I read those notebooks from start to finish and was affected for the rest of my life. The diary radically changed the vision that I had of her. The diary began on October 7, 1947, some ten months before my birth, it opened like this: “Today is my name-day, ugly thought. Ugly, everything is very ugly. Life is ugly. Take autumn, nothing but sadness. The trees are without leaves, the sun and the world have lost intensity and at last tell the truth. And one feels fear and cold and notices the little vitality life has and remembers the young woman that two years ago I still was, the poor, naive creature who without realizing it was heading toward the wrong marriage. I was like one of Jane Austen’s characters, one of those decent girls who sought a fiancé and so were fated to change county. But I did not change county, I merely changed life, I married and my life took a turn for the worse, as it had to with such a horrible husband.”
A terrible and somewhat surprising opening to the diary with an insect’s handwriting. Her notebooks, as tends to happen in all diaries, revolve around a series of recurring themes. One of them is the strong conviction that she had made a monumental mistake marrying my father, who was not, by the way, “a self-made man like Kafka’s father”—as it says in Montano’s Malady—but a simple social climber, a coalman’s son, a not very elegant and rather cynical young man, who feigned love where he was only interested in money. Although in honor of the truth, it has to be said that while he married for money and to improve his social status, after a few months he fell devotedly in love with his intelligent but fragile wife, who, by the time he began to fall in love, had already started to write horrible things about him in her secret square notebooks; they lived like this for forty years, he blindly in love, she hating him with all her soul, though in rigorous secret: “An hour ago the great idiot, the hopeless coalman’s son, was seated in front of me. I took a good look at this decrepit bore. How wretched I am! I took a good look, he really is extremely ugly, flat-faced, bald with a bit of hair, with a Mongolian’s mustache and sweaty, fat hands, how disgusting this life is!”
Another recurring theme is the compassion she felt for me — I knew nothing of this until I found the diary after her death and read it — a sentiment that repeatedly surfaces in her tragic and painful poems. The fact is that my mother wrote a fair amount of poetry in her secret diary. Although at home we were aware that the art of poetry held great attraction for her — she was a housewife and an almost full-time reader, a reader basically of poetry — none of us could imagine that she devoted herself rigorously in secret to the art of composing verses.
Some of her poems from the 1970s recall those of Alejandra Pizarnik — sheer coincidence, I believe — who was fourteen years her senior and whom she spotted one afternoon in the Taita, a bar in Barcelona, one afternoon in October 1969, an event that my mother described in her diary: “Today I saw that tiny Argentinian poet, who appears tormented, she was with some posh children from the Calvo Sotelo district….”
Some of her poems could have been by Pizarnik herself, as, for example, some verses my mother wrote in the afternoon of July 27, 1977: “To live free. / In the lamps of night, / in the center of the void, in the open darkness, / in the shadows the blackness and me. / To live free. / Leaning on the grave, / lost me, / in the sole light of the son.”
What does she mean by “sole light of the son”? Judging by what it says in the diary, I was the only person in this world who motivated her to live, she felt obliged not to kill herself and to help me as much as she could. She felt real compassion for me and some regret for having given birth to me. This compassion of hers is another of the recurring themes in her secret notebooks. Compassion drove her to make plans and to decide that, when I was older, were I to show a tendency toward writing, she had to channel it towards a literary activity that was not negative, that was not affected by her negative spirit. This led her to plan for me a kind of writing aimed exclusively, as far as I was concerned, at the elaboration of a personal myth.
Throughout her diary there is a surprising amount of verbal violence, surprising in someone like her, who never raised her voice and was, like many depressed people, a peaceable, very calm person. But in the diary she was terrible, destructive when talking about people. She loathed almost everybody, except Margot Valerí, a supposed friend of hers, an imaginary woman who happens to be an old Chilean aviator, perhaps her alter ego, a woman who did not exist and to whom she dedicates this short, strange poem: “Time 07:15, / direction 243°, / 7,000 feet. / Fog. / You and I are Emily. / Dickinson. / White housecoat and sad dog. / High climate and a goal at the summit. / The spirit’s salvation.”
Her verbal violence is surprising, but it should not be so surprising. After all, in private journals one is not merely talking to oneself, one is also conversing with others: all the conversations that we can never conduct in real life, because they would descend into outbursts of violence, get deposited in the diary.
When I think about it, I can see that my mother reserved her madness exclusively for her diary. She led a double life: model housewife and at the same time seriously disturbed woman whenever she wrote. Whereas Georges Bataille said that he wrote so as not to go mad, it could be said of my mother that, being a sensible person in real life, she went mad whenever she wrote.
Her writing is linked to the Secret, it is possible that she only understood literature linked to this idea of the Secret. This would explain why, when I began to publish under the name Rosario Girondo, my mother gave it no importance. Perhaps to her my writing, being neither private nor secret, was not exactly writing, perhaps she considered my writing only as a distant relation of what she understood to be real literature (always linked in her mind to the Secret): “Spanish poets today, / sad, sad, / distant relations / of what one day was real.”
The first Friday of each month, she would imagine a suicide and turn it into a poem, like this one dated Friday, October 2, 1953: “Today would be perfect / a mad dash toward the balcony, / a terrible jump into the void, / to splinter the wood in this coal-house / on Provença Street, / the jump into the void, / flinging myself from the sixth floor, / with the indifference of a bucket / of dirty, dirty water / emptied by a housewife.”
We lived on Sant Joan Avenue — later in Rovira Square — but my mother speaks in the poem of a house on Provença Street, possibly a deliberate mistake obeying her secret desire for a change of address, to which I would add a change of husband. While the poem is extravagant, even more so is the way in which she brought it to a close, something she explains in the diary three days later, when she says that the Siamese cat — as imaginary as Margot Valerí—interrupted the poem with her paw, at which point she decided it was finished and, what’s more, considered that the cat had written it.
When my first novel appeared, a pedantic exercise in style entitled Errant Necropolis, my mother simply remarked that she would have given it the title Theory of Budapest. And when I asked her why it had to have this title, given that my novel contained no theory whatsoever and made no mention of the city of Budapest, my mother smiled and replied that this was why it had to have that tide, precisely because it contained no theories and Budapest was not in it.
Years later, when I read her diary, in the second of her square notebooks I came across a lengthy essay written in 1956 and entitled “Theory of Budapest,” in which she lucidly disserted on the practice of writing private journals, but made no mention of Budapest, a city that, because of the bloody Hungarian national uprising, was frequently referred to in newspapers in the summer of 1956, when she wrote her “Theory,” which might explain why the Hungarian capital appeared in the tide of her essay.