The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Read online

  A joke that’s going around these days: “What are you doing?” Learning Chinese. Why? “I’m a pessimist.”

  Friday

  I write a cautious letter to David anticipating his current state of optimistic euphoria. I ask him what he means by starting a magazine in Italy and having me direct it.

  Then a meeting with Walsh, Cossa, Rivera, etc., discussing a variety of matters and projects.

  The best part is my conversation with Walsh about Borges and my subsequent, unexpected encounter with Borges himself while I’m getting off the bus near Retiro. I see him passing and call out his name, and he pauses a moment and smiles toward me.

  April 1

  My literature begins with a performance of writing a novel (copied from Verne), in which I recounted a voyage to the moon. A fuzzy memory of a class in school, I was telling someone an adventure about having a treehouse where I would take refuge to write. Two events before that, a reading competition in third grade against McDonald (who beat me), trying to seduce the teacher, whom I was in love with, and later my defeat by Castelli in a “composition” tournament, and the charitable praise to make up for it.

  In the afternoon with Luna and at night a poor profile that I’ll have to correct: I made professions of literary faith for the dumb boy and pretty girl who interviewed me, and my veiled and chivalrous competitiveness (with Walsh and Puig) led me to be attentive and impartial.

  Wednesday 2

  Passionately bound up in Marthe Robert’s biography of Freud, a novel and, at the same time, the vertigo of a man thinking against the very limits of reason. A history of a “madness” that consists in discovering a secret logic that reverses the history of philosophy. Interesting to analyze the role of money in his discoveries. Economy turned his life into destiny and gave retrospective meaning to all of his discoveries. He seems, at times, to have forgotten the trajectory of his knowledge, but he largely obeyed the path indicated by his needs. A grant for six hundred francs, a journey to Paris, Charcot, hysteria. Another circuit, the economic status of his patients, especially the women (and their husbands).

  In dreams we see ourselves as though we were characters. We attend to the adventures and misadventures of a hero whom we see traversing magical forests. Borges reconstructed this space and distance, but at the same time his work is a careful elision of sexuality and the body. Something we might term, using an oxymoron, the chaste dream.

  As always, my response to any contact with reality (always slight) is euphoria and the rhetoric of desire. A quick back and forth to the bookshop. I meet Jorge Álvarez and Vicente Battista. Another letter from David in Italy, still going on about his project of a magazine based in Rome. Uncertain information that seems to lie at the root of my discomfort with the present, as though something was about to happen. I have to come back to this feeling of immanence and think about it with more order, that is, narratively.

  In a way, my ideal has always been Robinson Crusoe, the isolation, the boundaries of an interior space that cannot be bridged (least of all by me). I remember the effect of projection that reading the novel produced in my father when we were still living on Calle Bynon (would it be in the year ’54?), his fantasies of happiness on a desert island.

  Series E. In my notebooks (1958–1968), the years pass by, the dates take place, but the temporality is motionless, static time. Rereading my conclusions from May of 1960, it is possible to understand the accidents I made in 1965. In a grammatical sense, what I call “temporality” is a sort of transference, semantic substitutions for lived experience.

  Thursday 3

  An uncomfortable day from the morning onward, interruptions, cutoffs. I’ve always thought that interruption defines experience for me, breaking the continuity of language (when I stop writing or stop reading) or at least that of written language, which seems to be the only one that matters to me, although conversations occupy a very important place in my life; but they belong to the order of reality, while the other language (solipsistic and intense) belongs to the order of literature.

  My schism, narratively speaking, is an attempt to reconstruct my childhood home, a space without history where I knew “consideration” (with all of the meanings we can give to that word). I, the considerate person, that is, someone who thinks too much about others, but also someone who is thought about, considered (though he isn’t doing anything).

  Sunday 6

  Why do I have this difficulty in “leaving” one subject and moving on to another, as though my interest were fixed with such intensity on an object that it then seems impossible to move on to somewhere else? Leaving my essay on Borges (I still have to make a final copy) and starting on another subject (resuming chapter three of the novel). In this transition, there are always mediations or bridges or focal points (Conti, detective stories, the courses).

  In summary, I hope to make progress on the novel, correct the essay on Borges, prepare for the course, write notes for the publishing house and the prologue for the Serie Negra anthology, write the article on Conti, and think about the first issue of Situación, the magazine that Lucas managed to get me to agree to direct last night.

  Series E. Night, self-destructive crisis, compassion. My conflicts with reality, my phobias, the seclusion that isolates me and prevents me from acting with fluency. I should be able to reconstruct that plotline in the narrative continuity of these notebooks.

