The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Wednesday 9

  I am in Buenos Aires, I rented a place in Hotel Callao, near Corrientes. I installed myself here alone, and we will see how things go. I am writing this in the Ramos bar. As always, I begin by rediscovering the familiar places, the bars empty at midmorning, where you can sit down almost on the sidewalk and watch life go by. I read Pavese (American Literature: Essays and Opinions).

  At night in the hotel once again, on the balcony. The avenue below. The people walking on the sidewalk seem little rubber dolls at that distance. I used the day today to check how far the water had risen, from the flood that sank Cacho.

  Some news: Jorge Álvarez asked me for my book of stories. Francisco Urondo wants a note for the magazine Adán (in exchange for two thousand pesos). F. Khun and Germán Rozenmacher went on about a television script; they make the series Historia de jóvenes, and the writers take it in turns. In this way, I can say that I more or less have the money I need for the coming six months guaranteed, and I’ve never thought about my future beyond that limit.

  Thursday 10

  I am in La Paz. In the paper, a note from Félix Luna about the anthology makes a reference to my story “Las actas del juicio.” I copy the text of the first review of my writing, done by a stranger: “E. R.’s debut work is an excellent conjecture into the spiritual conflict of one of Urquiza’s soldiers under the trance of murdering his old leader, disillusioned about him: a fascinating subject that surprisingly had never been undertaken by an Argentine writer until now.”

  I go to see Viñas in his apartment at the end of Calle Viamonte, almost in Bajo. He is grumbling about Carlos Peralta, who had promised him the text for the back cover of his novel, which, according to David, is now ready. In a bar, we talk a while about the difficulties of earning a living in Buenos Aires. A summary of the topics we covered. Novel-film. Possible impact on Latin America. Historical guidelines.

  The generation of post-Peronism. How some see others. Europe as mirror, market, and home.

  For my part, as always when I’m in danger, I would like to write about myself in the third person. To avoid the illusion of an “interior life.”

  Monday 14

  I am in Piriápolis, at Inés’s parents’ house. Very hot, too much beer. I have the impression of being stuck inside of a world I have always wanted to deny in order to live. As though all of the dikes crumbled down and the water flooded over everything.

  These days, I remember the lessons of other times: work, literature—sadly—is not detached from reality. There cannot be a “cure,” or a cutoff, or a parallel reality.

  In some way, the central mistake of Argentine writers can be detected in their “tremendous” and falsely literary metaphors. They always give a definition for each situation—that is, they always define and give a meaning to characters’ actions as they occur.

  Tuesday 15

  The world of Kafka—whom I have come back to reading with the same passion as always—is one of infinite mediations. Therein lies his greatness. What is postponed, what is always interrupted and diverted is, for him, reality itself. In fact, the extraordinary thing is that we do not “arrive” at the meaning either; everything is postponed and also interrupted in his texts.

  A subject. Maybe the story of the man who gives his woman to a friend (“I’ll lend her to you,” I told him), isn’t she the same as she always was?

  Thursday 17

  Last night, drunk, I really laid into Inés. The rage was coming from somewhere else. Sometimes you can actually “lose your head” (because you wagered it first).

  A rainy day. As always, I have no desire to go out when there is no sun. I went to meet with Rodolfo Khun about his proposal of writing one of the episodes of Historia de jóvenes for television. Afterward, I went to the theater and saw Odds Against Tomorrow, a very well-written police movie by Robert Wise. I left the theater and took a bus, which passed in front of the hotel on Medrano where we lived, and I felt a certain nostalgia; as always, the memory matters more to me than the experience itself. At night I saw Noé Jitrik; we went back to discussing the possibilities for courses and the institute that could replace the University, now seized by the military.

  “Consensus is the most important foundation for constitutional order; it is not material force, it is a reserve force for exceptional moments of crisis,” A. Gramsci.

  Friday 18

  Too many things to do. Search for a place to live. Get the furniture from Boca, collect the issues of the magazine that are now “out,” put together Issue 2, write the main article, correct the book of stories, prepare a script for Historia de jóvenes.

  “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,” T. S. Eliot.

  Saturday 19

  All I have left now is staying away, escaping, as though everything were going to fall apart at the same time. And it is logical that everything should fall apart at the same time. Yet, slowly, mysteriously, happiness returns, as though for an instant everything were held outside, separate, lasting as long as happiness can ever last.

  Sunday 20

  I want to live in this delicate mist forever, my head slow and eyes tired, without thinking about anything, without a future.

  Reading Bioy Casares, The Dream of Heroes. The intention behind the style, a colloquial prose, is to satirize and show the weaknesses of language from areas outside of literature. At the same time, the precaution of writing in an “Argentine” style (as seen in Cambaceres or in Cancela and Cortázar) takes these writers away from personal expression and moves them toward parody. By contrast, others, like Arlt or Viñas, show the “foreign” mark of their translated works and thus lose the local color (for the better), but also lose what they are seeking, a writing that is “free from literature.”

