The Way Out

praise for

The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

Splendidly crafted and interspliced with essays and stories, this beguiling work is to a diary as Piglia is to ‘Emilio Renzi’: a lifelong alter ego, a highly self-conscious shadow volume that brings to bear all of Piglia’s prowess as it illuminates his process of critical reading and the inevitable tensions between art and life. Amid meeting redheads at bars, he dissects styles and structures with a surgeon’s precision, turning his gaze on a range of writers, from Plato to Dashiell Hammett, returning time and again to Pavese, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Arlt and Borges.… This is an embarrassment of riches… No previous familiarity with Piglia’s work is needed to appreciate these bibliophilic diaries, adroitly repurposed through a dexterous game of representation and masks that speaks volumes of the role of the artist in society, the artist in his time, the artist in his tradition.

Mara Faye Lethem,

New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

"For the past few years, every Latin American novelist I know has been telling me how lavish, how grand, how transformative was the Argentinian novelist Ricardo Piglia’s final project, a fictional journal in three volumes, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi—Renzi being Piglia’s fictional alter ego. And now here at last is the first volume in English, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, translated by Robert Croll. It’s something to be celebrated… [It] offer[s] one form of resistance to encroaching fascism: style."

Adam Thirlwell, BookForum, The Best Books of 2017

A valediction from the noted Argentine writer, known for bringing the conventions of hard-boiled U.S. crime drama into Latin American literature… Fans of Cortázar, Donoso, and Gabriel García Márquez will find these to be eminently worthy last words from Piglia.

Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

When young Ricardo Piglia wrote the first pages of his diaries, which he would work on until the last years of his life, did he have any inkling that they would become a lesson in literary genius and the culmination of one of the greatest works of Argentine literature?

Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

"Ricardo Piglia, who passed away earlier this year at age seventy-five, is celebrated as one of the giants of Argentine literature, a rightful heir to legends like Borges, Cortázar, Juan Jose Saer, and Roberto Arlt. The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is his life’s work.… An American equivalent might be if Philip Roth now began publishing a massive, multi-volume autobiography in the guise of Nathan Zuckerman.… It is truly a great work.… This is a fantastic, very rewarding read—it seems that Piglia has found a form that can admit everything he has to say about his life, and it is a true pleasure to take it in."

Veronica Esposito, BOMB Magazine

"The Diaries of Emilio Renzi continue to be a fascinating literary-autobiographical experiment… and, especially, a wonderful immersion in literature itself. Of particular interest in showing the transition of Latin American (and specifically Argentine) literature—no longer: ‘out of sync, behind, out of place’—, Piglia’s range extends far beyond that too. Yes, most of this is presumably mainly of interest to the similarly literature-obsessed—but Piglia makes it hard to imagine who wouldn’t be."

M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

Much like Susan Sontag… my first introduction to Piglia is through his diaries. And what a privilege to be in someone’s head even for a bit, to know what troubled or delighted them as they made their way into the world. That no matter how esteemed or revered they are in the public spotlight, they deal with the same problems most of us do: figuring out how to make rent, finding enough time to write, loss, heartbreak.

Pia Cortez, Book Look

Also by Ricardo Piglia

Artificial Respiration

The Absent City

Money to Burn

Target in the Night

The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years

The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years

The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life

Contents

I • The Accident

II • The Russian Neighbor

III • In the Name of Conrad

IV • Hands in the Fire

Epilogue

To Germán García

for the way back

Infinite these riches abandoned.

Edgar Bayley

‌

I

The Accident

Chapter One

1

In those days I lived

several lives, shifting between autonomous sequences: a series of friends, another of love, of alcohol, of politics, of dogs, of bars, of nocturnal wanderings. I wrote screenplays that were never produced, translated numerous crime novels that always seemed the same, and compiled dry books on philosophy (or psychoanalysis!) that were published under other writers’ names. I was lost, disconnected, until finally—by chance, suddenly, unexpectedly—I ended up teaching in the United States, involved in an incident that I want to put on the record.

