Ricardo Piglia
Translated by Robert Croll
IN THE BAR
A life is not divided into chapters, Emilio Renzi said to the bartender of El Cervatillo that afternoon, leaning on the bar, standing before the mirror and the bottles of whiskey, vodka, and tequila lined up on the shelves. I’ve always been intrigued by the unreal yet mathematical way we organize the days, he said. Take the almanac, a senseless prison on experience that imposes a chronological order onto a period of time that flows without criteria. Calendars imprison the days, and this mania with classification has likely influenced human morals, Renzi smilingly told the bartender. I say so for my own part, he said, since I’m writing a diary, and diaries obey only the progression of days, months, and years. Nothing else can define a diary—not its autobiographical material, not the private confessions, not even the record of a person’s life. Simply, said Renzi, the definition is that what is written must be organized by the days of the week and the months of the year. That’s all, he said, satisfied. You can write anything, a mathematical progression, for example, or a laundry list or a meticulous account of a conversation in a bar with the Uruguayan man tending the bar, or, as in my case, an unexpected mixture of details or meetings with friends or the testimony of lived experiences; you can write down all of that, but it will be a diary if and only if you note the day, the month, the year—any of those three means of orienting yourself amidst the violent currents of time. If I write, for example, Wednesday the 27th of January, 2015 and then write down a dream or memory beneath this heading, or if I imagine something that hasn’t actually happened but make a note before I start the entry that says Wednesday the 27th, for example, or, even shorter just, Wednesday, it has now become a diary and neither a novel, nor an essay, although it can include novels and essays as long as you take the precaution of writing the date first, orienting yourself and creating a sense of serialism, but then, look out, he said—and he touched the index finger of his left hand to the lower eyelid of his right eye—if you publish these notes according to the calendar and with your own name, that is, if you assert that the subject who is speaking, the subject who is being spoken of, and the one who signs it are the same person or, rather, have the same name, then it is a personal diary. Your own name ensures the continuity and ownership of what is written. Although, as we know, since Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams at the end of the 19th century—a great autobiographical text, by the way—, you are not yourself, never the same person and, since I don’t believe at this point that a concentric unit called “the ego” exists, or that a subject’s manifold ways of being can be synthesized into a pronominal figure called “I,” I don’t share the current superstition about the proliferation of personal writings. And so, it is naïve to talk about the writings of the self, because no self exists for whom that—or any other—writing can exist, he laughed. The “I” is a hollow figure, and you have to seek meaning elsewhere. For example, in a diary, meaning is derived from the act of organizing according to days of the week and the calendar. Therefore, although I am going to maintain the mathematical temporal order in my diary, it also preoccupies me, and I’m thinking about other types of chronology and other types of order and periodization, provided, of course, that the diary is published under its author’s real name and that the person writing the diary entries is the same person who lives them and also has the same name, Renzi concluded. Rereading these notebooks amuses me, and my Mexican muse laughs uproariously, she tells me, at the entertaining adventures of an aspiring saint. All right, exactly, I say to her, a book of humor, yes of course, I always meant to write a comedy, and in the end it was those years of my life that achieved the touch of humor I was looking for, Renzi said. Maybe I’ll call them my happy years, then, because I was amused while reading and transcribing them to see just how ridiculous one can be. Without meaning to, I turned my experience into a satire of life—in general and in particular. Looking at yourself from a distance is enough to show you that irony and humor turn our stubbornness and departures from tone into a joke. A life retold by the same person living it is already a joke, or rather, Renzi said to the bartender, a Mephistophelian prank.
Due to my de-formation as a historian, I have a special sensitivity toward dates and the ordered progression of time. The great mystery, the question that has followed me through these weeks dedicated to transcribing my notebooks, to dictating my diaries, and to making, as they say, “clean copies,” lay in seeing the points at which my personal life crossed with or was intercepted by politics, for example, in the seven years I’m dedicating myself to now, incessantly, exclusively interested in knowing how I lived between 1968 and 1975, my poor life as a young, aspiring writer or rather as someone aspiring to be a writer because I wasn’t yet a writer in a full sense, though I had already published a book of stories, The Invasion, which was fairly decent, I can now say, especially compared to the story collections that were being published in those days; I was only young and aspiring to be a writer then, and now, in reading the diaries from those seven years, the question that has arisen, almost an obsession that won’t let me think about anything else, is what in any individual’s life is personal, and what is historical, Renzi said that afternoon to the Uruguayan bartender of El Cervatillo, as he drank a glass of wine at the bar.
A key event was the army raid in late 1972, during which, in search of a young, unidentified couple, they leveled the apartment building on Calle Sarmiento where I lived with Julia, my girlfriend at the time. We were a young couple and so the army, or that patrol, which was “combing”—as they say—the area, was surely seeking to verify some fact, some piece of information obtained with the interrogation methods typical of the security forces, forces dedicated to intimidating and killing defenseless citizens. Who knows who that young couple was, what they did, what they worked toward; they were, surely, leftist students, middle-class kids, since they lived and were being searched for in a building on Sarmiento and Montevideo, right in the center of the city. We weren’t them, but we lived there.
