The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  That is what interests me, narrating the story as though I didn’t invent it, as though the history was already there, had already taken place in reality, and I had to meet the protagonists and witnesses face-to-face in order to understand it. In short, I have to act as a historian. What interests me is that this perspective defines the method upon which the reader’s belief will be founded.

  Saturday, January 7

  Every time I walk through Buenos Aires, I let myself be swept away by forgetfulness and nostalgia (which is false memory). I forget the facts but remember with needless clarity the feelings that come back to me, resurfacing along with the places that bring up “personal stories.” For example, today, the wide sidewalks, the tree-lined boulevards of Cerrito, with tables in the streets, sitting in the open air and drinking beer. The same with the nocturnal walks and the dinners at daybreak, men and women who live out of phase and act as though the night never ends, walking between bars and seeking the morning that never comes; along the slope down Corrientes toward the river, the lights enclosing Plaza San Martín and the distant sounding of bells from Torre de los Ingleses; or the bookshops that stay open until dawn (the bookshops I imagine stay open until dawn).

  Jorge Álvarez seems excited about the stories. There will be a “tribunal” appointed, presided by Walsh, to judge them. I like that metaphor because it alludes subtly to the literary danger that I want my writings to possess.

  Tuesday 10

  Suddenly, like a music, like the ticking of a time bomb, I start turning over the first sentence of the novel. “It was a way like any other to let the time pass by, leave the cell, cross corridor and line up in the dining hall, all looking forward, with tin plates in hand.”

  The central episode of the novel is the standoff; they go three days without leaving the apartment in Montevideo. Suddenly the police arrive and begin the siege and the battle that lasts all night.

  Thursday 12

  I have only six hundred pesos, which need to last until who knows when, but I am only interested in today. I have a kilo of peaches for refreshment and expect to work until nightfall. Today I am going to write the beginning of the novel and the chapter from the recording.

  La Razón (1/12/1967) AFP. Havana. “Writers here from several Latin American countries have issued a declaration advocating for the urgent transformation of literature in Latin America and appealing against the armed conflicts. Julio Cortázar and David Viñas sign for Argentina; for Perú, Mario Vargas Llosa.” There is no explanation of whether literature will be urgently transformed by the armed conflicts, or whether literature will narrate the armed conflicts. Nor is there a clear understanding of the direction in which it must be urgently transformed.

  Saturday

  The tense unrest of Donatelli, the veterinary student who lives in one of the rooms in the house, whose girlfriend left him for a “negrito, a thirty-year-old loser, a bohemian who doesn’t know how to do anything but play the bandoneon.” He is nervous, can’t sleep at night, and thinks that “insanity is contagious” and that his girlfriend is sick. “She’s crazy,” he says. “‘I’m bored of you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you get it?’” As crazy as a different girl, also from Lobos, who hung out with another veterinary student and left him, and a while later ended up dancing at the Club Social, one Saturday night, barefoot with a stranger.

  Or the police officer whose wife had left him and who had to stand guard on Saturdays at the Club Social dance where she would go with other men. He watched her dance and go out with others, stony, never speaking, until one night he put a bullet in his head.

  Or the clown who worked at children’s birthday parties in the town, whom a man threatened with a revolver, demanding that he entertain him, and since, after several attempts, each once more desperate and useless, he failed, the man shot him in the left knee. “There, rengo, that’s how you’ll entertain people.”

  And also the brother, owner of the whiskey bar in the town, who laughed at how ridiculous it seemed to him to spend youth studying, saying, “I start work at six in the afternoon, viejito, and pay attention,” and he showed him the roll of money on the table. “But you,” the other asked, “what do you do for the town?” “Get it drunk, querido, I get it drunk. I am as necessary as the hospital.”

  And as he went on speaking and telling stories about his town, I leaned back against the wall, I looked at my face out of the corner of my eye in the wardrobe mirror and tried to find an interested expression. I let him talk because I needed the five hundred pesos that I’d asked to borrow.

  Sunday 15

  The danger in Norman Mailer’s literature (The Naked and the Dead) or in Sartre’s novel, which becomes unbearable in David Viñas, is the reiteration of the meaning of the actions being narrated. The motivations are always thoroughly explained, and logic or intelligence are not employed toward suggestion, toward ellipsis and the unsaid, but rather are shown in the explanation of the events narrated in the book. You have to analyze the ways that Vargas Llosa ruins his novels through excessive “intelligence” in the structural tricks (for example, hiding the identity of the Jaguar in The Time of the Hero).

