The Promise

by Silvina Ocampo

  I’m not going to have any luck, he always thought. One day, he noticed he was stepping on some sheets of handwritten pages folded in fourths. He picked up the pages, unfolded them, and looked around to see where they’d come from. He was a little embarrassed to see that a street cleaner was watching him. In the window of an upper-story apartment, a young woman quickly peered out; he wasn’t able to see her clearly. The kids, dragging the box, passed by. Leandro looked up again. Many windows were open, and one could glimpse the curtains, bedcovers, sheets and closets. Something indecently intimate emanated from the houses, odors that one could divine. He put the pages in his pocket and kept walking. He took out a cigarette. On the corner, the same girl, poorly dressed, was leaning against the wall.

  That’s Gabriel, Irene’s daughter, Leandro thought: she doesn’t look like her mother. She’s almost always dressed like a man because, as Irene explained to me, men’s clothing is cheaper and it keeps her from getting her legs dirty. He looked at her sideways and kept on walking. “Poor Gabriel,” he remembered Irene always lamenting. Irene was bourgeois. There’s always something in the dramatic life of a woman that makes her bourgeois. I agreed with him. In front of a barbershop, Leandro saw a man smoking and asked him for a light. While he lit his cigarette, he looked at the man’s beard and eyeglasses, the patches on his suit, the cuffs of his shirt, dirty like mine, he thought, I should wear short sleeves. He walked along the tree-lined streets, went into the botanical garden, past the shadows of the palm trees and the greenhouses. Under the foliage he remembered a beach: the air undressed him. He sat on a marble bench, then lay down face up to the sun and looked past the cigarette smoke at the statue of Pliny. He took out the slim folded packet again, read the pages attentively.

  A woman with loose long hair, wandering in the garden while licking an ice cream cone, observed him from a distance. She came over and leaned her knees against Leandro’s legs. Wiggling her body she finished the ice cream, making noises with her tongue. Leandro didn’t interrupt his reading. A flower the woman wore in her hair fell on his head, and Leandro finally looked at her. She’s a prostitute, he thought, they’ve never interested me, not even in the best places. He caught a whiff of her hair that emanated a dirty brush smell in the heat, like the heads of those people in his childhood kneeling in confessionals, smelling of cheap perfume and powders, of barbershop pomade. Leandro managed to make this memory mine.

  “You need a bath,” he said to scare her away.

  She, thinking he was flirting, looked down at him shaking her red mane.

  “Did the garbage truck come through here?” Leandro said in an obscene tone. Who was he imitating, some poseur from the university? It was the kind of thing a friend of his would have said in a similar situation.

  “Shithead!” she snapped back, stamping the ground and raising a cloud of dust with her heels. “You worthless bum!” she shouted as Leandro vanished through the trees, and she headed for the greenhouses.

  An effeminate young man in a blue blouse, with a book under his arm, looked at him persistently. Everyone fell in love with him. A vague odor of sweat and cosmetics poisoned the air. Five old men were arguing on a bench. He consulted his watch: time to go to the hospital. How quickly time passed when he wasn’t doing anything. Everyone fell in love with him, even Zulma.

  And if right now a whale appeared, or a swordfish or a sea lion, what would I do? At least the sea doesn’t have those amphibians I find so disgusting. How far I must be from the coast, as far away as my salvation!

  ZULMA

  Zulma lived next door when I was a child. Older than me, she’d made friends with my sisters. She had pale golden skin and light-brown hair, like the color of her eyes. Slender and agile, she would peer out the front door of her house, always hiding as if spying. Skinny as she was, she had thick, muscular legs. She was a ballerina. Every day we’d hear the piano that accompanied the exercises she did in the inner courtyard of her house. When the door was ajar, the people who walked by would stop to watch her, and the boys always said something obscene or paid her compliments. Almost naked in the summertime, or in a heavy leotard in the winter, she’d continue doing her exercises without paying attention to the comments from her fans or curious passers-by. After a while, Zulma had students and a big mirror in the dining room, which allowed her and her students to observe the rhythmic movements of the dance they were rehearsing. Her godmother, who was obese, would drink wine as she watched her dance. The piano chords were so out of tune that it seemed they’d traveled through water or outer space. I don’t know the pianist, who I probably never met and who had flaming red hair and bit her nails. I went into Zulma’s house twice or maybe three times, tagging along with my sisters who’d gone over for a visit. The obese godmother, light as a balloon, would be in the corner drinking red wine. For hours I watched Zulma do the exercises that she called “rhythmics,” exercises that made her look like a wounded bird trying to fly. I found out that Zulma had once fallen in love with a young man, who left her. But this did not cause her to give up her devotion to ballet. She was a real ballerina and should have danced in the Colon Theater.

