The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Read online

  The body speaks the language of action: a narrative key to literature that interests me. It’s enough to look at the role of the mime in significant moments in dialogue (for example in the detective novel); gestures and mannerisms allow the unstated—non-verbalized—thoughts of the other to be seen. To put it another way, the record of physical behavior is the hallmark of Hemingway and the substitute for the other’s thoughts. Showing but not telling (what is thought). Forms of an underground language directed toward reading thought (which always remains unarticulated, that is, bound up, confused with the action itself). Never saying anything about oneself, as though the hero were under surveillance. This language—the syntax of which is enacted—is deciphered and reconstructed through investigation. In popular literature (and in dreams), these gestures are categorized: turning pale and blushing are direct ways of showing what is thought or felt (fear, shame) but not explicitly said. There, the function of description in a story is gambled. That is how V. Woolf’s line can be understood: “God—or the devil—is in the details.” What has no function is what functions as a revelation. For example, while talking without really saying anything, a character looks at himself—too much—in the mirror at the back of the room. Those quick glances that tend to go unnoticed are the evidence that he is talking about himself and that he is “nervous” (the description must show that he can’t stop making that gesture, pointless, repetitive, for no reason). For example, a pregnant woman’s “cravings.” My father had to get up at dawn and go out like a madman looking for strawberry ice cream for my mother, who wanted “that,” and he had to get it so that the person who was about to be born—me, that is—wouldn’t have to endure a strawberry-colored mark on his face. He doesn’t state it but acts it out. In the best writing, for example in Kafka or Tolstoy, that gesture is seen but we don’t know what series it belongs to or what it means. It is there to open a question and give the story a non-verbal density. The investigation is the way in which those minor actions, almost invisible, form a significance that is only discovered at the end of the story. Then there is a double moment: blind, “unbound” actions that, once articulated—a syntax links them together—give rise to an investigation that reconstructs and supports what those invisible gestures say (if taken in isolation).

  In the great first-person stories (for example, The Stranger by Camus or The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway), the awareness is always at the same immediate level as the action. Narrators never recount what they already know. Therefore, we could say that they don’t narrate, to the extent that they don’t establish causal connections, always tending to narrate in the present.

  In reality, literature shows the opacity of the world. One never knows anything about people, even about those to whom we are close and those we love, and we only know what they tell us but never what they think because they can always lie to us; in that sense, we read novels because they’re the only way to see another person from within. I know Anna Karenina better than the woman I’ve lived with for many years.

  The great writings of Beckett or Tolstoy or Kafka, then, form a continuous and unconnected succession of small incidents. Action plus action plus action, disjointed, without causal connections. The nexus is made visible because the syntax or grammar establishes relationships that are not cause and effect. They display and offer up for judgment but do not explain, only place in relation. Why, after all, does Mr. Samsa awake one morning transformed into a horrible vermin? Kafka never says why but shows it. So, who institutes that syntax? Treating the story as investigation is one way. It begins in reverse: a family friend arrives at the house and is faced with a very confusing situation; something has happened to Gregor Samsa, but no one says what is happening, and something has happened in the other room as well, where Samsa is apparently resting. The friend spends the day in the house, collecting information, little clues, indirect accounts, and with that uncertain web of facts he constructs a hypothesis and says, without opening the door to the room: “I think Gregor awoke transformed into a vermin.” This reality is inferred, and it is told in reverse. The truth is approached in an uncertain manner, feeling around in the dark, and not everything is known. But what kind of animal has he metamorphosed into? The story can go on.

  All novels constructed in this way are a single thought, hidden and denied and lost and disguised in the action. In the case of the crime genre, the detective only attempts to read the murderer’s thoughts. Because that form of action—that of the murderer—is erased and the proof is altered, mixed up in the opacity of reality, and the investigator must invent an order, going from the effect to its possible causes. The genre is always about investigating a violent act, and that is its only identifying feature.

  Wednesday

  Series E. Just now I repeated a motion, and that is the only valid explanation of this diary: a ceremony that is repeated. I went out to the street to buy the black notebook with a rubber cover in which I am now writing. For years, everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve gone out to the street one day to search the neighborhood for a place where I can find this specific type of artifact (a Congreso brand notebook with one hundred pages). The bookshop on Calle 1, near the university dining hall in La Plata; the bookshop in Boca, with old books from Losada publishing and a little old man who kept a box in the basement with a hundred notebooks like this one (Casa Liscio. Olavarría 624. Tel. 21-4461); the other bookshop opposite the boarding house where I lived, crossing Calle Montes de Oca, and now, this morning, in the office supply store (connected to the courts and lawyers) on Viamonte and Talcahuano. Every time I come back home with a new notebook, I’m certain of the “great changes” that will have come in my life when I start to write the future on the blank lined pages of this magical object in which everything is possible, before I start to write in my nervous hand the incidents of my life that, in order to justify the notebook, I must write down.

