El otro cielo

by Julio Cortázar

27 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Julio Cortázar, born Julio Florencio Cortázar Descotte, was an Argentine author of novels and short stories. He influenced an entire generation of Latin American writers from Mexico to Argentina, and most of his best-known work was written in France, where he established himself in 1951.

Reviews

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not sure how many times I’ve read this story before. But I’ve always felt I missed something. I could see the trick he had done with intersecting two realities and it was clever; but it left me cold. It is appeared I needed to read “The sentimental education” by Flaubert and I needed to know who was Isidore Ducasse (Conde de Lautréamont) to make this short story properly sparkle in front of my eyes. That feeling when wipers have finally cleaned the last drops of rain from the windshield. And the joy of discovery was mixed with the melancholy of something has yet again ended both for the character and for me as well with this tale.

[Rebecca Popova · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest, I was racking my brain a little trying to decipher this story.
The first and most banal thing that comes to mind is the so-called notorious escape from the everyday reality of Buenos Aires since the end of the Second World War.

But then over time more and more insistently during the descriptions of the main hero's wandering through the Parisian galleries, the author draws our attention to a certain "American" who seemed to be deeply in some of his dreams and did not want to interrupt the hero and his company, 

“And while she was talking, I looked at him again and saw him paying for absinthe, throwing a coin on a lead saucer, and looking at us (as if we had disappeared for an endless moment) with a careful, empty look, as if he has stuck in dreams and did not want wake up!"

Then the "American" dies in that Parisian reality, which seems to be parallel to Buenos Aires' reality.

"I found out how he fell on one of the streets of Montmartre; I found out that he was alone, and that a candle was burning among the books and papers, and his friend took the cat, and he lies in a common grave, and no one remembers him."

And right after the death of the "American" our hero stopped falling into another dimension,

"I broke away, like a flower from a garland, from the two deaths, so symmetrical in my opinion - the death of an American and the death of Laurent, - one died in the hotel, the other disappeared in the Marseille, - and the two deaths merged into one and were erased forever from the memory of this local sky."

Still, I have a serious suspicion that the second - Argentine - reality is also not very ... real, and the hero has long died, and only his ghost in the form of an "American" has been walking through the galleries for some time.
Indeed, here is the phrase, confirming this version, at the very beginning of the story:

"Even now it is not easy for me to enter the Guemes gallery and not to be moved a little mockingly, remembering my youth when I almost died."

And it turns out that all these Parisian characters are just flowers on a dead garland, which a plaster statue gives the ghost.

“We were, as it were, woven into a garland (later I realized that there are also funeral garlands)”

“But gradually, slowly, from there, where there is neither him, nor Josiana, nor the holiday, something was approaching me, and I more and more felt that I was alone, that everything was not so, that my world of galleries was under threat - not, even worse - all my happiness here is just a deception, a prologue to something, a trap among flowers, as if a plaster statue gave me a dead garland ".

Really, we need not to forget that Cortazar is very fond of "juggling" characters. For example, he has the story "Clone", where he came up with 6 characters and the relationship between them, simply based on the parties of different instruments in a particular piece of music.

[Nicolás Guasaquillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una y otra vez me pregunté por qué, si el gran terror había cesado en el barrio de las galerías, no me llegaba la hora de encontrarme con Josiane para volver a pasear bajo nuestro cielo de yeso. Supongo que el trabajo y las obligaciones familiares contribuían a impedírmelo, y sólo se que de a ratos perdidos me iba a caminar como consuelo por el Pasaje Güermes, mirando vagamente hacia arriba, tomando café y pensando cada vez con menos convicción en las tardes en que me había bastado con vagar un rato sin rumbo fijo para llegar a mi barrio y dar con Josiane en alguna esquina del atardecer.

[Mabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mi percepción es que el otro cielo, es la otra vida del narrador. En casa tiene a su madre, su prometida y su trabajo. Pero por otro lado, tiene otra vida, Josiane, una prostituta y amante, sus amigos y su diversión.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

En esta historia me gustan las superposiciones de ambas realidades; me gusta la idea de escapar a ese otro cielo que puede ser el ficcional cuando no podemos más

[Mateo R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intertextualidad:

Menciones directas:
*Cantos de Maldoror, de Isidore Ducasse o el Conde de Lautréamont (citado en los epígrafes).