  The time came when I would no longer see her peer out the door of her house, nor hear the piano. The godmother was no longer seen drinking in a corner. I asked after Zulma. They told me that so much exercising made her body lose the weight needed to stay rooted on earth. She always looked as if she were about to fly away, and she had, just as the pigeons in the courtyard had flown away when the house was torn down months after her disappearance.

  “And the fat godmother?” I asked.

  “She flew away too. Haven’t you seen how balloons fly?” they answered me. “Ask Susana.”

  What exists at the bottom of this ocean? Shipwrecked vessels? Debris? The sea eats up everything. One day, any second now, it will eat me up too.

  SUSANA

  The first I see of Susana are her dark, shiny eyes, then the sad, smiling mouth, then hands that explain what her words tell. She shivers with the fear she feels about premonitions: a black spider on her bed, in winter, in her house, in the city.

  A young Peruvian medical student rushes over when she calls, to give a shot of penicillin to her sister. It’s three o’clock in the morning. Susana is nervous while he sterilizes the syringe and the needle with boiling water.

  The Peruvian asks her:

  “Aren’t you tired? Have you slept?”

  Susana answers:

  “No, I can’t sleep.”

  “Do you like peaches in syrup?” the Peruvian asks.

  “Yes,” answers Susana, who has a sweet tooth. “Why?”

  “Well, eat two or three peaches, they will have a soothing effect on the mucous membranes, they’re calming,” said the Peruvian.

  When the Peruvian returns at seven in the evening, Susana yawns.

  “Are you sleepy?” he asks her.

  “Very,” Susana answers. “I’m so tired.”

  “Do you like peaches in syrup?”

  “Very much. Why?”

  “Have two or three slices. They’re great for the mucous membranes. They revitalize your energy.”

  The next day when the Peruvian returns, Susana’s sister complains of a slight pain in the stomach.

  “Does she like peaches in syrup? They relieve pain.”

  “You’ve really got a thing about peaches in syrup!” Susana exclaims.

  “Do you like them a lot?” asks Susana’s sister.

  The Peruvian puckers his lips (I knew the Peruvian) as if he were about to kiss those imaginary peaches.

  “I’m crazy about them.”

  That night at eight o’clock Susana buys a can of peaches in syrup, eats them with her sister and regrets not sharing them with the Peruvian.

  As for me, I like fresh peaches—like the peaches Aldo used to give me!

  That yellowing photo of Aldo I kept in my pocketbook and that traveled with me when we’d go out to the countryside, never faded. I would take i
t with me to the bottom of the sea so that nobody could steal it from me.

  ALDO FABRICI

  Fabrici, stooped over, with his arms akimbo on each side of his body as if he were carrying watering cans, pails, or garden tools, was a very old gardener. I was very fond of him because, when I was a child, he gave me fruit, nuts, lettuce for my dolls. His big eyes always looked surprised, and when words failed him, he managed to express himself with his long hands that were like tentacles, enormous sweet potatoes or monstrous roots. Clean, orderly, devout, he’d place flowers in a glass in front of a print of the Virgin in the tool shed. Aldo gathered the oranges and lemons, the walnuts and chestnuts, the peaches, to distribute them. He never missed Mass on Sundays. He had a twenty-year-old girlfriend, and he brought her fruit and a bunch of flowers every week. Why are people named after flowers and not fruits? There is nobody named Strawberry or Raspberry or Apricot, which are lovelier than Lily.

  What is falling in love, anyway? Letting go of disgust, of fear, letting go of everything.

  Flying fish remind me of butterflies in flight.

  What is magical about the sea is that living deep inside it no one can speak.

