Too cruel!
So those critics in her home country of Argentina proclaimed back in the days when Silvina Ocampo published her short fiction.
Speaking
of cruel, writing a review for this blistering three-pager underscores
just how brutal Silvina could be on her characters. Spoiler Alert: I
recount the entire tale, beginning to end.
THE ACROBATS
"They
lived in dark, chilly corridors where drafts of air blew in from the
plant-filled courtyards. They had the souls of acrobats, playing under
the archways of the building's chain of courtyards."
The narrator
could be talking about the two kids in the foreground of the above
photo. Clodomira, their mom, is a deaf woman who does the ironing for the
neighbors. She calls her sons Cipriano and Valerio, both of whom have
grown more and more distant from her. The boys devise secret plans that
come from a storybook about acrobats, a book they were given by the
owners of the house.
"Cipriano leapt though the arches like a
galloping white horse, and Valerio sometimes balanced on a broken chair
and carefully concealed his fondness for dolls." We can appreciate the
kids' acrobatics but the one boy, so much like a girl, having a fondness
for dolls - very odd. But Valerio didn't realize being a boy and
hugging a doll was a no-no until he was laughed at by five girls. With
tears in his eyes, Valerio threw away the doll. Shame, shame. No more
dolls for Valerio, ever.
Meanwhile, mom continues to do the
laundry as she attempts to figure out what her two acrobatic sons are
up to. She fails to discover anything specific but she sure admires how
they both are experimenting on imaginary trapezes.
One day
Cipriano goes to the circus with his mother. Feeling the vertigo of
being up high that he'd once felt on the rooftop, Cipriano rushes into
the circus arena: he gallops like a horse, does somersaults, hangs from a
trapeze, starts acting like a clown. The audience breaks out in wild
applause.
Mom calls out "Cipriano, Cipriano!" thinking she's
lost her son forever. But just then an usher walks the boy back to her
side. Although furious initially, mom's rage quickly turns into
admiration since, after all, such astonishing acrobatics.
From
that day forward, Cipriano lived to return to the circus. Not to be
outdone, Valerio also lived for Cipriano to return to the circus. Thus
Valerio experienced joy in all things through Cipriano - with the
exception, of course, of his odd fondness for dolls.
Up to this
point we're right there, sharing Cipriano and Valerio's excitement and
joy for acrobatics and the circus. Who would expect Silvina Ocampo to
end her story the way she does? I certainly was not prepared. Here's the
concluding paragraph in its entirety:
"One afternoon they no
longer felt the chilly draft on their bare arms. Standing on a window
ledge on the third floor, they took a glorious leap, and, holding each
other in a farewell embrace, they fell, crashing on the tile of the
courtyard. Ironing in the side room, Clodomira, saw the marvelous act
and felt, with a smile, that from all the windows came millions of
shouts and claps, but she kept on ironing. She recalled her initial
anxiety at the circus. Now she was used to such things."
Now
that's cruelty squared! Not only to have two beautiful young boys leap
to their death but to have their mother take it all in stride and
continue ironing as if all those imagined cheers and her stack of neatly
folded laundry are infinitely more important, the things in life that
truly count. Oh, Silvina!
Silvina Ocampo, 1903-1993
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