*
At the age of three, he was intrigued by the image of his grandfather Emilio sitting in the leather armchair in a circle of light, off somewhere else, with his eyes fixed upon a mysterious rectangular object. Motionless, he seemed indifferent, reserved. The boy Emilio did not truly understand what was going on. He was prelogical, pre-syntactical, pre-narrative; he registered gestures, one by one, but did not string them together; he only mimicked what he saw being performed. And so he clambered up onto a chair in the library that morning and took down a blue book from one of the stacks. Then he went out the door into the street and sat down on the threshold with the open volume on his knees.
*
My grandfather, said Renzi, left the country and came to live with us in Adrogué when my grandmother Rosa died. He left the page of the calendar open on February 3, 1943, unturned, as if time had stopped on the day of her death. And that terrifying thing, with the block of numbers fixed on that date, remained in the house for years.
We lived in a quiet neighborhood, close to the railway station, and every half hour the passengers who had arrived on the train from the capital passed before us. And I was there, on the threshold, making myself seen, when a long shadow leaned over me and said that I was holding the book upside down.
*
I think it must have been Borges, laughed Renzi that afternoon in the bar on Arenales and Riobamba. He used to spend the summers in Las Delicias Hotel back then, and who but old Borges would think of admonishing a three-year-old boy like that?
*
How does one become a writer? Is one made to become a writer? For the person that it happens to, it is not a calling, nor is it a decision; it seems instead to be an obsession, a habit, an addiction; if he stops doing it he feels worse, but to need to do it is ridiculous, and ultimately it becomes a way of living like any other.
Experience, he had realized, is a microscopic profusion of events that repeat and expand, disjointed, disparate, in flight. His life, he now understood, was divided into linear sequences, unfolding series that flowed back toward minor incidents in the remote past: sitting alone in a hotel room, seeing his face in a photo booth, climbing into a taxi, kissing a woman, raising his eyes from the page and looking out through the window, how many times? Those gestures formed a fluid web, sketched out a journey. On a napkin he drew a map with circles and crosses. Let’s say this is the trajectory of my life, he said. The insistence of themes, of places, of situations is—figuratively speaking—what I want to perform. Like a piano player improvising over the tenuous form of a standard with variations, changes in rhythm, harmonies from some forgotten music, he said, and settled back into the chair. I could, for example, recount my life based on the repetition of conversations with my friends in bar. La Confitería Tokio, Ambos Mundos café, El Rayo bar, Modelo, Las Violetas, Ramos, La Ópera café, La Giralda, Los 36 billiards hall . . . The same scene, the same subjects. Each time that I have found myself among friends, a series. If we do something—open a door, perhaps—and later think about what we did, it seems ridiculous; on the other hand, if we look at the same actions from a distance, there is no need to extract from them a sense of continuity, a common form, even a meaning.
His life could be narrated following that sequence of meetings or any similar one. The films he had watched, the people he was with, what he did when he left the theater—he had recorded everything in an obsessive manner, incomprehensible and foolish, with detailed and dated descriptions, in his laborious handwriting. Everything was notated in what he had now decided to call his archives: the women he had lived with or the ones with whom he’d spent a night (or a week), the classes that he took notes for, the long-distance phone calls, annotations, signs. Wasn’t it incredible? His habits, his vices, his own words. Nothing of his interior life, just facts, actions, places, circumstances that, once repeated, created the illusion of a life. An action, a gesture that persists and reappears, saying more than everything that I could ever say about myself.
*
In El Cervatillo, the bar where he settled in the evening, at a corner table beside the window, he had placed his cards, a folder, and a couple books, Painter’s Proust and The Opposing Self by Lionel Trilling, and to the side a book with a black cover, a novel from the looks of it, with quotes of praise from Stephen King and Richard Ford in red print.
But he had realized he must start with the leftovers, with what had not been written, to move toward things that had not been recorded but persisted and twinkled in his memory like dying lights. Minuscule events that had mysteriously survived the nighttime of forgetting. They are visions, flashes sent from the past, images that endure, isolated, without frames, without context, cut loose, and we can’t forget them, right? Renzi laughed to himself. Right, he thought, and he watched the waiter crossing between the tables. Another glass of white? he asked. He ordered a Fendant de Sion . . . it was the wine Joyce drank, a dry wine, which had made him blind. Joyce called it the Archduchess, for the amber color and because he drank it like someone—like Leopold Bloom—sinfully drinking the golden nectar of a nubile aristocrat girl bent low, crouching, over an eager Irish face. Renzi came to this bar—which used to be called La Casa Suiza—because, in the cool air of the cellars, they kept several cases of this Joycean wine. And with his customary pedantry he quoted, in a low voice, the paragraph from Finnegans celebrating that ambrosia . . .
