The Diaries of Emilio Renzi- Formative Years Read online

  I don’t believe I’m a paleface or a redskin, but the girls take an interest in me either way. I seduce them with words. A friend in Adrogué, Ribero, who played billiards very well and was an inveterate bachelor, always said that the greatest feat of his life had been getting a woman into bed without once having touched her. “Only with my voice and my words, I seduced her,” he would say.

  When I reread what I have written of my thesis I want to die. Where did I come up with the idea that I’m a writer?

  I called Helena on the phone. I didn’t really know what to say to her. I’m a desperate guy. Don’t you want to sleep with me? The phone rang several times (eleven times). I was thinking, “If I don’t breathe, she’ll come.” No one answered. I hung up. I went back to my room holding my breath. I can hold my breath for a minute and a half, easy. I’ve been practicing how long I can go without breathing since I was fifteen. It would be such an elegant thing to be able to commit suicide by holding your breath. I will call her again, tomorrow or the day after.

  I just went a minute and forty seconds without breathing. My heart pounds like an eggbeater. If I were with a woman now, I’d tell her to put her hand on my chest to see how it beats. I’m a sensitive type, I’d tell her. Can you feel my heart?

  Thursday 7

  Inventions to relieve my sorrow, in which I also have faith: Lidia’s return, clandestine love, under the sun. It costs me something to recognize reality. I try not to lose my footing.

  The writer who writes a masterpiece. According to Steve, in 1930, while he was studying at Cambridge and working on Ultramarine, Lowry enlisted as an assistant in the coal room of a ship to Norway in order to meet the writer Nordahl Grieg, because he’d gotten his hands on a novel by the Norwegian author that had a theme that was similar, if not identical, to the one he was writing. From there emerged In Ballast to the White Sea and the portrait of Erikson, an alter ego for which he came to feel a special affinity.

  Saturday 9

  Once again I hid in the sea and the movie theater, so as not to think. Yesterday Welles’s Othello, today Compulsion. I go into the sea and watch the city from afar, flat and calm as if it were a photo. I let it carry me, but to where I don’t know.

  Tuesday 12

  I also saw, in another theater, Ashes and Diamonds by A. Wajda. It is sensational. A terrorist of the right, a Nietzschean, kills, “because life without action, more than lacking meaning, is boring.” Why does he always wear black eyeglasses? they ask him. “Because my homeland is in mourning,” he answers.

  Monday

  I spoke to Helena on the phone and attempted to tell her that I was now wearing tinted eyeglasses so that she would ask me why I wore them and I could answer her: “Because my homeland is in mourning.” But there was no way, and anyway, it was difficult to explain to her over the phone that I had my dark eyeglasses on. Maybe everything I say to her seems romantic. Helena likes me because she has blue eyes and is rather naïve. She invites me over for tea, and when I’m with her I never get introspective.

  Last night, before going to sleep, I reread The Great Gatsby, the use of Conrad’s technique, a romantic version of Lord Jim: men who want to change the past. The best part of the novel is the beginning, where Gatsby is a mystery, all the stories that circulate about him. The weakest part is precisely the denouement; maybe he couldn’t drive himself to leave everything in suspense and not clarify whether Gatsby was a gangster or a lucky man.

  Fitzgerald was able to realize the fantasy of being a writer better than anyone. One would never be as famous as a film actor, although the notoriety would probably last longer. Neither would one have the same power as a man of action, although he would certainly be more independent. Of course, we are always unsatisfied in the practice of this work, but I, for one, would have chosen no other fate, whatever the reason.

  Thursday 21

  I saw The Diary of Anne Frank in the theater. At the moment of greatest tension (the cat plays with a tin funnel, pushes it with its nose, nearly making it fall from the table while the Nazis are taking over the apartment, searching for the family hidden in the crawlspace), a fire extinguisher exploded—spontaneously—with a brutal noise and a flash. Panic and cries; the people piled up along the aisle in the darkness, but I stayed calm, ready to observe their figures, as if someone were filming the scene.

  Sunday 24

  I went to the sea alone, once again to the beach near the port. At noon, there was a confused commotion with the swimmers and lifeguards that ended with the police rushing on horseback at everyone. The fury was shared by women and men in their houses, who also insulted the police, though for other reasons.

  Wednesday 27

  Every morning, the face in the mirror. I get older, but the image stays cheerful and amused. I should wear a plaster mask.

  Yesterday I went to the theater; today I went to the theater. It doesn’t matter what I see, I seek only the darkness, the forgetting.

  I ran into Rafa. He is totally convinced that he’s flawless. He practices gymnastics every morning and gets tens in all the events. We went to Professor Jiménez’s house. He started to read Ortega y Gasset to us. He keeps all the yellow books in a separate library, as if he thought that with these books from a Spanish journalist he would become a knowledgeable man. I told him that he was an anarchist. He smiled with his despicable know-it-all smile.

