Valeria Luiselli Reads Julio Cortázar

[Music] This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine. I'm Debra Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear "The Night Face Up" by Julio Cortazar, which was translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn. It appeared in the New Yorker in April of 1967. He came too, abruptly, four or five young men were getting him out from under the cycle. He felt the taste of salt and blood, one knee hurt, and when they hoisted him up he yelled. The story was chosen by Valeria Luiselli, a MacArthur fellow and winner of the Folio Prize among others. She is the author of five books, including the novel "Lost Children Archive." Her new novel, "Beginning Middle End" will be published in July. Hi, Valeria. Hi, Debra. So you had a fair number of ideas for stories you might want to read today, and I'm wondering what made you settle on "The Night Face Up"? Yes, that's a great question. I really wanted to read Shakespeare's memory. Right, and then I, then you told me, "We're gonna take it." Which is strangely not that different in its philosophical content from this one. We can speak about that later. And then when you said it was taken, I went to the archives and looked, and I realized that my very dear friend, Hisham Hatsar, had already done that. And I thought, of course, Hisham, and I heard that episode, and you guys did a beautiful, beautiful job going into that story. But Cortesar, you know, like Borges, and maybe like Rulfum, was the most influential writer for my generation of Latin American writers. I think Borges was maybe our philosophical instructor, and a writer who showed us how philosophy could be rewritten as fiction. And Rulfum showed writers the way, paved the way for time space to be broken up through or by means of sound and dialogue. But Cortesar was our most fundamental, sentimental education. Everyone wanted to fall in love, the way Cortesar's characters fell in love. Everyone wanted to write about everyday objects, like pens and mugs through the gaze of Cortesar. And everyone wrote for a while like Cortesar before they learned how to write, like themselves. And I don't think I would be a writer, had I not read. He was a writer I read first with a kind of elation. And I started reading him when I was 15 or so, and it really shaped the way I saw the world, not only the way I read. So I wanted to go back to some kind of origin when you extended this invitation. And why do you think he had that, or has that appeal for younger writers, or starting out writers? I mean, the reasons are always mysterious, right? I think he did something similar to what Bolaniu did for a later generation, sort of younger generation in mind. I think he just had a kind of gaze that saw the world with a sense of surprise and perplexity that I think really taught others how to see. And that just is paradigm shifting for any young writer. To be able to see things through another writer's very contagious gaze. That is what made Cortassar the kind of writer he was for our generation. And that he was profoundly free as a writer. He really tried different things out and jumped around in different genres, but also within the genres he renewed what they meant and what they were. I mean, his masterpiece, "Hopscotch, Rayaela", which came out in the 1960s, it was a completely novel novel, right? Like, you could jump around, you could read it in one direction or in a different direction and decide how to read it. So yeah, he was, he was, I think, for all those reasons profoundly influential. Yeah. Do you remember when you first read the night face-up? I don't remember the exact moment, but I was a teenager. I must have been around 16 years old. I read it at school the first time. And then I read it again as an older teenager when I was in high school. I was in boarding school in India. And it was really a beautiful place to read in Spanish because we were a small group of Latin American students there. And somehow reading in our own language gave us a very deep sense of rootedness. Within a space it was mostly English speaking, but also all our Spanish's were different. We all came from different places in Latin America. So we sat out together to read, to read out loud, everything that we read for that class. And it was really amongst that group of Latin American students that I think I fell in love with literature for the first time. And Cortez Arras in the middle of that. And absolutely. And we all had copies of "Hopscotch". All of us, maybe 15 of us, and we all exchanged ideas and read out loud. And yeah, absolutely. So for people who do not know this story, there's an element of it that might be sort of mystifying if you don't know what it is. And that's what's referred to in the story as the War of the Blossom. Maybe you want to explain that. Yeah, the War of the Blossom is not something maybe anyone might have heard of. Because I don't think it exists as such with that name. It's usually in English, I think, referred to as the Flower Wars. And in Spanish, they're called "Las guerras floridas". And las guerras floridas are the Flower Wars where a series of ritual or ritualized wars during the final period of the Aztec Empire. And the Empire was already in decadence. And there were brutal famines. And social revolt was always bubbling. And as with most empires in decadence, the ruling class resorted to extreme measures, like mass detention or throwing bombs or in this case, human sacrifice. So what happened in the Flower Wars was that the rival groups would come together and they would have a set of very clear rules to follow. Different weapons were used, not the usual. So they would use smaller swords with stone knives. With stone knives. You had to kind of fight close up. And whoever lost those wars would be taken prisoner. And then brought up to the temples where human sacrifices occurred and would be killed in the stones of the temple. So that was the narrative arc of the Flower Wars. Of a soldier in the Flower Wars, yeah. Well, I think we should talk some more after the story. And now here's Valeria Luiselli reading the Night Face Up by Julio Cortaza, translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn. The Night Face Up Halfway down the Long Hotel Vestibule, he thought that probably he was going to be late and hurried on into the street to get out his motorcycle from the corner where the next door superintendent let him keep it. On the jewelry store at the corner, he read that it was 10 to 9. He had time to spare. The sun filtered through the tall downtown buildings and he, for himself, for just going along thinking he did not have a name. He swung onto the machine, savoring the idea of the ride. The motor word between his legs and a cool wind whipped his pants legs. He let the ministry zip past the pink, the white and a series of stores on the main street, their windows flashing. Now he was beginning the most pleasant part of the run, the real ride. A long street bordered with trees, with spacious villas whose gardens rambled all the way down to the sidewalks which were barely indicated by low hedges. There was very little traffic. A bit inattentive perhaps, but tooling along on the right side of the street, he allowed himself to be carried away by the freshness, by the weightless contraction of this hardly begun day. This involuntary relaxation possibly kept him from preventing the accident. When he saw that the woman standing on the corner had rushed into the crosswalk while he still had the green light, it was already late for a simple solution. He