*
The diary was an X-ray of his spirit, of the involuntary construction of his spirit, to put it better, he said, and paused. He didn’t believe in such nonsense (with emphasis), but he liked to think that his life was made up of small incidents. In this way, he could finally begin to think of an autobiography. One scene and then another and another, no? It would be a serialized autobiography, a serial life . . . From this multiplicity of senseless fragments, he had started to follow a line, to reconstruct the series of books, The defining books of my life, he said. Not the ones he had written, but rather those he had read . . . How I Read One of My Books could be the title of my autobiography (if I ever wrote it).
*
The defining books of my life, then, are not simply all the ones I read but rather those for which I clearly remember the setting and the moment in which I read them. If I remember the circumstances under which I was with a book, that proves to me that it was decisive. They are not necessarily the best or the ones that have influenced me most; they are the ones that have left a mark. I am going to follow this mnemonic criterion, as if I had no more than these images to reconstruct my experience. A book only has an intimate quality in memory if I see myself reading it. I am outside, at a distance, and I see myself as though I were someone else (always younger). Because of this, I think perhaps, now, that image of myself reading on the threshold of my childhood home is the first in a series, and here is where I will begin my autobiography.
*
Of course I remember these scenes after having written my books, and therefore we could call them the prehistory of a personal imagination. Why, after all, do we apply ourselves to writing? Well, because we have read before . . . The cause doesn’t matter, of course, but the effect does. More than a few should repent, myself for one, but in any bar in the city, in any McDonald’s there’s a fool who, in spite of everything, wants to write . . . Really, he doesn’t want to write: he wants to be a writer and wants to be read . . . A writer is self-appointed, he self-promotes at the flea market, but why does this position occur to him?
*
Delusion is a perfect form. It is not an error; it cannot be confused with a mistake, which is involuntary. It is a deliberate construction conceived to deceive the very person who has constructed it. A pure state, maybe the purest of all the states that exist. Delusion, like a private novel, like a future autobiography.
*
At first, he declared after a pause, we are like Valéry’s Monsieur Teste: we cultivate nonempirical literature. A secret art whose form will not allow itself to be discovered. We imagine what we are trying to do and live under that delusion . . . In short, these stories are what everyone tells themselves in order to survive. Thoughts not to be understood by strangers. But is a private fiction possible? Or must there be two? Sometimes perfect moments only have the one who experiences them for a witness. We can call this murmur—illusory, ideal, uncertain—our personal history.
*
I remember where I was, for example, when I read Hemingway’s stories. I had gone to the Ómnibus terminal to say goodbye to Vicky, who was my girlfriend at the time, and on the side of the platform, in a glass-enclosed gallery, on a bargain table, I found a used copy of the Penguin edition of In Our Time. How that book happened to end up there I don’t know; maybe a traveler had sold it, an Englishman with an explorer’s hat and a backpack traveling south had exchanged it, perhaps, for a Michelin guide of Patagonia—who can say? The truth is I went back home with the book, threw myself down in an armchair, and began to read. I went on and on as the light changed, and finished it almost in darkness, late in the evening, illuminated by the pale reflection of the light from the street that entered through the window’s thin curtains. I had not moved, had not wanted to get up to light the lamp because I was afraid of breaking the spell of that prose. First conclusion: in order to read, one must learn to keep still.
*
The first reading, the notion, he stressed, of first reading is unforgettable because it is unrepeatable and unique, but its epiphanic quality does not depend on the content of the book but on the emotion that remains fixed in memory. The associations with childhood; for example, in the Combray section in Swann’s Way; Proust returns to the forgotten landscape of his childhood home, transformed once more into a boy, and revives the places and the delightful hours dedicated to reading, from morning to the moment he went to bed. Such a discovery is associated with innocence and childhood but lingers longer than that. It lingers longer than childhood, he repeated; the image lingers with the aura of discovery, at any age.
*
Argentine writers always say, well, the defining books of my life, let’s see, the Divine Comedy, of course, the Odyssey, Petrarch’s sonnets, Livy’s History of Rome. They navigate these deep ancient waters, but I am not referring to the importance of these books, I refer simply to the lived impression that is there, now, picked up without a return address, without a date, in memory. The value of reading does not depend on the book in itself but on the emotions associated with the act of reading. And often I attribute to those books what belongs to the passion of that time (which I have now forgotten).
