{"id":12590,"date":"2017-10-25T11:40:09","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T17:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2022\/05\/two-excerpts-from-the-diaries-of-emilio-renzi\/"},"modified":"2023-06-07T08:16:57","modified_gmt":"2023-06-07T14:16:57","slug":"two-excerpts-from-the-diaries-of-emilio-renzi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2017\/10\/two-excerpts-from-the-diaries-of-emilio-renzi\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Excerpts from The Diaries of Emilio Renzi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s Note:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Since its founding in 2013, Brooklyn-based independent publisher\u00a0Restless Books has established itself as one of the most cutting-edge publishers of translated literature in the U.S. In the four years since its founding, its catalogue has grown to include some of the most important names in contemporary Latin American literature, both emerging and established, among them\u00a0Andr\u00e9s Neuman, Juan Villoro, Ricardo Piglia, Yoss,\u00a0Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fernanda Torres,\u00a0and Carlos Fonseca, and such notable translators as Nick Caistor, Alfred MacAdam, Lawrence Schimel, Megan McDowell, and Achy Obejas.\u00a0<em>Latin American Literature Today<\/em>\u00a0is excited to partner with Restless Books, via Editor and Marketing Director Nathan Rostron,\u00a0to bring readers previews of forthcoming translations. Here, we feature two excerpts from\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.restlessbooks.com\/bookstore\/the-diaries-of-emilio-renzi-formative-years\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Diaries of Emilio Renzi<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Ricardo Piglia, translated by Robert Croll and set to be released on November 14, 2017.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<style type=\"text\/css\">p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px}<br \/>p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15.0px}<br \/><\/style>\n<p><em>Excerpt 1: Incriminating political affiliations force Renzi\u2019s family to flee Adrogu\u00e9 at dawn, finding shelter in a movement sympathizer\u2019s home. Renzi describes shards of nostalgia and the pain of separating from his lover, Elena, whom he can no longer send letters to due to a union strike. Renzi tries to busy himself: he goes to the beach and watches films at the theater back-to-back. Amidst these imprints of a restless and liminal mind, we see Renzi\u2019s literary ruminations, from considerations of the appropriate tone for a narrator to comparisons of protagonists Holden Caulfield and Silvio Astier.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>2. FIRST DIARY (1957\u20131958)<\/p>\n<p><i>Wednesday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>We are leaving the day after tomorrow. I decided not to say goodbye to anyone. Saying goodbye to people seems ridiculous to me. Wave to the people coming, not the ones leaving. I won at billiards, made two nine-point shots. I had never played so well. My heart was frozen still, and I shot the cue with perfect precision. I felt like I was constructing the hits with my thoughts. Playing billiards is simple; you have to stay cool and know how to look ahead. Afterward, we went to the pool and stayed until very late. I dove off of the high board. From so high up, the lights from the tennis courts floated in the water. It seems that I\u2019m doing everything I do for the last time.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Saturday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The move, in the middle of the night. \u201cWe left at dawn, furtive, ashamed.\u201d There was a light on in the Yugoslavs\u2019s kitchen, on the other side of Calle Bynon. The truck weighed down with furniture, the house dismantled. The stupid docility of the plains; a falcon in the sky, its talons stretched forward like meat hooks, almost sitting in the air, captures, in its low flight, a guinea pig and carries it off with the slow, deep flapping of its wings. We pause at noon in a stand of trees, the dog runs round and round in the field. My father says, \u201cLook, a tramp made a little fire in this well,\u201d and he touches the ash with the back of his hand. In the shade, he makes a note in his black notebook, sitting in the weeds, his back against a poplar. He raises his eyes from the notebook, and off in the distance, a dark point amid the immense brightness, I see the remote figure of the tramp moving on foot through the country toward another stand of trees where he can light a fire and make mate. This tiny event (and my father\u2019s words) comes to mind many times in the course of the day, without relation to anything happening in the present\u2014clear in my memory, unexpected, as if it were a coded message hiding a secret meaning.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Monday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>We spend Christmas Eve in the house of Carranza, a friend of the movement, my father says. All rather cheerless. Mom barely speaks and does nothing but read novels and use unexpected words (as she always does when she\u2019s unwell): \u201cThis salad\u2019s a bit <i>dilapidated<\/i>.\u201d At night she gets up two or three times to see if I\u2019m sleeping or if I need anything (she wakes me up!). She is nervous, rarely goes out, suffers but never complains. Her world collapsed (her sisters, her friends), but she traveled with Dad for \u201csolidarity\u201d more than anything else. (\u201cShe wasn\u2019t going to leave this <i>good-for-nothing <\/i>on his own.