Childhood may end when you start to remember everything; and youth, when you slowly forget again . That is why adolescence is characterized by the accumulation of memories. In my case they were letters, postcards and small objects that witnessed each and every one of my trips and crushes. "I will never forget you," so many people wrote to me that I have forgotten and most likely have also forgotten me. In some box must be those other photos of Julio Cortázar that he gave me in Havana exactly 20 years ago now a girl who worked in some type of official body, maybe a photo library or a newspaper archive, portraits that do not exist in no other site, which were not then in the postcards or now on the internet. One of those clandestine copies of the face of the Argentine writer is here, next to me as I write, along with Bestiario and the rest of his books. He has survived the reincarnations of all my libraries.

Adulthood does not arrive peacefully with progressive selective memory, it also does so in parallel with violence. You kill your father and you begin to reject other figures and influences that have constituted you. You get rid of tutors and models until you articulate your own emancipated mythology. In that process it has become very common for good readers to say at 30, at 40, at 50 that Rayuela is an initiation reading, a book that seduces you as a young man, not a masterpiece that also gets you involved when you become higher. That opinion assumes that the reader you are now is better - because he is less innocent - than the reader you were. And at the same time forget that the reader you are now would not have existed if he had not gone through the pages of Hopscotch long ago.

I went to Paris a year earlier than to Havana to visit the cafés and the bridges of Cortázar. I have passed through the Pont des Arts in each of my trips. The first time I did it for mythomania; the next, for interest in better understanding the work; all others by rite and nostalgia. I have no intention of re-reading Hopscotch , but I also feel no need to reject that text or the reader who read it and reread it two decades ago. Especially since a text is never a single text: it is always part of one or more constellations. That novel took me to André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. From them I followed Walter Benjamin. Without that novel - as Roberto Bolaño himself admitted - the structure of the wild detectives would hardly have existed. I am not the only one thanks to Rayuela - this generous artifact - I discovered writers, thinkers, artists and musicians. Neither more nor less than jazz.

But in addition to projecting to exterior systems, Hopscotch is part of the whole of a work. An impressive work, formed by perfect stories ( House taken, Mom's letters, The island at noon, Continuity of the parks, Las babas del diablo ); for short novels as memorable as The persecutor ; by essays and letters that still illuminate the theory of the story and literary geopolitics; by collage books like Around the Eighty Worlds or Last Round ; for the registration of artistic operations such as The Autonauts of the Cosmopist . Over time Cortázar's most famous novel has remained in my past, but the Cortazarian machine has always remained a few steps ahead of me, like a horizon.

The same happens to me with Romancero gypsy and the Sonnets of Dark Love by Federico García Lorca. They belong to the first half of my life, a country to which I feel no desire to return. I do not get tired, however, of rereading Poet in New York ; nor his lectures that interpret the creation and the Spanish culture as no other artist has done; nor to look at his drawings, which dialogue with his texts to add and generate together a hybrid worldview; nor to study projects like La Barraca; nor go to the theater to see new staging of his works. Hopefully the records of his piano performances will be preserved. Even experimental cinema wrote the uncle . It is not surprising that he inspired - among so many other works - the album that revolutionized flamenco and - by indirect extension - the film of the same name by Isaki Lacuesta: The Legend of Time.

I came to Cortázar and Lorca as you get to pop singers who manage to create mirrors of your emotions. At the same time I read with passion Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez and many others. Of them I am only interested in some books now (like Residence on Earth or The Colonel has no one to write to him ); but not their poetics or their methods, which in my case did not become toolboxes. With Lorca and Cortázar, on the other hand, the opposite has happened to me: over time his most emblematic works have become blurred and, instead, his figures have been revealed to me in all their complexity, which transcends the limits of Your texts Mediums of the avant-garde, writers outside the repetition, conceptual artists, transmedia beasts, laboratories open to the future.

Jorge Carrión is a writer. His latest book is 'Against Amazon' (Gutenberg Galaxy)

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