Julia and I sit on the terrace of a bar over Calle Independencia in Mar del Plata. I listen to myself talking to her without any conviction in what I’m saying. The cold air filters in through the sliding glass and plywood window. The waiter is missing the thumb on his right hand. A strange sensation, as though there were an insect moving around the table.
The end-of-year family party, a tribal, cannibalistic reunion. Roberto is the circumstantial narrator, with the clan as a narrative system. Several recurring archetypes, the gambling uncle, the crazy sister, the drunk cousin, the suicidal sister-in-law. Then he adds nuance to the story: Susana and Agustín, who have been fighting for forty years, only married out of necessity (she was pregnant); they barely speak at all now, except to argue. In the end she threatens to leave him and to go work as a maid, but he warns her: “As long as it’s not in Adrogué…”
Political cartoons. Investigate the first worker organizations, the typographers’ assembly, the early socialist groups (1900). The minutes record that a worker arrived at the meeting three hours late because his wife was in labor. “I want to let my comrades know that I’ve given my daughter the name Revolutionary Socialist.” Make a propaganda comic strip, setting aside the pamphlets and illegible newspapers.
Series E. The only solution to the problem of style in these notebooks is to determine their tone, nothing to do with interiority. Set aside the illusion of writing. At this point, I should already know that it’s useless to transcribe a life. I could only construct a fiction based on certain real facts, but then, why write novels? I can’t rule out finding plots and anecdotes in these diaries that I can use in the future.
Marcos, my brother, left for Buenos Aires last night, determined to get married and find a job after a year of going in circles. At home, this is experienced like a crisis. Encounters with loneliness and old age, children being lost just like life.
Last night I found Juan Ñ. in a German bar downtown. The usual unraveling conversations, not overly intelligent, out of tune. He, as an intellectual, is my antithesis, the type to secure their social status first, making thought secondary to that position.
Everything is suddenly unleashed. On Friday there is an army search operation in the building. They don’t enter my apartment. “They’re looking for a young couple,” on the fifth or sixth floor. A week later, on Friday the 14th, six guys from the Coordinación Federal appear in the entryway, machine guns in hand; they wake up the porter and ask about me and someone named Bordabehere. After I hear about this, the chaos begins, and I pick up all of my papers, the apartment in disarray, make three trips, take out some clothing, the novel, the typewriter, the notebooks, and leave everything in the house of Tristana, Julia’s friend.
I have to move everything, the library, the clothing, the furniture. I transport suitcases, trying not to look at the books I abandon. I gather clothes, papers, come and go several times, look for a taxi, calm in the face of what cannot be changed. Later that night in Tristana’s house, conversations.
I see the attorneys, who offer opposite versions of the future (to move or to come back?), but both agree that it’s best to disappear until the end of the month.
I go back to working in bars the way I did when I’d just moved to the city. Dejected about my library and about being unable to continue with the novel.
Discussions about poetry with Tristana and her sister. They give me a hilarious retelling of the story of a taxi escape, or rather, the taxi driver’s escape; he goes off at top speed after a crash, chased by everyone, and then crashes three more times.
A conversation with Andrés and Lucas in a beautiful house on a street lined with trees. We sleep here after a day spent traveling around the city amid the heat and cracked streets. I’m reading Pound and Joyce.
I start to work slowly, bit by bit. We keep moving around the city, but at least I have a place now. On Thursday night I ran into Benjamín and came to this ramshackle house in Boedo with him. I remember my houses as a student, the lights that never worked, the broken furniture.
I have dinner with Enrique. We talk about Borges. He is capable of a careful disparagement of the Socialist countries, which guarantees him work at La Opinión. Meanwhile, he’s making progress on a story about Aramburu’s death. An excellent style but still weak, not much clarity as a writer.
I spend the night with Tristana and her stories, how she traveled to Europe with her family in the middle of the war.
Tristana is helpless, clinging on to anyone who will listen to her. She tells her suicide stories. “When I was born, my mother left me behind to go to Europe.” Her husband, caring for her in the hospital.
The same as always at Los Libros magazine. Fatal boredom, news of expanding the committee that catches me off guard.
Since I moved to this house, with a Spanish patio full of trees, things have become organized. Every morning I go to Benjamín’s place and work on the novel for four or five hours there. I feel like I’m “on vacation,” as though Buenos Aires were a city I’ve only just gotten to know, an effect of simultaneous changes of residence that force me to travel around different neighborhoods.
These “reality checks” have always helped me in one way or another. They force me to adapt quickly and yet dis-adapt with the same speed, like a traveler unpacking his luggage at every stop and then repacking it the next morning. For example, the afternoon walk south to that house where I shut myself in to write, alone.
The waiter sees me reading about the ERP robbery of the Banco de Desarrollo in the newspaper Crónica, when they took five hundred thousand dollars, and he starts talking to me about his life with almost no segue. An orphan since age six, he is raised by an aunt and uncle who make him live in an attic where they pile suitcases, old furniture, things they don’t need. He doesn’t even have a table, and he has to sit on the floor to do his assignments for school. “Even so, I managed to make it a quarter of a fiscal year before I had to leave for reasons out of my control.” He talks to me about books: “And what good does it do me if I read? What do I look like to you? Wearing my white jacket, working as a waiter.” He complains about the political situation.
News, people from the Coordinación Federal visit my apartment two more times. Impossible to go back, etc. A feeling of relief, as though I’d been hoping for that. No idea what to do, really, but anyway I’ll be able to find somewhere for myself for the month. We’ll see in a while.
At midnight I go to visit León, who phoned looking for me at the magazine office and rebuked me for not having visited him. His beautiful apartment on the 17th floor, a great high-intellectual atmosphere. He finished writing his book on Freud and Marx and hopes to submit it this month. Social conversation, and then he recites part of his book for a while. Of course, I ironically recount my own odyssey, etc.
Conversations with Rubén, who criticizes me for not putting my ideas on agitprop into practice. He’s right about that, I’m now too bound to my obsession with literature (which I never plan to abandon). The example of Walsh hangs in the air; he abandoned fiction to direct the CGTA newspaper. Walsh had called on me to join the project, but I declined. The rest of the discussion is difficult because of his demagogy around me. Accepts everything, etc.
Later I go to Los Libros, a great commotion. Carlos A., Marcelo, Germán, and Toto are there, talking about David’s psychotic outburst. He came in and asked who published Alejandra Pizarnik’s book of poems at Siglo XXI and why, saying that the book is a piece of trash, that whoever published it doesn’t understand anything, that she’s an illiterate. The matter grows worse, Toto barely defends himself, David becomes furious. He comes right up to Toto, takes off his glasses as if he’s about to fight him, and abuses him: “Fuck you, your mother and your grandmother, I’d punch you if you didn’t have your glasses on.” A spell of madness and, at the same time, a demonstration of David’s dangerous spontaneity, so competitive. Why did he go after Alejandra Pizarnik? No way to know, although maybe, I now suspect, it’s because she’s one of Cortázar’s protégés.
I am in my new apartment now, a spacious environment with a large picture window, the city eleven stories below. Nervous about possible dangers in this place (the phone being tapped by the people from the ERP). I try to write or, rather, try to get myself going. I discover what a sedative complete solitude is for me, and I plan to rent a studio and live there alone.
I can’t find myself inside this luxurious, empty apartment, floating in the terrible world of the city. At three in the morning last night, I stood in the corner with my briefcase, ready to leave. Lunch with José Sazbón, we talk about the translation of Sartre’s Flaubert, which he edited. José, lucid and shy, is humble despite his brilliant potential. A doctoral fellowship in Paris, a guaranteed career as a researcher, etc., free to study for his whole life. By contrast, I see myself up in the air, without a future. Let’s imagine a person who goes along making choices and suddenly suspects he has taken the wrong path, but he doesn’t know how to turn back or where to go.
Detective genre. Anonymous craftsmen who habitually write under pseudonyms, acutely aware of the market and the price they are paid per written word. Their stories first circulate in cheap magazines and then in books at kiosks. Demand that is not very diversified and undergoes sudden jumps: from the mystery novel to the thriller to the spy series. Often the same writer will write books in a variety of registers under different names, J. H. Chase for example.
At night in the publishing office, we have a conversation about the complications of publishing Sartre’s monumental Flaubert. We will get it done, but there’s a great deal of difficulty with the translation.
A beautiful landscape, the city in light rain, the river in the background. Airplanes taking off from the airfield nearby. The only color that of posters for 7 Up.
Julia to has started to separate herself from me. She sustains herself as best she can in the midst of this absurd chaos.
Yet another move, and now I’m in Tristana’s house, closer to civilization.
Yesterday David signals me from a bar across from San Martín as I am passing on the way to meet Ricardo at El Foro. Overblown greetings and promises to meet soon. Ricardo and I have lunch on Calle Paraná and walk around the whole city, the French bookshops, Hachette, all of the books double the price of a year ago. At the end, there was a drunk who insulted the waiter, and then he got punched and cried in humiliation.
Later with David, who has finished the first draft of his work about Dorrego. He leads me off to a room with a view over the rooftops and talks to me, downcast, about his psychotic outburst with Schmucler, blaming himself without conviction.
Well, last night was the end with Julia. I meet her in Galerna and we walk to El Toboso, have dinner, and say goodbye as though we didn’t know each other.
No one has ever been as alone as a lover saying goodbye forever to the woman he has lived with for five years.
I sustain myself in the void, not even dreaming of writing or reading. My friends are charitable, and I affect a stoic pose. I meet Ricardo and wait a half hour for him, stunned, dead. I rediscover the exercises that I learned in my youth for how not to think; I hadn’t practiced them in six years. In a while, the predictable conversation continues. The kind of lines like “all relationships end, etc.” Almost without a word, he brings me to his clandestine house, where I have lunch with him and we talk about the political future. Finally we hug, somber.
I have nowhere to work except for friends’ houses. I have no idea what I can do to get my books without having a run-in with the police.
Thinking about what is to come weakens me so much that I can only cling to the moment. If I want to avoid spectacle, complaints, it will be best for me to stay shut in alone, waiting for sorrow to pass and become dulled.
Aside from matters of passion, I was with Szichman and Germán García yesterday. Germán says that I’m the hinge between Marxism and the avant-garde in Argentina. David reiterated to him that I’m the best essayist of my generation.
I try to erase last night’s dream: the police were in my house and destroyed everything, I regret not having left during carnival. Why are they looking for me? There’s always a motive.
Series C. Maybe I must ask myself why I’ve stopped writing here in recent days, so full of events, but maybe that is the reason. Maybe I don’t want to “see them” as they are. Last night, for example, with T. until five in the morning, the games I lost. We had dinner in Taormina and, after having a whiskey at El Blasón, sat down in the plaza of Las Heras and then walked through the empty city until dawn, making it to the large house with a thousand rooms on Calle Arenales, where we listened to Schumann and continued drinking alcohol under the Flemish tapestries; I didn’t know what I could do to cut the night short without sleeping with her or at least trying. Today I am still overwhelmed, and I call her and cannot reach her.
