The olive green dress

The academic journeys that a student of Letters like me should (and wants, let's go ...) do sometimes lead to places that one had left relegated to oblivion, not for fun, but because the overwhelming accumulation of stories sometimes does not to breathe. Without wanting to be solemn, I want to share with you a story, a very beautiful story by one of my favorite writers, Silvina Ocampo, which because of a subject I had to read again (after a long time ...). It may not be a place, it may not be saying anything, but whoever writes does it to be read, and the best way for art to make sense is by closing the cycle. I hope that, like me, you enjoy it very much.

The olive green dress

The stained glass windows came to meet him. She had been out for nothing but shopping that morning. Miss Hilton blushed easily, she had a transparent parchment-paper skin, like the packages in which everything is seen.
that comes wrapped; but within those transparencies there were very thin layers of mystery, behind the branches of veins that grew like a small tree on his forehead. He had no age and one thought he was surprising
in her a gesture of childhood, just at the moment when the deepest wrinkles of the face and the whiteness of the braids were accentuated. At other times, one believed that she was surprised by the smoothness of a young girl and very blond hair, just at the moment when the intermittent gestures of old age were accentuated. She had traveled the world on a cargo ship, shrouded in sailors and black smoke. He knew America and most of the Orient. He always dreamed of going back to Ceylon. There he had met an Indian who lived in a garden surrounded by snakes. Miss Hilton bathed in a bathing suit long and big as a balloon in the moonlight, in a warm sea where one searched indefinitely for water, without finding it, because it was the same temperature as the air. He had bought a wide straw hat with a peacock painted on it, which rained wings in waves on his pensive face. They had given him
stones and bracelets, they had given her shawls and embalmed snakes, moth-eaten birds that she kept in a trunk in the boarding house. His whole life was locked in that trunk, his whole life was devoted to gathering
modest curiosities throughout her travels, for later, in a gesture of supreme intimacy that brought her suddenly closer to beings, open the trunk and show one by one her memories. Then he would go back to bathe on the beaches
warm from Ceylon, she was traveling again in China, where a Chinese threatened to kill her if she did not marry him. He traveled again in Spain, where he passed out in bullfights, under the peacock wings of the shaking hat.
announcing beforehand, like a thermometer, his fainting. He was traveling in Italy again. In Venice she was the companion of an Argentine. He had slept in a room under a painted sky where a shepherdess dressed in pink rested on a pile of grass with a sickle in her hand. He had visited all the museums. He liked the narrow, cemetery streets of Venice more than the canals, where his legs ran and did not fall asleep like in the gondolas. He found himself at the haberdashery El Ancla, buying pins and hairpins for
hold her fine long braids twisted around her head. He liked the stained glass windows of the haberdashery because of a certain edible air that the rows of caramelized buttons have, the sewing boxes in the shape of candy boxes and
the paper lace. The hairpins had to be golden. Her last disciple, who had a fad for hairstyles, had begged her to let herself comb her hair one day when, convalescing from a cold, they would not let her go out for a walk. Miss hilton
She had agreed because there was no one in the house: she had allowed herself to be combed by the fourteen-year-old hands of her disciple, and from that day on she had adopted that braid hairstyle that she made her, seen from the front and with her own eyes, a
Greek head; but, seen from the back and with the eyes of others, a commotion of loose hairs that rained on the wrinkled nape. Since that day, several painters had looked at her insistently and one of them had asked her permission
to make a portrait of her, because of her extraordinary resemblance to Miss Edith Cavell. On the days when she went to pose for the painter, Miss Hilton wore an olive green velvet gown, which was as thick as the upholstery of a kneeler.
old. The painter's studio was hazy with smoke, but Miss Hilton's straw hat carried her to infinite regions of the sun, near the outskirts of Bombay.
Pictures of naked women hung on the walls, but she liked landscapes with sunsets, and one afternoon she took her disciple to show her a painting showing a flock of sheep under a golden tree at sunset. Miss Hilton desperately searched for the landscape, while the two of them were alone waiting for the painter. There was no landscape: all the paintings had turned into naked women, and the beautiful braided hairstyle was wielded by a naked woman in a fresh painting on an easel. In front of her disciple, Miss Hilton posed that day stiffer than ever, against the window, wrapped in her velvet dress.
The next morning, when he went to his disciple's house, there was no one; On the table in the study room, an envelope was waiting for her with half a month's money, which she was owed, with a small card that said in large letters of

indignation, written by the mistress of the house: "We don't want teachers who have so little modesty." Miss Hilton did not quite understand the meaning of the phrase; the word modesty swam in his olive-green velvet-clad head. She felt an easily fatal woman grow in her, and she left the house with her face burned, as if she had just played a game of tennis.
Opening his wallet to pay for the hairpins, he found the insulting card still peeking out from among the papers, and he glanced at it furtively as if it had been a pornographic photograph.


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