braked hard with foot and hand, wrenching himself to the left. He heard the woman scream, and at the collision his vision went. It was like falling asleep all at once. He felt the taste of salt and blood, one knee hurt, and when they hoisted him up he yelped. He couldn't bear the pressure on his right arm. Voices that did not seem connected to the faces hanging above him encouraged him tearfully with jokes and assurances. His only comfort was to hear someone confirm that the lights indeed had been in his favor. He asked about the woman, trying to keep down the nausea edging into his throat. While they carried him face up to a shop nearby, he learned that she had got only a few scrapes on the legs. Nah, you barely got her at all, but when you hit, the impact made the machine jump and flop on its side. And recollections of other smash-ups take it easy, work him in shoulders first, there that's fine, and someone in a dust coat giving him a swallow of something soothing in the shadowy interior of the small local pharmacy. Within five minutes the police ambulance arrived, and they lifted him onto a cushioned stretcher. It was a relief for him to be able to lie out flat, lucid, but realizing that he was still suffering the effects of shock, he gave his information to the officer riding in the ambulance with him. The arm almost didn't hurt. Blood dripped down from a cut over one eyebrow all over his face. He licked his lips once or twice to drink it. He felt pretty good. It had been an accident, tough luck. Stay quiet a few weeks, nothing worse. The guard said that the motorcycle didn't seem badly racked up. "Why should it," he said. "It all landed on top of me." They both laughed, and when they got to the hospital the guard shook his hand and wished him luck. Now the nausea was coming back a little. Meanwhile hospital attendants were pushing him in a wheeled stretcher toward a pavilion farther back, rolling along under trees full of birds. He shut his eyes and wished he were asleep or chloroformed. But they kept him for a good while in a room with that hospital smell, filling out a form, letting his clothes off and dressing him in a stiff, gray-ish smock. They moved his arm carefully. It didn't hurt him. The nurses were making wise cracks the whole time, and if it hadn't been for the stomach contractions, he would have felt fine, almost happy. They got him over to X-ray and 20 minutes later, with a still damp negative lying on his chest like a black tombstone, they wheeled him into surgery. Everyone tall and thin in white came over and began to study the X-ray. A woman's hand were arranging his head. He felt himself being moved from one stretcher to another. The man in white came over to him again, smiling, something gleamed in his right hand. He padded his cheek and made a sign to someone station behind. It was unusual for a dream because it was full of smells and he never dreamt smells. Just a marshy smell, there to the left of the narrow trail where the swamps began, the quaking bugs from which no one ever returned. But the reek lifted and was replaced by a dark, fresh, composite fragrance like the night under which he moved in flight from the Aztecs. And it was all so natural. He had to run from the Aztecs who had set out on their manhunt, the war of the blossom, the ritual war when they took their prisoners, and his soul-chance was to find a place to hide in the deepest part of the forest, taking care not to lose the trail that only they, the Moteca, is new. What tormented him most was the new odor, as though even in the absolute acceptance of the dream, something in him resisted, something which up to that point had hesitated to enter the game. It smells of war, he thought. His hand, going instinctively to the stone knife that was tucked at an angle into his girdle of course wool. An unexpected sound made him crouch suddenly, stock still and shaking. To be afraid was nothing strange, there was plenty of fear in his dreams. He waited, covered by the branches of a shrub and the starless night. Far off, probably on the other side of the big lake, they'd be lighting the Bivouac fires that part of the sky had a reddish glare. The sound was not repeated. It had been like a snapped limb, maybe an animal that like himself was escaping from the smell of war. He stood erect slowly, sniffing the air. Not a sound could be heard, but the fear was still following, and so was the smell, that cloying incense of the war of the blossom. He had to press forward to stay out of the bogs and to get to the heart of the forest, roping uncertainly through the dark, stooping every other moment to touch the packed earth of the trail, he took a few steps. He would have liked to break into a run, but the gurgling fence lapped on either side of him. On the path and in darkness he took his bearings. Then he caught a blast of the heavy smell he was most afraid of, and leaped forward desperately. "You're going to fall off the bed," the patient next to him said, "stop bouncing around all buddy." He opened his eyes, and it was afternoon, the sun already low in the oversized windows of the long ward. While trying to smile at his neighbor, he detached himself almost physically from the scene of the nightmare. His arm in a plaster cast hung suspended from an apparatus with weights and pulleys. He felt thirsty as though he'd been running for miles, but when he asked for water they gave him barely enough to make a mouthful. The fever was edging up slowly, and he would have been able to sleep again, but he was enjoying the pleasure of keeping awake, eyes half closed, listening to the other patient's conversation, answering a question from time to time. A blonde nurse rubbed the front of his thigh with alcohol, and stuck him with a fat needle connected to a tube that ran up to a bottle filled with a milky, opalescent liquid. A young intern arrived with some metal and leather apparatus, which he adjusted to fit onto the good arm to check something or other. Night fell, and the fever gained, dragging him down softly to a state in which things were seen as though through opera glasses. They were real and soft, and at the same time vaguely distasteful. It was like sitting in a boring movie and thinking, "Well, still, it would be worse out in the street, and staying." A wonderful cup of golden broth came, smelling of leaks, celery, and parsley. A small hunk of bread, precious as a whole banquet, grew smaller and disappeared. His arm hardly heard him at all, and only in the eyebrow were they taken stitches a quick, hot pain sizzled occasionally. When the big windows across the way turned to smudges of dark blue, he thought it would not be difficult for him to sleep. Still on his back, so a little uncomfortable, running his tongue out over his hot dry lips, he tasted the broth still, and with a sigh of content, he let himself drift off. First there was a confusion, as of all his sensations, for that moment blunted or muddled, were being drawn into himself. He realized that he was running in pitch darkness, although above, the sky criss-crossed with treetops was less black than the rest. The trail he thought, "I've got off the trail." His feet sank into a bed of leaves and mud, and then he couldn't take a step that the branches of shrubs did not whiplash his ribs and legs. Out of breath, knowing despite the darkness and silence that he was surrounded, he crouched down to listen. Maybe the trail was very near, with the first daylight he would be able to see it again, and for the moment nothing could help him find it. The hand that had unconsciously gripped