An Excerpt from The Promise SILVINA OCAMPO I''m such an ignoramus. How could I publish this text! What publisher would accept it? I think it would be impossible, unless a miracle happens. I believe in miracles. "I love you and promise to be good," I used to tell her, to gain her sympathy when I was a child and for a long time afterwards whenever I''d ask her for a favor, until I learned she was famous for being an "arbiter of the impossible." There are people who don''t understand that you speak to a saint as you would to anybody. If they''d known all my prayers they would have said they were sacrilegious and that I am not a devout believer in Saint Rita. The statues or statuettes usually depict this saint holding a mysterious wooden book in her hand, which she rests against her heart. I never forgot the detail of this pose when I made her the promise that, if I were saved, I would write this book and finish it by the time my next birthday came around.

That date is almost a year away. I''ve begun to feel anxious. I thought it would be a big sacrifice to keep my promise. To make this dictionary of memories that are at times shameful, even humiliating, would mean giving over my intimacy to anyone. (Perhaps that anxiety was unfounded.) I don''t have a life of my own; I only have feelings. My experiences were of no importance, neither throughout my life, nor even on the threshold of death, but rather the lives of others would become mine. Copying these pages on the typewriter, as I don''t have the money to pay a typist to make the copies, would be a thankless task (neither do I have altruistic women friends who know how to type).

Presenting the manuscript to editors, to any publisher in the world who might refuse to publish the book, so that I would have to pay for it inevitably with the sale of objects I value or with some menial work, the only work of which I''d be capable, would mean sacrificing my sense of pride. How distant are those happy days when I would eat the chocolates in the Keystone Cop wrappings or the chewy white ones with my little nephews in Palermo, swinging on the hammocks, or sliding down the slide. Those times when I felt unhappy, now seem to me so joyful, when my nephews would get their hands so filthy playing in the dirt, that when we''d go back home to my sister''s house, instead of taking a bath or going to the movies, I would have to clean their nails with Carpincho saddle soap as if they had been in the Police Department Headquarters after leaving fateful fingerprints. I, who always considered it useless to write a book, find myself committed to doing this today in order to keep a sacred promise to myself. Three months ago, I boarded the Anacreonte bound for Capetown, to visit the less tedious side of my family: a consul and his wife, cousins who always cared for me. Everything we want too much turns out badly, or never happens at all. I got sick and had to return as soon as I arrived, because of an accident I had on the trip over there. I fell into the ocean.

I slipped on the deck where they store the lifeboats when I leaned over the handrail to catch a brooch that hung from my scarf and had fallen off. How? I don''t know. Nobody saw me fall. Maybe I fainted. I came to in the water dazed by the blow. I couldn''t even remember my name. The ship was calmly moving away. I shouted.

Nobody heard me. The ship seemed more immense than the sea. Fortunately I''m a good swimmer, though my form is quite deficient. After the first shock of cold and fear had passed I glided slowly through the water. The heat, the noonday light helped me along. I almost forgot my fearful predicament because I love sports and I tried all the styles of strokes. At the same time I thought of the dangers the water could inflict upon me: sharks, sea serpents, jellyfish, waterspouts. The ebb and flow of the waves calmed me down.

I swam or floated on my back eight straight hours, waiting for the ship to return to pick me up. I sometimes wonder how I managed to nurture that hope, and honestly I don''t know. At first I felt so much fear I couldn''t think, then thoughts came to my mind haphazardly: I thought of schoolteachers, noodles, movies, prices, theater productions, the names of writers, titles of books, buildings, gardens, a cat, an unhappy love affair, a chair, a flower whose name I couldn''t remember, a perfume, a toothpaste, etc. Memory: how you made me suffer! I suspected that I was about to die or that I had already died in my memory''s confusion. Then I noticed, upon feeling a sharp burning in my eyes caused by the salt water, that I was alive and far from dying since those who are drowning, it is known, are happy and I was not. After getting undressed, or being undressed by the sea in the way the sea undresses people as if with a lover''s hands, there came a moment when sleep or the craving to sleep took hold of me. In order not to sleep, I imposed an order on my thoughts, a kind of mental itinerary I now recommend to prisoners or patients who cannot move--or the desperate on the verge of suicide--to follow. I began my itinerary of memories with names and even biographical descriptions, down to the last detail, of people I had known in my life.

