The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  The list of writers influenced by William Faulkner is shocking: Onetti, García Márquez, Rulfo, Sabato, Dalmiro Sáenz, Saer, Rozenmacher, Miguel Briante. I keep myself away from that wave, seeking a laconic and elliptical prose. In that, at least, I am unique in the rhetoric of these times.

  Tuesday 21

  I am working on writing amusing and erudite biographical sketches of twentieth-century American authors, almost a panorama of modern narrative. I began with Truman Capote. In a quick visit to Jorge Álvarez, I made fifteen thousand pesos for those notes. I proposed a translation of In Our Time, the book by Hemingway that is not yet available in Spanish.

  The Sun Also Rises is by far Hemingway’s best novel, but it doesn’t achieve the splendor of “Macomber” or “Kilimanjaro.” Just as his novel about the Cuban fisherman is a pale version of “After the Storm.”

  Thursday 23

  I discover my natural talent, so to speak, for writing portraits of writers I admire. They have something of what I attempt in essays (they are narrative), but they are threatened by brevity and have echoes of Borges’s prose. I wrote about Truman Capote, Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald.

  Friday 24

  Signed inscriptions have an infallible technique: dedicating the book as though you were praising the merits of someone else (that is, of the person to whom we deliver the book in writing).

  Oh, the bursts of happiness are brief, intense, possess something luminous and lucid. They never last; when I want to preserve them, it is because they have already gone. But I still possess the memory—for example, just now in the armchair with Julia. Then you aspire toward that momentary happiness, and its immanence—or its promise—is what keeps us alive.

  The narrator must express what all men have once felt or will feel. That is, he must be able to convey emotions that we have once experienced or imagine to have been our own.

  Monday 27

  I used up the thirty-five pesos I had left on a half kilo of grapes and came back home on foot. I put the bunch in a bowl of ice and was eating them on the patio, an indefinable cadence; each one announced the next, as though the bunch contained an invisible rhythm—or shape—that organized them. I write or try to write about James Baldwin, while Julia is gone at the pawnbroker, trading all of the music of Brahms, the Deutsche Grammophon records, for money, because we need cash to make it to Friday.

  Hunger is an insatiable feeling, it makes you become monothematic, it is impossible to work or want to think about anything else. The grapes now finished, I wait for Julia, who has still not returned, even though it is four in the afternoon.

  Thursday, March 2

  I work for hours and hours without stopping; American literature has too many writers. I have already written about five authors and have seven or eight more waiting.

  Imagination also possesses a dark side; I am used to imagining catastrophes with the same austere ease with which I imagine plots or biographies written on commission.

  Saturday 4

  Yesterday I saw Tata Cedrón and his brothers in Boca. I share lamentations about the injustice Miguel Briante has suffered—not considered in the Casa de las Américas competition, not even by the publisher Jorge Álvarez, who rejected his book (a stain that cannot be erased). No one can use a friend whose prose I admire to confront me or to insinuate literary injustices that I agree about but have no connection to.

  Earlier, a walk with a photographer from Primera Plana who makes me fervently uncomfortable, placing me against walls with antique textures to take photos of me that I don’t want to see or remember. In the middle of the exposure, I lose my fountain pen. I’ll buy another, more expensive one, and if I lose it, I’ll buy myself another one, more expensive than the second, and go on in this way, wasting money on the objects that are my only real fetish. Later, I meet Álvarez and we adjust and put the final touches on Crónicas de Norteamérica.

  Tuesday 7

  I managed to settle the debt of sixteen thousand pesos that had been weighing on me for days. In total, I earned, for the notes and the prologues, twenty-six thousand pesos, instead of the seventeen thousand I had calculated.

  I write about Sherwood Anderson and then write about Faulkner, the best of all of them.

  Thursday 9

  I am writing this with another Parker fountain pen, a petty and auspicious gift from Julia. “Don’t lose it,” she said, “because then you’ll lose me, too.”

  Last night a long talk with Dipi Di Paola, always witty, he tells great stories about what he has experienced or imagined. One afternoon, euphoric, he went out to buy paint on credit in the hardware stores in Tandil because he wanted to paint blue the fronts of the houses on the block where he lives. “I wasn’t crazy, I was just happy.” His father went after him, trying to cancel the sales and refill the containers with blue paint that he had to pay for himself if they had already been used. Dipi and Briante and Saer are the closest friends whose literature I have as much faith in as my own.

  I am at a bar, very lofty, in the building where the editorial office of Primera Plana is run. It is the fourteenth floor; below is the city and further below the river. I come here with my second personality, the one who publishes and performs the formalities that writer detests. All of my contemporaries believe that appearing in that magazine, written in high-sounding and Borgesian prose, seems like glory. I laugh at that pretension; the weekly production obliges Cousté, and the mediocre people working under him in the cultural section, to discover or invent a new genius weekly, whose literary life will last a week.

