I’m back. I tell stories from the trip to Julia and my friends.
The end of a month with some news. Jorge Álvarez asked me to manage a literary magazine (along the lines of La Quinzaine) for fifty thousand pesos a month. This proposal would have guaranteed my happiness three years ago, but now it leaves me (like everything these days, except Julia) cold, distant. Maybe it is necessary to work with others. Always working on art for others.
Series A. A meeting with Virgilio Piñera at Hotel Habana Libre, I bring him a letter from Pepe Bianco. “Let’s go to the garden,” he says. “There are microphones everywhere in here; they’re listening to everything I say.” He was a weak and fragile man. We were already unconsciously growing to like each other. He’d been friends with Gombrowicz and had helped him translate Ferdydurke, which was why we admired him, and Gombrowicz’s touch can be felt in his striking stories. What danger or what wrong could that refined artist pose for the revolution.
She said: “But who can know how we’ve come undone, what things men have left after the first encounter.”
Such astonishment, facing the void of this window that looks out at the street. I have everything to live for now, coming back, but always from the outside. These notes as well, their tone more than their style, I’ll come back to them when it is too late, when it is the right time for decisions without motives. A ship’s logbook.
Series E. In a notebook from ’66, I find the record of a film by Michael Powell (Peeping Tom), with a psychopath who wants to grasp reality through the camera and ends up filming his own death. It seems very connected to Blow-Up by Antonioni. The concept of cinematographic technique as a magical eye used to capture personal reality, the same as the camera for still images. A diary too is a device for registering events, people, and gestures. Live to see, that could be the motto.
A harsh reaction after a family call; what had once been a peaceful, sheltered childhood, is now the experience of an invasion. I would rather not press this too far.
Coming and going, movements of solidarity. David Viñas and Germán García, letters to Primera Plana. I don’t understand their responses. Then yesterday, a report on Channel 11 on TV: you can’t even cross your legs, let alone talk about Vietnam. Then at home with David, another proposal: an article on American literature for the magazine David is trying to publish with the Centro Editor. The project is getting in the way of Jorge Álvarez’s magazine.
A series of meetings yesterday: José Sazbón, Ramón Plaza, Manuel Puig, Andrés Rivera, Jorge Álvarez, Pirí Lugones. Why do I make a note of this? Because I’ve changed my habits, and now I settle in at La Ópera bar and friends come to see me while I remain at the same table for three or four hours, or longer. A long talk with Puig, who gives me Heartbreak Tango to read, a book that follows the path of his previous novel but deepens the poetics and seeks popular feeling and technical experimentation. I’ve always admired his ear for spoken language, his rare sensitivity for capturing each character’s tone. The techniques in the novel are very original: using the melodramatic novel form involves thinking about the cutoff of each chapter like suspense in the classical novel. Once again, it is a novel in which the narrator is absent and can only be noticed in objective and clinical observations. Then dinner with El Quinteto de la Muerte. Pirí is quiet and capricious because of the presence of Andrés Rivera, who acts tender and charming around her, while Jorge Álvarez revealed to me both his intelligence (greater than I gave him credit for) and his turn toward Tercerista political positions, founded, as often happens, upon facts that prove the Machiavellianism and forcefulness of world powers (the USA and the USSR), as they play with the rest of the world. In that way, you end up as an absolute skeptic because anything you do is part of the superpowers’ plans. Beside me, Julia was dazzling, her tan skin rising above a white guayabera dress that I brought her from Cuba, a braid over her shoulder, and all of the qualities of her alarming temptation toward Doing Wrong (capitalized and emphasized).
One day I’ll have to take a look at my continuous, successive ability to keep up conversations that always seem the same to me, though I hold them with different people, all close to me, as though I were the only one who could unite them and make them coincide.
“The point is to permit the Germans not even a moment of self-deception and resignation. We must make the actual pressure more pressing by adding to it the consciousness of pressure and make the shame more shameful by publicizing it. Every sphere of German society must be shown as the partie honteuse of German society, and we have to make these petrified social relations dance by singing their own tune!” Karl Marx.
In literature, we know what we don’t want to do, because what we do want to do isn’t always accomplished in writing. On the other hand, this negativity allows us to write by casting aside everything that doesn’t interest us. The pressure of fashion (Cortázar), which mires my contemporaries (Néstor Sánchez, the tone of the novel that Castillo is writing, Gudiño Kieffer, Aníbal Ford, etc.), will never draw me away from my projects. I know that it’s something I never want to do, and thus a poetics is already defined. That doesn’t mean adopting rigid guidelines as a defense (the way David Viñas does), leaving out all Argentine writers from all eras, but instead adopting a position that consists of thinking that there is no single way to create literature (and here it is Borges that one must break away from, along with his literary dogmas like “Chesterton is better than Marcel Proust,” which become contagious and are repeated without analysis). Thus, writers who can discover the personal profiles of their own worlds (to reiterate the possessive) have at least secured a tone of their own, a music to the language that is imposed onto the era and not the other way around.
Some victories, certain circumstances in my life that would once have satisfied my dearest pretensions, are now commonplace, and their current relativity proves to me that my years of learning are now bearing some fruit. At the same time, my firmest certainties come from childhood. In those days, entirely separate from any knowledge that could correspond to my own future life, I adopted or created the convictions that now sustain me. It’s as though my soul’s defenses came before my soul itself, as though I were not allowed any knowledge of my life story until after the catastrophe. I had begun to live, not knowing anything about myself until the moment when I realized that all knowledge was useless when it came to doing what I wanted to do. That is why it’s easy to remember the magic of decisions made in total certainty, with nothing to justify them, when everything came to me naturally. That is why there is no present time that can bring to life something that has survived for itself alone. Hence the perverse coherence that some of these notebooks acquire when they are revised, finding signs that lead to the central highway, unsuspected profiles of myself, which now form my way of being.
Yesterday a visit from Germán García, an immediate verbal magic, taking off toward thoughts that floated in the air, Germán returning to his attacks against Primera Plana, since they praised him and then forgot about him.
Since we can only choose what is possible, the things that we choose—nothing can be rescued from the past now, not the paths or the meanings—are phantoms that guide us; strange portents arise behind uncertain intuitions, dark certainty, empty eyes, the blind gaze.
A sudden, but not unexpected, appearance from Ismael Viñas, escaping from the emptiness of this rainy afternoon, and a long conversation about Argentine nationalism and the merits of epigrammatic and provocative style. We made a genealogy that began with El Padre Castañeda and went all the way to Aráoz Anzoátegui. From there, critiques of the left’s journalistic style: they write poorly because they’re always trying to be optimists. Only the negative shines in language.
I’m in Mar del Plata, in the bedroom I’ve always had, with the window that opens to the tree that grows up from the sidewalk; I see old friends, and we reconstruct the years with Steve in Buenos Aires, his obsession with Malcolm Lowry, etc.
Yesterday a dangerous situation. Three boys in blue pullovers appeared in the hallway, followed by my brother; I thought they were his friends until I saw the guns. I was drinking maté with Julia in the kitchen. At first I was frightened, thinking they were police, and strangely I calmed down when I realized it was a robbery. They were looking for cash, but I of course didn’t know where my father kept it hidden, and he wasn’t home. The one who had the gun, a skinny guy with a cap and a face like a bird, was very nervous, more nervous than we were. I thought: “Something’s going to happen if they don’t find the cash,” but we didn’t have a single peso, no jewelry, nothing. The tension mounted until, suddenly, the one who had been standing guard brought in a round-faced man who had been looking for my father. They sat him down in one of the chairs and pointed the revolver at his temple. The man gave them all the cash he had, close to eighty thousand pesos. The one with the gun kissed him on the head and said: “You saved us, baldy.” Suddenly they left, and we remained sitting at the table. The man they had robbed went out to the street and returned with the police. He thought that Julia, my brother, and I were part of the gang because we were so calm. We explained the situation to the policeman, and my brother took the opportunity to lodge a complaint because the thieves had stolen a tape player that he really liked. My father came back that night, but he didn’t place any importance on the matter.
Novel. A moment of tension and expectation. Caught in a trap, as the police sirens cross the city, they are all silent. Malito: Speak, say something. Costa: What? Malito: Something, anything. Costa: When I was a boy, I saw my uncle coming in through the country on horseback…
I realized yesterday, during the robbery, that, in the middle of a tense, violent situation with an armed, nervous man looking for money, any dialogue can work well because no one refers explicitly to the situation they are experiencing. That’s how to make a narrative scene work: If the situation is strong, the dialogue acts as a soundtrack.
Recorded scene in the novel. Four or five people are talking about the Englishman. They let slip hints, pieces of information about him and his history, though they’re talking about other things at the same time.
X Series. “They lived in conditions where the unusual may be dangerous,” Joseph Conrad. (That seems to capture Lucas’s situation, the clandestine man must live a “normal” life and avoid what seems out of the ordinary to him.)
A novel. Imprisonment, outside of time, floating action, several unidentified narrators.
Realism. Balzac was not a realist in spite of his theocratism but rather precisely because of it. That was the condition of his critical view of bourgeois society. One’s way of seeing social issues is defined by one’s status and one’s way of life.
There’s an obvious preconception that leads “university thinkers” to dispel oppositions and disagreements in favor of always thinking about halfway solutions. It is the neither-nor that Barthes spoke of. Balanced thinking that opposes all positioned, “biased,” localized thought: they seek the truth in high places, in the middle ground. They imagine that not taking a position in a conflict is the same thing as being objective, while they actually hold the position of one who disengages and thinks outside of social matters (as though that were possible).
You have to look behind the criticism of Hopscotch for what has been offended, which is first of all the idea of what a novel should be, as though that were already determined; the critics don’t perceive the fluid nature of novelistic form. Other critics reject the novelty of the technique and argue that it has already been done before, etc. Of course, the model of the encyclopedic novel can be traced to Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (going no further), and of course also in Borges’s structures (“Tlön,” for example) or in Macedonio Fernández’s novel that is always about to begin. But to find precursors is not to say anything about a book’s value.
Little contact, even with unreality (these days).
Series A. We have moved very carefully, as though conserving energy, because we have no cash, and, it goes without saying, money guarantees many movements and changes. We have five hundred pesos, and that must be the measure of the distance we can traverse. Or, in any event, the material choices we can face. I am discovering, then, a secret relationship between economy and space, or rather, between the velocity and amplitude of subjects’ movements according to their wealth, etc.
I’m in La Modelo, always in this bar, which I will try to describe in a story someday. The lattices darkening the air, the blades of the ceiling fan turning slowly. The light of the afternoon, muted, filtering in through the picture windows onto the wood-paneled walls. I used to meet José Sazbón here now and then to read the chapter on fetishism in Marx’s Das Kapital.
I believe that everything I describe is autobiographical, only I don’t narrate the events directly.
“All Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” F. S. Fitzgerald.
“That those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it,” W. Faulkner.
Someone reads your absence on the palm of my [left] hand. A daydream that no one must discover [but for me alone].
Reading early Hemingway is crucial, definitive; he refuses to accept “depth” and narrates the surface of events. The fragility, the brevity, and the transience of action in some of his stories put the integrity of reality in danger. He acts toward reality as though he were blind. He takes the linearity of the story to the point of exasperation, and does not write what lies before or what comes after the events. He seeks the pure present, narrating the invisible effect of the action.
Suicide. His father had attempted suicide two days before. He learned about it that night, when someone called him several times on the phone and finally managed to reach him. “I’m a friend of your father’s,” she said, and there was a silence. The father attempts suicide. They save him. He stops talking. He saw his father sitting in a living room armchair, covered with a blanket of uncertain color, and he seemed… not bothered, more distracted. They looked at each other without speaking. (A man’s “reasons” for killing himself are never known.) During the journey by bus, he tried not to think. It was raining. At one of the stops, in a desolate area, at the entrance to a town, by the side of the road, it seemed to him that the men and women traveling with him knew each other and were talking too much. He went back and sat in the empty minibus, drowsy. Dawn came. He sat down in a bar to wait for the sunrise to end. In the taxi he could see the sea. He stays with his father that night. Grows bored. Goes back, leaving him alone.
Suddenly, a couple days ago, like a gust of wind, I envisioned the story of the father’s suicide, entire, complete. Basically, I’m thinking about narrating that nocturnal journey home.
Novel. Work with footnotes that interrupt the narrator. Confirming or denying the events. Adding information. Micro-stories at the foot of the page.
In Beckett, always the attempt to write. A post-Joyce literature, that is, a story that moves between the ruins and the void. “It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language,” Molloy.
I’ve always thought with a delay; the experiences were there, but when I wanted to say them it was always too late, they were out of place.
X Series. Lucas appeared. He always seems the same, but between one visit and the next what takes place is brutal (a bank robbery, the kidnapping of a businesswoman), but he never describes any of that, I find traces of it in newspapers, in notices, and in police reports.
Last night, I unexpectedly ran into a friend, Mejía, in Pasaje de La Piedad. He lives there, a fantastic place. I haven’t seen him since childhood, in Bolívar. That alleyway is another world; it is circular, with large houses and trees, at the end are a church and a sign: Exit for coaches. Mejía played the bandoneon and my grandfather would always ask him for “Desde el alma,” and he would play the waltz with great feeling, sitting on a bench, a cloak of black cloth wrapped around his thighs, where he rested the bandoneon. His father and mother were communists, and they read Russian magazines and scathingly criticized Peronism.
Series A. Bogged down and penniless. I’m working on the story “Mousy Benítez.” It will never be known for sure… That’s how it should start. Miguel Briante offers me two editorials in Confirmado for twenty thousand pesos, I tell him no. An uncertain future, but not so different from that of former years. A personal economy always in crisis.
Today on TV: Hitchcock. Cinema on the small screen, as they say, becomes something else when interspersed with advertisements from reel to reel. It seemed as though there were two interwoven narratives, a collage between a painstakingly made story with fully-conceived and almost perfect images and, in parallel, happy people with tyrannical images attempting to sell a number of objects in brief microscopic stories. This double game causes a detachment, dissolving the illusion that cinema creates in a theater. On the other hand, television is watched with the lights on, and people can talk and move around. Something has changed in the reception of images.
I was born on November 24, 1941, and I’ve looked in the papers for news from that date. I looked in the National Library for everything I could find. The war took up all the informational space. It was six in the morning, and, according to my father, it was raining.
Novel. With the three gunmen already inside the apartment, the informant managed to leave the place for a few minutes under the pretense of buying provisions and took the opportunity to notify the police that everything had gone according to plan, and he then returned quickly to the place with his orders, coming back out after a few minutes for reasons he did not reveal. (From the newspapers.)
Novel. Investigation using a tape recorder. The storyline appears from the beginning (they have been surrounded and cannot leave the apartment). It is about narrating the pauses, three recorded monologues, oral syntax.
In a decisive hour of the early morning (around four), I try to reverse my life and start working at night. I isolate myself even further. I go out into the city with a different spirit than at other times, more attentive to myself than to reality. Ready to return home and work through the night, without interruptions. The discipline of work is a way to organize passions like any other.
I wake up at two in the afternoon, shower, shave, and have breakfast. I go to the Biblioteca Lincoln and work there for a while in the afternoon.
“No one can describe a man’s life but the man himself. His inward being, his real life, is known to him alone; but when writing of it, he disguises it… he exhibits himself as he wishes himself to be seen, but not at all as he is,” J.-J. Rousseau.
Nonfiction. Up all night reading Treblinka, a testament of the descent into hell. The first thing that makes an impression in this investigation into the workings of a death camp is the use of technique, a recognition of a change in the use of mechanisms of destruction. A certain historicity of the horror and forms of slavery appears. Formally, it is along the lines of Oscar Lewis and Walsh: it is a “novel” like The Children of Sanchez and a narrative judgment in the style of Operation Massacre. Today, anyone who wants to respect critical realism has to employ the tape recorder, reportage, and nonfiction. This new way has as much documentary importance as cinema. It constructs a reality through the use of new methods and language. Narrative experience with forms of investigation, using the techniques of true (or testimonial) stories.
“Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself—and that already is a charming job—and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications,” Henry James.
Julia awoke from her sleep at noon and started to drift around the house, half-covered in my pajama top, her magnificent legs exposed, which was enough to rouse me, so I got up to have some tea with her. Then I took a cold shower, and even though my body remained dead and elsewhere, I couldn’t escape the beginning of the day.
“Destiny is character,” Heraclitus. “Character is destiny,” Novalis. The modern concept of experience is contained between these two definitions, and emphasis on one or the other defines a vision of the world. The quote from Novalis (closer to psychoanalysis) escapes Heraclitus’s magical, ritual, tragic meaning, which sees a design in character, a proof of the existence of fate. In Novalis, by contrast, there is no distance: a man “freely” chooses according to his character, that is, his impulses, his repetitions, in other words, his destiny.
A Christian conception: consciousness of original sin, initial guilt and the fall into mundanity (and into contingency), nostalgia for the paradise lost, prior to the division of the sexes, a sense of the supernatural. Transcendence.
A tragic approach: personal guilt does not exist, but judgment and fate do. Each person’s destiny is written and dictated by the gods, but, by reading it in the many signs (oracles) and being mistaken, the tragic subject is condemned (in pure immanence).
Octavio Paz is mistaken in Alternating Current; it is not our art that is “underdeveloped” but our way of understanding art, that is, our colonial way of seeing, blinded by certain models. In Argentine literature, this moment covers history until Borges: since the beginning, our literature felt itself lacking compared to European literatures. Sarmiento says it precisely, and Roberto Arlt says it ironically: “What was my work, did it exist or was it ever more than one of those products that they accept around here for lack of something better?” Recently, after Macedonio and Borges, our literature—in our generation—exists in the same plane as foreign literatures. We are now in the present of art, whereas, during the nineteenth century and until quite a way into the twentieth century, our question was: “How can we be in the present? How can we become contemporary to our contemporaries?” We have resolved this dilemma: Saer or Puig, and even I, are in direct dialogue with contemporary literature and are, to put it metaphorically, at its level.
Series B. Sometimes I feel that I am “letting go” of certain friendships (my relationships with José Sazbón or León Rozitchner, for example), distance from the world and other people, and an apathy that always postpones actions.
Sometimes I worry because I’ve gone several months without writing, marked by vertigo and social circulation. Meetings, parties, entertainment. I’m determined to have done with this farce and finally sit down to write, come what may.
Novel. Maybe the whole account of the events could be structured as an interrogation or a conversation with Malito, the chief, alternating with third-person narration, not in chronological order.
“What?”
“Because talking with that thing on bothers me.”
“The tape recorder bothers you?”
“I get all shy, it’s like that thing makes me shy.”
Series E. Neither the historical essay nor literature, strictly speaking, has succeeded in registering the microscopic changes of private experience. A narrator talks about himself in the first person, as though referring to someone else, because he habitually reconstructs his life from the end of the series that he is narrating, that is, from the present time of the writing. The best parts of the genre are the drafts or remnants or plans for a future autobiography that is never written. Life is momentum toward what does not yet exist, and, therefore, to pause in order to write it is to cut off the flow and leave behind the reality of experience. For its part, literature is a way of living, an action like sleeping, like swimming. Does this idea take away the sense of deliberate construction that literature possesses? I don’t think so; the mistake is to seek the ashes of experience within the book when you should instead seek them in pauses, in fragments, in short forms.
