For a long time, the fisherman cannot tell whether he is under the water or above it, whether on the surface or at the bottom. He is searching for a name, perhaps for himself, perhaps for the fish, or perhaps for the creature formed out of the two. As though surrounded by mirrors that multiply endlessly, he looks, he sees, and the more he looks the more he sees: one, a hundred, a thousand creatures that he has never seen before. A man whose arm is the body of a fish; a fish whose mouth holds a human head; a man swallowed by a fish; a fish and a man coupling; a man who is a fish who is a man; a fish, a man, self-coupling…Endlessly. One, a hundred, a thousand, still thousands of creatures that coil and tremble, uncoil and swell with maddening pleasure; a creature born out of a singular drunkenness, reborn into eternity, a creature engendered by pleasure. Endlessly.
Besides, he has seen fish couple only in pictures drawn merely for idle play.
It is as though someone is whispering the name he has been searching for, but the fisherman doesn’t hear it. He cannot make out the name being whispered.
The sky brightens every now and then. Perhaps the sun keeps rising and setting; perhaps the clouds break and separate. One thing he knows is this brilliance, its intensity.
He tries to think: I went out fishing and returned inside my prey. He knows he is speaking nonsense. This is not my prey, he says; neither did I chase it nor was it caught; ours was a fortuitous encounter. We aren’t altogether inside one another either: we became whatever the fish wants, however the fish wants it…Besides, have I even returned? Where? To whom? When have I returned? I am on a strange path, an uncommon journey. It is true, I am forced to live together with the fish, the creature that made me catch it and then swallowed me. Why am I talking like this? Don’t I enjoy this union? We are inseparable, and this is all that can be said, all that is certain. Nothing else.
He gives up thinking. Because now they are rising toward daylight.
There is no light, no shimmers in the water. It’s as if they are inside a milky way, far from the earth. “We both must have died,” the fisherman thinks or the thought takes hold of the fisherman. “I still bear its weight, yet I feel as if we are gliding.”
They are dead, torn to pieces; their hearts, their spleens, their bowels are renewed perhaps; perhaps they are reborn…
The dead know everything. Dying is the path to knowing. The one who dies and disappears among the dead, who descends into the underground or the underwater, and receives their advice; the one who ascends to the sky and beyond, who gathers light, enlightenment, wisdom—as if gathering flowers; the one who restores his mutilated body, brings about his own renewal, rebirth, and who returns to the earth to mix among the living, he is the one who knows everything worth knowing.
I have died, I shall be reborn and all-knowing, the fisherman says.
The fish thrusts its teeth into his shoulder. He mustn’t forget the fish. He mustn’t be overcome with pride.
Above them, a seagull spreads its wings like the crown of a tree. The fisherman is the trunk of that tree. The fish is inseparable from his shoulder, but its body extends into the distance—like the face of the earth or the sea. The sky, the earth, the deep water seem to have united in this Tree of Eternity. They have become, as it were, the entire universe. The fisherman knows that the fish is attached to him; what he sees below him is the sea. Until now, he had not seen the sea since he had been thinking through the mind of the fish. Then, suddenly—
A humming sound in the distance—it’s been approaching for some time, yet still is in the distance. Suddenly, it surges, a blast in his ear. That is how he experiences it. As the fisherman and the fish begin falling at a blinding speed, the seagull falling with them, he sees the sea spreading itself out, opening its myriad fingers below them, and he feels the fish tightening its grip around his arm, with all the force it can muster. Then darkness surrounds them.
The Bey rode his horse like a flash of light, chasing the
The unicorn is fond of virgins. The fabled creature runs and
deer. The horse spread its wings, its shadow almost touch-
throws himself into her embrace, laying its head on her lap:
ing the deer. The prey stopped suddenly, as if turned to
Everybody knows this. And the only way to capture a unicorn
stone. Worlds collided in this mad pursuit. The Bey lay on
and display heroism is by dressing a handsome young man as a
the ground, his neck broken, his face covered in blood.
maiden and setting him out on the meadow. The young man
Who would have known that the one who tried to revive
walks coquettishly; the unicorn sees him, comes running, throws
him with tears was a young man with long hair, long fin-
himself into the young man’s embrace. Then the lances hidden
gers, a beauty among beauties, standing in the place of the
under the folds of gowns are revealed and the unicorn’s chest
elusive deer? Who would have explained it afterward?
is pierced in a hundred places.
* * *
—
People yearn to return to paradise, its vague memory lodged in a remote corner of their minds. But how many manage to recover even a piece of that paradise? Perhaps it would have been possible in the past, the very ancient past. Nowadays, to believe in returning to paradise no longer means believing that everything devastated begins anew, or that a dying year ushers in a new one. People don’t believe they can die and be reborn time after time. In the tedious flow of existence, how many might be aware, for instance, that carrying the fish that swallowed one’s arm is a proof of wisdom, of attainment? Even before anyone else might understand, the one whose arm the fish has swallowed views the fish as a badge not of wisdom but of hopeless love. He looks to find virtue in the painful endurance, in having surrendered to relentless annihilation.
