The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Read online

  Saturday 18

  X Series. It is raining, and the storm erases a late summer that bothered us all week. In La Nación, I find out about the death of Emilio Jáuregui, born in the same year as me, in 1941. Some differences: an excellent political cadre, great military training. He was assassinated by the police, soon after the event. I think about Lucas in prison. Three years from Onganía’s coup: that night listening to the radio, and then later in La Plata, Julia on the stairway of the University. Oh, the past.

  Sunday 29

  Last night a meeting for the magazine (Schmucler, Sazbón, Ford, Lafforgue, Romano, N. Rosa, J. Rivera). We discuss the upcoming issues, and I insist on the need to place the critique of the cultural vision of the media at the center. Some of them, Romano, Ford, Rivera, want to study the media in the past but not deal with discussing it in the present.

  July

  Yesterday news that unsettles the country, it grows harder to live here with every passing month. Five men cut down Vandor’s guard at the Steelworkers’ headquarters, they enter the office and kill him with three shots, blow up the building, and leave. They seem to have been the same ones who blew up three Minimax supermarkets at the same time. A while later I see David (who seems to be going around looking for Coordinación Federal). And then lunch with the guys from Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing to discuss how the book sales are going.

  Wednesday 2

  Yesterday, after lunch with TC, a long walk with David through the empty city to the publishing office of Álvarez, who was in his office, alone, writing letters and listening to a portable radio with a broken case.

  Andrés and Susana are terrified by the oppression, more than five hundred arrested. They lock their doors, look at each other intensely every time they go out into the street, and obsessively come back to the subject of safety mechanisms.

  Thursday 3

  Julia and Susana, acting very bravely, entered Emilio Jáuregui’s house as family friends and came out carrying grenades and automatic weapons in their handbags. Meanwhile, the men waited for them in a bar under the pretense that the girls would pass unobserved by the police more easily. Julia was enthralled by the danger and wanted to go back in to get a Russian machine gun that she’d seen in the bathroom.

  Friday

  Last night with Juan M., a tender adolescent with a mixture of genius and melancholy, a sort of consul like Lowry, almost asthmatic, just as impotent and drunk, who writes beautiful verses about love and lives amid the chaos like a stubborn old man or someone who invents strange omens by reading tarot cards. Jealous, cultured young people crowd around him (as happens in such cases), trying in vain to guide him, but he insists on drinking one whiskey after another and writing sad profiles meant for the hands of nighttime performers. Then he played several tangos by Cobián on the piano, based on the arrangements that he plays in the Sexteto Mayor.

  Sunday 6

  A walk with David through downtown, the frozen air from the south blowing against our bodies. Bent over himself, dreaming that he is still in Europe, afraid of old age and of repeating himself as a writer, he talked, unable to come up with the “adventures” that could excite him. Won’t this be my fate in twelve years?

  Wednesday 9

  Last night David, Andrés, Boccardo, and company in the restaurant on the corner until three in the morning. Raving conversations in unison under the lights of the city.

  This weekend we will write the introduction for Los Libros magazine.

  Wednesday 16

  Last night in Edelweiss, clusters of golden and frivolous young people; Julia and I had run into Miguel and Nélida and also Pirí with her ex-husband Pérez, the fashion photographer, who was trying to seduce Miguel’s girlfriend and insisted that we go to his house so that he could show us some things; once there, he kept on courting Nélida, saying that his girlfriend was in Punta del Este and fascinating her by showing off modern and luxurious dresses; the funniest part was when she said that the clothes didn’t go well with the shoes and Pérez told her: “Don’t worry, Nena, you can go barefoot”; she was immediately head over heels. Then we ended up at Edelweiss, and at some point the barefoot contessa got up to buy cigarettes and the photographer followed her. They didn’t come back. Miguel, drunk by that point, was very crestfallen, but then Enrique Pichon-Rivière, the psychoanalyst, greeted Pirí from a table nearby and sat down with us. He had grasped the situation on the fly and started talking softly and consoling Miguel and, in the end, when he left, he gave him the pipe he was smoking as a gift. “There you have it, a great performance,” laughed Pirí, and she asked Miguel to lend her the pipe and started smoking it, never once mentioning that she too had been abandoned.

  Friday

  I want to write a story in the style of a tango: a man lets himself die because his woman left with his best friend.

  My father was waiting for me that morning at the grill on Viamonte and Montevideo, frightened by his loneliness and the buzzing of the city. He’d been calling me all morning, but I wanted to go on sleeping or making love (I don’t remember now) and finally he said he wanted to drop off my scarf as an excuse to come visit me again, to be with me, to kill time until his train departed.

  Thursday

  As always happens in times when I’m working well, I move away from these notebooks, my “interior life” dissipates. This afternoon David came in, content because he sorted out the movie adaptation of Amalia with Ayala for one million pesos and a script about Varela, the officer, for five hundred thousand. Roberto C. was also there, going on about the latest political changes, the importance of the freedom struggles, for which Mao is the Marx of the Third World. Then, at the magazine, I see Toto and Roa Bastos, who is working ferociously on his novel I, the Supreme.

