The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years

  Contents

  Introduction: The Reading Life of Ricardo Piglia

  Author’s Note

  I

  1 On the Threshold

  2 First Diary (1957–1958)

  3 First Love

  4 Second Diary (1959–1960)

  5 A Visit

  6 Diary 1960

  7 In El Rayo Bar

  8 Diary of a Story (1961)

  II

  9 In the Study

  10 Diary 1963

  11 Pavese’s Diaries

  12 Diary 1964

  13 The Swimmer

  14 Diary 1965

  15 Hotel Almagro

  16 Diary 1966

  17 The Greek Coin

  18 Diary 1967

  19 Who Says I

  20 River Stone

  Glossary of Notable Figures

  ‌Introduction

  The Reading Life of Ricardo Piglia

  Ilan Stavans

  “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself,

  or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction.

  No, read in order to live.”

  Gustave Flaubert

  Ricardo Piglia was an assiduous reader, that most embattled of today’s pastimes. He published a book called El último lector (The Last Reader, 2005), in which he celebrates not speed in reading, as often done in schools, but slowness. In the epilogue, he quotes a line from Wittgenstein: “In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last.” Piglia called sharp readers “private eyes,” in honor of his obsession with detective fiction, the style in which he wrote most of his work. (He loved W. R. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse.) He often invoked a famous photograph of Borges, who became blind in his thirties, taken while he was director of Argentina’s Biblioteca Nacional, holding a book a few inches from his nose. Borges said, “I am now a reader of pages my eyes cannot see.” Piglia writes, “A reader is also one who misreads, distorts, perceives things confusingly.” For him, it was crucial to read idiosyncratically, against the current.

  A cornerstone of contemporary Latin American letters, Ricardo Piglia taught at Princeton until he moved back to Argentina after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, of which he ultimately died on January 6, 2017 at the age of seventy-five. He didn’t spend his entire life only reading; he also invested a prodigious amount of time writing about that life: his education, his relationship with his grandfather Emilio, the upheaval of Peronism, his early attempts at writing, publishing, and teaching. He loved to write about his responses to favorite books, especially Argentine classics (by Macedonio Fernández, Roberto Arlt, Borges, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, and Juan José Saer), his thrill at mapping various national traditions (American, Italian, Polish), and his fascination with the Rezeptionsgeschichte of certain authors (Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, and Dostoevsky).

  Piglia identified himself as a critic who writes and as a writer who critiques, stating that “criticism is a modern form of autobiography.” Early on in The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, he speculates, “How I Read One of My Books could be the title of my autobiography (if I ever wrote it).” He wrote stories, novels, operas, screenplays, and several volumes of essays (including Crítica y ficción [Criticism and Fiction, 1986], Formas breves [Brief Forms, 2000], and Escritores norteamericanos [North American Writers, 2016]). Yet his most enduring effort, the one likely to earn him a place in posterity, is the 327 notebooks he crafted day in and day out between 1957 and 2015 in which he imagined himself not as Ricardo Piglia but as his alter ego, Emilio Renzi. As it switches from the first to the third person and back, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi generates a sense of alienation, wonderment, and displacement in the reader. The first volume starts, “‘Ever since I was a boy, I’ve repeated what I don’t understand,’ laughed Emilio Renzi that afternoon, retrospective and radiant, in the bar on Arenales and Riobamba. ‘We are amused by the unfamiliar; we enjoy the things we cannot explain.’”

  In The Symposium, Plato’s mouthpiece Aristophanes suggests that each human individual is made of two halves. At birth, these halves are divided, resulting in the vertigo and sense of incompletion that define us as humans. That division is solved through the quest to “find the other half,” in love. In the case of Piglia, his solution came through fictionalization: the chronicling of his life as if it belonged to el otro, the other—that is, to Renzi. This strategy is often called “autofiction.” The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is not a loyal distillation of what Piglia experienced, but rather a recreation, or even a revision. He started the notebooks just as the alter ego Emilio Renzi began to materialize.

  It isn’t surprising that Piglia loved other people’s diaries. There are reactions to a handful of them—by Goethe, Stendhal, Flaubert, Kafka, Woolf, Gadda, and Pavese—spread throughout the volumes. What attracts him in them, it seems, is that adulterated mode called “fictionalized autobiography.” In that regard, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is Latin America’s response to Scandinavian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Yet Piglia’s “autofiction” is different: the notebooks don’t present their protagonist’s state of being as a fait accompli but as an experiment. The reader catches Renzi in an ongoing state of gestation, writing, as he himself puts it, “an imaginary version of myself.” In the end, he inscribes himself as a palimpsest, made of evanescent stories that are “told over and over again, and through telling them and repeating them they improve, are refined like pebbles honed by water in the depths of rivers.”