  Monday 16

  Regrets, for me, are always abrupt; I ended up on Sunday with eight pesos, forced to walk to the post office today. My grandfather sent me a money order for 18,885 pesos. I call him on the phone to ask why that figure and he tells me, in his sharp and amused voice: “I calculated the hours and minutes that you worked with me, straightening out my archive.” He wants to know when I will come back, maybe this Saturday. He has decided to organize the documents and letters into different boxes. It makes the house look like a museum. On the door, he has hung up some handwritten signs: “Isonzo,” “Fosalta”—places where he fought during the war. In a larger room, at the back, he has put up “Last Mail”; the letters from the dead soldiers are in there. He has laid out the maps in another part and has left only the books dedicated to the war in the library. He imagines that he is the only one who can tell the truth. “My truth,” he says. Sometimes he wants to write a book, sometimes just an open letter to the Pope in the Vatican.

  I drank a few beers on the sidewalk under the awning with fat Ferrero, whom I have assigned to keep me in touch with Spanish poetry from the Generation of ’27. Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, and Luis Cernuda. Ferrero knows the poems by heart and recites them to me on command. Today he played a little trick, he recited a very good sonnet to me, I hesitated, couldn’t remember which of those poets had written the sonnet. Finally, he told me that the poem was his own. It was called, or rather, is called “La luz del día.” He writes inside of a tradition; his poems are and are not equal to the poems by the poets he admires, but they are surely better than what he could write alone, without references.

  Tuesday 17

  The novel. The gangster and the girl, a love story. But behind the scenes, secretly, she was sleeping with others, pushed away by him. In the end, she dies with a bullet in her back. Almost by chance; the bullet rebounds and kills her in the bathroom. Love, then, romantic, and at the same time, of course, as perverse as ever, between the Englishman and Moira, her death in the end, when they start to hate each other and only remorse is left.

  It rains without ceasing. I suffer the consequences of last night’s alcohol. I can see a little blue crystal ball that seems to float precariously on the lip of a bottle. Blurry vision. When I close my eyes and open them again, the ball slides to one side and smashes against the floor and shatters the harmony of the image.

  A true story. I saw La Pléiade’s edition of Flaubert’s novels in the afternoon. I decided not to buy it; it seemed too expensive to me, even though I had the money, so I went on doing the things I had pending. I was in Tortoni for a while and, while there, felt for some reason that I had to have that book. I went back to Hachette, but they had already sold it… Unbelievable. I am going to spend my life thinking about the book that I wouldn’t buy; it will last longer than the memory of all the bo
oks I have in my library.

  Thursday

  I have been in La Plata for a few weeks because of Julia. But today Lalo Panceira came to see me, and I felt once again the happiness of living in Buenos Aires. I will be here until the end of summer and then will return to the city.

  Thursday 26

  The club or gang of kids who play with the town’s deaf-mute, at the station bar. They threaten him with a revolver to get a reaction, to “see how he reacts”; in the end they kill him. “A bullet got away from them.”

  The married couple who separated long ago and now rent a hotel room in the city and lock themselves up there for a week. The sister tells the story.

  Tuesday, January 31

  I reread old notebooks in which Inés appears, here and there, until she leaves and never appears again.

  I spent twenty thousand pesos in fifteen days (without going to the races).

  Wednesday, February 1

  I balance certain virtues with my flaws (40 and 60 percent, let’s say), and I am certain of my ability to write what I want and how I want it…

  Dostoevsky contends that our notion of reality is at fault if we find events “exceptional” or unbelievable (in his novels).

  Knowledge in literature is considered a loss of innocence. For the storyteller, this represents a paradox; you lose something once you learn that it isn’t worth the trouble to narrate “like someone singing.” That conviction must be present in the prose. Fear of that knowledge can make us diverge from “the adventure” and turn from the path to avoid meeting the dragon.

  Thursday 2

  Last night, a very entertaining gathering at Edgardo Frontini’s house. Tensions between Rubi and Julia, which Antonio Mónaco and I witness like people watching a famous scene in a film they are seeing for the first time.

  “You can depict wine, love, women, and glory on the condition that you’re not a drunkard, a lover, a husband or a private in the ranks. If you participate actively in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature,” G. Flaubert, Correspondence.

  Irony is a hopeless method for the left. Too much solemnity, too much seriousness in its goals. All of them take what they say with too much gravity. Only those who have nothing to lose can laugh at themselves.

  Friday 3

  The novel as investigation of reality. Separate from the traditional story, as in the novel without plot, when the story is already in the realm of reality and you have to be able to recreate it and narrate it as though it were not your invention. Reality is not being copied; a fictitious story is being copied—transcribed—told as if it were true, or rather, made to pass as real.

  Saturday

  A strange experience today. A funeral for the daughter of a colleague who works with Julia at the laboratory. Then a walk in the cemetery in the sun. The pain of daylight.

  Two sudden ideas about death. A base idea, happiness at being alive. A metaphysical idea, there is no experience in death; anguish is for the survivors.

  To be immortal would be to lack emotional bonds, to die without anyone experiencing the pain of your death. Dying, then, would be a leap into the void.