Earlier, dinners and walks with the gang from Los Libros, Germán, Marcelo, and David.
I’m trying to figure out how to get into the apartment on Calle Sarmiento. At night, or would it be better in the middle of the day?
Julia and I come and go, carried by the wind. Resolution to live separately. Days without seeing each other and then she appears, beautiful as a stranger, subdued by herself.
What a time this is, solitary as a cat and lost in strange houses. Surprisingly, waiting on a woman I never would have reconciled with three months ago.
I should have at least tried to record this frenetic period of time day by day: I wrote an article on Brecht in ten days, without my library, lost in this house on Calle Uriburu where the sun hits my face at seven in the morning; along with that, my affair with T., born amid the chaos while Julia was leaving, has started to grow and is now another unresolved issue.
We went out together several nights in a row to eat dinner, to drink whiskey until four in the morning. Feeling my way around in the darkness, fascinated more and more by her way of being. Finally, on Saturday, February 26, I am lonely and feel so bad that I tell Ricardo about it, having gone to the theater with him, and then I call T.’s house and Julia is there. The three of us playing this ridiculous game. I go out again the next day and stay the night with her until eight in the morning. I accept that the issue revolves around the axis of whether to “tell Julia or not,” as she is her friend. I see T. again the following afternoon, and she actually insists that we continue. At noon on the 27th I run into Julia in Pippo and play her and T.’s game of being “sincere.” But as soon as I say that I’ve been with T. for the last few days, Julia runs out of the restaurant. I try to talk to T., but all of the public phones on Corrientes are out of order.
I meet David in Ramos at three in the afternoon and then Julia appears, along with T. I go to the Politeama theater and tell T. that I’m going to call her. She can’t look at me and lowers her eyes. “What for?” she asks me. She backs out, will not take it any further, in fact has chosen Julia.
On March 1 I had a hellish night. “Goodbye” from T. and also distance from Julia; in the morning I go back to Ramos, where Julia has plans to meet David. She comes and tells me that I can’t be with “her friend,” but yes with another woman, etc.
And so, I kept my distance at Ricardo’s house today; yesterday I met T., who respects the decision and is beginning to understand.
I walk home along an empty Calle Santa Fe at around four in the morning, with no transportation because of the strike, and suddenly a block of cars shoots around the end of the avenue. When they get closer, I can make out a patroller and two army trucks chasing a Torino: on the corner of Suipacha, twenty meters away from me, they cross in front of the escaping car, forcing it to stop. Men in civilian clothes and soldiers with machine guns step out and make three young people get out with their hands up, vulnerable. I cross toward Charcas trying not get myself involved in the matter and return to the empty house, tangled up in all of my catastrophes.
As has happened to me at other points in my life, I find Julia’s handwriting when I open this notebook. I want a word, she has written. You knew I would be your first reader, but you didn’t know how astounded I would be when I realized that, in a few years, you would reread the notebook and would really believe what it says, and it’s this astonishment that drives me to the sacrilege of writing in your notebook so that, one day, I will be something more than a vague presence that structures your story. A strange case, this novel in which a character who has been killed off comes back to life and talks back to the author, telling him he didn’t understand how to read my signals, and saying that this dead man was an absurd Dostoevskian who talked about “fantasy,” meaning reunions of those distant adolescent friendships he once cultivated. Maybe one day you’ll begin to remember that, the way I was, I was always too brutal for little emotions, because (with you!) I never wanted to use big words. That’s why I’m trying now to make you understand what you did wrong, that, to me, your relationship with Tristana was too commonplace. For my part, I haven’t been with anyone and, if I had chosen anyone, I would have chosen your brother, or maybe even your father, something a bit more unthinkable because, as you know, that would fit my style better. The rest was as miserable and shameful as your interest in that poor, crazy little millionaire who found a chance to be reborn with the man who had been with her friend. A sad little bourgeois girl whom I helped you to invent because, to stand up in front of you (terrible and brutal child), I needed to exploit someone who believed she was with me. My style lies in actions that are terrible, beautiful, cruel, but a bit more generous.
Finally I return, and for the first time am writing in an apartment on Canning and Santa Fe that I managed to rent a few days ago.
It’s impossible to write in these tumultuous times. As I read what Julia had written, I once again understood that no one ever says what they should, that everything is a disastrous misunderstanding.
And yet I still moved forward with the things in my life. I wrote two political articles for Desacuerdo, but I couldn’t write an assessment of these two eternal months when my life changed its course. Where will it go?
Moving was the hardest thing, a fantasy of the police coming to my hideout; the day before, baskets to carry my books, papers, a chaos that mirrored my soul: old notebooks, photos, shoes, letters. A new chronology. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by all of the objects I’ve managed to accumulate. The next day the electricity in the apartment was shut off, and I lit candles at six in the morning. The incredible feeling of being forced to abandon a place where I’ve been happy. Then, the landlord, who understands the clandestine nature of my move, charges me twenty-five thousand pesos (instead of the fifteen we had agreed on), insinuating that he has to sort things out with the police.
A feeling that I am moving in leaps, here now in this empty place where I will bring abandoned remnants and settle myself in to survive.
I saw Andrés yesterday, his book has been seized. He hopes to be able to shut himself in for the winter.
Go back over these impossible months. See what I am capable of.
A meeting for the newspaper Desacuerdo, nothing but good intentions. Oscar proposes that I direct it, but I decline with the politest firmness possible. I listen uncomfortably to the conversational discussions about my merits for the position. In short, I’m unable to accept what I myself have chosen. This legal newspaper, which comes out in the kiosks and discusses the politics of the dictatorship, is my chosen political work, but I can’t devote all of my time to it because all I am is a friend of my friends who have dedicated their lives to politics.
I see Andrés, ceremonious, weak underneath his aggressive exterior. With each of my friends, there’s always something that separates us.
There is little to be said about me at the moment, three packages tied up with sisal twine holding my notebooks. I untie them, again find what is written here, and avoid talking about saying goodbye to T.
A man who finds himself cornered, his face to the wall, realizing that the wall is a mirror.
I have discovered Charles Ives. A good time to come across this music.
I’ve been built by certain readings; let’s remember Pavese’s puritanical voluntarism, it’s as though I found in that the written prophesy of my life.
At night I listen to Ives under the lamp that silhouettes me in a circle of light, alone with this perverse feeling of estrangement that I always confuse with loneliness.
“What the subject seeks in a prostitute is the phallus of all the other men; it’s the phallus as such, the anonymous phallus,” J. Lacan.
Perhaps I’ve made a mistake yet again (it’s always the same, we always come back to the same place) in choosing solitude as a way of breaking ties. An effect, but of what? Arguing with León, watching television are only weak consolations. I never could escape this obsession in which I live. What I mean is that my absurd argument last night with León left me disoriented because, as always happens in such cases, I’ve discovered some incompetence, weak in a way that no one knows better than I.
“The style of sentiments is the Baroque,” G. Rosolato.
None of what I’ve written in the last five years is working; I just reread drafts of my novel with a fatal indifference. It tells the story of a gang of criminals who attack a bank truck in collusion with the police and then escape to Montevideo, breaking their agreement. A few days later, because of a betrayal, they are traced to a downtown apartment. They decide to hold out until morning even though they know it will be impossible for them to make it out alive if they don’t give in earlier. They make this heroic, unexpected decision, which in fact turns them—at least for me—into tragic heroes. To complete the circle, at dawn, when they can no longer defend themselves, they decide to burn the five hundred thousand dollars from the robbery. I’ve put together the story here so that something will survive of a novel that I’m going to throw out the window (if I can bring myself to do it).
Now I’m listening to Alban Berg; musicians are doing the same thing as Joyce. I’m sitting in a leather armchair, facing the window with a view over the river, in a curious state of mind, euphoric to realize that I’ve managed to find a place to live in spite of everything. A feeling of unexpected faithfulness to decisions made at age eighteen, which are also being validated in this dark time as I test my limits.
Arguments at the newspaper Desacuerdo, casual meetings with friends at the Galerna bookshop, and I went to Los Libros; the magazine just came out on Monday. I came back home, worked on the notes for Desacuerdo, dropped them in the mailbox, walked around Plaza Lavalle, and ended up having dinner alone at Dorá.
Opening the package with original versions of the novel I’ve been working on for three years is enough to make me feel a sort of deadly chill. I think about setting it aside, doing something else, or starting it over.
I sleep for ten hours, the same as in my best times. Before that I walked around the city all day trying to get some air and ended up watching Murmur of the Heart by Louis Malle in the theater.
Police sirens while I write. The ERP killed Sallustro, the director of Fiat, when he was discovered by the police. An ERP-FAR unit killed General J. C. Sánchez, Lanusse’s second-in-command in the Gran Acuerdo political plan. He was the strategist for the anti-guerrilla struggle.
I’m reading biographies (C. Baker on Hemingway, E. Jones on Freud) the way people read escapist novels as an attempt to get out of their own heads.
Yesterday I visit David and find him doing well, tense at the prospect of the Lisandro premiere and yet calm, as though he found a way to relax himself. The possibility of economically securing this year and the next calms him. Germán is with him and we argue about Peronism, amicably. They say Perón is going to establish himself in Europe in order to confront the United States. A kind of pro-free trade version of the struggle against monopolies. For his part, David is very attracted to populism and, presented with the fait accompli, thinks with the same mechanism of fascination. Realistic criteria; what is present and visible forces him to fantasize about a reality that the left is far from attaining. Later, Germán and I walk around the city, he wants to work on “the institution” of psychoanalysis because the Mannonis spent a week talking about it during their tour through Buenos Aires.
X Series. I meet with Rubén K., intelligent, wise. With him there is no need to insist on my confidence, which vanishes as soon as he leaves anyway.
“Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case,” John Cage.
A meeting for the magazine; Schmucler goes on about Perón, I grow bored.
Both here and everywhere else I’m writing less and less. Some incidents happened in the last few days. David, for his part, premiered Lisandro on Friday to quite a mixed audience. We’re all there, everyone on the cultural left and the liberal right are also there. A kind of internal X-ray of David. The mise-en-scène is good, adding to the outrageous “sacramental” quality, and for what it loses in political potency, it gains in rhythm and sculptural quality. Applause at the end, and David goes on stage to receive the gratification he needs.
Political conflicts in the meantime, disagreement that advances amid Andrés’s deviations. Rubén stays over for the night and gives me his version: Andrés is being pressured by Susana I., some resentment. León visits me on Saturday in the middle of all that, and I have a good time with him after months of veiled tension.
I’m working, answering letters for the publishing house, writing articles, jacket copy and introductions (Uwe Johnson, LeRoi Jones, etc.).