\u201d). At Christmas Eve dinner she refused to drink at the toast because she said it would \u201cmake her uneasy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Tuesday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The house has two floors. The office is downstairs, with the waiting room in front, and to one side is a large room that opens on the street, two bedrooms, the kitchen, and a patio. My room is upstairs, along with a living room, a little kitchen, and a balcony. I settled in there and brought up the few books I had brought. The window of my room opens over the blue flowers of the Jacaranda tree on the lane. In a tight spot, I could climb out on the branches.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I think I had to go back, to live with Grandpa Emilio. I write to Elena to cheer myself up, and I announce my plans to her, but Elena does not believe me. (\u201cIf you\u2019re going to come, come and I\u2019ll be ready, but don\u2019t tell me about it every five minutes.\u201d). It isn\u2019t every five minutes; I write to her every night (not today) with the news of the day and my states of mind. At the end of the letter she draws Landr\u00fa\u2019s cat and writes, \u201cI miss you and miss you. I cry all the time in the corner, like the dumb little flower I am.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Monday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>At the beach, yesterday and the day before yesterday and today. It\u2019s not the same swimming in the sea as swimming in a pool, same as the difference between living and reading. \u201cWhich do you like more? You, you, which do you <i>like more<\/i>?\u201d (stressed). Elena\u2019s questions.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Tuesday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>My father, from the office, asks me every time I go out to the street whether I have my papers. Mom, who is on the patio, always reading her novels, raises her eyes: \u201cThey\u2019re going to arrest you just for being <i>descended from him<\/i>.\u201d <i>Descended<\/i>, I think, in free fall.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Friday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Elena, oh Elena\u2026 She writes to me: \u201cI dreamed about you twice, a dream the night before last and another last night. We would leave the house to take the San Vicente bus and something would always happen and we didn\u2019t end up going (you braided my hair, in the garden). In the end, when we went out to the street I woke up. I drank some water, my hair was in my face. Last night I dreamed again, and this time we were together on the bus! Isn\u2019t that funny, two dreams, one following the other? Andrea says it\u2019s a good omen, but it scared me. This morning I woke up very sick (Emilio, am I pregnant?).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>False alarm (Galli Mainini test)<\/p>\n<p>I am reading <i>The Seven Who Were Hanged<\/i> by Andreyev. The condemned in the book are all freethinkers, <i>nihilists<\/i>. They will be executed at dawn; time does not pass, and yet it is always later\u2014or earlier\u2014than they imagine. Impossible to <i>describe<\/i> this waiting. \u201cDeath was not there as yet, but life was there no longer.\u201d A revolutionary, the heroine, thinks, \u201cI should like to do this\u2014I should like to go out alone before a whole regiment of soldiers and fire upon them with a light revolver. It would not matter that I would be alone, while they would be thousands, or that I might not kill any of them.\u201d (Isn\u2019t the comparison incredible? But \u201c<i>light<\/i> revolver\u201d is perfect.)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Monday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>My father still recalls some fragments of the letters that his father would send from the front, when he (my father\u2026 oh the pronouns) was a boy and his mother would read them aloud to him next to the fireplace: \u201cI was crying, General Gialdini was crying, all of the soldiers were crying,\u201d which leaves me intrigued as to the content of the letter. It makes sense that a boy would always remember that paragraph; it is unforgettable to discover in childhood that your father cries, that men cry, and that even a veteran general in the army could cry\u2026<\/p>\n<p>The wonderful thing about childhood is that everything is real. The grown man (!) is the one who lives a life of fiction, trapped by delusions and dreams that allow him to survive.<\/p>\n<p>For this reason, the shards of past experiences leave the kind of impressions that one remembers without entirely understanding; they are light and sharp, like a foil thrusting forth to pierce the heart. For this reason, these memories are so clear and so incomprehensible, because then, now, in youth, one becomes lost. In my case, I am in the middle of the river, I have lost the sense of total certainty of childhood and have no illusion that it sustains me.