By Cristina Wormull Chiorrini.
Published by
LA MIRADA SEMANAL
El Nuevo Observatorio
January 12, 2023
Being in Paris it is essential to visit the Montparnasse cemetery and look for the tomb of Julio Cortázar… it is difficult to find it because the simple white granite tomb easily goes unnoticed and only by going through the place over and over again can you find it and the cronopio, made by the sculptor Julio Silva who acts as a sentinel. Visitors usually remain silent and leave tickets as a tribute to the great writer who rests accompanied by the remains of the two women he loved the most: Aurora Bernárdez and Carol Dunlop.
When Julio met Aurora through a friend who introduced them, he was impressed by » her very upturned nose «, but perhaps this or an immediate connection made them start dating and the relationship progressed quickly. So much that Cortázar, after a brief trip to France, returns and proposes to go together to the French capital. He had obtained a scholarship from the French government, but he was still an unknown. Part alone, to settle. It is the year 1951. But he will never return more than occasionally to Argentina… In his last years he will become a French citizen.
More than a year passed before Aurora arrived to Paris and during that time Cortázar’s misadventures were multiple. Bernárdez was six years younger than Julio, recently graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and a translator like him. She was the perfect complement, it could be said that they were the perfect couple, both very tall, accomplices and with an almost magical coexistence given by a great intellectual affinity that complemented each other brilliantly and made the rest of the world seem superfluous.
“We ate kilos of French fries, we made the steaks almost clandestinely because there was no kitchen in the hotel room and we were not authorized to cook, we opened the window so as not to smoke so much,” Aurora will tell.
They married in 1954. And it was with Aurora that Julio got to know the streets of Paris and other places around the world such as India and Italy. They shared the economic hardships of the first years in France and worked with four hands for Unesco. She got a job translating a Philosophy encyclopedia. And Julio, with the help of Aurora, was commissioned to translate Poe. His first literary achievement, because until now it is considered the best translation of Poe’s works that exists. Cortázar called her “Glop” and Aurora was the one who saw how little by little he made a name for himself in the world of letters. Thus, they were able to buy a house in Provence and she became his “ground wire”, his connection to everyday life, constantly reminding him that he had to eat, even a little, despite being submerged in the formation of Hopscotch .
Their relationship as a couple lasted 14 years through which they created a powerful bond that maintained the mutual affection that remained throughout their lives. They remained good friends until the last days of Cortázar when she was the one who took care of him and accompanied him in his death and she was the one to whom he bequeathed his assets and the legal possession of half of his copyrights.
«What I like about your body is sex. What I like about your sex is the mouth. What I like in your mouth is the tongue. What I like about your language is the word, » Julio Cortázar wrote to Aurora.
In the midst of a crisis in his marriage, Julio met Ugné Karvelis in Cuba, where he had traveled alone since Aurora was in Argentina taking care of her sick mother. Many say that Ugné was the cause of Julio and Aurora’s breakup, but the truth is that nobody achieves something like that, unless there are already problems between the couples. Ugné was 22 years younger than Julio and they never married, but they lived together for four years, although their relationship extended over time because she worked at Gallimard, which published works by Cortázar and also, why not say it, because they continued to be friends. Ugné was the complete opposite of Aurora and her way of abusing alcohol, her bad temper and her jealousy were what prevented a more lasting relationship.
In Canada, on a writers’ trip, Julio met his second wife, the American Carol Dunlop, thirty-two years younger than him who had already turned 63. Dunlop was also an amateur writer and photographer. Cortázar baptized her as “Osita” and she nicknamed him “El lobo”. Cortázar was the one who sought her out after reading one of her works and proposed that they work together, asking her to move to Paris to «be able to meet twice a week, choose themes, exchange points of view and each write their own texts», and despite the fact that he had been separated from Aurora Bernárdez for a long time, in 1979 he asked for a formal divorce so that he could marry Carol. In total, they shared 5 years and would have been more if she had not died suddenly at thirty-six. Cristina Peri-Rossi, a close friend of the writer, maintains that both Carol and Julio died of AIDS, a disease that Julio Cortázar had contracted through a blood transfusion in the south of France and he would have infected Carol. However, Cortázar’s biographer, Miguel Herráez, writes that Dunlop died of bone marrow aplasia and Cortázar of leukemia. Julio Cortázar survived her inconsolably and speaking of her as if she were alive, barely a couple of years, but he managed to publish the book he had written with Dunlop: Los autonautas de la cosmopista.
“Los autonautas de la cosmopista”, the last book that the author of “Hopscotch” published while he was alive, is a crazy travel diary that draws on different discursive and literary genres, complemented by photographs, drawings and even the reproduction of highway toll tickets.
The surreal journey of Carol Dunlop and Julio Cortázar, from Paris to Marseille in 32 days, was an unusual adventure aboard a red Volkswagen kombi called the “Fafner”, stopping at every parking lot on the southern highway while trying to reach Marseille as the metaphor of all our goals in life, like Ithaca in the Homeric Odyssey. At the end of the trip, the writers discovered that Marseilles exists, but they felt a deep sadness at the end of their expedition and that is the moment when Carol uttered a phrase as wise as it was simple: » Oh, Julio, how short the trip lasted…». Perhaps as a premonition of her imminent departure.
«Your hand writes, together with mine, these last words in which pain is not, will never be stronger than the life you taught me to live as perhaps we have come to show it in this adventure that comes to an end here but that continues, continues in our dragon, continues forever on our highway” , post-script of the newspaper, Julio’s words after Carol’s death.
Julio Cortázar, that man with the deep look, outlined by the frame of his thick eyebrows, was the one who perhaps best spoke to love and there is no doubt that an immense love existed between Carol and Julio, which made the writer ask, at the moment before dying, to be buried next to Carol in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
To these women we should add a fourth that deeply affected Cortázar, creating his attachment to the city of Paris forever. The woman that Julio immortalized in the pages of Hopscotch: “La Maga” (the magician), Edith Aron who spent a long time with Cortázar before Aurora’s arrival in Paris.
“I didn’t decide to go live with him precisely because I wanted to study. In addition, I knew that he greatly admired Aurora Bernárdez, who was in Buenos Aires. Me in love with Cortázar? I did not know, I did not know it. One night, Julio told me that Aurora would be arriving to Paris at the end of the year, it was already 1952, and he asked me what was more important to me, Christmas or the New Year? I don’t know why I told him a New Year, that I would spend Christmas with my father. When we met again, he had spent Christmas with Aurora and had decided on her. It was losing him that I realized I loved him.» Wrote Edith Aron, the magician.
To close these lines, it is necessary to say that Aurora not only accompanied Julio in his last days, but that she was with Carol, until her death. Aurora’s last act of love with Julio was to accept that she be cremated upon her death (both the writer and she were opposed to being cremated) since Cortázar’s tomb had two places that he and Carol already occupied and this was the only way that she was buried next to the only love of her life and the woman who ended up being her friend and with whom she would have shared this beautiful phrase:
“Either the madness worsens, or we really enter little by little into this limitless space thanks to which, and beyond the first appearances, a second reality is drawn that allows us to say, exhausted and tired and happy, while Julio serves us a very cold white burgundy at five o’clock in the afternoon, and looking at us with a smile full of serenity, he exclaims: How well we are here!”- Carol Dunlop’s entry in the travel diary to Marseilles.