The Promise

by Silvina Ocampo

  “Silvina Ocampo’s prose is made of elegant pleasures and delicate terrors. Her stories take place in a liquid, viscous reality, where innocence quietly bleeds into cruelty, and the mundane seeps, unnoticed, into the bizarre. Revered by some of the masters of fantastic literature, such as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary.”—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University

  “A woman examines her life piecemeal, putting it together like a puzzle missing half its pieces—but the resulting image is all the more mesmerizing because of it. A deft and subtle novel that holds together as airily as a spider’s web.”—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories

  “Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise, which she spent 25 years perfecting, is one of my favorite books of 2019. It’s one of the most hopeful novels I’ve read in a long time, about the necessity of storytelling and the power of the mind.”—Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida

  “Only a masterful storyteller could pull off what Silvina Ocampo does in The Promise; a woman lost at sea drowns in her memories, while the water—never threatening—cradles her with echoes of the past. A novel that is not a novel; a hypnosis, really.”— Gabriela Alemán, author of Poso Wells

  “Translated into English for the first time by Suzanne Jill Levine, one of Latin America’s most gifted translators, and Jessica Powell, The Promise brings to an English-speaking public the work of Silvina Ocampo, a writer of great depth and audacity. The Promise, a novel written and rewritten over a period of 25 years, recounts the story of a woman adrift at sea telling and remembering her own life as well as the lives of others. An exquisite, fantastical, and philosophical novel that dwells on the ways one represents a life without fears or conventions. A masterpiece from an extraordinary author who deserves to be read over and over. A gem.”—Marjorie Agosín, author of I Lived On Butterfly Hill

  “This haunting and vital final work from Ocampo (1903–1993), her only novel, is about a woman’s life flashing before her eyes when she’s stranded in the ocean. The nameless narrator has fallen off a ship, and as she floats, her mind takes over, presenting a flotilla of real and imagined memories about the people in her life in the form of a version of the book she promises herself she’ll finish. The book’s main thread is a woman, Irene, and a man, Leandro, with whom both Irene and the narrator get involved. But the fluid narrative also encompasses brief snapshots of a murder mystery, the narrator’s grandmother’s eye doctor (‘In profile, his intent rabbit face was not as kind as it was head-on.’), her hairdresser, her ballerina neighbor, and the fruit vendor to whom her brother was attracted as a boy (‘it was a fruit relationship, perhaps symbolizing sex’). The narrator’s potent, dynamic voice yields countless memorable lines and observations: ‘The only advantage of being a child is that time is doubly wide, like upholstery fabric’; ‘What is falling in love, anyway? Letting go of disgust, of fear, letting go of everything.’ But the book’s true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind (‘what I imagine becomes real, more real than reality’) and the necessity of storytelling, which for the narrator is literally staving off death: ‘I told stories to death so that it would spare my life.’ Ocampo’s portrait of one woman’s interior life is forceful and full of hope.”— Publishers Weekly, * Starred Review

  “Silvina Ocampo’s richly textured world shimmers with childhood sweetness and sorrow. Her narrator’s hyper-observant gaze travels through the multiplying interiors of houses, mirrors, dresses, adult giants, dream figures, and nimble acrobats, in search of love stolen by bad magic. Ocampo inhabits and brings to life a hyperreal, surreal, and resolutely feminine world ruled by unapologetic beauty and pervading sadness. She is a close kin of Remedios Varo and Frida Kahlo, weavers of the magical Latin American art that bewitches us time after time. This beautiful translation fully renders that magic.”—Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now: New Poems

  “Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges’s. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It’s thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head-spinning and thrilling.”—Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe

  “There is literature that takes the known world (a dinner party or a walk with a dog, first love or a visit to friends) and shows it in a way we’ve never seen before; there is literature that takes us to a place we’ve never been (early twentieth-century Buenos Aires or adrift in the middle of the ocean) and makes it somehow familiar. The marvel of Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is that it does both things simultaneously, its deepest context the confluence of the things of this world (‘a heavy wool dress embroidered with flowers, the sleeves poorly attached,’ ‘a big box full of nails, newspaper clippings and old pieces of wire,’ ‘vanity tables without legs … old pharmaceutical flasks … chess pieces, chandeliers, minatures’) and the ineffable mystery of mortality (‘I close the windows, shut my eyes and see blue, green, red, yellow, purple, white, white. White foam, blue. Death will be like this, when it drags me from the little room of my hands.’)”—Kathryn Davis, author of The Silk Road

  “Silvina Ocampo was once called the ‘the best kept secret of Argentine letters,’ and was, through her own work and that of those she championed, a key figure of modernism. Known primarily in the English-speaking world as a friend of Borges and wife to his collaborator Bioy Casares, the translation of two more of her works into English is a reason to celebrate her in her own right, as one of the most singular writers of the 20th century.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books, CA