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Tuesday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>We move a library to the upstairs floor because Mom has set up a loom in the living room. She is going to weave a red and yellow bedspread, with fine wool. \u201cSo your father wakes up,\u201d she says. She learned how to weave when she was young, in the nuns\u2019 school. \u201cThese handicrafts,\u201d she likes the word and repeats it, \u201cthese handicrafts, <i>hijito<\/i>, you don\u2019t forget them, it\u2019s like riding a bicycle or making the sign of the cross, it doesn\u2019t leave you\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Sunday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve written my daily letter to Elena; the postal workers\u2019 strike acts as a raised drawbridge. So I\u2019m outside the besieged city\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Monday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>My mother has a personal witchdoctor. She calls him Don Jos\u00e9, but I call him Yamb\u00f3 to tease her. I don\u2019t like the guy at all. Pale skin, fish eyes\u2014he must be half Umbanda (a <i>pai do santo<\/i>). Mom already saw him in Buenos Aires; the guy warned her back in September that Dad was going to get arrested, but he didn\u2019t pay any attention, and she never forgave him for it. Now he comes to Mar de Plata specially. He has clients there and stops in the vacation cottage close to the house, on Calle Espa\u00f1a almost at Calle Moreno. The guy speaks and diagnoses. He doesn\u2019t use tarot cards, doesn\u2019t look in a crystal ball; he says whatever occurs to him. At night, eating dinner, Mom says he told her she was going to go live in a cold place. In Ushuaia, while Dad would be behind bars, I tell her. She laughs. \u201cDon\u2019t talk <i>hogwash<\/i>.\u201d (When she\u2019s acting odd she uses these strange words). Now she\u2019s reading Knut Hamsun (the collection bound in blue from Aguilar on bible paper that holds five or six novels per volume). \u201c<i>Hunger<\/i>, they\u2019ll have to read it,\u201d she says, not addressing anyone in particular, \u201cso that they [pluralized] can see what it\u2019s like to scrounge.\u201d When she isn\u2019t reading novels, she looks nervous and argues with Dad (\u201cCan you tell me why we came to this <i>opprobrious <\/i>city?\u201d). Opprobrious city, that\u2019s not so bad.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>There is a postal workers\u2019 strike, so I don\u2019t receive a letter from Elena and can\u2019t send the ones I\u2019ve written to her (I have three). An unsettling interval. Will she know it is because of the strike? (I\u2019m going to call her tonight.) The strike will accumulate so much delayed correspondence that it\u2019s pointless to think the letters I sent will arrive.<\/p>\n<p>Possible careless treatments of loving correspondence: the postman burns them; violent kidnapping of the messenger. The letters that don\u2019t arrive at their destination, how many will there be? Lovers interrupted by the union uprising: it\u2019s an interesting subject for a novel. Political history does not let us love\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Monday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>The funny thing is that Dad saw one of the delegates for the Internal Commission of Central Post on Calle Luro in his office (the guy signed in as sick and waited his turn in the living room). Surely he parrots Per\u00f3n\u2019s doctrine (now that we\u2019re reconciling with Frondizi we have to \u201ctighten things up\u2026\u201d). Don\u2019t worry, Doctor, we won\u2019t deliver a single letter to those turncoats, etc. (And my son\u2019s letters, you couldn\u2019t take them to his friends? he would have said). The letters don\u2019t go out until Wednesday\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>If I\u2019m bored and I spend the day without talking to anyone, I let myself get carried away by murderous impulses. Today I pushed a half-crippled old man I stumbled into on Calle Mitre. \u201cHey, want to get out of my way?\u201d I said to him, and while he apologized politely I gave him a judo-style elbow and he stood gasping half-bent over on the side of the church. A while ago I threw the kitten against the wall. It bounced like a ball with a terrified meow, all of its hair standing on end and all four feet splayed a meter above the floor, and no sooner did it fall than it dove behind the dresser (and stays there), and that\u2019s my own cat, Ferm\u00edn, and I like how he spends a long time watching the cloudless sky. I don\u2019t answer Mom and she gets really angry. Look, Emilio, don\u2019t get funny with me. She says \u201c<i>Emiiliio<\/i>,\u201d when she\u2019s angry, like scratching a blackboard (<i>Emiiliio<\/i>); otherwise she calls me \u201cson\u201d or \u201choney\u201d or \u201cM\u201d and speaks formally (and that infuriates me). In my family it\u2019s very common to speak formally; it always seemed like they were messing with you. \u201cYou ought to send your regards once in a while,\u201d said my Uncle Mario when he said goodbye.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Jorge is in Julio\u2019s house; we talk for a while. The narrator, should he be unclear or distant? Unclear: Dostoevsky, Faulkner; distant: Hemingway, Camus in <i>The Stranger<\/i>. Eduardo G. arrives with his experienced air. \u201cI\u2019ve got cash,\u201d he says, and we put together a game of poker. I lose, I lose (with a full house), I lose all evening and finally win a big pile with a royal straight because Eduardo thinks I am bluffing (he has a pair of kings and bets everything). He leaves furious because it <i>seems to him<\/i> that I played a trick. I say nothing, he wants me to <i>believe<\/i> he caught me cheating (we go on with this, out in the street and later in the bar on Independencia and Col\u00f3n with the jukebox, listening to Frankie Laine). When Eduardo\u2014as Dostoevsky would say\u2014believes, he believes that