  Sunday 27

  I’m reading The Man Without Qualities by Musil, the presence of a controlled, intelligent humor, setting up a puzzle that recognizes the irony of technocratic myths, the “delights” of everyday life, the splendor of science: a fervent rationality, I would say, impassioned.

  Series B. Yesterday I spent the morning in La Paz reading at a table by the window, alone in the empty bar. David stopped by at noon looking for me to get lunch, euphoric and at the same time depressed about his work on Varela with Ayala (he’s getting paid fifty thousand per week).

  An unsettling observation by Scott Fitzgerald, who lay on his left side every night—as he said—in order to more quickly wear out his heart.

  Thursday, July 31

  I can live on a hundred thousand pesos per month without much effort. If I manage to use the afternoons happily and efficiently to earn my living, everything will take on the rhythm that I, “mentally,” have asked of reality. Also, I’m using my intelligence to fight against the stupid aggressive ideas that are nothing more than a depraved reaction: suddenly I see enemies coming from every direction.

  Anxiety is the key to my peaceful madness: I can’t deal with the future, going to the barbershop, seeing Jorge or Toto, writing the introduction for the magazine, anything.

  Series E. Every time I come close to finishing one of these notebooks, as I have now, I grow philosophical about my life. These endings, dear God, my hands stained with ink, my fingers wasted away with yellow nicotine stains, my head heavy after lunch at the restaurant on Calle Sarmiento with dirty glass doors through which the noonday sun filters in and further slows my movements already affected by the wine.

  “It is certain that I don’t know how to write, but I’m writing about myself,” Juan C. Onetti.

  By rereading my old notebooks, I find confirmation yet again that one only writes about what is taking place in the moment of writing, as though one were a device registering the world in the present and, at the same time, I find that a vast collage has been constructed, from which I alone am absent; I disappear among words that form a path, the meaning of which can only be understood much later.

  Series C. I have to go out to the street, stand in front of a ki
osk, say hello to the woman there and buy condoms because Julia has stopped taking the pill this month. This worries me strangely, as though I lacked the strength needed to go out to the street, or as though I feared that, after buying what I am going to buy, I would lose myself in the city and never return.

  I have reached the end of this page, as one must.

  August

  I walk through the empty city at eight in the morning, envisioning this moment: sitting at a table by the window in an empty La Paz, writing notes and trying to capture what is taking place.

  Series E. I seek a writing that erases itself as it goes along, light and quick and so fleeting. But if I’m unable to achieve that here, where could I? I recall that I’ve always kept everything I write, as though I imagined that there, in that diffuse mass of words, the traces of a personal voice would be preserved.

  Sunday, August 3

  Last night at David’s house, I try to compensate for the fact that I don’t visit him as often as I should.

  I want to be able to write in any state of mind. Now, I’m killing time before I go with Toto to the printing press, where Issue 2 of Los Libros is now ready.

  Monday 4

  A scrap merchant with a broken voice is yelling out on the corner (“I buy old beds, I buy mattresses, rags, old newspapers. I buy aluminum, bronze, I buy glasses, bottles, clothing”). He reminds me of the old man who used to go by in his car every morning, just at the moment when I was lying down to sleep after having worked all night long.

  I was walking through Buenos Aires to Plaza de Mayo, and at a corner on Florida I saw the first afternoon newspapers coming in. At Hachette I ordered L’échec de Pavese by Dominique Fernandez and looked at the magazines and books, then stopped by David’s house, but he was not there, and I kept going without a fixed direction, and when I returned, a while later, David was back and we went to have a coffee in a bar on Corrientes.

  Wednesday 6

  Yesterday General Onganía shut down Primera Plana, attempting to take away the voice of a floating middle-class sector, very important for imposing a general sensibility.

  Yesterday I had lunch with David and went to the bookshop with him, and everyone was arguing in the café next door: García Lupo, Mario Trejo, etc. No one gives Onganía more than two months to live. They foresee an electoral solution via Lanusse.

  Wednesday 13

  The announcement of a catastrophe puts my friends on the left in check. Yesterday David was very depressed and pessimistic, Alberto S. had no money (me neither), Andrés was very worried: everyone predicts the fall of Onganía and an increase in surveillance, and the effects are growing ever closer, they shut down Ojo (which had replaced Primera Plana). Today I found out that the Coordinación Federal, that is, the political police, seized books from Álvarez’s place last night and summoned Jorge to come at two in the afternoon today. Friends in prison (Lucas, Ford, Fornari, Rojo), sources of work in danger. Those in opposition to the military government are affected the most.