  The name Emilio Renzi isn’t arbitrary: Piglia’s birth name was Ricardo Emilio Piglia Renzi. Emilio Renzi is the name with which he signed his first publications. It is also the name of the detective in a number of his books, from Artificial Respiration (1980) to Burnt Money (1997) and El camino de Ida [One Way Road, 2013]. These, however, are tangential paths to appreciating Renzi’s plight. The notebooks are his true habitat. In them his argentinidad, indeed his latinoamericanidad, come to full view. “How could one write about Argentina?” Renzi wonders. His answer is complex. It isn’t the content of a book that makes it Argentine because the Argentine writer can write about anything. So what is it? “We write our books, publish them,” Renzi posits. “We are left to live, we have our circles, our audience. To say it another way, everything must be centered on the use of language. In this way, the content will have different effects. The subject does not matter so much as the particular type of structure and circulation of our works.”

  In a conversation with Roberto Bolaño in the Spanish newspaper El País in 2001, Piglia describes Latin Americanism, the identity of Latin Americans, as made of misbegotten dictators and clairvoyant prostitutes, “a kind of anti-intellectualism that tends toward simplifying everything, and which many of us resist.” Bolaño responds that, “to our disgrace, we continue to be Latin Americans,” a condition that, he argues, is the result of economic and political forces. The two authors were disruptors rather than endorsers of this condition. Their fiction is a commentary on the merchandizing of stereotypes. Disruption for them meant laughing at how Latin America is exported abroad: a tropical, half-baked, exuberant landscape that is at once magical and anti-European.

  Like Bolaño, Piglia plotted that disruption meticulously. Aware of his end (also like Bolaño), he devoted his remaining years, from 2011 until his death, to adapting the 327 notebooks into three ample volumes and seeing them to publication. Rumors about this magnum opus circulated long before the volumes were released, and they were greeted with enormous enthusiasm upon publicat
ion in the Spanish-speaking world, one each year between 2015 and 2017. Respectively, the volumes cover Renzi’s “formative years,” from 1957 to 1967, “happy years,” from 1968 to 1975, and the years 2011 to 2015, under the subtitle A Day in the Life. He explores every detail of himself through Renzi, who serves as filter and intermediary, and perhaps also as demiurge.

  Call the notebooks Portrait of the Writer as Invention. In them Renzi isn’t an empiricist like Hume; he is closer to Spinoza. His interest isn’t in reality itself but in the ways the brain imagines it. In The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, we witness Renzi’s thought processes, his anxieties, his response to crucial actors in his life (such as his tyrannical father), even the way he constantly mocks his own seriousness—“I’m a trickster!” he enjoys saying. David Foster Wallace argued that fiction is where loneliness is not only confronted and relieved but also “countenanced, stared down, transfigured, and treated.” Renzi articulates principles, faces boredom, scoffs at platitudes, and shifts restlessly in his own views.

  A descendant of Italian immigrants (and immigrants are forcibly aware of the division of selves), Piglia was born in 1941 in Adrogué, in the south of Buenos Aires. The family eventually moved to Mar del Plata, and in 1965, Piglia, by then already a passionate reader, moved to Buenos Aires on his own. “It is what you read when you don’t have to,” Oscar Wilde said, “that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” Like many of his generation, Piglia found Borges, who in turn opened up Argentine letters in full.

  Renzi meets Borges during his student years. “He had an immediate and warm way of creating intimacy, Borges,” he exclaims. “He was always that way with everyone he talked to: he was blind, he did not see them and always spoke to them as if they were near, and that closeness is in his texts, he is never patronizing and gives no air of superiority, he addresses everyone as if they were more intelligent than he, with so much common understatement that he has no need to explain what is already known. And it is that intimacy that his readers sense.” If one doesn’t know how to distill his work, Renzi argues, Borges’s influence on others—and Cortázar’s, too—becomes “a plague.” Yet it is Borges who tells Renzi that “writing… changes the way of reading above all.” Indeed, such was the allure of the author of “The Aleph” that much of Renzi’s readings are built as digressions on Borges’s ideas; he wrote about him and taught his work profusely.

  The universe of signs is at the core of the Hispanic world, which is populated with books that address reading, from Don Quixote to much of Borges’s work to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Piglia’s oeuvre aims at that same insistence: living is reading and vice versa. In photos we have of him he is always caught looking at a book, with his thick glasses at center stage, or else toying with a magnifying glass, or—the trickster again!—giving the viewer (i.e., the reader) the middle finger. Clearly, reading isn’t a metaphor for him.

  Piglia’s apologia for reading doesn’t turn him into a hero whose mission it is to salvage an entire civilization, like Guy Montag and Clarisse McClellan in Fahrenheit 451. His quest is at once simpler and more complex: it is a defense of self-consciousness.

  The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

  To Beba Eguía, reader of my life

  To Luisa Fernandez, my Mexican muse

  ‌Author’s Note

  He had begun to write a diary at the end of 1957 and continued writing it still. Much had changed since that time, but he remained faithful to the obsession. “Of course, there is nothing more ridiculous than the conceit of chronicling one’s own life,” he would contend. “One automatically looks like a fool.” Nevertheless, he is convinced that if he had not begun to write his diaries one afternoon, he would never have written anything else. He published some books—and perhaps will publish some more—solely in order to justify this writing. “And so, to speak of myself is to speak of this diary,” he said. “Everything that I am is in there, but there are only words. Changes in my handwriting.” Sometimes, when he reads through it again and surveys the things he has lived through, it costs him something. There are episodes narrated in those journals that he has forgotten completely. They exist in the diary but not in his memory. And, at the same time, certain scenes that survive in his memory with the clarity of photographs are absent there, as though he had never experienced them. He feels the strange sensation of having lived two lives. One written down in his notebooks and one in his memories. They are images, scenes, fragments of conversation, lost remnants that are born anew each time. The two never coincide, or coincide only in minute details that dissolve amid the confusion of days.

