Paul Valéry recommends, in a letter to André Gide, Discourse on the Method as a model for the modern novel. It relates the life on an idea and not, as is customary, the life of a person.
Monday 21
Yesterday with Beatriz Guido, always outlandish and entertaining. Dizzying in her baroque house, antique furniture and circular conversations. Edgardo Cozarinsky was there, and he gave me the first edition of a Manuel Puig novel.
I prepare seven copies of the book of short stories to send to the Casa de las Américas competition. An insane project, with carbon paper that the portable machine only admits in small doses. I have to go over the whole book three times. I decide on Jaulario as the title for the volume (it bothers me that it sounds like Cortázar’s Bestiario and Neruda’s Crepusculario, but I can’t come up with a better name and do not want to use the title of one story for the entire book [but why not?]).
Tuesday 29
I left the book with Jorge Álvarez last night. Now I understand the void that follows the moment when you have managed to finish something after months. How long will I withstand the uncertainty of living from day to day? But maybe that is where the merit lies, not thinking about the future or thinking that I won’t make it to the month of March alive.
There is a scrap merchant, a junkman, who passes every morning at this hour calling at the top of his lungs that he buys disused materials. “I buy old beds, I buy mattresses, I buy broken chairs, I buy heaters, boilers.” He is a buyer who announces his intention to find objects that have remained outside the market; he seems like a collector and reminds me, through an audible likeness, of the voice of another second-hand dealer a year ago in Boca, who talked to himself, every morning at eight, when I was about to go to bed after working all night. And I was just going to bed after I heard him crossing Calle Olavarría.
December 4
Ramón Torres Molina tells me, as a friend, that my book is the best book of short stories of the decade. It is the first reading I have had. I gave the book to Celina Lacay, José Sazbón, Jorge Álvarez, and Beatriz Guido to read.
Fact. Between 1875 and 1907 Argentina imported enough wire to surround the perimeter of the Republic 140 times with a weave of seven strands. As I sometimes say—to frighten those who practice determinism outright in literature—when they fenced in the fields with wire, the gaucho was finished…
Wednesday 7
Last night, José Sazbón talks to me about the book. Critiques of “Mi amigo,” “En el terraplén,” and “La honda.” He finds issues with the ending of “En el calabozo.” He likes the tone of the book very much, the quality of the style, the temperance in narration. According to him, the best stories are “Tarde de amor,” “Tierna es la noche,” and “Las actas del juicio.”
Saturday 10
Once again I run into a woman I have lived with while delivering books to the library. Now with Inés, I let her take whatever she wants because it doesn’t matter to me. It isn’t even valuable as a metaphor for the things you carry and leave behind when love ends. Finally, drinking beer on the sidewalk, stupidly.
I went down Diagonal Sur and sent the book to the competition in Cuba by plane, or rather, in copies with airmail paper. Praise for the book from Jorge Álvarez and Beatriz Guido.
Sunday 11
I see myself, sitting on the hallway floor of the dismantled house, days before leaving Adrogué behind to live in Mar del Plata. I have a notebook and am writing the first entry of this diary.
Several concurrences among the readers of the book. The best, “Tierna es la noche,” “Mata-Hari 55,” and “Las actas del juicio.” Everyone rejects the story “Mi amigo.” What worries me is the criticisms of “En el calabozo,” which for José Sazbón are formal problems and for others (Álvarez, Frontini) are at root “gratuitous violence.” I don’t share that critique, but I have to revise the story.
In Cortázar, the brand names that accompany objects in the stories have a fetishistic connotation, in the sense that they are the magical illusion of advertising (which is based on the brand). The clash between an object and its designation produces an imbalance in style; the “sign of knowledge,” that he is an expert in the privileged objects of the market, becomes too evident. The same thing happens with jazz and with books. Objects that gleam and illuminate the consumer in his novels.
Last night—as Cortázar would say, in order to gain a reputation for knowledge—I went to listen to Piazzolla at Nonino with several friends (who don’t much matter to me): Frontini, Mae, Humberto Riva.
Another function of objects: in a Dickens story, the narrator has, as proof that he has entered an imaginary universe, a pair of eyeglasses (which he brought back from there).
Mae, a woman who has a nomadic literary knowledge and ties up her surroundings with the provincial snobbery of La Plata. She makes me think of Hilda Edward from Point Counter Point by A. Huxley, and Mrs. Headway from The Siege of London, and old Miss Bordereau, with her flashes of irony, in The Aspern Papers by Henry James.
A decision. The driver Juan Gálvez refuses to put on his safety belt because he is afraid of burning to death if there is an accident, but he is killed in a race because the car crashes into the concrete.
In Acto y ceniza, M. Peyrou commits the same stupid schematizations of any social novelist “on the left,” but with the measured cynicism of an author on the right. He is a kind of writer who doesn’t know what he is doing and confuses his novels with the editorials in political newspapers. It is a problem of false poetics. Or can good novels really be written along these lines, with an explicit (and trivial) political thesis? It isn’t about a character’s being politically defined, but about a book whose a priori bias is to prove an existing thesis (in most cases, political).
