Original subtitles

THREE FABLES ABOUT VILLA OCAMPO

Stories spring up of their own will.

They reach our imagination, or our memory, which is the same thing.

The starting point is always ambiguous.

Both vague and precise.

Unique and repeated.

For example: A man entering a house.

A man spellbound by the house he has just stepped in.

A man spellbound by the house he has just stepped in.

We are reminded of Bioy Casares "The Invention of Morel".

A fugitive is shown an island lost on the map.

A forsaken island which can be either his salvation or his doom.

Less defiant than resigned, the fugitive decides to reach it.

We know what follows: He will discover the same cyclical visitors,

an immortality machine and a woman of ritualistic beauty, named Faustine.

Before all that, however, he will have discovered a house.

A house which, oddly enough, he calls a museum.

As an exercise of the mind, let us imagine a similar fugitive,

here, in the slopes of San Isidro.

A fugitive who, like the one described by Bioy,

is the victim of a shipwreck who manages to reach firm land

and find his way to an impressive building, over a hundred years old.

While Bioy's fugitive called the house a "museum",

our imaginary fugitive is uncertain

whether he is in a museum or in a house.

THE FUGITIVE

The place is uninhabited;

but the fugitive feels it could have been abandoned very recently.

Or rather: The place expects someone who has no intention of coming back.

There is an odd mixture of periods and styles:

wicker chairs next to a sumptuous mahogany table;

great 19th century portraits next to very modern lamps.

The fugitive may not know the names, or the history behind those objects,

but something in such diversity draws his attention.

A piano and many photographs.

Whether he identifies them or not, the faces are famous:

Rubinstein, Nehru, Chaplin,

Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene,

André Malraux, Paul Valéry.

There are dedications and signatures on the photos.

In fact: The signatures are everywhere.

If the fugitive were an addict to the myths surrounding culture,

he could read names in every corner:

Troubetzkoy on a sculpture, Léger and Picasso on rugs,

Louis XVI on a fireplace, Man Ray on a photograph.

Certainly, it would be almost impossible to recognize

names such as Dagnan-Bouveret or Helleu on some of the paintings.

Those portraitists, so much coveted by the River Plate women a century ago,

today deserve just a bare mention in some biography of Proust.

But it's the girl in the portraits that attracts the fugitive's interest:

it's always the same girl.

A hundred years ago this girl was young, an adolescent

born, perhaps, at the same time the house was born.

The fugitive does not fail to notice her face,

at once melancholic and determined...

...Vaguely, the fugitive will succeed in defining what worries him.

He seems to perceive a contradiction in the landscape of the house.

On the one hand the attitude of the one that exposes his taste,

the collection of files on the person he admires,

but at the same time these people seem to have been present.

These are traces of famous people that perhaps

one of the girls in the portraits occasionally knew.

Or maybe it's the scattered and multiple version of a narcissistic family.

People who had lived here and who marked their passage.

Perhaps the house was a museum.

But for some reason the fugitive assumes that

whoever lived there would also have put the same photos

and trophies to live and admire themselves next to them.

Admiring themselves.

Eden Hotel Berlin Mars 81... 30.

Dear daughters.

Last night we've been to watch a movie of Conrad Veidt.

Pretty successful.

I got out excited as always when I see Conrad.

Tonight we've gone to the theater and we've seen him in the flesh.

It's identical.

It's so much more reliable in the movie than at the theatre.

We went back to the hostel for dinner.

And Drieu was telling bullshit about my enthusiasm.

And me telling back some bullshit as well.

And when at the best

Conrad Veidt appears in person

and sits at a table with two German-looking men.

Too bad he sat behind me,

for I could not see him unless I turned around completely.

I would have wanted to talk to him, because I feel I know him.

But there were too many people and Drieu bothered me

I feel frustrated for not having met Conrad.

I shall try to find a way.

He has amazing eyes and a somewhat sinister mouth...

His voice is quite charming and he's a very good actor. He intrigues me.

This afternoon we went out with Walter Gropius, another modern architect;

we saw more houses, more working-class districts, etc.

Gropius in person is far more interesting and nice than Mendelsohn.

But I think Mendelsohn's houses are more valuable,

even though the name has less value.

The fugitive continues to move smoothly through the museum,

or rather, the house.

He will neither find an immortality machine,

Nor a Morel or a Faustine.

The girl in the portraits, though, has definitely fascinated him.

He is thinking about her as he goes through a vestibule,

a hallway, a large dining room;

he is also thinking about her as he goes up the staircase,

which is framed by an improperly-hung rug.