  I worked then for a month on the brief portraits of American narrators. They were fifteen-hundred-word texts, in which I synthesized everything I know and everything I have read in the last ten years.

  Friday 10

  At Primera Plana magazine, Mastropascua, the photographer from the film club in Mar del Plata, gave me the copies of the photographs they took for me a few days ago. I am going to use one of them in the book. Pirí was surprised because I cut my hair very short before taking those photos. “I want to look like anything other than a writer,” I said. At the publishing house, Álvarez put me in charge of Crónicas de Latinoamérica. I’m going to write about James Purdy now, the final writer in the series, although I’m still missing Nelson Algren, Thomas Wolfe, John Updike, and Ring Lardner.

  A possible short story. It was a completely normal sensation at first. Who has never felt, in the face of an event (in the face of any event) that he has already lived through it? The feeling that you are repeating a previous moment of your life has an unexpected vehemence. It is not a memory, there are no images, it is only a state of grace, like returning to a room you have missed from childhood. Thus begins the story: the narrator lives concurrently in two distinct times; gradually the feeling of déjà vu grows and dominates his entire life. He knows what is to come, because he has already lived through it and cannot avoid it. (Maybe it will be the story of a crime the protagonist commits in order to escape from that imprisonment, platonic reminiscence or reincarnation.) In any case, the story does not explain at any point why the double temporality and the repeated life are taking place.

  Sunday

  I was thinking recently about the notion of the interval. Having a time frame, a future frontier that cannot be avoided; in English, they are called, very accurately, deadlines. They are not distinguished from the imagination of what is to come, but they have the peculiarity of being decided by a stranger. Someone gives us a definite time frame in which to do something, to fulfill or settle an agreement at a future time. Is it possible to believe in the deadlines you have assigned yourself? Difficult, whereas the other assignments or due dates seem inevitable or inexorable. Then time takes on another dimension and it is very hard to “let yourself go,” to live out the days in themselves and not as the promise or sentence of something yet to come. This feeling is embodied culturally in the myth of a deal with the devil. “What a long time you set for me,” as they say in the Spanish pl
ay Don Juan. (The notion of expiration.)

  Those who knew me from before can’t seem to forgive me for having accomplished what I desired—so to speak. As a result, there is a certain anger and a certain aggression that I perceive in old friends, who see me as different from how they had imagined me. Those who know me now only see what I’m doing as a virtue, not as a surprise that makes them anxious, faced with a stranger who nevertheless still remains, to them, “familiar.”

  If there is no God, all we have left, then, is the justice “of others.”

  A night in Edgardo’s house; mental speed and lots of whiskey. In the middle of the racket, like a flash of light, the subject of a novel occurred to me, a man who lives his life as though it belonged to someone else. He tries to conceal his false life, etc.

  Monday, March 13

  Anyway, the summer has gone now; the sun turns pale and weak this morning and a freezing wind comes in from the south.

  I have realized that, in writing about the American writers, I have defined or glimpsed my own lives through them. These texts are my tribute to Steve R.’s friendship.

  Pity is a terrible feeling. They speak of the passions of love, but pity is worse than passion. Adolescents do not commiserate with one another. Compassion is a passion of adulthood.

  Tuesday 14

  The cold, between us. Once again, I confirm an old supposition that the best way to think about a problem is to investigate it through concrete work. Synthesizing everything you have discovered and deepening it, as though it were something remembered. That explains my rapid journey through American literature (I knew it before).

  Hemingway attempts to turn the reader into a contemporary of the action, while the novelist writes in past tense. Yet it is not about the tense of the verb, but rather an alteration of the story’s syntax.

  Something that has started happening to me is that my friends or acquaintances confess to me that, beyond their concrete lives, what they want is to be writers. These days, Frontini, West, Lacae. Literature seems to be a way out, within reach of anyone who has learned to write in school. Obviously, writing is not the same thing as composition. I agree that anyone can be a writer; I don’t believe in “chosen ones,” only that there will always be great writers and terrible ones as well.

  In many cases, the recourse of literature as a way out, or as salvation, is an effect of the crisis of the left or the beginnings of adulthood. Confronted with skepticism, they think that this disillusioned view actually turns them into writers. Nevertheless, it is impossible to write without enthusiasm and trust in what lies ahead.

  Long ago, I dreamed about a journey by train in the middle of the night, in one of the old sleeping cars on long-distance trains. I imagined an almost endless trajectory, the stations lit up along the countryside, the towns rapidly passing. I remembered that hope to be separate and yet in motion, just now, looking at the picture window in my room as though it were the little window of a stopped train.

  Now I have come to fear surmenage, the image of a blank mind, without memories, a lagoon glittering in the light.