Naturally, they didn''t emerge in my memory in chronological order or in the pecking order of my feelings for them, but rather appeared in a whimsical way--the last were the first, and the first were the last, as if my mind could not obey the dictates of my heart. In my memory some people appeared without a name, others were ageless, others outside of the time I knew them, others without the certainty that they were real persons and not ghosts or inventions of my imagination. I didn''t recall the eyes of some of them, the hands of others, and in the case of others their hair, their height, their voice. Like Scheherazade to King Shahryar, in a way I told stories to death so that it would spare my life and my images, stories that seemed never to end. I often laugh thinking of that illusory order I suggested to myself and that seemed so severe when I was actually putting it into practice. Sometimes I was surprised by the vivid presence of what I was thinking, formulated in a single phrase: it was like one of those vignettes inserted at the end of a chapter of a book or heading the most important pages. Naturally, the order is respected in a different way when it''s only in the mind rather than on the page when it is written down. As far as possible I will try to reconstruct in these pages the order or disorder that I constructed with such difficulty in my mind, from the moment in which I found in the waters, as if through a glass window, a sea turtle resembling the tailor Aldo Bindo, which made me recall, through a whimsical association of ideas, Marina Dongui (behind the window of a fruit store) who, like him, had a beauty mark on her left cheek.

I began to enumerate and to describe the following persons: Marina Dongui Marina Dongui, the fruitseller, was the first to appear involuntarily before me in my memory. Blonde, pale-skinned and jittery she''d come to the door of the fruit shop whenever I''d pass by with my brother and wink at him. Her breasts were like certain fruits overflowing her neckline, and my brother would pause to look at her, but what am I saying: not at her but rather at her breasts, and not at the navel oranges, which were very expensive. "Señorita Marina, how much are the oranges?" my brother would ask. "The price is right here," she''d say, indicating the label with a plump hand and, picking up an orange, she''d display it with a caress and an indecent smile certainly meant to provoke my brother, who''s a handsome lout. Beneath her blue skirt you could make out the mark on her thighs where her girdle squeezed too tightly. The skin on her bare legs was very smooth and white, turning to a splotchy red damask down near her shoes, which were always black with spiked heels. "Señorita Marina, give me half a dozen oranges.

" "Why oranges, when they''re our least favorite fruit?" I''d protest, feeling the sting of jealousy that pitiful Marina provoked in me. The humiliation of jealousy is not being able to choose the object that arouses it. My brother Mingo would approach the counter without listening to me and there, a vein protruding on his forehead that appeared only when he was worked up, he''d corner her against the crates while she was tallying the total on the paper--which she''d then use to wrap the oranges--and take advantage of the occasion to feel her up. It was a fruit relationship, perhaps symbolizing sex. But I''m getting away from the task I''ve set myself, that is, to describe people and not situations or relationships. I''ve forgotten my brother''s face; I can''t even remember the color of his eyes, striped blue and green like glass marbles. Sometimes, loving too much blinds the memory. But whom did I love? Aldo Bindo Aldo Bindo was short, fat and pale.

He spent his Sundays horseback riding. His glasses shone on his face like a shop window; he had a tuft of curly blond hair and a tuft of straight white hair on his elongated head. He was ageless. With a measuring tape draped like a decoration around his shoulders, he''d come running out of the back room of the tailor shop when he was told that I was waiting for him. I''d be wearing the tailored suit I''d already put on, and he''d look at me in the mirror, covered in pins, kneeling at my feet. Often he''d take my measurements all over again as though he didn''t know them. With a pencil that was down to the size of a fingernail, he would note the measurements on a piece of brown wrapping paper he always had at the ready on some chair. As he took my chest measurements, he would touch with satisfact.