FOREWORD

It is painful to finish something. Why mark it like Beethoven, who wastes five full minutes on final chords? His whole oeuvre is impregnated with that final concern. I don’t like conventions, that a novel need have an ending, for example.

S.O. to Noemi Ulla
Encounters with Silvina Ocampo (1982)

Between 1988 and 1989, besieged by the illness that would darken the last years of her life, Silvina Ocampo laboriously devoted herself to correcting and finishing The Promise, the novel she had been working on sporadically since the mid 1960s.¹ During that long period of almost twenty-five years, she had gone through several cycles of writing, abandoning and resuming once again her work on this book. Nevertheless, its existence as “work-in-progress” was never completely secret, at least beginning late in 1966, when it had been announced in a brief journalistic note stating that Silvina Ocampo “is currently working on a novel which still does not have a definitive title.”²

In 1975, in response to an epistolary questionnaire, the author revealed one of her preliminary titles for the novel—“The Epicenes”—declaring that it was “the best I’ve ever written” and stating that “according to my calculations it will be finished by the end of next year.”³ In an interview published three years later, she described it as a “phantasmagorical novel” and confessed the difficulty she was having in trying to finish it “because the main character is endlessly telling us things; something is making this woman talk on and on, telling one thing after another. It’s a promise she has made and that she keeps so as not to die, but one can tell she is dying.”⁴ This brief summary of her plot provides a key to reading The Promise under the guise of a posthumous autobiography and at the same time anticipates, with tragic irony, the conclusion that would join in a similar fate, ten years later, the main character and her author.

The Promise is the longest work of fiction by Silvina Ocampo, hence demanding of her, to judge by the numerous preliminary versions, a greater compositional effort. Structured as a series of linked stories, it takes its form as a “dictionary of memories” that the nameless narrator recounts as she is dying, drifting in the ocean after falling off the ship on which she was traveling. The persons she knew throughout her life parade, erratically, through the theater of her memory, many of them receiving only a brief biographical sketch that, for the most part, becomes an autonomous story, complete unto itself. Others belong to a continuous single story whose branches cover most of the novel. Her choice of this concentric structure, open to multiple digressions and interpolations, is not surprising in one who asserted that she had chosen the short story form “out of impatience” and who made a literary creed of concision and brevity. Freed of the constraints that a linear development would have imposed upon her, she could devote herself to the independent and concentrated invention of episodes, which could then be inserted in the text without altering the proliferating architecture of the whole. Nevertheless, those alternating narrative levels doubtlessly required an intricate embroidery of episodes—which helps to explain the novel’s point-counterpoint movements—and also necessitated the arduous process of writing she sustained.

Over the years, during this prolonged labor of editing and assembling, The Promise underwent at least two substantial modifications. The first was the extraction of sixteen of its episodes, which the author included as stories in the volume Los días de la noche (The Days of Night, 1970)⁵, although she included one of them, “Livio Roca,” in both works. Shortly afterward, she undertook a labyrinthine story of discordant passions among two women, a man, and a young girl, whose features and man’s name—the archangelic “Gabriel”—appear to have given rise to the discarded title epicene.⁶ This story, from a screenplay written in the mid ’50s entitled Amor desencontrado (Misencountered Love), is the only one the narrator takes up again, circuitously, throughout the course of her tale.

The present text is the last version of The Promise found among the author’s papers. The manuscript, in a file folder with the definitive title on its front cover, consists of 152 typewritten pages, upon which there are a few scattered corrections and additions in Silvina Ocampo’s own hand. As with the majority of the author’s manuscripts, this text was typed up by Elena Ivulich, her secretary for more than forty years. As a general rule, we have only altered the author’s syntax or punctuation when it was necessary in order to assure the full legibility of the text; in a few instances, however, it was necessary to consult the earlier drafts—handwritten and typed—in order to resolve transcription errors. At the same time, it’s worth clarifying that the repetition of some scenes, with slight variations in the narrator’s point of view or in the characters’ identities, adheres to the novel’s plan, as evidenced by a note handwritten by Ivulich, inserted among the pages of the manuscript, in which she indicates the location within the text of some of these re-writings and adds that they are deliberate because “the memories are recurrent.”

Independent of her declared aversion to endings governed by literary convention, the author did not leave precise indications that could confirm whether or not she considered The Promise finished. Nevertheless, the vertiginous dissolution of the narrator’s consciousness, recorded in the last stretch of the novel with increasing lyrical exuberance, corresponds to the author’s succinct description of its phantasmagorical plot. Those final pages of The Promise, written by hand on loose sheets of paper, with intricate and faltering strokes, are also some of Silvina Ocampo’s final pages. In them the author and her protagonist appear to share, at moments, the same voice.

Ernesto Montequín
Translator, literary critic, and director
of the Villa Ocampo Center in Buenos Aires

1. The earliest draft that has been found, titled “En la orilla del sueño” (“On the Shores of Sleep”), is preserved in a notebook where there are also sketches of poems from Amarillo celeste (Sky Blue Yellow, 1972) and a letter in which the author refers to the death of her husband’s father, Adolfo Bioy, which occurred in August 1962.

2. “Vida literaria” (“Literary Life”) La Nación, October 9, 1966

3. Danubio Torres Fierro, “Correspondencia con Silvina Ocampo (Una Entrevista Que No Osa Decir Su Nombre)” (“Correspondence with Silvina Ocampo (An Interview That Dares Not Speak Its Name”), Plural, no. 50, November 1975, pp. 57-60.

4. María Esther Vázquez, “Con Silvina Ocampo” (“With Silvina Ocampo,”) La Nación, September 10, 1978.

5. They are the following: “Ulises,” “Atinganos,” “Las esclavas de las criadas,” “Ana Valerga,” “El enigma,” “Celestino Abril,” “La soga,” “Coral Fernández,” “Livio Roca,” “Clavel,” “Albino Orma,” “Clotilde Ifrán,” “Malva,” “Amancio Luna, el sacerdote,” “La divina,” “Paradela,” and “Carl Herst.”

6. Another of the preliminary titles was Memoria de la ciudad perdida (Memoir of the Lost City).