A hectic afternoon; I went to the Biblioteca Lincoln to look for Melville’s complete novellas in a single volume, and then I got Raymond Queneau’s article on Bouvard et Pécuchet from Galatea to use as a preface for the translation of the book. Then I went to Tiempo Contemporáneo to collect ten thousand pesos so that I can go on spending, and finally I ended up at Jorge Álvarez; not much new except for Y. Mishima’s book Confessions of a Mask.
“Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live,” William Burroughs.
I’m at La Paz, a bar with modest delusions, annoyed because I’m overdressed and overheated and also because Jorge Álvarez didn’t come to our meeting, so I don’t have enough cash to make it to the end of the month. I interrupted my note because B. appeared, wanting to write a script with me based on my novel in progress about the struggle in the hideout in Montevideo. I don’t have much interest in using the subject for another parallel story, but Carlos is insistent and offers me so much money for the script that, in the end, I write the first scene, very much in the tone of my short stories.
Surprised and uncomfortable after news of the publication of Gazapo, a novel by Gustavo Sainz, which, according to Monegal, was written using a tape recorder. The same as my story “Mata-Hari 55” and the novel I’m writing. I hope I don’t have to deal with an unintentional precursor.
Series C. A woman appeared in the brief moments of early dawn as though pulled along by the wind or the morning, dressed in a strange leather jacket, a dark mantle to command the night.
Novel. Among the theories to explain the betrayal, a possibility emerges that the Englishman chose the apartment knowing that the police would come.
Toward an aesthetics of the typewriter. To write with a typewriter means to introduce the fixed reading into the moment of writing, since the act of tapping out words is distinguished by the possibility of reading what is being written simultaneously, though in another register and in another position of the body, without having to withdraw from the paper or stop writing (as happens when writing by hand). At the same time, the sound of the keys creates a rhythm, directed at both the ear and the eye, which can be sustained or altered. The keys with their printed letters create a musical score of language, a key that one must know how to perform in order for the music of language to be heard (but I, of course, write by hand in a notebook with a black ink pen).
Series B. Last night a multitudinous gathering to celebrate Pirí Lugones’s birthday. At some point someone—I don’t know if it was a man or a woman—gave her a dare, and a moment later Pirí was kissing Laura Y. in the middle of the living room, and it was like a flash of lost desires and secret fantasies. We stayed all night, attending to the little neurotic nuclei of the party, and came back home at eight in the morning.
I entertain myself in every way possible, he said, and always with people whom I observe with a stranger’s gaze; every once in a while, I head out into the streets in search of an adventure.
I’m not so sure, but the risks are minor in any case. The risks are always minor. I think: “There are too many people in my way.” I think about Zelda, who died the same way as any of her husband’s characters; she refused to leave the hospital, as if she had been waiting for the fire.
A story. One early morning at the Atenas club in La Plata, the body of Mousy Benítez lay strewn across the floor, face up as though floating in the flickering light of dawn. // In a cracked and yellowed clipping from El Gráfico, covered in rags, The Viking’s fine, illuminated face looking at the camera head-on, his eyes opened wide, next to Archie Moore, who was laughing with his serious eyes.
Series A. A period similar to the last days of 1964; he talks about himself as though he were a historian reconstructing some long-lost past.
Today I didn’t do any writing on “Mousy Benítez” (it is ready now) because I couldn’t see it. The (verbal) image is everything in a short story: the gym at the Atenas club, a boxer feinting in front of a full-body mirror.
A desire to escape from here and to go out alone, with no baggage, to rent a room at a hotel downtown, to compose the inner logic of my life.
Series E. Diary: collage, montage, short forms, tension. “Killing oneself seems easy.”
Smoking marijuana calms him. Rather, it relaxes him. He was always very tense and alert. Through the window the city full of lights, and below, far below, the dark street.
The father’s suicide. The telephone tore him away from sleep, he sat up in bed, and he struggled so much getting dressed that he thought he was dreaming. Then he went to the hospital: it was there that he realized what he already knew. (Maybe it’s better to begin when the nun comes in.) A dry tone, terse, without metaphor.
Karl Marx. Historical creation of the categories of understanding. Philosophy takes up the rationality of the means of production at a linguistic level. The historical process is not thought of as content but rather is based on the categories produced by the process itself. Example: Nation. Example: Social class. Is literature also a concept produced by historical experience? In any case, we don’t call the same texts literature in different periods.
An economy. “The money which I got in exchange for sex was a token indication of one-way desire that I was wanted enough to be paid for, on my own terms,” John Rechy, City of Night.
Series E. Drastically changing lives, another name the same as other passions, seeking peace, leaving this empty chaos.
In Cuba, during a long and talkative walk with León Rozitchner along the Havana pier, León pauses and asks me: “But would you live here?” His philosophy is founded on the claim of an accord between modes of thought and ways of life. He calls this throwing yourself in. I recalled the habitual challenges in gaucho poetry—what I say with my lips I defend with my neck.
Novel 1. For me it was like returning to the town, pretending those hooks in my wrists did not exist, while the faces of the passengers in the train car watched me fleetingly, a woman across from me in a polka-dot dress did not know where to rest her blue eyes. I was returning to the town, as always, bound, with a policeman attached to me.
Novel 2. Costa comes to me and says: The Englishman told me you’re staying here, but I just saw him leaving Acapulco, going to Suipacha. We’ve been sleeping on the La Plata-Buenos Aires train for three days, back and forth, back and forth. I tell him: some day we’ll end up in the railway sheds, a day and a night, Costa says to me, sleeping. We were hitchhiking to anywhere we could go, we would cross the tracks and already be traveling backward, to the south.
Series A. In El Foro. I write in bars, spend my hours here. Once more the vertigo, turning in wider and wider circles around a center that changes with the clock. Yesterday with the newspaper classifieds, I go back and forth (as they say), from one end of the city to the other, and finally find an apartment on Pasaje del Carmen. I look for a guarantor, that is, a guarantee. I pay for three months as a deposit. Last night, turmoil with Pirí because of my leaving. The coming weeks seem difficult. If I manage to land this place (or another), I’ll try, after ten years of hotels and single rooms, to begin to live in a stable environment. Otherwise, my economic problems will start up once again. I prefer them to the others…
Series A bis. Another bar, now on Carlos Pellegrini, cold air filters in through the cracks of the poorly-closed window, to my left a woman speaks quietly in French with a man who seems to be her father, she laughs at him and he tells her a dubious story about an Algerian making the crossing to Gibraltar. The older man, who perhaps is not her father but rather her lover, who perhaps supports the woman or is supported by her, repeats “Gibraltar, Gibraltar” several times like a litany.
Settled into this bright apartment, in an alleyway that comes from the past, the rear-guard, last bastion, last defense. An end to the journey. How many places in recent years? Some economic security to let us survive for a season. I was lucky. Out on the sidewalk there was a fair, lots of noise starting at four or five in the morning, but to my good fortune they changed places and moved away from here… as of yesterday. All is calm now, waiting.
The structure of Puig’s novel is Faulknerian, choral narration based on narrators who at once participate in and witness the events. It is the reader who must reconstruct and synthesize a hodgepodge of faltering sentences, fragments of conversations, letters, and diaries, finally building a story that is not located anywhere, that has not been told but rather alluded to. A coming-of-age novel, great skill in the use of orality.
“A woman once left me stunned at the concept of ‘corny’ when she wrote to me in tears. These laments and protests of mine will seem corny to you. Corny is all sentiment that is not shared,” Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
Series E. As always, my tendency to blame my lack of solitude on “presences,” my difficulties with entering the game, are in reality an excuse. I think about empty spaces as places where I can cease to be myself, like someone in the corner of a station waiting room who changes his glasses, uses fake documents, and transforms himself.
Just now a walk down Santa Fe to the Supervielle bank to cash the check and stop by the bookshop to find Cabot Wright Begins by James Purdy.
Series B. Yesterday I ran into León Rozitchner, who offered me a bookcase to organize my books, and I walked with him down Florida, with everyone frightened after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Finally at Jorge Álvarez I ran into David Viñas, who has a striking ability to change the subject and draw me into the world of his concerns. In this case, our friendship is founded on what could be called a shared velocity for thinking about several things at the same time, avoiding obstacles. Impossible to have a conversation if it doesn’t come out of a dense series of implicit understandings and common ground.
In Puig’s Betrayed… a phenomenon of stylization occurs, a sort of visible distortion that can be viewed as a “defect” of the composition (in the manner of Onetti’s clashing and stylistic affectation). Yet this is its greatest merit; the novel reveals the extreme nature of a world that moves around within a common language based on forms of expression derived from Hollywood cinema—photo-novels and sentimental letters—which mold lived experience (and exist outside all literary formulation or high culture). What is striking is that he controls this form of verbal realism with such skill that he transforms language into the lived expression of life. That language is now a form of life. The novel, then, works with reality that has already been told (by the mass media).
Series A. I cross Viamonte to buy croissants, walking quickly to beat the cold, with the wind and sun in my face. The alleyway opens onto Calle Córdoba to the left and onto Viamonte to the right, and it runs parallel to Rodríguez Peña. Long ago, these shortcuts were passages for cars or the tram. The street is silent, and I feel well here.
Yesterday I worked out the matter of the newspaper pieces with old Luna. I arrange ninety dollars per month (a stipend). My dream of living off three dollars per day… I have to be in the editorial office for three hours every day, which I don’t like.
X Series. Later, Lucas comes to my place dressed like a banker; he always follows the walk signs when he crosses the street, but he goes around armed and carrying fake papers. He came with beautiful Celina, and I imagine (love notwithstanding) that she also serves as an alibi for him, or creates the natural image of a married man strolling along with his wife. Everything is fake, except for the danger. He sits down, and we talk calmly. Celina was my student at La Plata and is much more intelligent and sensitive than he is, but perhaps isn’t as brave. (I ask myself: does she know? Or, at any rate, how much does she know about Lucas’s clandestine life?)
Hamlet = Stephen Dedalus = Quentin Compson = Nick Adams = Jorge Malabia. The young romantic, the aspiring artist, who faces the world as it is and can’t bear it. The story told is how each one reacts to the weight of an unbearable (and adult or adulterous) reality. Creating, then, a story of the imaginary writers.
Series B. Just now a visit from José Sazbón, he’s my oldest friend from my new life (which began in A.D. 1960). I don’t know anyone more intelligent or more cultured (from the culture that interests me), no one shier or friendlier. Veiled conflicts about five thousand pesos, etc.
“It is not that one expresses anything when writing. One constructs another reality, the word,” Cesare Pavese.
“Literature is not a mirror that reflects reality but is something added to the world,” Jorge Luis Borges.
“Economy and interest are at the base of behaviors, beliefs, systems of neurosis,” Roland Barthes.
Dostoevsky. In his novels, the action moves forward for reasons that are hidden to the reader, and it is only when catastrophe approaches that the hidden cause is made clear by means of an extensive confession. Underneath, there is always an inability to remember or name “The Crime” (which is different for everyone and is secret). This outmoded exposition is the theory of the crime and the superior man, which Raskolnikov communicates only after the murder. It is the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor that functions as Ivan Karamazov’s novel. Stravrogin’s confession in Demons belongs to the same method.
I saw Godard’s The Carabineers, a fable about war, a silent film, an air of Beckett and Borges creating a story full of surprises, vertigo, earth, magic, etc., with photographs of everything in the world (style of Bouvard et Pécuchet) wrapped up in the violence of war.
Puig’s poetics. “Without a model I can’t draw,” says Toto. Then there’s the magnificent chapter with the school composition describing the experience of seeing the film The Great Waltz and retelling it. The letter that ends the novel is the same one that Berto tears up in the first chapter.
It is striking to observe the treatment of seduction in Stendhal and Laurence Sterne (A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy). The same situation in both: Julien Sorel and Sterne’s autobiographical narrator hesitate to take the hands of the women they love for the first time. Nothing more. A touch, the gesture of moving toward…
“It is time the reader should know it, for in the order of things in which it happened, it was omitted: not that it was out of my head; but that had I told it then it might have been forgotten now;—and now is the time I want it,” L. Sterne (seems like Macedonio Fernández).
Series A. A visit from my father, always cheerful and distrustful, with an air of helplessness but strong convictions. Disheartened because I’m not interested in politics (that is, in Peronism) like he is; we have dinner together, and he makes me recall moments of my life that I had forgotten. (My attempt to put a bomb in the UCR headquarters in 1956, in what had been Carlos Pellegrini’s old house in Adrogué, when I was fifteen and did everything in secret, or so I believed, though I see now that my father knew the score. I planned it with my cousin Cuqui, and it seemed natural to us to do something like that in response to the catastrophe caused by the Revolución Libertadora.) My father amuses himself by telling that story and, in the same way, silences the story of his own “exploits,” which put him in prison.
I read Absalom, Absalom! for the second time with astonishment and admiration. From a used bookshop I get the Mexican series Los narradores ante el público, autobiographies of writers from my own generation who describe ways and routines from their lives that are very similar to my own or those of Saer or Miguel Briante. A generation is a scattered, non-chronological series of shared readings and rituals, which will age along with us.
Celina L. comes to see me with a proposal for a lecture in La Plata. She is sick but perseveres despite her bleak outlook and goes onward, intelligent and firm. I left and went down Corrientes in the light rain. In Jorge Álvarez everything is going along well, he brings me Rojo’s book on Che. Many anecdotes with no great importance, critique of Guevara’s foco guerrilla theory.
I am working on possible topics for my lecture at La Plata, maybe I’ll talk about Puig and Cabrera Infante: spoken language and choral narration of an ever-elusive story. An alternative is to give a talk on Puig, Saer, and Walsh: Walsh’s nonfiction and his pieces in the CGT newspaper at one extreme, and Saer with his writing that tends toward lyricism on the other. Puig in the middle. All three reproduce the experience of Peronism in their own ways. Walsh in Operation Massacre, Puig with the diary of the girl talking about Eva Perón, and Saer in Responso, a novel in which Peronism is the context behind the protagonist’s “player” lifestyle. These are the three who can be read in Buenos Aires today (see Walsh’s short stories).
Series E. It is five in the morning, another hollow night, going from bar to bar. I always have the same conversations even though the friends sitting at the table are different. I go out and drink whiskey until dawn in order to erase some fixed ideas that have always pursued me, ones that I prefer not to name. A very cold night; I walked alone until I made it back to this corner by the window, through which the dawn air filters in.
Series Z. I want to record what is happening to me. Slight hallucinations that trouble me. First, I have a feeling of fullness, a ferocious happiness, and then suddenly a veil is unwrapped and pulled away, and I see reality as it is. I don’t know what is happening to me, and all I want is to name these visions. If I can. I don’t know if language suffices to describe these vistas.
For many weeks I’ve been coming to the library every afternoon and working on Tolstoy, and now I’ll say why I do it. My eyes are exhausted; according to the doctors, I don’t blink at the normal rate and my eyes are dry, like a well without water one of the specialists told me, and he gave me a prescription for tears. Not to help me cry (something that is hard for me), but to use as eye drops. We’ll see.
Series Z. That dryness may be the cause of my disrupted vision. In the extreme aridity of the desert, mirages appear.
Notes on Tolstoy (1). In the company of his younger daughter, Alexandra (who will die in the sixties in the United States), and his personal doctor, an ancient Tolstoy sets off—like a King Lear fleeing with Cordelia—on an erratic pilgrimage with an unknown destination. He is looking for Father Albert, he says, a starets, a holy man (the model for his short story “Father Sergius” and for Father Zosima from Dostoevsky’s Karamazov), who has been a sort of Mephistopheles for Good to him and is the one who converted him to Christianity, in a past encounter.
I must continue onward, recording what happens to me and never ceasing to register my life day after day.
Series B. Yesterday a long stroll around the city with David Viñas, circular and amusing conversations, maneuvers, estimations, the early stages of a friendship. I don’t let on to him about what’s happening to me, though I take his arm when we cross the street so that I don’t take a plunge. He doesn’t notice anything and goes on talking.
Yesterday a frustrating meeting for the magazine, Andrés Rivera’s confessions, sadness in the Royal Garden. I see Andrés’s face like a distorted mirror and comment on the Japanese park. I tell him: it was night and the faces distorted, he was surprised.
Two hours later the crisis has already passed. The memory is funny. Andrés’s face was like elastic, inflating and deflating. Now I’m working on Hemingway for the book Balance de E. H.
Hemingway saw the same things I’m seeing, and they gave him electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic, but he tried to throw himself out of the car when they took him back home. Funny and unbearable.
I am well and at peace; it is ten at night.
The mass media and journalists have found their hero in Hemingway. An image of the writer who doesn’t write and spends his life off hunting in Africa or fishing for sharks. It has to do with a cult of personality, putting literary figures in the place of movie stars, so that what is valued is the picturesque aspect of their biographies. Underneath lies the superstition that life legitimizes literature and replaces it. Soon there will be no need to write; it will be enough to lead a turbulent life and say you are a writer. His early books are, of course, examples of a very intentional writer, close to his experiences on the front lines, who created an extraordinary prose based on brevity and the cult of the unsaid.
Series A. When Henry Ford built the V8 engine, powerful enough to outstrip police cars, gangs began to develop. The automobile became a weapon of war. Gunslingers practically lived in their cars. In those years, the car replaced the horse as the symbol of the outlaw and, in a sense, Westerns evolved into gangster films. (From a description of the genre by the film director Arthur Penn.)
A laborious night, as usual these days, fighting against my own visions. It is written in the body, that is, in the posture; exhaustion can be recognized in multiple areas, in the stiffness of the fingers: a pianist with gloves, a hunter with dark glasses. Something about that. What is extreme lucidity worth if your body feels like it belongs to someone else?
We’re going to set ourselves in motion, and, even though I’m cramped, I won’t think of leaving the table, by the typewriter, sitting in this wooden chair, with its high back. (You also write with your ass.)
A story. A heavyweight boxer, elegant, charming, who moves with a lightweight’s speed.
Novel. A tape recorder is hidden in the apartment; the police know the layout. They changed their hideout. In any case, the narrator reports: this is a tape submitted by the police (a fragment of a telephone call can be heard).
In Pavese there is an opposition between “the business of the classics” and “the dialectical tumult of our time.” There is no language common to everyone now, but was there once? The language of the classics is in reality the literary language that functions as a social model (for us, Borges’s style, copied in the weekly magazines).
Series B. An unexpected visit from Andrés R. during an amorous moment. A theory about interruption must be made: who or what interrupts, and which is the situation that is “curbed” and must change direction. For the better, Andrés comes with his emotional misfortunes, so Pavesian (his woman left with his best friend, a poet, for a change).
For me, the interferences are the vistas (I don’t mean to speak of visions) that lie in wait for me. They are off to the side; I see them in the corner of my eye. Situated on the northeast edge of the room. They murmur like the whine of a taut wire in the night wind. I cover my ears with my hands or sometimes put on music to drown them out.
“Literature sustains me.” I like Onetti’s early prose, less baroque. I’m reading No Man’s Land, a nervous style, sensitive, tense, which incorporates echoes of Faulkner but above all a certain air of the “hard-boiled” novelists: Hammett and Cain. You can also see the connection to Roberto Arlt there; the Argentine era of Onetti is a bridge, crossing the void of the forties after Arlt. Borges is there like a light dazzling everyone, and Onetti takes many of his stylistic turns from him. Going against the short form of Borges and Rulfo, Onetti seeks to establish a story of longer duration, which doesn’t turn out well for him until A Brief Life, although what he writes in those first novels is very good.
