Translator’s Introduction
Ricardo Piglia wrote “A Fish in Ice” around 1970, when he was twenty-nine years old, but it remained unpublished until 2006, when he included it in a reissue of his first collection. Given its subject matter—the connections that form between people who live in two different epochs—it’s fitting that the piece itself inhabits two periods: the time of its composition, and that of its publication. We can view these two periods from three perspectives: those of (1) literary history, (2) the biography and oeuvre of its author, and (3) the histories of Argentina and the world. First, “A Fish in Ice” represents Piglia’s most ambitious early attempt to assimilate and react against the dominant literary figures of his time and place. In this sense, the story can be read as a response to the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Juan Carlos Onetti. Second, “A Fish in Ice” marks the first appearance of the character Emilio Renzi, who will serve as Piglia’s alter ego in many stories and novels to come. Some of Renzi’s (and Piglia’s) traits are already visible: waywardness, obsessiveness, distraction, intelligence, irony, and a high degree of self-consciousness. Third, Piglia wrote the story amid the atmosphere of anxiety and dread that preceded Argentina’s descent into state terror and repression. The story deals with this theme indirectly and by implication, through its detailed description of the fascist years in Italy. There is much more to go into here, outside the scope of a translator’s introduction; suffice it to say various pressures bear upon “A Fish in Ice,” and result in an intricate form.
“A Fish in Ice” is written in what might be called the voiceless colloquial. That is, the story has, or seems to have, no style—no verbal distortion to set it apart from what any person might actually say. Thus, its mode, and not its formal intricacy, presents the translator with a challenge. I’ve tried to meet that challenge with an informal English that contains no slang, but that is also, as far as possible, not idiomatic. I hope my attempt to create the non-voice, or non-style, of “A Fish in Ice” in English has a certain remoteness, because that’s how I read the original Spanish. Following the example of translators I admire—such as Cecilia Ross, in her English translation of Berta Vias Mahou’s novel about Albert Camus, They Were Coming for Him—I have identified extant translations of the works of Cesare Pavese, frequently quoted by Piglia’s protagonist, and inserted them into the text of my translation. This material possesses an alien quality, partly because of Pavese’s lyricism, and partly because the translations are old and sound like midcentury literary fiction from the United States. I’ve chosen to retain this strangeness, for its contrast with the narrative voice.
The text translated here is that of “Un pez en el hielo” (“A Fish in Ice”), printed in the 2006 expanded edition of La invasión (The Invasion), the 1967 debut story collection by Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia (1941–2017). In a prologue the author reflects: “The two longest stories, which open and close the volume, are unpublished. ‘The Jeweler’ was written in 1969 and ‘A Fish in Ice’ in early 1970. The two texts went through various versions and multiple rewritings. It seemed pertinent to include them in the book because they were written with the same conception of literature as the rest of the stories.” The text quotes and refers to Pavese in various ways. Phrases and sentences from Pavese’s works and biography are intercalated among Piglia’s lines, as motifs; they are offset from the text, as objects of scrutiny and commentary; and they are submerged within the text, as unattributed appropriations. Where I was able to identify a source, and an English translation was available, I have used these; end notes list the texts used.
A Fish in Ice
1
Emilio Renzi was at a sidewalk bar on the Piazza Carlo Felice in front of the Turin station early in the morning when he saw her. It couldn’t be. Inés was there at a table nearby with the whitehaired guy. With the whitehaired jerk who had taken her to Europe. She was wearing the blue outfit Emilio gave her and smiled beautifully in the summer glare.
She noticed him in turn, incredulous and a little irritated, as if she thought Emilio was following her. And he had of course been following her in his imagination ever since the evening Inés left him and went off for good while he told her Stay, let’s get married.
Several months had gone by and now Emilio was in Italy with a grant to study the works of Pavese. He had been looking for an excuse to escape Buenos Aires, to stop thinking about her and forget her. He now had her in front of him, however, seated in the shade of the colorful umbrellas. The thing most feared in secret always happens. What was she doing in Turin?
As if she’d read his thoughts the girl made a questioning gesture at him then stood and went into the bar, but before passing through the seating area she turned to look at him with an expression of annoyance that he knew well.