What is fixed in memory is not the content of memory but rather its form. I am not interested in what can obscure the image, I am interested only in the visual intensity that persists in time like a scar. I would like to recount my life by tracing these scenes, like a man tracing the markings on a map in order to guide himself through an unknown city and orient himself within the chaotic multiplicity of streets, not really knowing where he wants to go. In reality, he only wants to get to know that city, not to arrive at a certain place, to mingle with the whirlwind of its traffic so that one day he may remember something of this place. (“In that city, the names of streets reference the martyrs who died defending their faith in primitive Christianity, and as I walked down those alleyways, I imagined a city, this one perhaps, with streets that bore the names of the activists who died fighting for socialism, for example,” he said.) I was there, I crossed a bridge over the canals to the zoo. It was a light spring afternoon, and I sat on a bench to watch the polar bears’ circular pacing. That, for me, is constructing a memory, being open and surprised by the fleeting gleam of a reminiscence.
*
Primary School Number 1 in Adrogué. A lecture class. Miss Molinari has created a sort of competition: we read aloud, and whoever makes a mistake is eliminated. The tournament of these readings has begun. I see myself in the kitchen at home, said Renzi, the night before, studying “reading.” Why am I in the kitchen? Maybe my mother is helping me with the lesson, but I don’t see her in my memory: I see the table, the white light, the tiled wall. The book has illustrations, I see it, and I still know the first sentence I was reading by heart despite the enormous distance: “Ships arrive at the coast, bearing fruits from beyond . . . ” The fruits from beyond, the ships that arrive at the coast. It seems like Conrad. What book was that? The year was 1946.
“We learn to read before we learn to write, and women are the ones who teach us to read.”
*
It is my birthday. Natalia, a friend of my grandfather’s, Italian, has recently arrived. Her husband died “on the front . . . ” Beautiful, sophisticated, she smokes blond “American” cigarettes, speaks with my grandfather in Italian (Piedmontese, really), about the war, I imagine. As a present, she brings me Heart by Edmondo De Amicis. I can clearly remember the yellow book from the Robin Hood collection. We are on the patio of the house, there is a canopy, she is wearing a white dress and hands me the book with a smile. She says something affectionate to me that I don’t quite understand, in a deep accent, with those burning red lips.
*
What struck me in that novel (which I have not read again) was the story of the “little Florentine scribe.” The father works as a copyist, the money is not enough, the boy gets up in the night, when all are sleeping, and without anyone seeing him copies in place of his father, imitating his writing as well as he can. What fixed the scene in my memory, thought Renzi, was the weight of this unwitnessed goodness, no one knowing that he is the one writing. The invisible nocturnal writer: he moves in the daytime as if sleepwalking.
*
There is a series with the figure of the copyist, one who reads foreign texts by writing: it is the prehistory of the modern author. And there are many imaginary amanuenses in the course of history who have lingered until today: Bartleby, Melville’s spectral scrivener; Nemo, the copyist without an identity, whose name means “Nothing,” from Dickens’s Bleak House; Flaubert’s François Bouvard and his friend Juste Pécuchet; Shem (the Penman), the delusional scribe who mixes up letters in Finnegans Wake; Pierre Menard, faithful transcriber of Don Quixote. Wasn’t copying the first exercise in “personal” writing in school? Copying came before dictation and before “composition” (theme: The defining books of my life). I study English with Miss Jackson, the widow of an upper-level railway worker from the south, who lives alone in a two-story house and has published two or three translations of Hudson in La Prensa. She gives us private lessons. (She earned her living in this way, because the pension, she complained, comes to her reluctantly.) The first thing we read with her was Hudson’s book about the birds in La Plata. One afternoon she took us to visit Los Veinte-cinco Ombues, the author’s birthplace, which was a few kilometers away from Adrogué. We went on bicycles; she, in her pretty skirts, seemed to move in profile, as if she were riding a horse sidesaddle, her dark mourning overskirt flapping in the wind. Oh imagination, oh memories, Renzi recited, already slightly drunk by this stage.
The Englishwoman is nostalgic for London, but most of all for South Africa (Rhodesia, she says), where her husband was for a couple of years. The infinite savanna, the white-faced monkeys, and the pelicans with graceful reddish feet. She showed us photos of her large house built of logs close to the river, beside a pier; we had to describe what we saw in English.
