I've told it so many times that I even put it in ink on some forgotten page.
Today, which would be his birthday, the mirage of Julio Cortázar returns in Coyoacán, almost intact the ingenuity and daring to approach his immense stature and ask him "You are Julio Cortázar, aren't you?"
and he responded as they say Borges did too: “Sometimes”.
In that yesterday I was a member of an honorable Saturday gathering (which lasted until dawn on Sunday) where a luminous group of friends dreamed of publishing what we wrote during the week.
The gathering was known as El Parnaso, not because of conceit or arrogance, but because that was the name of the bookstore in whose cafe we met for several years to compose the world and several of the parishioners saw, without being able to fully believe it, the giant with the beard and glasses who entered the bookstore sheathed in a beautiful corduroy jacket.
After my bumpy entrance, it occurred to me to say “I didn't think you were so young”, because Cortázar didn't seem to be the same age as Octavio Paz and Adolfo Bioy Casares.
He looked like a mature teenager, very tall and with an eye to the cat… and he threw me a piece of velvet again – between happiness and sarcasm – when he told me “… and I didn't think you were that old”.
It was the deep voice of a languid tango, with French r's and a squinting smile that took me by the shoulder at the edge of the news table.
It was a yesterday where Bioy and Borges still lived and titles freshly cooked by Jorge Ibargünegoitia and so many other ghosts arrived at bookstores that now, after centuries, seem like a thing of enchantment.
With some confidence I told Cortázar that he didn't have the money to buy a copy of his
Hopscotch right
there, but that I had my own volume underlined and stained with guacamole at home.
"If you wait for me, I'll go get my book..." and said "Come on... come on", as if it were a black and white scene from the endearing movie where I see myself running from the central square of Coyoacán to Taxqueña Avenue, waiting for the passage of a pesera that came like a meal of sardines, get off at Insurgentes Avenue and get on the truck called Ballena… travel quite a few kilometers, get off at Hotel de México, run at supersonic speed to my house, go up the stairs shouting that Julio was waiting for me Cortázar "to talk about literature", to see my father's stupefied face in passing, go out with my copy with blue covers and make the same narration on the way back... only to snort at the laughter of two or three friends and the person in charge of the bookstore that hugged me with that "Did you really think that Julio Cortázar would wait for you an hour and ten minutes?".
So today, which is its birthday, which is not yet its centenary and I do not listen to jazz when trying to congeal this paragraph, I am convinced that there are days when it seems that I am still running impossible triathlons following invented routes, already in ink or in a dream, with the convinced illusion that when I arrive the smile of an endearing giant awaits me, the youngest old man I have ever read, to confirm that not all the ink that was spread over the coffee on Saturdays was in vain, that miracles sometimes recover and that we can speak in silence for not a few pages of his books that he did not manage to dedicate to me.
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