The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Sunday

  I see Roberto Jacoby, who tells me about some of his experiences in New York. Especially the spectacle in the street of groups fighting against the Vietnam War. Surprisingly, on a very crowded corner of the city, three or four actors hidden among the people feign a violent argument about the facts of the war, almost come to blows, but a third actor intervenes, and then an actress, who adds to the verbal violence. Quickly, the passersby join in the argument and the city erupts in a debate about the political situation. By that point, the actors have already withdrawn from the place; they enter the subway and get off in another populous part of the city. According to Roberto, it is a theater of violence that does not speak about it but rather acts it out. Connected in particular to The Living Theatre.

  Monday

  We are always without money. I hope the magazine—in which we have invested our reserves—works out well. I always have the article half-done. The truth is that the project is underway and it is impossible to turn back and there is nothing left but to undertake it. I hope to finish writing it this week so that the magazine can go to print before the end of the month.

  Last night we went to listen to Osvaldo Pugliese at Solís Theater; it was all of the friends from the magazine, and we took photos of ourselves and with the musicians. Very extraordinary, the first bandoneon player Ruggiero. He is unique, they call him “lead bandoneon” because he pushes on all the rows of bandoneons, like the lead horse drives the team pulling the cart. Pugliese’s bandoneons sound like a train moving forward while he plays the melodies on the piano. They finished by playing “La Yumba,” in which, if you listen closely, is all of Piazzolla.

  A proposal from Alberto Cedrón, who offers me a place in the tenement house on Calle Olavarría where all of the brothers live, including Tata. Very possibly I will accept the offer. The house is typical of the buildings in Boca, made of tin. When you enter, there is a patio with the sinks and bathrooms, and stairs lead from there to the second floor, where there is a line of rooms with more or less the same layout. It opens out into a hallway that goes to the kitchen and living room. At the end, on either side, there are two large rooms and a smaller place at the back of the living room. I would be in one of the ones that open onto the street, very spacious and well lit.

  Wednesday

  In Florida bar, eight p.m. A certain anxiety in the face of everything I don’t control, what others do without me. As though, in this moment (confronting the objective decisions that others make), I could recognize the opacity of the world, the exteriority I have always denied and avoided as though it did not exist. Though it may seem strange, I have acted for years as though I were alone in the world.

  La Paz, eight p.m. Strange, Cortázar praises my short story “Desagravio,” which I published a while ago, in a letter to a friend (A. C.) at the magazine where I no longer write.

  Subject. The morochito wrapped himself up in the blanket, looking like a pile of gray rags fluttering in the cold air that filtered in through the slits of the cell. A soldier had brought in the mattress less than an hour before. (Describing it in this way, dry, without making it clear what is taking place. Or if not, only through dialogue.)

  Thursday 20

  I am rediscovering the advantages of detachment. Anyway, I spent the afternoon with Sergio Camarda. He is trying to create a structure: bookshop + publishing house + distributor + magazine. Short twenty thousand pesos to buy the paper. Three thousand copies with one hundred sixty pages are sixty thousand pesos (paid ten thousand per month).

  The amusing part of the afternoon was the discovery that Sergio keeps several weapons in his house. We opened a chest looking for some photographs, but in fact found only weapons. “They’re a friend’s,” Sergio said, but I didn’t believe him. It’s not hard to see a relationship between these weapons and the magazine’s funding. Something distantly connected to money from some Cubans (I think).

  Thursday 27

  In Boca, at Tata’s house, I feel good here, working by night. The article is almost ready. Very humid and hot. I have several days ahead of me; I am alone, Inés in Tandil, I have one hundred pesos.

  Tuesday, June 8

  You are inside the world you narrate. What I mean is that you must never say anything that is external to the universe of the action. The narrator must know less than the protagonists.

  Monday, June 14

  I escape constantly. I hope to find an anchor in Boca. A fact I am fleeing from is that I barely write in this notebook. Always the same distance with Inés, as though a sheet of glass separated us.

  Friday

  I live here in this hospitable house, through which many friends circulate. Our place opens onto a calm street.

  Tuesday

  Last night at home, Gelman, Urondo, and Tata. After recording “Madrugada,” while we were talking I told him he could put music to Juan or Paco’s poems. They were working on that as we slowly got drunk. Then, after midnight, Tito Cossa and Germán Rozenmacher arrived, working on a collaborative project about the myth of Perón’s return: The Black Airplane, they call it.

  Sunday 27

  Things are resolving themselves slowly.

