The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  “That was,” he said, “the passion that inspired the readers.”

  Serial killers murder replicas, a series of replicas that repeat and must be eliminated, one after another, because they reappear unexpectedly, perfect, on a dark street, in the center of an abandoned plaza, like nocturnal mirages. For example, Jack the Ripper was searching the interior of his victims to discover the mechanical elements of their construction. These English girls, beautiful and fragile, were mechanical dolls, surrogates.

  He, on the other hand—in contrast to Jack the Ripper—wanted to set aside human beings and only to build reproductions of the spaces the replicas inhabited.

  He spoke faster and faster, in a low voice, and I could only capture the murmur of his words, resounding like static hallucinations.

  “We are attracted to the idea of one thing that becomes another, which is exactly the same, and is substituted for its double, and therefore we produce images. But while the division in representation concerns an unfolding relationship, assembled around a replacement, the synoptic substitution, what I call the synoptic substitution, signifies an immediate suppression of the replacement. The replica is an object transformed into the pure idea of the absent object.”

  Then he said that his true name was a secret from which the city was suspended. That it was the innermost center of the construction.

  “The southern cross…” he added, with a smile.

  There was a silence. Through the window, the distant shriek of a bird reached us.

  Russell seemed to awaken and remember that I had brought him the Greek coin, and he held it once again in the palm of his open hand.

  “Did you make it?” He watched me with a knowing look. “If it’s fake, then it’s perfect,” he said, and then studied the subtle lines and metal ribbing through the magnifying glass. “It isn’t fake, you see?” You could see slight marks, made by someone with a knife or stone. A woman perhaps, from the contour of the stroke. “And look,” he said, “someone has bitten the coin here to test if it was authentic. A peasant, maybe, or a slave.”

  He put the coin on a glass plate and observed it under the raw light of a blue lamp and then set up an old camera on a tripod and started to photograph it. He changed the lens and the exposure speed several times to reproduce the images engraved on the coin with greater clarity.

  As he worked, he forgot about me.

  I walked around the room, observing the drawings and machines and the galleries that opened along one side until, at the end, I saw the staircase leading to the attic. It was spiral and made of iron and ascended, disappearing above. I rose, feeling around in the semidarkness, never looking down. I supported myself on the dark railing and felt the steps, uneven and uncertain.

  When I reached the top, the light blinded me. The attic was circular and the roof was made of glass. A clear light flooded the place.

  I saw a door and a cot, saw a Christ on the back wall, and, in the center of the room, distant and yet near, I saw the city, and what I saw was more real than reality, more indefinite and pure.

  The structure was there, as though outside of time. It had a center but no end. In certain areas of the outskirts, almost on the border, the ruins began. At the boundaries, from the other side, the river flowed, leading to the delta. On one of those islands, one afternoon, someone had imagined an islet infected with swamps where the tides periodically set the mechanism of memory in motion. To the east, near the central avenues, rose the hospital, with white-tile walls, in which a woman was about to die. To the west, close to Parque Rivadavia, the neighborhood of Flores extended, calm, with its gardens and windowed walls, and, at the end of a street of uneven cobblestones, clear in the stillness of the suburb, the house on Calle Bacacay could be seen, and, at the top, barely visible amid the extreme visibility of the world, the red light of the photographer’s darkroom twinkling in the night.

  I was there a while, how long I cannot remember. I observed, as though hallucinating or dreaming, the imperceptible movement pulsing through the diminutive city. Finally, I looked at it one last time. It was a remote and unique image that replicated the shape of an obsession. I remember descending the circular staircase, feeling around toward the darkness of the living room.

  Russell, from the table where he manipulated his instruments, saw me enter as though he did not expect to see me, and, after a slight hesitation, he approached and placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Have you seen?” he asked.

  I nodded, without speaking.

  “Take it,” he said, and returned the Greek coin to me.

  That was all.

  “Now, then,” he said, “you can leave, and you can say what you have seen.” In the half-light of sunset, Russell accompanied me to the entryway that led out to the street. When he opened the door, the gentle air of spring came in from the motionless fences and jasmines of neighboring houses.

  I walked through the wooded lanes until I reached Avenida Rivadavia, and then I entered the subway and traveled, addled by the muffled rumbling of the train, watching the faltering image of my face reflected in the glass of the window. Piece by piece, the microscopic circular city was sketched out in the half-light of the tunnel with the fixity and intensity of an unforgettable memory.

  Then I understood what I had already known: everything you can imagine always exists, on another scale, in another time, clear and distant, just like a dream.

  Russell always refused to let his work be revealed, and that decision transformed his efforts into the obsession of an eccentric inventor. And there was something of that in him. But I knew (and others knew) that this fanatical work, carried out over decades, is an example of the revolution that art has maintained since its origin.