  The tone of the prose in these notebooks derives from the inversion of the act of writing consciously. There is no preparation; you sit down abruptly and write a few words about something that has happened, or that you remember, or something you have thought; everything happens in the midst of life and action. To write a diary is to establish an interval, a personal temporality, defined by the chronological entries. Writing down the date is the only formal sign that identifies a diary. Everything written there is truth; it is a contract, yet, nevertheless, you often write what you believe happened and reality contradicts it. You have to overcome inertia, sit down at the table and write. That is all, just a movement of the body, an intention without a clear aim or antecedent.

  Monday

  Carnival. There is a parade down La Diagonal and I watch it from the window. Before, I was filled with excitement by the days of guaranteed freedom; I would go to the dances, disguised so that no one would know who I was, and I could imagine myself having other perspectives and other words. But that has passed, and now I lean out from the balcony, hear the racket, watch pathetic buskers pass, and analyze it with the certainty that I am someone else while I write.

  Tuesday

  Last night on the sidewalk at Teutonia, Ricardo W.’s confessions reminded me of that party in the Villarreal sisters’ house, the cries about “the end of the left”; life no longer has meaning, they say, what can be done? We will never know if it is lucid thought or comedy. In any case, the story of desperation always leaves an impression (whatever it may be).

  And when we went down Corrientes and crossed Abasto toward Once, every night, and then on Medrano, her walking ahead and me wanting her.

  One of Beckett’s most repeated motifs is that of the ending of all possible self-expression: the end of language is the end of the known world, as though the characters—Molloy, Malone—had come to the edge and looked out from there at the inhospitable and silent desert.

  Saturday 11

  An enjoyable meeting in Edelweiss on Wednesday with Jorge Álvarez, who thinks that my book is “the best book of short stories in recent years, the best one I’ll publish.” He wants to print eight thousand copies but also wants an exclusive contract for everything I write in the five years after this book. We discuss possibilities for work: publishing a story in Adán magazine in May, an article on Malcolm Lowry for Marcha, a volume of collected essays on Hemingway, and the introductory notes for an anthology of stories from the USA.

  Monday, February 13

  At eight in the morning I am awakened by the bell from the street. A postman with a telegram from Casa de las Américas. “Your book long-listed for Casa Prize. Will be released in the coming months. Congratulations.”

  Doubtless, I know it better than anyone, this kind of happiness is always uncomfortable, too “social,” and worthless at heart. In any case, it is what I wanted, what I looked for; an arrival, a bridge into “literature” understood as a territory distant from writing. You could say that I’m two people, the one who writes and the one who hopes to be published. For the second one of us, some affirmations have now appeared: a prize (which is not a prize, just a mention) and a double publication promised: the book will come out this year in Havana and in Buenos Aires. I hoped for that approval (the telegram arriving at eight in the morning to announce that you have been “mentioned” in the literary world) even before writing the book. Maybe because I took it for granted, I don’t understand now whether it has meaning beyond this vague sense of unreality. Things have always been given to me with too much “ease”; it seems that there really is a star watching over me, the superstitious conviction that I will always be safe.

  But it isn’t as magical as I would like it to be. If I look carefully at the book, I discover the reason: a concrete book, with terse poetics, not easy or complaisant.

  In Buenos Aires, a long time traveling through the familiar area and several close-up shots: the bookshop, Plaza Lavalle, friends. I meet Ismael Viñas and also Álvarez, who celebrates the honor. Tata Cedrón is happy but hints that it was unfair not to give the prize to Miguel Briante’s book as well. I agree. These competitions, I tell him, are a lottery with few winners; luck helps more than the quality of the prose.

  Later, in Politeama, an encounter with Castillo’s troupe; Battista is there, too, and he also received a mention. We play at being celebrities and devils. They thought that when I left their magazine literature was over for me…

  Tuesday 14

  I am writing the mini-biographies for all of the American writers. Almost a book, with introductions or portraits going from Sherwood Anderson to James Purdy.

  Pirí is organizing an anthology of stories selected by writers—Borges and Walsh, among others. What would I choos
e? Two kindred stories: “The Death of Iván Ilyich” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” “The South” also belongs to that series. What does a man do at the point of death? How do we look at someone’s life if we know that he will die soon?

  Thursday

  Yesterday, long walks with Lucho Carneiro, who has discovered the Sergi winery and is still able to find some bottles in the suburban markets. Everything is part of my friends’ celebrations over my book of stories.

  Sunday

  On Friday, a considerable journey through Buenos Aires, alone at first because I missed a date with Inés, who had sent me a telegram congratulating me on the prize. Finally, another meeting with Castillo’s crowd at Tortoni, like the old days in my youth. We went to the Hormiguero afterward to listen to Mercedes Sosa, a young folk singer with a beautiful voice. We ended up eating breakfast at La Cultural as the sun rose. The same circular (triangular?) conversations that we had three years ago…