It is curious that Under the Volcano, behind its immense jumble of words, manages to maintain ambiguity. The dialogue is fluid and easy despite the fact that it is explicit and constantly transmits thoughts and ideas; the novel survives like a great ambiguous fresco, full of nuances and overtones, recreated laboriously in the raging sea of his drunken and Faulknerian language. The virtue of the book is that it moves forward in a narrative present (not in terms of the verb) of pure action—even if the action is minimal and blurred—which lasts for an entire day, and closes with the death of the Consul, clearly announced in the first chapter. He is going to die and it is known.
Friday 16
After the separation some time ago, I took refuge in La Plata. First in Dipi’s house and then in friends’ houses, until I finally rented this enormous and brightly lit room with a balcony that opens over Diagonal 80. I make a note of this to summarize my situation and indicate that I have spent all day today and yesterday transporting two heavy suitcases of papers, journals, and books from Buenos Aires. The man who carries with him everything of value in his life—a value that, like all true values, only he understands. If something sets me apart and supports my conception of literature, my personal brand, it’s that I’ve never had—or tried to have—a place of my own (or private); I live in hotels, in boardinghouses, in friends’ houses, always in passing, because for me that is the state of literature: there is no personal place, nor is there private property. I write to you, I joke, from there. A man from no place.
Sunday
Recently, dodging cars on 1st and 60th. Under the drizzle, heavy thoughts about my economic future. What to do after March?
One of the most surprising social games is trying to guess what others think about the things that wait for them, what they have to do.
December 29
I have come to Mar del Plata to visit my mother. I spend the mornings on the sea and the afternoons at the Municipal Library. The clock with giant Roman numerals is still there, the static happiness of this sphere, which sustained me in the delirious search for a world where I could settle down by my own choice. You “decide” to be a writer and then clear things up only so as to become what you said you were. This library, v
ery good, founded by socialists who loved culture—people laughed at them—in which I can find everything I look for, that is, I can find everything I needed when I was seventeen or eighteen years old and would read two or three books per day.
Friday 30
I enjoy returning to La Plata, where I effectively began my life, I would say if I were telling my own history. Alone, without anyone, with passing and fleeting loves, living in anonymous boardinghouse rooms, I created the space I had imagined and lived there, intensely, and then began writing my first stories. Suddenly I remembered the end of last year, in Cacho’s apartment in Ugarteche, while he made his secret life on the coast, where the police arrested him in the end: all of the future was available to me. Now, by contrast, I have come back to this place as though I had never been here.
A Novel. Involuntary memory. A race of cars and motorcycles, the “masculine” world of fast turns through the night with Cacho, by the river: paradise lost.
Bimba: at first the naïve girl, a figure he used in his work (a lady of the night); then, gradually, her true character becomes visible. Some time later, Inés tells me that Bimba seduced her and got her into bed. Why didn’t you invite me? I asked. Now, with Cacho in prison, no one knows who betrayed him. Bimba is possessive, malicious. A very brave and aggressive woman, but she does love him (she describes her history in front of him, which makes her more perverse).
I have to stress the significance of this year, to which I ascribe a special transcendence. I remember the room on Hotel Callao, Inés stretched out on the bed reading, while from the balcony I watched the beloved streets of the city where I was finally living. Now I’m looking for a place where I can live (Cacho’s apartment, a boardinghouse, whatever it may be, but outside of the suicidal sprawl).
I will end the year with a quote from the book that I am reading once again. “‘I understand nothing,’ Ivan went on, as though in delirium. ‘I don’t want to understand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be false to the fact, and I have determined to stick to the fact,’” F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
17
The Greek Coin
I have been told many times of the man who, in a house in the neighborhood of Flores, is hiding a replica of the city that he has been working on for years. He has constructed it with tiny materials and at such a reduced scale that we can see it all at once, up close and manifold and seemingly distant in the soft dawn light.
The city is always far away and that sensation of distance from so close up is unforgettable. You can see the buildings and plazas and avenues and see the suburbs trailing off into the west until they are lost to the countryside.
It is not a map or a miniature, but a synoptic machine; all of the city is there, concentrated, reduced to its essence. The city is Buenos Aires, but modified and altered by the madness and microscopic vision of its creator.
The man says his name is Russell and he is a photographer, or earns his living as a photographer, and he has a darkroom on Calle Bacacay and will go for months without leaving his house, periodically reconstructing the southern neighborhoods that the swelling river floods and destroys every time autumn arrives.
Russell believes that the real city depends on his replica, and is therefore insane. Rather, he is therefore not a simple photographer. He has altered the relationships of representation in such a way that the real city is the one he hides in his house and the other is only an illusion or memory.
The floor plan follows the sketch of the geometric city imagined by Juan de Garay, with the expansions and modifications that history has imposed onto the distant rectangular structure. Between the ravines that are visible from the river and the tall buildings forming a rampart on the north frontier, some traces of the old Buenos Aires survive—its calm wooded neighborhoods and pastures of dry grass.