the haft of the stone knife climbed like a fence scorpion up to his neck, where the protecting amulet hung. Barely moving his lips, he mumbleed the supplication of the corn, which brings about the beneficent moons and the prayer to her very highness, to the distributor of all matrican possessions. At the same time he felt his angle sinking deeper into the mud, and the weighting in the darkness of the obscure grove of live oak grew intolerable. The war of the blossom had started at the beginning of the moon, and had been going on for three days and three nights now. If he managed to hide in the depths of the forest, getting off the trail, farther up past the marsh country, perhaps the warriors wouldn't follow his track. He thought of the many prisoners that already taken, but the number didn't count, only the consecrated period. The hunt would continue until the priests gave the sign to return. Everything had its number and its limit, and was still within the sacred period, and he on the other side from the hunters. He heard the cries and leaped up, knife in hand, as if the sky were a flame on the horizon. He saw torches moving among the branches, very near him. The smell of war was unbearable, and when the first enemy jumped him, leaped at his throat, he felt an almost pleasure in sinking the stone-blade flat to the haft into his chest. The lights were already around him, the happy cries. He managed to cut the air once or twice, then a rope snared him from behind. "It's the fever," the man in the next bed said. The same thing happened to me when they operated on my duodenum. Take some water. You'll see. You'll seep her right. Layed next to the night from when she came back, the tepid shadow of the ward seemed delicious to him. A violet lamp kept watch high on from the far wall like a guardian eye. You could hear coughing, deep breathing. Once in a while a conversation in whispers. Everything was pleasant and secure, without the chase. No. But he didn't want to go on thinking about the nightmare. There were lots of things to amuse himself with. He began to look at the cast on his arm, and the pulleys that held it so comfortably in the air. They'd left a bottle of mineral water on the night table beside him. He put the neck of the bottle to his mouth and gulped it almost greedily. He could now make out the different shapes in the ward. The thirty beds, the closets with glass doors. He guessed that his fever was down. His face felt cool. The cut over the eyebrow barely hurt at all, no more than a recollection. He saw himself leaving the hotel again, wheeling out the cycle. Who'd have thought that it would end like this? He tried to fix the moment of the accident exactly, and it made him very angry to find a void there, and emptiness he could not manage to fill. Between the impact and the moment that they picked him up off the pavement, the passing out or whatever went on, there was nothing he could see, and yet he had the feeling that this void, this nothingness, had lasted an eternity. No, not time so much. More as if in this void he had passed across something, or had run back immense distances. The shock, the brutal crack against the pavement. Anyway, he had felt a flood of relief in coming out of the black pit while the people were lifting him off the ground. With pain in the broken arm, blood from the split eyebrow, scrape on the knee, with all that, a relief in returning to daylight, to the day, in feeling sustained and attended, that was weird. Someday he'd asked a doctor at the office about that. Now sleep began to take over again, to pull him slowly down. The pillow was so soft, and the coolness of the mineral water in his fevered throat. The violet light of the lamp up there was beginning to take a dimmer and dimmer. As he was sleeping on his back, the position in which he came to did not surprise him, but on the other hand, the damp smell, the smell of oozing rock, blocked his throat, and forced him to understand. Open the eyes and look in all directions. Hopeless. He was surrounded by an absolute darkness. Try to get up and felt ropes pinning his wrists and angles. He was staked to the ground on the floor of dank icy stone slabs, the cold bit into his naked back, his legs. Dully, he tried to touch the amulet with his chin, and found they had stripped him of it. Now he was lost, no prayer could save him from the final. From far off, as though filtering through the rock of the dungeon, he heard the great kettlegums of the feast. They had carried him to the temple. He was in the underground cells of Dokali itself, awaiting his turn. He heard a yell, a horse yell that rocked off the walls, another yell ending in a moan. It was he who was screaming in the darkness. He was screaming because he was alive. His whole body, with that cry, fended off what was coming, the inevitable end. He thought of his friends filling up the other dungeons, and of those already walking up the stairs of the sacrifice. He uttered another choked cry. He could hardly open his mouth. His jaws were twisted back as if with a rope and a stick, and once in a while they would open slowly with an endless exertion as if they were made of rubber. The creaking of wooden latches jolted him like a whip. Riving, he fought to rid himself of the cord sinking into his flesh. His right arm, the stronger one, strained until the pain became unbearable, and he had to give up. He watched the double door open, and the smell of the torches reached him before the light did. Barely girdled by ceremonial loincloths, the priests' acolytes moved in his direction, looking at him with contempt. Lights reflected off the sweaty torsos and off the black hair dressed with feathers. The cords went slack, and in their place the grappling of hot hands, hard as bronze. He felt himself lifted, still face up, and jerked along by the four acolytes who carried him down the passageway. The torchbearers went ahead, indistinctly lighting up the corridor, with its dripping walls and a ceiling so low that the acolytes had to duck their heads. Now they were taking him out, taking him out. It was the end. Face up under a mile of living rock that for a succession of moments was lit up by a glimmer of torchlight, when the stars came out up there instead of the roof and a great tear steps rose before him, on fire with cries and dances, it would be the end. The passage was never going to end, but now it was beginning to end. He would see suddenly the open sky full of stars, but not yet. They trundled him along endlessly in the reddish shadow, hauling him roughly along, and he did not want that, but how to stop it if they had torn off the amulet, his real heart, the life center. In a single jump he came out into the hospital night, to the high, gentle, bear ceiling, to the soft shadow wrapping him round. He thought he must have cried out, but his neighbors were peacefully snoring. There were bubbles on the sides of the bottle on the night table. It made a translucent shape against the dark, azure shadow of the windows. He panted, looking for some relief for his lungs, oblivion for those images still glued to his eyelids. Each time he shut his eyes, he saw them take shape instantly, and he set up completely wrong out, but savoring at the same time the certainty that now he was awake, that the night nurse would answer if he rang, that soon it would be daybreak, with a good deep sleep he usually had at that hour, no images, nothing. It was difficult to keep his eyes open, the drowsiness was more powerful than he. He made one last effort, sketched a gesture toward the bottle of water with