The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  End of June

  Ultimately, you never notice catastrophes. Separating with Inés seems like a commonplace event, but there is something more; I still expect her to come up the stairs, which means I am in a phase of transition. It also means that this is a time to open up and not allow myself to be surprised; everything is ready now, and I am the one seeking another path to follow. What you have tried to salvage is now lost and what you get, at best, is hopes that makes the past come forcefully back. You have to learn to avoid, to let it pass; heroism and courage are nothing more than clumsy sliding, breaking free gradually until only your fingers touch, and then the void, and you already know that you have started to forget that woman. I always lived like this and that is my life. This room is cold, of course, but I have few other solutions or places to go.

  These days are like the bridges that sometimes appear in dreams. A suspension bridge on which I advance slowly while the noise of the river below distracts and frightens me. What I mean, he said, is that my decisions have already been made. Deep down, it is the events that choose for him.

  Even the most absurd goal has some meaning and becomes connected once you discover its axis; it’s like learning a new language, forgetting the language you created with a woman, a private language that only lasts as long as love. Then it falls away like a dead language—that is, a language no one now inhabits. I have also found this in certain tics that I was not aware of, which alienated me at once.

  I always knew that the best way to live life was to invent a character and live according to him. If you have chosen well, there is a response ready for every situation. As though you could speak a foreign tongue that no one else knows and were waiting to meet a fellow countryman with whom to speak. You have to choose love according to some imaginary way of living life (and not the other way around). And isn’t that happiness?

  Meanwhile, just like those schematic dramas, reality follows its course. Real world, coup d’état. Illia’s end. For a moment, I imagine that the political catastrophe is duplicating my personal drama: the end of love experienced as a coup d’état. In short, there is a turn to the right, the end of an open cultural climate. Hard years are surely coming, when we will need to work alone and in secret.

  In the meantime, I am working on the short stories for the book. “Tarde de amor” went from twenty pages to twelve. The best thing I have written these days is “Tierna es la noche”; I wrote it in a strange way, drawing from a life experience that dwindled until it was only an image.

  The worst thing is when I encounter traces of the past—today it was a ring—when a memory is imposed and then it feels like you are living outside of time. You can’t change the past. You can’t change the past? Throw out the ring.

  My resistance to telling the story of our conflict and breakup comes from my theory, adopted many years before, that what happens in moments of great pain must never be told directly. You must find an object that allows you to half-state what you must never state directly: the ring I gave Inés, for example, a pure aquamarine that she returned to me because she didn’t want to become emotional whenever she noticed that she still carried it with her. I have it here, on the table, like the trace of something that has died, and so it becomes an amulet that keeps its emotion. (I didn’t throw it away.)

  Sitting at Ramos on the sidewalk of Corrientes, after eating dinner, that strange atmosphere in which you seem to float amid the night. Listening to two regulars talking about horses and discussing the odds of guessing right at the races: study The Hot Tip, says a very frail, skinny man with fervent eyes, or go with chance and your intuition, responds a heavy and fat man, who gives off the sense that he has seen it all before. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” the skinny one says, “that every time they threw me a hot tip or I followed the signals from the chair, I won. It wasn’t many times, but they taught me a lesson.” Then the conversation takes on a technical quality, and they start talking in a kind of idiolect that I can hardly decipher. And in this way, I can confirm that it is not only lovers who build up a personal language; wherever passion is at play, language is also forced to conform to the peculiarities of the people using it. At this point, the waiter comes up to serve me a coffee and reads my mind and asks, “What, the brunette didn’t come?” I looked at him like he was pulling my leg and said, “No, she’s traveling.”

  My relationship with reality, defined by loss, has only one sense: opacity and detachment. My stories, the place where I live, Inés, the books I read, my friends, everything that is exterior, seems—to me—to lie behind a dark glass, distant, alien.

  Suddenly, as though it came from some distant place, I find myself with the image of my first meeting with Borges: I remember how he smiled with bad timing, how his hand caressed the air before changing the subject, his deceptive and persuasive humility.

  I am in a bar over Lavalle, in the late beginning of night, and I think about going to see The Knack with Inés and whether she remembers, as I do, our last date. In front of me, a conspicuous stutterer clumsily tries to seduce a plump blonde girl. He said, slowly and laboriously, that she’s a bad girl, then claimed several times that it’s only one step from hate to love. A phrase the girl doesn’t mind repeating ironically when she says she does not have another boyfriend. Inés arrives at the bar, hurried and beautiful, and leans in to give me a kiss as soon as she sits down; I realize that she is already someone else (she has become affected and snobbish).

  If I could replicate—and determine—the secret rhythm of what is happening, up close, I could live life with some style.

  Making love to her again that night, in the furnished apartment on Calle Tres Sargentos, was the end of an era that I was beginning to forget.