  Monday 28

  I quite like Cortázar’s story “Instructions for John Howell.” A spectator is kindly invited to enter the interior of the theater; he thinks it has to do with some type of questionnaire, but he suddenly sees that they have brought him onto the stage and he must participate in a work that is underway. It has something of Onetti’s “A Dream Come True,” with the woman who has a recurring dream and looks for a theater director to stage the oneiric scene: on a corner in the city, she crosses toward a man she knows and, on the way, a car runs her over and she dies “inside the reality” of the theatrical representation.

  Cacho comes to visit me, he enjoys the place, we go down to eat nearby and then leave to take a turn in a Chevrolet that he has stolen hours before. Of course, the beauty of the matter lies in the risk of being stopped for any small traffic incident.

  Going out with Cacho made me abandon my intention to travel to La Plata. Sergio calls us, maybe I have to go to the bookshop, to hurry up the delayed release of the magazine. But I remain shut in, waiting. Outside it is raining and the summer ending.

  Tuesday 29

  The point could be the following: to destroy—to attempt to destroy—personal fate as manifested in the repetition of events. We know that we repeat actions but do not remember. In this case, the point would be to deliberately remember some incidents from the past, over and over again. It might be a single event—for example, an afternoon playing chess at the club—remembered with the intention of reconstructing everything surrounding the scene. Another alternative would be to reread these notebooks, to choose something recorded there that you no longer remember and try to do the same thing again—that is, to try to reconstruct everything around that event. Of course, there is no assurance that you can overcome the repetition of events by remembering (for example, in my case, by remembering my tendency toward isolation, which has persisted since childhood), but, in any case, it would give a new dimension to the events. It’s like the reaction of a cat, scratching or biting when it is stepped on by accident. Memory works in this way: you step on the toe of a memory and then the scratch and the blood come. Nevertheless, there doesn’t appear to be a solution; it’s impossible to rectify the past. And there in the past is the event, one which you have forgotten but which is repeated in other ways—yet always the same, again and again.

  Friday, July 2

  Yesterday, all day organizing the house. As always, all I need is a table by the window and a lamp. I pass the night working.

  We watched King and Country, Losey’s film about the First World War. Sometimes a bit annoying, the pretension of “proving a thesis.” Excellent for the last ten minutes, after the soldier’s sentence of death.

  Sunday 4

  I am reading Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night once again. The rhythm of
the prose constructs the story. Later, in Suárez bar on Maipú and Corrientes, too much whiskey to be lucid with Inés.

  “I have entered the literature when I have been able to replace the ‘he’ with the ‘I,’” Kafka. In my case, I could say: I have entered my autobiography when I have been able to live in the third person.

  Subject. Narrating the war from the perspective of someone who did not go. It is achieved through “notices of war.” I talk about it with my grandfather Emilio, who comes to see me. He has been to war but never speaks of it, only keeps the papers, documents, letters, maps, and photographs, and always tells me that one day he will take on the work of organizing his archive. In the meantime, he has actually paid for the first years of my degree with the sole condition that I come see him at the house in Adrogué and listen to him telling his fragmented stories. It was delightful, as always, to see him once again. I accompanied him to the station and watched him walking away down the platform, very upright and elegant, illuminated by the white light of the locomotive.

  Tuesday

  I spend the day reading Céline. Several pending things have resolved at the magazine (the cover, the majority of the articles). In Céline, I am excited by the confessional tone in which “evil” is narrated. In one sense, it is the limit of the first person: you have to explain why this individual is able to accuse himself of acts that society considers heinous. Céline consciously constructs horrible scenes, never self-incriminates, never complains, only narrates the events with a slightly cynical tone in order to show that, in the moment of writing, he can only remember the wicked events he is narrating. He is another who seems to have purified himself only by telling the truth.

  Subject. Told to the man going alone to where she was born. He waits for the train and now, on the journey, finds someone in the train car who knows the woman and starts telling shady stories about her. When he arrives in the town, in an almost fantastical manner, he starts receiving fragments of his wife’s secret life by chance from the strangers he encounters in different places. He returns, gets off at Retiro, and is lost among the people. (He had gone to the town to “recognize” the place.)

  You could construct an almost fantastical story based on past events in the present. The protagonist could begin the day with a small memory, which arises unexpectedly and lasts barely seconds, and as the morning advances the memories grow more extensive; now he has to stop, for example, and sit on a bench in the park to resist the emotions of what the memory brings. When night comes, toward the end of the story, the man lives in the present for a minute—in the moment he turns off the lamp before going to sleep, for example—but, except for that instant, the rest of the time is completely taken over by his past.