  Wednesday 15

  I still don’t know my limits, must begin staking out the boundaries of my life. At times, I imagine being a machine that carries out every function. And yet the only machine that I know first-hand is the Olivetti I use to write; it is there that I must test my reach.

  Friday 17

  A long march for two days through the city, in the middle a room made of angles, a skylight above and Julia daydreaming in the succession of whiskies she drank, one after another amid the storm that also lasted for two days. Pirí proposes becoming my literary agent and taking responsibility for my stories. Later, I met with Dalmiro Sáenz, who brought news of the competition; my book was in first until the end, but then they awarded it to the Cuban Benítez. In any event, they still decided to publish it at Casa de las Américas this year.

  Saturday 18

  Yesterday with Dipi Di Paola; we remembered old times, old projects. He is melancholy because his woman, a Lolita with a Japanese look, ran away with his best friend. I remembered the boardinghouse I shared with José Sazbón in 1960: Dipi brought me the Italian translation of a novel by Gombrowicz; back then everything was dark for me. A few years later I lived on a block with Briante, Constantini, Castillo. Nowadays, I think I work better and know what I’m looking for, and I feel that I’m at the vanguard of the writers in my generation (though that is not something I would say out loud, ever—unlike the others, who boast about their genius to anyone who will listen).

  Just now, a surprising appearance by Ramón T., who started to say goodbye to me “mysteriously” and vanished, passing over into his secret life. I left him in a taxi, and as we said goodbye he let me know, without saying so, that he was going to “join the revolution.” I thought I would never see him again. In the middle of it, Celina, helpless, tense. But I didn’t take advantage of my friend’s distance, even though she would easily have come with me, safe in her choice to live her own life (and not become a guerrilla fighter herself).

  Wednesday

  I passed the night without sleeping, working on the novel until morning. Just like that I picked up my main project again.

  A subject. A woman chastises her lover for failing to do what he promised her. Gradually, it becomes clear that the conversation is about suicide, which must never be stated but must become present in the gravity that their conversation develops. It would be a subjective version of what happened on Saturday, when Celina realized that Ramón was leaving and she would likely never see him again. Surely, she would prefer that to seeing him get out of the taxi and say he was renouncing his political ideals to stay with her.

  Thursday

  My most dependable erotic dreams are very entertaining: I make love to the daughter in front of the mother, all amid laughter and jokes about the Greek tradition.

  After many years, I read Cantar de ciegos by Carlos Fuentes once again; a good book, but no, in no way is he “a better short-story writer than Cortázar” (as Dipi says). Good control of insignificant and frivolous situations, but grisly and sensationalistic resolutions.

  Friday 24

  I look critically at certain life decisions I’ve made in service of the future of my literature—for example, living with nothing, no possessions, nothing material to bind and coerce me. For me, to choose means to discard, to cast aside. That way of living defines my style—stripped down, swift. You have to try to be quick, always ready to leave everything behind and escape.

  Now I am looking at the galley proofs for my little history of American fiction, which has high points but is uneven.

  As always, I live with a provisional calm; I won’t have any major economic difficulties for the next six months. After that, we’ll see.

  March 27, 1967

  I am at Don Julio in La Plata, such a students’ bar, half a block from the College; it provokes introspections that I have denied myself lately in order to live more actively in this beautiful summer, not stopping to think. But here I sat seven years ago, and once again the memory takes on the form of a snapshot in which I see myself back then, but at the same time I am the one seeing the image. I was in an unknown reality then, living alone and yet accompanied by a web of new relationships, and also confused, not knowing clearly how to find what I sought but sure of my ultimate triumph. That certainty, which had no guarantee or logic to it, held me steady in my new life. Now I have almost everything I could have wanted back then, but I’m at a new crossroads. I say this as a joke: things are not really that clear, and, in the end, I only wanted to recycle the coincidence of an image from memory and my presence in the place remembered.

  Tuesday, March 28

  The fear of breaking your eyeglasses “because I’ve had them for a long time” is strange. Why not use the same criterion for everything? With relationships, for example, time is the same as decay. We can think of someone, in love with a woman, who starts to be terrified because they hav
e had years of perfect relationship so far. That terror makes him turn against the woman; he starts to harass her, tries to find signs of disinterest and boredom in her, ends up metaphorically smothering her. She cannot stand this harassment and leaves him. The relationship breaks apart as he expected. I trust that the case of my eyeglasses is different from that fate. I almost left them behind on a minibus the other day. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I wanted to put them on as I was entering the College, I wouldn’t have discovered their absence. I left hastily, got into a taxi, went off after the bus; we kept up alongside it, I made signals for it to stop at the corner, got out of the taxi, got onto the minibus, and found them in a corner of the back seat. When I got off the bus, my eyeglasses on, the passengers applauded as though the company had sent me there to entertain them during the trip. A live show, as they say.