The fisherman sees himself among his friends, sitting in a coffee house. They surround him; he sees grief in their faces. They obviously notice neither the fish nor his arm inside the fish. They ask where he has been for days, they tell him they were worried he’d had an accident. No one asks how he has lost his arm. And not without good reason either…If a man were to lose his arm, he couldn’t recover in a few days. Besides, if he’d had an accident, they would have heard, or if he’d been in the hospital, they would have known. Not a word escapes the fisherman’s lips. Only, he is sorry that no one can see the fish. And, why lie about this: he wants to shout at them, to ask why they don’t see the immense fish that has swallowed his arm, but he cannot find the courage. Why should the act of making others see his beloved require so much heart, such a show of bravery; when he in fact already wants to flaunt his love? He returns home disgusted with himself. Yes, now he sees himself at home. As if he weren’t the one who had descended into the deep or soared into the sky with the fish. He senses the fish throughout his being, as if it has swallowed him completely. They didn’t see you, couldn’t see you, he says, in a defeated voice. What should I do to make them see you? Talk to them? Explain? They’d say I was crazy. Perhaps let them touch you? Can they touch a fish in place of the arm they cannot see? To tell you the truth, I can’t take the chance. Perhaps now I understand, now I know, I cannot do without you. Perhaps this is what I fear: that they may take you away from me. He pauses. For the first time, he is able to think, and speak out such thoughts. For the first time, love assumes the shape of his own words. I will go anywhere with you, even there: to death’s kingdom at the bottom of the sea…I am ready; now I’m ready, we can even go to death…
Suddenly he sees himself in his boat. Under a lead-colored sky soon to turn pitch black. The boat is still riding the currents. The weight on his arm feels lighter. At first, he thinks it is because his love is strong, but soon he realizes that the fish
is withering away as it dries out, its flesh breaking open as it rots. Its teeth still pierce his shoulder, even though the fish is rapidly decomposing, turning into a cage of bones. The fisherman thinks he is going mad—that is, if he hasn’t already. He doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to understand. As the fish decays and crumbles, it consumes his own flesh, and his bones begin to show, and then to crumble like those of the fish. His upper arm dissolves, and the remains of the fish’s head dissolve, and that’s when the fisherman decides what he must do. He turns his boat around, facing the shore, and lets his body fall in the water. Love was our name, he thinks, but I couldn’t find the name, I couldn’t choose it when I should have. I listened to the noise in vain, I should have tried to hear what was hidden inside.
The sea opens its embrace for the fisherman who comes of his own will. This poor man didn’t know that eternal love is fatal. Who will guide him now? Who will usher him to the kingdom of death now that he is ready to enter? The task belongs to the sea. Who will explain to the fisherman that the fish loved him as long as he seemed strong, but summoned his annihilation when he proved weak—not merely among humans, which is understandable, but also just with himself. Someone must explain. But that task does not belong to the sea. The sea, as wise as it is vast, knows that death is all-powerful because is overcomes suffering.
Below, the rock slowly opens to receive the fisherman who arrives in surrender. Like a mother, the sea will keep its beloved in its womb, and never allow him to be reborn.
Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was born to an elite family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six sisters. She studied painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger in Paris, then returned to Buenos Aires and shifted her attention to writing. Her eldest sister, Victoria, was the founder of the important modernist journal and publisher Sur, which championed the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and in 1940, Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo married. The first of Ocampo’s seven collections of stories, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937, and she went on to publish seven more, as well as eight collections of poetry. She was also a translator (of Dickinson, Poe, Melville, among others), wrote plays and stories for children, and with her husband and Borges edited the Antología de literature fantástica (1940), eventually published in English as The Book of Fantasy (1988). A selection of her stories translated to English, Thus Were Their Faces, was published by NYRB Classics in 2015, and The Topless Tower was released by Hesperus Press in 2010. It was originally published as La torre sin fin in 1968.
THE TOPLESS TOWER
Silvina Ocampo
Translated by Marian and James Womack
A LONG TIME AGO, or else not so very long ago, I couldn’t say, summer held out its green leaves, its mirrors of sky-blue water, the fruits in the trees. The days were not long enough: I could never finish swimming, or rowing, or eating chocolate, or painting with the watercolors from my black paintbox. I’d got prizes from school, but I am disobedient. I imitate people, like monkeys do. I even imitate the way people write. Like some famous writers, I use the first and third persons simultaneously. My parents have a lot of books. Sometimes I can’t understand what I write, it’s so well written, but I can always guess what I wanted to say. I’ll underline the words I don’t understand. Someone once said to me, and I suspect it was the Devil, “The great writers are those who don’t understand what they write; all the others are worthless.”