  Another subject. The only person who did not see the luminous phenomenon that appeared suddenly in the starry night was the director of the meteorological observatory, who was facing the wall at that moment, talking to one of his colleagues on the phone. When he returned home, everyone told him about the strange experience of seeing a pale and wicked light in the sky, which seemed to pause over each one of them. The observer started to think that everyone in the town except for him was having visions, given that his mission in the place was precisely that of observing cosmic phenomena.

  Friday 9

  I spent the afternoon with the sculptor Mario Loza, then we went out together and ended up at a club close to the Boca stadium, eating pizza and drinking wine. Now I’m trapped in a sort of exaltation that could easily be confused with happiness. Meanwhile it is raining outside and you can hear the archaic sound of water falling on tin roofs. What is the meaning of this meeting, in a bar and then in a restaurant, drinking wine with someone I barely know?

  Earlier, at the College, I run into Vicky, huddled, always fragile, beautiful, with her slightly childish aggression. (I no longer love her, it is clear, but I did love her so.)

  Sunday

  I spend the day with Miguel in his house. Conversations that flow up from the past, as though we had never stopped seeing each other. He is married these days to a blonde girl, a kind of giantess, who will make him suffer.

  Monday

  Letter to Daniel Moyano.

  Telephone. Call Eduardo.

  Perspectives. F. Herrera. A. Szpunberg. Ramón.

  Clothing to the laundromat.

  Buying oranges.

  A shirt.

  At night, in London, the Porteña Jazz Band.

  Tuesday 13

  In La Plata, the fellowships are renewed. I sign a contract for “Introduction to History” and “History of Argentina I.” I will give classes two days in a row, possibly Monday and Tuesday. (I am going to spend one night in a hotel close to the train station.)

  Wednesday 14

  At some point Freud made an important discovery: there seemed to be a tendency to repeat past situations even when they had been painful. “This compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed.” Freud thinks that the tendency toward repetition is an attempt to repair the trauma (often—and this is very curious—the repetition goes back to the time when the trauma still had not taken place). In short, for Freud, repetition is an attempt to dominate and control experience.

  I have forty-five pesos to finish off the day and Alberto is calling me every other day to reclaim the alleged debt of twenty thousand pesos that he claims I owe him.

  Thursday 15

  A ridiculous cold. Mornings need not exist. We have to get up in the afternoon or at nightfall, whatever time allows us to elude the diluted, frozen light when the day is still ahead and we do not know what to do.

  Wise words: del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho, the thing is easier said than done. The phrase has been coming to me ever since, a few weeks ago, I announced the plan of things that I am going to do and yet never do. Of course, the sentence depends on alliteration, the sound of the “ch.”

  I went to the bank. I couldn’t collect the wire transfer that my grandfather sent me (it was three thousand pesos). We’ll make it through the day with ten pesos. For maté, etc.

  Friday 16

  I remember one summer in Bolívar, the image of myself at the edge of the pool, about to dive. We walked on dirt roads under the sun from the country house by the train station to the forest; the swimming pool was beside the trees and, at the end, you would pass slowly from the shadows to the light, the summer on the water.

  In the bar on Olavarría and Almirante Brown. A long conversation with Inés about ending things. Everything breaks down, sooner or later. Ever since I stopped living in La Plata as a student and came here to conquer the city, I have felt slightly restless and static. It seems like everything I do is for the last time.

  July 17 (1:15)

  “A great means of consolation: make the heartbroken man analyze his pain; it will diminish at once; pride always triumphs, wherever it intervenes,” Stendhal.

  Now, after that almost unreal afternoon with Inés in a club confirming the disaster, I understand that these notebooks (their deformations, their silences) are justified by Stendhal’s sentence.

  Recently, listening to the Beatles, an aggressive style, lyrical, asexual, full of rhythm. Neurotic. I don’t know why, but I was reminded of Céline’s prose.

  “Betrayal is something akin to opening the window of a prison cell: everyone wants to do it, but it’s the rare person who actually succeeds,” Louis Céline.

  There is a single thing that I do not want to understand: in order to do what you want to do, you have to be capable of rejecting and losing other things. To be alone in the moment of writing, to not rely on anyone. That can serve as an example for me today; I worked while I was alone. Later, now, I turned circles around myself and around Inés and entered the room, closed off from stupid states of mind. I did nothing that served any purpose. Except for taking an Equanil.


  It is obvious that this restlessness immobilizes me, impedes me even from reading. I turn over the same thing, become distracted, look through books, articles, kill time before sinking down and sleeping.