Emilio followed her and went inside. He didn’t see her. The restrooms were downstairs next to the telephones. There were stairs and then a hallway that vanished in the dark. She wasn’t there either. He left the seating area and returned to the stifling heat of the street. Everything was dreamlike. Neither she nor the whitehaired man were at the bar. They had left in a hurry, perhaps they’d thought he was going to make trouble. Had she told the whitehaired man the truth? That guy over there is Emilio and he followed me here from Buenos Aires … .
The empty table, the money lying on a metal tray. Two beers. When she lived with him, she hardly ever drank beer, even less in the morning. There was a train ticket on the floor. Ferrovia Nazionale. Roma-Torino. Had they come by train? Then why was there only a single fare?
He knew what was happening but couldn’t manage to regain his composure. He ran into acquaintances everywhere he went. Arriving in Italy he immediately saw Roberto Rossi, a friend from La Plata, on the street in Rome. It was incredible that he should be in Italy and Emilio went over to greet him, happy to see him. Rossi was conversing animatedly with an older gentleman. Emilio came up alongside them, but it was not him. Much confusion, quick apologies.
Two days later on the train to Turin he saw another friend exit the dining car. It was Mario. Emilio stood smiling and Mario passed down the aisle as if he were invisible. We all have a double, he began to believe, on another continent, the world is a mirror and everything is duplicated, but elsewhere.
A woman just like Inés with the whitehaired man was too much of a coincidence. Two doubles the same on the other side of the globe. It couldn’t be, he raved. Seized by a mimetic impulse he was seeing repetitions everywhere, everything was a simulacrum. He hadn’t spoken to anyone in days. Maybe that was it. Or maybe he was right and soon he would come across someone who was him (curly hair, glasses, face of a sleepwalker) and then … he knew what happened to people who met their dopplegänger …
He sat back down at the table. He looked for his notebook with the black cover. He had to put this out of mind and focus on his work.
Straight ahead was the Hotel Roma. On this spot exactly twenty years ago Cesare Pavese had killed himself. He unfolded the map of Piedmont and went back to locating Santo Stefano Belbo, a town about ninety kilometers away, in the Langhe region. Belbo was the name of the river that ran through the town. Pavese was born there in 1908, he’d killed himself at age forty-two. Emilio counted. “I have fifteen years left … no, not fifteen, sixteen,” he calculated. “Plenty of time.” He began to take notes. He was working on Pavese’s diary.
Only those who keep a diary can read a diary that someone else writes. He crossed out this sentence and wrote: Only those who keep a diary can understand a diary that someone else keeps. He read the sentence and crossed it out again and wrote beside it Only those who write in a diary can understand what someone else writes in their diary. Pavese wrote one of the greatest diaries ever written … because he killed himself.
He didn’t know of a novelist who had ever killed anyone. It was strange. A writer of novels who turned into a felon. There weren’t any. Were there any? The novelist as murderer. Suicides are timid murderers.
He thought of Pavese’s suicide as a crime that had to be deciphered. There were clues, hints, multiple testimonies. There was no culprit, only strange events awaiting an explanation. I would pay a murderer my gold coin to kill me in the night, Pavese had written.
He looked at the hotel opposite. A girl leaned out a third-story window and gazed below, indifferent. She was just like Inés. Was she just like Inés? All women were alike. Women are an enemy race, Pavese wrote, like the Germans. He was desperate. It was not repetition but rather replication that dominated life. The predestined, that which repeats. Condemned to sameness. When we see we’ve always done the same thing forever, we can no longer think about the past without resentment.
Loss was the most atrocious thing that could happen to someone. To be abandoned, to know the person you love is with someone else. Oh Thou, have mercy. To see her with someone else. This is the state of mind in which crimes are committed.
He had reconstructed Pavese’s final itinerary. He packed the suitcase he used for short trips and brought only the Diary manuscript and Dialogues with Leucò, his favorite book. He abandoned the house on via Lamarmora where he lived with his sister, he merely waved goodbye to Ernestina who had raised him, he went downstairs and left to take the train out of Porta Nuova, but instead of going to the station he headed for the Albergo Roma.
He booked a room that had a telephone, they gave him Room 23 on the second floor. Simple accommodations, with a bed, a table, and a red armchair. From the window he saw the bar where Renzi was now seated and, farther off, the platform and the station.