David stops by to see me, euphoric about the success of Lisandro, an opening week with five hundred audience members every day, and his newspaper and television adventures: he denounces Jozami’s kidnapping live and direct on Channel 9.
The first issue of Desacuerdo comes out, made out of what we have. We reversed the slogans: against the dictatorship’s Gran Acuerdo Nacional. Intense days, meetings, success by the priest Longoni, Rubén’s driving force, and a variety of other events that I observe with unpleasant irony.
I write in these notebooks because it is no trivial thing to accumulate facts or implications that will be erased for everyone. Today, for example, I’m about to start the prologue for Chandler, and Aurora is on her way, coming to occupy the apartment while I go to the meeting for Los Libros.
David visits me, euphoric about the success of his work, great impact. He accumulates projects like a madman.
Diary of the young man who made an attempt to kill Wallace, the governor of Alabama. The pages tell the story of a lonely and confused boy. Some passages say: “Happiness is hearing George Wallace sing the national anthem or having him arrested for a hit-and-run traffic accident.” “I am part of the world… I am one three billionth of the world’s history today…” “If I live tomorrow… it will be a long time.” “I’m playing the game of life to win.” He had been living in his apartment since November; the neighbors say he was a recluse and they only saw him a few times, and they even said that his mother came to see him, and, though she knocked on the door and heard noises inside, there was no response.
Last night David invites us over to dinner. On the way out, Germán, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and Luis Gusmán, whom I had actually been planning to meet, are talking on the corner. I go have a coffee with them to break the tension, primarily caused by David. Plans to organize an anonymous literary group, to publish a pamphlet against the channels of literary distribution. I continue wandering around the city with David, euphoric, paranoid, until three in the morning.
Earlier with Mario S., naïve to the point of the grotesque. He comes to me with a story of his romance a few days before with a blonde coworker. He finally asks her out on a date on Friday, arrives in La Paz at six in the afternoon and gives her a box of chocolates with a card declaring his love. All of this, of course, said with all seriousness. She backs out kindly, etc.
I’m reading Eve by Chase. Striking, I’m going to publish it. Later, a book by Mailer with an autobiographical story written in third person.
Also excited about the idea of incorporating family history into Artificial Respiration.
I travel to Córdoba with Boccardo and Ricardo. Six hours recording life stories in a church. On Saturday a dance for the political prisoners, a record player alone on the stage, the empty paddle ball court, a false happiness. At the end, everyone sings “La balada de Sacco y Vanzetti” with fists raised in the air.
In the morning David comes over with a suitcase, escaping from the hotel where he was, and everything seems to be halfway done. David is raving more and more, hiding his weakness behind exasperation. He argues with Somigliana-Cossa and Halac-Talesnik: he shouts at them that Lisandro is the finest work in Argentine theater. The kind of outburst that he needs to believe more than anyone else.
I go around Los Libros with Beatriz S., we agree that David suggests a nineteenth-century literary model along the lines of Sarmiento, and Lisandro, settled into that project, finds a passive, comfortable audience.
I spend five hours listening to the tape recorded in Córdoba, good at certain moments. Eventually, Andrés and Rubén and I go out for dinner at Pepito. “Overjoyed,” Andrés tells me about David’s fit, how he threw himself at Cossa, Halac, etc., challenging them to outdo Lisandro. In the restaurant, Julia, who has reappeared in my life, very dazzling, corners Rubén, arguing about the place of women in politics.
Altamirano came to see me so that I’d go to the first meeting. When I get back, David drops in, going on about his obsessions. He wants me to be witness to an argument with León in the next three or four months, planning to accuse him as a false friend.
I woke up at six in the afternoon, having fallen asleep at noon after writing several letters and going out to buy envelopes in the freezing morning. I read until seven thirty. Then David came and we went to have dinner on Paraná and Sarmiento, and I went to the theater with him: sold out, with bourgeois ladies and gentlemen applauding at the least expected moments.
I go downtown and find Marcelo with Ismael and Tula. Trotsky’s books found in the used bookshop for three hundred pesos, Ismael will go to see David’s play with assistance from Soriano, since “my brother didn’t send me tickets.” Then I meet Néstor García Canclini, misfortune in La Plata after the Peronist invasion at the College.
A meeting at home with Rubén, Ricardo, and Carlos. Rubén gives a very dense account of the source of the funds, the relationship between money and politics, “donations” and austerity. Julia and I went out to get empanadas; she finally signed the lease for an apartment on Cangallo. Each of us will live on our own.
I go to the Lorraine theater to see Made in USA by Godard again, the shadow of David Goodis. The room cold, its paint peeling. The group of cinephiles—four or five—watch the film passionately, and the rest of the spectators—some twenty—just watch pictures to kill time. I am a synthesis of these two behaviors.
That fit of paranoia when we spent a few days at Alicia’s house, having left the apartment on Calle Sarmiento after it was broken into by the army. I was writing some notes on the living room table (white, oval shaped) and, in a surprising episode that summarized the tension caused by the events, I went down to the street, certain that the house had been “burned” and that the police had tapped the phone.
Busy all morning yesterday with the semi-covert move. I can’t carry the sofa bed and the cupboard that I’m giving Julia; the moving-van driver—an old Italian man with a light and comical air—complains bitterly and, in the end, hires a worker. Even so, they leave the cupboard on the second floor and I have to hire another two men to carry it up.
I finish my works in progress: the introduction for an article on street theater for Desacuerdo and a piece on Uwe Johnson for his book at the publishing house. I stop by the magazine office and see Carlos Altamirano, who reminds me about the roundtable with several intellectuals (Viñas, Rozitchner, Aricó, Sciarretta, etc.), which I am the only one to attend. I travel around the whole city by bus as far as Núñez before finding “Farolito” in the bar on the corner, the redheaded guy who instigated student struggles among the young people. He seems to have inflated, besides the little moustache that gives him the look of a villain in a Hungarian film. Along the way I’m uncomfortable because I couldn’t get myself free. In the College of Architecture, students are painting posters, talking with ironic gravity about everyone who is absent, and I stand firm, not admitting I was the only one to show up. With an admirable motion, Gutiérrez—student leader who was expelled from the university and moves among the students like a fish in water—invents a varied series of arguments to prove why, in fact, instead of the scheduled action on Vietnam, the best strategy is an inflammatory assembly for the students imprisoned in the mobilizaton on May 29. Carlos reads a proclamation that we’d prepared, and the students listen apathetically, yelling at him every now and then to speak louder. We leave, going down alleyways covered with posters and writings, and go to the little plaza from which the buses depart: a beautiful image of white lights from the buildings of the University campus, glass and wood in a sort of Mondrianesque abstract structure. Carlos and I come back, commenting on the state of the left among intellectuals, discussing whether specific work in that field is appropriate (as I believe), or whether the matter is an area (as Carlos insists) that must be determined “from the outside” through political struggle. Some jokes, too, after an incident that takes place while we were waiting for the matter to be established: one of Carlos’s student friends approaches. Straight away I don’t like the guy (the idiot is studying architecture and sociology); he goes around with a sort of snobbish superiority made out of current references: the situation with Portaniero’s professorship, Sciarretta’s courses. On top of that, he seems obsessed with Oscar Landi, whom he quotes, paraphrases, praises, and traces in every magazine or class he can get his hands on. After his praise for Landi, he talks about the Nuevos Aires roundtable and says: “The one I don’t understand is Renzi, too avant-garde.” Conspiratorial looks with Carlos, and he explains it to the guy, who is immediately embarrassed. I smiled at him, understanding, and a while later recall a line from Brecht: “It is good when one who has taken up an extreme position is overtaken by a reactionary period.”
A meeting for Los Libros in the afternoon; Germán, Carlos, and I argue with Toto, who is fascinated by the success of Peronism among intellectuals. Hard times are in store for this land, there is no doubt that they have the hegemony and will leave no room for us. Toto is a symptom, they control the media (newspapers, magazines, film, consensus) and can do whatever they want; and, since they employ certain phraseology that seems similar to ours, it appears that they’re able to impose a line, not because of that but because of their own political ability. By contrast, we always seem ineffectual and abstract, detached from practice. In this regard, Viñas should be analyzed as a populist who separates himself from them faster than anyone, not just because of that, but because he is anti-Peronist.
David comes over and we have dinner together, then he takes me to see his new apartment on Corrientes and Paraná, very high up. Above the city. He stands fearfully on the balcony and looks at the lights of the city as though they were the signs of some personal triumph. He’s very wise when he talks about literature, seeking his place and continuously reconstructing the history of Argentine literature. “Sicardi, for example,” he says to me during dinner. “You know what’s present in El libro extraño, there’s all of the grotesque, Arlt is there already.”
I get up late and go walking from Callao to Santa Fe, and on Córdoba and Callao someone walks parallel to me: “Documents,” he says. It’s the porter from Pasaje del Carmen. Desolate, he tells me about how they kicked him out. He talks without stopping, bearded, his teeth chipped and stained, furious, almost cornered. He won’t leave the apartment, threatening to kill someone. He can’t get work. Expelled from the Communist Party, close to the PCR, the administrator kicked him out. And he says: “I have dignity, it’s not pride, it’s dignity. A porter isn’t a doormat.” He trusts that they will help him. “My comrades won’t abandon me.” He was a metalworker, laid off in the strikes of ’62, and he moved around the city like a shadow about which we—the intellectuals of the left—make up theories. “Want to get a coffee?” he asks me. “No,” I say, “I’m in a hurry, you know.” We say goodbye, I can’t remember his last name at that moment and smile, trying to seem optimistic about his future. “No,” he says. “The whole thing’s fucked up.” I go into the subway entrance, kill some time leaning there in the staircase, and then furtively go out again and cross Córdoba in the middle of the street, trying not to let Merlo see me.
Julia tells me a comical story about David trying to seduce a girl, and then she makes up a ridiculous theory, he always falls into a kind of theatrical mauditism (he offers to take the girl to Europe, to buy her fine clothes), and she immediately starts to interpret him ideologically to her credit with quotes from Marcuse and others. Ultimately, it reminds me of a series of writers who think that their writing warrants any behavior in the world, like Oscar D. for example, who always has a Bataille quote at hand. On the other hand, the economic success of David’s play has made him turn out worse; his work is much better when he thinks like a failure.