The rug seems to be valuable, probably designed by a famous artist,

that's why it has been hung:

to spare it from its natural destiny of foot marks and cigarette embers.

The fugitive is still thinking of the girl

as he finds an impressive library at the top of the stairs.

There is also a desk, and some letters lying on it.

The signature he sees in one of them

bears the name which may hold the clue:

Victoria Ocampo.

THE FETISHIST

At this point, it may be better to abandon the fugitive,

overcome by the impenetrable library.

Or rather, to transform him, to turn him into somebody else.

Again, the image of the beginning:

a man entering a house.

But now he is hunting a treasure he believes or imagines is hidden inside.

Let's remember the hero of Henry James's The Aspern Papers.

The plot: A literature lover, a fetishist,

moves to Venice to have access to a famous writer's correspondence.

Those papers are inside a house,

and that house is guarded by a hundred-year-old woman.

The fetishist will pay any price

to obtain those papers,

including humiliating himself or seducing the old lady.

What is the story about?

Perhaps it is just a study about a strange obsession,

the passion for letters and manuscripts.

What do we look for?, he wonders.

Maybe the original's fragile and unequivocal evidence:

time's erosion on the material,

the hint of a pulse in the calligraphy,

the words meant for a single recipient.

It is not just the original's value, but also the presumption of intimacy.

Can letters reveal so much of a person?

James's fetishist believed they do.

He believed it too passionately perhaps,

and so he never gets to read them:

the old lady's niece burns them, one by one, in the stove.

"Why should I keep them?", the woman asks herself,

humiliated by the fetishist's refusal of her love.

The Aspern Papers, nobody's papers.

Instead, our fetishist, formerly the fugitive,

could spend long hours in this house.

Let us imagine that this man, suffering from temporary amnesia,

had woken up in this house without knowing how he arrived,

and, at first, ignoring even where he was.

This fetishist would have discovered before long

that this was Victoria Ocampo's house.

He does know that the hanging carpet is Picasso's,

that the music scores have been written by Stravinsky or Ansermet,

that the huge 19th Century portraits were painted by Pridiliano Pueyrredón,

that the sculpture is by the Russian prince Paul Troubezkoy,

that the lamps were designed at the Bauhaus

and the portrait of the lady of the house by the sea is by Pedro Figari.

The fetishist possesses - almost infinitely - the proper names.

Oddly, this stranger is the ideal inhabitant of this house,

an outsider and owner at the same time.

He can, therefore, find the letters Victoria wrote,

and the letters Victoria received.

He can be moved by Borges' calligraphy:

microscopic at first, bigger and erratic as blindness advances.

He can discover inscriptions from surrealists and dadaists,

such as André Breton, Paul Éluard and Tristan Tzara,

and others by Jacques Lacan: young and unknown in the first ones,

famous in the last, stentorian always.

He can spot the volume where Camus kept inscribing

the dates of his successive encounters with Victoria,

a list that closes with a question mark,

thus underlining the uncertainty of a future meeting that never was.

To the eyes of the fetishist the minute sign swells like a river

and conjures up the image of the insurmountable Acheron.

Shortly before, Camus had described the house in his travelling diaries:

"This is a big and pleasant house in the style of "Gone with the Wind".

Great old luxury - I feel like lying down and sleeping till the end of time".

The portraits show Bioy Casares, Borges or Roger Caillois,

but they also bear the signatures of Gisèle Freund or Man Ray.

Names and more names,

it is almost incredible that they all fit in just one house,

in just one life.

Each one of them evokes a destiny both in life and after life.

The fetishist knows that the whims of fame and prestige

have favoured some of them in life and quickly abandoned them after death.

Conversely, to this moment, and as he holds these papers

and volumes in his hands, others continue to be remembered:

Eduardo Mallea, André Malraux,

José Bianco, Indira Gandhi,

Graham Greene, Gabriela Mistral,

Rabindranath Tagore, Walter Gropius,

María Rosa Oliver, Le Corbusier,

Aldous Huxley, Henri Michaux,

Virginia Woolf, Benito Mussolini,

T.S.Eliot, Coco Chanel,

Silvina Ocampo, Hermann Von Keyserling,

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, María Rosa Oliver,

Alfonso Reyes, Charles Chaplin,

Tamara Karsávina, Xul Solar, Ernest Ansermet...

The fetishist finds not only the correspondence, but also the library.

A library can be that of a person,

but this one is almost the library of a whole era and its vicissitudes,

its fleeting trends, its secret treasures.

The fetishist can read the whole library without opening the volumes.