At the hotel, until 6:00 PM, Pavese wrote the last letter to his sister who was on vacation at the beach in Serralunga. It was a sad letter, and it was a goodbye.
I have checked into a hotel that isn’t costing me much and I sleep flawlessly. They clean my suits and shirts in house. There’s no need for you to come back on Monday the 21st. I’m doing just fine, like a fish in ice. He placed five thousand lire in the envelope.
That same evening Pavese’s friend Bona met him by chance on the via Po. They were in the middle of the August holiday, the city empty, like today. With a fiery gaze Pavese took long strides and seemed feverish. Bona had to trail along after him as far as the nearby Café Florio. Pavese was in love with an American actress, and she had left him. He couldn’t stop thinking about this woman. He saw her everywhere. Pavese said he was in Turin in secret, he wanted to rest, nobody needed to know Bona had seen him. He was steady, calm, relentless, exact. Later they went to dinner at a brewery on the banks of the Po. They chatted at ease about things of no importance. Soon, looking down into the dark river, he remarked suddenly that he wouldn’t like to drown. “Poison would be better,” he said. They parted ways at around midnight.
Then, presumably, Pavese made the rounds of the empty city until he finally returned late at night to the hotel. The receptionist saw him enter and Pavese asked not to be disturbed. At dawn on the 18th of August he wrote the final page of his Diary.
The thing most feared in secret always happens. I write: oh Thou, have mercy. And then? All it takes is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride. All this is sickening.
Not words. An an. I won’t write any more.
The Diary ended here. It was all arranged.
And yet Pavese went another week before killing himself. He committed suicide in the early hours of August 26. Renzi was moved by these final days. Pavese alone in the empty city. He tries to find the strength to kill himself. Which he did. He still lived eight more days, even though, to himself, he was dead already. Condemned. The living dead.
How long can the fish survive in the ice. Its eye fixed on clear whiteness, completely immobile.
2
The train was nearly empty. Renzi sat off to the side by a window and traveled through Piedmont looking at the landscape. These were the Langhe of Pavese. In the poems they seemed more beautiful, more exotic. The Devil in the Hills. It seemed like Tandil, the Tandil mountains where Renzi had spent summers as a child. That’s what literary landscapes are, he thought. Ruins of childhood. In The Moon and the Bonfire the protagonist returns after years away and revisits these same towns. For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods. I used to go back there in the evening from the city when it grew dusk, and for me it was not just another place but a point of view, a way of life.
The midday light lent the hills a phantasmal air, they were so bright they seemed transparent. Hills like white elephants. The cultivated lands and the yellow houses amid the trees and the gently sloping trails and the privet fences had been there forever. The vineyards were as old as the Piedmontese dialect.
Standing in the sun a man in shirtsleeves and a black hat watched the train pass. It was Nazareno, his uncle. The mild gaze, the Avanti cigarette extinguished between his lips, the whiskers yellowed by tobacco, the tanned skin. Of course, Uncle Nazareno had died when Emilio was ten years old. (A little earlier, before boarding the train, he had glimpsed Pancho Alfaro a ways off, in front of a kiosk, on platform 12.)
He was so alone that everything seemed familiar. The despair of love as a function of likeness. What has been lost is unique and so the world is populated with simulacra. What is missing is converted into an empty repetition. That’s why forsaken lovers consider suicide. Oh Thou, have mercy. The fixed idea would have to merge with the repetition. To always think the same thing is to see everything the same.
The train climbed the hill slowly and the valleys below shone in the bright summer air.
Renzi opened his notebook. Pavese’s Dairy began and ended with two great crises. Women were the pretext.
The first, in 1936. These were the fascist years, networks opposed to Mussolini proliferated in Turin. Pavese was compromised along with the woman with the raspy voice (the donna dalla voce rauca of the poems), Tina, a militant communist; she had already been arrested and indicted years earlier and was being watched. So she asked Pavese if he would receive clandestine correspondence at his address. Pavese accepted right away. He was found out, his house raided, the letters compromised him, but of course Pavese took it all on himself and never named the woman. He was jailed, tried, and confined at Brancaleone, in Calabria. He started writing his Diary there. He spent three years in isolation without communicating with Tina so as not to compromise her. He could never get news from her directly. He only knew she was safe, and this soothed him. At last his sentence was commuted and he could return to Turin. When he arrived he found out that Tina had married someone else a month earlier. When a man finds himself in my condition nothing is left for him but to examine his conscience. Now that I have arrived at utter abjection, what do I think about? I think how lovely it would be if this abjection were also material, if I had broken shoes for example. I write to Tina, have mercy. And then?
