PARIS, 1960

November 1
My life is missing, I'm missing from my life, I went away with that face that I can't find, that I can't remember.

November 24
To protect myself in the image of myself drawn by my mute eyes. The room closed in and the light loved itself in solitude. Everything was on my side. Unbearable tension of clors and forms.
The light opened like a wound. The headless body entered pushing the nonexistent curtain aside with an abrupt gesture. I sank into the bed and the body found me. Things made a dull sound like a muscle when it's pulled. I sank into the darkness of the embrace and didn't see anything but his lips.

PARIS, 1961

January 2
That morning I was afriad. No. It was not that morning. It's this morning. It's now. I repeat to myself that that morning I was afriad. It is not true, it was not in the least visible part of the verb, it is now, I wake up, I'm afraid. I have looked at my legs and have raised my eyes over my body, slowly, like a careful murderous thought. This is my body, I said. I woke up and I have seen. Hands on my throat. What an idiot I am.

January 3
Write to me, he said, write to me about you. Write to him until you tangle yourself in the threads of language and fall mortally wounded.

January 5
The horror of inhabiting myself, of being - how strange - my guest, my passenger, my place of exile.

PARIS, 1962

July 19
Neither light nor shadow. A total innocence.

July 22
Small silent suicides. Strange to have fallen so far into the depths after so many precautions. She groped her way all night; she didn't cry; she didn't groan; she didn't even breathe as much as was needed. BUt they discovered you all the same. As if it were nothing.

July 25
This belief of mine that by writing I will see a signal, something with which to go on. Purse nostalgia, in a pressing state of purity. The fierce wind, the cave of harpies that sends me to my daily call.

BUENOS AIRES, 1964

July 8
Euphoria, seeing the paintings of Enrique Molina. Surrealist painting makes me happy like nothing else in the world. Makes me happy and serene>
Yesterday I read A Room of One's Own by V. Woolf. Its charm, its delicious humor. Even so, I thought I was reading a book from another, very distant epoch. Important, the idea of "a death without hindrance..." but this cannot be applied only to women. Resentment, according to V.W., obstructs a masterpiece. Yes and no. Furthermore a protest cannot always be maintained, nor an accusation either. But V.W. refers to what C.C. calls "attention" and I call "isolation."
H.A.M. agrees with me in the lack of tradition, and the tremendous solitude that not having roots anywhere implies.

October 15
The solitude of each person. Not being the object of gazes. To look instead of being looked at. To use one's eyes. Limits. No writing, no worrying about writing. No playing at being Flaubert. S. understands. The one who doesn't understand is me.

October 19
Artaud. Desires to write a page about his suffering. His physical tension; his conflicts with thought, words. But without rhetoric, please, without rhetoric. What frightens me is my similarity to A. I mean: the similarity of our wounds.

BUENOS AIRES, 1965

April 18
I am no longer writing this diary in a continuous way. I am afriad. Everything inside me is falling apart. I don't want to fight, I don't have anyone against whom to fight. All of this is so old. So tired. I wish I were able to never lie.

May 23
Readings without fervor. Desire to find a more refined mehtod of perceiving what I read.
The Trial by Kafka. Poems by Cernuda. Poetry by Nerval.
The secondary characters in The Trial interest me more than the principal ones, at least in chapter 1.
Parallelisms: Kafka, Quevedo, Nerval...: to walk impatiently or to plant oneself at the window to hasten the arrival of someone expected. The first two comment on this ironically.
Nerval: his preoccupation with poetic technique and literary technique in general.

May 29
Without knowing how or when, here I am analyzing myself. That necessity to open oneself and see. To present with words. Words as conductors, as scalpels. Only with words. Is this possible? using language so that it says what impedes living. Conferring to words the principal function. They open, they present. What it doesn't say will not be examined. Silence is skin, silence covers and shelters illness. Sharp words (they are not words but rather phrases and not phrases either but discourses).
Impossiblity to forge symbols. From there the impossiblity of writing works of fiction.