I’m going along well, and only the altered, arrhythmic beating of my heart keeps me alert while I write so as not to think, seeing nothing more than my hand gliding through the pages of the notebook.
It is possible to detect the way certain invisible writers embody the tone of an era, later crystallized into what we call “a great writer” or “a great book.” This can be seen with José Bianco, Daniel Devoto, and Antonio Di Benedetto himself, and also with Silvina Ocampo and María Luisa Bombal or Felisberto Hernández, finally concluding with or flowing into Onetti. Of course, it isn’t about someone “consciously” reclaiming a tradition, but rather a sort of contemporary tone or horizon in which several writers, though unconnected, seek “the way.” (The one among us, who is it or who are they?)
Series E. As can be seen, this notebook tends to mark my intellectual biography above all, as though my life were being sketched with no other motion than that of literature. And why not? You always have to choose work over life or, rather, the work creates your way of living. For me, the lonely assailant now no longer demands “your money or your life,” but rather, more light-heartedly: “your work or your money.” Otherwise, in the other register, there are contingent events, which I give some meaning to by writing them down, although there’s a risk of introspection, the nonsense of “interior life” (what could be exterior?), for example, talking about today’s stroll with Julia, tangled up in a rhetorical and circular argument, trying to find a way to get along together. Impossible.
Series E bis. But, at the same time, there is a simple moral; the point is not to turn literature into a superior world, not to take part in the game where it is considered a sacred territory that only the enlightened or holy can enter. If, on the other hand, life is subordinated to literature, the risk is such that it doesn’t occur to anyone to “become an artist,” there is too much at stake, or too much has been set aside not to take on projects that have classical criteria, coming from Aristotle: the artist is like a carpenter who knows intuitively how to work with the wood and therefore chooses that profession and tries to learn how to make a table. That is all.
Novel. When I say spoken language, the use of oral syntax in narrative, I refer to the origins of modern Argentine literature, that is, to Martín Fierro, a story that is sung, from its vocabulary to its tone. This was the discovery that Borges made. Conversely, Arlt’s is a purely written language, a language fascinated by literature, translating Russian novels into cultured language. At times it is more “literary” than Borges. You have to wait until Manuel Puig to find their intersection, with his wonderfully fine ear for oral language and his experimental choice to write using techniques and forms that often come from elsewhere and not from the literary tradition in the strictest sense (and in that sense Puig is very Joycean).
Betrayed by R. H. and Mad Toy are coming-of-age novels. Arlt defines his poetics in the first sentence of that book (“I was initiated into the thrilling literature of outlaws and bandits”). That sentence constitutes all of the books that follow that first novel. In Puig’s case, the constitutive moment is the grade school composition that Toto writes about the movie The Great Waltz, retelling it. Bovarism, which consists simply of preferring fiction to reality, is present in both. That is what unites them and defines their education.
I spend the night awake, eavesdropping on the noises that come from the apartment next door. Once again come the murmurs that I alone can hear, a woman (a voice like a woman’s, a pretend voice) says something about an uncle who has bought a house in the country. That single mention troubles me. The womanly voice (that is the way I define it, as though it were a moo) keeps repeating the same thing but sometimes laughs with a little worn-out song, am I hearing voices? I have to do something, I don’t want to wake Julia up or tell her what has been happening to me for the last fourteen days. I furtively escape and take a little excursion down Corrientes to the bookshop. I discover the Spanish edition of Gombrowicz’s La seducción, which I had already read in Italian as Pornografia, lent to me by Dipi Di Paola. A little bird hanging from a wire, a sparrow?
Notes on Tolstoy (2). A shared dream between Anna Karenina and Vronsky in the novel: an old man with a bag says incomprehensible words in French, which—as Nabokov has already pointed out—is tied to a personal memory of Tolstoy’s. An ancient blind man, who had worked on the estate as a storyteller for many years, would come into his grandmother’s room at night, while she was lying in bed, the candle already snuffed out. He would sit on the inside sill of a deep window, eating some of the food left from dinner out of a bowl, and then, in the wavering glow of the nightlights that burned before the icons, he would begin a tale. Long-haired, with a large beard, he resembled other mujiks and wore a black wool tunic, both inside the house and outdoors, following the customs of peasants. He has Homer’s eyes, but how different he is from the ancient bard and his sublime songs, bathed in the blue of the sea! The old man mixes together stories that have not come to him through books (he is illiterate) but rather through orality, dating back along the Volga, coming from the far end of Turkestan, farther even, from Persia. One night, Lyovochka—the Russian diminutive that they called Tolstoy in his childhood—snuck into his grandmother’s room and listened. The mystery of the scene left an impression on him because of the storyteller’s unseeing eyes. He always says that it was one of his first memories.
I think about Martín Mejía, who would play the bandoneon for my grandmother Rosa on the dirt patio, behind the country house in Bolívar. I can see myself at age eight or nine, watching Martín’s serious face as he played with his eyes closed.
Series B. I woke up at three in the afternoon when David came knocking, as though I needed help from some danger he could perceive in me, though he doesn’t know what it is either. Half-asleep, I received him but, as usual with him, he gave me the sense that he was already talking to himself in the elevator and then continued his private-political-literary monologue without realizing that I was still asleep. He came to help me, but I scared him off despite his visible attempts to stay and chat with me all afternoon. I have to be alone in order to think.
There came a night when they locked me out of that house, lost in the country, and I jumped over the mud wall thinking the key might be the problem, since I always had trouble getting out: but on the other side of the door I found the padlock, and it was like a robbery in reverse. Above all because my books, my clothing, and especially the original versions of my short stories were on the other side of that padlock. And then I had to jump back over. Filled with anxiety, having nothing more than the front door, no place to sleep, Julia and I went to stay at a horrid hotel near the station, in a tiny little room.
The initiation. Without trying to prove anything, I found myself making love to a woman for the first time. I was fourteen, and she was a neighbor, the same age as my mother, and was one of her friends. To confirm all of my half-mystical theories, she, Ada, had red hair. I’ve always loved redheads.
Series E. Another landscape outside: balconies with bars, dark houses, always a different image in the window beside where I sit, writing. Every now and then, I raise my eyes and look off to the left, and I remain still like that while the words come and go until suddenly I start to write them down once again. That tiny room, painted white, on Riobamba, on the second floor; the high-ceilinged bedroom with a picture window that went all the way down to the floor, on Montes de Oca; the room shaped like a cross on Avenida Rivadavia; the wall painted by a Fine Arts student in the boarding house on the diagonal street in La Plata, where I would listen for the paperboy coming from the end of the street at dawn and get dressed to catch the newspaper from the balcony—they have remained fixed in my memory, places that come from a motionless time.
I do not exist in any place, and fortunately I do not belong to my generation or any classification of current writers. I am saying this because today (Wednesday, July 3, 1968), my absence from the overview of new Argentine narrative presented in Primera Plana is outrageous, and once more I feel the same anger that sustains my writing, the same sensation that I’m writing against the current. There are signs that reach me, even though they are very faint, and I alone can see them, ready to maintain a silence that has already lasted five months.
Of course, I’m trapped in the whirlwind caused by my move out of Pirí Lugones’s house, with her organized system of constant meetings and parties. In the vacuum of publicity, there is always a tendency to set aside more time for promoting a book than for writing it and, as an obligatory reference and measure of value, to put the same people in charge of managing that publicity.
I saw the beggar, her face bent to her breast, talking to herself, stubbornly walk past and turn onto Calle Viamonte as though she were escaping. She sleeps in a doorway and I observe her behavior, waiting for the right moment to approach and talk to her.
The narrative experience of boxing. Verbal description that moves among three planes: a rapid account of what is taking place, a lucid analysis of the technique and strategy of the fight, and, finally, the cries that filter in from the audience around the ring. I could write a novel by using those first two levels: narration and analysis in a single story. This all came to me because I heard the story of the fight between Bonavena and Folley, with ironic and picaresque moments: “Bonavena looked out at the stands, and his rival was furious.”
The workings of the narration. All of the characters appear as narrators, putting the story, so to speak, on the table. The role of the narrator, that is, a person describing something, must circulate among all of the characters, including the one writing the story. The point is to value the act of telling (conversing) over the simple act of writing.
All explicit reference made in literature itself to the void, to the absence or end of literature, invades the territory of ethics and is idiotic.
“The English… kill themselves without one being able to imagine any reason that would cause them to do so, that they kill themselves when in the bosom of happiness,” Montesquieu.
On Puig. In his work, there is no ironic distance between the writer and the speech of the characters (as there is indeed in Bioy Casares or Cortázar, who clown around, spurning the use of the subordinate classes’ language). There is a sentimental relationship between language and character. They tell themselves stories without discerning any meaning. Puig immediately understands the need to write without parody. Instead of ironically observing from the outside, the narrator moves among the characters like one of them. Puig avoids aristocratic satire, the kind of speech that creates a facile complicity with the reader; instead, Puig establishes a complicity with his characters.
Series E. Ultimately, like it or not, these notebooks will be an archive or register of my sentimental education, and so they will basically be composed of reflections on my feelings, barely intersected by actions or events or words about myself. At the same time, these notebooks form a narrative with little significance on the level of plot, but they have a tension that only arises from the reading yet to come: as in any novel, what takes place in the moment, brought on by chance and contingency, will be viewed as immutable once it has come to pass. I tend now to intersplice the narrative with analysis of the actions and with pure description of the events.
Solidarity with Viñas and his reserved and violent speech, rejecting what he calls “the seduction of the media” (which seduces him too much, I say). He’s right, he has captured the change in the intellectual climate. Literary validation no longer passes through the traditional systems (Sur for example), but instead through the mass media; journalists are the new intellectuals or, at any rate, they’re the ones who fulfill the function of intellectuals.
In the year before I published my first book, beginning a new story was an exhausting effort; my nerves were frayed, and I would catch perilous glimpses of the right names and spend a whole morning calling everyone, men and women, “Ramón.” One afternoon, which I experienced as though it were a sunrise, I watched the sunset through the window three hours after I’d gotten out of bed. I was hungry and listening to a strange radio story about a desert region in the north of the country. At the time I was living in a room in a large boarding house near Parque Lezama, on the corner of Martín García and Montes de Oca. I was calm, waiting to see nightfall before going to buy ham, cheese, and sardines at the market to eat with fresh bread and wine, letting the night pass without surprises. Now, by contrast, a year later, I live besieged by momentary visions or—as I call them—vistas. It’s as though I had a private TV channel activated inside my head, making me see a sequence of blurry, real images on the edge of my mind. At this stage, closing my eyes does nothing for me. Are they mental images or forgotten memories?
Light rain. I’m getting started. Fiction for B. now, then a meeting for the magazine with David Viñas, pushing forward well, on my side, but the rest is ambiguous, unclear. We’ll see what happens.
Novel. Tone before storyline, inner voices before plot.
“The author? For me, the author is the one who puts on the title,” Juan Carlos Onetti.
Series B. Yesterday a walk with David through Boca, the little houses that I almost never saw while I lived there. A world mixed with tango and anarchist tradition. A brotherly meeting with him, his way of understanding reality is very akin to my own (more so than anyone else’s). Then, in the end, we have ravioli with wine in a tavern looking out at the boats, between the clamor and the painted walls.
Series B bis. More visits from David, his attempts to attack Borges that I blocked elegantly but unsuccessfully, dinners in Bajo, meetings for the magazine, and meanwhile I’m working on Puig, many ideas.
Bursts of insomnia, rare for me, and no great results, a conflicted month. Today I saw Boorman’s Point Blank, with Lee Marvin, the loneliness of gangsters.
Series A. What enchants me about the indifferent figure is the decision to drive oneself to live without others. Living in a closed circle.
A complicated day, but so are all days, unless I decide to live on an island.
Adventures with David, who lambasts Borges again and again. We went to a lecture by Sabato last Thursday to stir up some trouble. Apprehension, but I am happier, riding out this period of my life without drama, with little clarity and much exhaustion, with nothing lying ahead but my own confusion, empty certainties, repeated mistakes. Disorganized reading. Fleeting elation.
The month ends with no great internal cataclysms, with Pirí, with Julia, with reality.
I don’t tell anyone what I see. Even here, I take care in writing about my “vistas” so as not to give them validation. What is happening? Hallucinations, visions. It is not a secret, they are not secrets or anything like that, but they’re so vivid that I can’t describe them (still).
Notes on Tolstoy (3). “Poet, Calvinist, fanatic and aristocrat,” Turgenev defined him with these four words. In the end, the categories of “Calvinist and fanatic” canceled out those of “poet and aristocrat.” After his crisis and conversion, he progressively distances himself from literature, learning how to make shoes with the cobbler in the town. “A good pair of boots is worth more than War and Peace.” As has become clear, in another context, the opposition of literature vs. boots had a tradition in the political and social debates in Russia. “Pisarev… following Bazarov, had resoundingly declared a shoemaker to be more useful than Pushkin.” The Peronist slogan of shoes yes, books no seems to be a creole version of the same tradition (extreme populism).
Disoriented, I realize that it’s been more than a week since I’ve paused to write about what is happening, the nights that stretch on past noon, altered sleeping patterns, working on the essay about Puig that interrupted a letter to Cabrera Infante. Meetings for the magazine, a certain sadness that came and took me two days ago. The worries continue, yesterday it pained me to cross the entryway with the woman sitting there, so I turned back and waited until I couldn’t see her. She wears a navy-blue cloak, and she even knows my name. She is fat; I have seen her in dreams, and she reappears to me now.
Yesterday David came over, assuring me that he felt “very good, better than ever.” Beba Eguía was already on the way to Europe, neither Julia nor I knew what to do for him, in my case due to my excessive shyness, in hers out of respect for my excessive shyness, until he finally left, as though it pained him, and agreed to call me on the phone. The light is low; my eyes are tired, and now I’m reading Gombrowicz’s Diary.
Series E. I get up early in spite of the cold and open the window, and on the other side of the street, against the wall, two old men are warming themselves beside an improvised campfire in an oil can which has already turned red from the heat. The flames rise and envelop the precarious container, and they shift around it and laugh, tapping their feet on the ground. The day is at once gray and clear.
Hard work to get five thousand pesos in advance of the fifty thousand for the book of three nouvelles by Melville, with a preface by Carl Olson! Earlier, a doctor gave me a prescription for eyeglasses. We’ll see if, by seeing more clearly, I can see more clearly. It would be amusing to prove that a pair of glasses modifies reality. According to the ophthalmologist, peripheral visions of figures or objects is a result of excessive reading. He treated me like an idiot: what do you see here? he asked me, and he lit up the wall with a little flashlight, pointing to different sized letters on the eye chart poster. Nothing, I told him, I mean, basically nothing, I can see the light from your flashlight. We went on like that for a while because he wanted to verify whether I was seeing those figures, but I only see them when I’m alone. This specialist is very expensive. Junior recommended him to me.
Series E. Someday, I will have to motivate myself to revise all of the notebooks I’ve written, selecting from within them and making clean copies. I am afraid, among other things, of misrepresenting the past, of deliberately forgetting, of choosing poorly, leaving out things that—in ten years, let’s say—may seem fundamental to me. I come and go with the style; sometimes everything is very fluid and other times I fall into private shudderings. The fundamental thing is the fatigue in my left hand, the stress from writing, and that’s why, I think, I see too much.
The effects of reviews are always insubstantial; it seems as though they are talking about something else and that is in fact the case, but what can you really expect? Something that can never come, and so you have to keep writing. There is no way to gain certainty in what you are doing, unless you come back from death. All this hot air because the Centro Editor’s chapter on this generation was published yesterday (which generation is mine?). Exclusions, little hostilities, etc. To overcome my abstract anger, I have to sit down and write, projecting myself toward a future that seems uncertain (but isn’t that the essential quality of the future?), because I’ve been in this dry spell for two years so far, writing to forget.
Series A. A splendid lesson, in any case; I’m here but would prefer not to be, which confirms some half-glimpsed truths. If I had the courage (I could barely make myself write down the above, I should never talk about myself or my relationship with the critics), I would keep coming back to this period but would write everything in third person: everything since I arrived in the city in 1965, my trip to Cuba, my stay in Pirí’s house, my work with Álvarez, my book release, my economic problems and solutions. This whole process is a sort of novel of education, and I still haven’t written about it because I find it hard to step back, despite mentioning this distant attitude as my most legitimate pretension. Maybe the fundamental work lies in finding the tone to narrate my passions with distance. Knowing how to let the incidents come. All the same, it is evident that I’ve spent my life asking for more time, looking for ways to postpone the moment of informed decisions.
One unexpected afternoon, his wife—the woman he considered to be his wife in his imagination—spontaneously appeared at his room in a boarding house in La Plata, along with the father (his father). He was in bed with Constanza; they weren’t doing anything special, they’d only gotten into bed because it was very cold. Inés came up the staircase first, and when she opened the door she stood there motionless, not entering, and only told him that she’d come with the father (his father). Confusion; Constanza took a moment to get dressed and put on her shoes and then went down the stairs, calmly (trying to seem calm). He remembers nothing of that day. Inés told him that his father had turned up, looking for her, and the situation was so confusing that she’d decided to come to La Plata with him, without warning. He imagined his father trying to seduce Inés, he’d already tried it with Helena, and he felt so wounded that he decided right there to leave everything behind and go to live in Buenos Aires with Inés. He remembers the journey on the bus, he and Inés were speaking in low voices, maybe he was making promises, and his father traveled in the seat behind the two of them.
Sometimes, the reality of an action is manifested to us in its consequences (I should say: it is always manifested in this way). On certain occasions, great crimes have been committed easily, as if in a dream. Then came the desire to wake up, but it was too late. I would not like to say that this has been the story of my life.
“I am not an entertainer… I’m concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image… to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness… to make people aware of the true criminality of our times,” William Burroughs.
Trouble concentrating and reading, a certain undefined restlessness; my sidelong glances, as I call them, persist. Now I’m reading André Gide’s diary, which I remain outside of, as if he were accountable for raising a fence to isolate his life, or rather, the everyday story of his life, presenting it as the experience of a man too aware of his privileges and virtues (and also his beautiful imperfections).
Alone, with Julia, at an event for Felipe Vallese in Avellaneda, caught up in excitement and anger.
I finish a draft of my essay on Puig, read Gide’s diary, and agree to write some articles for Luna under the pseudonym of Trekiakov, caught up in the narrative aspects of journalism; I finish two pieces, one on social delinquency and another on the military. In this voluntary work, I foresee a more and more efficient and impersonal mechanization.
Good times, at any rate, despite some indeterminate sources of restlessness that I put aside until suddenly, as I turn my head, I am surprised, seeing them in front of me as though catching myself, spontaneously, in a mirror. In such cases, of course, experience does nothing. If I could get them to leave me alone, I would not spend so much time gazing into this unexpected mirror.
Series B. David arrived last night.
Series A. Nervous about my visit to Jorge Álvarez in a little while. Why so many problems? I can’t bear economic favors, both because of my delirious relationship with money and my resistance to “entering” reality (and the two movements are just one). I would like to receive enough money—out of thin air, as they say—to work for a whole year in peace without seeing anyone.
I resist describing last night’s dinner and my meeting with David, a certain shared nostalgia for past times.