The train advanced through the hills. He was interested in studying the ways the two great crises of Pavese’s life brought language to the limit. The Diary entries between November 1937 and March 1938, and then the entries of the spring and summer of 1950. Stylistically the response was the same.
To be outside life. To leave nothing behind. (Only a Diary.) But to be outside life was to be dead. “Fundamentally, you write to be as dead, to speak outside of time, to make yourself remembered by all.” In fondo, tu scrivi per essere come morto. To be outside life. Kafka thought something similar.
Renzi recalled a Kafka quote and searched for it in his notebook.
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than the others do; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor.
It was a Diary entry from October 19, 1921. Kafka had been able to write from the land of the dead. Everything was in “The Hunter Gracchus,” Kafka’s most extraordinary story. No one will read what I am writing, writes Gracchus, the eternal phantom who lives among humankind. And we know Gracchus is Kafka’s German name. The living dead. The real survivor.
No one will read what I am writing. This certainty was unique. Kafka had ordered Dora Diamant to burn his manuscripts, and stretched out on a sofa, he had watched her burn them. The notebooks of his final years. Of all this, only “The Burrow,” Kafka’s last story, which had no ending, was saved.
Someone who makes that extreme gesture, thought Renzi, does not need to kill himself. He makes this gesture so as not to kill himself. Impossible for Kafka to say, No words, I won’t write any more. He said I will go on writing, but I will destroy what I’ve written and go back to writing again and no one will read me.
There was the letter from Max Brod to Martin Buber. January 25, 1925: “In the last year of his life [Kafka] asked his friend Dora Diamant to commit to the flames some 20 thick notebooks. He lay in bed and pondered how his originals burned.” Is that why he chose her? For this scene? As Kafka lay watching from the bed, Dora lit the match and touched it to the pages, dropping them into the basin as they caught FIRE. “I respected his wish, and when he lay ill, I burnt things of his before his eyes.” (Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant.)
Dora Diamant: the firestarter, Kafka’s desire in its purest form. Some twenty thick notebooks.
And “The Burrow”? “The final sheets were burnt by Dora who still managed to rescue part of the manuscript.”
Renzi was rereading these old notes, which now struck him as being intimately linked to his hypothesis about Pavese’s end. Literature, women, and death.
In any case Kafka had said that he could not write … but always started over. By contrast Pavese had put his papers in order, he thought of himself as a king of his calling. (Kafka, by contrast, saw himself as a servant.) If Pavese had written about that state, he would have been saved … But one must be Kafka or Roberto Arlt. Failed writer. (A pleonasm.)
So, Pavese had survived a few days. When he ought to have started writing, he stopped. To hold on in a gray zone. A fish in ice. I am as dead.
If he could have met the failures of today. Pavese wrote a letter, yes, a single text. And the ash of burnt papers was what they found at the hotel. What could those have been? If he had followed that road … . It was this letter, an extraordinary text that he wrote to his friend Davide Lajolo moments before killing himself.
Monday the 28th Lajolo receives it by express after the news of Pavese’s suicide has already appeared in La Stampa. The letter is dated Turin, August 25.
Seeing that my loves are shouted from the Alps to Capo Passero, all I can tell you is that I, like Cortez, have burnt my boats. I don’t know if I will discover Montezuma’s treasure, but I do know that on the Tenochtitlán plateau they carry out human sacrifices. I haven’t thought about these things in years. I wrote. I won’t write anymore. With the same obstinacy, with the same stoic willpower of the Langhe, I will make my journey to the realm of the dead. As always, I foresaw it all five years ago. The less you speak to “people” about this affair, the more I will thank you. You know what you have to do. Will you be able to do it? Ciao forever, your Cesare.
Human sacrifices. He wrote the letter, then entered the land of the dead.