He can survey the spines of books and guess the multiple layers they hold.

The 19th Century books that survived fires and the passage of time,

including her father's engineering books.

"Life of Dominguito", which Sarmiento himself dedicated to Victoria's aunt.

Hilario Ascasubi's "Complete Works", published in Paris in 1872.

Original editions of books by European travellers to the River Plate.

In sum: the whole "liberal" library inherited from parents and grandparents,

with books dating from the 16th to the 19th century.

Then: Victoria's own books.

Children's books in French, annotated by Victoria and Silvina.

Her first and last fellow traveller: Dante,

the inspiration for her first book.

Oscar Wilde, the banned writer,

whose books are hidden by Ramona Aguirre, her mother,

books which also guard among their pages her future husband's love letters.

Fashion, the prestige of Nobel Prize winners,

but also her own friends such as José Bianco,

editor of Sur magazine for more than twenty years,

or her own discoveries, such as Borges, and the translations.

Silvina's books, the most akin and the most secret.

Books with long-meditated inscriptions

or inscriptions as spontaneous as the confession of a crime,

as when Pablo Neruda, with one stroke, puts an end to fifty years of enmity.

Music books, design books, books by structuralists, mathematicians;

biographies and autobiographies, letters.

An itinerary from Ascasubi in France to Caillois as Borges' publisher -

episodes of the same parable.

As he shuffles names, titles and dates in his memory,

the fetishist thinks he is a voice imitator, an unlikely impostor.

Sometimes he remembers, with an almost painful precision,

moments belonging to other lives.

The setting for one of those moments is this house,

one evening towards the end of 1931 or at the beginning of 1932,

when destiny brought two passions together: books and friendship.

A boy of eighteen, an enthusiastic and premature writer,

chats in a corner with a 32-year-old poet and essayist,

already presumed to be a genius.

They had just been introduced at a social gathering

in honor of a foreign intellectual

whose name not even our fetishist seems to have remembered.

Suddenly, the hostess's commanding voice reprimands them:

"Stop being shitty and talk to our guest".

The abrupt confusion caused by the incident

ends up bringing those two shy men together.

On their return trip to Buenos Aires,

Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges sealed their association,

in literature and in life.

THE DETECTIVE

The fetishist is still immersed in the untiring papers:

A Narcissus in strangers' mirrors.

It is time to give him up too.

Or, instead of leaving him behind,

to transform him once more.

To turn him into someone who dislikes papers and the prestige held by a name.

Someone who has discovered, in the overcrowded solitude of the house,

a name and a face,

that is to say, a destiny.

It is then, the third story, the third memory.

A man enters a house.

He is a detective entering the house of a very beautiful woman,

who has just been murdered on her own doorway.

In "Laura", the novel by Vera Caspary which Otto Preminger laboriously

turned into a memorable film,

the detective gradually falls in love with the woman's portrait and memory.

In love with the portraits exuding the mystery of her wordly existence,

perhaps because the threads of fascination

allured him even more than those of crime.

Such subtle necrophilia will end very soon:

in the midst of the detective's dream, Laura comes back:

first, as a ghost and soon after, as a suspect.

She is the suspect of a death that had been her own

and now is just that of an anonymous woman.

But no one will return this time, the house will continue to wait.

Neither will there be anonymity:

the name Victoria Ocampo is inscribed in every corner.

However, the detective will have portraits to contemplate,

and a myriad of stories and testimonies

about the exceptional destiny of this Victoria.

The detective could uncover many odd things about that destiny.

First, that both the house he visits and Victoria were born at the same time,

more than a century ago, in 1890.

Also, that she was the eldest of six sisters and that Silvina, the youngest,

born thirteen years after her, was going to be a unique writer,

someone to whom fame was elusive in life and prodigal today.

He could find out that the engineer Manuel Ocampo and his wife Ramona Aguirre

had met at the funeral of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in 1888.

That is why she would say that, in that house,

Argentine history was discussed as another family affair.

He would know that Mr. Ocampo had built the house for the lazy summer days,

when the family arrived from Buenos Aires in horse-drawn carriages,

after a journey of several hours along the road leading to the river.

Also, that the house would witness something no one had planned,

because it can never be planned, it just happens:

the birth of a bond with literature,

established by both the eldest and the youngest of the sisters.

Our detective will eventually discover that such unforeseen, unexpected drive,

will be a central force in the lives of the Ocampo sisters,

an impulse which emerges as part of a certain education,

but which develops and asserts itself to become the center of one's life.

