is a hallmark of fiction, someone who comes in from elsewhere, someone unknown; the passing traveler brings with him a gaze that no one knows. Ulysses was the first outsider, and tonight I imagine that I am the last.

  Before, on Saturday, a long and tranquil walk through Buenos Aires with Inés, the bars (that bar on Maipú that is deserted at this time of day). We continue as far as Bajo, then walk down the covered walks of Alem to Retiro and then to the port with the muddy river, the color of the desert, which is always motionless. We went to Adam, the beautiful pub that opens onto the park and Torre de los Ingleses. We drank beer and remembered other times and other people in this very bar. Finally, we ate dinner at Pippo and went to the festival on 9 de Julio, and Aníbal Troilo was playing on a stage.

  Wednesday

  Iguazú Bar. Escaping from that town, we returned to the tiny and very tall room, happy once again in the city. In a hiding place between the books, I found four thousand pesos that I had forgotten there a while ago.

  Now I go back to reading Proust, the long paragraphs, his magnificent cadence: “Remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me,” M. Proust.

  Another comparison, or rather, another kinship: in Proust as in Kafka, power is thoughtless and irrational and is always paternal and has a nonhuman character. “My father’s conduct towards me was still somewhat arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him,” M. Proust.

  Friday, March 5

  I am in Las Violetas, I want to write a short story: they spend the summer in her town, and the woman stays there; during the journey, on the way toward the town, there were already hints of their breakup. Spaces have an emotional value that goes beyond the landscape and experiences. The story of the woman who does not leave seems to me the inverse of Briante’s story “Dijo que iba a volver” and Rozenmacher’s “Raíces.” The town as a passing place. The outsider as the modern hero. He has no birthplace, is always passing through, and, in the end, perhaps without anyone foreseeing it, he discovers the place where he was born. As though Ulysses didn’t know that he wanted or needed to return to Ithaca.

  Sunday, March 7

  Yesterday on the train, on the way to San Isidro, a surprising and novel fear about the immediate future. I was on the point of getting off anywhere I could. I had money in my pocket and this notebook in my bag. And that’s that. Later, at Haroldo Conti’s house in the country, many writers, too many writers. Miguel Briante was there, and so was Enrique Wernicke, with whom I had some verbal skirmish, in the routine tone of cultural machismo and hooliganism. (The two of us went to piss in the garden and competition and comparison immediately arose, then we saw that, while we were there, everyone was watching us from the living room through the glass of the large picture windows.) Marta Lynch applauded, I was already fairly drunk, and everything had that intellectual-party atmosphere—atrocious.

  In the morning, Alberto Szpunberg and Jorge Herrera trying to put together an intellectual front, wanting to organize a writers’ liaison with the MIR.

  Tuesday

  Last night, with Pancho Aricó and others, it becomes clear that the leftist front does not work without considering the issue of Peronism. He has proposed several times that I become involved with the magazine Pasado y Presente.

  When speaking about new writers (Rozenmacher, Briante, I myself), it is important to remember that they are not made so because of a generational issue, but rather because they have a different idea of art than that of the writers who preceded them.

  Is it about studying Argentine culture in the wake of Peronism? Yes, with the Pavesean concept of “lived history.”

  Thursday

  I take the train to El Tigre, the carriage packed. Near me, a fat and disproportionate man, of a certain age, drinking beer “so he wouldn’t go to bed cold,” after having spent fourteen years in Alcoholics Anonymous and becoming a teetotaler, “never drinking anything, not even Coca-Cola.” He has gone back to drinking and is “afraid of death” but sure that he won’t die like a dog, because he keeps dynamite under his bed and sleeps with a lit fuse, even if it’s cold and there are no mosquitoes, because he says that keeping the fire close is enough “to make everything fly.”

  Tuesday 16

  I go in loops through the bars in the city even though I know that this journey makes no sense. In the end, it is an ill-devised existence, which I only came to understand a short time ago. “Ill-devised” means you have accepted the risk of gambling everything on one card without knowing if that playing card was really there in the deck.

  Thursday 18

  For the first time in my life I am afraid of failure, yet I go on, static, not doing anything, as though searching for the end. On top of that, we have no money, and I escape the room and go into the city to stop thinking.

  Monday 22

  Miguel Briante reads me Habrá que matar los perros, a very good nouvelle—brilliant, lush, Faulknerian. In the bars on Corrientes with him, drinking unti
l sunrise.

  Today, the experience of listening to Oscar Masotta in Arts and Sciences presenting his book on Roberto Arlt. A notable autobiographical text following Sartre’s technique and, as in The Words, the speaker takes himself as the object of analysis and then speaks about himself but refers to who he was before—that is, another person who was him—without the clarity he has in the present. He recalled his misfortunes, his strange relationship with his father, his insanity and his neglect.

  Tuesday

  Tata Cedrón debuted a tango, “Trocha angosta,” and another with lyrics by Paco Urondo. In Chacarita, I wait for Casco, my old political contact from the days in La Plata. Now I am waiting for him in this place, full of flowers for the dead, a populated cemetery, strange, like an old fair.