he does not believe, and when he does not believe, he believes that he believes\u2026 and he loses everything. If only I were a <i>liar<\/i>. A disillusioned young cheater (who knows all the ladies), he travels by train through the provinces, gets off at lost stations, stops in at the plaza hotel, makes a show paying for drinks, with the air of a bored traveler, half-innocent, wakes up all the little widows in town; he accepts a game of poker in the social club the night before moving on\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Sunday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>In the Ambos Mundos bar, with the members of the film club, is the Englishman\u2014tall, wearing a hat, white pilot suit (a costume), speaks with a strong accent, works for an American company at the port that exports fish. He set out from Alaska, and they say he is a well-known writer in New York, Steve M. He is always joking. Last night he showed off a six-page letter and said it was from Malcolm Lowry. Apparently he wrote his thesis on <i>Under the Volcano<\/i> at Columbia in \u201953 (the first thesis in the world about the novel, he said, as if it were a heroic deed). Here, no one knows this book, even though Oscar Garaycochea, who is a genius, remembered <i>The Lost Weekend<\/i>, the Billy Wilder film, because there was a reference to Lowry in <i>Sight and Sound <\/i>magazine. \u201cYes,\u201d said Steve, \u201cLowry almost went crazy when that film premiered.\u201d He knew him personally; he visited him in Canada and Lowry spent a week in Steve\u2019s apartment in Brooklyn. He had to hide the whiskey from him, according to Steve, who, at the same time, is getting drunk little by little. Lowry took his bottle of aftershave lotion. Is he lying? It could be. He\u2019s brilliant, very entertaining, and he already picked up all the girls from quinto del nacional who came there that afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>I wrote down some of the things he said: \u201cLowry wasn\u2019t a novelist, he was a pure autobiographical writer. He wrote many personal diaries, a frenetic writer of letters.\u201d He made seven versions of <i>Under the Volcano<\/i>. He said he would give us the novel if we read it in the bar. \u201cI\u2019ll rent it,\u201d he said. \u201cIllegal to lend it.\u201d The novel takes place in Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Saturday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Compare Holden Caulfield and Silvio Astier: the two are sixteen years old (<i>like me<\/i>). One complains, has existential problems, wants to go to live alone in a forest; the other has no money, steals books from a school, wants to be a writer and rebel in the city. See the scene in <i>Mad Toy<\/i> of Astier with the boy who wears women\u2019s stockings in the one-peso hotel, on Talcahuano and Tucum\u00e1n, and the scene in <i>Catcher<\/i> of Holden with Carl Bruce in the Wicker Bar at the Seton Hotel. Holden is lyrical, rebellious, sensitive (the little sister); Silvio is desperate, has no exit, and is a whistle-blower. In Salinger the orality is light, lexical, self-pitying; in Arlt it is harsh, antisentimental, syntactical.<\/p>\n<p>According to Steve, Lowry had to change the initial name of the character of the consul, William Erikson, because he found out about the murder of an American with the same name who died in the same way.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Wednesday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>News in today\u2019s papers (May 21, 1958). Side A: \u201cA submarine of unknown nationality was attacked by the Argentine Navy in Golfo Nuevo. The damaged vessel managed to disappear.\u201d Side B: \u201cThe British Admiralty announced that the submarine <i>Avhros<\/i> was damaged in waters of the Atlantic Ocean by an unidentified airplane.\u201d The only people who believe the news in the papers, says my father, are the journalists. True, says my mother, only the people who wrote it believe what they\u2019ve read. Lately she is witty, Ida\u2014happier, very clever. The other day she said, \u201cMy brain is running cold you know, like it was in the <i>Frigidaire<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Sunday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>In Mar del Plata the theaters stay active outside of season, and to attract the public they show three different movies every day at reduced prices. I take the bus, see one at Gran Mar on Col\u00f3n Avenue at two in the afternoon, another in \u00d3pera on Calle Independencia at four, another at Ocean on Luro at six, another at Atlantic at eight, and another at ten at the Belgian Theater, on the same corner as our house. I spend all my time at theaters from Monday to Friday, as if I were a madman who had been deprived of movies, a beggar who just wants to sit quietly in the dark rooms, or a nomadic film fanatic. Saturdays and Sundays the program doesn\u2019t change, so I stay at home. Theater is faster than life, literature is slower.<\/p>\n<p>During those weeks I saw these: <i>OSS 117,<\/i> based on the spy novel by Jean Bruce; <i>Barabbas <\/i>by Alf Sj\u00f6berg, based on the novel by P\u00e4r Lagerkvist; <i>Behind a Long Wall<\/i> by Lucas Demare; <i>A Hole in the Head<\/i> by Frank Capra; <i>The Hidden Fortress <\/i>by Kurosawa; <i>O.K. Corral<\/i> by John Sturges; <i>Ugetsu<\/i> by Mizoguchil; <i>The Set-Up <\/i>by R. Wise; <i>I Vitelloni<\/i> by Fellini; <i>The Burmese Harp<\/i> by Ichikawa; <i>Roman Holiday <\/i>by W. Wyler; <i>Rear Window<\/i> by Hitchcock; <i>Citizen Kane <\/i>by Welles; <i>Tiger Bay <\/i>by J. Lee Thompson; <i>The Real End of the Great War <\/i>by Kawalerowicz; <i>The Quiet Man <\/i>by John Ford; <i>Picnic <\/i>by Joshua Logan; <i>Little Fugitive<\/i> by Morris Engel; <i>Wind Across the Everglades<\/i> by Nicholas Ray; <i>The Barefoot Contessa <\/i>by J. Mankiewicz; <i>A Man Escaped<\/i> by Bresson; <i>Nights of Cabiria<\/i> by Fellini; <i>The Informer <\/i>by John Ford.