I wake up at nine thirty, read the paper in bed, then take a shower, tidy the apartment, make toast and drink café con leche. I’m reading the original of Red Wind by Chandler to decide the subject for the cover image and the introduction. Walsh’s translation is very good, he captures Chandler’s tone just right, a sort of ironic distance that creates a twofold plot: the view of the narrator on one hand and the series of events on the other. In his best moments, Chandler is as perfect as Borges; he narrates violence well (or rather, the effects of violence) and is a master of the incidental details that create an atmosphere of reality in stories that are always a bit far-fetched. The detective gets mixed up with murderers, femmes fatales, police, cadavers, and junkies as though he were in a space suit; none of these dramas belong to him, and he watches them from the outside, looking for clues without emotion, sustained by a cynical sarcasm. Detached, the narrator, who is the hero, attends to events as though he were watching a film at the same time. His story is constructed like commentary on events that have already transpired, a sort of comic critique. On the one hand, the “romantic” effect that underlies Chandler comes from an uncertainty: at times, the detective who narrates is touched, is implicated in the events; on the other hand, he does everything for money and is a loser, and yet he has lonely and sentimental rituals (the rite of coffee, chess games against no one). When the two planes intersect, Chandler’s best work appears: the ceremony of the gimlet, etc. That double bind is concentrated around Linda Loring, a deadly blonde, attractive and romantic, who is also a millionaire. In essence, one of the core elements of Marlowe is the fluctuation between economic profit and stoic morality, which also defines the tone of the story.
As with many great writers, Borges first of all, there is a contradiction in Chandler that is never resolved: an attraction to aspects of life that most traditional writers end up resolving by choosing one of the two (for example, in Chase only the cynical side is valued), whereas the greats always struggle against two symmetrical temptations.
At noon I went over to Pocho P.’s place. He’s a likeable gangster who works on the black market: an automatic elevator to the 14th floor, where you have to say the name of the confidant who recommended you to the person spying from behind the electronic peephole. Inside is a carpeted and very luxurious office: international travelers, servants in white jackets, high-class women clutching their purses to their chests. No gangster looks like a gangster here, they’re all gentlemen who’ve learned their manners and style from Playboy. A certain nervous anxiety breathes through this rather abstract office with its view over a long stretch of the Río de la Plata. Inside, constant activity, elegant men coming and going, employees, numbers, prices dictated by the movement of the black market. The dollar may change its value at any moment, rising and falling to create a sort of theatrical metaphor here for money as fate within capitalism. Maybe a satire could be written with this setting: the characters feel, suffer, and become happy according to the fluctuations of the global market, as if their bodies were connected directly to the international circulation of capital. P., gray-haired, well-mannered, attends to everyone, resolving several issues at the same time, going in and out of different offices. “I’ll send Willie for you,” he tells me. “Here’s another,” and he indicates Marcelo Díaz, who, with his murderous appearance—he’s letting his beard grow and his face is shadowed as though stained or dirty—is trying to find out, in the finest tradition of the detective genre, who stole the five hundred dollars that the University of Mexico sent as payment for the magazine advertising. I go back with Marcelo and together we stop in at Martín Fierro to see Gusmán, who’s anxious about publishing his novel. There I run into Puig, who has returned from Europe.
At five in the afternoon I meet with Néstor, who always seems frightened, and in a while the students from Universidad de la Plata show up, proposing a course for me on literature and the avant-garde.
Series E. In my case, it is a difficult and slow road to what Pavese calls “maturity,” meaning autonomy and passion as a territory that must be earned each day. I don’t like the work, but I don’t want to practice the juvenile rhetoric of the writers in my generation either. I’ve been writing a diary for fifteen years and that should be the proof that I’m trying to transform some things in my life.
I go to the publishing office and spend several hours reading and answering letters, sorting through reading reports and magazines with international information about books and translations. Then I stop in Galerna to look at books and kill time, and Sebreli comes in; we study each other cautiously, and finally he approaches. His book about the Anchorenas is about to come out, and he talks about it emphatically, but at the same time he gives off an impression like he’s just gotten out of jail or is about to go back there. He talks about the Trotskyists, the political essayists. “Milcíades Peña plagiarized everything from Nahuel Moreno,” he says. “Nahuel Moreno is sensational, but he doesn’t write anything: he, Ismael Viñas, El Gordo Cooke, and Abelardo Ramos are the only political essayists in this country.” Then, a while later, he talks about Peronism: “The students are always wrong. They were wrong in ’45 and they’re wrong now. Back then they compared Perón to Hitler and now they’re comparing him to Mao Zedong.”
Earlier I had written a letter to Andrés; if I’m clear about the people I converse with and know what they expect of me, I can be a very effective writer. Virtue or calamity? First of all: knowing the audience and yet not knowing it at the same time. Friends are writer’s audience; beyond that circle, there is darkness.
David turns up at my place depressed, apocalyptic, as in his best times. He is hung up about a critic from Entre Ríos who accused him in the newspaper El Litoral of being a totalitarian because of his essays. He is also hung up with himself because he has to set up his apartment again after having just organized the one in Cangallo. Loneliness, no doubt, lies at the root of everything. She finds him in the street, tells him that she’s in love with someone else, and he knows he can’t go after her again and feels lost. As he is leaving, he asks me for a thousand pesos even though he’s making a million and a half per month from his play. A clear metaphor, taking something from me since I wouldn’t have dinner with him, like a boy stealing an apple at the fair.
A dream. An altercation with a social democrat taxi driver, we argue, actually there are several of us traveling in the car but I’m the one who confronts him. I feel that I haven’t made it to the root of the argument but, nevertheless, they take me to court a few hours later. Everyone accuses me, even the people who were traveling with me. Someone, a fat guy, says “he’s the one,” and he points at me, saying “both of us are just as fat.” Everything takes place in a courtroom, and I’m convinced that they’re going to sentence me, and then the dream is in color (it’s the first time in my life that I have dreamed in color, at least that I can remember). On the sea, crossing the Mediterranean, there is a party. From one of the boats that have gathered in the place, I see three or four sailors coming toward me, pushing a globe of many colors as they swim. “This is the festival of the cross,” they tell me, “you have to celebrate, it’s like losing your virginity.”
I stop by Galerna to use the telephone and find Vicente Battista, who now has a beard, and who, as always, laughs uproariously when he has nothing to say. He tells me about a roundtable organized for Nuevos Aires about popular culture and populism. With Getino, Villarreal, Puiggrós, and China Ludmer: monologues, indecision. This makes me remember China so I go over to see her; she’s working on a good project about Onetti and tells me her version of the roundtable, sharing her idea to attempt a dialogue with the Peronists instead of always confronting them at the table in the way that David or Villarreal do. I have to think more about this and decide a strategy. We agree about confrontations and immediate definitions.
I write to Andrés and prepare the jacket copy for the Chandler book. In La Plata, they’ve offered me twenty-five hundred pesos for the course to talk once per week for a month. I work at home and David comes over in the middle, furious about Granica. As for me, I go to the publishing office and Centro Editor and manage to get seventy thousand pesos for a variety of work and then get “stuck” with Germán García, over dinner, talking about Lacan and his followers.
I spend two hours at the College of Architecture, first contact between “artists” and writers. The distinction is clear, the difference is that we—the so-called writers—have language as our material. That is the only thing that unites us. The artists are a more varied gang that also includes architects, which is no bad thing. We discussed commitment and practice. This argument is always the same; for me, politics is internal to artistic activity, while most of them think about politics as something toward which they must go. Basically, for the majority of those who were there, the point was to talk constantly about torture and repression, subjects that seem to guarantee an art of denunciation. For my part, I tried to recall some experiences from the avant-garde that were closely connected to determining a specific language for the left’s slogans, newspapers, manifestos, and declarations. We came back by train at four in the morning when today’s papers were being distributed in Retiro. I go to Pippo before sunrise and watch the nocturnal people celebrating, up all night.
David stops by at eleven in the morning looking for me and makes me get out of bed. I make him come up, he whistles on the balcony while I get dressed, and then he takes a book from the shelf and finally we go down to have breakfast together. We walk down Santa Fe to Coronel Díaz and, in Tolón, after the basics, David asks me: “What are you up to?” I give him a drowsy version of the state of the novel I’m writing and tell him that I’ll probably end up throwing the whole thing in the trash. “You know,” he says after some hesitation, seemingly touched, “from a competitive standpoint, it made me feel satisfied to see that you have limits; I on the other hand am omnipotent.” I saw red and, after that, after a few exchanges of words, I said to him: “Look, old man, let’s leave things here and talk again in ten years. Remember what I’ve said this morning, and pay attention to how each of us has turned out then.” We each went our own way, and I had the feeling that my friendship with David was in danger, at least from my angle.
Ricardo comes over, and we go to see Boccardo and get tickets to go to the movies tonight. Throughout all of that I show no enthusiasm. I eat a steak at Pippo in front of them while they try to turn back to the subject of the script. On the way back we run into Viñas, tension between him and me. He greets everyone ceremoniously while I stare down to the end of the street, and he talks without pause, trying to find some way out. “Give me a call,” he says to me in an aside as he leaves, trying to affect the pose of a beggar. “Stop by and see me,” I say in my best indifferent tone.
Some writers who are “politically” reactionary, so to speak, are at the vanguard in everything else, as though their archaic political position afforded them a critical view of the modern world. Examples: Borges, Céline, Pound, and along the same lines but in an opposite political spectrum Brecht and Benjamin. One outlier case is Gombrowicz; I particularly like this quote of his: “Everyone is a writer. The writer does not exist, everyone in the world is a writer, everyone knows how to write. When one writes a letter to his girlfriend, that too is literature. I would go even further: when one converses, when one tells an anecdote, one creates literature, it is always the same thing.”
Series E. In reality, these diaries should be used in order to search, in the monotonous plot of days, for the turning points, the differences, things that are not repeated, things that persist in themselves beyond habit and are unique, novel, personal. Do such things exist? That is the question of literature.
Tied up with a series of projects. A prologue for Luis Gusmán’s book El frasquito. I have to reread the book so that I can think about what I’m going to write (starting this weekend). A report about the meeting of artists and writers at the College of Architecture to submit to Desacuerdo on Wednesday. A meeting with Germán García to put together the survey on criticism for the special issue of Los Libros; I have to write the introduction. Script for B., for the film El atraco, which must be finished before the end of the month. A class for the group of psychoanalysts this coming Thursday about negation in Freud. Starting the course on Borges at the University of La Plata, four classes that begin the day after tomorrow (give them the syllabus). Otherwise, various projects for the publishing house: notes, copy, reading reports, a prologue for Chandler. I make lists because it lets me delude myself, thinking that by making them the things will get done, when in reality all I’m doing is enumerating them.
I meet Julia, taking notes on Gusmán’s book while I wait for her at her house. I eat with her at Pippo, and she tells me about her encounter with David, who seeks her out so that he can cry about our schism.
Andrés drags me out of bed in the morning; we have lunch and say goodbye to each other in the mid-afternoon in front of Tribunales. He reads me an excellent story, lyrical, epic, with a Faulknerian tone, long (at some points, we might say, it’s a bit too rhetorical and literary in the bad sense). Then a meeting at the publishing office with the habitual misunderstandings; the Serie Negra is selling twenty-five hundred copies on average and, in spite of that, they’re resistant to expanding it.