  Monday 7

  A quick visit from León R.; I feel troubled without knowing why. I’m more aware of my words than his, while León, as always, settles into a space without distance, very near, something he can’t think without, as though he needs confidants more than people to talk to. Things are going well for him all the same, bearing in mind the usual difficulties, the same as the start of my friendship with David. Some mistrust and some distance on my part when faced with the barrier between generations; in fact, it is a problem of convictions more than a problem of ages. They’ve read Sartre and believe in authenticity and sincerity; they are suspicious of bad faith and performances of a social character. For my part, I’m “an American,” that is, I have a certain set of readings and an anti-sentimental, distanced, “objective” poetics, and I’m suspicious of interior life and sincere “confessions.” I have read Brecht and Hemingway, but above all I escape from the melodramatic excesses of my family, where everything is sentimental, emotional, and tragic.

  To write reviews of foreign books is to critique the version, the translation, as though it were the original. Even when one reads authors in their own languages, one never understands the same thing that someone for whom that language is a mother tongue understands. I read Faulkner in English but understand something other than what an author of my age born in the southern United States understands.

  Tuesday 8

  Another case. I run into G., walking down the same sidewalk as me opposite Tribunales, which causes me to turn toward Plaza Lavalle. I sit down on a bench, go back to the Álvarez bookshop, and on the way out I run into him again at the door. He hesitates, greets me with great affection and the necessary dose of smiles that is the style in such matters. I run off quickly so that I don’t have to greet him, but when I return I run into him once again, as though it were a dream.

  If I thought about the real-life dream of my encounter with G., I could begin to interrogate the events using an oneiric logic. It was reactive behavior, and thus an attempt to resolve a conflict that was not specific to him; the same thing would have happened with any acquaintance crossing paths with me. A sort of surrogate connection, experiencing what I don’t know as though it were external to me. On the other hand, that enigma is not present either, but rather has some meaning that I don’t know and causes a reaction. As Freud says, quoted by León: “Delirium is an attempt at the restitution of reality.”

  Wednesday 9

  I need to train myself for the complex time that is drawing near, so that I can handle four or five issues at once without losing my calm. For the first issue
of the magazine that Schmucler is planning, I’ll write a review of Catch-22, the novel by Heller.

  A long walk, first with Jorge Álvarez, setting the stage for tomorrow, putting strong pressure on Omar for the fifty thousand pesos I expect to get paid. Then with Mario Szichman in La Paz, talking about his novel based on Walsh, and last with Schmucler and Willie Schavelzon discussing the magazine, which is coming along very well. The same, at first glance, as my relationship with Willie, for whom I’ll put together a book about Malcolm Lowry.

  Sunday

  On Friday night a long talk with Manuel Puig. On one hand there is his varied and rather surreal work experience (dishwasher, receptionist in New York, hitchhiker), all intersected by his sexual hunt. On the other hand, there is the quality of his literature, very original, infrequent, extraordinary. In the middle there is a fragile, insecure, rather theatrical figure. The thinning hair that worries him, the weak smile, the jokes that help him keep a hold on reality and practice his seduction. Deep down, he confirms my old certainty that it is experience, real behavior, the novel in Puig’s case, that defines a person; the rest is empty gestures, brilliant masks to wear on a shallow stage.

  Monday

  A long phone conversation with José Sazbón, and I rediscovered his usual intelligence and humor. A secret mutual understanding unites us, abstruse for others but clear to us. As if we formed a sect with only two members. Sometimes I think José is the most intelligent person I know.

  Tuesday, April 15

  As always, random reading allows me to seek out the most enigmatic and revealing news without any preparation. Today, in the obituaries of La Nación, I find out about the death of Manolo Vázquez, who was crucial for me and my destiny, so to speak. Professor of Literature and History at the Adrogué National High School in 1956 and 1957, he had a pronounced influence on my choices, and so we might say that it was because of him, in a metaphorical and more or less incidental sense, that I dedicated myself to literature and history. In the way that important things happen, I didn’t realize it; who knows in what obscure place I identified with him. I still remember a poem he once recited, which was his own, dedicated to his dead father: “Alone, no light, no shadow, no heart’s beating.” That’s how it began, and I don’t think it was very good, but I still remember it all the same. He was forty-five, and I always thought that once I became known I should go visit him and thank him. I remember that first afternoon when he read the poem as though it were someone else’s and then, with a smile, admitted that it was his own. Neither he nor I knew where we would end up in twelve years.

  I spent the morning going over notes from the sixties and rereading my diaries; including this one, there are 37 notebooks.

  Saturday 19

  My relationship with Schmucler keeps adapting because of the magazine. I didn’t agree to co-direct it with him, but I did commit to handling a critical section in which I’ll review all of the books published in a month in a sort of micro-criticism. The shared work improves my relationship with him, and he seems ever more intelligent to me.

  Friday, April 25

  Several successive meetings to devise the magazine, which I think will work out well if we manage to counteract a certain tendency toward absolute immediacy, which turns “the news” into the axis of the magazine; it’s essential that we find a tempo that isn’t the same as that of the weekly papers or Sur magazine.

