Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed.
Not to read him is a serious invisible disease
which, in time, can have terrible consequences.
Something similar to a man who has never tasted
peaches, he would quietly become sadder, noticeably paler, and probably, little by little, he would lose all his hair.
PABLO NERUDA
IT WAS 1963. We were fifteen years old and in the third year of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, that vast, mausoleum-like building, which had, for over a century, bred politicians and intellectuals for the consumption of the state. Here we studied Argentinian history and Spanish, Latin and chemistry, the geography of Asia through long lists of rivers, lakes and mountains, and something called Hygiene, which included bits of anatomy and rudimentary sexual education. For us, it was the Age of Discovery: socialism, metaphysics, the arts of bribery and counterfeiting, friendship, surrealism, Ezra Pound, horror movies, the Beatles and sex. Under the influence of a Borges story that suggested that reality was a fiction, we went around the stores close to the school asking whether they sold fiulsos (a word we had just made up) and to our immense delight were told at one old haberdasher’s that they didn’t have any right now but would be receiving some soon. It was in this welcoming spirit that one afternoon we discovered Cortázar.
One of us had found, in the bookstore across the street from school, a small volume called Bestiario. It was square, the size of a shirt pocket, and the cover showed a solarized black-and-white photograph of a woman or a cat. We took turns reading the stories: a house inhabited by an elderly couple, brother and sister, is gradually taken over by unnamed invaders; two young people on a bus discover a conspiracy of passengers carrying bunches of flowers; a live tiger roams an otherwise ordinary Buenos Aires household. What these stories meant, why they were written, what allegorical or satirical meanings might have been intended, we didn’t know and we didn’t care; their humour corresponded exactly to our mood: absurd, irreverent, nostalgic for something that hadn’t yet happened.
I was going up in the elevator and just between the first and second floors I felt I was going to vomit up a little rabbit. I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.
We became Cortázar followers. We read the stories in End of Game, The Secret Weapons, All Fires the Fire. We understood exactly what he meant when he spoke of the dangers of walking an unmentionable creature through the city, of attending a play and finding ourselves suddenly on the stage, of being transported from an innocent operating table to the sacrificial altar of an ancient Aztec priest. These nightmares made sense to us; we didn’t know then that they were also describing something like the soul of the times.
Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914, of Argentinian parents, and was brought up and educated in Buenos Aires. In his early twenties, working as a teacher in the provinces, he started writing his first short stories. “House Taken Over,” one of the masterpieces of fantastic literature, was published by an admiring Jorge Luis Borges in 1948 in a small municipal magazine. In 1951, during Perón’s dictatorship—but explicitly not for political reasons—he moved to Paris where he lived for the rest of his life, preserving in his storytelling (an exile’s privilege) a Buenos Aires that no longer existed.
So much for the biography.
When I met him, he was already a celebrated writer, the playful storyteller who shared the logic of Lewis Carroll and a surrealist humour. But he was also what the French call un écrivain engagé, one of the “fellow travellers” sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. In certain writers (the Mexican Juan Rulfo, the Argentinian Rodolfo Walsh) both qualities were inextricably one. Not so in the case of Cortázar.
In 1968, just after the May Revolution, during which the French students had taken over the city, I arrived in Paris and, with an introduction from the poet Alejandra Pizarnik, went to see him. The man I met was a baby-faced giant (he was almost two metres tall), immensely affable and with a grim sense of humour. Cortázar offered to guide me through the city. He showed me the archway under which Pierre Curie had been struck dead by a carriage and where Marie Curie had picked up the scattered bits of his precious brain; he took me to the Place Dauphine, the triangular opening at the tip of the Ile de la Cité, which Aragon called “the sex of Paris”; he pointed out Picasso’s bust of Apollinaire across from the Café Bonaparte; he suggested I take his picture in front of his favourite May ‘68 graffiti: “L’imagination au pouvoir,” “Imagination to Power.”
