I Believe In The Good Fairy Of Your Native Land: Correspondences between Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo
__________________________ There developed a curious and lasting friendship between two supremely talented people: Gabriela Mistral/ Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (1889-1957) of Chile and Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979) of Argentina. It would be difficult to imagine two writers more dissimilar in background and upbringing, appearance and habit, not to mention literary careers. Yet because of their accomplishments, they shared an anomalous status as celebrities in their own countries and internationally. Despite their differences, they had more than a little in common. Both Mistral and Ocampo lived their adult lives as single women. While their public worlds were principally male, they lived in predominantly female households. They both claimed pride in their Basque heritage, and they took an unorthodox approach to religion. Both were physically imposing women in societies that prized petiteness. In their letters and visits, they shared their love of the open countryside and seashore. Because they led unconventional lives, they were controversial figures, subject to false rumors and mythologies that plagued them all their lives. And to their mutual surprise and delight, they had the same birthday, April seventh, one year apart. This became a touchstone in their letters; no matter where they were living, they sent affectionate messages to one another on that date. Stubborn and nonconforming, both women described themselves as having “violent” dispositions, which Ocampo would express in explosive bursts of temper and Mistral by reciting accusations of real and imagined wrongs. Both women, above all, felt passionately about distinct aspects of their American condition, which they perceived from a transnational, Latin American perspective. They both cared deeply about fostering spiritual unity and moral purpose among fellow Americans in the context of the continent’s truncated modernity. Yet their priorities did not always mesh: Mistral’s emotional defense of indigenous America seemed excessive to Ocampo, and Ocampo’s predilection for European culture struck Mistral as misguided. They also shared a penchant for letter writing.Each cultivated hundreds of correspondents, writing up to a dozen letters a day. Within weeks of their first meeting, Mistral and Ocampo discovered one another as women charged with writing, exploring, and defining the American (read Latin American) condition.That absorption in and engagement with America,expressed throughout their correspondence, arises from the unsettling political, social, and literary events of their era. The letters reveal two women who contributed in many ways to Latin America’s emergence onto the world stage. Here is a very short selection from the final and mature phase of their friendship and mutual affection: ____________________ February 21. 1954 My very dear Gabriela: I’ll draw up the list of books for you right away. But I warn you that the majority of the books that are published in B.A. are translations. Please tell me if they interest you as well. For the time being I’ll send you my translation of The Living Room by Graham Greene. I still don’t have any news about my passport. The worst part is that my petition has gotten no response. I’ve heard that they gave Borges his passport and certificate of good conduct. He hadn’t received them until now. I don’t know by what means he obtained them (he didn’t want to visit the minister of the interior either). But Borges wasn’t in prison for twenty-seven days, as I was. And the twenty-seven days of unjust punishment appear to be a powerful reason for not excusing the evil that one has suffered. I don’t know if I told you in my last letter that I gave up my trip to Turin, where Stravinsky had invited me to do the recitation of “Persé- phone,”as I had done before under his direction in B.A., Rio, and Florence. This sacrifice wasn’t easy. But now it doesn’t matter to me. I won’t say I’m happy, but I do have a clear conscience and the assurance of having done the only thing that my sense of dignity allowed. Many people think that I’m an idiot and no more. Well it seems that few people think twice about going to the minister to ask for a passport if they can’t get it through the police department (which is the usual place). But since I don’t consider myself a criminal or a political conspirator, but rather a person who has kept her freedom of thought, I don’t choose to act (under pressure from the dictatorship) as if I really were a criminal political conspirator. If you want to, or if you can make inquiries as to why they aren’t giving me my passport and certificate of good conduct to travel, it would be good, even if only out of curiosity: just to see what they’re going to invent to justify an attitude that is totally arbitrary, unjust, and infuriating. I see in the newspapers that my old friend, now the French ambassador to Washington and influential ex-minister from the Coopération Intellectuelle (do you remember those days?), is lunching with our ambassador to Washington, the representative of a government that physically and morally tortures innocent people . . . Ainsi va le monde. I no longer believe in the good faith of any politician, any diplomat, or any person tied to monetary interests. Amen! I’m living quite alone. I don’t see María Rosa as I did before (although I’ve invited her to come here, to bathe in the sea, because I know that otherwise she’d have no summer vacation). This is because her blind Communism (disguised as pacifism) gets on my nerves. Since I don’t want to broach political subjects in her presence, and since politics is truly her passion these days, we are inhibited in our conversation. I understand that her mission (pacifism) will be taking her to Europe again soon. The government doesn’t seem to have an eye on her as it does on me. I think that her Communist faith fills her life, which is fortunate in her case. It’s a pity, for those of us who don’t think like her, that that is her faith. I regret that I don’t have a sufficient amount