  A visit from Manuel Puig, who brings a beautiful copy of the French version of Betrayed. He’s a professional novelist, the first one I’ve known, and he’s determined to make a living from his literature. No one I can remember among us has had that goal since the days of Manuel Gálvez. Manuel clearly knows that he needs to expand the circle of his readers, to reach Latin America and Spain and to be especially attentive to the circulation of his books in translation. He uses the morning to catch up on his immense correspondence, keeping up contact with publishers, translators, and critics. Then he takes a nap, which he calls a siestita, and then writes from two to six in the afternoon every day. Then he spends a couple of hours watching movies with his mother and, after eating dinner, goes out, as he says, “to take a spin,” that is, to pick someone up, going around the city on risky, adventurous walks. Then you see him and he doesn’t look like a writer, and that’s what distinguishes him, because he’s more of a writer than any of the frauds who play that role; and then, as fragile and timid as he is, he walks into the Buenos Aires night to pick up men in the street with a courage that I admire, which never ceases to astonish me, a person who tenaciously pursues his two central desires (which in reality are one and the same).

  In detective novels there is a condition of reading that defines the genre itself: the readers know or imagine what awaits them when they read the book, and they know it before beginning. That knowledge, that previous understanding, functions as a protocol or a way of reading that defines the genre itself. This understanding of the books that exists before is strengthened by mass-consumption reviews, which try to define this situation with such intensity that the reading ends up becoming unnecessary. In a way, the field of opposition to this mechanism seeks to reverse or refute that previous knowledge and thus produces effects of parody or innovation. This literary transformation consists in going beyond the condition and expectation of the text; for example, the mystery detective novel is crystallized in such a way that we already know the suspect isn’t the murderer before we’ve read it, so that the hardboiled American detective novel doesn’t concern itself with the enigma but begins directly with the preparations for the crime.

  Monday

  X Series. The fetish of the written word, there is news in the papers that I’m almost certain is false, but it makes me uneasy all the same. Although maybe it isn’t false and has real consequences, even for me. Not to write about the visit I received on Saturday night would be to suppose that the police will be able to read this notebook, but, then, what sense is there in caution? Better to capture literarily the atmosphere of this morning after Lucas’s visit, which raised my spirits. We had whiskey to celebrate his freedom, laughing at the newspapers that assumed he was arrested, but then, after a terrible afternoon, reading La Razón and Crónica last night, I used logic to shake off the fear that was confirmed this morning in Prensa and Nación. All that remains is to hope, trying to know who among my friends really is in prison. I make a fire in the bathtub and burn some papers, compromising documents, as they say. Now my eyes are stinging from the smoke and the acrid smell of burnt xeroxes.

  Series B. I’m in Castelar, the old café on Córdoba and Esmeralda, back after many years, resting from an afternoon spent walking circles around the whole city, weighed down by this prolonged summer, doing nothing but letting myself be carried away, captured by thoughts about Lucas, who may be in prison once again. I’m waiting for the afternoon papers, as though that were any way to stay informed.

  Tuesday

  X Series. Lucas’s arrest was confirmed; the police were waiting for him when he returned home. They called him by name while he was waiting for the elevator, but he kept going on as though it weren’t him. He went up to the twelfth floor with them, trying not to be recognized and to sneak away. When the porter recognized him, they took him away. “Tough luck,” they told him.

  Wednesday, April 30

  I spent the afternoon in Galerna working on the magazine and trying to get Los Libros started; I discuss everything with Toto, who lets himself be led by opportunism and tries to keep the magazine “in the loop,” as he says.

  We wait for news about Lucas.

  Thursday, May 1

  Last night with Carlos B., the script taking shape. Carlos has a deliberate way of being a cynic, propping himself up on what he can so that he doesn’t collapse, but behind that lies a kind of melancholic sadness (suicidal).

  Friday, May 2

  La Negra Eguía (who came back from Cuba before David) confirms some suspicions: giving no handicap to the “leftist” Argen
tine liberals, they ease their conscience.

  May 4

  At noon Carlos B. came over; our mutual understanding is growing, basically because of his determination—like all of my friends—to insist or call in order to see me and break through my desire for isolation.

  “Literature… is not at the service of revolution, but it is the revolution at the level of words,” Edoardo Sanguineti.

  Monday 5

  A strange dream today (dreamt between seven, when the alarm went off, and eight thirty, when I finally woke up: almost a daydream): I was writing an article about Fitzgerald and suddenly came up with a sentence: “If Faulkner’s myth is born from the novels he wrote in four weeks, between midnight and dawn, taking advantage of pauses in coal shoveling, if the key to Faulkner is failure, in Chandler it is the fate of a writer of great talent, consumed by the detective novel and by Hollywood, whom we have to uncover.” I can’t remember now how the passage concluded, but I know I saw it structured together with Lowry, forming part of the theory. A dream of literature while not writing.