  I went to walk along the coast with Helena with an H. The wind made the canvas of the awnings vibrate. The empty beach, the fearsome sea; the waves were crashing furiously over the jetty and the water almost made it up to the street. We sat on the steps of the stairway leading to Playa Grande. A terrible wind, the salt air. “The only thing that interests me is writing,” I told her. “I know, dear; you don’t miss a chance to tell me every two minutes.” I didn’t say it for you, I told her. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t play strange. Here,” she said, “we’re going to take a photo together.” There was a street photographer, with a square camera, on a bicycle, his head covered with a black cloth. “Look at the lovers,” said the photographer. Helena smiled with a resigned expression. Curiously, I felt a sense that I had offended her. As if, because we had secretly entered close to the Ocean Club, I should have acted differently. I would have, ought to have…

  Sitting on a metal chair, under the gray light in the office. Dad has gone to Viedma tonight—a political matter, connected to the story of a group of Peronist leaders who escaped from a prison in the south. Among them, Guillermo Patricio Kelly, the nationalist, who was dressed as a woman.

  Thursday 28

  I went for the first time to a strange rectangular office full of women sitting in front of typewriters, tapping away rhythmically without looking at the keyboards. I had also come to take typing classes, to learn to write using all of my fingers. They put me in front of a big Underwood machine, but I didn’t do anything. I don’t think I’ll go back.

  I call Helena. She offers to type up the final draft of my monograph. Poor angel… I’m going to go to the house tomorrow. She triggers certain cruel instincts in me, my desires to make her see who I am. It would be a surprise for her to see me as I am. Deep down this is the only thing that worries me. Otherwise, everything would go very well.

  It is very early and I don’t know what to do.

  Monday, January 25

  A letter to Elena (without an H). Trouble finding something to say, making a “decorous” summary of the time in which I broke with the monopoly of her friendship to invent new—and ambiguous—partnerships. A presumptuous letter that I wrote in bad faith to prove my “progress.” I made a fetish—a totem—for spontaneous feelings, for sincerity. I summarized for her my conditioned (and blind) choice to study in La Plata and not in Buenos Aires. I want to live alone, far from family, even though it is my grandfather Emilio who will pay for my degree because I have broken ties with my father, who threatened me in an absurd way when he discovered I did not mean to study medicine as he had. My grandfather will pay me
a salary to help him organize his archive of material from the First World War. Living in La Plata, from what I can tell from these past few weeks of being here, is much cheaper than living in Buenos Aires.

  Wednesday 27

  I try to isolate myself, try not to think; there is no future, I live in a present without limits. Lidia must disappear from my life.

  Saturday, January 30

  A subject. An artist who works on a monumental project and dies before completing it. An unexpected end, news of a suicide in the papers. They find his room full of notecards. Inside the typewriter, a page where the only thing written is “A Sentimental History of Humanity. Chapter 1.” There was nothing more, and no pages of the announced book were found, only the notecards, which showed a long investigation into a wide variety of sources. Writings in an elegant calligraphy, the numbered cards included quotations, isolated sentences, brief biographies, plans for organizing the chapters, etc. No one knows whether—as it is supposed—he ever even began the work or if he became disillusioned after writing it and made it disappear a day before killing himself.

  In the afternoon, with Helena. She is more cynical than I am. She holds back, shows off. As she speaks of trifles, she leans forward so that I can see she is not wearing a bra. I can never be bored with this woman. With her, the best times are always the goodbyes. We are in the kitchen, full of light, floating between the white tiles. On the upstairs floor above, we could feel her mother’s coming and going.

  Fascinated by a detail: at the end, from some place she brought out a little towel. In such a way she had anticipated everything.

  I thought about her. We went up to her room in the middle of the night. Through the half-open door, we saw her parents sleeping. We spoke in a whisper, which I remember now as something very erotic. She was biting the palm of her hand, was so close to me, in the silence and the rough and light breathing.

  The difficulty with not having much money is finding a place to be together. A room of one’s own to make love. I’d have to write an essay on youth drifting through the city, begging for a place to lock themselves in.

  Monday, February 8

  For the past several days I have felt restless without knowing why. I don’t think about her anymore. I spend the morning on the beach and the afternoon in the public library, looking over old editions of the magazine Martín Fierro. I resign myself to thinking that within a month, within a year, all of this that seems insurmountable will be—barely—a memory. Thoughts as compensation, excuses.

  Wednesday 24

  He keeps going on around here, turning in circles, my mother’s personal witch doctor. She is amused, saying that he’s much cheaper than an analyst and that he habitually predicts exactly what she wants to happen. Don José, whom I have baptized “Yambó,” as though he were an African witch doctor, has very white skin, jewels on his fingers and at his neck, dangerously smooth manners, and a certain hidden insanity that surrounds him like a fine veil. He throws his body forward when he smiles. Today he sat with us at the dining table and, while we talked, he began to preach and predict my future in La Plata. According to him, I already began very well last year and things would improve this year. He is certain that my central interest is not only my studies but also a hidden river that he sees clearly but cannot name. I must take caution with the political activists and be polite with women. I thanked him for the diagnosis and told him that I would write a note in my journal quickly, this very day, to consult within a few years (which is what I will do). I hope that this subterranean river is a metaphor for literature, but I don’t know.

