The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  Because Joyce’s Ulysses is written in present and indicative (Buck undresses, the milkwoman serves them milk, etc.), the internal monologue marks out the passage of time.

  Wednesday 2

  I am in the Botanical Garden, at noon. I have always felt the need to capture the moment, now on this bench in shadow, under a tree, circles of sun on the grass and on the mud caused by last night’s rain. Meanwhile, I am reading Bernard Malamud.

  Thursday

  The hardest part of morning is finding a reason to get out of bed.

  Friday 4

  I go back to that image. These days and these places seem akin to the swelling of the Paraná, laying waste to everything it finds. I cannot stop building up the levees though they are already in ruins from the swelling current. Last night, Horacio informed me that Alberto C. stole the refrigerator I had left in the house in Boca. You should never be close to an “artist,” a low-class one even less. I hope he didn’t also make off with the three suitcases of books and papers that I left there. Thieves don’t bother me, but friends who steal from me do.

  In the end, what really worries me are the diversions in the path: tests, formalities, meetings, etc. For better or for worse, I have only five thousand pesos to make it to the end of month.

  Monday, March 7

  Later, sitting at the table beside the window, he thought it would be best to cut off from all of his hopes once and for all and leave things as they were. But the thing he had to do at three in the afternoon stood in the way, a kind of curtain, and there was no way to do anything, as though all internal order had collapsed.

  I spoke with Alberto C. today and the situation improved. I did nothing in February and the magazine is on hold, despite Camarda’s excitement; he says that the first issue has already run out and wants me to prepare the second. I don’t know what to do with my stories either. Maybe I should publish them this year.

  Translating Joyce. Regarding the difficulty of certain translations and the need (in general) to maintain the music and tone of the text, this passage from Ulysses is a valuable example: “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe.” The enigma is that emphasized sentence, which Salas Subirat translates as “I am a carrot; soy un zanahoria,” which isn’t bad, because it’s his way of solving an unsolvable problem, unless he had already read the entire novel under a magnifying glass. If he had, he would have seen the potato appear in the scene in the public bathroom, when Bloom puts it to the side as he looks for the soap in his pocket before getting undressed. Finally, the potato appears once more in the scene at the brothel, when the mother’s ghost asks if he carries the potato with him to fight his rheumatism. This is proof of two things: Joyce’s way of writing, never explaining what the character already knows, and, on the other hand, the need for the translator to know the general sense of the work. The motifs in the book work like musical themes, reappearing without explanation.

  In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes establishes the distinction between language, style, and writing, which is useful—although a bit mechanical. For me, the issue that Joyce poses has to do with the limitations of language. As though language were a territory, after which there is a void, which results in literature. If the desired effect in Joyce is often one of incomprehension and impenetrability, Barthes defines the opposite—clear, sharp, transparent language—as “degree zero,” an example of which would be Hemingway’s prose. But Barthes seems not to have noticed what Hemingway said, that following Joyce he had to start over from zero and work with a few simple words, with a disjointed and oral syntax. Beckett also took the same path, noting that, after Joyce, it was better to abandon English, and, as we know, he started writing in French because he could write badly in that language—that is, without style. In both cases, always an esoteric quality: in the example of Joyce, there is an esoteric quality in Finnegans, namely a rupture of the lexicon; in his turn, Hemingway worked with extreme subtraction, and his best stories are also esoteric because their allusions are not explicit.

  Tuesday 8

  I went to see Viñas in his apartment at the end of Viamonte, and then I went through the bookshops that abound in that area, five on each block, though they have started to diminish since the College of Philosophy and Letters relocated to Calle Independencia.

  These sudden outbursts of happiness—this one has already fled, now that I want to record it—are like epiphanies, unexpected and brilliant, which I find are connected to the sheer presentness of writing: quickly, everything seems to open up and become simple, everything is possible in language, and that happy feeling lasts as long as you stay in that volatile state of writing, thoughtless.

  Friday

  I am writing this at noon, in Florida bar. Searching for a narrative that does not distinguish between feelings and reasons, that works with plots—in both senses, that is, with stories but also with schemes.

  Sunday 12

  If it is true, as is the case in quantum physics, that experimenters form part of the experiments they undertake and their presence alters the material, we might say that literary experimentation essentially implies a renewal for the writer himself. The writer experiments—for example, by abandoning a previous style that has become commonplace and taking the risk of attempting a new way of writing—whether or not the result is a traditional work.

  The potential of a terrorist is hidden in every writer. Example: Roberto Arlt. A terrorist because he can never get away from the feeling of illegitimacy, of illicit life, of being a man pursued.

  Monday 14

  I was hungry and the hunger was distracting me, so I went down to the street; the icy wind seemed to cut at my skin. I bought two rolls, cracked them in half and topped them off with ham and tomato. I ate slowly, trying not to get my papers dirty. Then I made a pile of the remains and the crumbs and cleaned the table so that there would be no traces.

