The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  This is an age of quotations.

  We are on the left not because of generosity, not because of insidious piety, not because of the exercise of compassion, but because—as Engels says—“in any event, what is certain is that before taking sides in a cause we have to make it into our own cause, and in that sense, forgoing possible material expectations, we are communists.”

  Wednesday 26

  I am reading Stendhal and Melville to discover what part of us was already present in the nineteenth century.

  The solemnity in Sabato’s prose leads it—without reprieve—again and again, to ridicule.

  Thursday 27

  I want to erase my tendency to hold others responsible for the weaknesses and shortcomings that I suffer. Since it pains me to recognize “my virtues,” which I do not attribute to others, I will do the same with my avarice and my mean streak.

  “Born to die, nothing can restore the immortality of youth; after the golden age has ended, only degradation remains,” M. Merleau-Ponty (although the sentence could come from Pavese). Some people desperately yearn for childhood because—I now realize—they were, or felt themselves to be, immortal.

  “Our past acts,” he thought, “come to us from the end of years to come, unrecognizable, but our own.” He had seen that sentence written in the air, in front of him, like a psychotic motto—or a quotation. He was hallucinating but could imagine only written sentences. He saw them in the air, in the hospital corridors or up in the trees, on the faces of his companions in captivity. Sentences and sentences and sentences, unforgettable. He asked the nurse for the favor or permission to replace his phantasmagorical writings with murky or terrible images, but abstract, devoid of all language. He was confined in a detox clinic, only accompanied by his “assistant” or double; perhaps she was his daughter, unadopted, who stayed with him day and night and would say that she was Mexican.

  Yesterday with Edwards, the professor of social history, and his lover (an attractive blonde) and the classmates from the course (only three of them), at Ricardito, listening to Piazzolla’s quintet.

  Rodolfo Kuhn and Germán Rozenmacher propose that I write the script for one of the Historias de jóvenes that they and other writers are making for television. Maybe I could write Lucía’s story.

  I was thinking about Herzog, the novel by Bellow, admirable for its ability to capture a period of crisis, the crisis—personal, political, moral, philosophical, and intimate, but also current—of a liberal intellectual, a distinguished professor who has lost his hopes (and also his women), ambiguous, alone, hanging in the air. It is differentiated in this way from Rabbit, Run by J. Updike, which recounts the escape of a common man, an ex-basketball player famous at the college, a physical man in fact, an anti-intellectual, formed by popular culture, who is trapped in the middle of his flight, who is desperate because he has become a loser, living off his past—and mediocre—glory.

  Memories shared with a woman loved populate sleepless nights (when it is always three in the morning in the dark night of the soul), for the survivor who finds in them only dry leaves, words, I mean dead leaves.

  Despite everything, he said in the future, looking from there, this must be a happy time because the future is—potentially—in my hands. Economically, there is no unease (I have these three months of life until April guaranteed). For the moment, in spite of repeated dreams in which I wander through “alien houses,” I have Cacho’s apartment (“since where the wild cat makes its den, a man can live as well”), because he will have enough money to buy another house after the summer. But if he can’t, where will I go? But nothing depends on me, directly, and this waiting is my Beatrice (my muse). In any case, I must struggle against this “restlessness,” which does not let me live.

  Perhaps, in the novel, I can base Cacho on my own adolescence, give him my life experience from those years, extract it from my diaries. I must also find an almost political anecdote (which everyone will already know so that it will not have to be explained, as is the case with events in Greek tragedy: everyone knew the myths and the plots around which the works were based). For example, the theft of the bank truck and the criminals’ flight to Uruguay. In this way, using the pretext of nonfiction to escape from verisimilitude and costumbrism. To write, so to speak, an epic drama, or rather, a tragedy.

  Saturday, January 29

  The days pass by empty, as they do in allegories. Nothing I might have “created,” and yet, nevertheless, are these useless days not the basis, the cement that makes other “moments” possible, fleeting and perfect?

  Once again—once again, as happened that week in 1961—I find my body hostile: it is here, I am me (who?), but it is alien to me and has laws of its own, imposes itself, inexorably, and marks the passage of time in a way that I always saw in others (they grew older around me). Like that day in the Adrogué station with Elio Spinelli when, in a fight, I first discovered the fragility of my body, which did not measure up to my courage. These are surprising discoveries, short-lived, because later I disregard them, let them live their lives. But, in the end, the body (a skeleton, a shell, a frame, an empty skin, without a soul) is right, and I cannot ignore it.

  Something of that happens here, in this house where order is alien to me, and my friends want to impose it upon me, want me to be “molded” (to enter the mold) and accept it. Of course, it is impossible to live without others, without the body. And solitude is false, an illusion, like magic, as it was for Plato and the Platonists, for the mystics who cast off and condemn the body, not as an austere sacrifice, but for the great pride of being able to surpass physical “limitations.” Living life outside of the world, being hermit in the desert—these are sealed exits. What then? To understand that you are—if you can be—the shape of the face, the ineptitude, the restlessness.