his good hand, and did not manage to reach it. His fingers closed again on a black emptiness, and the passageway went on endlessly, rock after rock, with momentary ruddy flares, and face up he choked out a dull moon because the roof was about to end, it rose, was opening like a mouth of shadow, and the acolytes straightened up, and from on high a waning moon, fell on a face whose eyes wanted not to see it, were closing and opening desperately, trying to find again the bare protecting ceiling of the ward, to get to the other side. And every time it was night, and the moon, while they climbed the great terraced steps, his head hanging down backward now, and not but the top were bonfires, red columns of perfumed smoke, and suddenly he saw the red stone, shining with the blood dripping off it, and the spinning arcs cut by the feet of the victim, whom they'd pulled off and through rolling down the north steps. With a last hope he shut his lids tightly, moaning to wake up, for a second he thought he had got there, because once more he was immobile in the bed except that his head was hanging down off it, swinging. But he smelt death, and when he opened his eyes he saw the blood-soaked figure of the executioner priest coming toward him with a stone knife in his hand. He managed to close his lids again, although he knew now he was not going to wake up, that he was awake, that the marvelous dream had been the other, absurd as all dreams are, a dream in which he was going through the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with green and red lights that burned without fire or smoke, on an enormous metal insect that were to weigh between his legs. In the infinite lie of the dream they had also picked him up off the ground, someone had approached him also with a knife in his hand, approached him who was lying face-up, face-up with his eyes closed between the bonfires on the steps. That was Valeria Luiselli reading the Night Face-Up by Julio Cortaza, translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn. The story appeared in the New Yorker in April of 1967 and was included in the collection end of the game and other stories, later retitled Blow Up and Other Stories, which was published later that year. It was first published in Spanish as Lanoce Boca-Arriba in 1956. I'm Shilpa Oskarkovich, and I'm Jesse Sepcek, and we're the host of the Bonapetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bonapetit's community of confident, curious bakers. Jesse and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive, and we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month we publish a recipe on Bonapetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have, and we'll get together. We're here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the B.A. Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month, wherever you get your podcast. Happy baking! So Valeria, this story starts where very much in the head of this man. It's third person, but we're basically following along with his internal monologue, so we don't Get any information that's known. already to this man. So we don't get the name of the city he's in. We don't know how old he is and we don't even get his name. And we don't we were sort of in the middle of an action. He's halfway down a hallway and going to get his motorcycles. And we don't even know where he's going that he has to be. We know what time it is. We don't know what time he has to be there. Why do you think that opening is so immediate in that way? I think from the beginning of the story, and Cortas said I think was very very clear on how important the beginnings of stories were and how every single element had to be there for a reason and nothing that wasn't later used had to appear in the beginning of the story. It's a very early on in the story. We are as you will say already inside the eyes of a man who will soon after get on his motorbike, have an accident and lose consciousness for a moment. And we will never leave his consciousness. So our only access to the world will be through the constraints and limitations and apertures of this particular consciousness. Yeah. And also his sensory information because both stories are full of very sensory moments, smells, colors and so on. You see everything, you sense it, you even taste it. It's a strange kind of immersion for the reader. It is. It's a very sensorial story. As you say, there's smell, there's pain, physical bodily pain, there's thirst, immense thirst, the taste of blood comes up again and again. The way I thought about it while rereading it was how much this story feels like a Borges story, but passed through the filter of Cortas, who was much more worldly and sensorial creature. Borges had written this story. It would be much more as many of his stories, a kind of philosophical thought experiment of maybe, you know, simultaneously and the ability to travel in time. But we would not have this anchoring in reality and mundane sensorial reality that we have through Cortas ads, pen. You wouldn't feel the wind on your pant legs or the, you know, worrying of the motorcycle motor and so on. Exactly. Those are very anchoring moments, which also I think account for the success of the story, which is that, you know, we are constantly transitioning from one reality to another. And in order to really allow ourselves to suspend disbelief and go with it, we need very clear anchors and one side and the other. And those anchors are sensorial. Yeah. Yeah. He gets in this crash. We're still with him. We're still in a kind of recognizable environment. He goes to the hospital. He's going in for surgery with this weirdly smiling surgeon with his blade. And then abruptly we're in this different world. At that point in the story, do you assume it's a dream? I think very early on in this story, we start getting little hints of a kind of disassociation from what you and I would consider real reality, I mean, you know, a hospital and doctors. And we start seeing them through this gaze that starts seeing those things as a little strange, you know, just slightly off. So the first time you were saying just now that a doctor comes in as a smiley surgeon, he's not really even described as a doctor, but as someone tall and thin in white, comes over and begins to study an x-ray. So already there's, he's an undocktored doctor, right? Already we have a slight glitch in the way that we're proceeding. Right. And this x-ray is put on the man's chest like a tombstone. Exactly. Exactly. