—HELEN OYEYEMI
* “In an interview with Patricia Klingenberg in March 1980, Ocampo reported that she was denied the National Prize in 1979 by judges who felt her stories were ‘demasiado crueles.’ ” Quote from Cynthia Duncan, “Double or Nothing in Silvina Ocampo’s ‘La casa de azúcar,’ ” Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana 20, No. 2 (November 1991).
** Silvina Ocampo: Selected Poems, selected and translated by Jason Weiss (New York: NYRB/Poets, 2015).
PREFACE
NOT WITHOUT some feelings of reticence do I write this preface. An old, yet ever new, friendship binds me to Silvina Ocampo, a friendship based on the shared memories of certain neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, of sunsets, of walks across the limitless plains or along a river as quiet as the land, of favorite poems: one based, above all, on the understanding and kindness that Silvina has never failed to show me. Like Rossetti and Blake, Silvina has come to poetry by the luminous paths of drawing and painting, and the immediacy and certainty of the visual image persist in her written pages.
The range covered by her spirit is much greater than my own. The joys provoked by music and color, paradises barred to my memory as well as to my curiosity, are familiar to her. I would say the same of the things of nature: flowers, vague names when I come upon them in Latin and Persian verses, signify something precise for Silvina, something precise and beloved. The universe I live in is opaque because it is purely verbal; in hers, the senses take part in all their delicate variety. Our literary preferences do not always coincide. I am moved by the epic, she by the lyric and the elegiac; she is not drawn so much to the Chanson de Roland and the harsh sagas of Iceland as to Baudelaire, a poet I venerated in my youth, or to the idylls of Theocritus. She also likes the psychological novel, a genre whose slow pace I reject out of laziness.
It is strange that it should be I, for whom telling a story is the attempt to capture only its essential elements, who should present to English readers a work as wise, as changeable, as complex, and at the same time as simple as this collection. I thank the gods for this happy fate.
In Silvina Ocampo’s stories there is something I have never understood: her strange taste for a certain kind of innocent and oblique cruelty. I attribute this to the interest, the astonished interest, that evil inspires in a noble soul. The present, we might say in passing, is perhaps no less cruel than the past, or than the various pasts, but its cruelties are clandestine. Góngora, who was a normal man and a fine poet, makes fun of an auto-da-fé performed in Granada because it offered the modest spectacle of only one person burned alive; Hitler, an atrocious man, preferred the anonymous horror of the secret death chambers to the spectacle of public executions. Today, cruelty searches out the shadows; cruelty is obscene, in the original meaning of the word.
Silvina has a virtue that is frequently ascribed to the ancients and to the peoples of the Orient, only infrequently to our own contemporaries: clairvoyance. More than once, and not without feelings of apprehension, I have felt hers. She sees us as if we were made of glass, sees and forgives us. It is useless to try to fool her.
Silvina Ocampo is a poet, one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, whether on this side of the ocean or on the other. The fact that she is a poet elevates her prose. In other parts of South America, the short story is usually no more than a simple sketch of daily life or a simple social protest, or often an unhappy mixture of the two; among us, in Argentina, it tends to be the product of an imagination granted the fullest freedom. The book I am introducing is a clear example of this.
Groussac and Alfonso Reyes have renewed the intentionally verbose and sententious Spanish style with the help of the precision of French; Silvina Ocampo has understood their lesson and has constantly improved upon it in magical works.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
AM I AN outsider or a liar, a giant or a dwarf, a Spanish dancer or an acrobat? When you write, everything is possible, even the very opposite of what you are. I write so that other people can discover what they should love, and sometimes so they discover what I love. I write in order not to forget what is most important in the world: friendship and love, wisdom and art. A way of living without dying, a way of death without dying. On paper, something of us remains, our soul holds on to something in our lives: something more important than the human voice, which changes with health, luck, muteness, and finally, with age.
What will be left of us in this world? Sentences instead of voices, sentences instead of photographs. I write in order to forget scorn, in order not to forget, in order not to hate, from hate, from love, from memory, and so as not to die. Writing is a luxury or, with luck, a rainbow of colors. It is my lifesaver when the water of the river or the sea tries to drag me under. When you want to die you fall in love with yourself, you look for something touching that will save you. I write to be happy or to give happiness. I, who am unhappy for no reason, want to explain myself, to rejoice, to forget, to find something others might find in Ovid in my unhappiness or in my other self.
Palinurus exists in writing, and sleeps in my heart as if in the blue water of the sea. Andersen’s mermaid has a beautiful voice I never heard. When I call on the Guardian Angel in my language, he is more beautiful than life itself.
Sometimes you can tell the truth about little things only by not writing. On a white sheet of paper I have been sketching a hand for some time; it is my hand that sketches words. I have loved painting since childhood.
Writing is having a sprite within reach, something we can turn into a demon or a monster, but also something that will give us unexpected happiness or the wish to die.