  Friday, July 1

  I should go back to Hamlet to escape the photographic realism of current Argentine theater. I should search there for the aggressive and criminal structure of family relationships and thus avoid the benign tone those works possess. In Argentine theater, families grow bored, melancholy, and nothing ever happens. Whereas, of course, the aggression and hate in Hamlet’s family are transformed to devise a theatrical game. The characters revolve in their own orbits, always opposed to one another.

  I am in La Plata, in the old Don Julio bar, and everything seems to copy the atmosphere I encountered when I first came in 1959. Back then, everything was amazing to me; I was living alone for the first time, far from the family novel (not at all naturalistic, very epic), and maybe I can now imagine that I have accomplished everything I hoped for in those days.

  Saturday 2

  Sometimes I think suddenly, like a flash, about Cacho in jail. Every time I visit him, he’s the one comforting me. I bring him a grilled chicken, a carton of cigarettes, a can of peaches in syrup. We remember the old times, and I tell him what things are like on the outside.

  Of course—to go back to the subject of tragedy—the hardest things, strangely, are not the great catastrophes that leave us cold and cut off from everything and confront us with critical decisions, but instead these slow, ambiguous moments when a tiny, contingent gesture—waving a hand in the air—can change reality abruptly, and events seem to depend on us and not on destiny. The matter, then, lies in living alert, passionate about the simple passage of time because, sometimes, your whole life falls into jeopardy from a single glance or a badly used word. Tragedies are caused not only by evil omens, but also by the misunderstandings that occur in life, and there’s no need to go seeking the sphinx’s riddle. I try to build a reality in the same way that Robinson built his life, without any hope, so lonely that he had to speak out into the night even if no one could hear him. The man who seeks salvation does so because he is already lost.

  It also seems that you must learn to forget your notions about what you are for others. To learn, in this way, how to cast aside all attempts to be understood. Great wisdom comes from Nijinsky; when his friends came to see him in the asylum and comforted him with the hope that they would
see him in the theater again, he answered, “No, I cannot dance, because I am mad.”

  Monday 4

  In the monologue from Hamlet at the end of the second act, there is a theory of the imaginary close to bovarysme—that is, a theory of illusion, or at least a way of thinking about the ways that fictions participate in reality. The prince remembers having heard that criminals witnessing theater have felt so profoundly moved by the spell of the scene that, then and there, they have revealed their crimes. From there, the sentence I quote here from memory and translate as follows: “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king; el drama es el lazo en el que atraparé la conciencia del rey.” If I go back to my note from a few days ago about the ways in which we are seen by others, we could say not only that the theatrical stage is the site of performance—that is, of identification—but also that all of life in some secret sense is a performance (for others), which does not mean that it isn’t true.

  In Scene ii of Act III, Hamlet thinks that the purpose of the dramatic art, from its origins up to the present—he says—has been, and is, to hold up a mirror, so to speak—according to the prince—so that men may see their true faces. The weight of delusions upon reality. What we call real is, for the individual, a fabric of delusions.

  Therefore, it makes sense that it pains me to remember Saturday night. I saw Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa. An entertaining and “modern” conversation. Then Inés came in, a bit irritable, and as things became clear, she was less secure. In brief, the story of the party in the horrible ramshackle house on Calle Olleros. Afterward, in Patricia Peralta Ramos’s exotic apartment, where Antonio Gasalla and Carlos Perciavalle recited Romeo and Juliet, taking turns playing the role of the woman. I ended the night in Gotán, listening to Rovira at a table with Pirí Lugones.

  As for the magazine, the political situation caused by Onganía’s coup will surely make the publication of the next issue impossible. The University is also affected by the coup d’état. Once again, everything must be started over from the beginning.

  Wednesday 6

  The difficulty does not lie in losing someone (for example Inés) but rather in choosing the moment of the loss. It is always a slow retreat, the same as when you start visiting a friend less and less, reading a poet less and less, going to a bar less and less, gently retracing the path of return to avoid injury. Like walking backward down a dark corridor, feeling around and moving back: you always look them in the face and smile, not saying goodbye, as you see them grow distant.

  Women loved and admired him at first, but then something made them perceive the emptiness and they backed out—he thought—and he aided in their retreat, opened the door so they could leave unhindered.

  Sunday 10

  They always leave in the end; who knows where they go. The most persistent thing is sadness, an exhaustion that falls over him as he awakens and surprises him. In any case, in the middle of that void came Julia, a student in my history class. Her or anyone else—it didn’t matter, but it was her. Her incredible face, her past, which she told me about quickly, as though afraid of forgetting, the two of us sitting in that bar, by the window over Calle Alem, in Bajo. Now, as always, I think I must hide or to flee, but yesterday was very pleasant, going around between the bars we found open, each speaking in an intricate individual language that the other will have to learn.

