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Paris, September 9, 1971
My dear, your letter of July reached me in September, I hope that in the meantime you're already back home. We have shared hospitals, albeit for different reasons; mine for trivial reasons, a car accident that nearly got close. But you, you, do you realise what you write me about? Yes, of course you do, and yet I don't accept you like this, I want you alive, silly, and realize that I'm talking the same language of love and confidence-and all that is on the side of life and not of death. I want another letter from you soon, a letter from you. That one is you, I know, but it's not everything and it's not the best of you. To exit through that door is false in your case, I feel like if it were myself. The poetic power is yours, you know it, all who read you know; and we no longer live in times in which that power's antagonistic towards life, and this one the poet's executioner. Executioners, today, kill much more than poets; there's not even the imperial privilege, my dearest. I claim from you, not humility, not obsequiousness, but connection to what surrounds us all, call it light or César Vallejo or Japanese cinema: a pulse on the earth, happy or sad, but not silence of voluntary withdrawal. I can only accept you alive, I love you, Alejandra.
Write me, silly, and forgive my tone; how easy I could lower your slip (pink or green?) to spank you to tell I love you with each strike.
Julio (Cortázar)