The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Monday 29

  I don’t want to start another notebook because I don’t have the money to buy one. This one serves to clear my mind of these days, in which I have lived adrift, without tying myself down to anything and without expecting anything but the passing of days.

  April 5

  In Florida bar. The waiter had a black stone ring on his left hand, which moved as he opened the bottle of beer and tilted it against the glass so the foam would go where he wanted. Then he said that it had been a while since he’d seen me there, his friend; on the other hand, he said, referring to Júnior, he always comes. Curious, a waiter’s knowledge. He knows the regulars only through what they do or say while they are in the bar. Maybe someone (not me) confides in him or tells him episodes from their lives. But most commonly they know the remnants of experiences arising from conversations exchanged at the tables, because each waiter has a section of the place assigned to him and because—if I take myself as an example—those of us who frequent a café occupy the same tables almost unconsciously. And so, the waiter has a variable ensemble of individuals at his fingertips, who come to the place habitually and let him know unexpected areas of their lives, which he always accesses by chance.

  I live frugally off the money earned from the classes I give at the University. I travel to La Plata once a week and stay for three days, sometimes two. Anyway, I always spend a night in the city, always in the same hotel. The money I make from my two positions is enough for me to live on if I don’t have unusual expenses. But, like everyone else, I am only interested in unusual expenses, so I habitually have no money.

  Through the window, I just saw Inés arriving with the black handbag she always uses, her way of walking hurried but elegant, her hair tied with a black ribbon.

  I suddenly recalled that large theater, with a long corridor down the side leading to the bathrooms, the sounds from the street that filtered in despite the heavy curtains of the entrance, the matinées where I watched the Tarzan series, one film after another. It was the Brown theater, and I was seven or eight years old then and swelled with pride at going to the cinema alone.

  What I have kept from that far-off time is the delusion that each day is valuable in itself and is justified as though it were the only one. Childhood is a timeless time in which only momentary happiness matters, and you try to replicate it amid the inconceivable series of obligations to which a boy is subjected (school primarily, the daily rhythms at home forming an undeniable cohesion). Formally, nothing changes as you mature: it is always a combination of personal moments and imposed obligations.

  Wednesday 7

  Writing Pavese’s story: bound to the life of a cabaret pianist who plays tangos and milongas every night until, unexpectedly, he kills himself one morning.

  Recently, on the corner, while walking down the stairs to the subway at Medrano station to go downtown and lose myself among the people, I decided to come back, without wanting to, like someone who has forgotten something and goes back to look for it. And now I am in my room again, at the table, and can vaguely imagine what would have happened if I actually had taken the subway and gotten off at Callao and Corrientes.

  Once again in a lethargic state, the world is darkened and moves away from me. I lose my notion of space (first issue); what is far is near, and what is near is dangerous and almost becomes intimate (second issue). Now, for example, the cup of coffee, which, almost at the instant when I feel its proximity, falls to the floor of the bar and breaks. Sometimes I have to invent a reason to justify my hypnotic state, Inés’s slight lateness, for example. I saw her come in, greet me, and go over to a public phone; immediately I thought, among all the possible alternatives, that she’s calling someone else and making a date with him. In this way, though it may seem strange, I calm myself down by finding an explanation for my chaotic state. Then Inés comes over, sits down with me, laughs at the story of the broken cup on the floor, and says she was talking to Alicia on the phone, so we can go have dinner with her. Of course, I think these are the alibis that girls create with their friends. She agreed on that explanation with Alicia beforehand and was actually talking to a man. Alicia, on the other hand, is perfect in this area given that she is married to a musician but has been having a clandestine relationship with a surrealist poet for years. Of course, I don’t reveal my thoughts to Inés so that she will not suspect I have become aware of her adventures.

  Thursday 8

  I am on the train to La Plata, much better than yesterday; I can look out the window without danger and listen to the conversations of passengers traveling behind me without thinking that they are talking about me.

  Friday 9

  I won the competitions for my two fellowships because no opponent came forward. Anyway, it is a position that opens up every two years, and therefore my economic situation is resolved.

  Yesterday with fat Ferrero, long conversations about some Spanish poets he and I both admire. Poems by Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda. Then we discuss the draft of the story I’m writing and Ferrero immediately picks up on the pretentiousness of the prose. When someone reads one of my texts and immediately mentions an aspect I’m certain about, I look past it; on the other hand, if they mention, in a confused but critical way, an aspect that I feel insecure about or doubt, it is clear that I have to go back to working on it. Giving an unfinished text to someone else is a way for you to read it with their eyes, meaning that you can separate yourself from what you’re writing and see it with a certain distance.

  Theme, a variation. A Peronist laborer or employee is confined in a hospital during the days in September when the military coup against Perón took place. He becomes aware of the events confusedly, amid the stupor of the painkillers and medical treatments that constitute the everyday routine. On the radio, he hears differing and confusing versions and dies without knowing the conclusion of the historical events, which he was interested in but could not decipher.

  Saturday 10

  Vietnam is, for us, what the Spanish Civil War was for my father. A conflict in which something more than the immediate result is in play. According to the newspapers, tactics are being tested in all of the (western) armies to suppress guerrilla warfare.