  Now, best if I steep some maté, looking out at the light from the street. Sometimes I start wondering if I just need a place, need to stop going in circles, stop going out, but then suddenly I think that the best thing would be to sleep for a few months, wake up in October, for example. But for now I will try to sleep, more moderately, until noon.

  Monday

  There is always a moment when things become clear; recently, stretched out on the bed, not long ago, while translating a story by Hemingway, I understood that I hopelessly fall in love with tempestuous women (with intense pasts, that is what attracts me). Julia runs away with a musician at age eighteen, he abandons her in Bahía Blanca, she returns to her house defeated, so to speak, and immediately gets married to the family doctor, and they have a daughter, whom Julia abandons when the child is six months old. Ever since then, she tells me, she has heard a baby crying without seeing her daughter. She left her there, like a sacrifice, so that she could live her own life, alone. What makes her story circular is the fact that her mother had had a fling with the man who was her father. She never told her who he was, never gave her the name. Her mother got married again, had two other children, and Julia was always the illegitimate daughter that her mother’s husband—and her siblings—watched with distrust. You can see how hard it can be to describe the fluctuations of a family history. Julia told it to me in broken fragments, with irony and some cynicism (although she cried at one point, but much later, once we were already out in the street and had already forgotten her family novel).

  “Yes, I fly, I fly ceaselessly. I cannot avoid it… I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek,” Montaigne.

  When I think about characters, I remember Michael Craig, the husband of Claudia Cardinale in Visconti’s Sandra—a measured man, never crossing the line in the midst of all the chaos.

  At this point, the best thing would be for me to go back and start correcting the short stories. Wrap up the book once and for all. As it were, I am going to take advantage of the vacation to paint my apartment. But what happens is that, these days, I am also afraid of choosing a color to paint my walls.

  I cook two soft-boiled eggs, keep an eye on my wristwatch for the three minutes needed to achieve a perfect soft-boiled egg. I imagine the egg losing its whiteness, somewhere between milky and yellowish, and beginning to harden, but not too much, not enough to become a hard-boiled egg.

  Wednesday

  An ambiguous meeting with Jorge Álvarez about publishing the classics in the collection that I am going to direct. We will begin with Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky (prologue by George Steiner), then Robinson Crusoe with a prologue by Joyce, then Bouvard and Pécuchet by Flaubert with a prologue by Raymond Queneau. Then I went to La Paz and was surprised to read Beatriz Guido’s generous opinions: “I prefer reading the young ones, Emilio Renzi, author of some magnificent stories, because they are not emotionally implicated in the past.”

  Thursday 14

  Will I finally get paid? Several things depend on it. I must also learn techniques for survival.

  “I’ll return with iron limbs; dark skin, a furious look: from my mask I’ll be judged as of mighty race,” Rimbaud.

  Wednesday 20

  I am approaching a time of silence; the introspection will suddenly come to an end. Indifference once more.

  “All of my novels began as short stories. I never started by saying, well, I am writing a novel,” Hemingway.

  Saturday

  For me, finding a tone is always the way to resolve unclear moments. My best stories always depend on the tone of the prose and not on the incidents.

  Wednesday

  How can you know which is the best, among all the possible stories that present themselves while you are writing? It is always about making decisions; writing is making decisions. I never know what the story will be like until I write it. And as I write it, I let myself be led by intuition and the rhythm of the prose.

  Joyce: “The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen.”

  Sunday

  Sometimes, to amuse myself, it occurs to me to walk down the street, talking alone. I speak out loud, gesticulating; bystanders turn around to look at me, and I find that amusing, honestly.

  Tuesday 2

  This spacious bar with glass walls near the station, these days that are all the same to me and pass, imperceptible, without prior ideas of what is going to happen. Restless, as in other times, I sometimes ask myself how I will break out of this fallow ti
me, filled with tedium and a monotonous inner monologue.

  Saturday 13

  I arrive at the house; she is with another man. I am with Julia now. After everything, I no longer even have the memories left to me. What was the point of the three long years I spent with her? Loving her. Finishing a book, coming to live in Buenos Aires, making my living.

  We are saved by our inability to imagine the consequences that the events we live through must have. The only thing I can do is try to avoid the memories. Brush off the images the way you take off a suit.

  Tuesday 16

  I spend the night mired in Librium, made sluggish by dreams that do nothing more that remind me of things I want to forget. I try with effort to “get used to the idea” that Inés no longer exists and is moving further away from me, as though going backwards in time until becoming a stranger. Days and days will pass, diverse experiences will turn her into another person, different from the one I have loved.

  Wednesday 17

  A slight pain, imperceptible, made up of images, as though I were standing before a cataclysm that has already taken place and, covered in dust, thinking about how laborious the reconstruction will be. Perhaps inside—to put it that way—of three months or four months or six months, these days that drag along slowly, that are so painful to endure, will produce nothing but a melancholic nostalgia. A person in love surrenders to the relief of passing time, the only consolation in the face of loss.