Diary for a Story: Evasive notes

February 2, 1982

Sometimes, when a sort of tickle of a story begins to take hold of me, that insistent summons creeping over me gradually, stealthily, and muttering at this Olympia Traveller de Luxe

(there’s nothing deluxe about her, poor thing, but on the other hand she has traveleado over the seven deep blue seas, putting up with all the direct and indirect blows a portable could take, crammed in a suitcase between bottles of rum, trousers, and books)

so sometimes, when night is falling and I roll a blank page onto the carriage, light up a Gitane, and call myself an idiot

(why a story, after all, why not open a book by some other writer, or listen to one of my records?)

but sometimes, when I can’t do anything except begin a story like I wish I could begin this one, precisely then, I’d like to be Adolfo Bioy Casares.

I’d like to be Bioy because I’ve always admired him as a writer and respected him as a person, even though our respective timidities didn’t help us become friends, apart from other good reasons, among them an ocean precipitately and literally stretched between the two of us. At best count I believe that Bioy and I have set eyes on each other only three times in our lives. The first at a banquet of the Argentinean Book Society, which I was obliged to attend because in the forties I was chairman of that organization, why he was there is anyone’s guess, and in the course of which we introduced ourselves over a platter of ravioli, exchanged congenial smiles, and our conversation was limited to one moment when he asked me to pass the salt. The second time Bioy came to my house in Paris and took a couple of photos for a reason which now escapes me, though not so the good while we spent talking of Conrad, I think. The last time was symmetrical and in Buenos Aires, I went to dinner at his house, and that night we talked mostly about vampires. Needless to say, on none of the three occasions did we speak of Anabel, but this is not why I’d like to be Bioy now, but rather because I’d so much like to be able to write about Anabel as he would have done if he’d known her and if he’d written a short story about her. In this case Bioy would have spoken of Anabel as I’ll never be able to, showing her up close and deeply while keeping that distance, that detachment he decides to put (I can’t believe it’s not a decision) between some of his characters and the narrator. For me it’s going to be impossible, and not because I knew Anabel, since even when I invent characters I don’t manage to distance myself from them, although it sometimes strikes me as necessary as for the painter to back up from the easel to better embrace the whole of his image and to know where he must place the definitive brushstrokes. It’ll be impossible for me because I feel Anabel is going to invade me right from the start like when I met her in Buenos Aires in the late forties, and even though she wouldn’t be capable of imagining this story—if she’s alive and still around, old like me—all the same she’ll do everything necessary to prevent me from writing it the way I would have liked, meaning a little bit like Bioy would have known how to write it if he had known Anabel.

February 3

And so these evasive notes, these rings a dog runs around a tree trunk? If Bioy could read them he’d be quite amused, and just to enrage me he’d list together all the references of time, place, and name in a single literary quote that, according to him, they justified. And then, in his perfect English,

It was many and...