  Thursday, February 25

  I just recently saw Lidia in the entrance at Sao. You could almost say I left running. Then I returned, but she was no longer there. If what she told me in December is true, it does not make sense for me to approach her now. Every time I go down Avenida Luro toward the sea and cross in front of the Saint James building, I imagine I will find her, but seeing her suddenly in the bar I visit every day surprised me. As though Lidia must always remain in the place where I remember her.

  I had gone to the Atenas bookshop to buy Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock on the corner of Belgrano and 14 de Julio; they did not have it. I went as far as San Martín, passed through the Erasmo bookshop and, as I left, decided to walk to the coast and cross the sidewalk to go to the Salamanca bookshop. I ran into my cousin Celia in the doorway. Mathematical precision: if I’d arrived five minutes before and entered, she’d have passed without seeing me. Celia invited me to have an ice cream; we went and I returned alone. I crossed so as not to pass in front of Salamanca again (because I didn’t want to greet the salesman again), searched the book fair in the mall on San Martín and Córdoba, followed the same path, turned around, and there she, Lidia, was, standing in front of Sao, looking forward. I am certain that it was her, especially because of the pants. When I saw her I thought I was falling; I did not know where to go and stood, half-dizzy.

  Now I look for meanings hidden within a random series of incidents. I say that a woman called me on the sixteenth. It was her. I was not at home. Trying not to go back to thinking about Lidia, I stopped going to the beach at Luro, where we used to plan to meet. Our story went from the beginning of summer (the end of November, beginning of December) until the festivals. All was well; we spent the afternoons in La Perla Hotel, and one day she turned to me and with all casualness told me that she was going back to Buenos Aires to get married. I could not believe it. She told me, “This way I am not unfaithful, because I am not yet married, and an adventure is nothing too complicated.” Of course, I adopted the air of an experienced man and told her that I understood perfectly; she told me that she might return after the marriage and that if I kept going to the same beach I would see her. And that was what happened, but on the other side.

  Tomorrow I will go to the beach at Luro. I’m an idiot. I want to live in last year. I’m going to go out and walk… And if it wasn’t her? What’s more, why had she called me again? She doesn’t “suit” me, but the women who don’t suit me are exactly the ones I like.

  Friday, February 26

  I’m in a tight spot; I think all the time about the consequences of my most routine and casual actions. The paths I traverse without knowing what might happen to me. Impossible thoughts, without resolution: “If that car had not stopped for me as I crossed the street, if I had not turned the corner…” Life is a chain of casual encounters, but we try to explain ourselves to ourselves as if we had decided everything from the beginning. Paths that “seem” casual but are all the result of a way of living. Let’s think about what has been going on since November, when I met Lidia, until today, and it will be clear to see that I have rigorously programmed the coincidences myself in order to reach these very results.

  Obviously I went looking for her all around the city, a sort of Dostoevskian walk that culminated on the corner where the hotel we always went to is. Then, upon returning to the coast in front of the building with the hanging balconies, I saw her yet again, dressed in white and looking distant. The moral: she existed every moment of the day for me since she left; seeing her was secondary. I had “ceased to be” for her since the moment she left. It made sense that today she would look “through me,” without seeing me, as if I were a chair or a tree, because I had sunk away into hypotheticals, considering that she had decided to get married and had a “necessary” relationship with the world. Conversely, for me, of her, what mattered was her presence inside me.

  What I can’t endure is thinking that Lidia called on the sixteenth and I was reading some nonsense in the library. Of course I could have called her back. But I prefer to think about the opportunities lost by chance. I already said that she does not suit me (after all, she just got married), but who is forcing me to believe it? If I could make her disappear and stop hoping, I wouldn’t think about her anymore and would live only in the present. On the other hand, I should not have gone out to look for her today, but I did. I went at four in the a
fternoon and again at six and finally a little while ago, in order to find her.

  What does everything I’ve read matter to me now? What do reading and knowing matter to me if I am not with her?

  Saturday 27

  I dreamed about Lidia last night. I found her on the beach, and she seemed bothered that I was there. Then the lifeguard approached us and asked our names. I don’t know how and I don’t know the reason for this, but she was a prisoner. Then she held onto me, so that I might defend her.

  Eisenhower came on a visit to Mar del Plata, along with the ex-nationalist Frondizi. I only saw them from behind, standing in the roofless car; many policemen, people on the sidewalks, little flags. I saw a car with two men standing in the middle and constantly smiling, as if they had just made a joke. I remember the image of General Eisenhower, hero of the Second World War, then the slogan “I Like Ike.” A walk back with my hands in my pockets and a double game of fantasies. Throwing myself under the hooves of the horses with a bomb hidden on my body. Or also shooting a gun, running to the bus stop, going down Luro, entering Saint James, dying in the elevator that Lidia would take to the fourteenth floor.