The Promise by Silvina Ocampo

Author:Silvina Ocampo [Ocampo, Silvina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780872867710
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

RODOLFA, NORAH, AND CEFERINA

Rodolfa, Norah, and Ceferina were women who worked at their sewing machines all day long; some of them were friends of mine.

Rodolfa was chubby and flabby, with a dreamy look in her eyes that could lead anyone down the garden path. Norah was dry, thin, and as angular as a man. Ceferina was tiny. Nobody liked her because she was a gossip.

The music on the radio was deafening in the crowded little dress shop. There were two manikins; some women ran the sewing machines; others, with two or three pins between their lips, pieced garments together with long strands of white thread. I was there when Gabriela came in eating a hunk of bread. You couldn’t tell if she was pulling the pieces off listlessly or ravenously.

“My mother isn’t here?” she asked abruptly.

“What about your boyfriend?” asked a woman, as if she hadn’t heard her. “Your boyfriend Cacho?” and, laughing, she added: “He’s a peach.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Gabriela answered.

“Oh, you’ve already moved on!” said another of the women, laughing raucously.

“Mother isn’t here?” Gabriela persisted.

“No, dear. She’s probably studying.”

“Where?” asked Gabriela in frustration.

The women looked at one another. One of them winked, the other put her hand on her stomach.

“She’s probably shopping,” said the eldest, rolling her eyes.

Gabriela left with me but stayed outside the door to listen. It was one of her habits. For her, the world she listened to and imagined on the other side of doors was the real world. The other was merely a performance. “The things I’ll hear today will be very important, maybe the most important things I’ve ever heard. My mother is a stranger. I have to find out who she is, what she does when she’s not with me. And these dressmaker friends of hers will reveal the secret to me,” poor Gabriela might have been thinking. The women inside continued talking.

“Imagine studying medicine while raising a daughter! When she was a little girl she looked like San Gabriel, she herself said so. She was born March 18th.”

“She wanders about with no supervision.”

“She doesn’t take care of her. Why did she even get married!”

“She makes sacrifices. She works all morning,” the youngest one dared to say. “And Gabriela is a devil.”

“Sacrifices?”

“Yes, even though it doesn’t seem like it,” the youngest one insisted, cutting a strand of thread with her teeth.

“She’s a shameless hussy.”

“She’s nuts. I barely ever talk to her. She has photos of her lover in her purse, and a small revolver.”

“No wonder Orlando jilted her.”

“I don’t want to hear about that guy: what a creep.”

“Apparently, she carries the revolver to defend herself from sexual assaults. I don’t know if it was the husband or the lover who gave it to her.”

Rodolfa, who often defended Irene, put the clothes on the table and left the room. She found Gabriela listening behind the door. She patted her on the head and walked away.

Gabriela crossed the street with me. I’ll rummage through the whole closet. I have to see the photograph, she thought.

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