  LILY AND LILLIAN

  Lily and Lillian were always together. Everyone thought they were sisters because they wore the same color. Lily was blond and Lillian dark-haired, but sometimes Lillian dyed her hair blond and looked even more like Lily. People who love each other end up seeming identical, saying the same words, moving their hands with the same gestures, and biting their lips in the same way. At the age of twenty they fell in love—or believed they fell in love—with the same man. One would see the boy in the morning, and the other in the afternoon. He thought he was deceiving them both, but he wasn’t deceiving anyone. The two of them were deceiving him, because instead of kissing him they were kissing each other, instead of adoring him they adored one another.

  How green the sea was! How green and how blue! I would like to swim for hours and hours. But aren’t I in the sea now?

  LEANDRO

  Again I’m thinking about Leandro, again I mention him because that day Leandro was another man, his eyes were green, he’d grown a beard, and he seemed dirty, filthy dirty. What a pity! He was moving his chin like a ruminant, but what struck me were the secrets he revealed.

  Every time Leandro went out he would inspect the neighboring houses in hopes of seeing the girl he’d glimpsed on the balcony the day he found the pages. He admitted this to me reluctantly. With summer approaching, the streets were busier, and the chance of coming across the woman to whom the pages belonged would be even more difficult. Nevertheless, he did not give up on the hope he had when he first found the pages, his hope for an affair. In that text, so fragmentary, a name stood out as already familiar to him. That awful name invited him to read and reread.

  Long summers without vacations horrified Leandro. Irene was already boring him like a sister or like me. Seeing her all the time made time go slower. He had to invent something new in his life, something that had to be completely absurd: a bundle of pages written by an unknown hand. One evening, coming home in a taxi with me, as he was paying, he saw the pages he’d picked up a few days earlier on the street in his wallet, folded in such a way that the word LEA, as if commanding him to read, stood out among the others. And just then, at the entrance to the apartment building next to his, he saw a hearse with the same letters. The letters stood out against the black cloth. The crowd gathered at the door looked appreciatively at the parade of floral wreathes and sprays and people in mourning. In the crowd he saw or he thought he saw Gabriela. “That girl is everywhere,” he said to me. Leandro had a heart of stone. He went into the crowd and questioned a woman wearing a ridiculous hat.

  “Who died?”

  “Leonor. Don’t you know her? But yes: Leonor Eladia Arévalo. They called her Lea because her initials formed that name.”

  There are ridiculous names that affect us deeply, names with faces, with hands, with a voice! Why did he tell me that!

  Determined, Leandro made his way through the flowers and the people, pushing into the house where there was a wake being held for the deceased. I followed him like a shadow. We stepped into the dark elevator with the lady wearing that hat that looked like a bird flapping its wings. People still wear feathers and sequins and wigs, I thought. “I thought those frills only existed in photos of my great-grandparents. And that perfume that smells like incense, or those black paper fans with jet-black ribs, or those lace gloves that make you clench your teeth when you touch them, they all still exist. How pleasant not to know anyone, to feel like you’re in another country, among people who speak another language. To make things less awkward, maybe it’s a good idea to pretend that I’m a little deaf,” he said to me.

  Protected by the gloom and the contact of many hands, Leandro and I entered the wake. The communal hysterics inspired him to be bold. He ceremoniously greeted the women whose heads were bare and eyes were red. A bearded old man embraced him, mistaking him for another young man in the family. A gentleman with a stentorian voice parted the way for him to enter the candlelit chapel.

  “You must see her. Her fellow students loved her dearly,” said the loud gentleman.

  Leandro drew near to the coffin. He thought: Lea, what a name! Why isn’t she called Lia or Luz or Eva? There aren’t many names with just three letters in Spanish. A dead woman who’s not from my family or to be used for experiments, like in the hospital, looks beautiful to me. At least she can’t disappoint me or make me suffer. She’s unimaginably breathtaking. Her hair, pale blond, shines like the gold of those antique jewels I like. The color of her skin is neither white nor dark. Perhaps death gives her an ivory tint, or had it been her real coloring? And what if I cut off a lock of her hair? With what? I don’t have any scissors. What a pity. If I kissed her on the cheek, what would people think? And what if I gave her a kiss on the lips? Am I capable of doing that? People would think I’d been her lover or that we’d had a romantic friendship.

  Why did he tell me those things: to torment me or to disgust me? Leandro hesitated a moment, then kissed her on the lips: she smelled of paper, of incense, of flowers, of perfume.

