The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

by Ricardo Piglia

  I set a meeting with my parents here. Every new visit with them is an estrangement: I meet myself from twenty years ago yet again, take a cruel leap while trying to break free from that image and be myself, opposing them. My mother amuses herself and understands the façade of my life, and then, to show that she knows what it’s all about, she calls me Nene; my father, on the other hand, observes me with a certain anger because I have not become—like him—a Peronist doctor, ready to give “my life for Perón.”

  Wednesday 29

  Unpleasant premonitions and dreams about my economic future, always uncertain and increasingly out of my control. The fear has been bearing down on me ever since I left the University, after Onganía’s coup, and I joined the others who renounced their fellowships and thus cut off the possibility of stable work. It makes little sense, is absurd to worry myself over a future extending further than six months ahead. I have to live with an economy that guarantees me a few secure months, not my whole life—that would be ridiculous. I have the book of stories ready now and two hundred thousand pesos (as an advance for the publication). These ideas surface because I used up 22,500 pesos on an Italian coat that I bought for myself yesterday.

  Technically, Borges is connected to the cleanest narrative in the English language: the same reasoning behind the narrative material, the clear presence of a common narrator in all of the work (Borges himself), the framework that primes the action. His intelligence consists in erecting complex and unreal worlds upon those structures of meaning. Another of Borges’s qualities is that reality is never presented; it is always obscure and intriguing, and therefore it becomes the object of an investigation, giving rise to the searches (most often bibliographic ones for him) that conclude the events. His “humility” turns him into a perfect transmitter for books written by others, for stories that don’t exist, for fantastical characters whom he encounters, recreates, and displays. The greatest example of this method is “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the best thing Borges has written. A small bibliographic reconstruction leads into a parallel world. The story, painstakingly put together with chronometric precision, is blended, falls into the void, into unreality, into dream and nightmare. The most valuable part of Borges is the path that climbs up the hillside of the world toward that unreal, magical confirmation.

  Yesterday, my parents gave me their unedited vision of Inés. Suffering, very anxious, speaking about me too much, came to the house three times, repeating that she really loves me, that the relationship is over, that “they must love Julia,” etc. Just like on Radiolandia but, at the same time, the surprise of an affection that she wants to exhibit.

  Thursday 30

  Yesterday my cousin Horacio appeared; he is almost my brother, we were born just days apart in the same year and grew up together. Often, I have thought that he is my double; he stayed and lived in the same house where he was born, got his degree in medicine, as my father wanted me to do, and doesn’t leave the area where we lived as children. I have always thought about his as the life I would have led if I had stayed in Adrogué. Whenever I am in hard straits, I think about him and the life he leads, like a sanctuary I chose to abandon. If I had stayed there, I surely would have been the same as him. I suppose he sees me in the same way, the adventurous brother who broke away from the family to make his own life. He comes to see me every now and then, and the conversation picks up the fluidity of two friends who see each other all the time. He is back from some vacations in Brazil; I catch him up about my new situation. I have separated from Inés, I tell him, and am now living with a woman in Buenos Aires, Julia. He, on the other hand, married his childhood girlfriend and stays true to the passions of his youth. We go out to eat and then go in circles around the city, ending up listening to Rovira at Gotán. It was almost sunrise when we said goodbye, and once again I felt that he was living the life I could have lived, etc.

  I will try laboriously to correct the book of stories and prepare the final version. It is a moment when you can, with the same decision, send the book to the press or leave it in a drawer forever. Impossible for me to make a value judgment. What I like most about the book is that it is written contrary to the current stylistic fashion (which owes everything to Borges); in my case, I’m too interested in that work not to try to distance myself from it and start over, with a language that has no connection to “literature” as Borges has imposed it. I have to revise the story “Tarde de amor” in particular. It is the most daring, and I sometimes think that all of its deficiency hangs upon a well-placed comma and a rhythm resembling music. I am thinking of “touching up” the book while I copy it again—that is, copy it out once more and, as I transfer it, look for ways to adjust it.

  April

  Yesterday I met with Miguel Briante in Florida bar; long conversations about the book he has finished writing, which I like very much. It is called Hombre en la orilla, and I hope to be able to publish it at the Estuario publishing house in the coming months. We stop at Jorge Álvarez quickly, and I give Miguel a copy of my book, even though he knows all of the stories except for the last two. Earlier, I received three thousand pesos and checks for twenty thousand to cover next week. It’s the first work I’ve gotten since I left the College. At the moment, I’m preparing a collection of classics and planning a police series.

  Monday 3

  Last night we listened to Edmundo Rivero at Nonino. He has great talent and manages to disguise his decline. He sang “Mi noche triste” in a wonderful way, a medium tone with lots of “interpretation.” A great feel for captivating the audience, which led him to perform a more rabble-rousing and noisy repertoire. There were several friends in the audience, the women I have loved: Cecilia pregnant; Vibel uncomfortable, trying to be seen; Susana M., married.