  Year by year, more of the great Argentinian Silvina Ocampo is restored to us, like the lost work of a luminously dark seer. Borges and Calvino were in her thrall: the fantastic Mariana Enriquez has written an entire book on her. Yet Ocampo remains an obscure writer to most. Yet what work she wrote, what an incredible life she lived. These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. In The Promise, a woman falls overboard a transatlantic ship and confronts her regrets and longings as she bobs in the freezing water. Forgotten Journey gives us 28 short stories, translated into English for the first time, providing a surprising glimpse of the birth of gothic fiction in Latin America, which dates back to the 1930s. Lusciously strange, uncompromising, yet balanced and precise, there has never been another voice like hers.”—John Freeman, Executive Editor, LITHUB

  “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”—Jorge Luis Borges

  “I don’t know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.”—Italo Calvino

  “Like William Blake, Ocampo’s first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it.”—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread

  “A woman relives the people and places of her life while stranded in the middle of the ocean. The premise of Argentinian writer Ocampo’s posthumously published novella, which she worked on for the final 25 years of her life, is a grand metaphor for the authorial condition. On her way to visit family in Cape Town, the nameless narrator somehow slips over the railing of her transatlantic ship and regains consciousness in the water, watching ‘the ship…calmly moving away.’ Adrift, facing almost certain death, she makes a pact with St. Rita, the ‘arbiter of the impossible,’ that she will write a ‘dictionary of memories,’ and publish it in one year’s time, if she is saved. What follows is an intensely focused series of vignettes in which th
e characters of the narrator’s life once more walk through their dramas. There’s Leandro, a handsome and feckless young doctor with ‘a face as variable as the weather’; Irene, his intensely focused lover and a medical student in her own right; Gabriela, Irene’s obsessive daughter; and Verónica, a not-so-innocent ingénue. These central characters’ stories entwine and begin to form the basis of a tale that includes our narrator—who is present as a voyeur but never an active participant—but her drifting consciousness is just as likely to alight upon less crucial secondary characters like Worm, Gabriela’s countryside companion, or Lily and Lillian, devoted friends who fall in love with the same man because ‘instead of kissing him they were kissing each other.’ As the narrator’s memories progress, and sometimes repeat, they grow increasingly nightmarish in their domestic surrealism. Meanwhile, as all chance of rescue fades, her sense of self is diluted by the immense mystery of the sea. Completed in the late 1980s, at a time when Ocampo was grappling with the effects of Alzheimer’s, the book can be read as a treatise on the dissolution of selfhood in the face of the disease. However, its tactile insistence on the recurrence of memory, its strangeness, and its febrile reality are themes that mark the entirety of Ocampo’s oeuvre and articulate something more enduring even than death. ‘I’m going to die soon! If I die before I finish what I’m writing no one will remember me, not even the person I loved most in the world,’ the narrator exclaims in the final pages. This urgency and despair seem to sum up the central tenet of the artist’s condition—even in the final extreme, the act of making is a tonic against obscurity. Art is the cure for death.A seminal work by an underread master. Required for all students of the human condition.” —Kirkus Reviews, * Starred Review

  The Promise

  SILVINA OCAMPO

  Translated by

  Suzanne Jill Levine

  and Jessica Powell

  City Lights Books | San Francisco

  Copyright © 2019 by the Heirs of Silvina Ocampo

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell

  All Rights Reserved.

  First published in Spanish as La promesa in 2010.

  This work was published with the sponsorship of the “Sur” Translation Support Program administered by the Argentine Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship. / Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.

  Cover photo of Silvina Ocampo by Pepe Fernández, courtesy of Mariana G. Fernández of @archivo_pepefernandez

  Cover design by Elizabeth Knafo/Noctiluna Design

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ocampo, Silvina, author. | Levine, Suzanne Jill, translator. | Powell, Jessica, translator.

  Title: The promise / Silvina Ocampo ; translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell.

  Other titles: Promesa. English

  Description: San Francisco : City Lights Books, [2019] | Translated into English from Spanish. | Summary: “A dying woman’s attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019027247 (print) | LCCN 2019027248 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867710 (paperback) | ISBN 9780872868038 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ7797.O293 P7613 2019 (print) | LCC PQ7797. O293 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027247

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027248

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.citylights.com

  FOREWORD

  It is painful to finish something. Why mark it like Beethoven, who wastes five full minutes on final chords? His whole oeuvre is impregnated with that final concern. I don’t like conventions, that a novel need have an ending, for example.

