Chronicles of Leopoldo Brizuela's abandonment: memories in the raw

The writer Leopoldo Brizuela – author of titles such as Tejiendo agua, Inglaterra and Los que llega más lejos , among others, and winner of the 1999 Clarín Novela Prize – died in May 2019, at the age of 55. In his house in Tolosa, La Plata, there were dozens of notebooks, bookcases and boxes containing a large number of texts by him . During his last year of life, he organized his personal archive, which contained, among other manuscripts, those that make up Diario del abandono (Bosque energética, 2024).

“I connected very intensely with Leopoldo Brizuela and his work in a very unexpected way for me because he was part of the magazine El ansia, a literary publication of about 300 pages, in book format, which dedicated its last issue to three writers and one of them was him,” says Guido Herzovich, researcher in Latin American Literature and contributor to the newspaper’s edition. He says that in 2019 he had a “very intense, very nice” conversation with the writer – who died that same year – and then they held an attempt to organize a meeting for two months. “He was visibly ill, although he greatly minimized his illness,” recalls the researcher.

The initial idea of ​​that meeting was to meet in Ensenada, near where Brizuela lived, eat at the local yacht club and tour his area of ​​influence. “Because that is the spirit of the magazine,” says Herzovich. “Following an author for a year, getting to know the places where he currently circulates and where he lived, to learn his story and then write different texts about that year we spent together,” he adds. The text was to be written as a chronicle, but the author died. So Herzovich contacted Ariel Sánchez, his widower, to interview him with the idea of ​​drawing a profile of Brizuela based on the stories of those who knew him.

“We went to Ariel’s house, he is a very, very extraordinary guy; five months had passed since Leopoldo had died, he was very visibly grieving. But his way of grieving was absolutely hospitable, we were together in the house that had belonged to the Brizuela family, where Ariel continued to live, where they lived together for ten years. There he showed us his things, and a very impressive personal archive of Leopoldo,” says Herzovich.

During his later years, Brizuela worked in the Archives Department of the National Library, in personal collections. In doing so, he acquired great knowledge in the area: this is how he began to organize his own archive, which had previously been a collection of papers scattered around different corners of the house. “He had classified the materials with a certain criterion,” says the researcher. “In different spaces, labeled folders began to appear, in which Leopoldo had been organizing all that immense material. Ariel took out some letters and read small texts, some computer files; we took a small 'tour' with his guide that included the archive,” says the author of the article about Brizuela, who after writing it was so enthusiastic about him and the material that was appearing that he continued with the investigation about him in dozens of interviews, which he will compile in a book that will soon appear.

–Did Brizuela write the Diary of Abandonment with the intention of it being published?

–In this notebook it is very clear that he has a theme and a concern that he is exploring. There is something of diary writing, everyday writing, but there is a project. He organizes the material, there is an idea of ​​what form the complete text will have. There are very strong elements of the narrative structure, for example: the element that triggers the writing of this diary is the idea, the suspicion that there is a scene from his childhood, which occurred when he was five years old, which explains something of the fear of abandonment that haunts him at this moment in his life. That scene, announced at the very beginning, is only told on page 100. There is something very deliberate there, with the instruments of narration, which is not usual in an intimate diary. Partly because it is a relatively corrected text, different from the original handwritten text, but above all, I think, because it has a project. In that sense it could be said that, although it is a confessional and autobiographical text, with a diary structure, it is not strictly a diary.

–What differences are there between the texts in this book and those in Brizuela’s other personal diaries?

–Your first complete diaries are from two or three years before you wrote these texts. A fundamental difference is that these earlier ones were written in the heat of your hand, you write down every day what you feel. At the same time, I feel that there is something double in the sense of the comparison with the other diaries that seemed very evident to me: it is a raw text, with a very clear density, a play on your personal history; the idea you have of yourself, your projects and fantasies about what loving relationships you are capable of having. There is something of work on yourself, of inquiry and transformation. All this written with a very strong conviction and with great seriousness. But it is also an element of a narrative project, complexity in construction, sophistication, and a diary with a final list of quotes.