  Sunday 11

  I am in Las Violetas; I come here every day to write in the morning hours when the bar is almost empty. Around five in the afternoon the women from the neighborhood start coming here, to meet with their friends and drink tea. Today it is raining and the city behind the large windows looks like a gigantic fish tank populated by curious individuals who pass running through the street, holding up some circular cloth objects with canes that rise from their hands to a swarm of metal ribs, flipping around easily when the wind meets them head-on.

  I should connect the notion of “destiny” in Pavese with the “past” in Faulkner. They are crystallized ways of defining motivations that the characters act out without understanding. Faulkner writes as though the reader belongs to the story he narrates, never explaining anything that the characters already know. Therefore the air of abstract incomprehension and magic that events in his books possess.

  Monday

  I am reading Faulkner’s “The Bear,” a story of learning that, for me, has slight secret echoes of Melville’s Moby Dick. Stories with wild animals are the only ones worth telling, even though you sometimes come across peaceful and familiar stories with cats or dogs as protagonists. The best animals in literature are those of Kafka: “Investigations of a Dog,” “Josephine the Singer,” “A Report to an Academy.” In fact, in Kafka the animals are intellectuals or artists. Whereas Faulkner’s bear and Melville’s whale are forms of untamed nature. Having said that, what can be said about the horses that abound in Argentine literature?

  Monday, April 12

  A few days ago, one of Inés’s friends, who is coming to live in Buenos Aires, came in from Rosario. We go around the city, from one end to the other, through Bajo as far as Palermo. We saw Alberto Szpunberg and Daniel Moyano
. Inés’s friend writes some conceptual poems, which I enjoy. When we went to wait for her at the terminal in Once, she was reading a novel by Osamu Dazai.

  Thursday

  Yesterday with Daniel Moyano and Augusto Roa Bastos, looking for certain places we had read about in some books. For example, Plaza Vicente López, where you can see the shadow of the ghosts in Bianco’s story, or the cupola of the building on Talcahuano and Lavalle, where the hotel from Mad Toy was located, where Astier meets the boy who wears women’s stockings. For them, the landscape has a power superimposed onto the story; Roa in Son of Man, and Moyano in his Kafkaesque stories, find the space of fiction in the wasteland.

  Friday

  Last night, a round table in the College of Philosophy and Letters to present La lombriz, the book by Daniel Moyano that we published in Nueve 64. In the discussion, I faced off against everyone. While they defended so-called inland literature, I stood as the sole representative of Buenos Aires. Saer cracked a few jokes in bad taste, but then we went on arguing in several bars and ended up eating at El Dorá.

  Monday

  Many projects are in my hands—the book of stories, the magazine, which I’m publishing by myself. It’s important to hurry, to choose a direction; I must make up my mind. What am I doing here? Everything is ridiculous. I have found myself in the middle of a task that I didn’t choose. I can neither work nor stop working. It’s as if there are some problems—or traps—that I don’t want to escape from. But we are coming to the end now, slowly.

  Tuesday 27

  I return to dreaming the same dream: someone lights the room in La Plata on fire, all of the books and my stories burn. That dream repeats, as though I had assimilated my old myths, the fire in a library, the image of burnt books; of course, it doesn’t concern the other fable: the writer who destroys his old papers or manuscripts so that they will not be published. Although, perhaps, a careful interpretation of this recurring dream unites the two traditions: my books are burning, but I am also burning them myself.

  I have to go back—since I am in the tunnel of introspection—to the breakup that, I suppose, was the end of childhood for me, a paradise lost. Of course, all paradises are imaginary.

  Thursday 29

  I won ten thousand pesos in the Instituto del Libro’s short-story competition for “Una luz que se iba.” You can live for a month with that kind of money.

  Interesting, in current literature, the opposition between the artist and the intellectual, seen as incompatible. Each carries his own shortcomings: the artist, always inspired, is customarily a bastard who thinks he has privileges and others must be at his service. On the other hand, the intellectual manipulates others with his rational excuses and his historical blackmail, explains everything and everything serves to justify him. In short, it is another embodiment of the tension between art and life.

  Monday, May 3

  An American invasion of Santo Domingo. Several protests in Buenos Aires condemning it. The American paratroopers occupied the city within an hour and eliminated Caamaño’s supporters’ center of resistance. Immediately, my friends on the left saw clearly the difficulty of establishing a revolutionary strategy in urban insurrection (Lenin’s model). Today, it seems impossible to resist in a city that has been conquered; therefore, the discussion has veered toward rural guerrilla warfare with liberated regions in the mountains. But that strategy is madness in Argentina.

  Look at L. Johnson’s justification: “The American nations cannot, must not, and will not permit the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere. This was the unanimous view of all the American nations when, in January 1962, they declared, and I quote: ‘The principles of communism are incompatible with the principles of the inter-American system.’ This is what our beloved President John F. Kennedy meant when, less than a week before his death, he told us: ‘We in this hemisphere must also use every resource at our command to prevent the establishment of another Cuba in this hemisphere.’… But revolution in any country is a matter for that country to deal with. It becomes a matter calling for hemispheric action only—repeat—only when the object is the establishment of a communistic dictatorship.”

