“I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.”
Cortázar was the son of Argentine parents and was educated in Argentina, where he taught secondary school and worked as a translator. This is perhaps one of the most important points of my identification with Cortázar, my work mentoring teens for the last 15 years. But also, and as it happens with other artists like Agnès Varda, the passion and enthusiasm for telling common stories. He was on the opposite side of Jorge Luis Borges and I like that. He was not an intellectual, he was the common guy telling common things and I feel the same.
During the 2000s while I was living in Barcelona, I had a writer's part and Cortázar was without any doubt a big inspiration for me. By reading and studying him I understood the greatness of feeling like a common person, the originality and authenticity of finding a story in the courtyard of my house, in the bar, on the bench of the park. It was like discovering that life is much easier and simpler than you perceive. I'm still finding in Cortázar the reality as it is: inspirational and satisfactorily exciting.