{"id":11482,"date":"2019-08-21T18:41:37","date_gmt":"2019-08-22T00:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2022\/05\/from-the-promise-by-silvina-ocampo\/"},"modified":"2023-06-06T07:10:42","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T13:10:42","slug":"from-the-promise-by-silvina-ocampo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2019\/08\/from-the-promise-by-silvina-ocampo\/","title":{"rendered":"From The Promise by Silvina Ocampo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s Note:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In Silvina Ocampo&#8217;s\u00a0<em>The Promise<\/em>, a dying woman&#8217;s attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity. This essential voice from one of the great voices of twentieth-century Latin American literature is forthcoming in English translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylights.com\/book\/?GCOI=87286100537120\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">City Lights<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Only a masterful storyteller could pull off what Silvina Ocampo does in <em>The Promise<\/em>; a woman lost at sea drowns in her memories, while the water\u2014never threatening\u2014cradles her with echoes of the past. A novel that is not a novel; a hypnosis, really.&#8221; \u2014 Gabriela Alem\u00e1n, author of <em>Poso Wells.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<style type=\"text\/css\">p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'}<br \/>p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; min-height: 15.0px}<br \/>span.Apple-tab-span {white-space:pre}<br \/><\/style>\n<p>Just as when I was sick and, after being in bed for forty days, I missed my bed, now I miss the sea. Ah, the sea. \u201cThe sea full of masculine urgency.\u201d Whose line was that? Gabriela, oh how beautiful she was! Her eyes were the color of the sea.<\/p>\n<p>In a mosaic inside the Basilica of<b> <\/b>Saint Apollinaris, in Ravenna, the archangel Gabriel has big astonished eyes, gently curling hair parted down the middle, a small and slender nose, a well-defined mouth with the corner of the lips turning downward on the right side, a mild expression and a<b> <\/b>saintly halo over a rounded and not very long oval face, a white tunic and two large wings. Poor Irene had clipped the photograph of that mosaic from a magazine, first to jot down an address on the other side of the page, then, because she liked it, she kept it under glass for eight years in her single room. She used to say that she had looked at that image absent-mindedly many times during her pregnancy, never thinking that her daughter would look so much like him. She was frequently surprised that Gabriela wasn\u2019t a boy, didn\u2019t have wings or a strange frock like the one in the image. It became her habit to call her Gabriel, to shorten the name a bit and because she liked saying Gabriel better than Gabriela. She recalled the years of her own childhood in Spain, so different from Gabriel\u2019s. That she\u2019d been born in Spain seemed like a dream to her. She wasn\u2019t aware of the feeling of neglect that she sometimes inflicted on her daughter, and believed that she herself had been the most neglected girl in the world. She was three or four years old when her mother re-married, to a man who didn\u2019t want to endure the presence of someone else\u2019s children. They lived in Ginzo de Limia, a poor and isolated village. In less than nine months, her mother abandoned Irene and her sister, who was older. They begged in the street. They were given shelter in the attic of a brothel and received the leftover food at the end of each day.<\/p>\n<p>It was sometime later, when she found out those women were prostitutes, that she appreciated the kindness (it had seemed natural to her then) that they had shown her and her sister. She vividly remembered a particular woman who would always step out on the balcony to take the fresh air, even in winter when snow was falling. She held Irene in her arms when she cried, as if she were her mother. When she had to leave that house (which she had already felt was her own) because her repentant stepfather had sent for them, she cried for that woman as she\u2019d never cried for anyone. The time she spent in her stepfather\u2019s house before sailing for Argentina was brief. One day, the most memorable, her drunken stepfather tied a rope around her waist and swung her from the first-floor balcony until a crowd of villagers gathered, none of them daring to say a thing for fear that the man would drop her. Entertained by the game, she didn\u2019t realize the danger she had been in.<\/p>\n<p>Everything else was erased from her memory and came back as memories of baby teeth, the first day of school, Buenos Aires, the different people, the flat landscape, the river everywhere, the difficulties of life in the home of the aunt who had taken her in, the changes of childhood, her clothing becoming too small, life\u2019s many lessons (how to wash your face, brush your teeth, get dressed, eat, urinate and defecate correctly), adolescence, coming of age. Upon discovering love, she believed in its fleeting salvation<b>. <\/b>News of the death of her mother (a death that was never explained), who had lain for twelve hours in the snowy woods and, by some miracle, had not been devoured by wolves, tormented her. As if that weren\u2019t enough, sometime later, her husband abandoned her to run off with another woman, and then there was Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel and Leandro . . . but Gabriel most of all.<\/p>\n<p>I glimpsed a flash of lightning in the sky, then another and yet another. If I were brave, how I would have loved to see a violent storm. I closed my eyes. It rained a little. I opened my eyes again. The clouds were going away. Why won\u2019t they take me with them?