La Boda (The Wedding) – a strange cruelty pervades this Silvina Ocampo tale.
I picture the narrator looking much like the six-year-old sweetie in the above photo.
Gabriela
recounts past events, tells us she had a special relationship with a
young woman by the name of Roberta since Roberta paid attention to her,
went for walks with her, confided in her and occasionally spoke to her
"as if I were big, sometimes as if both of us were six years old."
Then,
vintage Silvina Ocampo, a dark foreshadowing: Gabriela informs us she
and Roberta could communicate their wants and feelings to one another
mind to mind, without the need for words. Also, how Roberta exerted a
mysterious control over her - so much so that if Roberta gave her an
order to jump out the window or put her hand in coals or run on the
tracks and let a train hit her, she would instantly obey.
Gabriela
continues: she lived on the outskirts of Córdoba with Roberta across
the street and Roberta's cousin Arminda next door - Roberta and Arminda
loved each other, when they weren't arguing over things like clothes and
boyfriends, that is.
Gabriela really enjoyed when Roberta took
her to the beauty salon down the street where she could play with
bottles, hairpins, hairdryer, and, most especially, an old wig.
But
then Arminda got herself engaged which distracted Gabriela more than
the beauty salon or anything else. Matter of fact, Gabriela says during
those days she got the worst grades in her whole entire life. And
Roberta told her Arminda was luckier than she, Roberta, since "at twenty
a woman either had to fall in love or throw herself in the river."
Roberta went on to say she wouldn't understand since she was so young.
Days
before the wedding, Gabriela relates a conversation between Roberta and
Arminda, Arminda arguing her beautiful hairpiece will make everyone
look at her. And those wedding preparations, so long and so involved -
Arminda's dress, Arminda's hair that she dreamed about all her life,
Arminda's huge hairpiece made of netting and a lock of her own hair she
cut off when she was fifteen.
The morning of the wedding - hot
and sticky. The thermometer reached 105 degrees. She and Roberta went
out on the patio. The sky darkened; it looked as if to storm and just
then she spotted a huge spider sitting in a nearby vine. She went to get
a broom to kill it but Roberta stopped her, told her a spider
represents hope, or so it is according to a French lady. She said to
Roberta, "If it means hope, let's keep it in a little box." Moving like a
sleepwalker, Roberta went to her room to fetch a box.
At this
point in the story, Silvia Ocampo, master of the craft, has Gabriela and
Roberta exchange these words once Roberta hands Gabriela the box:
"Be careful. They're poisonous," she said.
"And if it bites me?"
"Spiders are like people: they bite to defend themselves. If you don't do anything to them, they won't do anything to you."
Gabriela,
having made air holes with a pin, kept the box in her pocket. Later,
when she and Roberta went inside the beauty salon to wait for the
hairdresser who was attending mass, Roberta sat under the hair dryer
that looked like a warrior's helmet while she started playing with
Arminda's beautifully made hairpiece sitting there beside her (the
hairdresser was the one who put the finishing touches on the elaborate
hairpiece and called the creation 'a work of art').
Gabriela
asked Roberta if she should put it (the spider) inside the hairpiece.
Due to the noise of the hair dryer, she didn't know if Roberta could
hear her but Roberta nodded as if in agreement. What happens thereafter
is for Silvina Ocampo to tell.
The Wedding surely takes
its place among the stories critics at the time judged as "too cruel"
and thus denied Silvina a literary award. Reading this tale is quite the
experience. Each word, each phrase carries a powerful charge. And such a
visual piece. Let's not forget Silvina studied in Paris with artists
Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger.
We have a six-year-old girl
as narrator. What is it about a little girl that can give a story its
emotional punch? Critic and scholar Patricia N Klingenberg wrote in her
study of Silvina Ocampo, “The child provides an ideal vantage from which
to project the estranged world."
Estranged world, indeed. Can
you picture that tight psychic connection between Gabriela and Roberta?
What do you make of Roberta's intense rivalry and jealousy with Arminda?
I myself can't help thinking of all the guilt Gabriela must live with
every day for years and years. I also wonder what would be going through
Roberta's mind on her own wedding day. I bet she didn't wear a
hairpiece.
*Note: For readers of English this tale can be found in Silvina Ocampo's collection entitled Thus Were Their Faces published by New York Review Books. 
Silvina Ocampo, 1903-1993
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