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<style type=\"text\/css\">p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px}<br \/>p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15.0px}<br \/>span.Apple-tab-span {white-space:pre}<br \/><\/style>\n<p><em>Excerpt 2: Renzi remembers his first love\u2014juvenile and foolish, but also passionate. We then return to Mar del Plata, where Renzi spends his days languidly at the beach and falls into a torrid affair with a woman who is secretly engaged to be married. Feeling deflated and aimless, Renzi enrolls at a university to while away the time, reading voraciously and drowning himself in the cool darkness of movie theaters. He meets another woman, but still pines for his seaside affair.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>3. FIRST LOVE<\/p>\n<p>I fell in love for the first time when I was twelve years old. In the middle of class, a girl with red hair appeared, and the teacher presented her as a new student. She stood at the side of the blackboard and was called (or is called) Clara Schultz. I remember nothing of the following weeks, but I know that we had fallen in love and were trying to hide it because we were children and knew that we wanted something impossible. Some memories still hurt me. The others stared at us in line and she turned redder and redder, and I learned what it was to suffer the complicity of fools. When school got out I would fight with kids from the fifth and sixth grades who followed her to throw thistles in her hair, because she wore it loose, down to her waist. One afternoon I came home so beaten up that my mother thought I\u2019d gone crazy or had been gripped by a suicidal fever. I could tell no one what I was feeling and appeared sullen and humiliated, as if I always went around exhausted. We wrote each other letters, even though we barely knew how to write. I remember an unsteady succession of ecstasy and desperation; I remember that she was serious and passionate and that she never smiled, perhaps because she knew the future. I have no photographs, only her memory, but in every woman I\u2019ve loved there has been something of Clara. She left as she came, unexpectedly, before the end of the year. One afternoon she did something heroic and broke all the rules and came running onto the boys\u2019 patio to tell me they were taking her away. I carry the image of the two of us in the middle of the black flagstones and the sarcastic circle of eyes that watched us. Her father was a municipal inspector or a bank manager, and they were transferring him to Sierra de la Ventana. I remember the horror caused in me by the image of a mountain range that was also a prison. That was why she had come at the start of the year and that, perhaps, was why she had loved me. The pain was so great that I managed to remember my mother saying that if you loved someone you had to put a mirror on your pillow, because if you saw her sleeping reflection you would marry her. And at night, when everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I walked barefoot to the patio out back and took down the mirror that my dad used to shave in the morning. It was a square mirror, with a frame of brown wood, hung from a nail in the wall by a small chain. I slept in intervals, trying to see her reflection sleeping next to me, and sometimes I imagined I saw her at the edge of the mirror. One night many years later, I dreamed that I dreamed of her in the mirror. I saw her just as she had been as a girl, with her red hair and serious eyes. I was different, but she was the same and came toward me as if she were my daughter.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>4. SECOND DIARY (1959\u20131960)<\/p>\n<p><i>November 2, 1959<\/i><\/p>\n<p>We go to the sea while summer still has yet to begin; there is no time like the end of spring, when the dark days of winter have gone and the beach is empty. I always go to La Perla, take Independencia straight all the way to the coast. I became friends with Roque, an ex coast guard, a retired lifesaver who keeps coming to the beach and watching to make sure no one is in danger. He has a slight limp and totters a bit when he walks, but when he\u2019s in the water he swims like a dolphin, graceful and fast. \u201cWe should live in the water,\u201d he tells me, and muses on this for a while. \u201cWe came from there, and sooner or later we\u2019re going to go back to living in the oceans.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He runs an empty hotel, which is on a hill, facing the park, a great building painted in blue: Hotel del Mar. I went to visit him a couple times; there are rooms upon rooms, unoccupied, down the length of a hallway. He sleeps in different beds\u2014so that the rooms stay aerated, he says. He always keeps a portable Spica radio with him and listens to it all the time. He tells me that he was a singer in his younger days. He shows me a card with him dressed as a gaucho, wearing a sombrero and plucking a guitar; above, in the left corner, there is a little Argentine flag. The inscription reads, \u201cAgust\u00edn Peco, National Singer.