About the Author: Julio cortázar(1914-1984) is famous for his fantastical short stories. His stories always have an element of craziness or insanity. Hallucinations and illusions are also used regularly to create a atmosphere of mystery in which reality merges with imagination. One of his first stories to gain popularity was casa tomada (a taken over house) from the collection Bestiario. The story Las babas del Diablo (The dribbles of the devil) was adopted into a movie titled Blowup by Michaelangelo Antonioni (1966). This story is chosen for the shortness of it's length. The original Spanish version can be found here.
Continuity of The Parks
He had begun the novel a few days ago. Had to discontinue because of some urgent business. While returning on the train to the farm he had reopened it; letting himself to get interested slowly in the plot, in the descriptions of the characters. That afternoon, after writing a letter to his attorney and arguing with the superintendent over an issue of share cropping, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study which faced the park of oaks. Sprawled in his favourite armchair, with its back towards the door - it would have irritated him due to the possibility of intrusions - he let his left hand caress the green velvet a few times and set out to read the last chapters. His memory retained without effort the names and portrayals of the protagonists; The novelistic illusion mesmerized him more or less instantly. He relished the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the surroundings, and being aware at the same time that his head was resting comfortably in the velvet of the high back, that the cigarettes were at hand, that beyond the great windows was dancing the twilight air over the oaks. Word by word, absorbed by the sordid dilemma of the heroes, he allowed himself enter the images which settled and acquired colour and movement, as he was witnessing the last rendezvous in the mountain cabin. First entered the woman, apprehensive; now the lover was arriving, gashed on the face by the backlash of a tree branch. Lovingly she was stashing the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses; he hadn't come to repeat the rituals of their secret passion, guarded by a world of peeled eyes and surreptitious paths. The dagger was becoming lukewarm against his chest, and beneath it was throbbing the covert freedom. A salacious dialog ran through the pages like a stream of serpents, and it felt as if everything had been planned since forever. Even the caresses writhing about the lover'’s body as if wishing to detain him, to dissuade him, depicted disgustingly the shape of another body which had to be destroyed. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, accidents, possible pitfalls. From that moment onwards, each instant had its use minutely assigned. The brutal twice-gone-over reviewing of details was barely interrupted so that a hand caressed a cheek. It was beginning to get dark. Without even looking at each other, focused rigidly on the task that was awaiting them, they parted at the door of the cabin. She was required to fallow the road that went northwards. From the road opposite, he turned an instant to see her run with her hair flowing. He ran in turn, crouching behind the trees and hedges till he could discern in the mauve mist the poplar grove that led to the house. The dogs shouldn't have barked and they did not. The superintendent shouldn't have been present at that hour and he was not. He climbed the three steps of the porch and entered. Over the blood pounding in his ears came the words of the woman: first a blue coloured room, then a corridor, a carpeted staircase. At the top, two doors. No one in the first bedroom, no one in the second. The door of the salon, and then the dagger in hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair of green velvet, the head of a man in the chair reading a novel.