Today I spent the day alone without any surprises. Decent work yesterday, although the piece about Puig is still twenty centimeters short of the final. Correcting a piece of writing seems like one of Zeno’s paradoxes. Further still: to correct a text—with each modification—is to open a new path, finding another passage that moves the entire structure and opens a new balance and a new imbalance, which, in being modified, will open a new balance, etc. At any rate, if there’s time, I hope to correct the beginning and end before I type it all up definitively.
A good meeting for the magazine at David’s house. Discussion of some weak materials (by Ismael on intellectuals), prior tensions that David experienced after his conversation with me the other night (which I didn’t want to relate). Raúl Sciarretta has good critical sense, though he’s excessive sometimes: his joining, with David and Walsh, along with my momentum (how long will it last?) may work out.
Series E. Clearly, I struggle to write down here what I’m living through in the present; the experience takes on all of its newfound weight in memory. Anyway, I must demand greater continuity and less direct style from myself in these notebooks. But how can I write about crossing Carlos Pellegrini yesterday afternoon after taking LSD, with my super-heightened senses and a kind of velocity that went beyond the events themselves? Or Friday afternoon in Plaza Lavalle, reading an article on Gustavo Sainz in Mundo Nuevo and thinking about how I was the same age as him but still hadn’t published a novel? I think about how old writers are, what they did when they were twenty-six years old, my age. Better still, I thought about this while sitting between an old asthmatic man and a lady opening her lunch bag.
According to Julia, I talk in my sleep; last night, for example, I said: “But, old man, you know this issue is a spiritualization.” Before that, on Friday, according to her (if I must believe her), I said in my sleep: “For me, Erdosain is the literary unconscious, so to speak.”
Series B. In a bar filled with light on the corner of Lavalle and Rodríguez Peña. A convoluted morning that began badly, an argument with Julia that grew worse to the point that I left home and came here to calm down. The people in this place come and go, leaning over me to talk on the public phone on the wall at my back. When I saw a beautiful free table by the window, I didn’t consider the risk of the telephone located behind it. After a while I started to entertain myself with their conversations: a blue-eyed girl was announcing her father’s death to a friend, who asked her to repeat the news twice. Invasions of trusting ladies who covered my table with purses and objects, while they complained about the time and the state of the country.
Noon. A meeting for the magazine yesterday. A good editorial written by David and decent reception of my article, although David took the opportunity to criticize Puig and insinuate that he didn’t deserve an essay like mine. For his part, Ismael said that while my article was very good, I didn’t ever say whether the book was good or not. Then David, with a mischievous air, said to him: “Ismael, that isn’t done anymore.” For his part, Sciarretta critiques my article for lacking a critical element and literary theory. What is literary theory to him? I don’t know how to put it. Croce, maybe, or Della Volpe. Is literary criticism knowledge that is lacking from a book or knowledge that is already there? Sciarretta believes it’s what is lacking, which the critic must include in order to “complete” the meaning. Finally we find a middle ground; we will introduce my essay on Puig as part of a book, and in this way they can calm down because what is lacking can come later. All of them praise the prose and the level, but we’re in different worlds.
The difficulty comes not from what the words say, but from what is said between them. This means that the syntax matters more than the lexicon.
Suddenly, in the middle of my work preparing for the course on Arlt and Borges, an attack of terror comes upon me: fear of being unable to write any longer, of failing, etc. I am rational with literature and irrational in my relationship with literature.
Series B (or C?). I’m at La Modelo in La Plata, at a table by the window, in the sun, on the left side. Outside, you can see the trees, the wide streets; my past lies in this bar. The succession of afternoons when I was the only regular customer. Today I ordered sausages with fries and a bottle of white wine, just as I used to. And suddenly Lucía Reynal walked past, beautiful as always, on the other side of the glass, smiling and greeting me with an affectionate wave. Then she came into the bar and sat down with me and we were quiet. We had a history six years ago, which I imagine neither of us will forget. She wrote down her phone number for me on a scrap of paper and told me to call her when I came back here. But I won’t do it, I prefer the memory.
I looked at my face in the mirror and it was 5:30. I looked at myself again, and two hours had passed. Now I’m drinking maté to combat my hunger. And it is 8:30.
Now I’m watching the street through my “round pair of glasses” (heavy, with black frames), unsure whether they help to clarify things for me or erase them completely. The things I’m trying to forget can be seen more precisely. The images are clear and yet oblique, appearing as though blurred. The family dog, which had become rabid, had a black coat and was named Duke. They locked him up in a room, and we watched him through the skylight. He jumped around and growled furiously, and a fat policeman climbed up onto a table and killed him with a bullet.
Notes on Tolstoy (3 bis). Ostranenie [defamiliarization] as the difference between showing (making seen) and telling. In this way, Tolstoy broke away from the allegorical way of interpreting the Old Testament and the Gospels and imposed his detached (“Rational”) reading. Everything is built around the question “What must be done?” And, laterally, “Who am I?” Compromise as a theory about use, about the relations between art and life, about the rejection of artistic autonomy as false religion and false art. Against the kitsch that is possible in profane illumination, ostranenie, and epiphany.
Series E. When I manage to assemble my notebooks from the last eight years, I will type them up. I always run the risk of trusting more in my past than in my future. Anyway, it would be interesting to publish all of my diaries from 1958 to 1968.
I wake up at five thirty, get out of bed. Now it is six, and the clear light of the sun enters through the window. Uncertain about my perception, I wonder about my eyes, certain that my glasses are overly focused; my sight has started to grow cloudy, and now I struggle against a pained vision, sensing my own eyes as though they were made of glass. It is interesting to observe my way of seeing, understanding the contingency of the world; a pair of glasses can change the visible texture of reality. Of course, I can also go to the ophthalmologist to confirm or deny the excessive focus. But just what is focus?
Seeing one thing at a time.
Description of a mental state. My head paralyzed, a pain in my eyes, an emptiness, as though floating in the air, a weight that pulls my head to one side; I’ve always distrusted my body, which I cannot entirely control; that is where my rage at illnesses comes from. I undergo these states like rebellions, metaphysical experiences through which I confirm the existence of my body.
If I let myself be carried away by mysteries, so easy, so attractive, I would find a magical relationship in my encounters with certain books: Mad Toy, Hemingway’s short stories, Pavese’s diary, which I’ve never been able to “let go of,” which I’ve come to rediscover again and again, finding some quality that I hadn’t noticed but made me love them in the past. It is clear that these were the encounters that made me into who I am, and so I see them as encounters and not as origins. And that works for any magical idea about destiny; we always think we’re seeing events and things for the first time while, unknowingly, we’ve been learning to discover them.
I continue my confused testing, trying to ascertain what is happening with my glasses. For example, I look at my face in the mirror without them on, and I recognize myself, but with the contribution of the prescription lenses my face changes, changing from one moment to the next, maybe because of the motions I make when I see myself in glasses.
Series B. Yesterday confessions and misfortunes from Luna; I see in him that ferocious duplicity of all humbled. At night, David comes over and we walk down Corrientes in the insane atmosphere of the city on Friday nights and finally see Accident by Losey, with a script by Pinter, with all the snobs in Buenos Aires enraptured in the entrance hall, gaping at each other.
Series E. I would like to fill these notebooks more quickly, to systematize the information, to write about the everyday and analyze it, but—and I’ve already said this many times before—how can I write my conversation with Luna yesterday without making “literature” in the worst sense? The difficulty of writing openly in these notebooks arises from their lack of deliberate construction, which is both the virtue and the meaning of a diary. But, since I don’t believe in spontaneity or sincerity, it is clear that this diary will be no more than sketches, notes, a way of looking down at myself, leaving behind details with which to later reconstruct certain periods, certain states. Therefore, what they need is not “more literature” but more swiftness, more of a snapshot. What is important is to search for these tones, to practice them, to write “with the flow of the pen.”
A surprise last night on finding the drunk and half-crazed ex-boxer, who greets me every time I go down to the street, sleeping in the entryway to the building. I tried to step over him without waking him, but he spoke to me as soon as I opened the door. A frightened conversation with him ensued, throughout which I was trying to calm myself down more than calm him down.
I recall my experience yesterday in the carpenter’s shop. As I enter, I witness an argument between a blue-eyed workman and a laborer with a bored expression who was holding up a decree that banned long hair on men and miniskirts on women. “It’s a good thing,” he said, “that they passed this.” The other was looking at me, surprised and amused. “But you’re an enemy of mankind,” he said to him. “You should be sent off with the prisoners.” Finally, when the one with blue eyes crossed the street to check my opinion, the other watched me without stopping work. “Now. That guy doesn’t want to talk to me. Just got out of jail. He was a prisoner for five years…” It was a clash between the free man’s defense of military repression and the ex-prisoner’s defense of liberty. For me, scenes like this are the ones that condense experience, because they’re left open and you can construct the complete story (which you don’t know but can imagine).
Just now a boy’s voice through the window: “I’m in such a hurry, I don’t know where to go.”
Series A. A cloudy noon with a pale sun in the sky. Today is my father’s birthday, and I feel the same indifference as ever toward this man who was beaten “by history,” as he himself would say. He felt political anger and hatred as personal matters; that’s what Peronism was to him, a private matter, as though he was trying to be faithful to a friend (Peronism turned politics into an emotional matter, that’s why it has persisted). I called him on the phone; he always tries to seem euphoric and busy with projects. When will we see each other? is our leitmotif.
Yesterday, by contrast, was a splendid day with a clear sun, a walk down Calle Córdoba in the late afternoon, the warm air; the jacaranda trees had bloomed and my senses were heightened, maybe because of the conversation with Dad, who insisted yet again on my coming to live in Adrogué now that the house is empty. Worried about Nono’s archives, could I take over? “Maybe,” I said to him, “I should file and publish the old man’s secrets and the dead men’s letters.” The men in the family pass on these mournful remains from one to the next. And so I walked through the restless city, amid the warm air and the voices of the people.
“All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided,” K. Marx. There’s an element of Platonism in this sentence that opens the way toward an analysis of fetishism, that is, of the reality that is illusorily revealed in capitalism. And there is also a poetics of detective narrative; the philosopher is a detective investigating confusing traces in order to decipher the occult world. Only one who has a naïve and optimistic (or conservative) viewpoint can think that things are as they are.
A group of boys is playing with a ball in the ravine: one kicks it aiming for the goal that they’ve set up precariously. The ball goes off course and breaks a window. “I passed it sideways,” one says, “and it bounced off you.” “Yeah, well the redhead didn’t stop it.” They accuse each other, looking for the guilty one, and they all individualize, thus “separating” themselves from the group and also differentiating themselves from each of the members in particular. It is the inner mechanism of social matters, children learn it quickly. The guilty parties are individuals, collective responsibility is dissolved, and no one thinks about how they set themselves up to play on a narrow field with many windows for the ball to hit. A splintered way of seeing the world, and one that is learned in childhood.
Inevitably, literature works based on a situation (a non-verbal context) of reading: the interpretive delirium is measured in accordance with readers’ greater or lesser ability to understand the things that will limit their reading.
A peaceful day, brutally cut short by the arrival of Luna with a stupid, shifty excuse (work problems that could be solved another time, a project of a new publishing house that is an underhanded jab at my working relationship with Álvarez). He sets in with an idiotic stubbornness, invading the space, occupying it completely, talking to himself, always telling the same stories in the same way, with the same professorial, schematic tone. I feel bursts of rage, and I’m on the point of cursing at him, laughing, escaping. He goes on like that, waving his arms, slow, satisfied with himself and his own anger and resentment.
Two hours later, still irritated, I made some maté and drank it slowly with the imbalanced feeling that the act of drinking maté alone can cause, as though missing someone who could sustain the cyclical rhythm of the ancient ceremony of getting together to drink “unos amargos,” something bitter. As always, it is the little things that worry me, trivial matters, phone calls, ill-timed visits, avoided responsibilities, making me uncomfortable. It is very simple; for me, the only way out is absolute isolation, living outside of everything in a locked-off space, without a future. The only path left is to shut myself away, seeking refuge in an area of my own, high and walled, and working as though the world did not exist.
All that matters is knowing the limits of the outer wall, but this learning takes a lifetime. Now the cool air is coming in through the open window with the dry noise of crates, below, and the wheels of a car on the mismatched cobblestones.
Yesterday, an epiphany: In the empty street, Martínez (the crazy, drunken ex-boxer) with an air of “seriousness,” his expression docile, “well-behaved,” was standing next to a watchman, smoking fearfully, holding a package wrapped in white paper in one hand, his shirt open—and leaning in a doorway behind him, another vagrant, quite old yet with a fierce gleam still in his eyes and a scar on his face that gave away his real age—walking with a sluggishness I’ve never seen in anyone, immobile, moving imperceptibly, going slowly with the rhythm of a man who’s lost his way in the darkness, moving away, led down by another policeman, who paused every two steps and waited, bored, to let him catch up.
“I am Ricky Martínez, boxer, I have a beautiful young wife,” he applauded himself, looked for any wine left in the empty bottles, went on shouting insults: “Policeman, knob, snitch, animal.” The row of boys provides him a chorus: “Martínez is the greatest boxer in the nation. Martínez corazón.” He raised his arms with his fists closed, lowered his head, and danced around, on guard.
Seven in the evening on the almost empty bus, about to leave for La Plata. Where does this restlessness come from? As we know, I’ve always seen things “from above”; it bothers me to think about a group of idiots, condescending to the “lecturer.” Maybe I can’t stand to live in this time, knowing that no one knows anything about me. I can’t stand the middle ground. We shall see.
Series B. In La Modelo, empty, with the clear sun on the other side of the window. I ordered, as I always have for many years, sausages with potatoes and a glass of white wine. A certain stillness and peace. Then I give my first lecture. Everything goes well, some hesitation as I start, but then comes the feeling of controlling the subject, apart from some empty stares among the women in the audience. This first experience proves that my best tone comes from improvisation, almost without any notes; I go with the ideas and fall into the void, and after a while I feel the people coming along with me. The best part was my unexpected theory on translation (conceived of as social practice), which determines the literary style of an era more than any person can. For that reason, books must be retranslated every so often because, without realizing it, translators repeat the models of what can be said “literarily” at a given moment. They are working with the foreign language but also with the present state of the translation’s target language. For them, this state marks possible turns of style, permitting them to say certain things in a way that is acceptable for the era. Thus can be seen, implicitly, the traces of social and literary style. Books are translated into an already-formed language, with its rhetoric and “aesthetic” grammar.
Beforehand, a professor, a poet and journalist from the SADE, gave me an Arltian introduction, speaking about global knowledge and my fame “beyond the frontier”; I looked down at the floor and now and then glanced at him, trying to raise me up onto some kind of pedestal, at a vast table, far away from everything.
Ezra Pound says: Flaubert is Joyce’s immediate precursor. Joyce learned the encyclopedic form that structures his Ulysses from Bouvard et Pécuchet.
Tension between baroque style and classical style, defined by T. Wolfe in a letter to Scott Fitzgerald. I am a “putter-inner” and you are a “leaver-outer.”
The difficulty in the morning is not to think about what lies outside, almost as though I were piling up all of the senses, the events, into what begins after two in the afternoon, when I finish working. Today, for example, stopping by J. Álvarez, paying Pirí back what I owe her, dealing with everything for Gide’s diary, and also the many likely meetings with friends, acquaintances, etc. Then going to Luna’s place, enduring his gossip, his complaints.
Today I’m working on the script for B. In two hours, I unenthusiastically lay out three scenes—still very schematic—for the outline of the story about the criminals who escape to Montevideo. Then I take notes on Gide’s diary and Kafka’s diary, and I’m also reading Musil’s diary. What do they have in common, and what do I have in common with them?
In the short stories from my book, I have discovered, without knowing it, the difference between dramatization and story-telling. On one side are the “objective” stories, which tend to be narrated in the present tense, while the events and dialogues are taking place (“Tarde de amor,” “La invasión”), and on the other side are the monologues, which are defined more by tone than plot (“Tierna es la noche,” “Una luz que se iba”). So, when Héctor Alterio read “Mi amigo” aloud, it easily turned into a theater monologue. “Mata-Hari 55” is a reduced novel: recording, documentary, juxtaposition of voices (a model or plan for the novel about the criminals who escape to Montevideo). Present tense. Spoken prose, the act of storytelling, the form of the (false) nonfiction novel based on real events.
Series A. Last night with my brother Marcos, a stranger whom I struggle to recognize. “Grown up,” more legitimate than I have ever been, determined to leave this country behind and take his family and my mother to live in Canada. Conflicted about my father’s (his father’s) weaknesses, a fragile tone that my brother can no longer endure. They drove from Mar del Plata together, with Dad confessing his crises, seeing no way out; politics is a crime, he says, and he lays his misery on Marcos, as he used to do to me in Mar del Plata, making me be his confessor at age eighteen. I learned from him that you must never let yourself be blackmailed by people who put history on their side and justify all of their own weakness or failures with “historical” reasons. My father experienced the misfortunes of banned Peronism as though they were directed at him personally. At the same time, I recognize my own conflicts in him: being trapped by future events, refusing to accept reality. And so how can I, his mirror, blame him?
I’m reading Scott Fitzgerald’s letters: “Don’t worry about popular opinion. Don’t worry about dolls. Don’t worry about the past. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about growing up. Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you. Don’t worry about triumph. Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault. Don’t worry about mosquitoes. Don’t worry about flies. Don’t worry about insects in general. Don’t worry about parents. Don’t worry about boys. Don’t worry about disappointments. Don’t worry about pleasures. Don’t worry about satisfactions.” Only concern yourself with doing things well, and seek compensation in the work itself (not even in its result). You’d have to be a saint to follow those rules, she said.
At noon I ran into David with Edgardo F., and we went to eat at the restaurant on Montevideo and Sarmiento, talking about Eva Perón, the working girl who held a unique position. Condemned by the middle and upper classes, her rage and resentment transformed into an extraordinary political rhetoric, never before known in this country. Later with Luna, who takes note of the writing he finds in bathrooms and calls the phone numbers written there, and last with B., good ideas for continuing with the script.
Series E. Danger: replacing memory with these notebooks. Only living the experiences through writing.
When I’m working, I can’t read. Either nothing catches my interest, or everything seems connected to what I’m writing. The books are trapped by the passion of the novel and transformed into superfluous objects or contagious objects. They are either worthless or they say what I haven’t finished writing better than I can. A strange situation, the writer as the enemy of the reader. You become so sensitized by language that everything that is written seems either personal or personally addressed. A superstitious thought of the artist who feels as if the whole world—not just the books—is speaking to him privately, in service to the subject into which he is pouring the hours, the days, the years.
My other way of reading consists of having five or six books at hand and burying myself in them, a way to not think and not remember that I owe a debt to what I’ve left unwritten.
Pavese had decided to commit suicide; he was in the Hotel Roma but paused to write a few letters and entered the dead time of language, leaving his suicide in suspense. “The gods arranged all this, and sent them their misfortunes in order that future generations might have something to sing about,” Homer. Pavese’s suspended time before he killed himself has a likeness to “The Secret Miracle,” the Borges story in which a man asks God for the time to complete his work before he is executed. To finish writing before entering death.