One afternoon I was playing with my friends among the pines and cedars in our garden when a man, dressed in black with a black bowler hat and a mustache painted on his face, appeared at the garden gate. He spoke in French; every now and then he would, with the aid of a book, drop in a few words of English, or German, or Italian. He must have been very rich, because he had on his little finger a gold ring, mounted with a ruby, but at the same time he seemed tattered and dirty, like an old and battered piece of furniture. He was carrying a valise and a few large brown-paper parcels. After ceremoniously greeting my mother, who sat knitting under a tree, he opened one of these parcels like a conjurer and took out a few canvases that he leaned against the half-open iron gate. Then he opened the valise and took out some more pictures, and lined them up against the fence. The pictures were horrible. I wouldn’t say that they were clumsily painted, but they were absurd. A cold light illuminated them. The first picture was of a sketchy yellow tower, windowless and covered in stains. The second one was of a room decorated with rustic wooden furniture. There was a desolate magnificence in the unlit golden candelabras, in the porcelain jug, in the silver bedframe with its canopy. The remaining pictures were of other, sadder, more lugubrious rooms. The last one I looked at was of a huge studio with an easel in the middle; to one side, on a decorated table supported by carved golden dragons, were all kinds of brushes and paints and paper and canvas, palettes and flasks. I laughed. The more I looked at the paintings, the more I laughed. My mother took me by the hand and spoke into my ear.
“I’ve told you not to laugh at people.”
I carried on laughing. They both looked at me: the man with distaste, my mother with sadness. I looked down at the ant-covered ground, lowering my head to hide my giggles. I tried to imitate the man behind his back. He spoke to my mother in his fluting voice.
“Madam, would you like to buy a painting? Oil, pastel, acrylic? Which do you prefer?”
I burst out laughing again, because I thought he had said “pasta,” and because I saw he’d forgotten to put the windows in any of his paintings. My mother answered smoothly.
“They must be very expensive, and I’m afraid we don’t have the money to pay for them.”
“These ones are oil paintings, madam. Your son thinks I don’t know how to paint windows. How old is he?”
She replied quickly, but with the same smoothness.
“He’s eight, sir.”
“Don’t fib. You, child, are nine years old. Can’t you see the wrinkle on his forehead?” He looked at me closely. “What are you called? Well, can’t you speak?”
“Leandro.” My mother’s voice trembled as she pronounced my name, and then she added, “Why do you ask?”
“I’m interested in the names of devils, and mongrels.”
“No, please sir,” my mother said, “that’s not respectful. Don’t say that.”
“You think so little of the Devil?”
Swift as lightning, or a conjurer, the man spun around and caught me imitating him. Would to God and all His angels I had never done so. I heard his fluting voice again.
“I paint like this both deliberately and obliquely,” he said, looking at me.
“What does it mean, deliberately and obliquely?” I asked.
“Look it up in the dictionary when you get the chance,” he replied. “A boy of your age can’t be ignorant.”
“I’m not ignorant,” I protested.
“It doesn’t matter what you are,” he said, turning very pale. “These pictures are of my buildings. I am faithful to reality; I am honest.”
He cracked these last words out from between his purple lips. He stroked my head hypocritically and I heard a buzzing noise in my ears.
* * *
—
The garden, my mother, my friends, the man dressed in black, the pictures lined up against the fence…all of these disappeared, and I found myself inside a tower, the tower from the pictures, with its lugubrious rooms. Luckily enough, I still had my boxing gloves, my bag and the water flask I usually took on picnics. I had been invited to one that very afternoon. They’d be waiting for me. I took a sip of water. I looked unsuccessfully on the wall for a window I could use to escape, or from which I could call to my friends to come and help me. I slowly opened a door: what would be waiting for me on the other side? Hell? An abyss? Would I fall into a pit full of rats and vipers and wishes, as in the fairy tales, or else into a pit full of silence and cold and darkness, li
ke they have in science fiction stories? Darkness surrounded me. I felt scared and took a step backward. I went into another room: the walls were white with large gray patches, and it was decorated with rustic wooden furniture. There was a desolate magnificence in the unlit golden candelabras, in the porcelain jug, in the silver bedframe with its canopy.
* * *
—
Fear made me hungry: I hunted in my pocket for a bar of chocolate my mother had given me and greedily ate half. Had I already become resigned to the idea of finding no windows? I opened another door, slowly, and entered another room, as ugly as the one that had preceded it. I observed a few differences: the bedframes were made of green iron, with no mattresses but with thick red bedspreads, covered in red flowers that waved in an invisible breeze. Where could the wind come from if there were no windows? A wardrobe stretched its rough sides up to the ceiling; a small rocking chair caught my attention with its continuous back-and-forth.
* * *
—
What to do now? I left the room to look for a window. Could it really be possible that I had not seen any windows? I’d make a useless detective! A detective is never tricked. I didn’t want to be a ridiculous detective, someone who doesn’t know what he’s looking for. This tower is treacherous as the Devil. How could I think that there were no windows that opened onto landscapes to escape over? The tower could be omnipotent, with invisible windows that appeared and disappeared depending on the time of day. I won’t give up, and hope to find something of supreme importance, something no one could find apart from me. I will find something as soon as possible: here we are, here, a black space in the rectangular wall denoted a window. He approached it and, with some disgust, put his head through. Complete darkness blinded him. He pulled back terrified, feeling as if he were about to fall into the void.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 39