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that particular moment of distancing. I wonder if that moment of distancing actually comes even earlier, but one doesn't realize until maybe one reads a story a couple of times. You know, the way that the city is described, even before the accident, just sort of these storefronts that pass by and the ministries in a kind of very abstract way, the pink, the white. We don't get names of streets. Gordasad was a profoundly urban writer who is always telling you what street the character is in. You always know. Okay, that character is walking down the loud, the monel, or whatever. And in this particular story, it's a very unspecific, age-geographical space. Right? It is also strange that when he's sort of picked up off the pavement by these five men, they're all laughing and cheering and I think a great time even though they've just seen someone crash on his motorcycle and possibly be severely injured. And I wonder what that sort of smiling laughing thing is about. I also wonder, you know, we get these two parallel storylines and similar things in a way happen in both of them. But they're a little bit off in time from each other so that, you know, the modern man is injured in the first sort of scene. The other one is not injured until quite a distance on from that. He's still walking around at that point when we first see him in the hospital after the hospital scene. And it's interestingly sort of day going into night in the modern setting and it's night approaching morning in the 15th century setting. So I wondered when rereading it, if the timeframes are actually not quite as we're getting them, you know, if that injury is supposed to be parallel to the injury that's happening, you know, at the hands of the Aztecs. And why that would be. Yeah, that's a really brilliant observation. I hadn't really noticed that if anything I had noticed things like the violet lamp in the hospital maybe has like a resemblance, you know, like a weird echo in the 15th century with torches that are, you know, kind of moving around within the temple where the Moteca man. Moteca just means just means motorcyclist, right? I mean, I read a couple of theories, yeah. The motorcycle tribe. Yeah, I wonder if it was supposed to be humorous. I wonder if that must be just sort of Cortez Ars joke, you know, I think it had to be. It was, I mean, it's a very boyish kind of story. It's a kind of childish, you know, reimagining of the Aztec Empire and human sacrifice. And there's something kind of playful and childish in it. Even though I think it gets at the heart of Cortez Ars fundamental concerns about the real and the fantastic and we can speak about that shortly, but there is something love, you know, in a lovely way childish. Cortez Ars used to say that literature was a game. And then he would always pause and say a very serious game, right? But it's a game the way that children take playing very seriously. Like if you're playing a game as a child and some of the children playing the game violate the rules of the game, it's a very serious offense, right? So he did have that that relationship to literature. But anyway, back to this kind of staggeredness of events and moments that you're referring to between the two worlds, I have always thought of time in this story, not really as a linear thing that is being looped so that time traveled to the past as possible, but rather that the time of the 15th century is a kind of eternal time marked by the fact that it belongs to ritual time, right? The Florida, the Florida wars or the flower wars were ritual. So they belong to mythic time and ritual time, which in many ways is not really historical time, right? So it's maybe the way we think about mythology, the way when did things in mith happen? They didn't they didn't happen in time, they happen sometime outside time. And therefore we can travel back to them, right? And that's how I think of the time in the short story. It's not really time travel back to the past or between present and past, but between present and mythic or eternal time. Yeah, though even in that time, he makes it clear this this war is going to last this set amount of time. It doesn't matter how many prisoners they take. It's going to be three days, three nights, you know, and I suppose as you say, it has strict rules, you know, it's a very serious game. Absolutely, you know, and you're right too in that that it's, I'm referring to this as mythical or ritual time, but the flower wars were also a historical thing. They happened, right? But I think that even though they correspond to his historical moment, it is the nature of ritual itself that maybe sets whatever moment of the war outside time. Yeah. So people generally read this story as though we are supposed to assume that one of the timelines is the correct one and one is a dream, right? And obviously you begin the story thinking that the Aztec time is the dream and you end the story perhaps thinking that the modern time is a dream because these are the indicators Cortés are gives us by the end that motorcycle has become a worrying insect. You know, it's out of the scope of what that character knows. Is there another possibility? Are these two things happening, coexisting in the same, you know, as there are glitch in the sort of time space continuum? Is it, could it be seen as that kind of science fiction, you know? Yeah, you know, the kind of science fiction that makes you question the very nature of the real. I mean, beyond their being or not being a complete answer to that question, I think your question points to, I think the fundamental aspect of Cortés' craft in this story and in many other of his short stories. Not so much in his novels, really, but in his short stories, he really explores not reality and not a realistic way of portraying everyday life, but what he and many of his generation called "lo fantástico", which translates, I guess, to the fantastic. Although I think when we say fantasy or fantastic in English, we don't quite mean what it means to say "lo fantástico", which, you know, the "lo fantástico" starts from the plane of the real everyday life, mundane events, but then at some point the kind of fabric of reality tears just enough so that you know, you're able to kind of peer, peek through to the other side, and then, you know, that moment of being able to reach, you know, gaze through to the other side becomes a moment of perplexity, where perplexity really allows consciousness to be open to the absurd "hear" and there, doesn't matter where you are, which reality. It's more a state of mind, and I think, you know, Cortés had really fostered this state of mind as a state of mind that preceded and accompanied writing and observing more generally as a state that's, you know, a state of curiosity that makes you more acute to the mundane, to observing in the mundane its strangeness. Yeah, there's just one other point about time, which is that it seems to move differently in the two storylines that in the modern day one, we keep cutting away and then coming back to something different, right? So he's about to have surgery, then he's in the hospital bed, he's here, and then suddenly he wakes up and he's there, and time has passed since the last time we saw him, whereas I felt like every time we went back to the 15th century man, he was continuing right from where we'd left off, that he was sort of still running, he's hearing noises, he's still in the situation he was in before, except the one moment where he wakes up and he's, he's staked to the floor. Most of the moments seem quite continuous. You're right, there's a jumps in time in the modern world and continuous time in the 15th century plane. I would argue that that is maybe one more element that constructs a sense of more real real, right? The deeper reality in this alternate time frame, so quote unquote, alternate because it becomes, of course, the real, the one that's anchored. I think it's as the other elements we had discussed, like the level of detail and the kind of presence and the sensorial and all those other elements. I think what you're saying, which I actually hadn't really perceived, but this linearity or not linearity, this uninterrupted linearity, because time in the modern world timeline is also linear. It's just, it's just choppy, choppy and jumpy. Which I think, I don't know, I think that leads me to another thought that's something that Cortas had grappled with in his modern world stories and in his own life, a lot, which is the notion of ghostliness, of being a ghost in one's own life. He tells this anecdote while he's giving a lecture, I think, in