I meet with the group from La Plata, we put together the classes on Borges in exchange for twenty-five thousand pesos. Then I say goodbye to León R. with a certain nostalgia. I meet with Héctor, a good conversation about theater; he’s planning a show in a circus, and I suggest an adaptation of the novel Hormiga Negra by Gutiérrez. After leaving Pippo we go for a coffee at Ramos. David comes in with Daniel Open. Tension, furtive glances. On the way out, I pass in front of him: “Salud, David,” I say, and he looks at my face, solemnly, and stretches out a hand to me. A ceremonial, “significant” handshake. We turn down Corrientes toward Callao, they tease me a couple times. It is Julia, coming from Sciarretta’s class. Next to her, more present than my denial would have given credit for, also bearded, was Pepe. Introductions, greetings. I insist on having a coffee with them, but they refuse because they’re on the way to dinner. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say. A situation in a tedious atmosphere that overwhelms me.
Just now, at four in the morning, with the gas burners lit to stave off the cold, I’m starting to write about Gusmán. First notes center around organizing the “excess” of meaning that the story brings. Everything is stated, and if it seems strange to some, it’s because they lack the context on which it was based.
All of the difficulty with the prologue for El frasquito lies in the fact that I don’t want to write a “Freudian essay” but rather organize the excess of meaning, showing what literary writing is there.
Suddenly a clear vision, an epiphany, an unexpected, photographic memory: I see the street, or rather, the sidewalk parallel to the plaza by the cathedral in La Plata. A wall with concrete balconies, a portal with an inner door, trees, the empty plaza on the other side, to my left, and, most unsettling of all, I see myself from behind, walking toward Calle 7. Every time I see myself clearly in a memory, something has happened that I can’t remember, but the image, without saying anything, points to the existence of an event. In the memory, I am concurrently the person recounting the event and its protagonist.
I spend a while working on Borges for the course on Monday and then meet Julia, and chaos is unleashed. Always the same turmoil when she’s there. I head home and run into Juan De Brasi on the way, and I spend three hours with him, none of which I remember. I get home at midnight, and it’s impossible to work, impossible to sleep either. I go out, take the bus, go to Julia’s apartment. She isn’t there. I stare into the void until five in the morning, but she doesn’t come home, so I go back down to the street and return here.
After my Dostoevskian attack last night, I am calmer. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, since I was the one who separated from her. The illusion of a woman who’s always there when I go looking for her. For reasons like these, Raskolnikov kills the money-lender.
I find Sazbón and Marcelo Díaz in Galerna; the crisis at Los Libros because of Carlos Altamirano’s article continues. A violent argument on Thursday, Toto travels to La Plata with me, taking precautions in the face of Carlos’s dogmatism. The issue remains unresolved.
Melancholia on the diagonals of the city. I teach my class, and everything turns out alright. Then we all have a coffee together in the bar at the station. I come back, like so many times before, on the dark bus, an hour and a half of thinking in the same way as ten years ago.
After some back and forth I write the prologue for Gusmán. A six-page draft titled “El relato fuera de la ley.”
On Thursday an argument about the composition of Los Libros until three in the morning, first at Germán’s house, then at my place. Schmucler decided that Altamirano’s article won’t go out. His “passage” toward Peronism is not explicit and the debate is circular, elliptical. What space does the magazine occupy? The issue remains unresolved; in Peronism, Toto seems to have found the same path as many other intellectuals close to him, basically the group from Pasado y Presente. The general turn toward Peronism is growing immeasurably, and anyone who opposes it is isolated. It would seem that Toto wants the magazine to follow that path.
On Friday a meeting for Desacuerdo with Roberto C. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but I see traces of political pedantry, and I react. I don’t believe politics should be the thing that directs all spheres of reality. Let’s recall Roberto C.’s behavior at the roundtable of politicians at Philosophy and Letters. The issue has not been resolved and everything stays the way it is at Los Libros, up in the air.
In the afternoon Beatriz comes over and we work on publishing the magazine, pessimistically, sure of failure. Some fantasies about Nené on my part, but who could blame me in the middle of this situation? She suffers from a mimetic impulse, she saw Hiroshima mon amour and got married to a Japanese architect. Then she enrolled herself in a speed-reading course; such is the critic who writes.
Nothing can happen to me at three in the morning, alone in the city, like a sleepwalker who is losing everything he has, struggling to gain freedom of movement as though he were on another planet.
I sleep for four hours and then at noon walk in the freezing wind to pay the electricity bill at a bank with a very high ceiling. Then I have lunch at Hermann, alone in the empty room. I live like someone who is carrying out a delicate and secret mission in a foreign country. Unknown, lost among the people, expecting nothing from anyone, learning to survive on his own resources, with no contact with the country that has assigned him the mission, and with the sole objective of carrying out a plan that he only half understands. The life of a spy in enemy territory. That has been my identity—or my conviction in the world—from the beginning, and the signs are here in these notebooks, written in a coded language whose real meaning I alone can understand. Since 1958, so many years ago now, I have persisted in my attempt to build for myself what is usually called a “normal” life. If I resist, that is, if I manage to remember my reflections from those years, I will be able to break free; in the meantime, I’m on a road with no exit.
“The position of the artist is not wagered on the materials made use of, but on the process of elaboration of those materials,” Sergio Tretyakov. I find this quote in the excellent issue of VH 101 dedicated to the Soviet avant-garde. I find a photo of Tretyakov there, and I take apart the frame that held a photo of Hemingway and put it in on top, a sign of my changes.
Subject. A gang of superstitious gauchos, gathered around a medicine man who claims to be the son of God, sent by the eternal father to Buenos Aires province; they decide to steal the Virgin of Luján to establish a sanctuary and collect donations. They enter the Basilica at night, take it from the altar, put it in the car and drive to the country, and in a forest they take one look at it and then kneel, spellbound. (It would be interesting if the Virgin performed a miracle—for example, stopping the car from starting.)
Series E. For almost fifteen years I’ve pursued a writing that I hardly understand sometimes, letting myself be guided by a certain impulse, talking about myself in notebooks with black rubber covers, not really knowing the meaning of what I’m trying to capture. In order to better understand what I’m saying, it’s best for me to try to explain what was (what is), for me, this thing we’ve agreed to call literature.
At night I return home, and Roberto Jacoby comes over soon after; he’s intelligent, funny, and the conversation flows as it always does when I’m with him. Then I walk around the neighborhood to find a mailbox where I can drop off the letters I’ve written. At home, the electric doorbell rings: David Viñas, aged, white-haired, weighed down, but after some tension, we go back to our cyclical conversations. David tells me about his project of a novel (Pueblada) with a tone like Payró: a soldier in a country town who has a “great love” with a gay barber, and at the end a popular revolution arises. Then he describes his argument with a kid who criticized him for his liberalism during a lecture. As he is leaving, I say: “We have to talk.” He smiles, nods his head: “Didn’t I come?”
Yesterday Héctor came over, hurried, excited. He’s planning to take theater into the street, expropriate the setting, make an enclosure, he seeks me out and it is effort for me to think with him.
I work amid interruptions, but at least I organize a presentation on philosophy for the group on Mondays. I find some core ideas: negation, speech acts, the situation of utterance. I want to make the psychoanalysts think about the grammar and thought of analytic philosophy. Oscar Landi suggests that we take over a professorship in Philosophy. I’m not sure if we can work as peacefully if we enter the academic structure.
Then a meeting for Los Libros. In the middle of the conversation, I see the shadow of a woman through the beveled glass of the door, a patch of red, and suddenly Vicky appears, timid, and I follow her out into the hallway. She has come from La Plata. “I wanted to chat,” she says. We spend the night together, all the way into Friday afternoon.
Vicky waits for me in the station, making plans, and as always, I look at her from a distance, sitting with her in the noisy bar among people who come and go.
A fantasy of escape, going to a hotel in some country town, bringing a draft of my novel and staying there until I finish it. Working at night, eating in the hotel dining room, taking an afternoon walk through the town and returning to work, over and over, until I finish the book.
Some traces of “insanity” lately, which make me see possible fates. Vicky comes over, we had dinner at Hermann last night, and I look at her with surprise, some uncertainty that she doesn’t seem to perceive. The next day—today—things improve. Just like last time, it’s necessary to promise something, some fictional trap that appears of its own accord. And so, today, my certainty that the “matter” wasn’t working: an explanation of my present state (breakup with Julia, desire to finish the novel), a pretext to leave everything as it stands, not see each other, etc.
Anyway, the best part came just afterward. We go down to the street, I with the intention to accompany her to the bus station and then be alone. We walk down Santa Fe to Coronel Díaz. There, we decide to take the train at nine, but as soon as we step on, I realize that the prologue for Gusmán’s book isn’t in my briefcase. I think I’ve lost it, don’t have a copy, etc. I get off the bus at the first corner and walk down Santa Fe, clinging to the idea that I’ve left it in the apartment, but it isn’t there. I go back out to the street, and then something incredible happens: on the corner of Canning and Santa Fe, on the pavement, in front of the store, I see a sheet of paper. It’s page nine of my prologue, carried off by the wind; among the cars, I find another six pages. From there, I go on amid traffic from all four sides, trying to guess the direction of the wind. I go in circles, from one side to the other. At some point Vicky signals to me; in the gutter, in the middle of the block, on Santa Fe, I find all of the pages except one floating in the water, about to sink in. As has happened a few other times, this shows me how far my current “insanity” can go.
X Series. A meeting for the newspaper. An absurd discussion about the actions of the ERP; they freed Santucho, as well as other guerrilla leaders, after taking over Rawson prison and Trelew airport, where they got a plane to take him to Chile. Elías and Rubén criticize the adventurism of the guerrilla groups, putting political work in danger.
I bring the prologue for Gusmán to the Martín Fierro bookshop. Some wavering from Gusmán, influenced by O. Lamborghini, who, angry that I didn’t mention him, wants Luis to redo the prologue. Of course, I tell him he has every right not to publish it if it’s causing problems with his spiritual leaders.
I meet with David, who receives my call very cordially and gets past my criticism. He shows up in Ramos, now bearded, and we let ourselves be carried away by our old mutual understanding. We get dinner together in the restaurant on Paraná and go over David’s old obsessions (Peronism, Cortázar), and finally he pushes me on with everything and gets excited to have me write a plotline on the subject of the theft of the Luján virgin. “I think it’s sensational, it has to come out in the theater,” he says. We end up in the bar with the balcony where I saw him having coffee with Jorge Álvarez one afternoon many years ago, and now we drink coffee again and talk about our “old issues.” He apologizes without feeling, and we change the subject. Finally we go to his place, he lends me one of the books from the Coloquio de Cluny, we talk about his project of writing about Túpac Amaru; the city below is filled with lights, and I return home, in the end, without great expectations.
