On Beauty

Shortly after publishing his collection of short-stories "Bestiario" in 1951, Julio Cortázar planned on writing a guide to Latin America called "El continente efímero" [The Ephemeral Continent]. In an interview she gave in 1969, his first wife Aurora Bernárdez, still aching from the aftermaths of their divorce, shared how Cortázar had developed a unique method for writing this book. He'd only work on it during the first moments after making love with her, while the taste of her skin still lingered on his tongue and his teeth still felt the soft resistance of her landscape to his invasions. He'd light a cigarette and, while watching it burn away and transcend into smoke and ashes, he'd tell her about all those curious places and people he'd heard about in his imagination. 
Aurora Bernárdez cited one specific place in Mexico as an example, a small village about 30 miles north of Mexico City, where people would get up in the morning and, already knowing what their itinerary would be on that specific day, dress as to create small works of art: a dress that replicated the flowers of a garden, where they would have a cup of tea with a friend, a shirt whose colour contrasted nicely with a mural painted by a communist artist, underwear whose only function was to hide the beauty of a forbidden love. They didn't care if anybody would be present to testify the split second when that work of art came to be, when everything fell perfectly in place, when the dress merged with the flowers in the garden, when the colours found their perfect balance. They didn't care when the lover's sole intention was to rip off their clothes, oblivious to the charm of the invisible. It sufficed to know that they had contributed a moment to the beauty of life.
"Beauty is ephemeral", Bernárdez said. "Julio knew it. He never tried to hold on to it." 
"How do you think he feels about you today?" the interviewer asked.
"When I read the stories he wrote along the lines of my body, the only sentiment that remains visible from his imagined continent is painful gratitude."