  A dream. I was talking to Barba, my teacher at the College, in a room lined with my books, and I was ashamed that he had seen them because they were covered with dirt. He berated me for having dedicated my life to literature. I made excuses: “It’s my form of madness,” I told him, “as soon as I can control this delirium, I’ll go back to historical research.” He made me look at his latest book and rejected my collection of short stories because of its title. He was flipping through the yellow, egg-colored edition, very worn out. He told me about a diary that he was about to publish. Of course, I thought, he’s a professional historian and makes conventional literature in his free time between hours. “It’s untitled,” he said. “All books these days have titles.” I looked at him, admiring the originality of that blank book, a cover with no symbol other than his own name.

  Thursday 14

  Series B. At long last, I have understood my schizoid way of thinking: I attribute to others the issues that I want to understand in myself. I choose a real double (Dipi, Miguel Briante, Walsh, Germán), so to speak, and through them I experience issues that I can’t see with any clarity in myself. I give them the mechanism of thought that gives rise to the fixed idea. In this way, I split myself secretly into others and attribute ways of being (which are my own) to them, and I observe their workings. Using the scene of an external life, I think about my own ideas concerning what I am (or want to be): I use the other as a critique of my own shortcomings, seeing them clarified, more real, and can thus undertake a critique of my personality through my parallel lives. In other writers, I experience what I myself want to do. It is a more radical form of working with possible lives. My contemporaries are the test, the trial, the clear vision of the risks of living inside the imaginary. I’ve been doing this since adolescence, ever since I started to write these notebooks: Raúl A., Luis D., and also some women like Elena and Helena. It seems incredible to me that I have discovered it only now: friendship as a testing ground for my life. Instead of, or at the same time as, using fictional characters as models for projection, I do it in real life. A means of expanding my experience vicariously.

  Friday 15

  I want to write about my Halloween night on the boîte, in Mau Mau, the party: thirty TV screens showing different places and scenes of what is happening live. I have to find a prose that could present that collective tone, the social voice of a group.

  Curious, there is no envy in tangos, there is only loss and betrayal. They narrate the fait accompli and its effects.

  Monday, August 18

  I cannot perceive with any clarity what some women look for in me; it has always been that way, since the beginning. Mistakes, misunderstandings. I used to escape, now I play dangerous games.

  León R. stops by to say that he’ll be back at 10:00 p.m., but I want to prepare for seeing Álvarez, bringing him my now well-developed projects, writing a summary of what remains to be done, and so I postpone my meeting with León. Julia gets angry, saying that I was hiding her since I didn’t ask him to come in. I have to fight with Omar to get him to pay me the fifty thousand pesos per month that I settled on with Jorge, because right now he’s only paying me twenty-five thousand—and always late. Then I’ll go to León’s house, now that he’s moved to a distant neighborhood (Calle Salguero), to ask him to do an article on Althusser for Los Libros.

  Tuesday

  Yesterday I saw León, very depressed, in crisis, the same as David. Bad times: a crisis with the MLN, the free left, the form of structuralism, and he has no desire to work on his book about Freud and Marx.

  Dipi came over a little while ago, tense and incoherent, telling me about the photographs of Sandro that he’s going to take, the three-hundred-page novel that he says he’s finished.

  I see Touch of Evil by Orson Welles, top-quality film noir, with Welles inflated to seem even fatter in the role of the villain.

  Tuesday, September 2

  I’m resisting the current tendency toward writing without characters.

  A visit from David at noon, wanting to move ahead with my magazine project, he suggests Carta Abierta for the title, with León, him, and me directing it.

  “Anxiety pulverizes concentration,” Norman Mailer.

  Thursday 11

  I see David, who goes on about the magazine project as a way to combat his feelings of being outside, marginalized. I also run into Aníbal Ford, who got out of jail, and he tells me that he identified Fiorentino as the singer who showed up at the prison tango audition, which helped him become friends with the regular prisoners.

  Pasolini is right to question how far the distinction between the novel and poetry can continue to exist. But I’m not going down that road; for me, the novel must go deeper into the construction of characters.

  Saturday 13

  I want to separate the linguistic experimentation of the work from its plot and at the same time free myself from objective and “realist” prose. A writing in which the continuity is altered. The hero
sets aside a domain of experience for himself in which he struggles to avoid the novelty of the new. The new is an incursion on temporal continuity. From there comes the sense of a time based on the petrifaction of the present, the chronological void. Fixity. The time must cease to flow.

  Monday, September 15

  Series A. Will I be dead at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Less melodramatically, will I manage to see the year 2000? What will I be like at age sixty? Will all my hollow ambitions have been answered?

  What I wrote earlier was an effect of the insomnia that woke me and has kept me awake since three in the morning.

  Wednesday

  I prepare to move; a bad outlook for Tiempo Contemporáneo, pessimistic, threatening, closing down the publishing house, everything depends on the sales of Cosas concretas. Luna gives me two hundred dollars as an advance and I think I’ll use it for my move, which I’ll try to work out in the next few weeks.