The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Read online

  Praise for

  The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

  Formative Years

  “Splendidly crafted and interspliced with essays and stories, this beguiling work is to a diary as Piglia is to ‘Emilio Renzi’: a lifelong alter ego, a highly self-conscious shadow volume that brings to bear all of Piglia’s prowess as it illuminates his process of critical reading and the inevitable tensions between art and life.… No previous familiarity with Piglia’s work is needed to appreciate these bibliophilic diaries, adroitly repurposed through a dexterous game of representation and masks that speaks volumes of the role of the artist in society, the artist in his time, the artist in his tradition.… Piglia’s ‘delusion of living in the third person’ to ‘avoid the illusion of an interior life’ transmogrifies us as well, into the character of the reader, and ‘that feeling is priceless.’”

  Mara Faye Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

  “When young Ricardo Piglia wrote the first pages of his diaries, which he would work on until the last years of his life, did he have any inkling that they would become a lesson in literary genius and the culmination of one of the greatest works of Argentine literature?”

  Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

  “A valediction from the noted Argentine writer, known for bringing the conventions of hard-boiled U.S. crime drama into Latin American literature. L’ennui, c’est moi. First-tier Argentine novelist Piglia’s (Money to Burn, 2003, etc.) literary alter ego, Emilio Renzi, was a world-weary detective when he stepped into the spotlight in the claustrophobic novel Artificial Respiration, published in Argentina in 1981 and in the U.S. in 1994, a searching look at Buenos Aires during the reign of the generals. Here, in notebooks begun decades earlier but only shaped into a novel toward the end of Piglia’s life, Renzi is struggling to forge a career as a writer.… The story takes a few detours into the meta—it’s a nice turn that Renzi, himself a fictional writer, learns ‘what I want to do from imaginary writers. Stephen Dedalus or Nick Adams, for example’—but is mostly straightforward, reading just like the diary it purports to be. Fans of Cortázar, Donoso, and Gabriel García Márquez will find these to be eminently worthy last words from Piglia, who died at the beginning of 2017.”

  Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

  “In this fictionalized autobiography, Piglia’s ability to succinctly criticize and contextualize major writers from Kafka to Flannery O’Connor is astounding, and the scattering of those insights throughout this diary are a joy to read. This book is essential reading for writers.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Where others see oppositions, great writers see the possibility of intertwining forking paths. Like kids in front of a stereogram, they are able to shift their gaze in ways that allow them to read the history of literature otherwise and, in doing so, write beyond the dead end of tradition. Ricardo Piglia, the monumental Argentine writer whose recent death coincided with increasing recognition of his work in the English-speaking world, was without a doubt one of these great visionaries.… It was said that there lay hidden something more impressive than his transgressive novels or his brilliant critical essays, a secret work of even more transcendence: his diaries.… In the tradition of Pavese, Kafka, and Gombrowicz, the diaries were the culmination of a life dedicated to thinking of literature as a way of life.”

  Carlos Fonseca, Literary Hub

  “It almost seems as though Piglia has perfected the form of the literary author’s diary, leaving in enough mundane life details to give a feeling of the messy, day-to-day livedness of a diary, but also providing this miscellany with something of a shape, and with a true intellectual heft. In these pages we see the formation of a formidable literary intelligence—the brief reflections on genre, Kafka, Beckett, Dashiell Hammett, Arlt, and Continental philosophy alone are worth the price of admission—but we also see heartbreak, familial drama, reflections on life, small moments of great beauty, the hopes and anxieties of a searching young man, the endless monetary woes of one dedicated to the literary craft, and the drift of a nation whose flirtation with fascism takes it on a dangerous course.”

  Scott Esposito, BOMB Magazine

  “As a fictionalized autobiography, it is, like the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, of My Struggle fame, part confession and part performance. Renzi meets and corresponds with literary luminaries like Borges, Cortázar, and Márquez, and offers insightful readings of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Faulkner, and Joyce.… Fans of W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño will find the first installment in Piglia’s trilogy to be a fascinating portrait of a writer’s life.”

  Alexander Moran, Booklist

  “In the long history of novelists and their doubles, doppelgängers, and alter egos, few have given more delighted attention to the problem of multiplicity than the Argentine novelist Ricardo Emilio Piglia Renzi.… Under the name of Ricardo Piglia he published a sequence of acrobatic, dazzling novels and stories that consistently featured a novelist called Emilio Renzi.… The larger story of Formative Years reads something like a roman d’apprentissage: the romance of a writer’s vocation, in all its hubris and innocent corruption.… [T]he book’s real subject is more delicate and more moving than the simple story of a literary vocation. It is the process of textualization, of the stuttering, hesitant way a writer tries to convert life into literature. In these diaries, Piglia is dramatizing not only the writer’s split between a public and private self, but also the time-consuming, exhausting, delicious, compromised effort to construct that textual self: the self that exists only in words.… Formative Years is one of the great novels of youth: its boredom, powerlessness, desperation, strategizing, delusion… this journal impassively records not only a novelist’s self-creation, but a society’s unraveling.”