A dream. I was dying behind a garden wall in a vast park, a woman was trying to lift me into a wooden stroller. “Can’t you see I’m dead?” I ask her. I woke up with a start, trying uselessly to remember whether I saw myself dead or whether, as happens in dreams, I just knew I was dead and accepted it naturally. Dreams are an example of how a story can be told as long as the reader knows the subtext and believes in it. A dream has the peculiarity of joining the narrator, spectator, and hero of the story in a single image; you are simultaneously inside the scene of the dream and watching yourself while the events transpire. Of course, it also you who is telling the story.
In reality—as I learned from Brecht—emotions that reconcile and console in the common ground of “profound” feeling (extreme misery, abandoned childhood) are always the visible extremes of a shameful reality; they are easy to access, real illusions that enchant beautiful souls. The Trelew massacre allows everyone to talk about their impressions instead of seeking an answer and finding something useful beyond the explanation.
I miss an appointment at night when I leave the theater after seeing the excellent film Deep End. I lose my way in the city, on Saturday night, and waver between whether to eat at some restaurant on Corrientes or go back home; finally I make up my mind but just miss the train at Callao station and stand under the light on the empty platform, looking at posters, and Marcelo Díaz appears at the far end, almost hidden in shadows. I latch on to him (as others who were alone used to latch on to me), and we have dinner together at El Ciervo.
I call C., a psychologist recommended to me by Oscar Masotta. An appointment on Monday, October 2 at 6:15 p.m. in a clinic on Calle Díaz Vélez.
At the movie theater again, We Are All in Temporary Liberty, a premonitory title. Afterward I leave to meet B. at Colombiano. Someone touches my shoulder, it’s Lola Estrada, excited, staring at me, mischievous and shy. “I saw you the other day,” she says, “with Rivera at La Paz.” I tell her I’m going to call her, that we’ll get a meal together. Both of us know that I know she told Marcelo she wanted to sleep with me. I “don’t want trouble” (I don’t want to go back to my promiscuous life of 1962–63). Anyway, it amuses me that she would remember having seen me, as though, in these gloomy days, I’m affected by a woman noticing me.
Some symptoms last night. I see Nené at Galerna, she tells me she wants to stop by my place tonight to pick up Brodie’s Report (as if she couldn’t get it anywhere else). I tell her I can’t today. “And tomorrow night?” she asks. I can’t do that either. It’s clear that she came to the bookshop at five in the afternoon because she knows she can always find me there at that time. Quickly I decide that I’m not interested in getting dinner with her or sleeping with her. I prefer to make a date with Ana despite the fact that I no longer have any interest. I teach the class at the Institute and call Ana on the way out, but she can’t see me, and now here I am with the empty night, so I stay downtown and go out to dinner alone. I have a few glasses of wine and suddenly decide to call Lola. It’s eleven at night and I apologize like a phantom; she can’t either, she’s finishing a project, why don’t I call tomorrow?
First session with C. Some restlessness during the half hour before. I have a coffee at La Paz to kill time and then get a taxi on Lavalle. Calle Díaz Vélez reminds me of the boarding house on Medrano, the bridge that crosses the tracks near Rivadavia. The waiting room is just a garage, there’s a heater, and I’m by myself. Leather armchairs, a painting. After a while, a short, scrawny guy with a boyish face comes in, looks around, greets me with a powerful voice and climbs the staircase in leaps. He isn’t wearing a jacket, carries books under his arm, seems intelligent; I later confirm that he is C. Now I’m thinking that he only came for me, that he had no patients, that he spent five minutes studying my information. A woman comes in after a while, then two more. Some guys with intellectual faces peek over the banister of the staircase, call for them, and they go up. Once 6:15 has passed, I think I was supposed to confirm the appointment by phone, I try to make up a pretense, “I didn’t call because I wanted to postpone.” But if I had called, he would’ve thought I was compulsive. I’m going to say that I just came back from traveling. But couldn’t I have called five minutes before? At that point it occurs to me to leave, find a telephone, and call. I don’t know what I can do to let him know I’m here. A short while later a young girl dressed in a pink smock appears. “For Doctor C.” she says. I follow her. We go down a hallway with several side doors, and I’m again reminded of a hotel (with appointments?), a boarding house (something squalid). To the left there’s a little room with a dim light, a couch (Giacovate?) with a plastic cover, a desk. Behind it sits C.; on a corner of the table, against the wall and next to the table lamp, is a stack of books. Then he opens a drawer and several five hundred-peso bills are visible. I look at the couch, at the wall with a painting hanging on it, and I try to imagine what it will feel like to lie there, where he will sit, what part of the wall I will see. (Today, I dreamed I was lying down in the other direction, so that I was facing the painting and he was in front of me. Except I sit down in this chair, that is, I use it because the other is behind the desk and the couch can’t be moved.) As always, I work a priori. He isn’t going to talk, I have to get to the essence, etc. I talk about my separation from Julia, my work conflicts. In general, he keeps himself out of it, and I don’t look at him. He intervenes two or three times, nothing spectacular, more affective, you could say, than intelligent. He tells me that the basis of my work seems solid to him, that it has positive results and gratifies me, but that I should be able to accept that there’s no contradiction between going to therapy to break from certain molds that impede my progress and fearing that therapy will dismantle my relationship with the work. In the end we talk about money; he’s very expensive, and I set my limits (between thirty and forty thousand pesos per month). He extricates himself, asking for another session on Friday. After I leave, I wander a bit around the neighborhood, which I can’t place (somewhere near Almagro?). I think: “What a sense of time, he knew it was time to stop after fifty minutes without glancing at the clock.” I think: “Money and time lie behind everything.”
Monologue (1). When I first came here, I told him, I thought I’d have to decide what the first sentence of my psychoanalysis would be. Where to begin?, etc.
Series C. The circulation of telephone calls and staggered appointments, just now calling Julia to see her today, Lola to see her tomorrow, all governed by the vertigo I live with. I can’t pay full attention to anything, and the girls imaginarily accompany me in the confusion. There will always be someone who’s there when I call her.
Yesterday another goodbye with Julia. I meet her in El Foro, across from the building where David lives, which is being cleared out because there’s danger of a collapse. She starts analyzing, and says we have to stop seeing each other; after much reminiscing, I tell her I’m about to travel to Europe. Two minutes later we leave the restaurant. I find Perrone at a table, he holds me back; out in the street, Julia is already gone. I walk alone through Paraná, alone in the night, doggedly. Almost two hours of walking takes me to the end of the city, past the rails of Palermo, where the low houses begin, and I take a taxi there and return home.
A meeting for the magazine; Toto doesn’t come, Germán doesn’t come, the others come but without enthusiasm. We decide to face the matter head on next Thursday (a different magazine?). At La Moncloa, everything for me revolves around Nené’s signals, a certain mutual understanding. We leave together. We make a date for Saturday. Then I go to Lola’s place, everything goes well with her as always, casual. We walk around the house, look at Russian posters, have dinner at the Salguero restaurant, spend the night together.
I meet Beatriz at El Foro and we go looking for Gregorich to go to the roundtable in Morón, and there begins one of the most delirious and mixed-up nights I can remember. We go across the city to Retiro, take a train with Susana Zanetti and Nené, get off at Morón. Throughout the trip, many jokes with Beatriz about the cultural progressiveness of the West. On the podium, little white folders and a ceramic jug. My participation goes well, more or less. Going last, Beatriz is nervous, imprecise, academic, running over her time. We have dinner at a typical restaurant and I argue unenthusiastically with G. about Borges. Finally the train back, we arrive at Once, I get in a taxi with Nené, we go to her new house in San Telmo, she doesn’t have the keys. Two drowsy friends appear and let us in. We finally get in, a desolate place. Once we’re alone, everything continues with the same tone. Nené is frightened by the place where she’s going to live, she insists that she doesn’t want anyone to protect her, doesn’t want dependent relationships. “You want to sleep with me,” she says. “Of course, that’s why I came.” Nené sits down on the staircase leading upstairs. I left in a taxi, thinking it was all a kind of creole circus, very funny.
X Series. Rubén K. stops by looking for me and we go to Constitución for lunch with Chiche P., two working professionals. Lives that intrigue me; there’s something bureaucratic in the succession of meetings and something epic in how they dedicate their lives to the political struggle.
A meeting of the discussion group with Landi, which is going along very well. The violence and political circumstances as a field of experimentation for discursive reality. How do a series of newspapers, tasked with describing the political world, refer to the situation?
At Los Libros we begin the political discussion, seeing what will become of the magazine. We can’t continue with the way things are. The core of the matter is Peronism, but I also insist that we must go back and define our specific objective and plan.
In the meeting Nené is beautiful, childish. Very melancholy right away, and we exchange a couple of glances. She arrived late, and I left early. That’s how things are for me.
Earlier on the phone with Lola. I stopped by to see her at night. Things went well, and neither of us wanted to stretch out the matter any further. We exchanged compliments, comforted each other, and I left, trusting there would be no dramatic farewells.
My upcoming trip to China is a point of escape for me. On the one hand, I’m explicitly retreating from areas of conflict in my current life. On the other hand, it’s like going to the moon for me, a place that I imagine because I’ve seen it in the imaginary nights of the culture of the left. I hope the time to leave comes soon.
In the morning at the College of Engineering, an empty labyrinth at this hour, the slow elevators and at last a group of students very similar to what I was at the age they are now. They are quick, intelligent, connect well, have initiative. Discussions about the Russian avant-garde, Proletkult, and the art of propaganda.
Walking along Paseo Colón to Plaza de Mayo, I go down the avenue, feel the loneliness of the city without affection. Then I call Tristana, make a date with her, and we eat together; I cling to that woman as I would do with any other who showed me care and affection. We plan to meet at her house at night, while I finalize the trip to Córdoba.
This woman helped me through these difficult months, and now I think I’m alone and have no one to turn to, he said, everything is distant, socialized, and false.
During the trip to Córdoba, Héctor, onto whom I project my old delusions from the sixties, tells me a story about a Spaniard who takes some people to his attic and proudly shows them a letter he received from Cuba (“from Fidel”) in response to his own, which he had written because he listens to Radio Havana in the night.
X Series. The cafeteria on the terrace at the terminal, the city under the sun. I have lunch at Rubén K.’s house. He makes the food in a didactic style while they organize the working plan and discuss relationships with other Maoist organizations. Rubén, serene, wise, firm, knows how to listen.
I spend the morning in Córdoba talking about Brecht, facing the young people, once again feeling like a veteran in front of them. In the mid-afternoon, an informal chat with a group of Architecture students. After that I decide to be alone and walk around the city, mentally preparing the evening’s talk, and I go from one end to the other without leaving Avenida Vélez Sarsfield. Finally, I return to the Department of Architecture and, in the Great Hall, pose a series of hypotheses on the relationship between the aesthetic avant-garde and the political avant-garde.
