This week marks one year since the arrival of the pandemic in our lives. I confess that I have moved away from the unsuccessful criticisms that only expose a vision similar to an English labyrinth, but with no way out. We have reinvented ourselves and do different things than we did before. However, a constant has been good reading, the fortune that the publishing industry continues with few, but learned books, as Quevedo would say.
Mariana Enríquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) executes a solid approach to the life and work of Silvina Ocampo. The success of this book lies in the fact that it avoids falling into the stiff and tedious speech, in the praises of amazement and glory that biographers often resort to when they admire the author. There are no suckers. Fortunately, he is also far from another vice: when the biographer insists on bringing to light unproven inaccuracies that distort the writer’s memory. Enríquez’s work is balanced and entertaining, the prose flows like a mighty river. It has information and precise data to put together the life of Ocampo, as if it were a character in the stories of Mariana Enríquez: with chiaroscuro, enigmatic, without ties in the sexual field, brilliant and unconventional.
The biographer exhibits two fundamental aspects in Ocampo’s career: the love-hate relationship he had with his sister Victoria, and the close friendship that she and Borges, Bioy Casares and her had. Silvina was the wife of Bioy Casares, for a long time Borges used to visit them frequently, stay for dinner and continue talking about literature. That bond that undoubtedly brought fruits to literature, the author describes as a three-headed monster.
Why is Victoria Ocampo important in her sister’s life, if apparently they did not get along? Victoria was the eldest of the Ocampo sisters. That gave her some power over the younger sister, who was somewhat affected by decisions or, whims, Victoria. In addition, she also wrote and, by chance of fate, they asked her for a review of the first book of stories that Silvina published. The criticism was atrocious, with more viciousness than objectivity. All the rivalry they had is visible in that text. However, years later Borges praised Silvina’s writing and, although he was referring to another book, the dilapidating trials of the first-born de las Ocampo no longer hurt him.
Silvina invented a word or kind of code for when she needed to tell Borges that she was tired, without him feeling like she was running him out of his house. The word, Enriquez reveals, was At the reservoir, a variant of Goodbye. This meant that Silvina was no longer going to contribute anything to the literary gathering and that she preferred to go to sleep instead of offering them sandwiches and drinks. It should be noted that since Bioy, following the advice of his wife, left the legal profession for literature, he and Borges discovered that they could write with four hands, read, comment on books and feel comfortable in each other’s complicity.
Here we meet a demanding Borges, misogynist? The writer and poet Juan José Hernández narrates in the documentary DependenciesBorges preferred to talk and talk at meals with Bioy and Silvina, since most of the time he did not like what Silvina cooked. And that, for the author of The Aleph, no writer was worthy of “an admiration if you reserve. Not even Virginia Woolf was saved. ” If you pay attention to Hernández’s observation, a witness to that fraternal coexistence, Silvina was the few writers who deserved care from Borges; A situation that became a daily job when he offered to translate Ocampo’s stories into English. The other author who was approved by Borges was María Luisa Bombal.
Bioy was known to have lovers, it was not something hidden. One of them was Elena Garro. At the beginning of the seventies, Enríquez refers that Garro contacted Bioy to warn him that he should leave Mexico, perhaps because of everything she said (or did not explain well) about which writers supported the 1968 Movement. Elena Garro, in an outburst He decided to send his four angora cats to Argentina, to the writer’s house. The cats arrived, but Silvina liked dogs better. Garro’s pets ended up in a nursery for animals without an owner and that was never told to her, who in those years did not enjoy much acceptance in the Mexican literary circle. Paradoxically, the day Silvina Ocampo was buried it was raining and four cats appeared in the pantheon.
Without a doubt, it is a valuable book that makes staying at home more tolerable.
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