  Russell belongs to that lineage of stubborn inventors, dreamers of impossible worlds, secret philosophers, and conspirators who have been kept apart from money and common language and who have ended up inventing their own economy and their own reality. “Normally,” wrote Osip Mandelstam, “when a man has something to say, he goes toward the people, searches for someone who might understand him. But with the artist, the opposite occurs. He escapes, hides himself, flees toward the edge of the sea where the land ends, or goes toward the vast rumbling of empty spaces where only the cracked desert earth lets him hide himself. Is his walking obviously atypical? The suspicion of madness always falls back on the artist.”

  Until the end, Russell kept that spirit of neighborhood inventor and amateur alive: he spent the days in his darkroom in the neighborhood of Flores, experimenting with the quiet rumblings of the city. His work seemed to be the message of a traveler who has arrived at a lost city: that this city might be the city where we all live, and that this feeling of strangeness has been achieved with the greatest simplicity, is another example of the originality and the lyricism that characterize his work.

  The project in the artist’s studio was individually visited by eighty-seven people, mostly women, over the course of twenty years.

  Some have recorded their testimonies of his vision, and for a while it has been possible to consult those stories and descriptions in the book The Close City, edited by Margo Ligetti and published in March of 1965, along with a series of twelve original photographs by the artist.

  Many Argentine words are secret tributes to that enigmatic city and reproduce its spirit without ever naming it because they respect the desire for anonymity and simplicity held by the man who dedicated his life to that infinite, impossible construction.

  Art lives on memory and what is to come. But also on forgetting and destruction.

  The city—as we know—burned down in February of this year and immediately gained notoriety because only catastrophes and scandals interest the proprietors of information.

  The photographer had died two years before in darkness and poverty.

  Of the city, only its scorched remains now survive, the skeleton of some buildings and several houses in the southern neighborhood that have held up amid the d
estruction. The filmmaker Luisa Marker filmed the ruins and the last conflagrations, and the images we see prompt thoughts about a documentary that records and traverses a city burning in a nuclear holocaust.

  In the reddish half-light, the construction survives in ruins, spectral, flooded by water and partway submerged in the mud. Certain signs of life have started to suggest themselves among the scorched remains (houses where lights still shine, live shadows amid the rubble, music in automated bars, the siren of an abandoned factory ringing at daybreak). They seem like the nervous images of a newsreel about Buenos Aires in the remote future and what we see is the flash of the catastrophe we have all expected, which surely draws near.

  A few days ago, I saw those images again and discovered something I had not noticed before. I saw Plaza de Mayo. And in Plaza de Mayo I saw the cracked open cement and off to one side—beside a wooden bench—I saw the Greek coin, the Greek drachma: a point, I saw it, scorched and almost driven into the ground, blackened, clear.

  Sometimes, during insomniac nights, I get up and through the window observe the endless lights of the city, disappearing into the river. Then I open the drawer of my writing desk and pick up the Greek coin that Lucía gave me, and its slight weight is like the slight weight of memory.

  I think that one of these days, in the afternoon perhaps, I might make up my mind and go down to the loud and feverish city to walk through the crowded streets and, after skirting the avenue, cross Plaza de Mayo and leave it in the same place Russell had left it in his replica, safe and half-hidden, off to one side, on the cement path, concealed under the wooden bench. I sometimes think I must go looking for it. But the nights pass by and I do not make up my mind. I’ll do it now, I think. When autumn comes and the first rains begin.

  ‌18

  Diary 1967

  Monday, January 2

  The best thing to happen recently is a letter I received from Julio Cortázar in the conversational tone of Hopscotch; he comments on the stories he sent me and leaves me with a clear image of an everyday life without uncomfortable surprises, a life constructed according to his work.

  I read some fragments of Vertical Poetry by Juarroz—close-fitting, as they say about the toreadors who strike the bull. (A definition that also works for some of the prose I admire.)

  I looked through paper bins and drawers until I found the sheets I was looking for—enormous and ruled with lines. I’m going to write out the novel by hand this time.

  I want to go back to the nights that, like these rooms, have long been locked off—or better still, like those cool and dark corners you discover as a child and use as hiding places. To enter the night that abets my escape and takes me to a personal territory, where I can work uninterrupted.

  Today, I started the preliminary notes for the novel about the thieves who escape to Montevideo.

  I am also captivated by the presence of a narrator who observes the events and is distantly implicated in them (as in Henry James, Conrad, and Fitzgerald): I would like for him to be the author of these notebooks, sketching the facts of my life with a clear and efficient style, from the outside, and made to exist through the ambiguous references of my acquaintances, who will speak about him as well (when referring to me).

  Recently, the strange memory of a trip on the bus (maybe from Adrogué): uncomfortable, with my legs pushed up against my chest because of the wheel invading the seat, but happy because it eased my exhaustion from the journey halfway down a dirt road that I had made on foot, at nightfall, under the eucalyptus trees, after being with Elena in a hotel on the outskirts.