A second talk, equally improvised, which culminates in a night staying up with Héctor and Greco at an architect’s house. Then Roberto C. comes over with his usual tone, sententious and long-winded, a type of thinking that I recognize and want nothing to do with.
I’m still in Córdoba amid meetings, projects, and talks. Sometimes I have a need to isolate myself, to be alone. Finally I return to Buenos Aires, traveling all night without sleeping, looking at the open country and the lighted towns through the little window, imagining how the other journey will be, the one through which I hope to lose the burden that I carry with me. I arrive in Buenos Aires and am met with an unexpected festival commemorating one hundred years since the publication of Martín Fierro, and I make several calls but don’t reach anyone. Things put themselves back together while I drink a glass of wine at El Olmo, Beatriz turns up for the magazine meeting, and then a while later so do the others. Straight away, Toto proposes that we shut it down and hold the funeral rites; the discussion seems unnecessary to him because we all know our own positions. We try to determine the situation, and I make him see the need to discuss alternatives as well. We know that the core of the debate is Peronism, which Toto has enrolled himself in, and of which we’re all critics. At the end, Beatriz invites me to have a coffee and get dinner. In Pepito, we talk calmly and in a friendly tone, of another time, about Perón’s return. Then she leaves, and I stop by Martín Fierro where I have an appointment with Gelman.
I spend the night with Lola until early morning. We see Esther Ferrán dance at La Potra, get dinner at a restaurant on Calle Viamonte, and go back to her place.
It would seem that there’s always a way out. Today, after spending the night with Lola, I find a letter from Amanda and everything is organized. I feel better, calmer.
In the morning another letter from Amanda, written prior to the one that came yesterday, and more explicit, always passionate and seductive. “In these hard times, it’s easier to give your life than your heart.”
Lola comes and stays with me, beautiful in her striped pants and black sweater, dressed like a child.
On TV, I watch Perón’s return in the rain after so many years in exile. Surrounded by soldiers with weapons guarding him; the military officers didn’t think his desire to return was real.
My brother comes, and we exchange impressions about family. There isn’t much difference between the things we’ve lived through, beyond the ten years of distance that separate us from one another.
Beatriz leaves word for me in Galerna to call her. “I want us to talk about the situation with the magazine before the meeting tomorrow on Thursday.”
After the meeting for Desacuerdo, I thought I had written down Héctor’s address but it’s actually Horacio’s. I cross the city on the 59 bus, get off at Núñez, look for a phone, dial and then realize that this isn’t it, that I’m lost and don’t know where to go. I go in circles trying to find the house by chance, uselessly. In the end I return home alone.
In the meeting for Los Libros, it’s clear that Carlos, Beatriz, and Marcelo are working together in the PCR line and take the issue to be resolved; I am marginalized.
I waited for a letter from Amanda that did not come. The dark city in Plaza de Mayo, damp and gloomy at nightfall.
A letter from Amanda. “At the end of December, once the theater performances are over, I’m coming to Buenos Aires. And I’ll be there to stay.”
A meeting for Los Libros, Schmucler renounces the magazine that he himself founded. Paradoxes in the culture of the left. Toto’s political evolution created tensions over the course of time, until finally he decided to step away.
I’m in La Moncloa, meeting with Germán, Carlos, Beatriz, et al. David appears, shy, with a humble air, he’s come looking for me, and I plan to meet him at La Paz two hours later. We sit down at a table by the window and chaos soon erupts. David starts complaining because the actors groveled in front of him to get work, and from there we move on to the criteria he uses for his selections, if indeed he can select the cast. The argument grows and scatters and becomes chaotic. David chides me several times, saying he’s the one who always comes looking for me, that I play hard to get, that I judge him from above, etc. Finally we leave, and, on the corner over Montevideo, David starts to cry. During our argument, he’d called me by his son’s name several times. I feel bad, etc., etc.
Héctor comes over, impassioned, affected by a woman who lives in his building, whom he “loves,” terrified by her ex-husband, a fascist from the Guardia de Hierro who hits her and threatens her. After that, some confusion (between Héctor and me) about childhood and the images that rise from the past while we have maté with cookies and advance clumsily in one of my typical friendships: I am the father, the “mature one,” while the other one takes everything from me, and I’m trapped (other examples, B., S., etc.).
I prepare for tomorrow’s course, and in the middle Lola appears, excited, thankful for my telegram, always lost in the thousands of projects she has to do, crazy friends, surprise in the face of events. Later, at night, I was alone and started to work, without any need to go out into the street, to escape into the city.
Monologue (20). He tries to understand a certain coldness that characterizes this time, the end with Julia and the arbitrary quality in which affection—with no real bearing on the object or the moment—suddenly emerges (with Lola, with Tristana). Being cold, distant, tough against a certain nebulous area that bewilders him, one which he can scarcely name; language that is confusing, too abstract to “explain.” He weeps unexpectedly in front of a painting by Morandi, violating the passage from reason to feeling, but where did this crack begin? He acts out of necessity: being with a woman, having friends, being intelligent, but what he really wants never appears: when it does appear, he grows confused and so starts to babble.
In order to be unforgettable, you must first have lost yourself, and then you are remembered because of that. The same virtue as immortality (which is reserved for the dead).
Monologue (21). One who wants, can. He said that and thought that affection was something given (which no one can steal), yet there is a certain unease because he cannot repay it, and when affection is missing, or when he doubts whether it really can exist and be given to him, he shields himself in the shield of forgetting; modesty in an ability to be melodramatic. For him, to be intelligent is to forget affection, because he cannot think if feelings enter. Thus, intelligence serves to make himself wanted, it is the only thing—he thinks—that allows him to be wanted, but his aggressive tendencies reveal a “tough guy” who doesn’t need anything and tries to straighten things out by himself. His intelligence and also his literature are gambled on those fluctuations. In order to break through his limits, he must act by surprise, like a hunter waiting for an unexpected opportunity: the short story that he wrote about Urquiza without really trying. It’s as though he thinks that, if he makes it that far, he’ll lose everything. One who says is one who is.
A dream. Several people in a room, just like in La Plata during the student meetings. Suddenly, I start reading a poem, the title: “Tristana Tejera Transita Thames.” In the dream I remember and recite the whole poem. Is it a sonnet? The skill lies in the handwriting; I can clearly see the control of the T and the S because at a certain point the poem makes a lisp, and I think that this spoken first-person is something unusual: a return? I write a comment in the black notebook (where I know I write down all of my dreams).
I teach my class, go out for a walk, the city always strange at that hour of night.
I go to see a play by Brecht at the Embassy with staging by Onofre Lovero. I escape in the middle, overwhelmed by the progressive stupidity.
Monologue (22). He had thought that, in fact, excision was a way of being and at the same time a façade; he hadn’t taken the real moment into account, and his thoughts therefore tended toward mythology.
I meet Beatriz, who returns the folder with pictures of the Soviets in the twenties.
I correct Gusmán’s prologue, which is being published soon. Dinner with Boccardo, then we go to La Paz.
A dream. I’m in a circular tower, a terrace on top of a column, I feel vertigo, I’m lying face up on the floor.
I spend the day on the Tigre in Alberto’s boat. A meeting of single men: León, Altamirano, and Boccardo.
I return late at night. Sitting in darkness by the picture window, I look at the city, the lights, and cannot think about the future.
I spend the weekend with Lola. In the middle of the afternoon the doorbell rings, and it is Amanda, shy but commanding. She comes from the past. The three of us sitting around the table. “Do I have to leave now?” Amanda asked. “I knew I had to leave as soon as I came.” I made a date with her for tomorrow and left her in the elevator. As always, the events decide for me; things hurry along, and I let the days flow by. We have dinner at Costanera underneath the trees.
Series C. I meet Amanda at Ramos, her yellow dress, her tan skin. “I told every man I’ve lived with that everything would go well unless E. R. appeared.” I stood up to make the waiter come over. She moved between languor and energy, very erotic, not wearing a bra, and then she drank the double gin as if it was a shot. She insisted on paying. “I pay for my men.” We went out to the city and walked along Corrientes to Córdoba and Carlos Pellegrini to get the bottle of pisco and the gift books that were at her sister’s house. We stopped by Lafinur and I showed her the bar where I come every day, across from the Botanical Garden. We went home and then had dinner at Hermann, and I got up to talk to Julia on the phone. We came back and went to bed. “I’ll stay with you forever, let’s not be apart any longer.”
In the morning I run into Beatriz Guido, who hands me the things for the passport. She has her usual chaos, this time organized around her obsession with Peronism, the drugs, her brother’s suicide attempt. We have a coffee at Alvear, she takes out some cash while the girl (Marieta) waits patiently for her to leave the money for the day’s expenses. Always kind, charming, very intelligent.
Monologue (27). He started talking about his distance from things, the glass that separates him and traps him in an uninhabitable place. He looks at everything as though it had to do with someone else and, at the same time, events lead him from one place to another without his choosing. The coming journey, which he cannot experience as real. In that dark center, the corpses were then being arranged, as though he were in a locked room now, with no windows, with the air from the fan circulating as though it were alive. Someone takes note of what I think and writes it down. Women imposing on him, or the stories he would tell of women imposing on him. All in the midst of a great sadness.
I miss a date with Julia, angry because I haven’t seen her in days. Then I go to give my classes at MONA, which I bring to a close. Later I see Lola, happy with her flowers. She’s worried about me, and I, in turn, am worried about her. She’d stopped in at La Prensa to buy a copy of the speech by the Commander in Chief of the Army from 1969.
Let’s look at what just happened: I talk with Beatriz Guido’s secretary, she gives me the name of an officer, I go to the Central Police Department. “He’s in a meeting,” they tell me. I return home, worried about the delays. I write my pieces for the newspaper. I decide to go out, call Lola, stop by to see her. I change clothes and suddenly freeze: I’ve lost my ID card. I look in my pockets, in the desk. I reconstruct everything I did with her. I took it out of the little booklet where I keep it, I had it in my hand when I entered the Police Station, I didn’t put it back in its place, I think: I lost it in the taxi! Vertigo, self-pity, certainty that I caused the catastrophe myself. Everything is ruined, I won’t have time to get the ID too. I go around in circles, stunned, for close to an hour. I go down to talk with Lola, but she isn’t there. I come back. I throw myself into a chair. I decide to go out, meet Amanda. “In this state of mind, everything’s going to be ruined.” I go to the bathroom for no reason, open the medicine cabinet, and there, behind the mirror, was the ID. As though I had hidden it there myself. Do I feel good about this tragedy? Dazed, I let go. For the moment, I create real situations based on an element that has a particular charge for me. What will happen on the day when there isn’t a real lost object (the ID, the prologue for Frasquito, the notebook that I gave to Vicky by mistake), but rather a void that, of course, I will never be able to find? Faced with a chaos that chills my blood and the detailed descriptions that await me if that is so, I pass the days.