I studied painting with Giorgio de Chirico in Paris. I came to know the trials of artists, and the joys; I submerged myself in colors that reflected my soul or the state of my spirit. Also in Paris, after feeling that Chirico had given me all that he had to give, I went to Léger’s academy: an enormous garage converted into a huge hall full of studios, where the students went with their paintings and their canvases, paper and pencils, and where a sad-eyed nude model sat on a platform, waiting for someone to sketch her. There I excelled as a student. Léger congratulated me, but that was not enough for me. I have retained his preference for design, even if his designs are inferior to those of any other painter’s. Nothing interested Léger except the design of his paintings, lost among endless colors and brushstrokes that no other painter could imitate.
I fought with Giorgio de Chirico and told him he sacrificed everything for the sake of color. He would answer, “What else is there besides color?” “You’re right. But color disturbs me. You can’t see the forms amidst so many colors.”
That is how I started to grow disillusioned. I drew away from a passion that was also a torture for me. What was left? Writing? Writing? There was music, but that was as far beyond my reach as the moon. For a long time I had been writing and hiding what I had written. For so long that I suffered from the habit of hiding what I wrote: as if God could heal me and give me a piece of good news that never came. The world is not magical. We make it magical all of a sudden inside us, and nobody finds out until many years later. But I did not hope to be known: that seemed the most horrible thing in the world to me. I will never know what I was hoping for. A beggar who sleeps under a tree without anything in the world to shelter him is happier than a famous man, a man known for his charm, for his talent. What matters is what we write: that is what we are, not some puppet made up by those who talk and enclose us in a prison so different from our dreams. Will we always be students of ourselves?
—SILVINA OCAMPO
Buenos Aires, 1987
from
FORGOTTEN JOURNEY
FORGOTTEN JOURNEY
SHE WAS trying to remember the day she was born. She furrowed her brows so much that the adults interrupted her telling her repeatedly to unwrinkle her forehead. That was why she couldn’t reach the memory of her birth.
Before they
were born, children were held at a large department store in Paris; their mothers ordered them, and sometimes went in person to pick them up. She would have liked to watch the package being unwrapped, the box in which the babies were shipped, but she never reached the houses of newborns quickly enough. They arrived quite hot from the trip because they couldn’t breathe very well inside the box, and that was why they were so red and cried incessantly, their toes curled up.
But she had been born one morning in Palermo Park making nests for birds. She couldn’t remember having gone out of her house that day; she had the feeling that she had made the trip without a car or a carriage, a trip full of mysterious shadows, and that she had woken up on a road lined with trees that smelled like Australian pines where she had suddenly found herself making nests for birds. The eyes of Micaela, her nursemaid, followed her like two guards. The making of the birds’ nests wasn’t easy; they had several rooms each: they even needed a bedroom and a kitchen.
The next day, when she returned to Palermo, she looked for the nests along the road lined with Australian pines. There weren’t any left. She was about to cry when her nursemaid said, “The little birds have taken the nests up into the trees, which is why they are so happy this morning.” But her cruel sister, who was three years older than she was, laughed, pointing with her linen glove at the Palermo gardener, a one-eyed man who was sweeping with a broom made of gray branches. In addition to the dead leaves he was sweeping up the last nest. At that moment, she felt like throwing up, as if she had heard the sound of hammocks in the backyard of her house.
Then time had passed, making the date of her birth seem desperately far away. Each memory was of a different baby girl, but all of them had her face. Each year she grew older the group of girls that surrounded her expanded.
Until one day, when she was playing in the study room, the daughter of the French chauffeur said, with atrocious bloodthirsty words, “Babies don’t come from Paris,” slowly adding, while looking around to see if the doors were listening, with unsuspected strength, “Babies come from the tummies of their mothers, and when they are born they come out through the belly button.” Who knows what other words dark as sin emerged from Germaine’s mouth, though she didn’t even pale upon saying them.
That was when babies started to appear all over the place. Never before had so many children been born in her family. The women wore huge balloons on their stomachs; each time an adult spoke about a newborn an intense fire burned across her face and she bent down to the ground looking for a ring or a handkerchief that hadn’t fallen. All eyes turned toward her like beacons lighting up her shame.
One morning, just out of her bath, watching the water swirling into the drain while her nursemaid wrapped her in a towel to dry her, she laughed and confided her horrible secret to Micaela. The nursemaid got very angry and assured her once again that babies came from Paris. She felt slightly relieved.
But when night returned, anguish mixed with the sounds of the street took hold of her whole body. She couldn’t sleep even though her mother kissed her over and over before going to the theater. The kisses had lost their power.
And it was only after many days and many long dark nights—the enormous clock in the kitchen, the empty hallways of the house, the many grown-ups hiding behind doors—that she was lifted onto her mother’s lap in the dressing room and her mother said that babies didn’t come from Paris. Her mother spoke about flowers and birds, and everything mixed up with Germaine’s horrible secrets. Still, she desperately believed that babies came from Paris.