  Things were difficult in the beginning. He had nothing to say; his life was absolutely trivial. “I like the first years of my diary precisely because, at the time, I was struggling against the void,” he said one afternoon, in the bar on the corner of Arenales and Riobamba. “Nothing happened; in reality, nothing ever happens, but it worried me back then. I was very naïve, always looking for extraordinary adventures.” Then he started to steal experiences from the people he knew, stories of things he imagined they experienced when they were not with him. He wrote very well in those days, as it happens, much better than he does now. He had absolute convictions, and style is nothing more than the absolute conviction of possessing a style.

  There are no secrets; it would be ridiculous to think that secrets exist, and he would, therefore, gladly disclose the first ten years of his diary in this book. He included stories and essays because they formed part of his personal journals in their original version.

  The publication of his diaries was divided into three volumes: I. Formative Years, II. The Happy Years, and III. A Day in the Life. It was based on the transcription of the diaries written between 1957 and 2015, not including travel diaries and what he had written while he lived abroad. At the end, he recorded his final months in Princeton and his return to Buenos Aires, so that this trilogy thus finds a (rather classical) way to conclude an extensive story, organized along the succession of days that make up a life.

  For anyone who is interested in such details, he insists on mentioning that the notes and entries from these diaries occupy 327 notebooks, the first five of which are Triunfo brand and the rest of which are notebooks with black covers that can no longer be found, from a brand called Congreso. “Their pages were a light surface that for years drew me to write on them,” he said. “I was attracted by their whiteness, altered only by the elegant series of blue lines that summoned phrasing and prose, as if I were writing on a musical staff or Freud’s mystic writing pad.”

  Buenos Aires, April 20, 2015

  ‌I

  ‌1

  On the Threshold

  Ever since I was a boy, I’ve repeated what I don’t understand, laughed Emilio Renzi that afternoon, reflective and radiant, in the bar on Arenales and Riobamba. We are amused by the unfamiliar; we enjoy the things we cannot explain.

  At the age of three, he was intrigued by the image of his grandfather Emilio sitting in the leather armchair in a circle of light, off somewhere else, with his eyes fixed upon a mysterious rectangular object. Motionless, he seemed indifferent, reserved. The boy Emilio did not truly understand what was going on. He was prelogical, pre-syntactical, pre-narrative; he registered gestures, one by one, but did not string them together; he only mimicked what he saw being performed. And so he clambered up onto a chair in the library that morning and took down a blue book from one of the stacks. Then he went out the door into the street and sat down on the threshold with the open volume on his knees.

  My grandfather, said Renzi, left the country and came to live with us in Adrogué when my grandmother Rosa died. He left the page of the calendar open on February 3, 1943, unturned, as if time had stopped on the day of her death. And that terrifying thing, with the block of numbers fixed on that date, remained in the house for years.

  We lived in a quiet neighborhood, close to the railway station, and every half hour the passengers who had arrived on the train from
the capital passed before us. And I was there, on the threshold, making myself seen, when a long shadow leaned over me and said that I was holding the book upside down.

  I think it must have been Borges, laughed Renzi that afternoon in the bar on Arenales and Riobamba. He used to spend the summers in Las Delicias Hotel back then, and who but old Borges would think of admonishing a three-year-old boy like that?

  How does one become a writer? Is one made to become a writer? For the person that it happens to, it is not a calling, nor is it a decision; it seems instead to be an obsession, a habit, an addiction; if he stops doing it he feels worse, but to need to do it is ridiculous, and ultimately it becomes a way of living like any other.

  Experience, he had realized, is a microscopic profusion of events that repeat and expand, disjointed, disparate, in flight. His life, he now understood, was divided into linear sequences, unfolding series that flowed back toward minor incidents in the remote past: sitting alone in a hotel room, seeing his face in a photo booth, climbing into a taxi, kissing a woman, raising his eyes from the page and looking out through the window, how many times? Those gestures formed a fluid web, sketched out a journey. On a napkin he drew a map with circles and crosses. Let’s say this is the trajectory of my life, he said. The persistence of themes, of places, of situations is—figuratively speaking—what I want to perform. Like a piano player improvising over the tenuous form of a standard with variations, changes in rhythm, harmonies from some forgotten music, he said, and settled back into the chair. I could, for example, recount my life based on the repetition of conversations with friends in bars. La Confitería Tokio, Ambos Mundos café, El Rayo bar, Modelo, Las Violetas, Ramos, La Ópera café, La Giralda, Los 36 billiards hall… The same scene, the same subjects. Each time I have found myself among friends, a series. If we do something—open a door, perhaps—and later think about what we did, it seems ridiculous; on the other hand, if we look at the same actions from a distance, there is no need to extract from them a sense of continuity, a common form, even a meaning.