  You think, say, Within thirty years… Such a phrase is the only possible awareness of temporality. Looking back from the future (as though that were possible) is one of the qualities of fiction, like parallel lives, pure bodies: one goes onward, toward what is to come, in order to endure the present. This reflection is way to destroy the images we have of ourselves, to understand that hope is impossible, that no one has the inhuman resilience that would permit living in the pure present; destruction lurks in everything, and none of us have certain dominion over ourselves (none of us have our own dominions assured). Yet, in spite of everything, there are objects, entities that appear secure, to which we must subject our absolute spirit.

  Cantar de ciegos by Carlos Fuentes, a brilliant book, ingenious, almost superficial but very intelligent, with an astute perception of the relationships between people. “A Pure Soul” is the best story.

  The virtue of Sartre’s autobiographical prose (The Words, Nausea, the portraits of Merleau-Ponty and Nizan) consists of his ability to transform reality into concepts, in the reverse of Borges, who turns concepts into realities.

  Monday, January 31, 1966

  The collapse begins. Cacho (and Bimba and Victor) in prison. I was the only one who understood the emptiness of his life. Robbing, being in danger, being pursued, taking risks was his way of feeling alive. The rest of the time he was bored; he perceived the senselessness of life better than anyone. He went to the casino to regain something of that intense time of transgression and danger. He started to lose in a fiendish way; he bet against himself and always lost, only seeking to sustain the feeling. The other night he left the roulette table, crossed the street, and, in one of those buying-and-selling caves, there to prey on hardened players who sell their clothes to keep playing, he sold a stolen Rolex watch and wrote his real name in the check book, the address of the house and his mother’s, and his identification number. The police followed him for three days and finally arrested him and all of his friends. While interrogating him, they told him that they had proven during their surveillance that Bimba was sleeping with Victor and that no one was loyal to him. They broke into his mother’s house and took away all of the electronic
s he had stolen and even the money he had hidden in one of his shoes.

  Meanwhile, Cacho was inside. Everything fell apart for him in a moment, as in a dream. The police came to the house at two in the morning. They took three revolvers, two suitcases of jewelry. He must have imagined that someone had betrayed him, but it was he who set the trap for himself.

  I began this notebook with the crisis at the house in Boca and now continue with Cacho’s arrest and the end of a golden age, a dangerous time for him although I have remained safe (since he, under torture, did not name me or implicate me in his doings, even though, according to Bimba, the police questioned him about me).

  The first thing I thought was that I had lost my typewriter. I left it in Cacho’s apartment in Buenos Aires, which the police have surely searched or will search.

  Sometime I will leave a notebook only half-finished (as I am now doing with this one).

  February

  I am reading I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch. I like the outrageous reasoning of the plot: one man who is taken to be another—or confused with him—writes the book as a defense and testimony of his true identity. “Today they brought me this notebook of empty pages. I’m supposed to write down my life story.” Technique becomes the theme; the same happens with Beckett’s Malone Dies, where he receives some pages of paper every night and writes the novel we are reading, there in his mother’s room, in the bed, with a pencil. Nevertheless, there is an appreciable difference between those tricks and the way in which Pavese, for example, writes his diary. In his case, the artifice is reduced to a minimum—someone is writing out his life—and it is legitimized, implicitly, with the author’s suicide.

  We must avoid the canonization of literature made into an absolute (example, Sabato) and therefore meaningless triviality, or, inversely, doing the same as Henry Miller, who tells us that his novels are written based on life itself—and without form (another fraud). Sabato first creates his figure of the tormented writer, and Miller has first read Thomas Wolfe. Diaries avoid these two delusions and set out on an uncertain and fragile path.

  I’m Not Stiller is the reverse of Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal. In both cases, there is a play on the unfolding of identity and possible lives. Everything comes down to the name, which is the condition of confusion and changing place; that is why there are those titles, where a personal name shines (how many other novels have the male surname on the cover?). Frisch advances into a Kafkaesque atmosphere (Joseph K. seems to have been confused with another man); the individual is interrogated and imprisoned by the authorities, who treat him as guilty from the first.

  I walked along the old covered walk, dappled with water. I crossed it from side to side, made my way among passersby who had taken refuge there and were piled up escaping from the rain. The business, a kind of glass kiosk, was almost at the exit, over Rivadavia. I knew he hung out around there. Last night, no further than this, he almost crashed into me in the middle of the street and I had to jump off to a side to avoid him and escape. I moved quickly and mixed into the crowd and then started to walk slowly so that he would not notice me as he left. Perhaps because of this, today, I spied through the glass before entering. I turned my back to him, trying not to make sudden movements, not to break the rhythm of the pedestrians who moved between the shop windows and passageways. He was behind me. I started to walk and distance myself, not knowing if he had managed to see me. I imagined that icy touch at the back of my neck and at my waist, close to my spine, expected to feel it with the contact of his soft and tired voice.