The man has imagined a city lost in memory and has replicated it precisely as he remembers it. Reality is not the object being represented, but rather the space where a fantastical world takes place.
The construction can only be visited by one spectator at a time. That approach, incomprehensible to everyone, is nevertheless clear to me: the photographer reproduces, in the contemplation of the city, the act of reading. The person who contemplates it is like a reader and must therefore be alone. That aspiration to privacy and isolation explains the secret that, until now, has surrounded his project.
I always thought that the secret blueprint by the photographer from Flores was the diagram for a future city. It is easy to imagine the photographer, lit up by the red light of his darkroom, who, in the empty night, believes that his synoptic machine is a secret cipher of destiny, and the changes he makes in his city are then reproduced in the neighborhoods and streets of Buenos Aires, but blown-up and sinister.
The alterations and erosions that the replica suffers—the little collapses and the rains that flood the low neighborhoods—become real in Buenos Aires in the form of brief catastrophes and inexplicable accidents.
The photographer acts as an archaeologist unearthing the remains of a forgotten civilization. He does not discover or determine reality except for when it is a series of ruins (and in this sense, of course, he has, in an elusive and subtle fashion, created political art). He is married to those obstinate inventors who keep alive what has ceased to exist. We know that the Egyptian definition of the sculptor was precisely that: “One who keeps alive.”
The city is thus concerned with replicas and representations, with reading and solitary perception, with the presence of what has been lost. In short, it is concerned with the ways of rendering visible the invisible and anchoring the clear images that we no longer see but that still survive like phantoms living among us.
This private and clandestine work, constructed patiently in the attic of a house in Buenos Aires, is linked, in secret, to certain traditions of the art of reading on La Plata River: for the photographer from Flores, as for Pierre Menard or the anonymous editor of Marta Riquelme’s memoirs by Martínez Estrada, for Xul Solar or Torres-García, the tension between real object and the imaginary object does not exist: everything is real, everything is there, and you pass among the parks and streets, dazzled by an ever-distant presence.
The diminutive city is like a Greek coin, sunk down into the bed of a river, that shines under the last light of afternoon. It does not represent anything except for what has been lost. It is there, dated but outside of time, and possesses the characteristic of art; it is worn away, does not age, has been created as a useless object that exists only for itself.
In this time, I recall the pages Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind on the work of art as a miniature model. Reality works on the real scale, “tandis que l’art travaille à échelle réduite.” Art is a synthetic form of the universe, a microcosm that reproduces the specificity of the world without passing for mimesis. The Greek coin is a scale model of an entire economy and an entire civilization and, at the same time, is no more than a lost object shining at sunset in the transparency of the water.
A few days ago, I finally decided to visit the studio of the photographer from Flores. It was a clear spring afternoon and the magnolias were starting to bloom. I paused in front of the tall inner door and rang the bell, which sounded off in the distance, in the depths of the corridor that could be glimpsed from the other side.
After a while, a gaunt and tranquil man, with gray eyes and gray beard, dressed in a leather apron, opened the door. With extreme friendliness and in a low voice, almost a whisper, in which you could perceive the harsh tone of a foreign language, he greeted me and made me enter.
The house had an entryway that led to a patio, and at the end of the patio was the study. It was a wide, one-story house with a pitched roof and tables, maps, machines, and strange metal and glass instruments were piled up within it. Photographs of the city and drawings of ambiguous forms abounded on the walls. R
ussell lit the lamps and invited me to sit. In his eyes under thick brows burned a malicious spark. He smiled and then I gave him the old coin that I had brought for him.
He looked at it up close with great attention and then moved it away from his sight and moved his hand around to feel the light weight of the metal.
“A drachma,” he said. “For the Greeks, it was an object both trivial and magical… Ousía, the word that conveyed being, substance, likewise meant wealth, money.” He paused. “A coin was a tiny private oracle, and, at life’s crossroads, they would toss it into the air to know what to do.” He stood and pointed to one side. In a plan of Buenos Aires, the city stood out among the drawings and machines. “A map,” he said, “is a synthesis of reality, a synoptic mirror that guides us through life’s confusion. You must know how to read between the lines to find the path. Pay attention. If someone studies the map of the place where he lives, he first has to find the place where he stands, looking at the map. Here, for example,” he said, “is my house. This is Calle Puán, this is Avenida Rivadavia. You are here now.” He drew a cross. “This is you.” He smiled. “Our grammar has no synoptic sight. Synoptic representation generates comprehension, and comprehension consists of seeing connections. Therein lies the importance of discovering and inventing intermediate case studies.” He opened a book. “Reading teaches us to see synoptically. The concept of synoptic representation defines our form of representation, the way in which we see things. There are representations that are connected to the things that they signify through a visible relationship. But, in that visibility, they make the original fade away. When you look at an object as though it were the image of something else, it produces what I have decided to call synoptic substitution. Such is reality. We live in a world of maps and replicas. The concept of synoptic representation is of fundamental importance. It defines our means of representation, the way in which we see things. This synoptic representation is the medium for comprehension, which consists of seeing connections. Wait and see.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Page 33
