Silvina Ocampo is perhaps the greatest overlooked author from Argentina. Forgotten Journey, a collection of twenty-eight short-short stories, is her first published fiction.
Silvina's older sister Victoria wrote a review of Forgotten Journey in Sur,
the leading literary magazine in South America back in 1937 where she
happened to be editor at the time. Now, did Victoria give Silvina's
first published collection of stories a glowing review since, after all,
they were sisters? No! Just the opposite, Victoria panned the book with
such pronouncements as language full of irritating mistakes and writing
stilted and awkward. Ah, sisters!
How did other critics and
reviewers characterize Silvina's fiction? Most frequently we hear things
like surreal, cold, eerily dark and strangely cruel - as a matter of
fact, Silvina was denied a prestigious Argentine literary prize in 1979
since the judges cited her fiction as "too cruel."
Suffering from
an inferiority complex of sorts throughout her lifetime, Silvina tried
to remain in the shadows and simply write her stories - not so easy
since she was married to novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares and was a friend
and occasional collaborator with the great Jorge Luis Borges.
You'll be given additional biographical information in the book's Forward
written by Carmen Boullosa. I'll share a more direct taste of Silvina
Ocampo's fiction by focusing on a pair of fascinating gems from this
collection beginning with the title piece -
FORGOTTEN JOURNEY
As
a young boy I cherished the fantastic. I wanted to live in a world
where Superman could soar through the air and Santa Claus and his
reindeer delivered the presents I found under the tree. When told these
types of things didn't, in fact, exist, I became upset.
Silvina
Ocampo captures a similar upset and confusion in her tale of a young
girl (perhaps Silvina herself) on the cusp of learning where babies
really come from.
“Before they were born, children were stocked
in a big department store, mothers ordered them, and sometimes went to
buy them directly. She would have liked to see them unwrap the package
and open the box that held the baby, but they never called her over in
time in the houses with newborns.”
So charming. The narrator dips
into the mind of a sensitive, impressionable little girl to give us a
glimpse of how she understands the facts of life.
But then a
series of shockers, beginning with the French chauffeur's daughter
(Silvina grew up in a large family of wealthy Argentine aristocrats)
delivering the bad news: “Children when they're born don't come from
Paris. Children are inside their mother's bellies, and when they're born
they come out of the bellybutton.”
Forgotten Journey, a
tale of a young girl coming to grips with one of life's harsh realities.
If we read carefully, we can detect an emotional charge that lies
hidden deep between the lines, as if there's a strangeness too dark to
be expressed in mere words.
SKYLIGHT
A number of critics and
reviewers who characterize Silvina Ocampo's fiction as eerily dark and
strangely cruel could take this weird tale as prime example.
I
picture the narrator as nine-year-old Silvina, all curls and knee-length
dress in the spirit of Alice in her Wonderland. Only here we have an
unsettling tale which could carry the subtitle: Silvina in Crueltyland.
Every sentence, every image carries a weight that borders on Gothic horror. Yet, should we call Skylight
a tale of terror? You'll have to read the story in its entirety to
reach a final decision. For now, I'll link my comments to a quartet of
direct quotes:
“Above the hall in that house with a skylight was
another mysterious home, and through the glass you could see a family of
feet surrounded by haloes, like saints, and the shadows of the rest of
the bodies to which those feet belonged, shadows flattened like hands
seen through bathwater.”
We've all been in an apartment building
where we hear heavy footstep overhead. With this tale, Silvina imagines
a little girl who can not only hear the upstairs neighbors but, thanks
to a glass ceiling, she can look up and see them. Oh, my darling, you've
become the ultimate voyeur.
“The home above was empty, except
for the soft crying of a little girl (who had just received a goodnight
kiss but didn't want to go to sleep) and the shadow of a hoop skirt,
like a black devil in a perverse schoolmistress's ankle boots.”
Sounds
like our little girl can sense all is not well upstairs; she can sense
there might be drama brewing leading to an outbreak of violence.
“Both
sets of feet ran in circles without reaching each other; the hoop skirt
chased after the tiny bare feet. With talons outstretched, until a lock
of hair hung, suspended in the air, caught by the black skirt's hands,
and screams erupted.”
Violence, indeed! With those outstretched
talons, so like a predator, grabbing a lock of hair (nice touch, Silvina
– a lock of hair underscores we have a tender innocent overhead) and
then screaming. Oh, my, if those upstairs neighbors ever realized they
are being watched carefully thanks to (for them) their glass floor.
“Slowly, a head split in two was sketched upon the glass, a head sprouting bloody curls, tied in bows.”
How
realistic is our narrator's depiction? Might she be imagining the
entire sequence of events? After all, at the end of the tale she watches
as the little girl overhead has taken the elevator down to run and jump
amongst the trees in a plaza by the statue of San Martin.
Intrigued? If so, you'll have many more Silvina Ocampo tales to look forward to in Forgotten Journey, an author critic Chris Via describes as a combination Flannery O'Connor and Julio Cortázar.
Author Silvina Ocampo, 1903-1993
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