Toco tu boca. Con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca. Voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano. My literature teacher reads aloud chapter seven of Rayuela, known to anglophone readers as Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar. I am a high-school girl ready to fall in love, my notes filled with hearts on the margins. Como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de movimientos vivos, de fragancia oscura. After class, I walk up to the teacher and ask why, in a romantic chapter like this, would he decide to talk about fish, why would he say that fish swim in your mouth when you kiss? My teacher smiles at me. She waits for the classroom to clear and asks if I have had my first kiss yet. I feel my face going red as I answer no. « You will understand as you grow older », she says and tells me to go get lunch.
Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce. I had my first kiss at eighteen and as I had a guy’s tongue in my mouth I thought about Julio Cortázar and his fish, swimming from one mouth to the other.
Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium by accident. His father was an Argentine diplomat, it was 1914 and World War I forced the family to stay in Europe for the first six years of his life. Despite this « accident », Julio Cortázar was Argentinian: no one from Argentina would let me say anything different of one of their most famous authors. He published several short story collections, novels (Los premios (1960), Rayuela (1963), 62 modelo para armar (1968), Libro de Manuel (1973), Los autonautas de la cosmopista (1983)), essays, poems and even a comic book.
Cortázar was internationally known for his ability to narrate seemingly boring situations through a fantastical lens: for example, he has a short story called « On How To Climb A Staircase ». He is also renowned for his word-play and formal innovation: Rayuela can be read front-to-back or starting from chapter 73. One of the most sensuous passages in literature is written in his made-up-language, giglico: « As soon as he began to amalate the noeme, the clemise began to smother her and they fell into hydromuries, into savage ambonies, into exasperating sustales. »
He was obsessed with jazz, boxing and socialism. A friend to Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, Cortázar was the Argentine representative of the Latin American Boom and his books were translated into dozens of languages. His short story collection A Certain Lucas has just been republished by New Directions (2025).
At thirty-six years old, Julio Cortázar moved to France where he would live until his death. It is said his love for Paris was as consuming as a carnal love. When he first arrived, despite being completely broke and alone, the beauty of Paris turned his sadness into aesthetics. He would smoke and walk around the city like a flâneur conjured up by Charles Baudelaire. Rayuela happens along the streets of Paris — from Nôtre Dame to Carrefour de l’Odéon — as the reader follows the story of Oliveira and La Maga. « We went around without looking for each other, but knowing that we were walking to find each other. » Countless readers, myself included, have read in Oliveira and La Maga an ideal couple: she, a mysterious and quirky woman; he, a bohemian and creative man. But their relationship was also unjust and incredibly painful.
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