  Necrophile, how dreadful! I thought. He put his mouth on those hard, marble lips! He liked it! It’s monstrous. When you’re in love nothing else matters. They’ll throw me out. They’ll call me a necrophile, he thought; I don’t care, none of it matters. He remembered a poor, hungry man who would go to all the wakes just to get something to eat, or an old woman who would steal flowers or teaspoons. Wasn’t what he was doing worse? They offered him a cup of coffee to get things back on the right note, perhaps to get him away from the dead woman. He shook his head, raised his eyes and saw that some people were looking at him with compassion, others with horror, or with indignation. He thought: I could ask the dead woman for something, perhaps I could ask a favor as if she were a saint. But what would I ask for? To come back to life, to be the unknown person I’m looking for, the woman I can never find.

  The man with the booming voice patted him on the shoulder:

  “Come say hello to Verónica; they were inseparable, almost twins, born one year apart. She didn’t want them to take her away yet.” Consulting his wristwatch he added: “The hearse has been waiting outside for some time. They didn’t close the coffin. She should be taken out of the room already. They’re already taking away the flowers.” He took Leandro by the arm and led him over to Verónica, telling her: “He’s one of Leonor’s fellow students, don’t you remember him? No, you didn’t know him. You could share your sorrow with him.” Then, very ceremoniously, he took Verónica and Leandro to another room where many people were standing around. Three little girls were muffling their laughter in their handkerchiefs; an old woman was crying, praying with her rosary; another was stealthily stealing flowers from the bouquets; one lady was fanning herself with a saint’s image.

  Verónica and Leandro gave each other a long look, as if studying a p
ostcard; he admitted as much himself.

  “Did you know each other for a long time?” Verónica asked, fingering the lapel of her suit that, according to Leandro, was very elegant.

  “Quite a while,” Leandro answered.

  “How similar a wake is to a party. There’s the smell of flowers, the eating at all hours and people hugging each other all the time. At parties people hug each other dancing, but at wakes people hug each other crying, that’s the only difference. But I can’t cry. I envy people who cry; they show off their tears like necklaces. I feel deprived without tears, impoverished, said Verónica, laying it on thick, and moving over to the open shutters. Then, when she saw the sun on Leandro’s face, she exclaimed: “How could this be happening on such a nice day!” and, leaning her head against her arm like an actress, she said, “I should have died.”

  Perhaps Verónica felt laid bare by Leandro’s eyes on the back of her neck, just as I felt when I saw him for the first time. Somewhere in her soul perhaps she was in despair over her sister’s death, but the lucidity with which she noted every worldly detail around her made her think, in that moment, that her heart was made of ice. Perhaps an inner voice was repeating to her: “I’m a monster, I’m a monster.” Leandro thought all this as he looked at the nape of her neck: “She’s pretty. She doesn’t look like anyone else, at least.”

  “So, do you like her?” he asked me.

  I didn’t answer him, dropping his clammy hand. He has no soul.

  SONIA GIMÉNEZ

  Sonia had the face of a startled fish, faded hair, and a lipless mouth.

  Was she miserable? To judge by her laughter she was happy.

  The only advantage of being a child is that time is doubly wide, like upholstery fabric. Time, of which there is never enough for anything, was as infinite as a desert for Sonia. Whenever she had a free moment, and these were plentiful, she’d go to the zoo. Like Gabriela, she liked animals because they behaved in a natural way: if they were hungry they ate nonstop, if they were thirsty they drank until they were full, if they were in heat they made love desperately, if they were tired they slept at any hour of the day, if they were furious they bit or scratched or killed their enemy. It is true is that they also died and that dying is ridiculous, but they were so meticulous, so precise. (Sonia would never forget her paternal grandfather’s death; an apocryphal death). Sometimes she would give the animals the cookies or chocolates she had been given. Sometimes she would put her hands through the bars to pet them. What could a jaguar, a wolf, a hyena, a tiger do to her? She was the animals’ champion. She always brought a little notebook in which, after looking at them for a long while, she would draw them, carefully recording each of their names beneath the drawings, marking her favorites with a star and those she liked least with an x. In her opinion, the ones she liked the least generally resembled certain people. Will I ever think of someone who isn’t a person?