  Adam Thirlwell, The New York Review of Books

  Also by Ricardo Piglia

  The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years

  The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life

  Artificial Respiration

  Money to Burn

  Target in the Night

  The Absent City

  Contents

  In the Bar

  1 Diary 1968

  2 Diary 1969

  3 Diary 1970

  4 Diary 1971

  5 Diary 1972

  6 Diary 1973

  7 Diary 1974

  8 Diary 1975

  The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

  The Happy Years

  ‌In the Bar

  A life is not divided into chapters, Emilio Renzi said to the bartender of El Cervatillo that afternoon, leaning on the bar, standing before the mirror and the bottles of whiskey, vodka, and tequila lined up on the shelves. I’ve always been intrigued by the unreal yet mathematical way we organize the days, he said. Take the almanac, a senseless prison around experience that imposes a chronological order onto a period of time that flows without criteria. Calendars imprison the days, and this mania with classification has likely influenced human morals, Renzi told the bartender, smiling. I say so for my own part, he said, since I write a diary, and diaries obey only the progression of days, months, and years. Nothing else can define a diary—not its autobiographical material, not the private confessions, not even the record of a person’s life. Simply, said Renzi, the definition is that what is written must be organized by the days of the week and the months of the year. That’s all, he said, satisfied. You can write anything, a mathematical progression, for example, or a laundry list, or a meticulous account of a conversation in a bar with the Uruguayan man tending the bar, or, as in my case, an unexpected mixture of details, or meetings with friends, or the testimony of lived experiences; you can write down all of that, but it will be a diary if and
only if you note the day, the month, the year—any of those three means of orienting yourself amid the violent currents of time. If I write, for example, Wednesday, January 27, 2015 and then write down a dream or memory beneath this heading, or if I imagine something that hasn’t actually happened but make a note before I start the entry that says Wednesday 27, for example, or, even shorter, just Wednesday, it has now become a diary and neither a novel nor an essay, although it can include novels and essays as long as you take the precaution of writing the date first, orienting yourself and creating a sense of serialism, but then, look out, he said—and he touched the index finger of his left hand to the lower eyelid of his right eye—if you publish these notes according to the calendar and with your own name, that is, if you assert that the subject who is speaking, the subject who is being spoken of, and the one who signs it are all the same person or, rather, share the same name, then it is a personal diary. Your own name ensures the continuity and ownership of what is written. Although, as we have known since Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams at the end of the nineteenth century—a great autobiographical text, by the way—you are not yourself, never the same person and, since I no longer believe that a concentric unit called “the ego” exists, or that a subject’s manifold ways of being can be synthesized into a pronominal figure called “I,” I don’t share the current superstition about the proliferation of personal writings. And so, it is naïve to talk about the writings of the self, because no self exists for whom that—or any other—writing can exist, he laughed. The “I” is a hollow figure, and you have to seek meaning elsewhere. For example, in a diary, meaning is derived from the act of organizing according to the days of the week and the calendar. Therefore, although I am going to maintain mathematical temporal order in my diary, it also troubles me, and I’m thinking about other types of chronology and other types of order and periodization, provided, of course, that the diary is published under its author’s real name and that the person writing the diary entries is the same person who lives them and also has the same name, Renzi concluded. It amuses me to reread these notebooks, and my Mexican muse laughs uproariously, as she tells me, at the amusing adventures of an aspiring saint. All right, exactly, I say to her, a book of humor, yes of course, I always meant to write a comedy, and in the end, it was these years of my life that achieved the touch of humor I was looking for, Renzi said. Maybe I’ll call them my happy years, then, because I was amused while reading and transcribing them to see just how ridiculous one can be. Without meaning to, I turned my experience into a satire of life—in general and in particular. Looking at yourself from a distance is enough to show you that irony and humor turn our stubbornness and departures into a joke. A life retold by the same person living it is already a joke, or rather, Renzi said to the bartender, a Mephistophelean prank.

  Due to my de-formation as a historian, I have a special sensitivity toward dates and the ordered progression of time. The great mystery, the question that has followed me through these weeks spent transcribing my notebooks, dictating my diaries, and making, as they say, “clean copies,” lay in seeing the points at which my personal life intersected with or was intercepted by politics. For example, in the seven years I’m dedicating myself to now, I am incessantly, exclusively interested in knowing how I lived between 1968 and 1975, my poor life as a young, aspiring writer or rather as someone aspiring to be a writer because I wasn’t yet a writer in a full sense, though I had already published a book of stories, The Invasion, which was fairly decent, I can say now, especially compared to the story collections that were being published in those days; back then I was only young and aspiring to be writer, and now, in reading the diaries from those seven years, the question that has arisen, almost an obsession that won’t let me think about anything else, is what part of any individual’s life is personal, and what is historical, Renzi said that afternoon to the Uruguayan bartender of El Cervatillo, as he drank a glass of wine at the bar.