Sunday August 27, at 8:30 in the evening, a staff member concerned about the guest who has not been seen all day knocks two or three times on the door of the room. He doesn’t receive an answer and forces it open. Cesare Pavese is dead. He is clothed and stretched out on the bed. He has only removed his shoes. On the nightstand, packets of sleeping pills. Ashes on the windowsill. Burnt papers.
He had only removed his shoes.
3
The station at Santo Stefano Belbo was tranquil and sad. It was just the way Pavese had seen it as a boy. S. Stefano Belbo, Renzi read at the end of the platform. A small town station. He walked around a bit. He entered a cool dark bar and ordered a grappa. Then he exited into the afternoon heat. He climbed a road that vanished among the poplars. At the end was a tall house with barred windows. Esposizione Cesare Pavese. “The poet Cesare Pavese was born here.”
He rang the doorbell and at length the custodian appeared. There did not seem to be many visitors. Some of the rooms were being repaired, there had been flooding, a lot of materials had been lost. There were several rooms with manuscripts and photos. In one of the side rooms Pavese’s desk had been reconstructed. The worktable against the window that gave onto the hills, various dictionaries, a Remington, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (It was Tender Is the Night.) There was a pair of eyeglasses with black frames, a number 2 Faber pencil, a broken lamp, the dead remains of a life.
Inside a showcase were the originals of the Diary. This was what he had come to see. Sheets written in a microscopic hand, cards, verso translations. Texts and dates, paragraphs crossed out. The accumulated days of a life.
On a cover sheet, Pavese had written in blue pencil: Il Mestiere di Vivere: Diario 1935–1950. It was the same kind of paper he’d used to write the final page. This is the first time I have drawn up a balance sheet for a year that is not yet over. In my work, then, I am king. In ten years I have done it all. If I think of the hesitations of former times … And almost at the end of the page, written in the same firm and serene hand, the sentence. This is the balance sheet of an unfinished year, that I won’t finish.
He had left his Diary in perfect order, ready to be published. If he had burnt it he would not have killed himself. (Perhaps.)
In fact he had written it so she would read it …
“Why write these things, which she’ll read, which may persuade her to intervene, and walk out on you?” We have to think that right up to the last page, the Diary must have been written from within an obsession with the beloved who would read it (“she must know it, she must know it,” he wrote on May 27, 1950). And the penultimate entry can’t be ignored, August 16, which is addressed to her: “My dear one, perhaps you are really the best—my real love. But I no longer have time to tell you so, to make you understand—and then, even if I could, there would still be the test—test—failure.”
Death will come and will have your eyes.
There had been a series of books that reproduced this impossible tension through their form. The Unquiet Grave by Connolly, The Subterraneans by Kerouac. They were like letters, private notes, books without a form. A real woman is behind the writing. “If this faithless girl forgot me, there would be no one for whom to write,” said Connolly.
Those who understood women wrote elegant books: Flaubert, Henry James. Those who didn’t understand them wrote chaotic books: Melville, Malcolm Lowry. A theory about this relationship had to be made up. Kerouac wrote his confession in one night and Pavese his book over thirty years, but the issue was the same. Connolly: a London summer. It was all a matter of intensity. Metamorphosis.
Books written for love of a woman, during love or after love. A cartography could be made of them. Those who can’t separate themselves from a woman (F. Scott Fitzgerald) and write about her. Those who separate themselves from all women (Kafka) and absolutely do not write about them. Those who are abandoned (Pavese) and write to her. Transformations of Beatrice.
Understand women. Pavese was unable to. But he had his suspicions. Renzi recalled an astute observation from the beginning of The Business of Living and read it now in the manuscript in the showcase.
“2nd October 1936. I much regret that, until now, I have always ignored formal rules of deportment and have not acquired my own style of social behavior. Why do women in general have better manners than men? Because they depend for everything upon the formal effect they produce, while men act and think. I must become more ladylike.”
If he had become more ladylike, he would have saved himself. He sought form in life. That’s how to understand the Diary’s title (and its failure). He had only learned how to write.
—Look at this photo, that’s Constance Dowling, the lovely Connie, the North American actress, the last love. He killed himself over her.
The voice came from behind. Renzi turned around. The man who’d spoken gazed intensely at the photo, bent, hands behind his back and eyeglasses on his forehead. He looked nearsighted. He was thin with a dry face and wore a white raincoat.
