Silvina was part of a magical circle whose nucleus was formed by Jorge Luis Borges and, among others, the younger man who would become her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Each member of this circle created his or her own works, and also worked in collaboration. While each writer had his or her own style, as a group, known as the Sur group—around the important journal Sur founded by Silvina’s eldest sister Victoria in consultation with the New York writer Waldo Frank—they shaped a literary cultural identity and a new literary genre. In their collaborative work, the trio of Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares became a quartet with the creation of yet another writerly persona (or personae). For example, Bioy and Silvina (married in 1940; he was eleven years younger) wrote with four hands a detective thriller spoof, literally Those Who Love, Hate. In 1940, Borges, Bioy and Silvina published a famous anthology of Fantastic Literature, and when Bioy and Borges wrote together, the writer they created had various pseudonyms (taken from the names of their ancestors) like “Bustos Domecq” or “Benito Suarez Lynch.” Silvina contributed to those literary ventures and inventions as well, but she didn’t sign on as an official contributor, perhaps because her collaboration was exclusively oral.

For many years, Victoria was the only famous Ocampo sister, a celebrity in the intellectual circle coalescing in the 1930s and 40s, known as much for her elegant beauty as for her intelligence. Among the illuminati whose friendship she cultivated were José Ortega y Gasset, Virginia Woolf, Paul Valéry, Lawrence of Arabia, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, and Rabindranath Tagore; she had passionate affairs with a number of distinguished writers (including Roger Caillois, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle who, unlike Victoria and most of those close to her, was pro-Axis and committed suicide at the end of WW II); she commissioned Borges to translate Woolf’s Orlando and other works (we readers in Spanish have read that version for generations, and are familiar with the legend that Borges crafted it with his mother, another four-handed duet). In addition to being an editor in chief and a cultural entrepreneur, Victoria was a self-styled patroness, and her generosity was legendary, as when, for example, Tagore visited Buenos Aires in 1924, and Victoria sold a diamond tiara to put him up in a luxury hotel for two months.

In contrast with her sister’s flamboyant life, Silvina wanted to go unnoticed, to be invisible. She believed she was ugly and refused to go to parties most of the time, saying “where would I be going with a face like this?” She would also claim “I am the etcetera of the family,” “I do not like to socialize, I prefer intimacy.” According to Mariana Enriquez (a member of the Ocampo family and author of Silvina’s biography, The Kid Sister) “she preferred dim, shadowy places, especially in her damp apartment in the Recoleta Quarter.”

But Silvina was no hermit. She was a seductive woman who enjoyed the company of her male friends (great writers, of course), though her intimate world was very different from her older sister’s. While Victoria wrote her memoirs in several volumes, Silvina shied away from the public eye, and perhaps nothing damaged Silvina’s prestige more than the first review of her first book, written by Victoria, in which the latter defines her stories as “autobiographical” and classes her narratives as awkward (totally not true, I must add, because Silvina’s first book, this book, is masterful). The fact is that the book written by the youngest Ocampo sister, which you the reader now hold in your hands, has nothing to do with “memoirs”: the author is not telling us the story of her life here, although, like all writers, she has pillaged the trunk filled with her memories.