*
She was a kind woman, but irascible and not at all conventional. If one of us passed wind (sorry), she made us stand in line and smelled our arses. One by one until she discovered the culprit, who was immediately led into the courtyard by an ear. It seemed like a scene from Dickens, a sudden change of tone in a Muriel Spark novel. I still have the old edition of Birds of La Plata, with notes written in the margins by Miss Jackson. A circle surrounds the word “peewee” and beside it, in her diminutive, ant-sized writing, she gave the definition: “A person of short stature.”
*
I’m on the train and have the book open on a little table beside the window. I’m reading Jules Verne’s The Children of Captain Grant. I don’t remember how I managed to find this novel, which describes a voyage through Patagonia, just as I was voyaging across the same Patagonia.
*
At the end of primary school, my grandfather takes me with him on a long journey to the south. We take a sleeping car, the bunks convert into seats. There is a little sink that folds down from the wall, silver-plated, tiny, with a mirror. In the neighboring compartment, alone, travels Natalia. A sliding door connects the two cabins. We have breakfast and lunch in the dining car—English silverware, silver tureens.
*
Natalia caresses my hair in the dizzying corridor of the train. An unforgettable scent comes from her body; she is wearing a flowered sundress and her armpits are unshaven.
*
In Verne’s novel, Scottish aristocrat Lord Edward Glenarvan discovers a message in a bottle, thrown into the sea by Harry Grant, captain of the brigantine Britannia, which was shipwrecked two years before. The main difficulty is that the information in the message thrown by the castaways is illegible except for the latitude: 37º South.
*
Lord Glenarvan, the children of Captain Grant, and the crew of yacht Duncan leave for South America, since the partial message suggests Patagonia as the site of the disaster. In the middle of the voyage they discover an unexpected passenger: French geographer Santiago Paganel, who has come aboard by mistake. The expedition circumnavigates the 37º South line and crosses Argentina, exploring Patagonia and much of the region of La Pampa.
*
As we crossed an old steel bridge over the Colorado River, I read in the novel that just as Patagonia began an old steel bridge crossed over that mighty river of reddish waters.
*
Verne’s book explained to me what I was seeing. The erudite French geographer classified and defined the flora and fauna, the waters, the winds, the geographical accidents. Popular literature is always educational (that’s why it is popular). Meaning proliferates, everything is explained and made clear. On the other hand, what I saw through the window was arid, windy, scrubland, crushed weeds, volcanic rocks, emptiness. There will always be an insuperable rift between seeing and describing, between life and literature.
*
“We must remember,” said Jean Renoir, “that a field of wheat painted by Van Gogh can arouse more emotion than a field of wheat tout court.” It may be so, but it depends on what you are doing in that wheat field . . .
*
At night I leaned out of the window and saw, in the shadows, a car’s headlights on the road, the houses illuminated in the towns passing before me. I heard the slow and anguished sighing of brakes in barely visible stations; the leather curtain, once lifted, revealed a deserted platform, a porter pushing a luggage cart, a circular clock with Roman numerals, until finally the pealing of the bell announced the train’s departure. Then I lit the little light at the head of my bunk and read. My grandfather was in the compartment next door.
*
The fleeting vision of Natalia alone, at dawn, digging among glass objects in her nécessaire on the plush gray cloth of her illuminated compartment, is unforgettable.
*
We traveled two days and two nights to Zapala and from there took a rental car to a house on a ranch in the desert. We visited one of my grandfather’s friends who had been with him in the First World War. He was a tall and ungainly man, with a burning red face and pale blue eyes. He called my grandfather “the Colonel,” and together they remembered the slippery combat positions on the frozen slopes of Austrian mountains and the interminable battles in the trenches. The man had a large mustache, like a Cossack, and was missing his left arm. “This guy,” said my grandfather, “is a hero; he saved me, wounded, from no-man’s-land and lost his arm in the attempt.”
*
Several times I’ve thought of going back to the ranch in Patagonia to see the man who had lost his arm. “Well fine,” he might have said to me, “I’m going to tell you the true story of your grandfather in the war.” But I never went and have only isolated traces of that personal war: a photo of my grandfather dressed as a soldier and the papers, books, maps, letters, and notes that he left me as his only inheritance when he died. Nevertheless, sometimes, I can still hear his voice.