  A slow and empty day. I am unable to clearly see the aim of my essay for Issue 2 of the magazine. Then, my notes on Bioy and my rereadings of Mansilla. Maybe I am hoping to place the concept of “Argentine literature” in question. Or, anyway, to bring that adjective into discussion (what, in the end, is the meaning of an Argentine quality in literature?).

  I am reading the stories of Henry James. I would like to overcome the temptation of letting myself be carried away by the episodes, the flowing of events when I read stories, in spite of my resolve, and to pay attention to their composition, how they are put together. James is essentially a narrator of uncertainty. And in this story of vengeance (“The Abasement of the Northmores”) we encounter that constant duplicity again, with excessive interpretation of the protagonists’ actions and intentions. What is ambiguous, of course, is not the reality but rather the motivation; the distortion seems, in that way, to form part of the plot. A story half-heard or misheard, broken, fragmented, never fully understood. The same as when you unintentionally hear a phone conversation in a bar and must recreate the speakers’ lives based on it. On the one hand, you hear a single part of the conversation and must therefore imagine the responses. But even if you get it right and manage to “follow” the talk well, you would still understand almost nothing. Incredibly, Henry James writes in this way. Within the story, we cannot decide whether the vengeance will be realized or not.

  In the case of Daisy Miller, James’s technique is more descriptive and goes from large to small; an observer narrating in the first person describes the tourist section and then “descends” or goes to the hotel area, and then he descends further and goes to one hotel in particular, and then descends again and goes to a room in that hotel, and then concentrates on two people next to each other, having a conversation. A dramatic way of narrating, that is, of showing rather than telling the events, situated in the place of an observer who witnesses the fragmented conversation but does not synthesize it the way a traditional narrator would. James knows that in order to tell the story effectively you have to respect the opaci
ty of reality. You have to present the facts and leave their (possible) meaning open.

  Monday 21

  Here I am, sitting in a plush armchair by a window that opens onto the rooftops and terraces of Buenos Aires, reading Henry James, and at the same time the most varied thoughts pass before me, as though I could see them, as though my mind were connected to a personal television channel. A channel that works parallel to reading, as I have sometimes seen happen with friends, when I visit them at home and find them reading with the television turned on, sometimes no sound, only images, while they listen to music on a record player.

  Tuesday 22

  Unconcerned, I postpone the visits, the letters, the phone calls, the meetings with friends, I keep myself hanging, like a trapeze artist who jumps, imagining that there is a net below to catch him if he falls.

  A short story begins. I was the first man who slept with her, long ago now, almost ten years; I saw her at Antonio’s party last night and did not recognize her. She came toward me, smiling.

  Wednesday 23

  I have spent several afternoons visiting hotels and boardinghouses in the city, looking for a room for myself. It’s a very strange exercise because you have to choose a place to live without much information. I walked and walked and walked. There is a special section in the classifieds, where offers of rooms for rent appear. You are guided by the very concise information detailed in the ad: basically, the neighborhood, the street where the place is located and the offering price for rent. Finally, with no doubts, I let myself be guided by intuition and chose a room on the third floor in a petit hotel over Riobamba, almost at Paraguay. The room, with a balcony, opens onto the street, has a mini bath with a shower and a kitchen with two burners built in between two doors. Price, 220 pesos per day, which is close to 7,000 per month. I will bring my things tomorrow.

  Thursday 24

  Settled in now, I placed a table by the window, hung my clothing, left two suitcases on the side covered with a blanket. I enjoy changing to a new neighborhood and starting to walk around and scope out the place. This time, I am very close to the city center but also far enough removed for it to be more tranquil. I return to the circumstances of my arrival in Buenos Aires a year ago: in a boardinghouse, without money, placing my hopes on a half-finished book.

  I am reading James Purdy. All of the stories are a long conversation between two people who are building—in the moment, so to speak—rather than a story, an atmosphere.

  Recently, my cousin Horacio called with news about Cacho; the option materialized for me to go back to his searched apartment and live there, until he gets out. Staying in the discovered hideout would be a means of staying in danger, always vigilant to the movements outside. What better training for a writer? Installing yourself in an imprisoned friend’s foxhole and, while there, writing his story. So many ideas would cross through my mind if I were there. That night when Cacho called us together, Bimba led us in and we saw the bed covered with thousand-peso bills and him, sitting there. He had stealthily entered a two-story house in Martínez one Saturday night when, according to his calculations, the residents would be at the cinema or the theater or out visiting friends. He had fifty minutes, he thought, to get in, pick up whatever he found, and then leave under cover of darkness. He forced open the bars with the crowbar he carried on his belt, under his double-breasted suit, and leapt into a room on the second floor. He found a safe behind a painting. “I thought,” he told me, “the husband has one key. The wife has another. Where does the wife keep her key? I was cool, calm but aware of noises from the street. Where does the wife keep her key? In the kitchen, I thought, in a coffee tin.” He went to the kitchen, opened the tin, found the key, and went back to his apartment on Calle Ugarteche with two million pesos in American dollars and Argentine bills. But living there would be impossible for me, not only out of fear for being disrupted by the police, but rather because nothing would be the same now as back in the days when Cacho and I would swerve around the city together, certain we could conquer it, between the two of us, each in his own way.

