Afterword: Reflections on Silvina Ocampo

Summary

Silvina silent silhouette. Distracted you cross your city, always Buenos Aires. You know it from dreams, you imagine it in all your waking hours and in all your nightfalls. From its domes, its enormous avenues tapestried with autumn leaves and stories. You write and you dream, you dream and write as if from your hands stories flowed. Everything in you Silvina reminds me of a time without time or maybe the time of magic encrusted with sequins of mystery.

I hold your words in my hands, I caress them and enter. I enter your spell, into the unfolding of your days wild with stories. More than anything I lose myself in your city as if it were the most exquisite labyrinth of your desires. But suddenly, I know that that city is an open book where your readers accompany you. Do you want to play with us Silvina or do you want to play at imagining bewilderment? Moments where the magic blends with illusion, where your words mix with other words, the invisible, the imagined, those that play with the unsaid of the said.

Buenos Aires is your city and that of Bioy and of Borges but as with everything yours is more than a city. It is a labyrinth of unlimited spaces for the coming of sleep and wakefulness, of fantasy and reality. You appear in it as if everything were someone's story and where spaces are borders; where the imagination and the strangeness of reality wander together; where the beginning of the story is inverted with its ending; where awe and discomfort are united in a single voice.

Silvina, your writing always recognizes only itself and therein lies the power we find in it. Its autonomy, its inexorable beauty, its rain of images and its poetry. I always felt that your words were rain. Rain that illuminates us, that came to us from the space of mystery that has always been your literature. Better than saying that you belong to the group that practices the art of fantastic literature, I only know that you are a maker of words. That you allow the rain to fall at last on your eyelids and when you set out to write you enter beyond the space of magic.