I realized it because, when I reached the area, I saw army trucks and two soldiers leaving the building, and so I turned back and retraced my steps, as they say, and called Julia at the office of Los Libros magazine, where she worked in the afternoons, and I caught her in time, and we decided to stay in a hotel that night. The City Hotel. We’d had, Renzi told the bartender, some training on how to change our residence when the storm drew near; we knew that one tactic of the occupying army’s suppressive forces, as they would now be called, was to act quickly, by surprise, and then move away to surround another neighborhood. Though what happened back then can’t be compared to the brutal, criminal, and diabolical methods that the Argentine Army, or rather, the Armed Forces, used a few years later under the operational command of the Military Junta, as it was called from March, 1976. That time was much easier, but all the same Julia and I erased ourselves, so to speak, for a couple of days. The army patrolled rather randomly—or with fairly imprecise information—an area of the city; they would surround it and inspect house after house, seeing if they could catch some dangerous little fish. In this way, we spent two days in that hotel near Plaza de Mayo and then, when the storm seemed to have passed, we went back home. Renzi turned toward the entryway and, absorbed, commented with a tired voice, “this heat is going to kill us” and then, as though awakening, he resumed his conversation without changing position, that is, in profile to the bartender, looking out toward Calle Riobamba.
So, when I get back, the doorman tells me that they came through, people from the army, asking about the young couple who lived in the room on the sixth floor of the building, and since we lived in that room, we gathered some things—my notebooks, my papers, the typewriter—and left, not meaning to return. I see an intersection, there, between history and personal life, because that retreat brought about multiple effects within me, as decisive as the move from Mar del Plata when my father was affected by politics and, unwillingly, we had to abandon Adrogué, the town where I was born.
The porters of the buildings in Buenos Aires were divided into two categories; 30 or 35 percent were retired policemen and another 30 or 35 percent were undercover activists for the Communist Party. The communists had undertaken a great project of planting old militants in buildings around the city as caretakers. The Argentine communists had used that technique in anticipation of an insurrection in Buenos Aires similar to the one that had brought the Bolsheviks into power; managing the buildings of the city was an excellent revolutionary tactic, but, since the communists had no intention of making a mess, the doormen had become informants for the party and were also used to protect sympathizers of the left who were being pursued by the police. I lucked out with one of those, a kind man from Corrientes who warned me of what was happening when he saw me appear and helped me flee.
I will never know if it was me the army was looking for, but I had to act accordingly, as though I, a pacifist and schizoid aspiring writer, were actually a dangerous revolutionary. That misunderstanding, that crossroads, changed my life, Renzi said that afternoon to the bartender of El Cervatillo. Everything changed, chaos came back into my life. And so, to impose some order onto the passions and impulses of existence and to turn the disorder into a clear line, I must periodize my life, and for that reason I find, in that young couple whom the army was trying to capture, in that serendipity, a meaning.
Personal experience, as written in a diary, is sometimes intervened upon by history or politics or economics, that is, the private is often ordered by external factors. In this way, a series could be organized based on the intersection of individual life and outside forces—or shall we say external forces—which tend to intervene periodically in the private lives of people in Argentina under political systems. A change of one official is all it takes, a drop in the price of soybeans, a false piece of information taken as fact by the information services or state intelligence, and hundreds and hundreds of pacifists and distracted individuals are forced to change their lives drastically and stop being, for example, dignified electromechanical engineers after a factory is forced to close due to a decision made by the Minister of Economy one morning while in a bad mood, becoming bitter and resentful taxi drivers who only talk to their poor passengers about the macroeconomic event that changed their lives in the manner of heroes in Greek tragedies lamenting the power of fate. Mine could be another example, Renzi said to the bartender of El Cervatillo, that is, a young writer who must leave his house and flee because of an incomprehensible decision by an army colonel who looks at a map of the city of Buenos Aires and, based on a vague piece of information from the army intelligence services, after a slight hesitation, uses a pointer to indicate a neighborhood in the city, or rather a corner, which must be searched to find the suspicious couple. An abstract, impersonal factum acts as the hand of fate and takes a young couple between its index finger and thumb, lifting them into the air and literally throwing them out into the street.
And so, in order to escape from the chronological trap of astronomical time and remain inside my personal time, I analyze my diaries according to discontinuous series and, upon that basis, I organize, so to speak, the chapters of my life. One series, then, is that of the political events that act directly on the private sphere of my existence. We can call that series or chain or continuum of events Series A. On that afternoon when we left, covertly, trying not to be seen, like two thieves robbing their own house, loaded down with suitcases and bags and putting them in a taxi while a moving van driven by the doorman from Corrientes transported some furniture, many books, lamps, pictures, a refrigerator, a bed, and a leather chair to a warehouse on Calle Alsina, a new life began for me, very chaotic, without a fixed address, and very promiscuous, because the first effect of that intervention of political destiny and the military search was my separation from Julia, a woman whom I had lived with, by that point, for five years. There, we have a new chronology, a temporal scansion, an incident that changed my life; I separated from a woman not for emotional reasons but because of the catastrophic effect of the military’s intervention in my little personal sphere. An elephant’s foot had crushed the flowers, the thoughts I cultivated in my garden, figuratively speaking, Renzi said to the bartender.
(November 6, 2018)
Ricardo Piglia (Buenos Aires, 1940–2017), professor emeritus of Princeton University, is unanimously considered a classic of contemporary Spanish-language literature. He published five novels, including Artificial Respiration, The Absent City, and Target in the Night, as well as collections of stories and criticism. Among the numerous prizes he received were the Premio de la Crítica, Premio Rómulo Gallegos, Premio Bartolomé March, Premio Casa de las Américas, Premio José Donoso, and Premio Formentor de las Letras.
Robert Croll is a writer, translator, musician, and artist originally from Asheville, NC. He first came to translation during his undergraduate studies at Amherst College, where he focused particularly on the short fiction of Julio Cortázar.