Moved by Amanda this time, in a way no woman has affected me in a while. Passionate in the certainty of her love for me, she has been after me, she says, for years.
I stopped by the ramshackle house in Córdoba looking for her, and a stranger opened the door for me. I thought: it’s her sister. It was her, however, with her hair wet, wearing striped pants. We had lunch in the pub on Carlos Pellegrini and then I bought her a ring to replace the one she wore. I like her: she’s neither calm nor serious, she’s beguiling. She holds me while I wait for the taxi: “The man tells me stories,” she says, when I tell her about the past.
We go out for dinner at Costanera. Long stories, especially mine, the same ones as always. She listens to them, fascinated, and I feel that everything is false. On her part, a “crazy” love, fantasized about for ten years. It isn’t me, just her remembering a past that we never lived.
We argue (Altamirano, Beatriz, and I) with Germán and Miriam, distrust of “politics.”
Difficulties with the “mandatory” work: the classes, the notes, the reviews, the reading reports. In reality, these are the things I do to earn my living. It would seem that there’s something less clear, less visible in this matter. It isn’t the kind of work that worries me, but rather the concrete result. I try to put together money for the trip to Europe; I have fourteen hundred dollars and many expenses ahead of me.
Lola comes bearing gifts (towels, a shower curtain). “I wouldn’t have known what to buy for you.” We spend the night together after having dinner and walking around the city. Early in the morning she leaves for Rosario, some repetition of my own goodbyes when I go traveling.
Sitting in La Paz, killing time before the movie. He had stopped by the large house on Calle Córdoba looking for her along the hallways with facing mirrors. He always had a slight terror of her excesses; Amanda had insisted on telling his future by reading the grounds from the coffee they drank. By then they’d gone over to the table by the window with a view over the street and had watched the city in the rain. He had a secret, perverse inkling of being seen by Julia, as though he guessed that she would also be in the theater, watching the Melville film they were going to see later.
Two older women have a conversation in the entryway of Amanda’s building while I wait for her. They look at the gales of wind that heighten the rain, obsessing over the subject of accidental death. “Remember Christmas in ’50?” one asks, her hair wrapped up in cellophane paper. “The roofs were flying off, remember how they flew? I was in San Fernando, and we watched the roofs flying through the air. What a wind,” she said, with a wicked gleam. “Because wind is the worst thing, it brings fire, brings water,” she added. “Yes,” the other said, with the same biblical style. “But I’m more worried about cornices, I’m always walking along in front of brick buildings, and the cornices can fall off and kill a person at the drop of a hat.” She looked at her friend with frightened eyes. “Anyway, in the year two thousand we’ll all be walking around in gas masks because of the smog,” the first one said, excited. “Of course, in the year two thousand we’ll be dead.” Then they started to develop a meticulous strategy for crossing the emptiness of Carlos Pellegrini, along which the city opens, without the wind making them fly away like the rooftops from the Christmas of ’50.
A little old man lives next to Amanda’s place and asks people to visit him every day because he’s afraid of dying in his empty apartment without anyone noticing.
Series E. Maybe the best way to use these notebooks would be to successively transcribe notes from the same day over the course of twenty years, without explicitly providing the context or variations.
I spend Christmas Eve with my parents at a Chinese restaurant; I’m grateful for their gesture in coming here to be with me, but at midnight I say goodbye and go for a walk around the city, alone, as I have always wanted.
Amanda and I spend the day at home and see Fellini’s Roma at night.
I go out to dinner with Carlos and Oscar Landi at Bachín, and we talk about the Chilean rugby players whose plane crashed in the mountains; they survived for almost a month until one of them finally decided to head out over the peaks and managed to find a local guide, who rescued them. Of course, they ate the flesh of their dead companions, and that cannibalism has led them to a sort of mysticism that allows them to move past the taboo they transgressed.
I wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible nightmare. In a barren place, a partially devoured human silhouette, the face half-eaten, visible holes and the texture of the face. An effect of the conversation about cannibals and corpses.
I spend the day with Amanda, we have lunch at Pippo, go out in the city, end up going through Bajo to Plaza de Mayo, and then to Dorá. Scenes of the past. One night she came up to my room in the attic, in the boarding house in La Plata; we slept together, and in the morning she wanted to take something, a sheet of paper. I gave her a little flat white stone and she still has it and always carries it with her. She found me once on the street, on a diagonal; I showed her a piece of paper with everything I had to do, and she was fascinated by someone trying to organize his life. Another day I found her on her way to take an exam at the College. She was wearing a hairband. “You look like an Egyptian sphinx,” I told her, and then I write down the dialogue on a piece of paper. “What is it?” I asked. “Don’t you see I take notes of everything?” She stayed at the College waiting for me to leave. I invited her to get a glass of something at Don Julio, the bar around back of the University, and once again I’m fascinated by this woman who gets drunk every day.
During our walk she tells me about her descents into madness, into alcohol, her suicide attempts, her phobias. She speaks about it with some pain, afraid, she tells me, that I will stop loving her. Sitting on a bench in Plaza de Mayo, facing the palm tree that divides the flower beds, Amanda passionately reads my story “Tierna es la noche” and, of course, recognizes the character of Luciana, who is, in a sense, inspired by her. Beautiful, she ties a shawl around her head to make me compliment her and talks about me, “certain of this love.” For my part, I am afraid, but of what? Of her insanity (or mine?).
I was in bed with Amanda when the doorbell rang, and I silently turned down the volume of the record player. It was Lola, who slid a beautiful print under the door for me showing Don Quixote overcome by his readings. A lovely note with references to my dream archive, with a sorrowful goodbye for her absence. A reversed reprise of the first day, when Amanda came over and found herself with Lola. A predilection for love triangles.
We stay together until noon, then she leaves quickly, fleetingly, to see her friends lost in the past, chased. I finally manage to finish the passport process and go back to pick it up. Then I have a meeting for Los Libros. She comes with me. We go out to buy cookies and maté, she talks ironically about us while I call and make a date with Lola for tonight. A strange certainty, at times, that I’m going to be with Amanda for years to come.
Series C. I meet Julia, who had called me yesterday at the magazine. Beautiful, more beautiful than anyone else, and at the same time, as always, intelligent, wary, able to guess what I’m thinking. We have lunch together at Pepito, very nice, in the best style. Promises of love with her as well; she will wait for me, she can come and live with me today. I’m going to leave her the apartment, and when I return we’ll see what happens. I meet Lola and everything becomes complicated. She tells me that I’m growing distant, that she feels left out and that I’m going to abandon her when I go on my travels. She had a dream that I had another woman, and in the dream she thought: “But how can he do this to me now, just when he’s about to leave.” Will I ever find a way to make up my mind and speak clearly? From there I went to see Amanda. I stayed with her all day, sad because she was leaving for Mar del Plata at midnight. At home, around the city, planning the future, she’s jealous of Julia. “Couldn’t she just die?” We go out and have Gancia vermouth with cheese at the bar on Lafinur, and then we go back to listen to music and be together. Finally I stop by to see Ricardo Nudelman and bring her with me, proud of this beautiful woman who sparks interest and suspicion in the men who keep coming in for some meeting, celebrating something I never figure out. We leave there in desperation because she’s going to miss the train and stop by her house; she’s slightly drunk, and the house is in disorder. Her sister is showering, we have to wrap up [illegible], and we bring some bottles of Chilean wine, but they fall in the street, and I have to pick up the wine-soaked package. At the station, we sit down on the wood floor of platform 14, and then “the girls” arrive, her girlfriends, running, hurried, at the last minute. I walk over to the train with her and she embraces me, not wanting to get on. She had stumbled earlier, drunk, and hit her knee. Standing on the running board, she looks at me in a way I will never forget. The alarm went off, signaling the departure of the train, and I was already on the phone talking to Lola. I was scheming about what I had to do to stop by her place and sleep with her, considering the time. If today isn’t a symptom of madness, wrongdoing, desolation, stupidity, then I never will accept that I’m insane, wrong, stupid, or desolate.
Monologue (30). He cannot stop thinking about a nightmare from the other night, with a woman who was devoured. Her face was eaten away; it seems that, when he isn’t isolated and “shut in,” terror rises up and actions disorient him and are fractured. He also recalls the Chileans who ate human flesh. Society protects these “gentlemen,” he thinks, they’re heroes able to practice what is forbidden.
I spend the night with Lola after having dinner at a table by the window in Munich, the restaurant on Carlos Pellegrini. She too will wait for me “because she loves me.” Three months will go by quickly, etc.
Monologue (31). He has started to navigate among three women, seeming to love them all at the same time. He cannot “detach” himself and, therefore, he cannot choose. Things seem to be given, so that no one can alter them. For that reason, he is surprised by his own violence. He scorns A. when she puts her hand on his sex while he is sleeping. B. tells him how she feels because he’s growing distant and the trip frightens her, and he falls asleep while she’s talking. Finally, with C., the arrival of X when they’re in a bar draws a third person into the game and violence breaks out. Because it is unexpected, anything that comes from outside, whether benign or malicious, shakes up the system in which everything could be anticipated. Then his tendency to create catastrophes and tragedies is exacerbated, making conflicts and difficulties worse, creating a void, although the void really did exist before, he now thinks.
Dream. My mother is ironing clothes and there’s a cord that goes from wall to wall. Pieces of transparent cloth hang like dirty clothing.
León R. comes to see me in the mid-afternoon like a shadow of the person I may come to be in the future. Desolate and sad, “he doesn’t know what to do with his life,” feels he has “failed” with his book on Freud that “no one is reading,” unable to be in a relationship and maintain it. Fixated as he is on Isabel, who rejects him and refuses him. My own traits appear in him, so we understand each other very well. This promiscuity will only cease if I fall in love, because loving is the hardest thing. For the years I lived with Inés, and then with Julia, I was monogamous, didn’t even notice other women, but when I have no anchor, my life is chaos. I can’t focus my desire and so am transforming into a desperate scoundrel, indifferent to everything.
Lola comes over and we spend a night at home, looking at the lights of the city from the balcony. We’d bought food and champagne and listened to the Jimi Hendrix records that she brought. On the balcony, we looked at the city, the pieces of paper that fell from a window like yellow snowflakes. The downstairs neighbors hit a pot, adding to the general noise. The bathroom lamp exploded, the next-door neighbors are partying in the hallway, I poked my head out to watch them. I peed while Lola was in the shower. I felt a temptation to throw champagne on the bald head of a neighbor downstairs. I don’t remember anything else. In the morning, she had to tell me what I had experienced, though I didn’t want to remember. Traces of conversations. “There is less and less that can help me.”
This has been my passage from one year to another, from one place to another, but to what end?