It then reflects back on such origin and education so as to redefine them,

to redesign them.

What the fetishist had observed in the library,

now the detective tries to find in life.

These girls, educated by French and English governesses,

had to make a real effort to write in Spanish;

their family had not foreseen a literary career, or any artistic

career for them,

they were just destined to become wives.

We were six girls, not like those in children's stories, but pretty ones.

Our education was home-made.

Around that time, no one thought of giving women a different education.

My father (with a certain gift for understanding things) was more aware

of my good qualities than of my defects

(my laziness to do things that demanded an effort).

He said once, in my presence:

"If she had been a boy she would have studied, followed a career."

I thought: "Thanks God I'm not a boy. What a bargain!".

Mademoiselle Bonnemason, the French governess,

would arrive in Villa Ocampo with the one o'clock train.

She never missed it,

although, when the rain was heavy, we hoped she would.

She was never sick either, even if her pupils

used to wish her a mild but prolonged illness.

We would wait for her at the gate. I would then run,

climb up the side of the break and shout to the driver,

who wanted to hault the horses: "Keep going! Keep going!".

The detective will then find out that Victoria,

following the family mandate, will marry someone

only to fall suddenly in love with that someone's cousin

during her own honeymoon in Paris.

She will have an affair with Julián Martínez, her husband's cousin;

it will last until she is forty

and he, who is much older,

understands it is time to disappear from that woman's life.

But the Paris honeymoon in 1913 is a double revelation for Victoria:

her love for Julián Martínez and her love for Stravinsky's music,

the modernity which was always

to accompany her and for which she would fight many a battle.

Somehow, the romantic scandal and the radicalism of the music

seemed to be the two sides of a coin,

and Victoria will parade both provocations throughout Buenos Aires.

Guided by the great conductor Ernest Ansermet

and the Castro brothers, she will succeed in introducing

contemporary music in the Colón against a ferocious resistance.

En 1936, at the Buenos Aires premiere of Perséphone,

with Stravinsky - the composer - conducting, and she herself reciting,

she was to combine several obsessions:

the old childhood dream of being an actress,

the stubbornness to change the Colón's taste and make it match her own,

her eagerness to meet those she admired,

in this case a Russian of genius in perpetual exile.

When he thought I was about to be angry, Stravinsky used to tell me:

"You have a temper. I like that."

And he would laugh in my face.

(In fact, what happens is I have "outbursts".)

I could have replied: "And what about you?"

But I gave him rights that he did not grant me.

There are genius's rights just as there are author's rights.

He was in a position to demand them, I wasn't.

When he disliked something or someone, you could not change his mood.

He became indomitable,

and his buckings could throw the best horseman off.

So I would put up gently with the free expression of his opinions

on whatever his whim chose to take him regarding musicians,

even those musicians I admired.

I would not have tolerated an iota of such criticism by someone else,

someone of a lesser stature. A creative talent, I used to think,

sometimes defends his creation by denying somebody else's.

Although he does not quite understand it, the detective thinks

that Victoria believes romantic and other provocations mingle together,

as if they were all the same thing.

Precisely, to be able to live in Mar del Plata with her lover Julián Martínez,

Victoria commissions a cubic house from a storehouse builder,

as if it were necessary to spark a double outrage in her neighbours.

Soon after that, she will also raise the stakes in Buenos Aires,

by commissioning a rationalist house from Alejandro Bustillo.

Her neighbours also accuse her of ruining the district.

It started with an itch,

a desire to get rid of the clutter I had gathered around me.

I had a hunger for white walls without mouldings, without ornaments,

either outside or inside.

I had not been in Europe for some years and it was only in some magazines

that I could have a glimpse of something matching what I liked.

I got together with a man of good disposition, a storehouse builder;

we drew the plans for a stripped house: a few cubes.

The house was meant to stand on a small piece of land

I had bought in Mar del Plata, in front of the sea.

It was built there, with all her windows

letting in an unbelievable stretch of the Atlantic Ocean.

There was no hint of a skyscraper project in the resort.

It was 1927.

To his amazement, the detective will discover that at the age of forty

this woman resolves to take yet another detour on her course:

she founds a magazine,

probably because the craving born of childhood reading is still alive:

to read more, to achieve her own writing, to lead others to share the same passion,

to meet in the flesh the authors of the pages that changed her life.

One day, around October 1929,

we were taking a walk in Palermo.

The air had the heaviness of a storm;

the smell of the earth and the roses was as thick as fog;

and we walked through that sweetness without really noticing it.

You strongly criticized my passivity,

and I would criticize, with no less violence,

your presumption that I was fit for certain chores.