  Yesterday I saw Bullitt with Steve McQueen: a cop’s everyday life, the density, the fatigue. Going through trunks full of clothing, spying in a hospital, running and running after a guy in an airport and, in the midst of all that, there’s a barely suggested relationship with a woman, which is constantly being interrupted (phone calls while they are making love); it gives the tone of a broken life, overtaken by violence. Reality “blocks” and covers that aperture toward excitement. Lots of dramatization, a heavy atmosphere, dead time, and a formidable car chase along the streets of San Francisco in the middle.

  Now with Julia, who lost her contact lenses. Desolation, superstitious fear; any loss of an object is experienced as a sign or a warning. And so she too moves slowly, as if lost.

  Yesterday I saw Edgardo in Tribunales, a fleeting wave, and as always I felt tense in the face of the unforeseen. Later, at home, he—without knowing it—reframed the situation for me.

  “What happened today when we ran into each other? It seemed like you were afraid of jeopardizing yourself.”

  “Actually it was the opposite,” I told him. “I didn’t want to jeopardize your image as a lawyer by letting people see you with me.”

  The joke brings the matter to an end, but it leaves one fact standing: there is an ambiguity in incidents when one is not alone. A need to quickly impose an interpretation on actions, a reading (always opaque) for others, without any precise significance. Aggression is a way to elicit the hidden significance and discover the meanings that the other keeps hidden.

  Cacho’s phone number: 72-5237.

  Thursday

  Notes on Tolstoy (6). Self-examination, in the sense of protection of the self, as mutilation. The subject against the world and the subject outside of the world overlap. In his Diaries (which then become the “Work” that replaces his work), particularly during his last ten years, you can see his struggle against all feeling of self-affirmation and even of joy, so much so that he is ashamed for having felt happy to see his granddaughter Tanechka or for having been moved while listening to good music or even for having felt more distraught at t
he death of his daughter than at the death of any peasant. The only joy he allows himself is caused by criticism and insults and his feeling of disgust and guilt toward himself. Happiness sprang forth from pure negativity as an expression of being an agent of God’s will. And so the last note in his diary, from November 3, 1910, four days before his death, reiterates the position. It defines the idea of absolute solitude that Gorky perceived when he went to see him: nihilism, indifference toward other men, incurable desperation, and a solitude that no one had ever experienced so lucidly. “Real love is only that directed at a non-attractive object” (see entry from 10/8/1910). Alexandra Tolstaya made a note of this quote from her father (10/10/1910): “Exceptional love for children is a sin. If they bury my Masci, I suffer, and if they bury another girl it does not matter to me.”

  Friday, February 21

  Just now through the window I saw a tow truck pulling a car: I’m amused by the owner’s astonishment, his feeling that his property has been questioned. He can’t bear to watch the agents taking the car from its space as though it belonged to them. A procedure in which having a “mislaid” property makes a person see that the whole country is the great possession of someone else that no one knows, whom the police work for.

  Being on the favorite side has its advantages, at least in this indifferent time when our military has laid down a shameful quilt that covers the whole country with the same torpor. A boy who lives in hotels around this block deflates the wheels of all the cars parked in the alley. His little rebellion amuses me. For me, then, reality consists of the news in the papers (today in Uruguay the Tupamaros carried out a spectacular robbery and left a note with their regards), and the things I see through the window of the apartment if I raise my head to look out into the street. So I could imagine a narrator who only sees what is right in front of him or things that he reads in fragments: the rest, he imagines.

  After an afternoon spent reading, taking notes, and searching for a common thread in my ideas about Borges, I ended the day eating in the restaurant on the corner with Julia, sensing the sumptuous presence of a couple behind us who were exhibiting themselves alongside a bottle of champagne set to chill in a bucket of ice. Despite the theatricality of the scene, the woman complained about the cost of the bill in the end.

  Saturday 22

  Julia and I walked down Corrientes, which was half empty at the end of summer, all the way to the sidewalks of Cerrito, trying to guess the story that came to us in fragments and bursts as though the whole city were a fabric of little histories. An old man was interrogating a hard-faced woman and asking her, rhetorically, for explanations; he went back and forth about some shared past, but she kept her lips sealed.

  I saw the poet Alberto Szpunberg; upset, with nothing to say to one another, we shook hands ceremoniously, promising phone calls soon.

  Monday 24

  An easy debut of the work with Luna, who was waiting for me to read a story of his in which he repeats his rhetoric of false modesty in a nonsensical “literary” history. He left at once, as could be expected, and within the hour I finished the work, two pieces about education.

  Now I’m reading, inattentive, mired in this humid heat that the light from the lamp adds to, creating a heavy atmosphere.

  Tuesday 25

  A strange day, everything twisted and halfway done, back and forth to the publishing house without finding Jorge, and then I go to the paper and work with Luna.

  Later a visit from Germán García with a magazine project (yet another) to critique Primera Plana. It isn’t bad, a way of participating in the debate about the media, which decides the march of culture today.