\u201d<i> <\/i>This was in the forties, when they had \u201clive numbers\u201d in the movie theaters, and artists from a variety of genres entertained the public from the stage in the interval between one showing and another. Roque sang the repertoire of Ignacio Corsini, milonga dances, and folk songs with lyrics by H\u00e9ctor Blomberg, describing the era of General Rosas. One time at the beach, a little drunk after lunch, he sang, under the sun and unaccompanied, \u201cThe barmaid from Santa Luc\u00eda,\u201d which is one of my father\u2019s favorite songs.<\/p>\n<p>The other day I went far out into the sea, and as I was on the way back I got into a riptide and the current wouldn\u2019t let me advance; the high waves before the first breaker threw me out to sea. I wasn\u2019t frightened or anything, but my breath failed me and Roque guided me to the shore with shouts and waves. He did not get into the water, but he helped me to make it out by motioning for me to swim diagonally, distancing myself from the cold line, and to keep moving toward the long jetty. Once I was within range, he dove in and pulled me out, swimming with one arm.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>November 4<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday a girl, lying on a yellow sailcloth on the empty beach, was watching me. She is from Buenos Aires, came with her mother for a few days. We understood each other immediately. Her name is Lidia; she is beautiful and kind. I kissed her on the staircase leading to the house, where we had sat down together. \u201cDon\u2019t worry, <i>pajarito<\/i>,\u201d she said to me afterward, as if talking to herself. \u201cNo one gets pregnant from a kiss and a hug.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I was with Lidia constantly during those days at La Perla; we find each other in the morning and are together talking until the sun sets and she leaves. She is staying in the Saint James building on Calle Luro. She is intelligent and entertaining. I told her we had come to Mar del Plata to escape from the police because my father had a score to settle. I could, in that way, speak very openly with her because I was not talking about myself; I am someone else when I am with her (I feel like someone else, a stranger, and that feeling is priceless); I told her I was a writer. That I wanted to be a writer, anyway. She laughs with a cheerful and contagious laughter, and she made me promise to take her to the alumni dance at the Hotel Provincial.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>December<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Those final weeks I spent with Lidia; I introduced her to Roque so that we could go to bed in the empty but furnished and mysterious rooms of the hotel. She left at the end of the month and, before leaving, she said that she loved me, that we had spent unforgettable days together. And then, with an enchanting motion, she brushed her hair from her eyes and told me that she was going to Buenos Aires to get married. I was crushed. She was getting married soon and had come to Mar del Plata in search of an adventure for the final days of her single life. You don\u2019t know my name or who I am; you told me that your name is Emilio and that you are a writer. One lies when enamored and living a short-lived adventure. I was paralyzed. She left on Monday and did not let me go to say goodbye to her in the station. I\u2019m going to miss you, she said, and I\u2019m not going to forget you. She was lying. But it doesn\u2019t matter; lies, she told me, make life easier to bear.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Sunday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>A rendezvous in a bar with tables on the sidewalk, across from the Hotel Nogar\u00f3. She, tender and compassionate, looks for a way to get rid of my pain, without seeing that for me it is a leap into the void, to return home or go to the beach in the afternoons, hidden behind a novel.<\/p>\n<p>An intense rendezvous with the woman, serious for my part and like a game for her. She will marry in March.<\/p>\n<p>Now as always, I wait for her. \u201cI\u2019ll come back. I\u2019ll call you. Wait for me.\u201d Empty words to alleviate the goodbye. She does not know what it has meant to me. If I look at things with indifference, I say: What can you expect? Unexpected summer passion with the first guy to appear on the empty November beach. Three months before her wedding to an attorney, a friend of her father\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>So as not to put her under pressure, I did not ask for her real name or her address in Buenos Aires. Very gracious, but really I didn\u2019t ask because I didn\u2019t want to her say she wouldn\u2019t tell me.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Wednesday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Roque laughs when I tell him the story of my romance with Lidia. Women are more fearless than men, they are faithful to what they want and are not concerned with the consequences. Nothing of her remained to me, not even a photo or a memory. I had enjoyed how she brushed her hair from her face with a motion that seemed to illuminate her. I gave her my phone number and she hid the paper inside a powder compact. Strange, but of course, she doesn\u2019t want her husband to find proof of her adultery.<\/p>\n<p>Adultery is an intriguing word.