And then, for the first time, the name of this magazine -

which had no name - was uttered.

When I arrived in Paris, I realized the magazine project had preceded me.

I noticed the fantastic and absurd turn which the scheme,

not yet articulated in my mouth, had taken in other people's lips.

I knew then that such a vulgar caricature

would not yield to my explanations or rectifications,

but only before the magazine itself.

Do you remember my arrival in New York?

Do you remember your frustration when, attracted by skyscrapers and jazz,

I seemed to have forgotten the magazine?

One night, as we were having dinner at Child's, you admonished me.

Your long speech ended like this:

"If your interest in the magazine is so superficial

that anything can take you away from it, then give up your project".

You saw my eyes fill up with tears

(tears that fell on the food on my plate).

I was both annoyed and moved.

Annoyed with my own emotionality and moved by your friendly harshness.

That same night, however, once your bitterness subsided,

you admitted you understood quite well my greediness for New York

and my neglect of everything else.

Who better than you to understand it!

As I embarked in Brooklyn we were both sure the magazine would exist.

I ignore, as I write, whether you know its name already.

It was chosen by phone, across the Ocean.

A whole Atlantic seems to have been needed for this baptism...

We had several names in our heads but we could not reach an agreement.

It was then that I called Ortega in Spain.

Those people are used to baptizing us...

and so, Ortega did not hesitate

and immediately found his favourite among the names on the list:

"SUR" he shouted to me from Madrid.

That's the name I brought back from my phone hunt,

and which we stuck with an arrow on the magazine cover.

The detective will learn about Victoria's other love affairs.

For example, the tragic Frenchman

who defined the Pampa as horizontal vertigo

and who used to feel that he was inhabited by Hitler's soul.

A Frenchman who before attempting suicide for the first time

would write to Victoria about how beautiful his death was,

on a gorgeous afternoon, with his window wide open on Paris.

He did not succeed then and Victoria will receive his lines many years later.

But by that time Pierre Drieu La Rochelle will have achieved his end,

shortly after the first attempt.

Paris, 20th January, 1930.

Dear Ange:

- You cannot imagine with how much pleasure. - or joy- I receive your letters.

This is a life of Franciscan poverty

as far as "courtesies of the heart" is concerned,

as the Beast of the Apocalypse would say.

Drieu? He was here today and the day before yesterday.

As I told you: he is more and more in love with shipwrecks, defeat,

disasters, cataclysms, decay, ruin.

He does not want to see anyone.

When you order me to sing.

It seems that my heart must be bursting with pride.

And I look into your face and tears come to my eyes.

There was the love affair with another Frenchman, much younger than her,

who was stranded in this same house during the war,

the one who discovers Borges and shows him to the world,

who edit, in San lsidro, the issues of a magazine financed by Victoria,

which the allies will drop on the turbulent European soil.

Probably Roger Caillois is better remembered today for those things

than for his prose assembled in so many of those library volumes

which the detective will never touch.

The detective will find out much more about Victoria:

that she dined with Mussolini, and was sent to jail by Perón,

that she fought for the equality of women's rights,

and made a proposition to Eisenstein to film a documentary on the Pampa,

that she attended the Nüremberg trials,

that she anticipated the dimension reached by Lacan and Borges,

and overestimated that of Tagore and Von Keyserling,

that she received decorations from France and England,

that she despised the 1978 Football Cup,

and that she died impoverished and very lonely in 1979,

in the same overcrowded solitude of this house.

All that will be known to the detective,

formerly the fetishist, formerly the fugitive.

He cannot, however, stop thinking that those dates and names

do not solve the mystery of the beautiful girl in the youthful pictures.

Now he envies the portraitists whose names do not mean anything to him:

because they saw her, because she posed for them,

because they created these images which are different from her

but have become the real her for the detective, and now for us too.

A girl who crossed an ocean to have her portrait painted,

who went to France in search of her own image.

She found more than that a hundred years ago.

In a matter of hours she met both Julián Martínez and Stravinsky's music,

love and modernity.

But for us, that girl is unrecoverable.

"When the end draws near, there no longer remain any remembered images;

only words remain".

The phrase sounds familiar to the detective,

who, through professional bias,

has always been suspicious of words.

I have reached the edge of eternity where nothing ever dissipates.

Neither hope, nor happiness,

nor the memory of faces glimpsed through tears.

O soak my glassiness in this ocean.

Immerse yourself into the bosom of your complaints.

And let me finally feel,

this lost caress throughout the whole of winter.