Women and Power in Argentine Literature: Stories, Interviews, and Critical Essays

1. Elvira Orph

Elvira Orphée has dark, wide eyes that are intense and penetrating. Her gaze projects intelligence and passion. When she speaks, her soft voice seems to be sharing a mysterious secret intended only for the listener, who feels privileged to have her attention. When outraged or delighted, her voice transforms into a forceful torrent of emotionality. She is a woman of few, but exact, words. Every utterance is measured and precise. Elvira Orphée THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Elvira Orphée | The Author and Her Work Elvira Orphée was born in 1922 in the city of Tucumán, the capital of the northern province of Tucumán, known for the beauty of its green hills, lush countryside, and hot weather. Her father was a scientist of Greek origin whose family had immigrated from France to Argentina. Her mother was a devout Catholic whom she remembers as a disciplinarian with a sense of humor. She considers her roots to be both Greek and Incan, as Tucumán was the southernmost region of the Inca Empire. She credits her fascination for the mystical and metaphysical aspects of life to having grown up in the land of the Incas. Orphée’s mother died when she was fifteen years old, and since she was not particularly close to her father, she moved to Buenos Aires at age sixteen, after finishing high school, to pursue her university studies. Two experiences have marked both her work and her personality: growing up in the provincia, and having been a frail child plagued by illness. For Orphe é, Tucumán was a mysterious and desolate place filled with ghost-like creatures of her imagination that she fashioned as a young child to explain the mysteries of people, places, and events she could not comprehend. Orphée believed that her life in the provincia was filled with imaginative substance but not with events. Nothing happened unless one made it happen. This is why she decided to become a writer; she wanted to create a world for herself that had meaning and substance. Tucumán also marked her because it was there that she began to su¬er from a series of digestive infections and other illnesses that continued for many years. Instead of humbling her, though, Orph ée’s frail health made her angry and rebellious and transformed her into a passionate fighter, whose vision is seen in work that has an incisive understanding of the underdog, the victim who seeks to vindicate herself relentlessly . Her characters are passionate in their search for both power and love, as they struggle to transcend the triviality of their lives and circumstances. When Orphée left the province to seek her degree of Professor of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, her world became much larger than it had been in Tucumán. In 1947 she received a scholarship to study Hispanic literature in Spain, and in 1948 she was granted a French government scholarship for foreign students to study French literature at the Sorbonne . While in Paris, she encountered Miguel Ocampo, whom she had met earlier in Buenos Aires. The two were married soon after. Miguel Ocampo was in Paris studying painting, his life-long passion. A descendent of the famous elvira orphée 21 Argentine Ocampo family, his father was a cousin to Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, two of the most prestigious literary figures of Argentina. Orphée does not credit her literary accomplishments to them, however, as she claims they only expressed interest in the work of internationally acclaimed writers, and she was young and just beginning to write at the time she came into the family. Nevertheless, she has fascinating memories of her friendship with Victoria Ocampo, who encouraged her in her literary career. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Orphée lived in Buenos Aires. This was the time of Juan Domingo Perón. Orphée belonged to a social sector that was persecuted by Perón; she was a writer and intellectual and a member of the land-owning Ocampo family, whose properties were threatened with expropriation by Perón’s government. In her novels La última conquista de El Ángel (El Angel’s Last Conquest) and Uno (One), Orphée describes the atmosphere of repression found in Argentina during Perón’s regime and also foreshadows the repressive conditions experienced during the military dictatorships of the 1970s...