  A key event was the army raid in late 1972, during which, in search of a young, unidentified couple, they leveled the apartment building on Calle Sarmiento where I lived with Julia, my girlfriend at the time. We were a young couple and so the army, or that patrol, which was “combing”—as they say—the area, was surely seeking to verify some fact, some piece of information obtained with the interrogation methods typical of the security forces, forces dedicated to intimidating and killing defenseless citizens. Who knows who that young couple was, what they did, what they were working toward; they were, surely, leftist students, middle-class kids, since they lived and were being searched for in a building on Sarmiento and Montevideo, right in the center of the city. We weren’t them, but we lived there.

  I realized it because, when I entered the area, I saw army trucks parked outside and two soldiers leaving the building, and so I turned back and retraced my steps, as they say, and called Julia at the office of Los Libros magazine, where she worked in the afternoons, and I caught her in time, and we decided to stay in a hotel that night. The City Hotel. We’d had, Renzi told the bartender, some training on how to change our residence when the storm drew near; we knew that one tactic of the suppressive forces of the occupying army, as it would be called now, was to act quickly, by surprise, and then move away and surround another neighborhood. Though what happened back then can’t be compared to the brutal, criminal, and diabolical methods that the Argentine army, or rather, the Armed Forces, used a few years later under the operational command of the Military Junta, as it was called after March, 1976. That time was much easier, but all the same, Julia and I erased ourselves, so to speak, for a couple of days. The army patrolled an area of the city rather randomly, or with fairly imprecise information; they would surround it and inspect house after house, seeing if they could catch some dangerous little fish. So we spent two days in that hotel near Plaza de Mayo, and then, when the storm seemed to have passed, we went back home. Renzi turned toward the entryway and, absorbed, commented with a tired voice, “this heat is going to kill us,” and then, as though awakening, he resumed his conversation without changing position, that is, in profile to the bartender, looking out toward Calle Riobamba.

  So, when I get back, the doorman tells me that they came through, people from the army, asking about the young couple who lived in the room on the sixth floor of the building, and, since we lived in that room, we gathered some things—my notebooks, my papers, the typewriter—and left, not meaning to return. I see an intersection, there, between history and personal life, because that retreat produced several effects in me, as critical as the move from Mar del Plata when my father was affected by politics and, unwillingly, we had to abandon Adrogué, the town where I was born.

  The porters of the buildings in Buenos Aires were divided into two categories; 30 to 35 percent were retired policemen and another 30 to 35 percent were undercover activists for the Communist Party. The communists had undertaken a great project of planting old militants in buildings around the city as caretakers. The Argentine communists had used that technique in anticipation of an insurrection in Buenos Aires similar to the one that had brought the Bolsheviks into power; managing the buildings of the city was an excellent revolutionary tactic, but, since the communists had no intention of making a mess, the doormen had become informants for the party and were also used to protect sympathizers of the left who were being pursued by the police. And one of them was there for me, a kind man from Corrientes who warned me of what was happening when he saw me appear and helped me to flee.

  I will never know if it was me the army was looking for, but I had to act accordingly, as though I, a pacifist and schizoid aspiring writer, were actually a dangerous revolutionary. That misunderstanding, that crossroads, changed my life, Renzi said that afternoon to the bartender of El Cervatillo. Everything changed, chaos came back into my life. And so, to impose some order onto the passions and impulses of existence and to turn the disorder into a clear line, I must periodize my life, and for that reason
I find, in that young couple whom the army was trying to capture, in that serendipity, meaning.

  Personal experience, as written in a diary, is sometimes intervened upon by history or politics or economics, that is, the private changes and is often controlled by external factors. In this way, it would be possible to organize a series based on the intersection of individual life and outside forces—or shall we say external forces—which tend to intervene periodically in the private lives of people in Argentina under political systems. A change of one official is all it takes, a drop in the price of soybeans, a false piece of information taken as fact by the State information or intelligence services, and hundreds and hundreds of pacifists and distracted individuals are forced to change their lives drastically and, for example, cease to be dignified electromechanical engineers after a factory is forced to close because the Minister of Economy made a decision one morning while in a bad mood, and they become bitter and resentful taxi drivers who only talk to their poor passengers about the macroeconomic events that changed their lives in a way we might associate with the heroes in Greek tragedies, controlled by fate. Another example could be me, Renzi said to the bartender of El Cervatillo, that is, a young writer who must leave his house and flee because of an incomprehensible decision by an army colonel who looks at a map of the city of Buenos Aires and, based on a vague piece of information from the army intelligence services, after a slight hesitation, uses a pointer to indicate a neighborhood, or rather a corner, in the city which must be searched to find the suspicious couple. An abstract, impersonal factum acts as the hand of fate and takes a young couple between its index finger and thumb, lifting them into the air and literally throwing them out into the street.