Popular storytelling, the serial novel. They possess, in particular, a precise functional power and invariably match with their meaning, which is, first of all, the desire to be read. But the point of these novels is not to be read at the level of their style and the typical dimension of language; they want to be read for what they narrate, for the emotion or fear or pity that their words are obligated to transmit, which they must communicate with pure and simple transparency. The prose has to have the absolute seriousness of the narrative, it must be no more than the neutral element of the pathetic. That is, they offer nothing in themselves. There is a fever of expression, an informative language. This gives rise to their complementary opposite, which we would call parody, an artificial expression that employs this language of excessive passions for comical effect. But this effect doesn’t lie in the language but rather in the way it is read. Inversion of the reading, not of the meaning of the text.
The best part of yesterday was my discovery of Doris Lessing, a lateral writer, the same as us. She was born in South Africa, was in the Communist Party, and had a daughter, whom she took with her to London after she divorced. She looks at English culture obliquely and thus writes what we might call a poetics of the left. First rate: great use of autobiographical material, looking at herself as a dynamo that receives many rays. The protagonist of her stories is always an aspiring writer. Thus, there is always a tension between life and writing. I read her work for hours, as happens every time I discover a writer. I’m going to read all of her books. But now I am turning, as happens with these “excitements” that won’t leave me in peace (but what peace?), and moving away from the true path, as the mystics say. It is dark outside, gray. Ahead lies the end of the afternoon, public relations avec Mr. R.: we’re going to watch Czech films. “La” Lessing distinguishes herself from Andrés R. and all of the ex-communists because she doesn’t place blame on anyone, just observes their reactions ironically.
Series A. My ignorance of the past is clear, my complete forgetting of my childhood days. Because I’m here, I cannot remember them. Yesterday, a flash of the times I would go out with Grandfather Emilio, and his death, so close that it doesn’t seem like it happened. Almost nothing beyond that, fleeting remnants; it’s almost as though Nono conceals everything else, until he alone remains in my past.
These days I’m rereading all of Chandler, and I very much enjoy the combination of adventure and irony, a sedate epic. Marlowe is always looking for lost objects, facing many obstacles. He experiences this tiresome work (that of a private detective) like one of Kafka’s heroes, with humor, seeing death up close and viewing money as a key that gives meaning to the game. He pretends to accept these rules as a way to conceal his attraction to the constant movement. There is formidable narrative technique, intended to incessantly bifurcate the paths; the action always moves two steps ahead of the hero, who always comes across the consequences of events but never the events themselves. Many times, I’ve felt tempted to write the Don Quixote of police novels. A single protagonist who would have to be Don Quixote and Sancho at the same time, a slightly insane ex-commissioner accompanied by inner voices that talk only to him (or that only he hears) with Sancho Panza’s common wisdom, sayings, refrains, unexpected solutions to the mysteries. He solves them “on hunches.” To have a hunch is to guess at the future, imagining how things will progress. And that is what this investigator’s method should be, out on the edge of the genre.
I’m interested in the way that Chandler operates with a single hero-narrator in his novels, in such a way that the books can be read as a single, vast novel. I like this technique.
Series B. Yesterday conspiracy, commiseration, an affectionate and secret huddle with León R. and David V. They’ve adopted me as the heir to their way of thinking. Why? Maybe because of the editorial I wrote in the first issue of my magazine Literatura y Sociedad.
First phone call with León, aggressive and hurt because of what happened to him that one Saturday in the German pub before he went to the airport, when everyone (and David most of all) was criticizing the way he lives—too comfortable, he’s a homeowner now and we don’t like that—but also the way he thinks about Marxism, too personal. Several weeks of silence since that day. Yesterday my affection for him returned along with the memory of that month traveling around Europe with León, our long conversations in Havana.
There was a meeting for the magazine, a number of arguments, full of tension (David and Ismael against León), which I observed with the clarity that comes from understanding three or four levels of a situation. The editorial will focus on the ways that the dominant classes think about and define themselves. What Brecht called “the idealist customs” of the bourgeoisie. Capitalism with delusions; what they’re doing never coincides with what they think about what they’re doing.
Intense work. I write copy for three book covers (Mailer, Vargas Llosa, and French writers of today) and several biographical notes (Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Le Clézio), and now, tired, I look forward to a long trek: go to the bank, collect a check, pay the rent (very late, with a warning notice attached), see Jorge Álvarez, stop by El Mundo to see the photos, chat with Luna about future articles, and finally come back home.
Obviously a confusing panorama, what will we do? Overwhelmed, I think about suicide as a way out for me. The scars on my right wrist that I used as a mark of my past life (I got them as a boy by punching through a glass door, but I have always used them for seduction, showing that trace as proof of my decision to have done with everything). The insane order of my life is going to break apart… like the glass of the door.
I’m rewriting “Mousy Benítez,” it works well because the story is an implicit investigation, and the mystery is not deciphered (who or what killed Benítez?). The love among men in a hypermasculine world: boxing.
I went to bed with Julia at noon and stayed there all afternoon, until now.
A note I made on the white inside of the cover of a book by Pavese. I find an annotation dated August 15, 1966: I’ve always wanted to find a style that defines my way of living. Language depends on the way one lives one’s life. That note is there, hanging in a vacuum, so I went to my notebook from that year and found a note from the day before. I am with Julia at El Jockey, I decide to go back to La Plata with her and spend a while there, hidden, writing. Then, on August 16, I wrote that I had already found a room: a house with a patio and rooms that open onto the garden, and on the front side balconies over Diagonal 80. I settle in here with no one knowing where I am. A strange game of mirrors.
If I decided to admit that my life, shall we say, also changes and “evolves,” I could remember my profound stupidity in the beginning (1957), before I came to the end of that period of learning, ten years later, one year ago that is, when I published my first book. Those ten years could be the living material for my autobiography—if I were to write it.
A short story, beginning like this: “Later, my father killed himself.”
Series C. Women viewed as apparitions at distinct points in my life, sharp turns, until I reached that fleeting vision—a woman in a white raincoat—as though watching the form of my own life passing by.
Luna’s perverse conversation yesterday, a wicked passion for misfortune (both personal and external) that he disguises as generosity, as good intentions. I reject his piety because of the element of spectacle, of bad faith, that finds all of its reasoning in this vicious puppet, with his air of a helpless hippopotamus, jumping up to spy through the window and collecting the juicy news, reading pornographic books, betraying, all with the greatest “good will” and love for his fellow man.
Just now to David V.’s house and back. Preoccupied with the prospect of work, he critiques the literal line of Primera Plana, the ease of presenting autobiographical writing as an example of experimentation.
Series E. Rereading Pavese’s diary, I rediscover my old obsession with his self-construction of life (as a work of art), his businesses (of living, of writing, of thinking), his techniques, and his rules.
Fast bursts of images from the books I’ve lost in the times I’ve moved, in my “separations,” the same books I need to have today, on this table, which are—let’s say—on Jorge Álvarez’s desk or at León’s house or in some bookshop I don’t know. There will always be new (and old) books to read, but there will always be a book I’m looking for and can’t find. My hope is to have all of the books at hand so that I can use them when a practical need demands it, so that I can choose one when it’s the right time for me to read it and I’m ready for that book and no other. Therefore, my library and the books I buy are not meant to be read now, but rather are meant for a future reading, one I imagine will find its place in a volume I’ve bought years before. This idea is sustained by my tendency to see traces of the future in the present (and to be prepared). The library persists as a place I return to: the same books, the same ideas that have been repeated for years and will be repeated in the future as well.
I think the best things I’ve written in these notebooks have been the result of spontaneity and improvisation (in a musical sense); I never know what I’m going to write about, and sometimes that uncertainty is transformed into style. I defend the perplexed author trying to understand a hostile world. Letting myself be guided by an intuition, a hunch, a pálpito (a beautiful word that refers to palpitation and also to the imagination of what is to come).
Everything I’ve thought or tried to think comes from ignorance or from the attempt to write in its place. For example, when I reread Faulkner and wrote a profile of his life, I discovered the novel as investigation. I was only able to think of that because I was led to that insight while preoccupied with working on other matters.
Series A. I’ve always been afraid of thinking all the way to the end, worried about the effects that this thinking might have on my body. To escape the pain, I avoid thinking about myself entirely. To put it better, I think from myself but not about myself. And in that lies the revelation that it is always someone else—not me—who is writing.
Viewed from another angle, there is my choice to postpone, to pass on what is troubling me now to another day: to create a pause, a waiting. That’s why the collapse is so unexpected, because it breaks into the ceasefire when no one expects it (the surprise is the catastrophe).
I began to earn my living at age twenty-two. What did I do before? Nono’s patronage. And before that?
A discontinuous temporality—never linear, in which there is no progress—can be seen in what I write (and in the way I write): There are raptures, happy moments, inspirations, and I’m always writing in spurts, in streaks, struggling to establish a stable working rhythm, a discipline. It is an incessant search for the perfect moment. I have too much confidence in the future, and that is what defines my life, the way I think and write (and love). What is to come, that imminence, allows me to go onward.
I’ve started rereading Conrad under the pretense of putting together a selection of his stories for my classics collection. I quite like the way he places the narrator, who is recounting the story, in the center of the scene. He always defines the situation that makes the story possible. For example, the ebb of the river, the calm girl who halts the journey and brings together the idle sailors and the narrator (who is or was one of them).
“Marlow (at least I think that is how he spelt his name).” This is the distance between the writer and the narrator, but also the relationship between the writer and the narrator, who already knows the story and is telling it in his own way, in conversation, to a group. What fails is his confidence in the spoken tone of the story. What he needs to tell the story is less calm, more narrative confusion, fewer direct dialogues. And that is what Faulkner does, coming directly from Conrad but creating a narrator astonished at the story he is trying to tell.
Every morning, before starting work, I open the window slightly to let the light of day come in, without waking Julia, and then I clean the table, making an empty space for the typewriter, and begin, without rereading what I have written.
X Series. A. P., whom I’ve known for years, appears in an article about the arrest of a group of guerrillas in Tucumán, and therefore Lucas T. M. as well. I discuss this with David V., needing to support them “morally” despite the fact that politically we disagree with their methods, etc.
Walking around the city with David V., we made it as far as La Noria bridge and went in circles around the slums that surround it, the dumps, Boedo to the south, ending up on Corrientes and then in the Alvear theater to watch Bajo la garra.
A note about my nonfiction novel. As I have said, I became aware of this story through the newspapers, I thought there were unclear points and decided to investigate, etc.
Series E. I’m reading Gide’s diary, and I don’t like the self-satisfaction, the way he lives in the spotlight. For me, only diaries written in opposition to oneself are valuable (Pavese, Kafka). In my case, what I most often find are moments that—in reading them today—I would have wanted to live another way. It pains me to reread them because I discover what was undesirable in myself. Not because I may have said so—or understood it—explicitly, but rather because of what can be seen from the present. A gesture would have been enough to make everything different, but in that moment I was blind: we never see what we meant to do until ten years (at least) have passed, and so we live blinded by the events, never finding the way out that we seek, even though it is right in front of our faces; it is not a problem of physical distance, but of temporal perspective. When I reread these notebooks, I can clearly see the moral quality of the man I was.
Commerce is the motor of the peripeteias in Conrad’s novels; the interchange between distant regions acts, in his stories, like fate in a tragedy.
X Series. Taco Ralo guerrilla warfare. In the foco theory, the margin of error melts away and is minimal; only total efficacy would allow possible action to develop in the future. And so they fall too early, due to minuscule errors. In this case, what is new is the Peronist character of the politics (but not its methods).
Series B. Last night with David. I went to see him about a meeting with León. He greets me with an enigmatic smile. “You like Borges, no?” I keep on walking toward the middle of the apartment and see a book on the desk. “What trap are you setting for me?” I ask him. David throws himself backward, grabbing the book and hitting me on the arm, offended. “No, old man,” he says. Then a great confusion on my part as I try to exaggerate my thanks and dispel the misunderstanding. He has given me a first edition of The Language of the Argentines as a gift, with an inscription from Borges, to which he adds another, written in large strokes. I realize that he stole the book from José Bianco because I know the way Pepe binds his books, but I don’t say anything. So the situation is multiplied. David steals a book and then gives it to me, and as he establishes a mise-en-scène without telling me anything, I act defensively because I know his tricks. León is late (in the end, he doesn’t come), and David once again shows me his friendship by recalling our trip around the city the previous Sunday. I go back, walking slowly down Viamonte, and León is waiting for me at home, a surprise, a reprise of the previous scene: León offers to give me a bookcase (because I have my books piled up on the floor), and then I try to be impartial.
Relationships with writers from other generations are always complicated because each one speaks a different language, and so we end up understanding one another through an invented jargon with fragments of each person’s private language, and all we accomplish is incomprehension and unease.
My distrust of overly effusive and obvious outward performances of affection is the first thing that separates me from my Sartrean friends, León, David, Ismael, even Massotta. They act out their childhood readings, seeking “authenticity,” turning sincerity and explicit words into proof of a conscience open to the world. For my part, I have had other readings; the true emotions are the ones that don’t show themselves, and passion is too strong to be exhibited as though it were an object in a toy store window.
Even better, I find this quote from Borges in the book that David gave me: “The subject is almost grammatical, which I announce as a warning to those readers who have condemned (in the name of friendship) my grammarianisms and requested a human work. I could answer that there is nothing more human (that is, less mineral, vegetal, animal, and even angelical) than grammar.”
Another from Borges: “Someone who does not work to earn his living finds himself a bit outside of reality.”
The bookcase León gave me arrived, I set it against the wall, and now the books are there in rows, too many to see in a single glance, too few for my fantasy (to read everything).
I get the volume of Pavese’s letters, so expensive (nine thousand pesos), the chance nature of what he writes, I can fill in the voids between one letter and another using his diary and his stories. What am I looking for? Always the same thing, to know why he writes, who or what it was that led him to write—just as it did me. The result: when I’m interested in a writer I read everything. There are not many who have this good fortune. And Pavese was one of the first.
An impression from that reading helps me understand that we are in a situation of breaking free from the exterior nature that has defined us from the beginning. Now we no longer look at other literatures or foreign writers as though they had more opportunities than us. We read as among peers, that’s what has changed.
Series E. I imagine myself based on three or four clear, not-so-distant memories, as though my life began not long ago and before that—the rest—was the lost paradise of my over-prolonged childhood. The decision was made impulsively, and my closest friends (Diana, Elena, or Raúl’s sister) insisted that I couldn’t dedicate my life to literature, far too risky a gamble. For a few years, my father and his cronies began a campaign to convince me that I needed to make sensible decisions, and that was what ultimately had me cornered in a suicidal defense of a future about which I had very confused ideas. I recall and look at those scenes as a way to understand my subsequent vengeance (literature as revenge), and above all as a way to understand why I write this diary. For years, it was—and still is—the only place where I could support myself in maintaining this delusional decision. All or Nothing would have to be the title of these notebooks if I ever published them.
This all comes because of my shock in confirming in Pavese what I haven’t realized about myself, shall we say, “consciously,” something I only understood long after I decided, once again, “to be a writer” before I had ever written anything to justify that delusion. The advice I wouldn’t listen to was trying to convince me to admit that literature must be a “secondary occupation” for me. I saw all of that—almost psychotically, I saw my whole life already lived—in one instant that afternoon, as I sat on the tiled floor of the hallway, my back leaning against the wall, writing furious words in a notebook. I must have thought: “If I write the things I want to experience here—and not, stupidly, only the things that I do experience—then I’ll be able to experience them like prophecies come true.” Just like that, I bound writing and life together forever. I was never worried by the idea that literature can distance you from experience, because things were the opposite for me: literature created experience.
Protect yourself well from making art a secondary occupation, because the gods who watch over general mediocrity will punish you, I thought without realizing it. I saw it at age seventeen, when I had done nothing so far to justify that belief. That was why I was intrigued by the lives “of writers,” I was seeking their moment—or moments—of decision. I remember reading Proust’s Recherche one summer and seeing the epiphany of that discovery in the Guermantes’s library, when at the end of his life Marcel understands that he has lived through everything so as to be able to write the novel you are reading. In my case, the matter was reversed; I made the decision before I had lived, sitting on the floor in a hallway of our dismantled home.
I set aside all excuses (studying law, looking for stable work, making, as they say, a family, etc.) before anything else, in the same way that Marcel understands that his fascination with social life, parties, and the aristocratic world was nothing compared to his will—put better, his desire—to be a writer.
There is something strange in that decision to choose the imaginary as a reason for life itself. A flaw, a fracture that no one has seen, the consequences of which can be felt in the language, in a murky and troubling ability with words: None of that justifies anything, and you can have that certainty and never get as far as writing a single page. And so, without realizing it, I have also started to continue the creation of imaginary writers in fictional texts. What kind of writers do writers invent in their novels? What do they do? What is their work? The first in that lineage for me was Nick Adams, the young aspiring writer in Hemingway’s stories, and then came the great Stephen Dedalus, the young aesthete who looks at the world—at his family, at his homeland, at his religion—with contempt because he has chosen to be an artist, and we never know whether he succeeds because, at the end of Ulysses, Joyce leaves him walking half-drunk through the Dublin night, with Leopold Bloom, who brings him home with the secret intention of adopting him as a son (and also, perversely, as his splendid wife Molly’s lover). I read this succession fervently, as though it were my own life: Quentin Compson, Faulkner’s suicidal character, who kills himself before he has done what he imagined he wanted to do (to be a writer). The list goes on, and I’m on the way to attempting a gallery or an encyclopedia of the lives of imaginary writers: They all seem to have a certain immaturity in common—they never manage to become adults (because they don’t want to). Here, I could use Gombrowicz’s novels, where the artist resists maturity. That is the limit, since maturity is the transformation of the artist into an assimilated man. That is what happens at the end of Don Quixote, once Alonso Quijano has forgotten all his delusions and resigned himself to a trivial life. That is why the lives of artists in novels end quickly and, in general, they all die or commit suicide so as not to resign themselves and admit the weight of reality.
I respond to an almost surreal scene: A woman asks me to lend her a novel and asks if I’ve read it, and a few weeks later I’m writing these notebooks. That would become clear if I thought about the situation in which—“without realizing it”—I gave Vicky my diary instead of my class notes. And she was clearly the second love of my life (for that reason).
Everything would be in place if I dared to live as though I were about to turn (not twenty-eight, as is the case, but rather) eighteen years old. Then I would indeed be able to wait, to be calm, to let myself go, ready for my formative years. But, of course, the temporality worked backward in my case.
While reading Pavese’s letters, I once again felt the desire to compose a story that takes place in Turin, an invisible collage made from fragments of his diary and my own. Narrating Pavese’s life (or one day, or the end) and at the same time a few days—or a few hours—in the life of the protagonist, who is an imaginary writer (and that’s why he has gone there to see images of Pavese up close). One possible beginning (if I write the story in first person): “I do not understand why I am here, how I have come to be in Turin, with nothing to justify this journey to a city that I do not know, one that I only feel close to because my father and my father’s father were born here. I came on a fellowship to study Pavese, or rather, I came here to write something about Pavese’s diary, but that is a pretense. As always, the reasons and the causes are something darker. Sometimes, some afternoons, when I am more disoriented than usual, I find a place in this room at the Hotel Roma, open my suitcase, and reread the notebooks in which I write, here and there, about what I am doing or thinking. I am alone in Turin, I scarcely know three or four people, the waiter who serves me in the restaurant, the girl who comes to clean the room, a circumstantial friend I met in the café where I go for breakfast every morning. My Italian is slow and hesitant and my acquaintances think I’m a bit slow in the head, not really a foreigner, more a stranger, an outsider…”
French and English Books
Art-Science-Medicine-Literature, etc.