  Thursday 6

  Last night, shooting and gas from the police at the protest for Santo Domingo. We assembled in front of the Congress and the mounted policemen charged the crowd, which dissolved into small groups and reassembled again and again. For my part, I have a confused version of the events. I remember Alfredo Palacios speaking against the American intervention from the stairway of the Congress, and then I see myself sitting at a table in La Ópera bar on Corrientes and Callao, but I don’t remember what happened in between.

  I watch Chronicle of a Boy Alone by Leonardo Favio. A notable first film of great quality. An intuitive artist who knows how to tell stories and has seen very good cinema. The film reminded me of S. Ray.

  I am in London on Florida and Avenida de Mayo. I make a circuit through the bars, obliged to feel a certain detachment, as though traveling through. Very unfocused, no capacity for work.

  Monday 10

  I am in Las Violetas now. I work in this brightly lit bar, just in front of the hotel where I live. I prepare the introduction for the magazine. I don’t hope for much from this either. I also think, as has happened to me in other magazines I have worked on, that it is very productive and enjoyable to work in a group, creating a composition, but at the same time I know intimately that true work is always solitary. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon in Martínez with Sergio, translating the work of A. Wesker. Everything is ready now; the index is set and I can start preparing the introduction. I don’t want it to be an editorial, but simply an essay that deals with some issues discussed in the magazine. I still have reservation concerning the title of the publication. It could be Letras/65.

  Rereading my notebooks is a narrative lesson: everything is organized chronologically according to the cuts of days of the week. That continuity is exterior to the events, so that the form these notes take depends in some sense on the time I take to write them. But, in reading them, things change and I start to discover connections, repetitions, the persistence of certain motifs that reappear and define the tone of these pages. In short, the events, the characters, the places, and the states of the soul are combined here; the distinctive feature is that all of that is present while at the same time the days are narrated, one after another. In that sense, a diary seems akin to dreams.

  One of the lessons—if there really are lessons, because deep down it is idiotic to think you can learn from the experience—is the fluctuation between what can be done or said and what can be neither said nor done. A diary should be written about the second part of the sentence; that is, you should ultimately write about the limits or the frontiers that make certain words or actions impossible. But where do those obstacles come from, the feeling that there is something—a space, a person, a series of actions—“that cannot be done?” It wouldn’t mean a “real” impossibility but rather a place it is prohibited to enter. Then we ask whom it is prohibited for and start again… It’s also true that my past (what Pavese calls personal destiny) allows me to see or define what I can do; the rest of the alternatives and options I could never see nor conceive of directly. Literature could be, among other things, helpful as a way of discovering or describing these blind spots.

  Tuesday, May 11

  In the bar on Rivadavia and Gascón. A sensation of being clean, shaven, tranquil, up in the air. Maybe take a trip to the south, to Banfield.

  The introduction to the magazine becomes clear as soon as I frame it as an attempt to treat culture as a politically specific field. Politics has its own registers and modes, which cannot be applied directly to literature or culture. It doesn’t mean they are autonomous, it only means that they have their own ways to discuss and “do” what we call politics, or rather that they have their own power relationships. But we cannot forget that literature is a society without a state. No one,
no institution or form of coercion, can obligate someone to accept or enact a certain artistic poetics. The material decisions of art belong to their own sphere; in fact, more than talking about politics in general, it is necessary to talk about the dynamic between the museum and the market. The museum as site and metaphor for consecration or legitimacy, and the market as the sphere of circulation for the works, always mediated by money. In that frame, the problem of “creation” becomes at once more clear and more complex. That must be the crux explaining the meaning of a new publication.

  Wednesday 12

  It is not by chance that now—as I work on the article for Literatura y Sociedad, which is what the magazine will be called—the tranquility of my best times returns. For me, the essay must center around the letter y: it is about investigating the difference that this letter establishes and also the connection that it defines.

  Thursday 13

  In Florida bar. Last night in front of Congress, another protest against the American invasion of Santo Domingo. In the middle of the action, a confrontation between the Tacuaras, the nationalist group of the right, and the Communist Party. The gunfire lasted more than a half hour. I took refuge in the entryway of El Molino and could only see the confusion and the commotion and a young man in a suit with black glasses shooting a pistol toward a target I wasn’t able to identify. He was crouching behind one of the benches in the plaza and would appear here and there, supporting his arm on the back and firing, and then, without losing calm—or at least it seemed so to me—and without hurrying, he would go back and hide behind the wooden bench. In the end, there was one death, one casualty, and five wounded. At midnight, the protest returned to the city center, listlessly. In the end, on the corner by El Obelisco, a group started shaking a Coca-Cola poster on top of a lamppost. They threw it down and everyone celebrated as though it were a triumph… Then a Neptune water cannon appeared (the police also have their irony and know the classics) and started shooting water at everyone there. There was also tear gas, dogs, etc. For my part, I left running not very heroically down Diagonal Sur. I was with Inés, Raúl E., and Sergio.