  Suddenly I recall the days in Cacho’s apartment, not long ago, in January, alone there, reading Cantar de ciegos by Carlos Fuentes and also, from time to time, writing the stories I had imagined long ago in the same place. The summer had begun and everything was possible.

  Now, on the other hand, amid the desolation, I create passageways for myself to escape the storm. The way someone might build up ever more precarious barrier walls, absurdly, to halt the swelling of the river that threatens him, having diverged from its course, flooded the defenses one after another, and laid waste to everything.

  I live in the present, attentive to brief pauses of calm, unable to plan anything, imagine the days to come, or work in the long range, because doing so always means coming back the image of Cacho in prison.

  February 26

  Rereading my notebooks from last year, I recognize that the technique I have used for my stories—antisentimental, hard and objective—works well for short-form writing in which everything is resolved in the narrative situation. It is ineffective, I believe, for showing the temporal evolution of relationships—that is, for writing a novel.

  Last night I saw Breathless by Godard again for the fourth time. I enjoy his approach to genre: open, tangential, but simple in the construction of the plot. And I particularly enjoy his use of quotations, allusions, discussions, and cuts connected to a diverse store of knowledge, which act as context for the action. In this sense, Godard is, for me, the finest contemporary storyteller.

  Once again I have a thousand pesos to live on for a week. Pending matters: introduce Orson Welles, finish the script for R. Kuhn.

  February 28

  I hung up a photo of Roberto Arlt in this place where I have settled, hoping to finish the book of stories. I write beside the second-floor window that opens over Riobamba while the sun burns on the asphalt, wet from fleeting summer rains.

  Last night, after leaving the movie theater and still in the atmosphere of the film, I made a furtive visit to Cacho’s apartment to look for my papers and books. Not wanting to turn on the light, I went in with a lantern and saw the deliberate destruction the police had caused while searching the place: clothing strewn, the mattress ripped up and open, the floor covered with boxes, tins… At once, I imagined Cacho with his hands tied, beaten, present for the disaster, humiliated, watching as the police broke everything (after they had forced him, under torture, to reveal the address of his house in Buenos Aires).

  Dubliners. In his short stories, Joyce deliberately avoids all events; they have almost no plot, except for an oblique vision that shows a fragment of a broader theme. He does not seek adventures or dramatic incidents, is interested in the routine of the everyday, and attempts to present the greatest possible amount of otherwise implicit material so that, in the stories, there is always a glimmer, a light that fleetingly but clearly illuminates the whole world. The measure of success for such an open form resides, of course, in its level of concentration. Even if Joyce—in bad faith, from what I understand—claimed not to know Chekhov, his stories are connected to those of the Russian writer in terms of his effort to write stories without endings, which signified the first important transformation of the genre after Poe.

  I catch myself counting the pages of this notebook, in which the notes tend to be too long and too varied (because it really is the only thing I’m writing these days), since I don’t want it to end. Filling up a notebook in a month proves to me that something in my life has accelerated, a need to be on top, as though I meant to write, without naming it, about the vanishing point that has led me to change many things in my life, including where I live.

  “Now, Marat, you are talking like an aristocrat. Compassion is the property of the privileged classes,” says Sade in the theater piece by Peter Weiss.

  The indifferent man. The protagonist lives locked up in a room. In the afternoon, between two and ten after three, the sun filters in t
hrough the little window. Even though it is summer, the man and the room are freezing cold most of the time. The character fears and hopes for the moment when he will be able to abandon the bedroom. He envisions himself, pale, almost gray, walking between passersby, whom he imagines are happy. One afternoon, in a bar, they interrogate him violently to find out where he comes from. He is afraid that they have confused him for a convict…

  The indifferent man II. One afternoon, he situates himself under the sun’s rays, which filter into his room for an hour every afternoon. He acts methodically, putting in both of his hands first, then his left arm, later his right arm, one day the side of his face, the next day yet another part of his body is warmed and allowed to take in the heat. One morning he turns up dead, and his body appears tattooed, with white expanses between the areas that have acquired a natural hue.

  Tuesday, March 1

  I went to La Plata and came back, spent the night there in a hotel facing the station. I taught my classes, saw my friends again, José Sazbón, Alejandro Ferrero, Néstor García Canclini, the ones who always seem the same to me, as though only I have changed, but that is an illusion. What happens is that they persist in their being, and while talking with them I hear words and phrases, ideas and schemes that I have heard before. As for me, I am multiple, and I imagine myself as a man capable of change.