*
In 1960, 1961, when I was studying in La Plata, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather at the house in Adrogué. He even hired me, which was in a sense both comical and touching. I had no money at the time, and he thought I could help him organize his papers and recreate his experience in the war. He was afraid of losing his memory with age, and he had organized his documents spatially: in one room there were the maps and drawings of the battles (“The Map Room,” he had written on the door); in another, he had the glass cabinets and tables covered with letters from the war; in another, hundreds of books dedicated exclusively to the worldwide conflagration of 1914–1918. He had fought on the Italian front; they’d hit him in the chest, and his friend and companion (whose name I don’t know; my grandfather sometimes called him “the African” because he was born in Sicily) had saved his life at the price of losing an arm. My grandfather had a deep scar on his chest from the war. He spent three months in a hospital tent, and then he was sent to the Second Army’s post office (because he knew English, German, and French) to the section for letters from soldiers killed or missing in action. His work consisted of gathering personal effects—watches, wedding rings, family photos, unsent or half-written letters—and sending them, along with letters of condolence, to their relatives.
“Many died, so many every day, the offensives against the Austrian defenses were a massacre.” What task could be more oppressive than sorting through letters of the dead and answering a mother, a son, a sister?
Incomplete letters, interrupted by death, messages from those missing, shot down, killed in the night, never knowing the dawn, said Grandpa. Pity for those who fell, frozen stiff, alone, sunken into the mud. “How can we give voice to the dead, hope to those who died without a hope, relief to the phantoms that wander among the barbed-wire fences and under the white glare from the floodlights?”
Little by little, after months and months of struggling with these remains, he began to lose his mind: he clung to the letters and stopped sending them; he was, he told me, paralyzed, without willpower, without spirit, remembered almost nothing from that time, and, when they finally sent him home to Argentina with his family, he carried with him the words of those bound to die. I still have a French officer’s binoculars, which Grandpa gave me when I turned eighteen; on the side you can make out Jumelle Militaire, but the number of the regiment is scraped off with a knife or bayonet so that their fate cannot be discovered. In the metallic circle of the two smaller lenses is engraved Chevalier Opticien, and, when you turn it around, there is a tiny compass between the two larger lenses that finds true north even now. Sometimes I lean out of the tenth-floor window and look out at the city with these magnifiers: a woman with her hair wrapped up in a red towel is talking on the telephone in a lit room; the minuscule and agile owners of the Korean supermarket on the corner move boxes and speak among themselves in shouts, as if they were arguing in a distant, incomprehensible language.
Why had he stolen these letters? He said nothing, looked at me, serene, with his clear eyes, and changed the subject. For him, I imagine, they were a testament to the unbearable experience of the endless frozen battles, a way of honoring the dead. He kept them with him, like someone saving the letters written in a forgotten alphabet. He was furious, and his delusional speech still rings in my ears because sometimes, even today, I seem to hear him, and his voice returns to me in the most desperate moments.
“‘Language . . . language . . . ’ my grandfather would say,” said Renzi. “That weak and frenzied material, without a body, is a thin thread that intertwines the tiny ridges and superficial angles of human beings’ solitary life; it ties them up, why not, sure, he would say, sure, it binds them, but only for an instant, before they once again sink into the same darkness in which they were submerged when they were born and howled unheard for the first time, in a far distant white room where, in darkness once again, they let loose their final cry before the end, from another white room, although once again, of course, their voices reached no one . . . ”
*
In the room at the back of my grandfather’s house was the library where I had found the blue book, which I now connect to Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Giornale di guerra e di prigonia [Diary of the War]. I discovered it back in the time when I was studying in La Plata and came to visit him. It was an edition of La cognizione del dolore. Gadda had lived in Argentina, and in his novel, which is set in a town in Córdoba, the inhabitants, terrified in a lawless setting, hire a team of private security and it is they, the guardians, who murder those Argentines in the insular community, one after another . . . A prophet! Gadda had understood everything at once in a novel from 1953.
How could one write about Argentina? It could be seen clearly in The Seven Madmen, in Trans-Atlantyk, and in La cognizione del dolore. The three are by extravagant writers, untranslatable, who do not travel well. They don’t use much literary language, said Renzi. They look at everything with crossed eyes, obliquely; they are dyslexic, guttural stutterers: Arlt, Gombrowicz, Gadda. As for me, I, who was the son and grandson of Italians, have sometimes felt myself an Italian-Argentinian writer above all; I don’t know if that category exists . . . but I see that the secret line of my life goes backward from the book, to Heart and to La cognizione del dolore, passing through “Ships arrive at the coast, bearing fruits from beyond.” I would have liked to have been Carlo Emilio Gadda’s nephew, but I have to resign myself, Renzi would say, to being only his voluntary but illegitimate and unrecognized descendent . . .