  A short story. A long-distance phone call, a man and a woman talk, confusion, silences. “What can we say to each other?” etc. She is in California and he in Buenos Aires; the dialogue has several possible interpretations. In the end, it is revealed that she is not his wife but his cousin—his sister?—whom he has loved ever since one afternoon, now many years ago, at the hour of siesta, in a country house, when he found her—encountered her—naked in a tub set out on the patio, and with whom he had a passionate and impossible romance.

  Wednesday 5

  A talk with Noé Jitrik today about a possible course focused on American fiction. We will begin in July. I am thinking of opening with Thomas Wolfe and closing with Kerouac and the Beat Generation.

  Thursday

  While I make progress on the final version of the book, doubts arise, as expected, about the style. That always happens when you analyze the isolated sentences and lose sight of the general tone of the story. For me, that is the distinction between a decorative literature, which only thinks about isolated effects, and a more direct writing that works on the style in blocks, building it up the way someone raises a wall with different-sized stones. In fact, I end up typing out the book again, feverishly, as though someone were chasing me, anxious about changing phrases or words without running the risk of altering the prose. Curiously, no one reads books with as much detail as the writers themselves.

  Friday

  A day of steady and happy work in the afternoon at the Lincoln Library, reviewing American fiction, developing theories about the books that I began thinking about nine years ago, when I started with Hemingway’s first stories and then continued with Fitzgerald and Faulkner.

  Hemingway understood that, after what Joyce had done with the English language, he had to begin from zero. In 1938, Ezra Pound would say of Hemingway, “He has not spent his life writing anemically snobbish essays, but he understood at once that Ulysses was an end and not a beginning.” He sought a conceptual, elliptical prose, “more difficult than poetry,” and in his first book he achieved it.

  Sunday 9

  Although periods of intense work distract me from these notebooks, it is certain that, at some point, I will have to search for a tone—even her
e—that unifies this record of my days, to go against an immediacy that impels me to note down what comes into my head, without deciding or choosing. Although, sometimes, I think that spontaneity must lie at the center of these diaries.

  I turn things over and change the order of the stories in the volume. The first will be “Tierna es la noche” and the last will be “Tarde de amor.”

  Tuesday 11

  Resolved to move once again, the journeys through rooms for rent in hotels and boardinghouses force me to traverse the city like an adventurer seeking a place to settle down. Suddenly I need to change my neighborhood, and now I’ve decided to abandon the room on Riobamba and Paraguay and look for something further south. In the end, after going in circles around Barracas, I find a spacious and brightly lit room on Montes de Oca and Martín García, near Parque Lezama.

  Wednesday 12

  Once again, amid papers strewn on the floor and suitcases, the strange feeling of changing places, always experienced as an escape. The figure of the man without a fixed residence, a hero for me in the contemporary world. Without property, without rules, without settling down anywhere, yesterday, a magical encounter with a beautiful place in Barracas. Julia looked in the paper, because someone had walked by selling it a minute before, and she discovered this address, after we had almost decided to rent another with less light. It’s amusing to see that the room costs thirteen thousand pesos per month, that we will move in on the thirteenth, and that the room, of course, is number thirteen.

  Friday

  Carrying suitcases that feel like they’re filled with lead, (almost) escaping without paying for the other room in La Plata. Entering the city gradually, with a certain economic insecurity and a great urge to start something new here. I write in this incredible room over the avenues, with a large picture window, filled with light. Literature, for me, depends greatly on the place where I write. I could imagine a superstitious man who, before writing a new book, changes neighborhoods, opens a map, points to an area by chance, moves there, and lives for a few months until he finishes a novel and then undertakes the same ritual once again.

  Monday 17

  Against this balcony over the city, dampened by light rain, I start to work. Worried about Julia, who will live in La Plata for part of the week.

  Some discoveries: The white whale represents evil for Captain Ahab. The central subject in Edgar Poe is vampirism (of love).

  A little while ago, I went over to see Jorge Álvarez, who calls me on the phone and confirms my work as coordinator of publications in exchange for twenty thousand pesos per month. I will continue with the collection of classics, make some anthologies, and plan the police series. Jorge suggests three hours per day at the publishing house. We’ll see. Economically secure, set up in a place in the south of the city now, I can finally start writing the novel about the robbery of the armored bank car in San Fernando.

  Tuesday

  Going through old notebooks, I found a subject that I want to transcribe here once again. The indifferent man, detached from everything, who sees someone in a plaza about to fall from a tower he has climbed to do repairs, and, as he sees him descend and step on a broken rung, he doesn’t warn him, lets him fall. A meticulous story in which nothing is said about the central theme, the character of a man who, in a certain moment, does nothing. Murder by indifference.