Extremely low prices
.……
Don Bosco 3834 (Rivadavia and Medrano)
Tel. 89-6098 / 6099
Monday to Friday from 2 to 5 p.m.
Now the sun, which is always reflected in the window at the same hour and gets in my eyes: a white brilliance, moving away and blinding me; then everything is silhouetted clearly with a gleam that gives the city the guise of a photograph.
Pavese also deals with the key to all of us (or put better, some of us, or better still, only me); literature is contrary to life, and that is its virtue. For example: what it is that he does in that city he doesn’t know, studying an author who spoke a language that was his father’s and his grandfather’s but not his own. Maybe it would be better, instead of getting lost in duplicating forms, to simply devote himself to translating some of Pavese’s stories that he likes (“Wedding Trip,” “The Leather Jacket,” for example). In that way, his residency in Turin would be productive, and he could present a report at the end, justifying the money from the fellowship that had allowed him to travel. For example, to say: Pavese was an unbelievable man, which is not to say that he was a valuable man.
Yesterday a long meeting for the magazine with David, Ismael, Rodolfo, and Andrés; we finished at two in the morning in Munich, near the port. Argument about the publishing house, the issue is how we’ll fit in what I call the foreign series. I’m trying to capture the multiple meanings of a lateral position with a single term. A nation on the margins of the central currents. Sarmiento already saw it, but we now think that such a position does not prevent us from establishing direct contact with the current state of culture. We are synchronized with contemporary culture for the first time.
Andrés gives himself a clear conscience there. He looks to others for the source of any ambiguous action that implicates or complicates him. A slightly out-of-focus image of any one of us, resentful; he seeks security, revolutionary verbalism, and imagines that experiencing everything in a complicated way is a demonstration of sincerity. A beautiful soul that conceals what we might call, in his words, dark temptations.
Very excited about the project of writing a story about Pavese, I rediscover old notes that have been inside me since ’64. Suddenly, a phenomenal lucidity allows me to see the whole story and its title in a single image: a fish in a block of ice.
A fish. I came to Turin with the snows of January and saw the glimmers of the pale sun on the waters of the Po. To get to know a writer, you have to turn him into a part of your life. That is why I am here. (Use my own name to signal a fictitious narrator, inverting the mechanism of the pseudonym.)
Destiny. The texture of unconsciously chosen events. A path only seen in its entirety at the end, when it is already too late.
Unwanted entanglements yesterday. It’s Luna every time. Now he’s spinning an ambiguous web around some women and—especially—several men he wants to take his revenge on. Intent, ritual desire, repeating his own misery, able to be (after so many times that he’s played that role) a “prestigious” bastard, deceiving, usurping a friend’s wife, abandoning the “honest” but miserable side of the wronged, faithful husband deceived by his comrades.
Sartre’s face, framed, half-bearded, his eyes watching the corners of the room; imagine the moment when he looked at the camera and felt the tension preceding this fleeting immortality, and what came immediately after that pause, which I have hung on my wall, the photographer and Sartre in conversation, saying goodbye, while I was somewhere else in the world, not knowing the photograph was destined for me.
Now I’ll drink the tea that I let cool while the crisp morning air brushes by my face and a woman sweeps the sidewalk below, a familiar sound that carries me off to childhood. I am in bed, I must be six or seven years old, gliding the tips of my fingers along the wooden railing that crosses the wall at face level. It is seven thirty in the morning, and, as though wanting to make this moment eternal, I struggle to begin this pause in which everything is yet to happen and I am alone, free, in the middle of the city.
Why didn’t my failure with “Los días futuros” in 1965 change anything in me? Everything stayed as it was, the same certainty, the same emphasis despite the amount of time it took me to write any stories that still last for me. What place, what blindness did I extract my confidence from in those days? Then the failure, partial, momentary, coming back to me with the certainty that it is only fools who triumph and come out ahead. (You need 40 percent mediocrity to be able to succeed in art. A decrease in those stupidity quotas condemns you directly to failure.) This theory is the direct realization of the way I think about reality.
Series E1. What is in play is the opposition between form and sincerity. An old polemic that has taken many names over the course of the years and has resurfaced in this present time, when people sing the praise of ignorance and celebrate the spontaneity of the noble savage. Meanwhile, I am alone, rowing against the tide and trying to create my literature by inserting that tension—life versus literature—into the themes of my stories (and also into these diaries). Creation in art and creation in life. Giving form to experience.
Series E2. Certain periods of my life that I’ve experienced with angst reclaim their true reality when I “go back to read them” (not the same as going back to experience them): some good insights, certain happy quotes that betray a healthy “movement of the soul,” despite the suicidal tedium with which I sustained them, as though I were looking at a painful wound without seeing the beautiful texture of the flesh that is visible thanks to the division of the skin. The passage from wound to scar. And so, today, tense and with a strange lucidity, I see no reason to allay the burden that holds me away from (my own) mandate to write, every morning, my novel in progress.
Series E3. And what if the best thing I have ever written, the best thing I will ever write in my life were these notes, these fragments, in which I record that I never manage to write the way I would like to? An admirable paradox: infuriated because he is unable to write what he wants, a man dedicates himself to recording the story of his life in a notebook, always going against himself, and sustains himself on his notebooks, observing himself, continuing to fail, never knowing that he is writing the greatest literature of his time in those notebooks. He dies, unknown, anonymous, with no one interested or able (even despite knowing their value) to publish them. Notebooks in which an unknown man talks about his life, recounting his frustrations day after day, writing the deepest testimony of his era, about the fate of failure. It would be Kafka’s life in reverse, the secret of a quality that is completely ignored, a great literature ignored, or rather, unknown even to its own author.
It is raining, seven in the morning, the damp air comes in through the open window, and I’m troubled because I can’t read now, waiting to go out to the street in the afternoon after writing all morning, going to see friends, have drinks, and seek adventures in the city until late at night.
Notes on Tolstoy (4). In his later years, Tolstoy struggled intensely to free himself from the bonds of his social life and from conformity, and therefore he fascinated a great number of men and women around the world who—like Gandhi—wanted in all sincerity to “return” to a simple and pure life and practiced nonviolence. Tolstoy himself was tragically unable to bring about this return, and his final attempt was, in its own way, a suicide.
Don Quixote. “All in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could.” In Cervantes’s novel, there is always an aspiration to move on from life to literature, to the future novel: “When the veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes it, when he has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do it after this fashion: ‘Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread… ’” and he goes on, showing how his story will be told. That is, he indicates the true meaning behind his actions: they are meant to be read. What he does by living is to indicate the rhythm of the wise writer who will write his life. In short, he speaks and acts in accordance with the novels he has read (which is what defines his madness), and, at the same time, he aspires to become a writer who would write things in the future according to how he has experienced them (which will define his sanity). And his peace, when he dies, sane, as Alonso Quijano once again, will lie in the hope that he has left his (written) mark, while the author speaks through the pen with which he is writing.
Yesterday, a brief exchange with David around four in the afternoon, very emotional, with unusual antipathy and helplessness that he tries to conceal behind his emphatic gestures, his rhetoric, and his intelligence.
Working since seven in the morning, always in intermittent stretches, with the temptation that everything I write must be “consumed” in a day. For me, concentration is synonymous with swiftness. I must cultivate the virtue of continuity.
Just now, my face pressed against the foggy windows, I watched the water falling against milk bottles piled up in wirework boxes on the sidewalk next to “Provisión San Miguel.” The whole street was dark under the rain, and I once more felt the calm of certain mornings when anything is possible because the dawn, the rain, blanket me and hide me from the future.
Sometimes I have doubts, unsure whether this unscrupulousness—writing for an hour, completing one scenario, pausing—is the maturity I’ve hoped for, or laziness. Before, writing used to be a passion, something that carried me, that required certain rituals, certain exact times. Now I’ve found a discipline for my work, the first hours of the morning like a blessing, leaving a page half-finished and resuming it the following day and moving on ahead. I don’t think I’ve lost the enthusiasm, because I like nothing more than to be sitting and writing, but I think I would like to turn it into a practice or habit that is picked up and set down, as in the days when I used to swim in the pool at Club Temperley and would break records, or improve my time, every day, not waiting for ideal moments.
Writing is like swimming. The stories have the speed of a front crawl stroke, a hundred meters at top speed, but for a while I’ve wanted to write as though swimming at sea, with no limit but my own exhaustion urging me to return to shore. A while ago, I wrote a story called “The Swimmer,” relating the experience of a man I met on the beach who swam out three kilometers to a sunken ship and delved into the interior of the submerged boat, hoping to find treasure. For me, that could be a metaphor for the novel.
In any case, I think I could always go back to my old “pure moments of creation” and write stories, but I want to acquire a swimming rhythm that would allow me a longer term, “extended” concentration. On one side is the experience of “Tierna es la noche,” written in six hours; on the other is the work that goes in circles around itself, my “Italian” nouvelle with Pavese at the center of the plot.
Learning about Pavese in 1935, in total confinement and with three years of exile ahead of him, with no news of the woman he loved, alone, under the elements, he writes in his diary about his poetry, about the way he works, and never lets himself be won over by the “tragedies of the soul.” I mention this because yesterday I worked all morning, until I was lost, “addled” by exhaustion, a ring of iron around my head. After that, nothing until evening except for my “mundane routine,” which was barely a pass through the editorial office yesterday because Luna wasn’t there, and then I went down to the city for a walk around Plaza San Martín. As I was getting off the bus to go to Air France, there was an explosion in the Círculo de la Armada; fear, everyone running for the park, even though it had only been an innocent short circuit that filled the sidewalk with smoke “like a bomb.”
“In writing, the difficulty is not in what to say, but in what not to say,” Kipling.
Series C. We might say that the books I write are the price I have to pay for distant mistakes, sorrows that no one could have allayed, slow hours erased by a woman with a red skirt, black stockings, and a sweet smile. What is the point in distrusting and lamenting a history of which not even ashes now remain, from which only some lost books survive, a library that was divided as though the books were precious objects that warranted a dispute, when really they were only symbols of the love that was left behind, imperishable moments, monuments to past joy. For I have never escaped from the books, and so these books are all that I can lose and lament and ponder. For example, one day I would like to write a story about two lovers’ separation using only the titles of the books they fight over.
Since a precise moment (1957), everything has come to me easily, as though the forces had been accumulating since that time and everything had come all at once: the redheaded woman (Vicky was the third in that streak), the decision to live alone, the money I needed (thanks to the work that Grandfather Emilio invented for me), and no effort, finally reaching this place where I live, in a corner of the city. That explains my conviction, the certainty that, of course, I’ve never doubted, going past the “failures.” An absence of the meaning, confused and always postponed, that I find in reality, in my love for the profession—and not in its results—which has allowed me to live for all these years.
So now what? A life always discovered afterward, the decisions, the changes, the subtle choices that have led me to this need to organize everything around literature. Never thinking about other possible paths.
I’m reading Marks of Identity by Juan Goytisolo. Of the writers of his generation (Viñas, Fuentes), he is the one who seems to have recovered best from the crisis that brought about “commitment” and the social novel. Here, he progresses in a new direction, political in the best sense of the word.
Yesterday I rediscovered a core part of my education, the English, French, and Italian literary magazines through which, in the Library of the Universidad de La Plata, I discovered contemporary literature and its debates and “learned” to become what I am. There was also my experience in the Historical Archives of Buenos Aires Province, in the basement of the Galería Rocha, where Barba was my Virgil. One learns quickly, with the instantaneous velocity of a bird of prey, and a few seconds are enough to clearly perceive a path in the woods of culture.
Once again Andrés R.’s confessions, he’s obsessed with the Viñas brothers, with their girlfriends, with their stories, which he tells me as though they were his own. Ismael, hiding his father’s death from his brother David for two years, to prevent him from suffering. The descendants. Ismael, according to Andrés, asks David: What is it we have that makes our children turn out this way? A complaint, a lament.
I spend two hours listening to music on Radio Municipal. I have at last perceived the dual logic of live concerts: the spectators applaud and scream for ten minutes as though that noise were the music. I think: “That is the concert.” Now it is time for the intermission, that is to say, the music. Now Schubert.
Not much work today. I am waiting for Julia now, so we can go out to eat. A strange thing. I just started reading intensely, two hours ago, and now the letters dance before me, I can’t see.
Earlier, a lovely walk at noon after a talk with Álvarez and a haircut. Stops at all of the bookshops in Buenos Aires (Dinesen, Akutagawa, Les Temps Modernes), and then I sat down outside a bar on Avenida de Mayo. Later, in the plaza, a woman was chasing pigeons and I, alone on a bench, was trying to decide whether I really would like to be a father. I decided that the decision I made ten years ago was best, no family. Last, I met Korenblit about the lecture on Arlt and Borges that I’m giving at the Hebraica on Friday for five thousand pesos, which I look forward to with little enthusiasm. Álvarez offered to have me compile an omnibus, that is, an anthology of David’s work. Will it mark the end of our friendship? I mean, could it become his will (his testament)? We shall see.
Last night everything went well, the room was full and I “watched myself” walk out toward the people, remembering my body, and theirs sitting there, stirred by my youth and my brilliant speed. Afterward with Julia at Arturito, celebrating the five thousand pesos for my first paid lecture.
A very good era, I’d have to look hard to come up with another period this clear and smooth and “creative.”
“My passion began the day that my soul fell into this miserable body, which I finish consuming by writing this,” Michelet.
Series E. I walked in the sun through Buenos Aires, deserted because of Día de la Raza (as it is called here), trying to find the desire to write the article on translation that I have to turn in on the 21st. An urge to pass through Mar del Plata, despite all of the family ceremonies, to look for the notebooks that I keep there and start transcribing my diaries from ’58 to ’62. See what can be salvaged from those times. And what will that rewriting be? A written reading of writings lived?
Nothing worse than mornings, nothing worse than Sunday mornings. I listen to Mozart, watch fragments of sunlight through the slits of the window, the swishing of a broom below, gradually leaving the oppressive opacity of the morning, rediscovering certainty, convictions to hold on to and pull my head out of the water to breathe. After a while, everything is set into motion, the work that begins at dawn, the books to be read. Ahead lies the end of night, the day to come… I always regain my drive.
“An autobiographical poem… portrays an idealized image of the poet, not what has occurred but what should have occurred,” Tomashevsky.
Series C. Battles, ups and downs, there are times when this woman crosses from the other side, taking refuge in a strange ceremony that turns me into a strange guest. The two of us sitting, kneeling, lying in the bed, crying. Pausing to find new paths toward destruction. Strangers striking out at each other, their only motive not to know each other.
I suppose what bothers me in André Gide’s Journals is a certain fascinated contemplation of nature. His sanctimonious optimism irritates me: birds that eat from his hand, mountains that let themselves be scaled, fish that develop their lives before him, etc.
Were my surprising tears at reading Pavese’s terrible final letters a way of “posing?” Above all, who knows why? Something that a relative wrote to him, naïvely congratulating him for his “great prize” (that year’s Strega), as though I had seen in that the clash of his own reality against abhorrent sentiments. A way to appear sensitive, worthy, crying for Pavese as though for myself. An aristocratic way to make myself be seen in that pain by the chosen, those whom the world crushes.
“If the science of literature wants to become a science, it must recognize the ‘device’ as its only ‘hero,’” R. Jakobson.
Every day, at ten thirty in the morning, the sun destroys my things, my books, my desk.
“It is difficult to describe a character who has nothing to do in the story,” L. Tolstoy.
“An artist’s fate, in its ultimate analysis, lies in his technique,” Heimito von Doderer.
Today the whole city in chorus: students from La Plata are intercontinental soccer champions. Car horns, confetti, noise, and chanting. Earlier with León R., his ideas about Freud are good since they confirm my intuitions; along with that are the trials, his skirmishes with David, which catch me off guard.
At times I catch myself trapped in a blind vertigo, in the trivial chaos of the everyday, which I can’t control, which crushes me: calls, visits, interviews that use themselves up and invade me, paralyzing me. Once I react it is too late, gone are the times when I imagined a space of my own, as though my days became that confusion, my work a continuous postponement.
A bomb in the Biblioteca Lincoln. I thought: “I hope they didn’t lose any books of literature.”
A crisp morning, certain rituals interfere with the joy of launching myself into the Jakobson book, as I am learning to relate to my own body. Certain games that I play with reality have become a kind of rhetoric, and at the same time there is something fragile, theatrical about them. An effort of willpower, of intelligence, always leads me to be a rather cynical witness of the events that involve me (or someone close to me). I’ll never entirely know whether this pretext of ironic objectivity is anything more than an implicit production of bad faith. A bit like Andrés, who always gives away what he’s really thinking, denying any meaning behind what he says, though his words allude to it directly. It’s as though the most resilient ghosts were the opposite of the motions we make to exorcise them. I mean my inability to control myself has turned me into a sort of schizophrenic, leaping from extreme self-control and irony to confession. Anyway, I could write a series of performances: my grandfather’s death, accident in the army, attack in Mar del Plata. Incidents in which I have rehearsed a performance of myself. The old story about the sad songbirds.
My usual places: just now someone’s voice reading science fiction stories at Pirí’s house with a distant, passive affectation, the empty afternoons at those school desks that open up, a house full of invisible spiderwebs, unexpected visits, painful objects. From there come the searches, the meetings, that broken music (an oboe?), Cortina on Radio Municipal, which I listened to in La Plata, and in Medrano that woman’s voice reading a science fiction story, and before that the corner in Mar del Plata, a strange ritual with another woman when the only thing we had in common was the Montecarlo show, and before that the programs I used to escape from my adolescence—modern jazz, with Basualdo—which I’ve rediscovered in the afternoons now, here.
I prefer to know about myself through others, through the reflection of a gesture, from a phrase on the face of someone close to me. Knowing about myself through the mirror that startles me suddenly as I enter a room, showing me a threatening stranger who watches me watching him, astonished.
Yesterday afternoon, the way I dealt with all (or almost all) of my ideas about a possible history of translation and was unable to resist the temptation to seem more lucid than I am in front of Roberto C., is proof of my several lives: one of them is the way I let myself go in order to be sincere. The lives I speak of are ways of being, and they always remind me of a quote from the Austrian philosopher: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” Changes in outlook and perception of reality, then, are complicated by a certain point of view (like Henry James). And so, yesterday, I mentioned all of my theories that might seem brilliant, although the instant that I exhibit them could hold a high price: there is no need to speak about what is being written, and the luster is no a guarantee of quality. In this way, I have introduced a harmful rhythm into the tempo of my own maturation, as long as I need others in order to think.
X Series. Yesterday a fleeting exchange with Lucas, always elusive and evasive, more “secure” than at other times, his face marked by his newly shaven beard, some certainty that sustains his life. “And what if they catch you?” He smiles: “They won’t catch me.” But if they do catch you, what can we do. They won’t catch me. Conviction is everything; nothing can be done without that. He also made some analysis and recalled his history. He was in the Taco Ralo guerrillas, after the EGP, these are previous experiences that began in 1961. At the same time, I perceive in him a demeanor of spying, of boredom, of falsehood. The man of action.
