Abstract
In this crónica, I pay homage (and talk back to!) one of my favourite authors, Julio Cortázar, who I had the great privilege and pleasure of befriending in 1980, when he was a visiting professor at UC-Berkeley. I have been obsessed with time-travel, doubling, and interstitiality since I was very young; even the most casual Cortázar reader (if such a thing is possible) will immediately recognise these as recurrent themes in his work. Here, faced with several actual axolotl in a Buenos Aires aquarium, I explore and comment on Cortázar’s strangely mesmerising meditation on identity and transformation. My personal connection is (as in much of my writing) concerned with aspects of gender and sexuality suppressed or (more likely) ignored in Cortázar’s version. I identify, too, with a poignant in-betweenness and ambiguity I read in the figure of the axolotl—and in the work of Cortázar and Alejandra Pizarnik.
Highlights
Viéndome sentada allí, en ese vinyl-topped, uncannily casi ’50s Califas-style table, gazing embrujada into the little tank,¿Qué son? me pregunta una casi-hip, slightly concheta mujer
Pero she’s already backing away from me, slowly, cual si fuese sho la eccéntrica, backing up back to her comfortable table para comentar a su boyfriend que esa mujer staring into the fishtank a esas raras criaturas está chiflada
Buenos Aires: the force of inevitability pero pronto, ay, way too soon, la partida
Summary
En ese vinyl-topped, uncannily casi ’50s Califas-style table, gazing embrujada into the little tank,—¿Qué son? me pregunta una casi-hip, slightly concheta mujer. Buenos Aires/Los Angeles 29 julio, 2001/25 mayo, 2010 Para Julio Cortázar y Alejandra Pizarnik, in memoriam And for Wim Lindeque and James Zike, for (y)our way of seeing Me lo pregunta a mí, cual si yo fuese la dueña del lugar, de este PoMo lite, matte oxblood-red painted bar en el ‘pop hotel’ [sic] Boquitas Pintadas, owned by una romántica pareja de young Germans y del cual había estado leyendo todo mi año en Buenos Aires pero I’d never made it here, y ahora. Esta mujer asks me, casi como si yo fuese la dueña, también, de ellos.
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