<\/p>\n<p><i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Wednesday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Things become clear in my other life. By chance I went with the Mar del Plata students to a talk at La Plata, where I understood immediately that this would be my point of escape. They rent cheap rooms in student hostels, and you can eat in the university dining hall for five pesos per meal. Now it is decided that I will go to live in La Plata, but I still do not know what I will do there.<\/p>\n<p>I bought the three volumes of Sartre\u2019s <i>The Roads to Freedom <\/i>for two hundred and sixty pesos at the Erasmo bookshop. I went to the courts with Cabello and Dabrosky to watch the Boca Juniors game. I went to the movie theater: Billy Wilder\u2019s <i>Some Like It Hot<\/i>. Marilyn Monroe\u2019s body, singing with a tiny banjo in the corridor of the train. Two men dressed as ladies in an orchestra of women.<\/p>\n<p>Helena (with an <i>H<\/i>) gave me an Aktemin, an amphetamine that kept me up all night with extraordinary thoughts that I forgot immediately. I\u2019m studying trigonometry.<\/p>\n<p>I bought new shoes and went out in them to walk down Rivadavia, all self-assured. A half-hour later I started to come to my senses and closed myself up in a theater so as not to think. I saw <i>High Society,<\/i> a musical.<\/p>\n<p>A penchant for positive forecasts, blind confidence in the future. I expect to break expectations, to spend the summer in peace.<\/p>\n<p>Last night I read \u201cThe Overcoat\u201d by Gogol (\u201cwe all come out of Gogol\u2019s overcoat,\u201d Dostoevsky said) with his tone of rabid orality: unforgettable. But Kafka comes out of there, too: his comical drama revolves around a coat. It is similar to dreams, where an insignificant object\u2014lost, found, glimpsed\u2014produces devastating effects. The minute cause creates brutal consequences. A great narrative strategy: incidents do not matter; their consequences matter. Here, waiting in a public office possesses the cheerful terror of a legendary epic.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t believe I\u2019m a pale face or a redskin, but the girls take an interest in me either way. I seduce them with words. A friend in Adrogu\u00e9, 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. \u201cOnly with my voice and my words, I seduced her,\u201d he would say.<\/p>\n<p>When I reread what I have written of my thesis I want to die. Where did I come up with the idea that I\u2019m a writer?<\/p>\n<p>I called Helena on the phone. I didn\u2019t really know what to say to her. I\u2019m a desperate guy. Don\u2019t you want to sleep with me? The phone rang several times (eleven times). I was thinking, \u201cIf I don\u2019t breathe, she\u2019ll come.\u201d 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n<p>I just went a minute and forty seconds without breathing. My heart pounds like an eggbeater. If I were with a woman now, I\u2019d tell her to put her hand on my chest to see how it beats. I\u2019m a sensitive type, I\u2019d tell her. Can you feel my heart?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday 7<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Inventions to relieve my sorrow, in which I also have faith: Lidia\u2019s return, clandestine love, under the sun. It costs me something to recognize reality. I try not to lose my footing.<\/p>\n<p><i>The writer who writes a masterpiece.<\/i> According to Steve, in 1930, while he was studying at Cambridge and working on <i>Ultramarine<\/i>, Lowry enlisted as an assistant in the coal room of a ship to Norway in order to meet the writer Nordahl Grieg, because he\u2019d gotten his hands on a novel by the Norwegian author that had theme that was similar, if not identical, to the one he was writing. From there emerged <i>In Ballast to White Sea <\/i>and the portrait of Erikson, an alter ego for which he came to feel a special affinity.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Saturday 9<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Once again I hid in the sea and the movie theater, so as not to think. Yesterday Welles\u2019s <i>Othello<\/i>, today <i>Compulsion. <\/i>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\u2019t know.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Tuesday 12<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I also saw, in another theater, <i>Ashes and Diamonds<\/i> by A. Wajda. It is sensational. A terrorist of the right, a Nietzschean, kills, \u201cbecause life without action, more than lacking meaning, is boring.\u201d Why does he always wear black eyeglasses? they ask him. \u201cBecause my homeland is in mourning,\u201d he answers.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Monday<\/i><\/p>\n<p>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: \u201cBecause my homeland is in mourning.\u201d 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 clear eyes and is a little foolish. She invites me over for tea, and when I\u2019m with her I never get introspective.<\/p>\n<p>Last night, before going to sleep, I reread <i>The Great Gatsby<\/i>, the use of Conrad\u2019s technique, a romantic version of <i>Lord Jim<\/i>: 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 explication; maybe he couldn\u2019t drive himself to leave everything in suspense and not clarify whether Gatsby was a gangster or a lucky man.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday 21<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I saw <i>The Diary of Anne Frank <\/i>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\u2014spontaneously\u2014with 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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Sunday 24<\/i><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Wednesday 27<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Every morning, the face in the mirror. I get older, but the image stays cheerful and amused. I would have to put on a plaster mask.