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hurrengoa
julio cortazar: side b of everyday life eider rodrigez   �Imagine the tallest man you could envision, inside an endless raincoat, a widower-like man who had the face of a naughty boy, whose eyes were so special, like a cow�s, askew and clear, they could have been the Devil�s, had they not been under the dictate of his heart�. A few days ago, this is how Gabriel Garc�a Marquez described the gigantic cronopius, who passed away twenty years ago. The year 2004 has been named the year of Julio Cortazar, the Argentinian writer born in Brussels who lived all over the world. They say Julio Cortazar was a big man and a great man he must have been too, because through literature he hit the readers, he helped us find beauty to better live our daily lives. Cortazar was an explorer, a seeker and a persecuter and at the end of his search and persecution he found himself, like Johnny Carter, but in a different way. Cortazar�s reader is taken willy-nilly into his search and persecution. He will cut up reality in shreds and look at them closely, in search of something, in search of himself/herself, going after his/her own shadow. Behind the action of brushing one�s teeth in front of the mirror, behind the CD music we play everyday, behind the second floor neighbour, Cortazar�s reader will find something big, beautiful and at the same time frightening: chaos.

Cortazar will lift the lid ceremony, habit and duty have covered chaos with and will place the reader face to it. The fainthearted reader will say he doesn�t like fantasy, will shut the book and put it aside. This kind of reader will never brush the teeth of his reflection in the mirror, will never enjoy the musician�s image that flows out of the music. The daring reader, the one that can muster enough strength to watch himself/herself in the mirror, will go ahead and all of a sudden chaos will become his/her friend. This reader, when the phone calls at the office stop, knelt on the desk, with pricked-up ears will try to hear the flowers growing in the flower-pot or will look at the goldfish in the fish bowl and will feel the scales growing on him as if he were on the dentist�s chair until he feels he�s drowning and will put off his appointment with the dentist.

Cortazar�s zest for life, instead of reading information for real life, prompts us to touch and bite into reality, instead of bowing to language, he urges us to rise against it, to smash it and make up new words, a new speech, new dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Cortazar always expressed his scorn for words and theories (�They�re just words�) and tried to live life without filters. Instead of pressing the bottom of the tube of toothpaste, he urges us to become clouds, he invites us to give one�s lover a snowflake as a present, or maybe a crystal jar containing sunshine, he prompts us to become one with chaos, a brother of nonsense, in the search for innocence. As one of his characters puts it: �innocence like alligators fucking, oh, no, dear mother Maria�s innocence wirh dirty feet; innocence like the shows doves offer on the slate roof, innocence like pigeons� droppings on a wife carrying a bunch of parsley, of course... Horace, Horace, please. Innocence!�. In fact, Cortazar is a writer with no moralizing to make, a neoromantic prophet against moralizing, going after what is not found, a searcher for what isn�t yet lost.