  Wednesday

  Yesterday at the Ver y Estimar art gallery; some exhibitions of Argentine pop art and kinetic art. Best, conceptual works by Jacoby and Carreira. Also a Víctor Grippo installation. I see Patricia Peralta and Alicia Páez, friends from another era, or, should I say, from another geological period. Both of them studied with Inés at the College, and we would see each other very often. You break up with a woman and lose half of your friends and half of your library.

  Borges like Hemingway. They ask him: What is your greatest concern before writing a short story? To imagine an action or series of actions honestly, Borges answers. And he adds: To forget what has already been written about the subject and hope that another imagination claims it. And to the question “What is your technique when you write short stories?” he answers: To intervene as little as possible. To omit, for the sake of brevity, some part of the things I have imagined. That will lend it feeling in some way. And Hemingway, referring to one of his first stories, says the same thing: “It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

  The key for an artist, we might say, is meditation on necessity. Not needing more than you have in order to live. Forgetting “necessities,” you have to learn to live in the present.

  Overcast and cold once again; a while ago I ate a bit of ham with a glass of wine, and now I feel the harsh and burning flavors of the ham and wine in my throat and that memory, persisting in the present, distracts me from reading Katherine Anne Porter.

  Thursday 20

  It is still raining, and I kill time waiting for noon, when the pawnbroker opens, so that I can leave the camera in exchange for the money I need for the rest of the month.

  I could describe the morning today like this. I slept until ten and shaved slowly and stayed in the shower a while, and midmorning I drank a double espresso at the bar downstairs while reading the paper disinterestedly, and finally I walked out down the damp streets of the city looking for the pawnbroker.

  Friday 21

  I go to La Plata to give Julia company, and in the College hallways I encounter the same commotion as always, and once again a memory comes up like a gust of wind. When I came in on the first day, I saw Jiménez, my professor from high school in Mar del Plata, and I avoided him without any greeting despite his friendly gesture. As always, I see the scene as though looking at a photograph, and, as always, I wonder what exists in the memory that I cannot see in its image.

  Saturday 22

  “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” H. Melville.

  In the writers I admire, for example Osamu Dazai now, what I like most is that everything is narratively justified: the story is supported on documents—notebooks, diaries, letters, confessions—that the writer makes available if you wish to interpret them. I am trying, therefore, to write a story based on Pavese’s diary, narrating his thoughts, dramatizing them.

  Dazai is in the same vein as Pavese: “In the final analysis, my suicide must be seen as a natural death. A man does not kill himself for his ideas alone,” he said.

  Sunday 23

  Meetings with David Viñas in his apartment in Bajo, over Viamonte, and then in a bar on Calle Florida with José Sazbón.

  I am working on the prologue for Crónicas de Latinoamérica. Essentially, I’m interested in creating a record of experimental writers. You have to remember that the often-mentioned crisis of the novel is nothing more than the crisis of the nineteenth-century novel, and that short writing forms were already more innovative than novels (Poe, Bierce). I am fascinated to read Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Fernando del Paso, Vicente Leñero—redevelopments in method and the search for new forms.

  Monday, May 1

  The city half-empty, the streets deserted and, on July 9, from Corrientes to Córdoba, a crowd watching an assailant’s desperate defense, surrounded by police at the top of a building. As though the day, vacant and with no work, had prepared them for a live spectacle, ready to be spectators to a man’s death.

  Tuesday 2

  The room filled with light and eight hours of peace ahead to work on the new story, tentatively titled “La torre.” It begins like this: “Sometimes standing at the lookout, with the wind crashing wild against the tin, I have felt the tower alive, as though it were an enraged animal.”

  Saturday

  Yesterday a meeting with Roa Bastos; we
talk a while about his projects and mine as well. He is a novelist who, because he is exiled, now has his narrative domain defined: all of his writings are set in the place he lost. In my case, I tell him, exile is the subject: the narrator is trapped in his territory and yearns to live like a stranger, lost off in another country. On this subject, Roa asks me for an explanation of the chronicles of another country (Conti, Moyano, Saer). Well, what connects them? A certain monotony in the way they tell stories, a certain interest in marginalized areas of life and the provincial world. I don’t have anything to do with that poetics of slow and descriptive prose, and I don’t claim to be—or brag about being—an interior man.

  Monday 8

  Last night at Gotán we saw La pata de la sota, a new work by Tito Cossa. Some changes in his poetics (always floating, the mother reading the Bible), which aren’t able to resolve the internal conflicts of realist theater, once again a priori. Drawing from a concept in order to arrive at the same concept (the crisis of the middle class reflected in a work that focuses on the crisis of the middle class). Good control of situations, dialogue. Leaving the theater is like leaving after a family visit: nothing happens, and that is everything.