*
I will have to conclude the first part of the so-called story of the defining books of my life there, yet something remains, a detour, a slight change in direction, a sharp turn that I can share before I leave, he said, as he raised his final drink.
He raised his hand and made a circle in the air. Waiter, he said, just a bit more.
*
A time after the trip to the south, at age sixteen, I was courting, so to speak, he said, Elena: a beautiful girl, much more sophisticated than myself, with whom I studied in the third year at the National High School of Adrogué. One afternoon, we were coming down a street lined with trees next to a wall painted sky blue, which I can still see clearly, and she asked me what I was reading.
*
I, who had not read anything significant since the days of the upside-down book, remembered that, in the display of a bookshop, I had seen Camus’s The Plague, another book with a blue cover, which had just come out. Camus’s The Plague, I told her. Can you lend it to me? she asked.
*
I remember that I bought the book, rumpled it a bit, read it in one night, and brought it with me to school the next day . . . I had discovered literature not for the book itself but for this feverish way of reading avidly with the intention of saying something to someone about what I had read. But why? The eternal question. It was a detached reading, directed, intentional, in my schoolboy’s room, that night, under the circular light of the lamp . . . Out of Camus’s work I’m not much interested in The Plague, but I remember the old man who always hit his dog and, when the dog finally escapes, he desolately searches for it throughout the city.
And how many books have I read, borrowed, stolen, loaned, lost since then? How much money have I invested, spent, squandered on books? I don’t remember everything I have read, but I can reconstruct my life based on the shelves in my library. Times, places . . . I could organize the volumes chronologically. The oldest book is The Plague. Then there is a series of two: This Business of Living by Pavese and Stendhal: par lui-même. They were the first ones I bought and were followed by hundreds and hundreds of others. I have brought them and carried them with me like talismans or amulets, and I have put them on the shelves of rooms in hostels, apartments, homes, hotels, cells, hospitals.
One can see who one has been over the course of time only by making the rounds past the walls of the library: I heard a lecture by Attilio Dabini about Pavese and bought the book (because I, too, was writing a diary). Stendhal: par lui-même I found in the Hachette bookshop on Rivadavia Avenue. I remember the train when I returned to Adrogué and the guard who appeared in the corridor and didn’t let me finish the sentence I was writing in the back of the book. It remained an incomplete sentence, that trace (“It’s difficult to be sincere when you have lost . . . ” what?). I don’t know if it’s a quote or one of my phrases (the ones that don’t come to mind when we read them again). I can see changes in the marks, underlinings, reading notes in the same book over the course of the years. In This Business of Living, for example, by Raigal Publishers, translation by Luis Justo. It is signed with my initials, ER, with the date July 22, 1957. I annotated it with impressions in the margins or on the last page: “The diary as counter-conquest, or the many ways of losing a woman.” I annotated with “see pg. 65.” And some quotations: “Youth ends when we perceive that no one wants our gay abandon.” And on the first blank page of the book, before the titles, there is one of so many lists that I’ve made, always with the intention of taking what I’ve written for granted: “Call Luis, Latin II (Tuesday and Thursday),” and, further down, one of so many superstitious annotations. In that moment, I was writing my first stories, I was vividly interested to know how long a writer takes to write a book, and I reconstructed the chronology of Pavese’s work based on his diary:
November 27, 1936 – April 15, 1937: Il carcere.
June 3 – August 16, 1939: Paesi tuoi.
September, 1947 – February, 1948: La casa en la colina.
June – October, 1948: Il diavolo sulle colline.
March – June, 1949: Tra donne sole.
September – November, 1949: La luna e i falò.
Back then, a short story only five pages long would take me three months.
*
The Plague and This Business of Living were the first books that were my own, so to speak, and my latest book I got yesterday afternoon, The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel by Benjamin Black, a gift from Giorgio, a friend. You must write something, he tells me, Renzi said, he’s Chandler but missing . . . What’s missing? my friend asked. The touch, I thought, he’s missing the grit, as tango dancers say when a tango is played just “fine . . . ”
Renzi opened the book and read: “It was one of those Tuesdays in summer when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving.” So it begins: it’s the same, but not the same (maybe because we know that it isn’t Chandler . . . ).
Too many pastiches, old man, this time of year, he said now; too many parodies, I prefer direct plagiarism . . .
