At three, coffee and bread with ham.
At seven, I left the office and headed in the direction of Costanera Avenue for a breath of fresh air (it’s very hot, about 90 degrees). I was thinking about what Aldo told me yesterday. Then I went to Cecilia Benedit’s home and we went out for dinner together. I had soup, steak frites, and salad, stewed fruit. I hadn’t seen her for some time, so she told me about her adventures in a Mercedes […]. From there, around midnight, I went to the Rex for a coffee […]. On the way home, I went into the Tortoni to pick up a package and talk to Pocho. At home, I read Kafka’s diary. Went to sleep around three. I tell you all this for you to know what I am like in my daily life.
Friday
“Then,” says Justo Navarro, “you grab the thing that is closest: you talk about yourself. And, writing about yourself, you begin to see yourself as if you were another, you treat yourself as if you were another: you move away from yourself in proportion as you approach yourself.”
Saturday
In an essay by Alan Pauls on the genre, I have just read that the great theme of the private journal in the twentieth century is sickness. I didn’t know, I had never thought about this. And yet — curious coincidence — one of my diary’s central ideas, one of its most recurring themes, is undoubtedly that of sickness, in this case literature-sickness, Montano’s malady in short.
“The great theme of the private journal in the twentieth century,” writes Alan Pauls, “is sickness. The annotations which the writer attaches to this illness represent something like a daily, unflagging report, giving an account of its progress, a kind of clinical history that seems only to have ears for the stealthy expressiveness of the ailment.”
As I deduce from what I have read in this essay on the genre, those writing great private journals in the last century did not do so to know who they were, but kept them to know what they were turning into, in which unforeseeable direction catastrophe was taking them. “It is not, therefore, the revelation of a truth that these diaries could or wanted to give us, but the crude, clinical account of a mutation.”
We are, therefore, face-to-face with writing’s clinical dimension. Surely in these pages I have been striving — perhaps without being entirely aware of it until now — to find out where the elimination of my illness, of my Montano’s malady, would lead me. To silence, probably. Is this a good thing? I don’t think so, because I would be back to where I was in the beginning: seated before the rickety chair of someone who is tragically agraphic. So surely the illness is better than the cure.
But is the illness a good thing? At the moment the best thing would be to keep smoking, to keep writing: to write, for example, that I am smoking. I take a drag from my cigarette and remember that, in Gombrowicz’s diary, the writer ends up identifying himself with the eviclass="underline" “I myself was the illness, meaning the anomaly, meaning something related to death….”
But was Gombrowicz being sincere when he wrote this? His diary is not exactly a masterpiece of sincerity, that quality so many hope to find in a private journal. In his diary, he accomplished a new inventive form and at the same time invented a new form of writing a diary. And he did this perhaps because, as a writer, what Gombrowicz feared most was Sincerity, he knew that Sincerity in literature led nowhere: “Has there ever been a diary that was sincere? The sincere diary is without a doubt the most fallacious, because frankness is not of this world. And also — sincerity, what a bore! It isn’t even faintly fascinating.”
Because of all this, he did not allow his diary to become confessional. He understood in time that in his diary he had to present himself in action, in his intention to impose himself on the reader in a certain way, in his will to create himself in sight of and with the knowledge of everyone. To tell the reader, “This is how I want to be for you,” and not, “This is how I am.” Gombrowicz claimed the right to his own face: “Surely I do not have to allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry to disfigure me as he pleases.”
I am doing something similar here, in this dictionary, resounding fortissimo with one of the great themes of existentialism: the creation of one’s self.
“But,” the reader might say, “you’ve been trying for some time now to be sincere, to give reliable information about your life.”
And it’s true, in many pages of this dictionary I have been kneeling before the altar of Truthfulness and offering an amount of reliable information about my life, about how I composed the fictional Montano’s Malady, I have opened a parenthesis here with great pleasure, and I have done so in the form of a timid autobiography, but it’s also true that, by the time I reach Monsieur Teste and Paul Valéry, the final entries planned for this dictionary of writers of private journals, I intend to enter a space bordering fiction and reality, possibly as a way of letting off steam after having been so veracious, after having told truths — for now, I shall carry on doing so — about my fragmented life, very truthful truths, recounted as if I didn’t know that the truth is also invented, as Antonio Machado said.
GOMBROWICZ, WITOLD (Małoszyce, 1904–Vence, 1969). At the end of the twentieth century, Rosa and I went to Valparaiso to think about explosions. It isn’t that we had agreed beforehand on something so extravagant as traveling to a distant place just to think about something so alien to us as explosions. No, in reality we went to Valparaiso just to celebrate the end of the century, but what happened was that, once we were on the hanging terrace of the Brighton Hotel, watching the fireworks launched from ships anchored in the bay, neither Rosa nor I could stop thinking about something normally so far from our minds as blessed explosions. So much so, that Valparaiso will always be linked in our minds with explosions and the names of six Chilean friends: Paula and Roberto Brodsky, Andrés, Rodrigo, Carolina, and Gonzalo. With all of them we spent the restless night of December 30, in a house facing the Pacific, in Tunquén, and the following day, with the idea of celebrating the end of the century, we made the long drive to the Brighton in Valparaiso, where we had booked all six rooms in this small hotel equipped with a truly unforgettable terrace, a terrace with a wonderful view of the city and bay, a space that today, with the perspective afforded by memory, strikes me as one of the central places in my life.
In Tunquén, the night before, we had been chatting and drinking until the early hours of the morning, in an ideal atmosphere for me, since our Chilean friends showed — or at least very politely feigned — a certain interest to know episodes and memories from my life: something that does not tend to happen to me in Barcelona, for example, where nobody seems interested in knowing fragments of my life — they behave as if they already knew it — and that may explain why they arrange to meet me in the city’s rowdiest bars and restaurants, they deliberately arrange to meet me in a place where they know that conversations will always be disrupted and nervous. In Tunquén, however, I was listened to with respect, laughter, and attention. Even Rosa seemed to be amused by my recollections and was especially charming when she laughed in the company of the others.
A long, unforgettable evening, with laughter at times punctuating some of my remarks. As, for example, when Carolina — an inspired journalist, a good interviewer in real life — asked me point-blank, almost treacherously, what I should like to be were I not a writer. And, after a brief hesitation, I replied that I should like to be a psychiatrist specializing in dissociative post-traumatic stress and disorders, and a member of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. (Response followed by prolonged laughter.)