Siesta in the Cedar Tree
Witch Hazel, 86% distilled water and a woman running with two branches in hand, a shapely woman against a stormy yellow background. Looking at the label, Elena dampened a cotton pad with Humphrey’s Maravilla Lotion for those ribbons of blood wrapped around each knee. Needing the pain to be able to cry, she had fallen on purpose. Swinging higher and harder to reach the highest branches, then dragging her feet to stop abruptly, she had finally succeeded in falling. Nobody heard her in that house of sleeping shutters at siesta hour. She cried, her face against the ground, her mouth filling with pebbles and fallen tears — any tear that wasn’t shared seemed wasted, lost like a forgotten penance… She came crashing down so that someone would feel her suffering as she kneeled, bearing her knees like two wounded little hearts.
Her best friends were the gardener’s daughters, skinny barefoot twins named Cecilia and Ester. They lived in a modest house swathed in mallow and honeysuckle vines, surrounded by small flowerbeds.
One day she heard the chauffeur say, “Cecilia has tuberculosis. That makes three dying of the same disease in that house.” Quickly she ran to tell her nanny, then her sister: I wonder what sensuality lay dormant in that ivory-colored word. “Don’t get too close, just in case,” they told her and added softly, “Be careful if she coughs.” The word changed color, turned black — the color of a horrible, fatal secret.
The next day a hollow-eyed Cecilia came over to play. Only then did Elena notice her coughing every five minutes: each time it felt like the world split in two to swallow her whole. “Don’t get too close,” she heard them say in every room, “and don’t drink water from the same glass.” But she avidly drank water from the same glass.
When Cecilia left at five that afternoon, walking alone through the woods, Elena ran to her mother’s room and said, “Cecilia has tuberculosis.” Suddenly a fence sprang up around her, and once the news reached her mother’s ears, she was trapped.
From that day on she lived hidden behind closed doors. She would listen to voices grow, fade and vanish into other rooms: “It’s dangerous,” they’d say, “Cecilia won’t be coming to this house anymore.” That’s how they indirectly, bit by bit, kept her from Cecilia, from behind closed doors. The summer days passed with the heaviness of a soft, sweaty hand, with the hum of mosquitoes as slight as silver pins. At siesta hour she would watch the sleeping garden through the slits in the shutters. The cicadas sang starry songs that echoed in her ears like the red stains that soaked her vision after she stared at the sun too long. She watched Cecilia enter through the garden gate, gathering acorns: they resembled tiny pipes which, pretending to smoke, they used to pass back and forth like men sipping mate. She felt that Cecilia was gathering them for her, those smooth green acorns that concealed an almond-white flesh. After looking steadily up at the shutters, willing them to be glass you could see through, she’d run toward the door and ring the bell. Someone would answer the door and say words Elena couldn’t hear. They’d give her sweets or toys before shutting the door, telling her that Elena wasn’t home, that Elena had a headache or a cold. But each day she would return, gather acorns, and stare up at the closed shutters behind which her friend’s eyes peeked out. Until the day she never came back.
Elena was behind the shutters at siesta hour. The gardener was dressed in black. Now Elena ran from secrets spoken behind closed doors. She ran through the halls, screaming loudly so as not to hear secrets, singing loudly, banging chairs and tables in every room she entered. But nothing mattered. Beyond the clatter of tables and chairs, beyond her songs and screams, Cecilia had died. Cecilia had caught a cold running barefoot along the river’s edge two weeks before and had died.
Elena saved the glass from which they drank the forbidden water.
A few days later Micaela, the nanny, snuck her over to visit the gardener’s house. Elena tried to recreate her unhappiest expression, but she was too nervous to feel sadness as she tried in vain to reach her previous state of suffering. When they arrived, the family’s conversation, punctuated by laughter, was all about embroidered tablecloths, knit scarves, weddings, and the best way to earn a living. It was as if nothing had happened in that house. Micaela listened sternly, as if someone were playing a trick on her. The visit could not end like this: she had come to take pity on the family. She tried to slip in a sad word like a child slips into a game of jump rope, and at last she did. She asked if they saved any portraits of the deceased. Until then the entire family was acting as if Cecilia would walk through the door at any moment, coming home from the market, the river, or one of the neighboring estates. Chaos erupted inside the wardrobes and drawers in search of photographs as if they were medications. During a stretch of silence Elena heard footsteps — Cecilia’s bare feet. No, there was no portrait except the photograph on the girl’s identification card. A dark cloud hovered over the house. Her mother brought out the photograph, already fading: only the outline of her mouth was clear. Ester was all that remained of her. They had been born together but looked nothing alike. Ester laughed in her chair. “Go on, wash your face,” her mother yelled, before returning urgently to the matter of the tablecloths… When they said goodbye, her mother wiped Elena’s eyes. Micaela inspected her face for tears, then opened the small door and stood motionless on the porch, her hands crossed over her gray apron, smiling.
Witch Hazel, 86% distilled water and the woman running on the cardboard box, crazed. Elena stood up and peered through the shutters. The gardener dressed in black was laughing. No one knew that Cecilia had died. And who was to say, if she waited at the window long enough, that one day she wouldn’t reappear, gathering acorns. Elena would run down with a spoon and a bottle of cough syrup, and they would keep running until they reached the cedar tree where they lived from then on, amid the branches, in a cave of their own making, at siesta hour.
* * * * *
“Siesta in the Cedar Tree” is a selection from Forgotten Journey, appearing here with the permission of the publisher, City Lights Books. Published in October 2019 and translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, Forgotten Journey was Silvina Ocampo’s first book, published in Argentina in 1937. City Lights is also simultaneously publishing Ocampo’s The Promise, translated by Ms. Levine and Jessica Powell, a work of fiction first published posthumously in 2011.