Five years before our meeting, in 1963, he had published Hopscotch, the novel through which, Mario Vargas Llosa declared, Latin American writers “learned that literature was an inspired way of enjoying ourselves, that it was possible to explore the secrets of the world and of language while having a great time and that, while playing, one could explore mysterious levels of life hidden to our rational mind, to our logical intelligence, chasms of experience into which no one can look without serious risks, such as madness or death.” As most readers now know (even those who have never read the novel) Hopscotch gives us explicit permission to go through the story following whatever sequence of chapters we choose; Cortázar suggests one sequence (not the one in which the book is arranged) as if to imply that by once ignoring the hierarchy of chapters imposed by the novelist, the reader makes all other combinations possible. A precursor of Cortázar’s game was Museum of the Eternal Novel by Borges’s mentor, Macedonio Fernández, which offers the reader a number of forewords and first chapters, and no ending. “My readers,” Fernández had declared, “are the readers of beginnings—that is to say, the perfect readers.” Another precursor might have been Borges’s story, “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain,” in which the reader is invited to follow not a random sequence of chapters but a series of novels, each of which chooses a different possibility stemming from the same plot. In each of these cases, what matters is the reader’s illusion of intellectual freedom (which Laurence Sterne, the master of them all, had proposed in Tristam Shandy). The computer games of hypertext continue and enhance this illusion.
But while Cortázar was pursuing these literary games, he was also attempting to respond to the political struggles in Latin America. Cuba’s Revolution had seemed a promise to most artists and intellectuals, and Cortázar—in spite of the warnings from Cubans exiled in Paris—gave Castro his support. For Cortázar, voluntarily distanced from the place he still called home, an artistic response didn’t seem enough; a political response was required, a prise de position, a badge of allegiance. Rather than write the fantastic tales for which he had become famous, he attempted a more realistic, even documentary form of writing—and failed. Those accusatory stories and his novel A Manual for Manuel founder in spite of (or because of) these good intentions. Cortázar himself was well aware of the dangers of a literature written from a sense of duty. Speaking in 1962 to a Cuban audience in Havana, he said that he fervently believed in the future of Cuba’s literature.
But this literature will not have been written through obligation, following the slogans of the day. Its themes will be born only when their time has come, when the writer feels the need to fashion them into stories or novels, poems or plays. Its themes will then carry a deep and true-ringing message because they won’t have been chosen for didactic or proselytizing reasons; they will have been chosen because an irresistible force will have struck the writer who, calling on all the resources of his art and craft, without sacrificing anything to anyone, will transmit this force to the reader, in the manner in which all essential things are transmitted: from blood to blood, hand to hand, human being to human being.
Then, all of a sudden, in the late seventies, Cortázar, still faithful to his old political beliefs but disillusioned with the possibility of rendering these in literary terms, “without sacrificing anything to anyone,” returned to his fantastic writing in his final book, Unreasonable Hours. Magically, a number of these stories—“Tara,” “The School at Night,” above all the masterful “Nightmare”—turned out to be not only brilliant examples of Cortázar at his fantastic best, but also among the most powerful political stories written in Spanish in those years—years especially noted for the literature of outrage sparked by the military dictatorships throughout Latin America. In “Tara,” a group of guerrilleros has sought refuge from the military in a poor, faraway village, and their leader finds in the word games he likes to play the revelation that will allow him, before his death, to understand the evil he has been fighting. “The School at Night” follows the venerable tradition of a hero’s cautionary descent to the underworld, where, among the horrors, he is given to see the dreadful times to come. “Nightmare,” perhaps the last story Cortázar wrote, is in many ways a companion piece to “House Taken Over,” only that here the invading presence is in the mind of a comatose woman while the outsiders—her family—can only witness the invasion from the wings. The moment of understanding overlaps with that of final destruction, when the unconscious woman’s vision coincides with an assault from the real world. Anyone familiar with the report on Argentina’s “disappeared” (published under the title Nunca Más) will understand exactly the overlapping of the two atrocious ends.
What will Cortázar be remembered for? I venture to suggest that, like one of his own characters, he will undergo a metamorphosis. The common reality that attached itself to him like a second skin—the political struggles, the difficult affairs of the heart, the messy business of literature with its passion for novelty and gossip—will quietly fade and what will remain is the shining teller of uncanny tales, tales that hold a delicate balance between the unspeakable and that which must be told, between the daily horrors of which we appear to be capable and the magical events with which we are gifted every night in the labyrinthine recesses of the mind.