I’d received an offer to spend a semester as a visiting professor at the elite and exclusive Taylor University; they’d had an unsuccessful candidate and thought of me because they knew me from before, and so they wrote to me, we moved forward, set a date, but then I started going back and forth, putting it off: I didn’t want to spend six months confined to a wasteland. One day, in mid-December, I received a message from Ida Brown, written with the syntax of an urgent telegram from the old days: All ready. Send syllabus. We await your arrival. It was very hot that night, so I took a shower, got a beer from the fridge, and sat down in my canvas chair facing the window: outside, the city was an opaque mass of distant lights and dissonant sounds.

I had separated from my second wife and now lived alone in an apartment in Almagro that a friend had lent me; it had been so long since I’d published anything that, one afternoon, as I was leaving a movie theater, a blonde woman I’d struck up a conversation with under some pretext was startled to learn who I was because she thought I was already dead. (Oh, someone told me you died in Barcelona.)

I was getting by, working on a book about W. H. Hudson’s years in Argentina, but the project wasn’t going anywhere; I was tired, held in place by inertia, and I’d gone a couple of weeks without doing anything until, one morning, Ida tracked me down on the phone. Where had I gone off to that no one could find me? Classes were starting in a month, I had to leave right away. Everyone was waiting for me, she exaggerated.

I gave my friend back the keys to his apartment, put my things in a storage unit, and left. I spent one week in New York and, in mid-January, caught a New Jersey Transit train to the peaceful suburban town where the university operated. Ida wasn’t at the station when I arrived, of course, but she’d sent two students to wait for me on the platform, holding up a sign with my name misspelled in red letters.

It had snowed, and the parking lot was a white desert with vehicles buried in an icy haze. I got into the car and we moved forward at a walking pace, lit up in the middle of the afternoon by the yellow gleam of tall streetlights. Finally, we reached the house on Markham Road, not far from the campus, which Housing had rented for me from a philosophy professor who was spending a year on sabbatical in Germany. The two students were Mike and John III (I would encounter them again in my classes), and they helped me, energetically and wordlessly, with my suitcases, gave me some practical instructions, and opened the garage door to show me Professor Hubert’s Toyota, which was included with the rent; they showed me how the heating worked and wrote down a number to call if it started to freeze (in a pinch, call Public Safety).

The town was charming and seemed to exist apart from the world of New York at eighty kilometers away. Residences with wide open gardens, glass picture windows, tree-lined streets, total calm. It was like being in a luxury psychiatric clinic, just what I needed at that time. There were no metal bars, no security watchtowers, no walls anywhere. The fortifications were of a different order. The dangers of life seemed to exist outside of here, on the other side of the woods and lakes, in Trenton, in New Brunswick, in the burned-out houses and slums of New Jersey.

The first night, I stayed up late, investigating the rooms, looking out through the windows at the lunar landscapes of neighboring gardens. The house was very comfortable, but my strange feeling of dislocation returned given the fact that I was living in someone else’s place yet again. The pictures on the walls, the decorations on the mantel, the clothing stowed carefully in nylon bags made me feel more like a voyeur than an intruder. In the study upstairs, the walls were covered with books of philosophy, and, as I went through the library, I thought that the volumes were made of the same dense material that has always allowed me to cut myself off from the present and escape reality.

In the kitchen cupboards I found Mexican salsas, unusual spices, jars of dried mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes, tin cans of oil, and pots of jam, as though the house was prepared to weather a long siege. Canned food and philosophy books, what more could you ask for? I made myself some Campbell’s tomato soup, opened a tin of sardines, toasted some frozen bread, and uncorked a bottle of Chenin Blanc. Then I made coffee and settled down on a sofa in the living room to watch TV. I always do that when I arrive in a different place. Television is the same everywhere, the only tenet of reality that persists beyond all changes. On ESPN the Lakers were beating the Celtics, on the news Bill Clinton was smiling with his good-natured air, in a Honda ad a car was sinking in the ocean, on HBO they were showing Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed, one of my favorite films. Joan Crawford appears in the middle of the night in a Los Angeles neighborhood, not knowing who she is, remembering nothing from her past, moving along the strangely lit streets as though inside an empty fish tank.