Cuba, where he tells the audience, he's trying to tell them about his ideas on craft of the short story. And it's conscious that the audience that he's talking to doesn't know his short stories very well because just of circulation issues in Latin America for Latin American writers. And he has been living in France, basically, his entire adult life, sort of self-exiled in the 50s from Argentina, but then his exile became not so voluntary as the Argentina plunged into the dictatorships of the 70s. And he mentions very much several times how ghostly his life seems. And he tells this audience that he a few days ago had just been back in Buenos Aires and a receptionist in a hotel when taking down his name, had told him, "You're not Julio Cortasar. I know Julio Cortasar." And he has white hair and he's older and he's a friend of my aunt and he speaks differently. You're not Julio Cortasar. And he says that in this lecture, the event that he could have really just discarded immediately and even laughed at, sat with him more and more heavily as the days pass and this feeling of being a ghost in one's town, the feeling of being a ghost ultimately in one's life grew and grew in him. And then the thought of possibly there being another Cortasar living a parallel life somewhere, or maybe several of them living parallel lives. And I think that beyond the fun thought experiment of parallel living, there is something also deeply rooted to an emotional disconnection from time and space when one has left home, when one is an exile, when one has left a life and can never quite return to it. And I think that although it shows up in many different ways in Cortasar, there is ultimately this very sentimental root to the ghostliness of a lot of his characters. Certainly these two parallel lives are ghosts of each other in some way. Yeah, nothing ever feels quite as solid as where you were as a child. Absolutely, right? The life, the afterlife of exile is never quite as real as the place that has been left behind. And you know the smells of the place you grew up in and the sensory information far more than you do because when you're older you just don't notice as much. You don't look as much. Absolutely. You're farther from the ground. Yeah, you're just less open to feeling perplexed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that was his great gift. He gave us perplexity. Yeah, one has to hold on to it, right? Otherwise, if nothing surprises you, we risk the worse. Absolutely. What's interesting in this story is that the modern day man is not very observant and he's always a little bit out of it. You know, he has this accident because he's in the state of intense relaxation. You know, he's not, as you say, he's not, he sees the ministries as pink and white. He doesn't see them as, you know, a ministry of something specific. And then once he's taken into the pharmacy, he's sort of drugged and then he's out when he's on the ground. He goes in the pharmacy and he's drugged. Then he's at the hospital and he's put under again. So his mind is never very sharp. Whereas the other version of him is constantly aware. He's hearing every little sound, wondering if it's an animal or if it's an Aztec coming to get him. He's thinking about every smell. He's directing himself because he can smell where the swamp is. He can smell war. So it's interesting that the most acute conscious mind is the historical one. You're absolutely right. The level of detail in the observation of surroundings in the 15th century timelines to speak or the timeless timeline, the level of detail in describing the surroundings is so much more than the one in our modern reality. We have names of things as well, and the kind of swamps and the precise trees that surround him and the twigs that break with every step. We have otherwise a very generic, large paintbrush strokes in the hospital in our reality. And I think all of that, again, contributes to what you only realize in hindsight, which which is that maybe the. the imagined reality, the not real reality was really always this modern one, that this is a kind of nightmare that sprung out of a mind of the past. I don't know if quite a lot of that sort of thought of it this way, but I think a long standing debate in Latin America has always been, you know, who are we, this in between Europe and our indigenous past. You know, most of Latin America's mystice are racially speaking, meaning mixed, mixed of the two, and culturally absolutely mystice are a combination of things. And in this debate, you know, one of the most staggering distinctions, a long time in Vogue was the one between civilization and barbarism, right? It was always, you know, how the margin could become tamed by the center, how the world, the pre-Hispanic world could become tamed and civilized. And I think that if there is a historical and political positioning at all in that debate, Cortasad is reflecting upon the absurdities of the modern world, right? And the kind of unreal nature of hospitals and ministries and it seems dreamlike when you go back and read it, it feels like, oh, that is actually just a weird dream. Yeah. Yeah. And interestingly, you know, the most organized group, the Aztecs, right? They're not just kind of laughing and pulling people up off the street after they have crashed. They have a set period of time for their war. They have a strict plan and there's a regular regulated sacrifice. Yeah, absolutely. And as you all say, and the world out here seems kind of chaotic and absurd, you know, when he's in the bed, it purported the, you know, fever dream, his next door, next bed neighbor says to him, oh, yeah, the same thing happened to me when they operated on my doodine. No, don't worry, just drink some water. Yeah, completely absurd kind of world. Nothing quite makes sense. And there's that moment at the end where he's trying desperately to get back to the hospital and he's got his head hanging off the back of the bed or the side of the bed when, you know, really what he's trying to get away from is this rock he's about to be sacrificed on. That's a great image, by the way. It's just wonderful, that tiny flash of the hospital coming in there as he's trying to fall asleep again or trying to reenter the other reality. And he's trying to, he's trying to get the water again, right? But as soon as he kind of reaches for it, there's just nothing in front of him. He can't quite grip the bottle. Yeah. I mean, it is sort of a horror story as well. It actually, the experience of reading it reminds me of the movie Memento. Do you remember that one where he's losing his memory every 20 minutes? So he's constantly waking up in a, in a space he has no idea where he is or what he's doing. Yes, as far as there is that horror, the sort of the psychological horror of losing grasp of reality. And of being really in the middle of something and not knowing what it is. Right. But I agree, it does read like a horror story. And especially that sort of the deeper you go in and the more fear is experienced by, by our protagonist in the 15th century. But at the end, I always have the feeling that not only that it's a wonderfully childish game conjuring the past in this way, but also that ultimately what we're getting at is that the capacity to see through what we think is normal and understand it as not quite normal is a much more lucid way of seeing. That it's that what we are exercising here as readers is our capacity to reach a state of perplexity. And we can exit the story and maybe look at our window and see a big building and think how absurd. Look