  “A great work is impossible today, in view of the fact that the writer is involved in his writing as though trapped on a dead-end road,” Roland Barthes.

  A soft breeze with the distant perfume of watered soil and jasmines just came in through the window, taking me off to the country house in Bolívar at the siesta hour while a workman watered the patio with a tin can. The silver color that came along with that memory instantly made me “see” the tin-plated jars where priests poured the dulce de leche they made at the monastery in Del Valle, a nearby village full of cottages and milking stables. And so we could say that this perfume now was like the scent of wet soil from my childhood, making me see the tin watering can that the gardener Don José used at the siesta hour, and its silver shine immediately led me to the memory of the priests making the candy, pouring it into large jars, they, too, colored silver.

  Tuesday 15

  Yesterday in Florida bar, a discussion with Eduardo Romano and Alberto Szpunberg, once again about the question of the second issue of the magazine. I left there and ended up in Plaza Rodríguez Peña, sitting alone on a bench facing Palacio Pizzurno, wavering between going to the library in front of me or returning home. Once again an instant of epiphany, a moment suspended in the pure present, but this time the effect was negative, a perverse miracle.

  I have three projects in my hands. I hope to continue with the book of stories until October, rewriting, correcting. I have to go ahead with the second issue of Literatura y Sociedad. Finally, I have to prepare exams for “Introduction to History”and “Argentine History” so that I can keep my positions. I may have lost the draft of my story “Entre hombres.” I abandoned it among my things—the papers, the magazines that I kept in two suitcases, which I left in the house on Olavarría in Boca. Maybe it is scattered on the patio, among the flowerpots and the washing basins.

  “The novel has always taken the conflict between living men, and petrified human relationships, as its true object. The same absurd situation, for the novel, becomes an artistic medium,”
T. W. Adorno. It seems that he means to say that telling stories always deals with ghosts and memories of the dead, as though the story were always the pause after the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears and the prince delivers his monologue.

  I turned out the light so that I could be present for the fierce storm that shakes the city and hastens summer resolutely away.

  “The author did not then know (1919) what his working path in life would be. If he would be a businessman, a thief, an employee at some commercial firm or a writer. Above all things he desired to be a writer,” Roberto Arlt (note to the second edition of Mad Toy).

  “There is not a single critic of The Seven Madmen who has not written: The greatest quality of this book is Erdosain’s pain. They think that great pain is not invented, think that I myself could be Erdosain,” Roberto Arlt (letter to his mother).

  “This stage in Argentine civilization, spanning between the years 1900 and 1930, presents curious phenomena. The children of shopkeepers study fantastical literature in the College of Philosophy and Letters; they are ashamed of their parents and in the morning tell off the maid if they find a discrepancy of a few cents in the bill from the market,” Roberto Arlt, Love the Enchanter.

  Wednesday

  In Florida bar. I meet with my father, always dull tensions. Looking at him, I try to find signs of things that I see as virtues when I notice them in others.

  Friday

  Last night I ate dinner with Dad at El Dorá in Bajo. After talking a while about politics and Perón, suddenly—as though he were a stranger to me—he started confiding in me and telling me about his relationships with other women, with a false naturalness that made me more uncomfortable than the content of his stories. We have been fairly distant since the days when I went to the University (years ago now); little by little, we had reestablished some cordiality and some confidence, but today everything fell down once again. A man who tells another about his romantic adventures is a fool, and if he’s his father on top of that, that childish stupidity transforms into something sinister.

  I am in the bar on Lavalle and Rodríguez Peña. Inés rented an apartment on Uriburu and Santa Fe, a clean and bright place to live. For my part, I am going to look for a room in a boardinghouse nearby, where I can lock myself up and write.

  Monday

  I went to Boca and came back, gathering the rest—mattresses, chairs—in the Cedróns’ apartment, and I left everything, like after a storm, not knowing what to do.

  It is four in the afternoon. I haven’t had anything but a coffee since I got up. A few things are left to do: finish the move, get the refrigerator, and, most of all, prepare myself for the exams at the College. Deal with the magazine. And then, only then, begin to write.

  Tuesday 22

  All morning transporting papers, dealing with a Kafkaesque mattress (there is nowhere to grab hold of it, like in the story “The Judgment”). Things are decided little by little. Now all I have left to do is prepare for the exams and succeed. Money and the future depend on it. I have a room in the boardinghouse on Riobamba and Paraguay. I took my things out of the house in Boca and out of Cacho’s apartment. Now I am tired, my hands are dirty from going through so many ink-covered papers.

  Wednesday 23

  Amazing, Stephen Dedalus’s system; he had 500 pesos to make it through the month, I stopped at a kiosk, spent 250 pesos on Mansilla’s Memorias, and, the trap already set, forgot it on the subway.