I must have dozed off, because the telephone woke me. It was nearly midnight. Someone who knew my name and called me Professor too insistently was offering to sell me cocaine. The whole thing was so extraordinary that it must have been real. I was startled and cut off the line. It might have been a prank caller, an idiot, or a DEA agent monitoring the private lives of Ivy League academics. How did he know my last name?

That call made me very uneasy, to tell the truth. I often have slight attacks of anxiety. No more than the next guy. I imagined that someone was watching me from outside, and I turned out the lights. The garden and street were in shadows, and the leaves of the trees rustled in the wind; off to one side, over the wooden fence, my neighbor’s house was visible, lit up, and a slight woman in jogging clothes was doing Tai Chi exercises in the living room, slow and harmonious, as though floating in the night.

2

The next day I went to the university to meet the receptionists and a few colleagues, but I didn’t mention the strange nighttime call to anyone. I had my photo taken, signed some papers, received an ID card that would give me access to the library, and installed myself in a sunny office on the fourth floor of the department that looked out over the stone pathways and Gothic buildings of the campus. The semester was just beginning, and students were arriving with their backpacks and wheeled suitcases. There was a happy bustle amid the frozen whiteness of the wide streets lit up by January sun.

I met Ida Brown in the faculty lounge, and we went out to eat at Ferry House. We’d seen each other when I was there three years before, but whereas I was now in decline, she had only improved. She had a distinguished look with her corduroy blazer, her crimson lipstick, her slender body, and her mordant, malicious tone. (Welcome to the cemetery where writers come to die.)

Ida was a star in the academic world; her thesis on Dickens had transfixed all studies into the author of Oliver Twist for twenty years. Her salary was a state secret, but it was said that they raised it every six months and that her sole condition was that she must earn one hundred dollars more than the highest-paid male (that’s not what she called them) in her profession. She lived alone, had never married, didn’t want children, was always surrounded by students, and you could see the light on in her office at any hour of night and imagine the soft whirring of the computer where she developed her explosive theses on politics and culture. You could imagine her little laugh of delight as she thought of the scandal her theories would spark among colleagues. They said that she was a snob, that she changed her theories every five years, that each of her books was different from the last because it reflected the fashion of the day, but everyone envied her intelligence and force.

As soon as we sat down to eat, she apprised me of the situation in the Department of Modern Culture and Film Studies, which she’d helped to create. She had included film studies, she said, because students may not read novels, may not go to the opera, may not like rock music or conceptual art, but they will always watch movies.

She was frontal, direct, and she knew how to fight as well as think. (Those two verbs go hand in hand.) She was bent on an all-out war against the Derridean cells that ruled over literature departments in the Northeast and, above all, against the central committee on deconstruction at Yale. She didn’t critique them from the same position as defenders of the canon like Harold Bloom or George Steiner (kitsch aesthetes from magazines for the enlightened middle class), but instead attacked them from the left, from the great tradition of Marxist historians. (But it’s a pleonasm to say Marxist historian, it’s like saying American cinema.)

She worked both for the elite and against it and despised the people who made up her professional circle; her audience wasn’t wide, only specialists read her, but she had an impact on the minority that copies extreme theories, transforms them, popularizes them, and turns them—years later—into mass-media information.

She’d read my books, knew about my projects. She wanted me to teach a seminar on Hudson. I need your perspective, she said, with a weary smile, as though that perspective did not matter so much. She was working on the relationship between Conrad and Hudson, she told me, forestalling me by stating that this was her territory and it would be ill-advised for me to go down that road. (She didn’t believe in private property, they said, except when it concerned her field of study.)