*
You could lend it to me, Elena said to me. I don’t know what became of her afterward, but if she hadn’t asked me that question, who knows what would have become of me . . . There is no destiny now, no oracles. It isn’t certain that everything in life is written in stone, but, I think sometimes, if I had not read that book, or rather, if I had not seen it in the shop window, perhaps I would not be here. Or if she had not asked me, no? Who knows . . . I exaggerate, in retrospect, but I passionately remember that reading—a room at the back, a desk lamp. What to say to a woman about a novel? Retell the whole thing yourself? The book wasn’t worth much—too allegorical, a heavy style, deep, overwrought—but, all in all, something happened there, there was a change . . . Nothing special, a trifle, the truth, but that night, speaking figuratively, I was on the threshold once more: knowing nothing of anything, making a show of reading . . .
*
“Oh fortune, flowers, the girls in bloom . . . I’m seventy-three, an old man, and I go on like this, sitting with a book, waiting . . . ”
*
My father, he said later, was imprisoned for almost a year because he went to defend Perón in ’55 and suddenly Argentinian history seemed a conspiracy woven to destroy him. He was cornered, and he decided to escape. In December of 1957 we abandoned Adrogué, half in secret, and went to live in Mar del Plata. It was in those days, mid-escape, in one of the dismantled bedrooms of the house, that I started to write a diary. What was I looking for? To deny reality, to reject what was coming. To this day I still write this diary. Many things have changed since then, but I have remained faithful to this obsession.
*
There is no evolution, we scarcely move, fixed to our old shameful passion; the only virtue, I believe, is to persist without changing, to go on, faithful to the old books, the ancient readings. My old friends, on the other hand, aspire as they age to be what they once hated; everything they once detested they now admire. Since we cannot change anything, they think, let’s change appearances. Entire libraries burned in the incinerator and buried in the backyard . . . It’s hard to get rid of books, but what about our way of reading? They go on as always, dogmatic readers, literal, they say different things with the same haughty wisdom of the old days. We live in the error of thinking that our old friends are with us. Impossible! We’ve read the same books and loved the same women (for example, Junior), and we save some letters that we were not and are not able to send away or burn in the bonfires of time, and that, then, would be the subject of my autobiography, if someday I decided to write one . . .
My grandfather (since I started with him) died in 1968, almost fifty years after the end of the war he had fought in, and the man missing an arm was with us at the burial, but not Natalia. Who knows what became of that woman? She was as beautiful as a goddess and sang, I remember, when she was happy . . .
*
It was almost night now. Outside, the asphalt shone under the warm lights of the city. It was time to leave, to return home.
“We ought to go.”
We went out to the street and, as we went toward Charcas (no longer called Charcas), walking slowly because Emilio had a little problem with his left leg (“The result of bad habits, the economic crisis, Peronism, rough nights”), we decided to stop for a bit of coffee at the Filippo bar on the corner of Callao and Santa Fe, and at that point Emilio decided to add an epilogue to what he had told me so far, a conclusion, a visit, he stressed as he savored the coffee. An encounter that could be understood, with a bit of good will and favorable wind, as the end of his literary education, or something like that. A bridge, he said, a rite of passage.
Once at the student center we organized a lecture series and decided, of course, to begin with old Borges. I called him on the phone to invite him and he accepted at once. He met me at the National Library, friendly, with his indecisive tone, seeming always on the point of losing the thread of what he was saying. Immediately he spoke to me of La Plata, where his friend the poet Paco López Merino lived, whom he visited frequently. One Sunday, at home, Borges tells me, explained Renzi, before leaving after they had lunch, his friend insisted on saying hello to Borges’s father, who, as was the custom among the old European criollo class, was taking siesta. After some scheming, they decided to accompany him to the bedroom.
Doctor, I’d like to say goodbye to you, said López Merino.
They all felt uncomfortable, but since they liked him they accepted the insistent but friendly request, and Doctor Borges, with a calm smile, gave him a hug . . . Upon leaving, López Merino saw Güiraldes’s guitar, which the author of Don Segundo Sombra had presented to Borges’s mother before leaving for Paris, and López Merino made it sing, softly.
It’s out of tune; it never was very good, this guitar, the poet said maliciously, Borges recounted, and Borges added, said Renzi, it sounds hostile, but it was just a joke among friends.
The truth was that López Merino shot himself the next day, and then they understood the imperative and serious manner of his final farewell.
Beautiful, isn’t it? said Borges with a tired smile, as if the elegance of the secret goodbye had moved him.
