Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop, is about a journey the authors take from Paris to Marseilles during which they never leave the highway and its rest stops. Each day they travel for about 20 minutes in total, dividing the day in two, setting up camp and spending the night at every other stop. It’s a pretty lighthearted and low-effort book, at least it seems so at first - two loafers in love, unflaggingly positive in the face of a world that doesn’t know how or when to be lazy. But it grows into something sweeter and more affecting than I expected it would - about love and friendship, and what all road books are about.
This (one chapter from the book) is the kind of casually beautiful prose Cortazar is so good at, that made this book the unsung little joy it was…
Sleeping Osita
I presume a good explorer tends to wake up at dawn to make various scientific observations corresponding to the day as it begins. It must be for that reason that I too almost always wake up very early, but instead of getting up and consulting the various instruments Fafner [their van] is equipped with, I stay agreeably in the house and devote myself to the study of a subject that Vespucci, Cook and Captain Cousteau never even attempted, in other words: La Osita’s manner of sleeping.
This manner of sleeping is perhaps that of all little bears, something which would be impossible for me to verify, for which reason I shall take care not make imprudent generalizations. In Osita’s case her sleep goes through two principal stages, the first of which is not at all extraordinary: Osita finds the most comfortable, most agreeable position, covers up depending on the atmospheric temperature, and for most of the night sleeps very naturally, almost never face up and almost always face down, with lateral intervals that never last long but which give way to other positions with no effort whatsoever after gentle movements that reveal the depth and pleasure of her sleep.
When dawn arrives, in other words the time when I tend to wake up entirely, for the preceding observations have actually been made without too much scientific rigor, I notice quite soon that Osita has entered the second stage of her slumber. It is here where one might well ask whether this manner of sleeping is all her own or if it extends to the entire species, since it seems like quite unusual, even extraordinary behavior, consisting of continuous attempts the sleeping Osita makes to turn herself into a parcel, a bundle, or a package, which contains everything, thanks to a series of movements, gestures, tugs, pulls and tangles that progressively wrap her up in the sheets until she turns into a big white, pink or blue and yellow striped cocoon, depending on the situation, to the point where a quarter of an hour after this daybreak metamorphosis that I always contemplate in amazement has begun, la Osita disappears in a twisting confusion of sheets, which gradually disappear from my side of the bed, by the way, for no one could imagine the strength Osita employs in drawing them to her until she manages to get entirely involved in them and finally keeps still after one last series of evolutions that complete the chrysalis and the evident happiness of its occupant.
Leaning on my elbow on the mattress, which is all that’s left, I tenderly watch Osita and wonder what deep need to return to the womb or something similar her determined labor every dawn responds to. I know very well (because at the beginning I didn’t know and was frightened) that none of this rejects me, for all I have to do is brush the warm parcel at my side with a finger to get a soft growl of satisfaction to emerge from its depths. The mystery is complete, as you can see, because la Osita is content to feel me at her side and at the same time take refuge in a cloister I cannot enter without destroying its precious darkness, its intimate temperature, and something within her knows it and defends it from daybreak till she wakes. Once—not anymore—I tried to unwrap her as gently as possible from the cocoon, because I was afraid she’d suffocate in the tangled sheets and confused pillows, and I found out what it meant to separate her hands from the knots, bonds and other not so loose ends of the sheets between her fingers. So now I only watch her sleep in her ephemeral and undoubtedly atavistic hibernation and wait until she wakes of her own accord, when she begins to extricate herself little by little, to get a hand out, a trickle of hair, a little bum or a foot, and then she looks at me as if nothing had happened, as if the sheets were not a huge whirl around her, the broken chrysalis from which peeks out my new day, my reason to live a new day.
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop, is about a journey the authors take from Paris to Marseilles during which they never leave the highway and its rest stops. Each day they travel for about 20 minutes in total, dividing the day in two, setting up camp and spending the night at every other stop. It’s a pretty lighthearted and low-effort book, at least it seems so at first - two loafers in love, unflaggingly positive in the face of a world that doesn’t know how or when to be lazy. But it grows into something sweeter and more affecting than I expected it would - about love and friendship, and what all road books are about.
This (one chapter from the book) is the kind of casually beautiful prose Cortazar is so good at, that made this book the unsung little joy it was…
Sleeping Osita
I presume a good explorer tends to wake up at dawn to make various scientific observations corresponding to the day as it begins. It must be for that reason that I too almost always wake up very early, but instead of getting up and consulting the various instruments Fafner [their van] is equipped with, I stay agreeably in the house and devote myself to the study of a subject that Vespucci, Cook and Captain Cousteau never even attempted, in other words: La Osita’s manner of sleeping.
This manner of sleeping is perhaps that of all little bears, something which would be impossible for me to verify, for which reason I shall take care not make imprudent generalizations. In Osita’s case her sleep goes through two principal stages, the first of which is not at all extraordinary: Osita finds the most comfortable, most agreeable position, covers up depending on the atmospheric temperature, and for most of the night sleeps very naturally, almost never face up and almost always face down, with lateral intervals that never last long but which give way to other positions with no effort whatsoever after gentle movements that reveal the depth and pleasure of her sleep.
When dawn arrives, in other words the time when I tend to wake up entirely, for the preceding observations have actually been made without too much scientific rigor, I notice quite soon that Osita has entered the second stage of her slumber. It is here where one might well ask whether this manner of sleeping is all her own or if it extends to the entire species, since it seems like quite unusual, even extraordinary behavior, consisting of continuous attempts the sleeping Osita makes to turn herself into a parcel, a bundle, or a package, which contains everything, thanks to a series of movements, gestures, tugs, pulls and tangles that progressively wrap her up in the sheets until she turns into a big white, pink or blue and yellow striped cocoon, depending on the situation, to the point where a quarter of an hour after this daybreak metamorphosis that I always contemplate in amazement has begun, la Osita disappears in a twisting confusion of sheets, which gradually disappear from my side of the bed, by the way, for no one could imagine the strength Osita employs in drawing them to her until she manages to get entirely involved in them and finally keeps still after one last series of evolutions that complete the chrysalis and the evident happiness of its occupant.
Leaning on my elbow on the mattress, which is all that’s left, I tenderly watch Osita and wonder what deep need to return to the womb or something similar her determined labor every dawn responds to. I know very well (because at the beginning I didn’t know and was frightened) that none of this rejects me, for all I have to do is brush the warm parcel at my side with a finger to get a soft growl of satisfaction to emerge from its depths. The mystery is complete, as you can see, because la Osita is content to feel me at her side and at the same time take refuge in a cloister I cannot enter without destroying its precious darkness, its intimate temperature, and something within her knows it and defends it from daybreak till she wakes. Once—not anymore—I tried to unwrap her as gently as possible from the cocoon, because I was afraid she’d suffocate in the tangled sheets and confused pillows, and I found out what it meant to separate her hands from the knots, bonds and other not so loose ends of the sheets between her fingers. So now I only watch her sleep in her ephemeral and undoubtedly atavistic hibernation and wait until she wakes of her own accord, when she begins to extricate herself little by little, to get a hand out, a trickle of hair, a little bum or a foot, and then she looks at me as if nothing had happened, as if the sheets were not a huge whirl around her, the broken chrysalis from which peeks out my new day, my reason to live a new day.