All these elements indicate an idea of ​​the work, they give one to think that he fantasized about publishing this text, making it public in some way and circulating it among certain people. I think that the coexistence of these two aspects is what makes it so powerful. On the one hand, it was designed to be read by others: it is an accessible text and hospitable to the reader, at least much more so than other diaries of Leopoldo, which are more difficult to read because one does not know who the characters are, he tells stories halfway, he anticipates that he will tell something the next day that is not resolved that night and finally he does not, etc. On the other hand, there is the lived intensity. I think that makes the text something very particular.

–I think it’s a great topic in several ways . This is a text that he wrote two years after breaking up with his last girlfriend, a woman, and having started going out with boys. He had been having two years of adventures, trying to form more stable relationships, having suffered a lot and creating a kind of gay community, especially in La Plata. Afterwards he would come to Buenos Aires, very disappointed by his chosen family. But I think there is something about the experience that inspired him and pushed him to write this text that is historical, that has to do with the type of communities that certain gays of that time were part of, in the late 80s and early 90s. Whether they said they were gay or not, what type of bonds they felt they could form with each other, the places where they could go out or not, feel free or not: the experience that he writes in the diary has to do with the conditions of possibility. Although all love experiences are related to the possibility of love at any given moment – ​​there is always something social in love – in this case I think it is seen very clearly in the sense that they did not have many models of relationships. There was little information, there was no internet to investigate these things, they were not gays connected to the past. Although Leopoldo did have a very good bond with María Elena Walsh, for example. In that sense he had a very good model of homosexuality there.

Shocked by the material he had found, Herzovich spoke with Sánchez, heir to Brizuela’s rights, who authorized the publication of the diary. “He has an intense relationship with Leopoldo’s intimacy; in my case, with respect to the unpublished texts, my feeling is to be between betrayal and historical reparation,” he says. He adds that, although he believes that he had the intention of publishing this material at some point, it is likely that he would not have had that possibility at the time it was written. “The fact that today it is easy to find a publisher that can publish a genre like this at a given social and cultural moment – ​​it is very clear that a story like Leopoldo’s is more readable today than it was 30, 35 or 20 years ago – generates a very strong idea of ​​reparation. But, at the same time, he was very careful in relation to what he published and what he did not. He was not a guy who liked to reveal his intimacies, to publish very intimate texts.”

The researcher maintains that the point of contact between the diary and the turn that Brizuela's work took as it progressed is that of autobiographical writing. “The project he was working on before he died,” he says, “was an autofiction, a book about his father.” He adds that the writer traveled to La Rioja in search of material related to his personal history, especially his family history. “I believe that he discovered that vein as a possible opening for his writing, and that this diary, although it is from much earlier, can be considered a document of that process.”

Through this project, Brizuela discovered that she could investigate issues related to Argentine society and history, through her family history, and the tension between her father's family history and that of her mother, which were very different from each other. Her father was from the interior, the son of a domestic worker of indigenous origin, who worked for wealthy families living between La Plata and La Rioja. Her mother came from a family of humble immigrants who came from a rural area in southern Europe to Ensenada and then rose in class.

“From my perspective, the turn in his career has this mix of the personal and the literary, the premeditated and the elaborate,” says Herzovich. “It is a complex, sophisticated text. The autofiction texts of the last few years are absolutely complex, they are not confessional in the least, nor was the trip to La Rioja going to be. And what began as an exploration of his absent grandfather, his father’s father, whom he knew nothing about, and whom his father did not want to talk about, became an exploration of the inherited ties of the colonial period, too.” And he adds: “My suspicion is that he would have published this book, but what I think is that he lived out of step with his time for many decades, and that in the last few years his time was getting closer to him, and therefore he had begun to legitimize things that he had always done. For example, reading women. In the last 15 or 20 years Leopoldo began to consider that he could feel legitimate, to explain why he had always done things in a much more intuitive way. He and the times slowly came together, I think that if he had lived longer he would have felt much more comfortable.”