The lovely young lass pictured above could be the narrator in a number of stories from La Furia (The Fury).
Reading these artfully constructed cruel tales by Silvina Ocampo of Argentina reminds me of those French contes cruels by such authors as Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Jean Richepin and Jean Lorrain.
To share the flavor of exactly how cruel Silvina can be on her characters, in The Photographs, a little girl recounts how she arrived at a birthday party given for Adriana, a fourteen-year-old who suffered a near fatal accident and is now confined to a wheelchair. After all the photographs that taxed poor Adriana's energies that scorching summer day, she slumped over - dead. And, in The Objects, the narrator speaks of a woman, age twenty, by the name of Camila Ersky and her obsession with all the toys, dolls and jewelry she owns only to gather up more toys, dolls and jewelry and then come home to see her precious possessions having faces, "the horrible faces they acquire when we have stared at them too long." Silvina concludes The Objects with this line: "Through a long series of joys, Camila Ersky had finally entered hell."
Here's my brief write-up on two more Silvina tales:
THE CLOCK HOUSE
Silvina switches it up: her nine-year-old narrator is a boy with the initials N.N.. The entire tale consists of N.N. writing a letter to his teacher, one of those 'what I did on summer vacation' kind of letters.
N.N. tells of his experience at a party given for Rusito's baptism. Among the adults helping to set up for the party is his friend Estanislao Romagán, a hunchback watchmaker, alarm clocks his specialty, who lives in a little hut he built for himself on the flat roof of a building, a hut that looks like a doghouse. N.N. calls Estanislao's hut the Clock House.
Every time he paid a visit to Estanislao's Clock House, his friend would treat him to pictures of clocks from around the world and he'd listen as the clocks in Estanislao's roof house would strike the hour a thousand times a day. How wonderful!
The evening of the party, Estanislao put on his wrinkled suit, washed his face and combed his long black hair that almost reached his eyebrows so it looked like a Spanish beret. Wow! Estanislao looked quite elegant.
N.N. relates the details of the party: her older sister Joaquina asking Estanislao if she could touch his back, Joaquina telling him he has all the luck in the world (Is that really fair?), rock and roll music, Spanish music, and a man forcing him to drink liquor (ah, it burned his throat).
Everyone was jolly. The prettiest girl in the room picked a flower from a vine and stuck it in Estanislao's button hole. You could see he was the king of the party. He apologized for his wrinkled suit and then Gevasio Palmo, the owner of the laundry around the corner, came up to Estanislao and said, "Let's iron it right away in my laundry. What are laundries for if not to press the suits for our friends." Everyone welcomed the idea, especially Estanislao who cried with joy and danced a few steps.
Everybody got ready to make the trek to the laundry but N.N.'s mother tried to hold him back. Nothing doing! N.N. joined the others and when they arrived he could see all the huge irons and gigantic bottles.
N.N.'s letter continues and we're given the eerie sense Estanislao is about to make the transition from life of the party to victim when he asks if he has to take off his wrinkled suit and Gervasio responds, "No, don't bother. We'll iron it with you in it."
N.N. tells his teacher he was forcefully removed from the laundry since he was only a kid and threw up from the ammonia smell. He goes on to relate that he never saw Estanislao again and a van from Parcae Watch Repair Shop came and took away all of Estanislao's clocks.
REPORT ON HEAVEN AND HELL
Much of Silvina Ocampo's writing consists of the exactitude of language to convey feeling and perceiving life from a peculiar angle. To share an example, here's the way Silvina begins this two pager:
“Following the example of the great auction houses, Heaven and Hell have galleries full of objects that will surprise no one, since they are the same things that usually fill the houses of the earthly world. But it is not enough to speak only of objects: in these halls there are also cities, towns, gardens, mountains, valleys, suns, moons, winds, seas, stars, reflections, temperatures, favors, perfumes, and sounds, for eternity gives us all sorts of spectacles and feelings.”
And here's how Silvina ends her short-short, parable-like tale:
“The laws of Heaven and Hell are flexible. Whether you're sent to one place or the other depends on the slightest detail. I know people who because of a broken key or a wicker birdcage went to Hell, and others who for a sheet of newspaper or a glass of milk went to Heaven.”
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*Note to readers of English: these tales are also in Thus Were Their Faces published by New York Review Books and translated by Daniel Balderston.
Silvina Ocampo, 1903-1993
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