Series A. On Tuesday I waited, anxious, for the shopkeeper across the street to open for business. That waiting unsettled me, isn’t it strange? It seems that every change in my plans or in my will, however small, microscopic, produces a greater effect in me. Finally, after two or three false starts, I went downstairs and saw him opening the metal shutter with both hands, his back to the street, and then I crossed and bought a bottle of milk. I paid with fifty pesos, there was no change. I accepted this, quickly, to avoid causing an uncomfortable situation, emphasizing my indifference about the fact that the shopkeeper still owed me eighteen pesos. This morning, I was the one who had no change. I put together thirty pesos in coins, but I was missing two pesos. Several times, as I slid the coins around, I came close to reminding him about the debt. Finally I held out the thirty pesos to him confusedly, asking him to trust me for two pesos. Without listening to his response—amiable—I went back as though escaping. For me, economy is a kind of secret passion, and I can never act with money “in the light of day”; in any situation, it feels like I’m handling counterfeit money and making unfair trades. A man without a personal economy. Or, better still, a man who has a personal economy, private, that is, who can’t share with anyone, in the sense that he has no people to talk to or figures to “do business” with.
The violent reactions (see Sabato’s letter in the magazine Análisis) in response to any theory about the marginal character of Argentine literature provoke an outcry that proves the truth of my arguments. Clearly, it doesn’t have to do with talking about an “inferior” literature, but rather thinking about the temporality of culture in a territorially defined field. My argument was to say that, since the origins of the Literary Salon in 1837, Argentina thought about itself as a culture out of sync with the present, arriving late to the contemporary situation. What causes the outcry is my opinion about us, the writers who have begun to publish in recent years; we have broken from that imbalance and are now in the same literary temporality as European or American writers. The outcry comes from the fact that culture has been the space in which our relationship with the central countries has been most deliberately concealed and diverted. We have seen that things changed after Borges and Cortázar. Today, any one of us, Puig, for example, can exhibit the full contemporaneity of his writing and now has no need to go on about our “delayed” situation. It is about not accepting that mystification and using all contemporary literature, without any sort of “difference” or inferiority.
A tortuous walk under the merciless light that filters in among the clouds and shines on the cement like a knife of sun, avoiding meetings with other writers (for example, waving to Rozenmacher from far away and going on at a distance), until I dock at a bench in Plaza San Martín, under another sun, now clear and softer.
If I were dragged out of paradise by age, when everything is worn away, and I realized it, how could I look outside of my experience for the certainties of that incomparable time? Our capacity for happiness depends on some balance between what our childhood has denied us and what it has granted us. Completely fulfilled or completely deprived, we will be lost. Maybe I am suffering the consequences of a too-happy childhood (too happy?).
People who still explain the crisis of the tango as a result of the embellishment of themes fall into a realist mystification. They don’t see the tango as a genre that had a clear origin (1913, “Mi noche triste,” recorded by Gardel) and has had a glorious end (“La última curda,” 1953, sung by Goyeneche). Something shared by all the great genres (tragedy, for example): they are connected to certain conditions that make them possible, and, when those conditions change, the genre doesn’t adapt and comes to a splendid close. The lyrics that sustain the story had a short duration that, nevertheless, made it possible to tell a story in three minutes, but that duration was intimately tied to the dance. Tangos were danced to, and when the singers intoned the lyrics, the audience would sometimes stop dancing and move in closer to listen to them. Troilo, for example, sometimes shortened the song to a minute and then the music would fill the space. It is rock that has put an end to that logic; that is where young people find what they need to dance, and tango has become a music to be listened to and not to be danced to. Piazzolla is to tango what Charlie Parker was to jazz. Faced with the presence of rock, jazz also stopped being a popular, danceable music and took refuge in clubs or in bars where people go to listen, as in a concert, to the development of a sophisticated music, popular in its history but rarified in its new situation. The same thing happened with tango; the typical orchestra disappeared, and these days you go to Caño 14 or Jamaica to listen to duets like Troilo-Grela or Salgán-De Lío or to Piazzolla or Rovira’s Quintets. But now there are no lyrics, and people don’t dance to them the way they did in the great dances of the forties, which had allowed them to support a complex—and expensive—orchestral ensemble.
My verbal anticipations of my own reality continue, my readings of the future; the project of writing about Pavese, in Turin, is a way for me to prepare for my journey to Italy, which today resurfaced as an imminent possibility. An escape.
X Series. On Friday Lucas T. was here, brief and mistrustful as always, rigidly clinging to a stubborn rationality, which reminded me of some pianists I’ve known who always seem to be practicing the next piece. Lucas is always in action, never relaxes, comes to see me as a way to rest, to change conversation, lays down his weapons on the table and converses with me. “A man who’s worn out politically doesn’t talk,” he says. And the torture? “He doesn’t talk.” And what certainty can there be? “Ideological certainty, ideological work. I know what I’m telling you. I was a prisoner, as you know.” I grew furious, that’s metaphysical, I told him, pain is a leap into the void, like death. “I have absolute faith in myself and my companions. You know who they are, they’ll never betray me.” But absolute trust is the reason for failure. It is the opposite of voluntarism, reality doesn’t exist, you triumph or fail through errors, never through political matters. Lucas smiles. “If I thought the way you do I’d be working as a lawyer, I’d be living in Paris, spending my family’s fortune, if I wanted to.” A guy who acts tough and clings to the feeling of power that ideas give him. In his case the reasons make me ashamed: he has been betrayed, chased, his name put in the papers, accused of murder, all of the gates are closed, his only escape is by going forward. I love him like a brother, but he seems further and further away from me, even though I believe I’m the only friend he has left from his former life. We stay together until morning, shooting the breeze. If I read that line somewhere, I would say: “But why the breeze? Why shooting it?” Lucas would start a poem that way if he were living in France, free and away from danger.
The city was empty today, as though he were imagining it, a clear sun predicting the arrival of summer. A stranger watching himself walk along the streets that lead to the river. “A city of no one,” he thinks.
Roman Jakobson has taken on the task of demonstrating the relationships between the translator, the cryptographer, and the detective, insofar as all three decipher messages in another language, in another code, or in an implicit language that the murderer has erased in order to leave no tracks that could let his presence be read in the “scene of the crime.”
Series A. In relation to Perón’s attempt, Onganía’s dictatorship is in crisis not due to political reasons but rather because of a lack of politics. It is a demonstration of what Gramsci said: “the dominant class” has lost consensus and is no longer the “leader” but just “dominant,” only boasting coercive force.
A strange day, wandering, at intervals, around this empty apartment; Julia is in La Plata facing her mother and her daughter, and I am distant and neutral, in this place, as disconnected as everyone, listening to music on Radio Municipal, working at intervals on the essay, which seems to be on the right track and puts me at ease, thinking that tomorrow I’ll begin to give shape to these insights, which I leave hanging for now. Empty, exhausted, with no desire to read or to make the slightest motion, what am I going to do with the time left before she comes back?
Series B. The friendships that interfere with my reality are like a bridge that connects me to things, to the actions I must undertake in the near future, which invade and cancel out any present goal (the imagined actions, not my friends).
X Series. The covert man, who immerses himself in armed conflict and becomes invisible; his life is duplicated, he lives in the light of day as any one of us, but at night he lives in the inevitable revolution, behaves deliriously or—to keep up the consonance—bravely. In the early years of this notebook the subject under study was Steve, the secret American writer who seemed to live in two worlds. Then the years passed, and the hero was Cacho Carpatos, the man outside the law who broke into the houses of the powerful and was surrounded by the necessary figures of his own life (Bimba, the call girl, “the fence” who moved the stolen objects). Now, for a while, the figure under my gaze has been the man of action, the clandestine revolutionary who works in the shadows to bring about changes in the course of history. The one who observes this varied species of men, his friends and the people he admires, he is the indifferent, tranquil man (this one would be me, in a sense). These are the characters in my life, my friends. The other series is that of the women I’ve loved: the redhead, the married girl, the tempestuous woman, the young girl of the night (the girl with the Vespa).
A murder in the neighborhood and a gaunt, slight man with many verbal tics is raving: “She was fifteen, but he bled her dry. He bled her dry, all bled out. I was in front, there, and I heard something I thought was fireworks. Didn’t even realize it or see the people crowded around because I thought it was fireworks. Now, a boy told me he saw them turn the corner, arguing, from what I saw they were stopped there, in the doorway.” A couple, nearby: “They’re going to close down the hotel,” she said. “No, why are they going to close down the hotel?” And her: “Don’t you think that’s too much?” she said. “What I saw was, it happened on the sidewalk. What does the hotel have to do with it?” Later, in the store: “What can you tell me about the crime? Now, she was kind of a bimbo. Every time she came I realized she was kind of a bimbo. But it takes all kinds…” And as I was leaving several people crowded around a woman holding up the Crónica newspaper, which showed photos. “She looks about the same,” she said with a mix of stupefaction and secret envy, as though the news belonged to her. And a man to one side said: “He gave her a kiss and she went like this,” with a gesture of wiping his hand over his mouth, “like she was cleaning herself off… If a woman did that to me I’d…” And the others looked on with a mix of compassion and irony. Meanwhile, on the corner, two kids were carrying some machines (photocopiers?). The one who was further away said, skeptically: “Nothing. See? They already cleared it away. What do you want to see?”
The storm comes, breaking the bright afternoons that made way for the summer. It is noon, and in the street the darkness flattens the fronts of houses as the rain begins to fall violently, a classic scene, already seen many times in the repertoire of images of nature in the city. Now the rain has come down relentlessly (has the rain come down relentlessly?) and the fresh air carries the heavy smell of wet earth. The lamp traces a white circle on the table and warms my left arm while everything is dark in the world. A strange feeling of dispossession forces me to close the window to prevent the rain from dampening the notebook that I’m writing in, isolating me still further from reality. I am empty and alone, going in circles on a Ferris wheel, doing nothing but looking at the axis, immobile.
Yesterday as I was getting off the subway there was a throng of people looking on with a strange mixture of satisfaction and shame. An acrid smell of burnt rubber, employees running from one end of the platform to the other, the train conductor, pale, pausing every time someone looks at him or suggests a question. He is a bald man, wearing glasses, with a pockmarked face and a strange object in his hand, some kind of handle. He pauses suddenly, as though having found what he was looking for, and explains that he couldn’t brake. “I couldn’t brake,” he says. Then he takes off running again. And then he pauses once more. I too peer around the edge of the platform and look through the gap left between the coaches, toward the dark opening of the rails. I try to imagine the woman below, silent and alive. She couldn’t have killed herself. The scene is extended. There’s a sort of continuous motion inside a static scene, some people moving and running around, the rest peering around the edge of the platform (like me), still others surrounding a man with an honest face, fat and dark, with gaps in his teeth, who has climbed up the stairs, onto a podium, and speaks slowly, seeming surprised, stunned. “I cried out,” he says, “if I’d seen that she wanted to throw herself off, I would’ve grabbed her, but I cried out because she went too close to the rails, she had a checkered purse and skirt, she was in line on the platform with the purse in her hand, standing there, next to me, and you could see the light of the oncoming train and after it hit the brakes she was nowhere to be seen.” The firemen came a half hour later. She was alive. “Destroyed,” said the policeman, who seemed inflated and spoke in a slow, almost childish voice that grew hoarse when he wanted to be authoritative and made the curious people circle around. I let myself be carried toward the surface by the escalator. I’d left home after the storm thinking specifically about “suicides,” but I was thinking about the metaphysics of that decision and not about the dark track where a body throbbed below, strewn across the tracks, where everyone was anxiously looking for her. The body of a woman who had clung to the edge of the precipice, thinking about what, about who… and had jumped into the void, breaking one storyline and opening another, more terrible, but distinct.
Notes on a suicide. Everything takes place as though the horrific image could naturally give rise to a concept. There is a mysterious relationship between terror and thought. What lives becomes nature. Dying in the subway (sic), in the bowels of the city, run down by a silent vehicle that lights up the sorrow.
We lived on a stage, facing the furtive but attentive eyes of our neighbors, residents who spied on our everyday routines: they peeked through the windows, pulled back the lace curtains, the latticework, the netting, the blinds, voyeurs spying in through the cracks. To kiss, we had to hide behind the doors or—almost always—in the bathroom, an enclosure where we finally settled in for good. (A story.)
Sitting in an airplane seat, taxiing along the damp runway, and flying over the rainy city toward the sun.
We could say that what scandalized the critics on the right or on the conservative left in Hopscotch is its explicit, visible poetics, the fact of its deliberately being a work in progress. Cortázar has tried to cross the narrow bridge that unites short form with vast novelistic structures without hiding the inner workings. Cortázar’s novel narrates certain renowned processes of cultural consumption. In a sense, he establishes a moral hierarchy in the interior of artistic products, and those critics felt provoked, seeing themselves tied to the “female reader” (the unfortunate name that Cortázar gave to conservative consumption).
What if I were the subject of my collection of essays on literature? Criticism as autobiography.
You’re Lonely When You’re Dead by J. H. Chase is a great crime novel because it is very aware of the techniques and traditions of the genre. It is a cynical novel that uses them coldly and, in that sense, is the opposite of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, where the awareness of the history of the genre is romantic and nostalgic. The scene with the girl contorting, half-naked, her stockings with long runs in them, in front of the agent who writes on the typewriter, not looking at her, and she can’t insult him for fear of losing her chance to get a job, it’s sensational. On the other hand, the scene of brutal physical violence to elicit a confession stands out because Chase narrates it in the present tense, making it elapse over the same length of time that the reading lasts. We might say that the failed genre elements are the excessive expressivity and the use of coincidences to solve the investigation. Also the too-visible awareness of the rules of the crime novel. “‘This scene has gone a little sour,’ I said, for something to say. ‘The detective always gets his girl. If you shoot me the story will have an immoral ending,’” J. H. Chase.
Series E. A good day of work, agile, full of ideas. Advantage: these notebooks are born “so that nothing can escape,” but they immediately show our “inner poverty,” while there’s nothing that can escape, and so I must attempt to think in order to “have” something that will not escape. A poetics of thought.
Series E bis. There is also subservience to the space in these notebooks: often, everything improves when there is a blank page and grows worse when I’m trying to fill the end of a page. Spatial arrangement is also a mode of thought. In literature, I think, the means are ends.
In Andrés Rivera, I confirm his intuition for writing, which functions well, a less stylized but more dangerous poetics, and in rereading all his stories I discover his use of ambiguity, of midtones, few examples of which can be found among us (perhaps Conti’s “Every Summer,” Walsh’s “That Woman”). The key is not to close off the meaning when concluding the story. Of course, these virtues have their flaws and their limitations, and the material always seems on the point of losing its way. These writers (Wernicke, Rivera, Conti) hit their mark in one out of every five attempts, but they struggle to go beyond the limits they impose upon themselves. They are deliberately naïve, the opposite of Hemingway or Borges, because greater awareness comes with greater risk but also greater achievements. Rereading a few pages from these notebooks is enough to make me think about “spontaneity.” A need, then—or rather a desire—for an alert consciousness in the narrative, particularly when the technique consists of stating everything that happens, as I do here, as much as possible, while it is taking place.
We went in circles around the room at two in the morning, thinking it was eight, and then I fell asleep holding Julia, and we awoke unexpectedly at ten after six, confused as we saw the hands of the clock but read ten to twelve on the upside-down alarm clock. Confusion in the springtime night, an effect of the passion that keeps us from sleep. We finally went out into the street and walked around in the icy drizzle. We found an English version of Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground) and ended up at La Fragata, on Corrientes and San Martín, having café con leche and croissants.
I would like to recapture my wanderings with David Viñas around this same apartment; we talked as we moved around the room and then continued at his place, and later we had lunch together and ended up walking down Corrientes.
Series E. This notebook also suffers from the effects of yet another static time, in which all I can do is look for a way out, as though I were swimming underwater in the hold of a sunken ship.
I watch the days passing, one after another, unable to do anything that would lend them meaning. Julia said: “In ten days, you’ll still think you’re burned out. You’ll look for more excuses so you can say: ‘I’m ready, I am at the bottom of the sea.’” All of that, said sweetly.
Twenty-five years had passed; some women who had been very beautiful when they were young now exhibit the traces of time on their proud faces, and they hang Jeanne Moreau’s photograph on the walls of their hearts. But this is only the wall across from the glass table where I sat in one of its high-backed chairs, not taking off my jacket, looking at a woman with blue painted eyelids as she told stories with metaphors that included me in them and talked pejoratively about herself. Finally I left, made it to the ground floor without an umbrella, went back up, walked into the empty place until she appeared with my umbrella, wearing a terrible smile, a smile that awoke an endless sadness within me, the light rain still wetting the streets.
Series A. In this notebook, I leave a record of the sixteen hundred seventy-two (1,672) copies of my book purchased by presumed readers. Mathematical exactitude that was converted into sixty thousand fifty pesos (60,050), with which I settled my account for books at my publisher’s bookshop, books that had allowed me to survive by reading for the last two years. And so, to celebrate, I bought no. 11 of Communication magazine and Libertella’s novel.
I saw David going past in a taxi, upset, aggressive, wearing those glasses that look like a mask, suffering from dizziness and headaches, with his touching attempt to “objectify” and distance himself, as though his fear of old age had turned him into someone else. A speculative interpretation, because David looks too much like me.
I managed to wake up at five thirty in the morning, and now I sense the engine of the garbage truck below, on Carmen, mingling with the noise of bins hitting the sidewalk and the voices of workers yelling to one another.
Too much alcohol last night for me not to feel this oppression in my head, slowly clearing away in the crisp morning air.
Confirmation that I’ve been constructing my life against my better judgment. From the time of the photo that shows me smiling timidly at age six (dressed in overalls, short pants, and a shirt behind which you can glimpse my—heartwarming—fleece shirt with buttons, standing to the left of the blooming jasmine, in the open entrance to the hall where you can see the hard chairs of pale wood) all the way to this warm November night: narratively, it would be delightful to seek the paths, the detours, the good decisions, the accidents that lead from one image to another.
What seems undeniable is my learning of humility—that is, control over my emotional nature in order to face the extreme expressivity of family life. That may be where my interest in skeptics comes from, those elusive figures who conceal sentiments under irony. A learning that may end up in desolation, silence, if I’m unable to retrace my steps and rescue my emotions.
Series E. In reading my diaries from 1957, some constants appear: an evolving relationship with Elena, getting myself caught in everyday ceremonies (I went to play chess every day. Discovery of voracious reading, three books in one week). Narrative experience, double consciousness, and a schism between who I was in 1957 and who I am now in 1968 as I reread these events. Retrieving the events because of the value they may come to have in the future, an unforeseeable time for one who is living it. I let myself be dragged along by the rare excitement of reading my own life.
Julia walks and moves around, taking off beautiful dresses, trying on an orange-colored one, holding it against her body and looking at her bare feet.
My excessive expressiveness in my early notebooks, in my letters to Elena, proves the spontaneous motion of an introspective nature, created in the expressionist atmosphere of my family.
Suddenly, like a wind in the night, whispers of my adolescence return: furies, fears, and tears that represent a search for that time when I owned the world in my ambition and imagined how I would conquer the city with my books.
José Agustín’s The Grave interests me because of his frantic handling of a rough language that captures the vertigo and inescapable world of adolescence. I’m not interested in his use of very dated language, an argot that is too lexical, words that grow old overnight. The best part is how he uses Anthony Burgess’s strategy, inventing a language of undefined territory, without a set timeframe.