  Wednesday 2

  I woke up slowly, at seven in the morning, as though frightened, covered in sweat. Nothing but complaints with the attorney since last night. Cacho is in jail in Buenos Aires; they took him for forced entry in the apartment in Ugarteche. There is nothing I can do for him. There is nothing I can do for him? Impossible to go to the place on the eighth day as we planned. What’s more, after beating him, the police figured out everything, and they told Cacho that they knew about his impotence, that they had discovered Bimba’s relations with Ernesto and Victor. They had been following them for days and told him the details of his woman’s secret rendezvous with his friends. “All to bring him down,” the attorney told me with a mournful air. They even went to Ernesto’s apartment and took away everything hidden there. After the night when Cacho sold the stolen Rolex and gave his own address, the attorney told me, they had started following him and all of his friends, including me. He recommended that I “make myself scarce.” What I did was to go to Adrogué, to my grandfather’s house, which used to be mine. I always go there when I am in trouble. My grandfather always welcomes me with the same knowing smile.

  The difficulty is remaining calm. The “changes” (emotional or material) impede me from thinking and acting effectively. But I already knew that. The essential thing now is to insure my footing, get money, look for a place (with de Brasi, in another boardinghouse, etc.) that hasn’t been compromised. From there, I will be able to start everything again and help Cacho.

  I just walked alone, in the sun, down the empty street. I found a certain peace. But now I am centered in myself again, like back in ’59, as lost as I was then. I feel—with news of the events—that all of my certainty has broken down, that nothing is stable, and then I turn circles and circles around myself.

  Thursday 3

  “The truly strong man in any sphere is the one who most clearly realizes that nothing is given, that all must be made and paid for; who is uneasy when he fails to find obstacles, and so invents them… For such a man, form is grounded in reason,” Paul Valéry.

  “Great music consists of fulfilling the obligations the composer incurs with virtually the first note,” Arnold Schoenberg. He worked based on conventions. In literature, they are grammatical, syntactical forms, implicit in genres, methods and techniques already used by others, themes, motifs, and plots already written and stereotypical characters (the hero, the miser, the dumb girl, the femme fatale), for those of us who try to relive by writing.

  Friday 4

  The character is “the indifferent man,” but socialized. You have to pay attention to his sick characteristics, how he stains everything he touches and everyone he knows. He lives outside of society, in the void, but through his actions he contaminates others with his vitriolic presence. Everyone falls down on him; the method is denunciation—as with Cacho, betrayed by those who were the closest.

  Saturday 5

  Cacho turns up in the newspapers, caught, arrested. The papers have the power to stupefy us, especially when we are implicated in the news we read. The sinister thing is that they seem to be written by no one, as though they were just information, stripped of prejudices or subtexts. They want you—by reading the name, seeing the photo, reading about the “misdemeanors”—to accept everything as though it were irrevocable.

  For a history of literature, the only valuable criterion must be the present, meaning that what justifies a writer historically is not his or her permanence in the zeitgeist; instead, his or her reality is a kind of continuous present, becoming contemporary in some times and obscure in others. Because for no one, at any time, are there absolute values.

  Sunday, February 6

  Every morning this uncertainty, like hanging in the air. Maybe I haven’t learned to go backward, but I am afraid of returning to the hotel room on Calle Medrano.

  Yesterday, almost without realizing it, but displaying my discomfort through some nervous jostling and a kind of persecution complex that lasted a while, I accepted—in his mother’s house—the five thousand pesos that Cacho had left me before falling prisoner.

  The only thing I need to save is the work. I lock myself in to write as though creating a replica of Cacho’s incarceration. I work neurotically, in spite of everything.

  Yesterday in the theater, a film with James Bond, an essential contemporary figure who combines the adventurer, the dandy, and the romantic conqueror. “A gentleman of the night,”
as he says about himself (girls, passion for gambling, fine food), forgetting—and letting you forget—that he is a spy, 007, with a license to kill, who lives a double life. He seems to be a reincarnation of Superman, but updated for the modern consumer world. The hero is an expert consumer and a secret warrior who not only defends his style of life, but also a form of social life.

  Monday 7

  Yesterday at the sea, on Sorensen’s beach, and then in Barrilito and then in Beruti’s melancholy and Kafkaesque hotel, where she and I tried to create an absolute. Escape the uneasiness of this time and the worry over Cacho’s incarceration. Withdraw for a closed-off and perfect time. But it was pointless.

  Today, tonight, the journey; at the end of the respite that was already growing worse on its own, I am returning to Buenos Aires. There I will find the situation as such: the apartment on Calle Ugartecho searched by the police (my typewriter was there). I doubt that the hotel on Calle Medrano is a good idea. So I have to change residence, look for money and some calm to resume my pending work.

  To what extent do the best American “hard-boiled” narrators (Hammett, Cain, Chase, and Chandler) destroy, trivialize, or in fact improve on Hemingway’s narrative technique?