Love and Gaby

Gaby y el amor

Salvadora Medina Onrubia

In the twenty-five years of Gaby’s life, only one minute had had the profundity of all the hours that form a destiny. In Gaby’s twenty-five years of life, only one minute …

And to be able to arrive at that minute, I have to tell her whole story.
Her story?... It’s really an unimportant story; there’s nothing in it that could act as a cliché for some tormented modern psychologist.
The heroines in all the magazine novellas are just like Gaby. Or we find them in the theatre, as the cheesy, mediocre heroines of earnest and weepy dramas.
In her life, she simply exists. She walks down Florida Avenue, goes to the stores, to the flower stands. She was educated by nuns; she knows how to embroider and play the piano. Just now she’s cut her long hair.
Among all of the Gabys out there, the one in my story is without a doubt the most beautiful. Golden blonde hair, blonde, so blonde, warm and soft, fluffed up like tangled silk.

Silence and Darkness

Silencio y oscuridad

Silvina Innocencia Ocampo

Luminous letters on the front of the building announced: “SILENCE AND DARKNESS.” The sign demanded attention. Those older than fifty were not allowed to enter; the spectacle could bring on depression or a heart attack. Those younger than fourteen weren’t allowed either, for they could throw noisemakers, cause a ruckus and bother the audience. In the fresh, celestial theatre, seated on cushioned seats, spectators closed their eyes according to the instructions handed out at the theatre’s entrance; later – always according to the instructions – so that the shock wasn’t too great upon opening their eyes, they leaned their heads back to contemplate what they hadn’t seen in a long time: absolute darkness; and to hear what they also hadn’t heard in a long time: total silence.

There are different gradations of silence just as there are different gradations of darkness. Everything was calculated so as to avoid startling the public too much. There had been suicides before. At first, one could hear the infinitesimal singing of crickets, which gradually diminished until the ear got used to it, and then it would surge once again from silence’s terrifying depths. Then, the subtlest whisper of leaves could be heard, rising and falling until arriving at the chromatic scales of wind. After that, one could hear the whisper of a silk skirt, and finally, before arriving to the abyss of the silence, the murmur of pins falling on a tile floor. The silence and darkness technicians had managed to invent noises analogous to the silence in order to arrive, gradually, at silence. A light rain of broken glass over cotton served these ends for a time, but without satisfactory results; the far-off crumpling of silk paper seemed better but wasn’t quite right either; sometimes the first inventions are the best ones.

At the theatre’s entrance, colored markings on enormous maps of the world showed the sites where silence could best be heard, and the years in which it was distorted, according to statistics. Other maps indicated the places where one could obtain the most complete darkness, with important historical dates up to its extinction.

Many people didn’t want to see the spectacle, as important and fashionable as it was. Some said that it was immoral to spend so much money in order to see nothing; others said that it didn’t make sense to readjust to what they’d lost so long ago; others, the stupidest of them all, exclaimed, “Let’s return to the age of cinema.”

But Clinamen wanted to go to the theatre of darkness and silence. She wanted to go with her boyfriend to find out whether she really loved him. “The world has become aggressive for lovers,” she exclaimed, dressed in a miniskirt. Light passed through the doors, sounds came from various distances.

“Only in the ancient darkness and silence will I know to tell you whether I love you,” Clinamen said to her boyfriend. But Clinamen’s boyfriend knew that everything his girlfriend did she did out of timidity. He didn’t take her to the theatre of silence and darkness, and they never found out that they did love one another.

The House of Embroiderers

La casa de bordados
Salvadora Medina Onrubia


It’s a small shop decorated with dark papers. Dark wood, blue curtains, two or three cushions make it comfortable for the women who prefer to do their shopping in this discreet and almost elegant environment. The old Jewish widow dressed in black, who is the owner there, understands her business well.


It also sells useful work items, lace, silk flowers, stockings, gloves. She has a salesgirl to help her. She’s an insignificant girl, neither ugly, nor pretty, without the freshness of youth, and without precise forms beneath her simple black salesgirl’s uniform.


Obligated to be in that dark room all day, to always smile, to make herself seem happy in order to squeeze one more cent from clients under the watchful stare of the Jewish owner, her personality is a blur.


In the free moments when there are no people in the shop, she sews or knits. She raises a corner of the curtain and feels the light’s rays. She always works with her head leaning on one shoulder. Her pulled-back silky brown hair reveals her pale, wide forehead and the imperceptible Mona Lisa smile on her lips.


She bears an extraordinarily close resemblance to La Gioconda.


I am sure her boyfriend tells her this all the time and that it’s because of this that he’s in love with her.


Her boyfriend must be a poet. Or painter. He wears a wide hat, a black scarf and his hair in a mane. He’s very tall, very thin, has feverish eyes and the hands of a man. Every afternoon he waits for her on the corner, or leans against a tree almost in front of my house. When she comes out, they sink arm-in-arm into the tree-lined street.


I know that the modesty of her classic smile looks with sadness at the stately garden, the flowery castle, the sumptuous cars, the suits and the hats of the yard that faces her. That she thinks about the tragic poverty of her bohemian boyfriend …
Life: You are blind. Blind as the blindfolded child. And crazy. More crazy than Aeschylus the Immortal. And you distribute your gifts accordingly.


Bibí says it …how very much she’d like to sing and dance, raising her paws above the scaffold and above the orchestras of the theaters filled with lights and people applauding her … And Gloria? Gloria Brena who has so much talent, so much talent. And me? How many things you gave me that I didn’t want, that I didn’t need.


Among them, my multi-faced soul that likes everything and holds onto nothing; the curse that all, all of my desires become living things in my hands.


Life: I’ve only wanted a simple and modest soul, a small, dark, laborious life, a sad and thoughtful smile, a poor, very poor, bohemian boyfriend who loves me very much … Who recites feverish verses by the light of the stars; verses that I don’t understand …


Life, among so many things, so many things that you gave me, humility never came.