On Julio Cortázar's 'After The Party'

Argentine author Julio Cortázar is not well known for his poetry. Primarily a novelist and short story writer, in his long literary career he published only one poetry book, Salvo el Crepúsculo. That book was eventually published for the English speaking world as Save Twilight (City Lights Books, 1997). Unfortunately the original English publication is a highly truncated version of the original 1984 publication. As to why it’s hard to say but like his fiction, which is known for being playful, engaging the reader to participate in the experience, the original publication was offered in much the same manner. The original English edition removes all the interaction, play (as well as a number of poems), and is offered more of a sampling of this inventive novelist’s poetic skills. Thankfully, twenty-odd the full version was eventually published, again by City Lights.

It’s a shame Cortázar hadn’t published more poetry in his lifetime because his poetry is just as inventive as his fiction, although it is more straightforward and less surreal as his prose. One poem in particular always stuck with me, not so much for what it says but more for what it doesn’t. That poem is After the Party. A simple poem on the surface, which seems to merely describe the atmosphere after a night together with friends and loved ones. What’s not said, what the reader doesn’t get to actually see, is what makes this poem the beautiful one that it is. It reads:

And when everyone had gone

and just the two of us were left

among the empty glasses and dirty ashtrays,

how beautiful it was to know that you

were there like an oasis,

alone with me at the night’s edge,

and you were lasting, you were more than time,

you were the one who wouldn’t leave

because one pillow

one warmth

was going to call us again

awake to the new day,

together, laughing, disheveled.

For me, this poem speaks to the gratitude of having someone at your side, when all the laughter and conversation is over; when everyone disappears and knowing this love, this ‘oasis’ among the ‘dirty ashtrays’ and ‘empty glasses’ will still remain. The word ‘oasis’ is key for me — a reprieve from perhaps a night that wasn’t so perfect after all. One could almost ‘hear’ the silence after the last person walked out the door, smell the stale cigarette smoke, remnants of alcohol in those empty glasses. That moment of silence where one feels alone after company has left but knowing the one important person is still there to share the last moments of the evening with you, that no matter what, you are both still one — together.

It was this mood I tried to capture in one of my own poems, Quixotic, published in my 2009 chapbook A Symphony of Olives (Propaganda Press, 2009, now out of print). While it may not be as positive as the Cortázar poem (nor as good), this one was directly inspired by it. It reads:

Maybe it’s how beautiful you look when you sleep and how peaceful you look as I run my hands through your hair;

Maybe it’s how beautiful you look upon immediately awakening.

Maybe it’s the way you walk around the kitchen

while preparing coffee for the both of us

or the way your eyes light up when you look at me.

Maybe it’s the way your smile lights up the whole apartment,

or your uncanny ability to make me feel as if I am sitting beside

a warm fire whenever I am near you.

Maybe I just don’t know anything at all.

Maybe I’m simply on the wrong path,

wandering aimlessly, stupidly and blind

to the fact that I am merely trying to convince myself

that the windmills are actually giants

that the herds of sheep are actually armies

that the inns are actually castles

or that you are actually Dulcinea del Toboso.

Perhaps I am this quixotic because I really

haven’t learned anything at all.

Perhaps my love for you is best left hidden

behind those windmills,

those herds of sheep or in the back room of all

those inns.

Perhaps I am offering you nothing more than a

fool’s fate

and not what I think is the blood in my heart.

Perhaps it’s time to stop this seemingly endless

quest

and recognize once and for all

that I will never be your heroic knight

but will always be that old eccentric

forever going on his fool’s errand.

‘A Symphony of Olives’ by Julian Gallo (Propaganda Press, 2009)

With this poem, I tried to capture that same ‘voice’ in the Cortázar poem, the same sense of the unsaid behind what the reader hears. As to whether it succeeds in that is up to the individual reader to decide, but it was Cortázar’s poem that pointed the way, to try something just a little different from what I was normally used to writing.

Originally published in The Operating System in 2013