Edward Gardner, the publisher who discovered Conrad, had published Hudson’s books as well. That was how the two writers met and became friends; they were the finest prose writers in English at the end of the nineteenth century, and both had been born in exotic and distant lands. Ida was interested in the traditions of people who set themselves against capitalism from an archaic, pre-industrial position. The Russian populists, the Beat Generation, the hippies, and now environmental activists had taken up the myths of natural living and the rural commune. Hudson, according to Ida, had added his interest in animals to that rather adolescent utopia. The cemeteries that serve luxurious suburban neighborhoods are full of graves for cats and dogs, she said, while the homeless are freezing to death in the streets. For her, the only thing that had survived from the literary struggle against the effects of industrial capitalism were Tolkien’s stories for children. But, well, anyway, what was I thinking of doing in my classes? I explained my plans for the seminar, and the conversation continued along that line without any major surprises. She was so beautiful and so intelligent that she seemed slightly artificial, as though she was making an effort to diminish her charm or even considered it to be a weakness.

We finished the meal and then walked down Witherspoon toward Nassau Street. The sun was starting to melt the snow, and we moved carefully along the icy sidewalks. I would have a few free days to get adjusted, and I had only to let her know if there was anything I needed. The receptionists could take care of the administrative details; the students were enthusiastic about my course. She hoped I was comfortable in my fourth-floor office. When we said goodbye on the corner facing campus, she rested her hand on my arm and said with a smile:

In the fall I’m always hot.

I stopped short, confused. And she looked at me with a strange expression, waited a moment for me to say something, and then walked resolutely away. Maybe she hadn’t said what I’d thought I heard, maybe she said In a fall I’m always a hawk. Hot-hawks, maybe. Fall meant the fall semester, but it was only the beginning of the spring semester. Of course, hot could be slang for speed, and fall could be a term for prison time. Meanings proliferate when you’re talking to a woman in a foreign language. It was another sign of the destabilization that would only grow worse in the days to come. I tend to obsess over language, a bad habit left over from my education. My ear has been poisoned by Trubetzkoy’s phonetics, and I always hear more than is actually there and sometimes get hung up on anacolutha and substantive adjectives but miss the meanings of the sentences. It acts up when I’m traveling, when I haven’t slept, when I’m drunk, and also when I’m in love. (Or would it be more grammatically correct to say: it happens to me when I travel, when I grow tired, when I drink, and when I love?)

I spent the following weeks filled with these strange resonances. Speaking in English made me uneasy; I make mistakes more often than I’d like and then attach onto those mistakes the threatening implications that words sometimes hold for me. Down the street there are pizzerias to go to, and the pavement is a nice, bluish slate gray. I could never think that in English, I’d start translating it straight away: En el fondo de la calle hay una pizzería y el asfalto (el pavimento) brilla agradable bajo la luz azulada.

My exterior life was peaceful and monotonous. I did my shopping at Davidson’s grocery and cooked for myself at the house or went out to eat at the professors’ club, facing the gardens at Prospect House. Every now and then I’d get into Professor Hubert’s Toyota and visit other villages nearby. Old one-horse towns that held traces of battles from the Revolutionary War or the cruel Civil War. Sometimes I would walk along the banks of the Delaware, a canal that connected Philadelphia to New York in the nineteenth century and had been the main route of commerce. Irish immigrants had excavated it with shovels, and it had a very complex system of locks and dams, but now it was out of operation and had been converted into a wooded walking path with luxurious houses on the hills overlooking its calm waters. It was frozen this time of year, and children with yellow jackets and red caps flew along like birds over the transparent surface on their skates and sleds.

One of my pastimes was observing my neighbor. She was the lone image of peace in my solitary mornings. A diminutive figure, tending flowers in a little private garden in the middle of the lifeless ground. From the shadows of my room on the top floor, I could see her go down to the park every morning, walking with careful little steps because of the snow, and then lift the yellow cloth that she used to protect the greenhouse flowers that she grew along one side, under the shelter of a stone wall. She tried to keep the sprouts going through the frost and the lack of sunlight and the desolate winter air. I think she spoke to them, to the plants, and the sound would reach me as a gentle murmur in a strange tongue, like some soft and unfamiliar music. Sometimes I thought I could hear her whistling; I don’t remember