  S.O. to Noemi Ulla

  Encounters with Silvina Ocampo (1982)

  Between 1988 and 1989, besieged by the illness that would darken the last years of her life, Silvina Ocampo laboriously devoted herself to correcting and finishing The Promise, the novel she had been working on sporadically since the mid 1960s.1 During that long period of almost twenty-five years, she had gone through several cycles of writing, abandoning and resuming once again her work on this book. Nevertheless, its existence as “work-in-progress” was never completely secret, at least beginning late in 1966, when it had been announced in a brief journalistic note stating that Silvina Ocampo “is currently working on a novel which still does not have a definitive title.”2

  In 1975, in response to an epistolary questionnaire, the author revealed one of her preliminary titles for the novel—“The Epicenes”—declaring that it was “the best I’ve ever written” and stating that “according to my calculations it will be finished by the end of next year.”3 In an interview published three years later, she described it as a “phantasmagorical novel” and confessed the difficulty she was having in trying to finish it “because the main character is endlessly telling us things; something is making this woman talk on and on, telling one thing after another. It’s a promise she has made and that she keeps so as not to die, but one can tell she is dying.”4 This brief summary of her plot provides a key to reading The Promise under the guise of a posthumous autobiography and at the same time anticipates, with tragic irony, the conclusion that would join in a similar fate, ten years later, the main character and her author.

  The Promise is the longest work of fiction by Silvina Ocampo, hence demanding of her, to judge by the numerous preliminary versions, a greater compositional effort. Structured as a series of linked stories, it takes its form as a “dictionary of memories” that the nameless narrator recounts as she is dying, drifting in the ocean after falling off the ship on which she was traveling. The persons she knew throughout her life parade, erratically, through the theater of her memory, many of them receiving only a brief biographical sketch that, for the most part, becomes an autonomous story, complete unto itself. Others belong to a continuous single story whose branches cover most of the novel. Her choice of this concentric structure, open to multiple digressions and interpolations, is not surprising in one who asserted that she had chosen the short story form “out of impatience” and who made a literary creed of concision and brevity. Freed of the constraints that a linear development would have imposed upon her, she could devote herself to the independent and concentrated invention of episodes, which could then be inserted in the text without altering the proliferating architecture of the whole. Nevertheless, those alternating narrative levels doubtlessly required an intricate embroidery of episodes—which helps to explain the novel’s point-counterpoint movements—and also necessitated the arduous process of writing she sustained.

  Over the years, during this prolonged labor of editing and assembling, The Promise underwent at least two substantial modifications. The first was the extraction of sixteen of its episodes, which the author included as stories in the volume Los días de la noche (The Days of Night, 1970)5, although she included one of them, “Livio Roca,” in both works. Shortly afterward, she undertook a labyrinthine story of discordant passions among two women, a man, and a young girl, whose features and man’s name—the archangelic “Gabriel”—appear to have given rise to the discarded title epicene.6 This story, from a screenplay written in the mid ’50s entitled Amor desencontrado (Misencountered Love), is the only one the narrator takes up again, circuitously, throughout the course of her tale.

  The present text is the last version of The Promise found among the author’s papers. The manuscript, in a file folder with the definitive title on its front cover, consists of 152 typewritten pages, upon which there are a few scattered corrections and additions in Silvina Ocampo’s own hand. As with the majority of the author’s manuscripts, this text was typed up by Elena Ivulich, her secretary for more th
an forty years. As a general rule, we have only altered the author’s syntax or punctuation when it was necessary in order to assure the full legibility of the text; in a few instances, however, it was necessary to consult the earlier drafts—handwritten and typed—in order to resolve transcription errors. At the same time, it’s worth clarifying that the repetition of some scenes, with slight variations in the narrator’s point of view or in the characters’ identities, adheres to the novel’s plan, as evidenced by a note handwritten by Ivulich, inserted among the pages of the manuscript, in which she indicates the location within the text of some of these re-writings and adds that they are deliberate because “the memories are recurrent.”

  Independent of her declared aversion to endings governed by literary convention, the author did not leave precise indications that could confirm whether or not she considered The Promise finished. Nevertheless, the vertiginous dissolution of the narrator’s consciousness, recorded in the last stretch of the novel with increasing lyrical exuberance, corresponds to the author’s succinct description of its phantasmagorical plot. Those final pages of The Promise, written by hand on loose sheets of paper, with intricate and faltering strokes, are also some of Silvina Ocampo’s final pages. In them the author and her protagonist appear to share, at moments, the same voice.

  Ernesto Montequín

  Translator, literary critic, and director

  of the Villa Ocampo Center in Buenos Aires

  1. The earliest draft that has been found, titled “En la orilla del sueño” (“On the Shores of Sleep”), is preserved in a notebook where there are also sketches of poems from Amarillo celeste (Sky Blue Yellow, 1972) and a letter in which the author refers to the death of her husband’s father, Adolfo Bioy, which occurred in August 1962.

  2. “Vida literaria” (“Literary Life”) La Nación, October 9, 1966