On the wall was a black-and-white portrait of a girl in a practiced pose, then a snapshot of Pavese with the same girl on a hotel terrace in the mountains.
—To die for an actress, American no less, the man said, his smile a wicked gesture. —Pavese had fallen hopelessly in love with Connie. They had spent a few days at a hotel in the Alps, that’s where this photo is from. But she went back to Los Angeles and married somebody else. She died in an accident a few years later, so you see, if she had stayed with Pavese, maybe she would have been saved … . Him too. Although he couldn’t be with a woman. But kill yourself, over that? Over that silly little problem … We all have our silly little problems.
The man spoke a strange Italian that Renzi understood perfectly. He always understood an alien language better when a foreigner spoke it. He looked Polish, a Polish count (like all exiled Poles, according to Dostoyevsky).
He was Polish, but not a count.
—I am a Polish collector, he said.
He had made a little discovery and wanted to integrate it into the Pavese collection. That’s why he was there. He went from museum to museum offering his finds. He had just sold Ezra Pound’s typewriter to the Rapallo Museum. The year before, he had acquired the original orthopedic leg that the Bible seller steals from the crippled girl in a story by Flannery O’Connor.
In this case it was something special. The ghostly presence of a woman. The faithless beloved phantom. A movie. Black Angel, a film noir (so-called) that Constance Dowling appeared in, young and beautiful, in a minor but special role. She was the Black Angel, a beautiful hardboiled blackmailer, he added, the depraved woman killed with a white scarf in the film. In this 1946 picture Connie can be seen in all her youth and beauty forever.
He said he was certain Pavese had a print of the movie and watched it on summer nights after she had left him and gone to Los Angeles to marry somebody else.
The scenario was based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich (the great Cornell Woolrich, he said). And Roy William Neill directed it, the best B-list director in Hollywood, a brilliant Irishman, a great unknown. It was his last film, he premiered it in August ’46 and died a month later.
Everything seemed meaningful to him, everything seemed extraordinary, as if he were out of his mind.
The start of the film centers on Constance Dowling. Winter in New York. A luxury apartment. The girl is having a dispute with the governess, they’re arguing over a white scarf. Connie stays behind, alone. There is a fish tank with a dark fish that swims alone in the clear water. Outside it has stopped snowing. The girl puts the tank on the balcony, so the fish has a few hours of natural light, then goes into the bedroom, but leaves the window open. At the end of the sequence, when the police enter the house, two days later, they find Connie, strangled with the scarf. The window is shut, the fish in the fish tank frozen. (A motionless fish in a block of ice.) The girl dead on the floor.
Pavese had the only complete copy of the movie without the cuts the distributors had made to the opening sequence. The commercial release is 81 minutes long, said the Pole, with an air of satisfaction, but this copy is 85 minutes.
A slight difference. But that’s what interests collectors. The slight differences. The deviation in the series. The unique object. For example, Ezra Pound’s typewriter had a backward keyboard because Pound was left-handed. Surely this sole copy of the complete movie was Connie’s. And that’s what he had acquired.
—It’s my job, he said, to find out the difference.
They went on chatting a while, they ended up going through the house again and at last Renzi decided to leave. It was late, he had to get back to Turin. The Pole saw him to the door.
—There’s a bus that will take you to the station, it comes every half hour, at the intersection, over there. He pointed to a nearby road.
They parted ways. The Pole went into the house, stooped, hands behind his back. Odd. He seemed to live there. Alone, shut up inside the empty house. As if he were the guardian of the museum. A Pole. Was it possible?
Renzi went out into the street and climbed the path toward the route to town. It was the end of the afternoon but the heat had not ceased. He stopped under a tree at the crossroads to wait. The hills were the same ones Pavese described in his books. Soft and bright, they seemed to meander among the clouds and vineyards and old manses with colored roofs. Cars passed along the highway with their headlights on in the dusk.
The day had been intense, strange. At moments he had managed to forget Inés. And the Pole? A collector. Like me, he thought. Of what? Simulacra.
Suddenly a car passed, pulled over a little further on, and backed up. A girl stuck her head out the window.
—What are you doing? We’ll take you.
It was Inés. She was there.
—So, it was you.