  Thursday 27

  A decision to run the necessary risks. I have to talk to Luna about restructuring the work, getting out of the bureaucratic formality of three hours a day. If he can’t do it, I’ll throw away the salary of thirty thousand pesos even if I have to go back to the era of undignified hardship. The risk is living only on the salary from Álvarez, who’s always on the brink of bankruptcy, but I prefer uncertainty to that closed-off working time.

  Friday 28

  A little while ago I had a silent run-in with Helena, with a swift little wave on my part to avoid another meeting; a woman I wrote about in the old notebooks from ’59, who now seems to be a stuffy housewife.

  Saturday, March 1

  Since eleven I’ve been unable to pull myself out of the cynical prose and oppressive atmosphere of Nabokov’s Lolita.

  Last night at B.’s house, the woman was describing the illnesses of her soul, the story of her grandfather, handsome and drunk, who fell into a tar pit and came out black, covered in the guilt of having lost his grace. Then, as always, I felt an irresistible boredom from being in the middle of a group.

  Series A. A meeting with Borda: Minister of the Interior, with the director of Semanal magazine, asking for censorship of the reflections of the “alarming evolution of traditions.” The military government wants to change not only cultural customs, but also any mention of a reality that it doesn’t view as Western and Christian.

  The bars along the coast, under the trees, with music, the disc jockey announces that Pascualito Pérez is there, “let’s hear some applause for him,” Julia and I face the river, eating barbecue with iced wine, while the wind makes the paper tablecloths fly up to show the glossy surface [illegible] carved by the knives in our hands.

  Tuesday 4

  X Series. Sunday night seeing Lucas, always furtive and cautious, drawn by events that he can’t talk about and that isolate him. A marginalized man, he reminds me of Manuel; both of them bury their real worlds, which they must protect. In his case, armed action; in Puig’s case, furtively picking up men around construction sites, the same mistrust. I also have to hide my reasons for adhering to secret agreements. Never asking.

  Earlier I saw Néstor, wavering between everyday mediocrity (College, etc.) and the snobbish fascination of the cultural consumer (Grotowski, Cortázar, the people he’s seen in Paris). At its root, this synthesis defines the archetype of the Argentine intellectual, attentive to the official cultural hierarchy, dazzled by the avant-garde (the future academy), consumers with no imagination.

  Earlier León Rozitchner, who had been in Israel, confirms David’s return. Rather intrusive, self-pitying because he hit his head, repeating the motions of guys from his generation, wavering between lucidity (abstract) and a temptation to show his control over things (real).

  I was with Luna, I wrote two pieces and went to an old film studio on Calle Riobamba (where I had seen The Lady with the Dog in 1963). Torre Nilsson made everything revolve around him, silences, glances. Earlier, Beatriz Guido tells me that “Actas del juicio” was selected among the ten best Argentine short stories.

  Wednesday 5

  Enjoying the cool air, the lovely time, without the eagerness of summer, without the nightmare of a day that ended at two in the afternoon because I had to go to the newspaper office. I’m enjoying Lolita, which has an excellent tone.

  It’s interesting to see the distinct behaviors of individuals when isolated and when included in the family drama. They seem like different people; on one hand there’s a kind of social automatism, stereotypical behavior, and on the other hand a decision, often not thought-out, not to show how norms are followed but rather how they can be changed. I say this because people in my family change whether they are in groups or alone, my cousin Z. for example, who is effusive and cordial when he’s by himself and reserved and timid when he’s with the family.

  Daniel came to see me, and I felt uncomfortable having to tell him that Álvarez rejected his book of stories. Then we saw a great film by Melville with Julia: Le Samouraï, with Alain Delon.

  “I seem to speak (it is not I) about me (it is not me),” Beckett.

  Thursday

  The culture of neoliberalism is spreading more and more, organized as a means of “worshiping” everyday modern life. The world is a spectacle, a never-ending party. />
  Tuesday

  A letter to Jorge Álvarez from David in Italy, he’s planning a magazine in Rome. “In fourteen months, E. R. will come here, he’s the only one who can direct it after I leave.”

  Wednesday

  Last night a visit from Héctor G. He recalls the splendor of May in Paris, the discovery, the happiness; now that he’s back here the opacity crushes him and buries him as it does all of us. There is no place for beautiful generalizations, everything is politics here, literature is as remote as the past itself. Between earning our livings and ignoring reality, our youth leaves us.

  Wednesday 26

  A letter from David repeating his offer for me to go to Italy to coordinate the magazine about Latin America that he’s putting together.

  Social variations. First with León. R., chatting about David’s project, and then Elías and Roberto C. came over with two guys from the College of Philosophy to propose a course at the College in May. Last, Héctor Schmucler is back from Paris; very generous, he proposes that I start a magazine in Buenos Aires with him in the style of Quinzaine. That is, a monthly magazine that would be tasked with reviewing all of the books that are published in Argentina, and also, as I propose to him, staying abreast of the debates about literature and opposing journalistic criticism and the cultural supplements.