  Also, an afternoon with Inés in La Plata, the two of us sitting under the cathedral, the dusk was waning and the night seemed to come from very far away, and no one could feel it because the sunlight still lit up the plaza and the flowers.

  I always remember these situations and see myself in them, but I can’t reconstruct the content of those memories, or rather the experiences that often precede the memories and others, their consequences.

  Emotion persists in memory, feeling gives form to an image and assures its intensity; that is why the books I have read and the women I have loved endure: figures—or subjects—that resist forgetting. As it were: I only dream of birds and trains that pass in the night.

  And now Julia turns over in bed, illuminated by the light of this lamp, and I can imagine her dreaming that she is sick, as I was a few days before. Events persist, evolving into images that never age.

  There is a danger but also a grace in the dispersion that comes to me from the fragmented notes for the novel as I search for a tone in this notebook. I am looking for a mid-length prose, allowing me to escape from short forms.

  Wednesday 4

  Last night I worked until three in the morning, writing down some situations. Someone abets a robbery on the San Fernando bank. He settles an agreement so that, in exchange for information, he will receive part of the stolen money. The situation will not be told directly; only the effects will be visible.

  Thursday 5

  The admirable Thomas De Quincey, at the end of his homage to the crimes of J. Williams, uses a multiplicity of viewpoints and ambiguous and possible texts, which are recreated in bursts, a technique that owes something to journalistic reports and to the technique of the police genre, which recalls Truman Capote’s “very modern” In Cold Blood, that is, the current methods of new journalism and the nonfiction novel. He reviews interviews, notes, reports, and news stories and recreates a “real” crime. There is a clear similarity in the tones and techniques through which the two authors approach the events they narrate, with similar deviations. If Capote disguises himself as a novelist in order to legitimize journalistic work, De Quincey disguises himself as a journalist in order to legitimize his work as a novelist. And that is, precisely, what I envision that I want to do in a novel.

  What leads from De Quincey to Capote is what leads from my novel to the real recordings from Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sanchez. Facing nonfiction, facing the novel-report, what I imagine would be a novel “disguised” as true fiction.

  It is a technique that comes from far away, descending from illustrious forebears; the origin of the English novel is the false autobiographical document of a castaway who survives on a desert island and tells his epic, as Defoe imagines in Robinson Crusoe (and invents not only the story but also the method of narrating it as though it were a real document). The same thing occurs in Borges’s best, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The strange thing about this apparent verism is that, using “true” events, it legitimizes an imaginary account. They are decidedly antirealist writers (De Quincey, Capote, and also Borges), who use the technique to traffic in radical stories. I am searching for a tour de force, to create a real world and base myself on events that have really happened in order to create a novel in which everything is imaginary except for the places, some events, and the names of the protagonists.

  Going back to the action novel, passing through some antiromantic tendencies that turn the story into a subject of investigation and journalistic inquiry. The greatest success would be, as in the case of Borges’s Pierre Menard, for the first critics to review the novel as a book of nonfiction.

  The point, in short, is to create a real universe through the narrative technique, as real as the events it recounts.

  In the novel that I’m imagining, the greatest difficulty is in conveying the interiority, or rather the consciousness with which the characters live through the events. The greatest challenge will be to recreate and imagine the personal worlds of characters who are completely different from the novelist and from the readers. To try to write a novel that goes far beyond the habitual experience of the people who read it and the person who writes it.

  I am thinking about a possible title for this imaginary novel: Campo de batalla, and an epigraph from William Faulkner that I translate here: “The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools; el
campo de batalla está en todos los sitios para revelar al hombre su propia locura, y desesperación, y violencia.”

  After having published “Desagravio” in 1963, I encounter this passage in Thomas De Quincey: “To conceive the idea of a secret murder on private account as enclosed within a little parenthesis on a vast stage of public battle-carnage is like Hamlet’s subtle device of a tragedy within a tragedy; concebir la idea de un asesinato secreto por un motivo secreto, incluido en un pequeño paréntesis en la vasta escena de matanza en una batalla general, se parece al sutil artificio de Hamlet de una tragedia en una tragedia.” (My translation.)

  Something other than the same. Reality cannot be represented inside a novel except by means of very complex artifices. Therefore, narrative technique becomes a central element in the development of the plot. It is necessary to invent witnesses, make the protagonists speak; reporting is necessary, pieces of news to ensure that the fiction survives the mediocre cloak of the journalistic cult toward true facts and real events. Today, the novel struggles against the wave of false reality produced by the mass media. Everything seems real and the fiction is ever more devalued by the common general feeling. Lies grow in the world, but readers are ever more skeptical and demand stories that are equal to life (as though the poor reality and the lives they lead were not enough).