—We saw you at the bar …
The whitehaired man smoked, seated next to her, indifferent. Inés got out.
—What are you doing here? she asked.
Suddenly Renzi heard himself say:
—I came to forget you.
—I came to forget you too, she said, and laughed. We’re heading north, we’ll take you if you want.
—No thank you, said Renzi, and smiled.
They remained hushed a moment. At last Inés brushed his face with her lips and went off. She turned around before getting into the car and looked at him again. The car vanished in a cloud of dust.
Sources Included in the Text
The thing most feared in secret always happens. Pavese, Cesare translated by A.E. Murch with Jeanne Molli. Diary entry for August 18, 1950. The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935–1950. New York: Walker & Company, 1961, p. 366.
Suicides are timid murderers. Pavese, diary entry for August 17, 1950. The Burning Brand, p. 365.
Cf. “I spend most of my time at the local tavern, which costs me very little, and I sleep well there [… .] I’m well, like a fish in ice.” Pavese, Cesare translated by A.E. Murch. Letter, August 17, 1950. Selected Letters. London: Peter Owen, 1969, pp. 267–68.
The thing most feared in secret always happens [… .] I won’t write any more. Pavese, diary entry for August 18, 1950. The Burning Brand, p. 366.
For a long time, we had talked of the hill […] a way of life. Pavese, Cesare translated by R.W. Flint. “The House on the Hill.” The Selected Works of Cease Pavese. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968, p. 59.
When a man finds himself in my condition [… .] And then? Cf. Pavese, diary entries for April 10, 1936, and August 18, 1950. The Burning Brand, pp. 47, 48, 366.
In fondo, tu scrivi per essere come morto. In Italian in Piglia’s text. Cf. “Fundamentally, you write to be as dead, to speak outside of time, to make yourself remembered by all.” Pavese, diary entry for April 10, 1949. The Burning Brand, p. 338.
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life […] is the real survivor. Kafka, Franz translated by Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt. Diary entry for October 19, 2021. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914–1923, p. 394.
No one will read what I am writing. Cf. “Nobody will read what I say here [… .] he would not know how to help me.” Kafka, Franz translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. “The Hunter Gracchus.” The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 1971, p. 230.
As Kafka lay [… .] before his eyes. Diamant, Kathi. Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant. New York: Vintage, 2004, p. 84. In English in Piglia’s text.
I am as dead. Pavese, diary entry for February 25, 1938. The Burning Brand, p. 83.
Seeing that my loves are shouted [… .] Ciao forever, your Cesare. Pavese, Cesare. Letter, August 25, 1950. Lettere 1945–1950. Turin: Einaudi, 1966, p. 570.
He had only removed his shoes. Lajolo, Davide translated by Mario and Mark Pietralunga. An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese. New York: New Directions, 1983, p. 242.
This is the first time [… .] of former times. Pavese, diary entry for August 17, 1950. The Burning Brand, p. 366.
This is the balance sheet for an unfinished year, that I won’t finish. Pavese, diary entry for August 17, 1950. The Burning Brand, p. 366.
Why write these things […] to walk out on you? Pavese, diary entry for January 26, 1938. The Burning Brand, p. 93.
She must know it, she must know it. Pavese, diary entry for May 27, 1950. The Burning Brand, p. 363.
My dear one [… .] the test—test—failure. Pavese, diary entry for August 16, 1950. The Burning Brand, p. 365.
Death will come and will have your eyes. Pavese, Cesare translated by Geoffrey Brock. “Death will come and will have your eyes.” Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2002, p. 347.
If this faithless girl forgot me there would be no one for whom to write. Connolly, Cyril. The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus. New York: Persea Books, 1981, p. 70.
2nd October 1936 [… .] I must become more ladylike. Pavese, diary entry for October 2, 1936. The Burning Brand, p. 61.
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Erik Noonan
Ricardo Piglia (Buenos Aires, 1940–2017), professor emeritus of Princeton University, is considered a classic of contemporary Spanish-language literature. He published five novels as well as collections of stories and criticism, and received numerous prizes.
Erik Noonan is the author of the poetry collections Stances and Haiku d’Etat, and his writing appears in the anthology Cross Strokes. He is Managing Editor at JackLeg Press and Assistant Dean at the San Francisco Film School. He lives in Oakland, California.