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday I went to the theater; today I went to the theater. It doesn\u2019t matter what I see, I seek only the darkness, the forgetting.<\/p>\n<p>I ran into Rafa. He is totally convinced that he\u2019s flawless. He practices gymnastics every morning and gets tens in all the events. We went to the Professor Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>I went to walk along the coast with Helena with an <i>H<\/i>. 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. \u201cThe only thing that interests me is writing,\u201d I told her. \u201cI know, dear; you don\u2019t miss a chance to tell me every two minutes.\u201d I didn\u2019t say it for you, I told her. \u201cCome on,\u201d she said. \u201cDon\u2019t play strange. Here,\u201d she said, \u201cwe\u2019re going to take a photo together.\u201d There was a street photographer, with a square camera, on a bicycle, his head covered with a black cloth. \u201cLook at the lovers,\u201d said the photographer. She smiled with a face of resignation. 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\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Sitting on a metal chair, under the gray light in the office. Dad has gone to Viedma tonight\u2014a political matter, connected to the old story of a group of Peronist leaders\u2019 flight from a prison in the south. Among them, Guillermo Patricio Kelly, the nationalist, who was dressed as a woman.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Thursday 28<\/i><\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t do anything. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll go back.<\/p>\n<p>I call Helena. She offers to type up the final draft of my monograph. Poor angel\u2026 I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<p>It is very early and I do not know what to do.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Monday, January 25<\/i><\/p>\n<p>A letter to Elena (without an <i>H<\/i>). Trouble finding something to say, making a \u201cdecorous\u201d summary of the time in which I broke with the monopoly of her friendship to invent new\u2014and ambiguous\u2014partnerships. A presumptuous letter that I wrote in bad faith to prove my \u201cprogress.\u201d I made a fetish\u2014a totem\u2014for 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 broke 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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Wednesday 27<\/i><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Saturday, January 30<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>A subject.<\/i> 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 \u201cA Sentimental History of Humanity. Chapter 1.\u201d 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\u2014as it is supposed\u2014he ever even began the work or if he became disillusioned after writing it and made it disappear a day before killing himself.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s coming and going.<\/p>\n<p>Fascinated by a detail: at the end, from some place she brought out a little towel. In such a way she had anticipated everything.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The difficulty with not having much money is finding a place to be together. A room of one\u2019s own to make love. I\u2019d have to write an essay on youth drifting through the city, begging for a place to lock themselves in.<\/p>\n<p><i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Monday, February 8<\/i><\/p>\n<p>For the past several days I have felt restless without knowing why. I don\u2019t 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 <i>Mart\u00edn Fierro<\/i>. I resign myself to thinking that within a month, within a year, all of this that seems insurmountable will be\u2014barely\u2014a memory. Thoughts as compensation, excuses.<\/p>\n<p><i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>Wednesday 24<\/i><\/p>\n<p>He keeps going on around here, turning in circles, my mother\u2019s personal witch doctor. She is amused, saying that he\u2019s much cheaper than an analyst and that he habitually predicts exactly what she wants to happen. Don Jos\u00e9, whom I have baptized \u201cYambo,\u201d 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\u2019t know.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Translated by Robert Croll<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We are leaving the day after tomorrow. I decided not to say goodbye to anyone. Saying goodbye to people seems ridiculous to me. Wave to the people coming, not the ones leaving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[2982,4461],"genre":[2020],"pretext":[],"section":[2365],"translator":[3134],"lal_author":[3024],"class_list":["post-12590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-argentina-es","tag-numero-4","genre-nonfiction-es","section-translation-previews-and-new-releases-es","translator-robert-croll-es","lal_author-ricardo-piglia-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12590"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=12590"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=12590"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=12590"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=12590"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=12590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}