at that. Or a C&S Tech temple, you know, and find it familiar. Yeah. Also the, you know, the 15th century man seems sort of better equipped even though he does get captured. He actually does seem to kill an Aztec long the way. He plants his stone knife deep in his chest. Before he's captured, he does seem, he seems more aware of the rules that he's playing by. And he knows what he has to do. And if he doesn't make it, you know, that's because it was sort of the odds were against him. But along the way, he puts up a good fight. Whereas this kind of hapless guy in the hospital wants some water, he doesn't know what's going on. And he's not, he doesn't consider the future. You know, he was so stressed about getting to his appointment on time. And then we never hear about it again. Yeah, there's a kind of just sort of sad mediocrity in modern man, right? I mean, I wonder if it's again another, another way, subtle way in which Corta Sad is commenting on modernity and our supposed civilized and organized world. We're really, what we're seeing as a man with very little agency. He's just kind of being dragged around from stretcher to stretcher. No one is really actually in deeper communication with him. Every kind of exchange is absurd. And there's no actual communication in conversation. It's a sort of words flung back and forth between people. And there's no, there's very little depth of feeling. Even fear doesn't seem like a, like a deep primal feeling in this man. Yeah. And as you were noting earlier, observation is kind of bland. We don't get many details. Except maybe there's some lovely details when he looks out the windows, the big windows of the hospital where, where, where day is turning into night. And we, we get different kind of a zures and different, different shades. But other than that, other than the, the light of day, there's a blandness to the world. Whereas the man in, in the 15th century is completely awake and completely present. Right? There's a groundedness and a presence that expresses in many different ways, one of them being a cuteness and observation, but also just in the capacity to, to, to, to make us feel how alive he is right before he will no longer be alive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because you could like a, maybe an obvious reading of the story would be, Kutazars telling us, we haven't changed where all the same and this man in the 20th century could just as easily be this man in the 15th century. And there's this through line to humanity. But in fact, the details of the story tell us, well, perhaps we've deteriorated. I think, so I think that yeah, that if anything, there's that, that vision of humanity becoming more absurd, less in touch with things, less, less alive somehow. So there is definitely a more pessimistic observation of where we, where we ended up. Yeah. And instead of being dreams, it could be just, you know, here's what this soul reincarnated in the 20th century would be experiencing, you know. Absolutely. Maybe if this were a, a board history, it would be more about reincarnation in many lives. Yeah. That's true. That's true. I was reading, speaking of Borges, I was reading an interview with Kutazar where he talked about Borges, because I, you know, there is, there is that element to this story. And actually, I saw one interview where he sort of said, well, I, you know, I have nothing to do with where it's not how I write. But this one in the Paris review, he said, he was talking about the Baroque. He said, I distrust the Baroque. The Baroque writers very often let themselves go too easily in their writing. They write in five pages, what one could very well write in one. I too must have fallen into the Baroque because I'm Latin American, but I've always had a mistrust of it. I don't like turgid, voluminous sentences full of adjectives and descriptions purring and purring into the reader's ear. I know it's very charming. Of course, it's very beautiful, but it's not me. I'm more on the side of Jorge Luis Borges. He has always been an enemy of the Baroque. He tightened his writing as if with pliers. Well, I write in a very different way than Borges, but the great lesson he taught me is one of economy. That's beautiful. Yeah. And we do get, we do get economy here. Absolutely. I would say Cortésar, Borges and Rulfó, although they could not be more different as writers, share that characteristic. They are very almost leconic, certainly efficient. I remember reading something Cortésar said. I remember reading this when I was, again, 15 or 16, and I found it, you know, it was a breakthrough. Because you know, one is learning how to write. You're so Baroque indeed. And so florid and language. I read an interview in which he complained about writers who wrote sentences like he'd descended the stairs. He says we walk down the stairs. And I think, you know, indeed, in his generation there was still, I mean, obviously previous to Cortasa's generation, there was a lot of floridness in language. But even in his generation, other members of the so-called Latin American boom, like, or kind of in Dier certainly, like the most baroque, but Barrazoza definitely Garcia Marquez. All of them have this kind of floridness as you know, it's a richness too. But I am more on the school of the plain and leconic and I think, yeah, taughtness versus abundance. Yeah, because they don't suffer from a lack of substance. It's just, you know, their way in to substance, the way they tear the tissue of reality and look at things in their deeper layers is just as poignant. But they do it with sort of more surgical means or-- Yeah, yeah. They create so much tension simply by having short sentences and by having, you know, these sort of allisions. You keep people on edge. Yeah, I like that you mentioned tension because Cortasa was a great defender of tension in a story and he's very good at it too. He thought that the only way to really build a short story is by understanding tension. You know, in a novel, you have time and you can have and sometimes you even need dead time. You have to transition from one moment to another. But there is not the luxury of time in a short story. You have to be able to play with moments of release and tension, but you have to be a great controller of tension. You have to leave things out and you have to leave out information that's important. That's how you keep the reader thinking on the tension, puzzling and trying to understand. And you know, in some cases, they never get that information. In some stories, you get it at the end, but just simply by not telling the reader everything. You can keep the reader engaged. Absolutely. I think another idea there that reminded me of related to this is an idea that he was wary of, but he's often quoted saying this. He says somewhere, I think in an essay about the short story, that a friend of his, so he kind of, he doesn't say that he thinks this. He's asking for a friend. He's a friend of his says that a lover of boxing. A friend of his lover of boxing says always that novels, when by accumulation of points, whereas short stories, when by knockout. Right. Yeah. And you know, one should not take this to seriously, but there is something. And there's certainly something in the way that tension is handled and withdrawing information or not giving it away, enables that. Right. Yeah. Of course. Let's talk a little bit about the translation by Paul Blackburn, because I don't read Spanish, but I found some of the phrases here quite unusual. And I don't know if they are that way in the original or not of what you