In the detective genre, certain scenes are repeated. For example, the bad women; Marlowe comes across the daughter of a millionaire who sucks on her finger and stares at him, beguiling. In Chase, the detective seduces the invalid daughter of another millionaire, and she tries to make him come in through the service door. In that sense, it’s possible to uncover a certain rhetoric. Millionaires in predicaments, generally married to actresses or ex-ballerinas who abandon them or die and leave them alone with their daughters, crippled, rather dumb, or nymphomaniac. Cynical butlers, very wise, great for creating atmospheres and delivering ingenious retorts. A multitude of secondary characters, all characterized by some singularity. The “other” fundamental element is the often-repeated moral code of the detective. As Molley says in a novel by Chase: “I enjoy my work. Maybe it isn’t very productive, but it’s original enough to inspire me.”
I recall Valéry’s theory: the story must be told from an idea and not from a passion, and I think that, if Discourse on the Method is the first modern novel, then Marx’s chapter on fetishism of commodities in Das Kapital is the Ulysses of our time.
Yesterday I saw Miguel B., the “delights” of the atmosphere, unnamed things that betray our differences, gossip. Miguel, meanwhile, is lost in the brutal world of journalism, or rather, literary journalism, a nest of resentful people, omnipotent mediocrities devoted to proving themselves through injury. I wanted to cover my back by making my code of ethics clear. All the same, he carries his resentment, his youth, his awful, insane father, his brilliant entrance into literature, like a bulletproof camera. Difficulty conversing with me since I come from the other side and find his literature to be one of salvation, of escape from this sinister realm.
All of this metaphysics in the editorial office of Confirmado with the bold young people (Mario E., Horacio V., Andrés A.) who practice “preemptive journalism.” Amid the tumult, I saw a copy of 62: A Model Kit on a table, Cortázar’s latest novel, a sort of guide that draws its aesthetics from Hopscotch; from what they tell me, it has already sold twenty-five thousand copies.
Dream. I call Montevideo and travel to the south, where I’m supposed to work as a mathematician for fifty thousand pesos per month. Mountains covered with snow, abysses into which I could be silently lost, drawing the buzzards to destroy my body with their talons and then clean their beaks on my beard.
A certain relationship with women, certain ceremonies, parties in dim light that repeat over the course of time; they are the cipher of my life.
Last night I went walking near the river, drinking wine and eating grilled steak in the open air. Before that to La Plata and back, collecting an unexpected four thousand pesos.
Series E. I’m making a place of my own for the first time, somewhere I can put my body and know where the friendly parts will be, a celebration that I discover in the mornings when I get up during the sunrise and write or read at this desk by the window. On the table are Cortázar, Paco U.’s Adolecer, Pavese, and Onetti’s short novels.
In some places I am slightly sickened by the elegant and contorted prose of Cortázar’s latest book, 62. At first glance, we might say, all of the characters are the same or, at any rate, they correspond to the same “figure,” as Cortázar calls it, a ubiquitous space (city, area) that is all of the characters and none. A novel that should be read in the same corner as Hopscotch along with other passages and stories (“A Yellow Flower,” “The Other Heaven,” “All Fires the Fire”) and Persio’s entrances in Los Premios, because of their kinship, their thematic similarities: a secret theory about narrative causality and motivation that, in this case, tends to be aleatory and spatial. An autobiography (in chorus), sixty-two voices through which each of the many narrators sketches the silhouette of an elusive figure.
Pavese, a story. I had chosen to go to Italy because that was what I was most familiar with; I was obsessed with Pavese, but it might have been anyone else, Osamu Dazai, let’s say, as long as it was someone half-defeated, an ally who could help me to take action. But I chose This Business of Living and applied for a fellowship at Dante Alighieri and installed myself in Turin.
The use of pseudonyms is very common in popular literature. In this respect, the detective genre is the highest-quality narrative that I’ve read. I assembled lists and lists of titles for my project of making a collection of American crime novels. The production is vast, so I’ll have to read twenty books for every three that I select. I’m going to start with an anthology, and then I’ll publish Chandler’s short stories.
Yesterday I saw Marcela Milano, whom I mentioned the other day. A judge requisitioned Nanina, accusing it of being a pornographic novel, and I spent the afternoon helping Germán make sense of the difficult ordeal. Finally a meeting for the magazine (Ismael, Andrés, Rodolfo W.), with many ideas circulating about the political situation.
Series C. “You used to deny your body, now you deny your feelings,” Celina said to me. A woman’s great ability to capture and expose masculine affectations. In slang they’d say she nailed me, the way someone would check a fruit to see if it’s ripe.
Some tones, the melodies of certain prose (Chandler, Céline), mark the cadence and the rhythm of the story. You have to break yourself free from those tones, the way jazz musicians improvise on the piano over standards, trying to forget them.
“The Relatives of E. R.” came out, an essay by Beatriz Guido about the writers who published their first books with Jorge Álvarez. We’ll see what happens in the next ten days, remembering that my maturity is slow to come.
A striking rediscovery of Dostoevsky’s best while I’m revising the edition of Notes from Underground, the first book in my classics collection for Jorge Álvarez. This nouvelle will be a revelation; it has never been published as an individual book in Spanish. Floreal Mazía’s translation does a good job of capturing the irascible tones of the prose; it is based on the English version by Constance Garnett, which I read many years ago in Mar del Plata at Steve’s recommendation.
If, as G. Lukács notes in the preface to this edition, “Raskolnikov is the Rastignac of the second half of the nineteenth century,” then the man who wrote these memoirs is the antecedent of the great first-person prose of this century. Beckett in first place, but also Sartre’s Roquentin, Camus’s The Fall, and of course there is the atmosphere and acuity of Kafka’s monologues: “Josephine the Singer,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “A Report to an Academy,” etc.
Series B. Sadness as I say goodbye to David, who is traveling to Cuba and Italy, sympathy with his cutting of ties; he sold his library, emptied his apartment. A feeling that I’m losing the only person I can talk to freely.
In Puig: the omniscient reader. (The absent narrator.)
Saturday was a complex day. A visit from David. My friendship with him is growing, facing the deadline of his flight. His demolished apartment, the sisal twine for bundling books, the helplessness of goodbyes. In the afternoon I have a meeting for the magazine, struggling to complete the third issue, which seems to be almost ready now. An unexpected invasion by Paco U. and Pepe A. at three in the morning like a police raid; they yell up at the window of my apartment from the street, asking for the Bola de Nieve record that I left at Pirí’s house more than a year ago. Hostility that I have no response for, since I’m not going to get into that locker room game, and I have enough education and experience to tell when the “boys” are drunk. One more lesson learned and they’re gone… I have to trust my intuition and mistrust insecure, anti-intellectual, populist associates. U. traveled to Cuba with me last year and we had several conflicts on the trip; for me, the first impression is always the one that matters.
Last night at the Teatro Apolo on Calle Corrientes. A Beat concert, Almendra, Manal, Javier Martínez. It’s the music of the future, and I listen to it with the distance that comes with my age, so to speak. I went with Jorge Álvarez, and this seems to resolve the intersections we see in the bookstore, Pappo, Pajarito Zaguri, Miguel Abuelo, long-haired kids who smoke hash along with Jauretche, Pajarito García Lupo, and other birds.
Yesterday, a journey through the city to pick up the 158,000 pesos for Andrés and our secret, or almost secret, publications, on which I collaborate sporadically and anonymously. I finally found several volumes of detective novels that they brought for me at the Costa agency in Belgrano. I’m making progress on the anthology, which will become the first volume of the Serie Negra, beginning this year, onto which I am placing all my literary and economic hopes. I ended up at the publishing office, dying of heat, looking through several boxes of crime books. The production of novels amazes me; authors like Ed McBain, Richard Prater, Chase, etc. write two or three novels per year for a fixed audience that buys for the genre and not the writers as such.
Yesterday, with the ephemeral quality of cinema, I was disappointed rewatching The Man with the Golden Arm, which used to be legendary to me but has not stood the test of time. The best part is Eleanor Parker, the hysterical woman who pretends to be paralyzed in order to tie Sinatra down, the striking narrative value of the whistle she uses to call when she is alone. I remember the first time I saw it in Adrogué after reading the novel by Nelson Algren, which I’d liked despite its naturalistic tone. Cinema ages more quickly, but literature is more easily forgotten.
Manuel Puig came to visit me, describing the passionless brothels for men in Tangier and Roberto Il Diavolo, whom he recalled with fascination on the Paseo de Julio, an unforgettable man, Manuel said; he managed to meet him before his death. Yesterday a conversation with Conti about his first novel, his current projects. I am reading badly, wanting to get the two anthologies over with and have the summer free.
X Series. David comes to say goodbye to me because he’s leaving; as always with him, it’s hard to write about the reasons for this flight. Later with Lucas T. M. at a bar in the Mercado del Plata, drinking beer from Denmark to give meaning to the meeting. He’s in hiding, and his returns to the surface are always connected to me, visiting me as a way to rest. Despite the heat, he wears a jacket and tie, intending to look like an office clerk, but he is armed. He tells me about a bank robbery to confiscate funds; the cashier doesn’t believe him when he points a Beretta at him, “Get out of here, don’t kid around,” he says. Lucas threatens him, saying “I’m going to kill you” as he backs away and leaves the bank, empty handed.
A check today from Jorge Álvarez (fifty thousand pesos) for the English chronicles. And twenty-five thousand from Tiempo Contemporáneo for December and the promise of another twenty-five thousand in January. I hope to live comfortably for the whole summer with this money.
A meeting for the magazine and an argument with Andrés and Ismael about the implications of David’s trip. A.’s hatred toward D. is very clear in this. He took charge of passing this judgment, inciting Ismael to betray him.
Carlos B. tells me a couple of stories. His father, buying newspapers from the revolution in ’55 to “read when he retires.” His mother, institutionalized and weeping. The father steps out into the hallway with Carlos. “I haven’t shot myself because I don’t have a revolver.” Another story, an Argentine man and a Swedish woman look at each other, and he, unable to communicate with her, takes her to his apartment and there, not saying a word, she undresses. The next day, he thanks her and says goodbye.
X Series. Last night with Lucas, transformations—physical as well—of a person who has kept himself in shape for ten years despite successive transitions (rural guerrilla in Taco Ralo, a metal worker, then an ally of Casco, a Trotskyist leader). The only one in my generation who (despite his title as an attorney) hasn’t returned to the fold. At the same time, he has a way of burning bridges, getting caught up in the inevitable whirlwind of unchecked violence around his life. He is learning to have courage, to not run away despite the bullets, to feign the “astonishing calmness” that the newspapers describe. It’s also certain that I’ll have to write about him again, here.
In Gide’s diary (which I always come back to reluctantly), he has a good insight in comparing the museum to the library. He points out what is perishable in literature, the changes in time that become changes in space. The museum, a pure space, confirms the juxtaposition between the way some forgotten painters are reborn and certain fashionable ones come to inevitable ends. Confirmation or superimposition of what seems new and what has been forgotten, which are synthesized in a single space: the museum.
In Pavese’s admirable “Primo amore,” reticence becomes a tone, a level of awareness, but not, as in Hemingway, a void or a silence; what is unsaid in Pavese turns into something halfway spoken, into a restraint that defines the character.
I am going to make a note here of all my movements today. I got up at six, wrote until ten. From eleven to one, I read all of Pavese’s August Holiday. Then Néstor García Canclini came with a letter from Cortázar and other nonsense. Next I went to Andrés’s house and finished a piece about the CGTA for No Transar, signed as Sergio Tretiakov. Now I’m reading a book by Pierre Macherey, and in a while I’ll go to bed.
It has been raining since last night. I find a striking handling of the abstract second person in James Cain’s Double Indemnity, the reference to an invisible interlocutor allows him to strengthen the narration and structure it.
“The author does not make the materials with which he works,” Macherey. In that sense, he or she is not a “creator” who extracts something from nothing. A history of the motives, themes, techniques, and forms should be made, and a work should be inscribed in the space of that history in order to be understood.
Strikingly, some European writers (Gide, Sartre, Pavese) dismiss Faulkner; they see a great writer appearing and don’t want to believe it. They look for ways to discredit him, to “diminish him.” Today, the tendency is to use his techniques but talk about something else, the nouveau roman, for example. It’s impossible to understand a writer like Claude Simon without Faulkner’s prose, but they prefer to say that his poetics only results from a rejection of the traditional narrative of the nineteenth century. The same thing happens with present-tense narration and the rupture of narrative continuity which, of course, were present in Faulkner.
As for Chandler, his greatest merit is the way he handles romantic irony, set against a cynical and cruel world. The naïveties of his novels are typical of the crime genre; for example, there must always be a character who has looked through a window and witnessed scenes that the detective—who is also the narrator—could not see.
Just now, a walk down Corrientes to the offices where two books by Chandler were waiting for me as well as another two by David Goodis and a novel by Ross Macdonald, free of copyright, in Spanish, which we’re going to make an offer for.
I should reflect on the use of parentheses in a narration (they are a pause, or they are an interruption that must be pointed out).
Ever since I went to see José Bianco, a few weeks ago, to give him the book that Virgilio Piñera sent him from Havana, dedicated to him (and with a photo), we have begun a telephone friendship; we talk early in the morning or in the evening, a way for me to start or end the day by talking to someone with whom I have an understanding, almost without having to explain anything, even though he comes from another generation.
I looked at my face in the mirror and decided that I shouldn’t have a beard. Immediately some issues came up, and now I’m sure I’ll keep my face the way it is.
In the morning I stopped by Jorge Álvarez’s place to drop off a list of books and had a very good talk with him, as is usual these days; he always has many projects and unexpected ideas. We go forward with the plan for a crime collection, in which we’ll publish American novels distinguished from the model of the English mystery novel. In the bookshop I ran into Walsh, who invited me to see The Hour of the Furnaces on Friday next week. Then I got lunch with Schmucler and we organized some things for next year. He brought me a very favorable review, published in La Nación, of my anthology of autobiographical texts. From there I went to the magazine meeting without much energy, trying to put together the program for a meeting among intellectuals of the left at the end of the month. Finally back at home with Daniel and B. having a very good discussion about the script, with compromises and agreements that allowed it to progress quickly.
At night I see Manuel Puig again, always infallible in his selections, he sees “the Argentine” in Isabel Sarli and Armando Bo’s films. There, he finds what he was looking for: passion and social politics, everything taken to an extreme and beyond. He also sees “the national” appear in Silvina Bullrich and in radio dramas, more clearly than it appears in writers from the left, who deliberately try to reflect reality.
Today I reread Chandler’s The Long Goodbye in almost one sitting, it has all of the mystery, the mythical atmosphere, and the tone of a great novel like Gatsby or Fiesta or The Glass Key by Hammett. In a sense, all of his novels form one saga structured around the adventures leading up to the meeting with Marlowe; a character’s past becomes a novel you have read before. This heightens the sense of reality in the everyday life of the protagonist, whom you already know. Soon after the beginning of The Little Sister, after his meeting with Maioranos on the last page of the previous novel, he would have taken a shower and gone to his office to wait for a phone call. Rather, the structure of the novels allows them to be linked as a succession of Marlowe’s adventures as he grows old, not learning from experience.
Last night a thwarted attempt to see The Hour of the Furnaces covertly. It was raining and we all crowded into El Foro. I’m writing the cover copy for Mailer’s Complete Stories.
Amazed at the Americans’ arrival on the moon, which I watched on television yesterday at Daniel’s house.
Before I go to Mar del Plata:
M. Milano.
Miguel Briante.
Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing.
Chandler.
Magazine.
Boccardo (meeting Thursday).
Buy:
Agenda.
Notebook.
Shoes.
A year ends, its merits reduced to money. I earned one hundred thousand pesos per month instead of the thirty thousand I earned last year. Autonomy, free time.
A meeting for the magazine (which is coming out on Thursday), then at the publishing house, nothing else.
I spent Christmas Eve alone.
The end of the year, empty days, not reading or writing, waiting for something to change, not quite knowing why.
An interview with Borges on Monday; my idea is to have him select a set of short stories by Conrad and write a preface for the classics collection.
Yesterday a visit with Borges (brief, hindered by María Esther Vázquez), which will be repeated next Monday.
At ten thirty I meet Borges. I arrive and the maid opens the door and lets me in. Borges is having breakfast, the tablecloth is an English flag, he seems to be eating ham. He gropes around in the air and bends forward in greeting, and the bones of his face are visible under his transparent skin. While responding to the imperative questions of a young man, trying to “make him talk” about Perón and about Russian communism, Borges confirms what the other man says but then starts talking about Stevenson. Finally, as he is leaving, Borges tells him not to put in anything about politics except for one line that amuses him: “What we need in this country is a good-natured Swiss dictator.” Finally he comes toward where I wait for him in an upholstered armchair by the window, carrying a piece of furniture in front of him, and he says: “It’s very dark. Is it still raining?” We begin to choose the stories by Conrad. “The Duel” is the first, and then I was able to see the mechanism of Borgesian fiction almost laid bare. First, he talked to me about Conrad’s story; his reading emphasized the symmetry between the duelists’ private war and the Napoleonic wars that went along with them. At the same time, he insisted on the difference between the duelists, they’re different, not similar, he said. One of them doesn’t want to fight and the other forces him to. Immediately, the theme of “duels” starts to be organized as an uninterrupted succession or an endless chain. He describes them as though they were his own and constructs a series linked by thematic unity.
1) Sainte-Beuve condemned duels. He was fat, very tall, and bald, and he snuck around with Victor Hugo’s wife, disguising himself as a woman to enter his lover’s house. Someone challenged him to a duel one day, but he couldn’t accept since his convictions forbid dueling, but at the same time, he had to accept so that people wouldn’t think his stance came from a fear of combat. He accepts, and on the field of honor, Borges tells me, he grips the pistol in his right hand and a yellow-painted umbrella in his left hand as a way to mock the whole procedure.
2) In the middle of the war, Julius Caesar was challenged to a duel by a general from the enemy army. Julius Caesar would not accept and told him he would send a gladiator if he wanted to die. Napoleon did the same thing, saying he was very busy and offered to send a fencing master.
3) Dr. Johnson, in a tavern in London, had a coarse argument about theology and his opponent, enraged, threw a glass of wine at his face, Dr. Johnson looked at him, “That is a digression,” he said, “I await your arguments.”
4) Conrad was about to fight B. Shaw, who had said that he didn’t like his novels and couldn’t remember the reason why. H. G. Wells intervened, convincing Conrad that he only wanted to fight because he didn’t understand the rules of English humor.
5) An employee at the National Library told the story of a gardener, Narciso, who had fought with a man and killed him. They went out into the street to fight so that they wouldn’t make a mess of the house (the unexpected gentlemen did this even though they were in a brothel). They fought for half an hour, and Narciso received serious wounds on his left arm but killed his rival. The whole town attended the duel, even the watchman. They fought near the drug store, Borges clarified, so that they could be treated.
6) A lion tamer named Soto comes to San Antonio de Areco with a circus. Everyone in town is amazed at his courage: the man puts his head between the lion’s jaws. A tough guy named Soto, whom they call “Toro negro,” challenged the tamer every time he came near the small village and went into a bar to have a gin. “There’s only room for one Soto,” he said, and in the end he killed him in a pasture, even though the other refused to fight.