  Thursday

  After my delirium on the subway yesterday, today I am paying for the consequences. I only have eighty pesos for the day and then comes the void. I have no way to make money until the tenth. I will see what I can do.

  It was almost noon when I got up today. I read a few articles in French magazines about Brecht. I met Sergio Camarda; our differences regarding the magazine grew worse. I bought bread and a Suchard chocolate to ease my hunger; I decided to eat the bread first and then the chocolate, and while I was eating I saw this in La Razón newspaper: A woman committed suicide by lying down across the train tracks “with her arms spread open,” she was forty-five years of age, had on a black dress, and wore black shoes and brown leggings. A change purse was found next to her remains, in which she had a fifty-peso bill, a sky-blue handkerchief, and a small piece of paper on which she had written with a fountain pen, “I have no family, throw me away wherever you like, I am alone and I come from the country.” For my part, I have forty pesos. Now I’m going to make a copy of the story “La honda” to give it to Horacio, who is coming to visit me.

  A short story. On that Saturday afternoon, the two of them were playing chess on the patio. Tell the whole story in the third person. Do not immediately reveal that the key is Pelliza. It was there: I had discovered it quickly. Using the description of the game in order to describe the secret.

  Friday 25

  An hour on Corrientes and Montevideo with twenty pesos in my pocket, loaded down with books, after walking around the city waiting for Raúl to follow him to his house. I sold two volumes of Historia by Vicente F. López for one hundred pesos each.

  I take an amphetamine and sit down to work. Immediately a feeling of fullness comes, lasts one night, and then is abruptly extinguished.

  “We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. The dead holds the living in his grasp,” Karl Marx (preface to Capital).

  Sunday

  Yesterday I walked down Callao to Corrientes. I took the subway. Ate dinner in Bajo, alone. Came back slowly on the same route.

  The building opposite is a dark square. Every now and then the metallic noise of a window opening can be heard. Suddenly, along with the noise, a rectangle of light appears, seeming to float in the void, suggestive of abstract paintings.

  Thursday, March 31

  I write letters: to Daniel Moyano, to José Aricó. They took Cacho away in February, I moved into this place in March. The competitions at the College are next week. I hope to win at least one of them and live off of that. I spend the afternoon locked up in this room, alone, going around in circles, and nothing matters much to me.

  April 1

  Last night, Norman Briski at the Di Tella. El niño envuelto. Very fine performance with a poor text.

  Subject for a short story. The lunatic escapes with clothing given to him by the laborers who work in the asylum, and he goes to the police station to report that they have kidnapped him. The ones who saw him coming glimpsed the insane glimmer in his eyes. He was dressed in blue work overalls, lent to him a moment before by one of the laborers whom he had been badgering for days.

  Sometimes I would like to go back to certain periods of my life and live through them with the consciousness I have now. For example, to start history over in 1956. It’s a strange hope because if it weren’t for the way I lived at the time, I would be nothing; that notion is one of the effects of literature, wherein you can always start a story over again. At the same time, it is one the great novelistic themes: Conrad’s Lord Jim, who tries to change the past, go back to the day when he acted like a bastard and change it. Borges has a similar story called “The Other Death”: a soldier who acted like a coward in battle makes a Faustian pact, and he returns to combat to die as a hero. It is also the subject of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: a poor man, rejected by a woman in the past, doggedly becomes rich in order to find the girl again, now a man of fortune, and thus change destiny. Ultimately, it concerns thinking about the past with the categories that we use to imagine the future. The hypothetical past.

  Monday 4

  With fifty pesos in my pocket and without having eaten, I travel to La Plata by train, worried about the competitions and the magazine, unable to find the calm I need in order to write. A calm that, for me, is defined as the absence of thoughts. Not thinking as a way to write, or rather, writing as a way to achieve the not-fully-conceived thoughts that always define a writer’s style. At least, that is the Río de la Plata tradition, that of Macedonio, Felisberto, Borges: the writer vacill
ates, does not quite understand the story he is telling, the opposite of the despotic figure of the classical Latin American writer who has everything clear before he starts to write.

  The competitions were postponed again. I have spent a couple of weeks studying the bibliographies from the syllabi, preparing for the exam classes. We’ll see what happens.

  I meet Dipi Di Paola and we go out for a coffee. Always entertaining and emphatic, he creates beautiful retrospectives about himself and his friends. He reminds me of Miguel Briante, who, like Dipi, settles into the self-defined space of an artist. We are great friends, but we see things differently; I am not interested in posing as a “creator,” which is what gives him all of his magic, but what interests me most is creating a figure that is separate from the Argentine stereotypes of the “writer.” All writers are self-designated, but the ones who really interest me are those who do not believe in self-indulgence. Dipi would walk around with Heidegger’s Being and Time under his arm because he’s no fool and puts his faith in culture and intellect, but underneath that, the light of a genius illuminates him.