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Irene Roca<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Irene was not at all like her daughter. Irene had a joyful nature. Her even features made one think of a faded porcelain doll. Gabriela was waiting for Irene in Plaza Las Heras. She had followed her that day, which I remember now, as Irene\u2019s face comes back to me. She was so pretty dressed in green with that necklace of tiny pearls, and a pair of white gloves she carried in her hand like a bouquet! Gabriela lost sight of her in a moment of distraction, in front of a tobacco shop where they sold marbles. I saw her sitting pitifully on a green wooden bench eating an orange and staring, without realizing it, at the door her mother had entered.<\/p>\n<p>What do women do when they\u2019re not at home? When they were pure like her mother they devoted themselves to serious tasks, Gabriela might think. Then she\u2019d think, as usual, about the sex act. What she desired most in the universe of her curiosity was to see a man and a woman doing it. She had seen cats, dogs, pigeons, <i>guanacos<\/i>, monkeys commit that act, but never human beings. Juancha, a schoolmate, had told her that it was lots of fun.<\/p>\n<p>To make her way into that disorderly room, with books on the floor, socks over the chairs, half-opened packages of bread on a table, shirts thrown on the floor, Irene had crossed a vestibule with an interior door whose glass panes were red and blue, blue like the color of the ocean I am looking at, then a courtyard with plants, birdcages and a lemon tree in the center. I knew that room. But how different was the place Gabriela imagined her in, engaged in mysterious occupations!<\/p>\n<p>What was her mother doing? She thought of nothing else. Irene told her that in the house she was visiting there was a mechanical bird that sang inside a glass cage with gold trim. Liar. How she lied to her. That glass and gold cage occupied a predominant place in Gabriela\u2019s imagination. It had turned into a palace illuminated by a thousand chandeliers, a palace where her mother wove beautiful cloth with her perfumed and kind-hearted friends.<\/p>\n<p>She crossed many rooms and gardens before reaching the place where he was waiting for her. There, in a kind of cloister, was an enormous fishbowl with fish covered with purple fins and tails. This was Valent\u00edn Masini\u2019s drycleaners, where they never took Gabriela because the fumes of ammonium and other acids were not good for her health.<\/p>\n<p>The sun lit up the mirror of a wardrobe, the face of a faun, bunches of grapes, and leaves sculpted into the wood; a tiger-striped cat slept on a simple bed with a peeling iron frame, while torn, dirty curtains waved in the breeze. I liked that room! Irene did too. Sitting on the floor, her elbow leaning on the bed, she would occasionally glance at the disorder, as if it bothered her, then she\u2019d return again to the book she was reading. Sometimes one of her brassieres or handkerchiefs would be left on the floor. I looked at them with such hatred the first time I found them, without knowing to whom they belonged. She, Irene, was part of that disorder, one of its makers and also one of its martyrs. Stretching like an idiot, she\u2019d call out to Leandro in a shrill voice. Did she love him? Was that what love looked like?<\/p>\n<p>Often I imagined this scene that tortured me so. He had told me about it. Not even the sea makes me forget it.<\/p>\n<p>Leandro\u2019s muffled voice, from under the shower, would respond as usual:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat do you want?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019d tell me in detail the silly things they\u2019d say.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI can\u2019t be a minute without you, my love,\u201d she\u2019d always say to him.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m coming,\u201d he\u2019d answer, annoyed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCould you explain that matter of the synapses of the nervous system or about the extra-systolic pathways of the respiratory system?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt would be better if they didn\u2019t exist,\u201d Leandro would reply, drying his face with a towel; none of it mattered to him and he would add vehemently: \u201cIt would be better if humanity didn\u2019t exist, human beings are utter crap.\u201d As he entered the room his body gleamed like the body of the bronze statue in the museum that Irene had sketched in her adolescence. How well I could imagine him! He always seemed happy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDon\u2019t ask me to explain anything to you today. I have to go to the hospital. I don\u2019t have time for anything. I\u2019ve got to leave right now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo early? Who are you going to see?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNobody. Don\u2019t pester me with questions. I have to feel free, don\u2019t you understand? I can\u2019t be tied down,\u201d Leandro would answer as he dressed.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes when I have a fever I hear this conversation, with their voices buzzing like bees. How salty the sea is!<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIdiot,\u201d Irene would say. She was the idiot and she knew it. She\u2019d think <i>that \u201cnobody\u201d is worse than if it were somebody.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Nino, purring, would come over and rub against Leandro\u2019s legs. He was a dreadful cat, with his face split by a black stripe, which Gabriela would have liked because he looked like a tiger, and he adored me.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNot tied down,\u201d Irene would continue, \u201cas if you could live without ties. You even carry on a relationship with that ridiculous cat. You never go to bed without saying \u2018Good night, Mr. Cat,\u2019 as if you were a little boy. This rug is full of fleas.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As he did with me, Leandro paid no attention, whistling as he looked at himself in the mirror. Irene\u2019s words seemed ridiculous to him, and her attitude, unpleasant. Pathetically, Irene would suddenly go over to hug him. The sensual voice has meaning beyond the words uttered, but she seemed so disagreeably human to him, there in the mirror.