*
He had an immediate and warm way of creating intimacy, Borges, said Renzi; he was always that way with everyone he talked to: he was blind and did not see them, and he always spoke to them as if they were near, and that closeness is in his writings, he is never patronizing and gives no air of superiority, he addresses everyone as if they were more intelligent than he, with so much intimation that he has no need to explain what is already known. And it is that intimacy that his readers sense.
He loved the prospect of going to La Plata, he was thinking of speaking about Lugones’s fantastical stories, what did I think? he said. Perfect, I told him, what’s more, Borges, look, we’re going to pay you, I don’t know quite how much it is right now, let’s say about fifteen hundred dollars.
“No,” he said, “that’s a lot.”
I was taken aback. Look, Borges, I’m telling you, it’s not our money, it’s not the students’ money, the University is giving us a fund.
“It doesn’t matter, I’ll charge you two hundred fifty.”
And we went on talking, he went on talking, I don’t remember now if it was about Lugones or Chesterton, but the truth is that I felt so comfortable, so close to him, with that feeling of brightness, of clear intelligence and complicity, that a while later, almost without realizing it, while speaking about the endings of Kipling’s stories, I said to him, emboldened by the climate of intimacy and grateful for the sensation of talking to someone as an equal: “You know, Borges, I see a problem with the end of ‘The Form of the Sword.’”
He raised his face toward me, alert.
“A problem,” I said. “Hell, you might call it a defect . . . Something extra.”
He looked into the air now, cheerful, expectant.
The story is told with a technique that Borges had already used in “Streetcorner Man” and would use again later: it is told by a traitor and murderer as though he were someone else.
The man who narrates the story has a round and “spiteful scar” across his face. At one point in his tale he faces an informant and marks his face with a curved sword. One realizes then that the man telling the story is the traitor, as the scar identifies him. Borges, however, goes on with the story and closes it with an explanation. “Borges,” he says, “I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me.” He listened to my summary of the story with signs of agreement and repeated in a soft voice, “Yes . . . now despise me.”
“Don’t you think that explanation is excessive? It’s superfluous, I think.”
There was a silence. Borges smiled, compassionate and cruel.
“Ah,” he said. “You write stories, too . . . ”
I was twenty years old, I was arrogant, I was more of a fool than I am now, but I realized that what Borges had said meant two things. Generally, if someone confronted him in the street to say, “Borges, I am a writer,” he would answer “Ah, so am I,” and the conversant would sink into the void. There was a subtle wickedness and calm arrogance in that sentence: “This rude kid thinks he writes stories . . . ”
The other assertion was more benevolent and might have meant, “You already read as if you were a writer, you understand the way in which texts are constructed and want to see how they are made, to see if you can do something similar or, ideally, something different.” Writing, he was telling me, above all changes one’s way of reading.
We went on talking a bit longer, and I was distracted and embarrassed and sort of numb. Borges showed me Groussac’s circular writing desk, which he passed over with his magnificent pale hand, the hand with which he had written “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader.”
I realize that Borges has always been a classical story writer: his endings are closed, with everything explained clearly; the sense of amazement is not in the form—always plain and clear—or in the organized and precise endings, but in the incredible density and heterogeneity of the narrative material.
He kindly accompanied me to the door and before saying goodbye added one last thing, as if to stop me from forgetting his lesson on well-closed stories:
“I got quite a good deal, didn’t I?” old Borges said, amused with himself.
*
In short, he buried me, but he recognized me as a writer, didn’t he? said Renzi. I had written two or three stories, horrible, poorly ended, but in short, hope must be confirmed once in a while, even if it’s by way of humiliation and fright. Therefore, the young—and the not-so-young—go around with their writings, looking for someone to read them and to say, “Ah, you write, too.” Of course they put them up on the web now, but they lack qualification in the same way, for someone to say to them—personally—you are on this side, too . . .
*
I talk too much, I get judgmental and apodictic, as is fitting for a man of my age, he kept thinking. Now we were at the door of the building on Calle Charcas (ex-Charcas) at number eighteen hundred. Maybe he thought he was going to die in that war, my grandfather, but he went all the same. An act of heroism, to go. I would not have driven myself to it, said Emilio as he opened the entry door, held it with his body, and turned around, smiling.
“One of these afternoons I’ll finish the story for you . . . We’ll see each other, dear,” he said, and with an uncertain walk he entered the hall in search of the elevator.
It was already completely dark, and I saw him go up, enveloped in a yellowish light, his eyes beaming and a smile of satisfaction illuminating his face, as if he were still thinking about the girl who had asked him to borrow the book by Albert Camus.
