Silvina Ocampo and one of her stories

Walking around the site Taringa, where the eclectic character of his posts can give one an article on psychology for dogs, along with another on Heideggerian philosophy, I came across a post that really made me happy, as well as surprised me in my ignorance.

Silvina Ocampo deserved a post, where a story was published that I had not read, and that I was pleased to find. I would like to share it with you, along with a review that Borges himself wrote about the writer.

«Like the God of the first verse of the Bible, each writer creates a world. This creation, unlike the divine, is not exnibus; it arises from memory, from forgetting that is part of memory, from previous literature, from the habits of a language and, essentially, from imagination and passion. […] Silvina Ocampo proposes us a reality in which the chimerical and the homemade coexist, the meticulous cruelty of children and the demure tenderness, the Paraguayan hammock of a fifth and mythology. […] He cares about colors, shades, shapes, convex, concave, metals, rough, polished, opaque, translucent, stones, plants, animals, the peculiar flavor of each hour and of each season, the music, the no less mysterious poetry and the weight of the souls, of which Hugo speaks. Of the words that could define it, the most precise, I think, is great. "

Jorge Luis Borges

Him for another - Silvina Ocampo

I expected to see him but not immediately, because my disturbance would have been too great. He always postponed our meeting, for some reason he understood or not. A simple pretext not to see it or to see it another day. And so the years passed, without time making itself felt, except in the skin of the face, in the shape of the knees, neck, chin, legs, in the inflection of the voice, in the manner of walking, listening, placing a hand on the cheek, repeating a phrase, in the emphasis, in the impatience, in what nobody notices, in the heel that increases in volume, in the corners of the lips, in the iris of the eyes, in the pupils, in the arms, in the ear hidden behind the hair, in the hair, in the nails, in the elbow, oh, in the elbow !, in the way of saying how are you? or really or can it be or at what time? or I don't know him. No, not Brahms, Beethoven, well, some books. Silence, which was more important than presence, wove their intrigues.

No meeting, that was not totally absurd, took place: a pile of packages covered me and he, eating bread and holding a bottle of wine and a Coca-Cola, pretended to shake my hand. Invariably someone stumbled and the goodbye was before what? The phone called, always wrong, but someone's breathing corresponded exactly to his breathing, and then, in the darkness of the room, his eyes appeared, in the color the timbre of that bottomless voice appeared, a voice that communicated it with the desert or with some branches of a river that runs between the stones without ever reaching its mouth, a river whose source, in the highest mountains, attracted pumas or photographers who came from far away to see these wonders. I liked seeing people like him. Some who looked almost identical, if they squinted; or a way to completely close the eyelids, as if something hurts.

I also liked talking to people who used to talk to him or who knew him a lot or who would go to see him in those days. But time was running out, like a train that has to reach its destination, when the guard knocks on the door of the passenger who is sleeping or announces the next station, the end of the trip. We had to meet. We were so used to not seeing each other that we didn't see each other. Although I'm not sure I didn't see it, even through the window. In that gloomy afternoon light, I felt that something was missing.

I passed in front of a mirror and looked for myself. I did not see inside the mirror but the closet in the room and the statue of a Diana the Huntress that I had never seen in that place. It was a mirror that pretended to be a mirror, as I uselessly pretended to be myself.

Then she was afraid that the door would open and that he would appear at any moment and that the postponements that kept their love alive would end. He lay on the floor on the rose of a carpet and waited, waited for the bell on the front door to stop ringing, waited, waited, and waited. He waited for the last light of the day to go away, then he opened the door and the one who was not expecting entered. They held hands. They fell on the rose on the carpet, rolled like a wheel, united by another desire, by other arms, by other eyes, by other sighs. It was at that moment that the carpet began to fly silently over the city, from street to street, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from square to square, until it reached the edge of the horizon, where the river began, on an arid beach, where Cattails grew and storks flew. Dawn slowly, so slowly that they did not notice the day or the lack of night, or the lack of love, or the lack of everything they had lived for, waiting for that moment. They were lost in the imagination of a forgetfulness -he for another, for another her- and they reconciled.