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWon\u2019t you explain about nerve synapses or the urinary tract? If you don\u2019t explain it, I\u2019ll never understand, not with the help of pictures or textbooks or even with hands-on practice,\u201d she\u2019d say to him every day, playing the doctor. It was always the same, always the same.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIrene, don\u2019t you think we\u2019re letting life slip through our fingers studying together like this? You\u2019ll never understand that there\u2019s not enough time to go sneaking around.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLet\u2019s not start that eternal argument again. You\u2019ve changed in the last two months, ever since you\u2019ve been living here. I want to graduate, I want to have a profession. I want to study. I\u2019m doing it for Gabriela. She\u2019s the only person who loves me. The only one!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhich do you prefer: to love or to be loved?\u201d Leandro interrupted her.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019d say the same to me, but I\u2019d just smile.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo love,\u201d Irene would answer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLove me, then.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lying on the bed, Irene would embrace Leandro once again. He would kiss her passionately, the way he kissed me. The same thing would happen whenever she mentioned Gabriela. Leandro needed Irene to love another being that wasn\u2019t him in order to feel any interest in her. It is so overwhelming to be loved exclusively.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDoes she always follow you?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe\u2019s probably on the corner. I don\u2019t dare to go out,\u201d Irene would remark. \u201cShe\u2019s so young, but she understands so many things! She\u2019s not like other little girls. Look at her, isn\u2019t she lovely?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Leandro would adjust his tie and finish dressing, looking out the window at the girl passing by.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLovely,\u201d he\u2019d say, thinking of something else.<\/p>\n<p>For him, children weren\u2019t as marvelous as they were for me, they were a concoction smelling of milk and oranges, they were creatures from another planet &#8212; especially that Gabriela, or Gabriel, whose name, constantly changing back and forth from feminine to masculine like a hermaphrodite, was always on Irene\u2019s lips.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPoor Gabriel,\u201d Irene would murmur, \u201csometimes I feel guilty.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAbout what?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAbout everything,\u201d Irene would answer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDon\u2019t forget to lock the door and leave the key in the big planter in the courtyard. I have to go.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That was how it was, every day always the same, always the same.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou\u2019re not even going to give me a kiss?\u201d Irene would sigh.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDidn\u2019t I kiss you enough?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEach of your kisses is a dream. Nothing seems real. It\u2019s as if I\u2019m embracing you at the bottom of the sea and cease to exist. Later, when I\u2019m alone, I still don\u2019t exist, but now it\u2019s unpleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Uttering this sentence, Irene would feel that she had destroyed the importance of her feelings, and she had. Why explain them? Bitterly, she would hear Leandro\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou\u2019re always so sentimental. What a pity!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After kissing Irene again impatiently, mussing her hair, hurting her lips, Leandro would pick up the books that lay on the table.<\/p>\n<p><i>These unpleasant scenes repeat over and over again. He\u2019s going to hate me, <\/i>Irene would think<i>. When a man doesn\u2019t love you, his embraces become awkward. He has too many arms and legs, too many bones, elbows and knees. It\u2019s almost impossible for him to produce an orgasm. He used to slide over me like water, now he hurts me.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>She was right. Poor Irene, I alone understood her: alone as I am now, on a sea of relentless doubts. Dying is the only sure thing. Now I can finally die. But how? It\u2019s as impossible as before.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Translated by\u00a0Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Silvina Ocampo&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>The Promise<\/em>, a dying woman&#8217;s attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity. This essential voice from one of the great voices of twentieth-century Latin American literature is forthcoming in English translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylights.com\/book\/?GCOI=87286100537120\">City Lights<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[2982,4453],"genre":[2022],"pretext":[],"section":[2365],"translator":[3136,3135],"lal_author":[3047],"class_list":["post-11482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-argentina-es","tag-numero-11","genre-preview-es","section-translation-previews-and-new-releases-es","translator-jessica-powell-es","translator-suzanne-jill-levine-es","lal_author-silvina-ocampo-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11482\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11482"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=11482"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=11482"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=11482"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=11482"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=11482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}