think. Yeah. I definitely, like I think it's a good translation. I certainly don't have criticism on the translation. I think the translator made very difficult choices in moments in the story where there is ambivalence. You have to make choices as a translator. There are however some strange things that maybe should be pointed out just maybe because it'll help readers think or imagine things a little more clearly. Like there's a moment where we're in the translation, we see the man in the 15th century lying down about to be sacrificed, but still not outside the pyramid, not yet on the outside, but still kind of being held in the dungeons. And the translation says that he's lying under a mile of stone, which would really make for a very tall pyramid. Very tall. Very tall. Yeah. Which really is not the case of those examples. The word in Spanish is made though, which is one meter is equivalent to about three feet. Anyway, that's small things like that that can make a translation seem a little more murkier. But there's also one of the things I care more about is in the story is it's theory of time, so to speak. Maybe I'm obsessed with time travel and time dear, or how to write about a sense of time traveling, but contained within the sense of everyday life and realism. In the translation, we get a sentence that says, and yet he had the feeling that this void. So this is going from the moment he falls and he's trying to remember, he's already in the hospital but he's trying to remember the moment where he fell and hit his head and what happened. And he can't really remember what happened. There's a void there in his very very common, I guess, in moments of accidents. And yet he had the feeling that this void, this nothingness, had lasted an eternity. Right? More as if in this void, he had passed across something or had run back immense distances. So the translator here is doing a really good job until this last conglomeration of words had run back immense distances. There's no indication in the Spanish version that there is a backness in time. The Spanish actually says, "Recorrido de Estancia sin Mensas." We traveled immense distances. In Spanish, there is no mention of going back anywhere, just "Recorrido de Estancia sin Mensas" traveled immense distances. So I think there's a kind of time space theory here that has nothing to do with linear time where you go back in time, but really something else in time where indeed there's an eternity. There's some things that exist in a kind of eternal time. Right? Or parallel dimension. It is more more recent phrasing. I mean, it's interesting because Blackburn, the poet Paul Blackburn, and he and Cortezar were good friends and communicated a lot. So I believe they would have spoken about the translation. So if he made mistakes, I mean, something like a mile, maybe Cortezar would just miss that. I don't know how good his English was, but if he changed the meaning, you would think that would be discussed. Possibly, right? I mean, although, you know, by this time, I mean, I would imagine, although I don't really know the chronology of the translations into English of Cortezar's work, but I would imagine that by the late 60s, so much had been translated and maybe he had translated a lot of Cortezar's work by then. I don't know because he was as agent as well, right? Yeah, he worked really closely with him. Yeah. I don't know. I don't really have a theory of like why these slips pass in translations. It's either that the writer trusts their translator so much eventually, right? Like if you work for enough years with a translator, you've just also hands off, right? Like let them do their craft, and I think it's often better to stay away. But who knows? Who really knows? I mean, he might not have ever read this version in English. Were there any other moments that you thought gave something more meaning or less meaning than it had in the original? Yeah, I noticed a very, a very translatory kind of thing, especially translator into English kind of thing, which is in the Spanish we have an epigraph that sets us somehow in the flower wars. The epigraph does not exist in English because the magazine did not publish epigraphs. So the translator had to find a way to tell us that the flower wars were going to be a part of this story somehow. So in the translation, the translator inserts an entire clause into a sentence, a clause that does not exist in Spanish, and this is the clause and it's between M dashes and it's about a quarter of the way into the story. He had to run from the Aztecs who had set out on their manhunt the War of the Blossom, the ritual war when they took their prisoners. So we have this sort of explanatory, a lot of explanation in this in this clause enclosed and neatly in these M dashes. I found that a poor decision for several reasons. I mean, I know he had to he had to do it somewhere. He had to find a way to place us in history, but it feels you know like the old this old dichotomy between allowing a translation to foreignize your the language that you're translating into versus domesticating a translation and being sort of maybe over catering to your to your readership and in explaining too much, right? He really spells it out. He's we don't we don't get that kind of explanation in the Spanish, not even with the epigraph because an epigraph is always you know something more subtle, something a little bit outside the text anyway. So I found that a strange gesture. I think he he kind of decided that his readership would not be sophisticated enough to really understand what was going on so he needed to translate and explain, which I find always a, I don't know, a questionable decision. - Right, I'm sitting here sort of guiltfully thinking perhaps it was his editor. (laughing) - The music for our readership with the fluid was - It was the New Yorker editor saying, you know, no one will understand this setting. - Can we add something? - Possibly, possibly indeed. - Yeah, so it might not even be Blackburn. - Yeah, more Blackburn. Here we are just assuming, you're right, maybe they're somewhere in a parallel reality, editor in Blackburn and Cortez are saying, oh, if they only knew. I hope so. I hope that that's what they're doing in their alternate realities. (laughing) - Absolutely. - Well, thank you, Valeria. - Thank you, Deborah. It was such a pleasure to speak with you. Julio Cortezar, who died in 1984 at age 69, was an Argentine essayist, poet, playwright, and fiction writer. His works include the novel "Hopscotch" and the "Collections B.C.D.A.R.I." "Blow Up and Other Stories" and "A Change of Light." He was also the translator of Spanish language editions of Daniel DeFos Robinson Crusoe, "Little Women" by Luisa May Alcott, and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Valeria Luiselli is the author of five books, including the nonfiction book "Tell Me How It Ends" and essay and 40 questions. And the novels, "The Story of My Teeth" and "Lost Children" archive, which won the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her new novel, "Beginning Middle End" will be published in July. You can download more than 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction podcast, including one in which Ben Lerner reads "In the Name of Bobby" by Julio Cortezar, or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the writer's voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the writer's voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction podcast was produced by John Lume. I'm Debra Treesman, thanks for listening. (soft music) from PRX.