A moment later, her mother said she was going to open the window, and after opening it, immediately her mother’s face completely transformed: she was a lady in a feather-covered hat who just happened to be visiting the house. The window was almost shut, and when her mother told her that the sun was glorious, she saw the dark sky of night where no bird sang.
STRANGE VISIT
BEFORE she would have lunch at a little table in the pantry and now she was allowed to have lunch at the big table. In the middle of the chatter, Leonor’s eyes looked up through the windows searching for a bit of blue sky, but for the moment it was entirely covered with clouds. It was going to rain; she had been waiting for that day for a long time, because they had promised to take her to a house on the outskirts where she had only been once before. That was where a very tall man lived, isolated from the world perhaps by his height. He was a friend of Leonor’s father and he had a daughter, two maids, and a gardener who lived in a tiny house with a spiral staircase. In the garden there was a tiny fountain with two conjoined tritons, with water coming out of their mouths, and a squat palm tree next to the wall of the house, and four rosebushes in double rows on either side of the path. Elena had incredibly black hair, and her face was so transparent that it was as if it had been erased; but all that was left of her hair was a very careful white knot, and her dress had five pleats in which Leonor’s eyes got lost.
They had explored the house and the only thing that there was a lot of were hidden corners. They had gone up to the flat roof, from which it was possible to see the life of the neighboring houses, with retinues of clothes drying in the sun. They had hidden under the staircase and had grown weary when nobody came looking for them. They had peeked in the window of the study on the first floor where two men were talking, two men with faces as severe as their fathers’, two men drowning in the seriousness of stiff collars and cigar smoke. Leonor, containing her laughter, squeezed her nose against the cold glass; her eyes had to travel across the expanse of a white curtain and a Diana the Huntress to reach her father who was sitting on a brown leather sofa. He hadn’t taken off his overcoat, and yet, with the same gesture of drying his forehead on very hot days, he rubbed his face with his handkerchief up as far as his eyes, stopping as if he were about to cry. The noise of a sewing machine wrapped the house as if in a hem of silence and the only sound was the moaning that tears must make in order to squeeze out of closed eyes. Elena’s father got up and came running over to the windowsill. After a while they heard the voices rise to the level where they were. Elena took the hand of Leonor, who was afraid, and they walked toward the playroom as if ordered to play, though they didn’t play. Elena gave her a little medal that she lost three times on the floor while taking it out of a drawer. They said goodbye without looking at each other, with a kiss that brought their cheeks close together in the air.
In the car, on the way back, her father scolded her twice, and Leonor no longer believed that he had cried. Along the edges of his eyes she had seen the hardness of his wrinkled forehead and she couldn’t reconcile the two images—one seen through the distant scene of the curtain, the other so near and in a remote region thanks to his ill humor sitting there in the car.
Leonor thought about Elena. The table was full of laughter during dessert. The sky turned darker and darker, and rain as fine as powdered sugar was falling. Leonor saw her father shaking his head and thinking that they wouldn’t be going to Elena’s house that day, and she felt a great ocean like the ones they showed her on maps that held her distant from the face she wanted to reach, and which they had erased from her memory, the face of Elena.
from
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF IRENE
THE IMPOSTOR
IT WAS suffocatingly hot. I reached Constitution Station at four. The books tucked into the straps of the suitcase made the suitcase even heavier. I stopped to finish a strawberry ice-cream cone next to the stone lions that watch over the stairs at the entrance. The train wasn’t leaving for twenty minutes. I wandered around the station for a while, looking at the shopwindows. In the bookstore I noticed an Eversharp pencil that was very cheap; I bought it, along with a bottle of pink pomade. I don’t use pomade but I thought it might come in handy in the countryside on windy days. I saw my curly hair reflected in a window. Vague memories of my first suffering at school flooded my memory.
I had forgotten something, something very important. I looked at my wrist to make sure th
at I was wearing my watch, looked at the handkerchief in my lapel pocket, the Scottish wool scarf wrapped around the straps of the suitcase. I had forgotten the bromide tablets. Before and after exams I suffer from sleeplessness, but maybe the sun and air of the countryside would calm my nerves better than a sedative, as my mother told me when she was saying goodbye. She couldn’t bear that a boy of my age was taking medication. However, I had forgotten something, something much more important than the bromide tablets. I had forgotten my algebra book; I felt regret when I looked at the sphere of the clock above the platform (its perfect roundness reminding me of the most beautiful theorems). I regretted this because algebra was my favorite subject.
When I got on the train the attendants hadn’t yet finished arranging the seats. They were raising the windows vigorously, cleaning with big feather dusters that stirred up clouds of dust and flies. The car was full of smells, of a succession of waves of hot air. The burning light of day was resting in all its blue brilliance on the glass, on the metal handles, on the motionless fans, on the leather seats.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 2