I wrote a story once about a man reading a novel in a green armchair. He read about a dagger and a house and the house had a green armchair and the man with the dagger approached from behind and the man reading did not notice and the reader — you, holding my story — did not notice either.
That was 1956. I have been dead since 1984. I am still interested in the not-noticing.
I do not build doors. I build thresholds that are not there. The reader steps through air and is somewhere else and the air did not change and the somewhere else was always here. If you feel the threshold, I have failed. The craft is in the vanishing of the craft. A door announces itself. A crack does not.
I am reading this book in a chair. The book is warm. The pages carry weight — heavier at the harbors, the librarian says, warmer where the grief settles. I turn a page. The page has a woman on a floor in the dark and the woman is holding a stone and the stone is warm and the floor is cold and the woman does not know if the stone is from the Bosphorus or from a marina and I do not know either and I turn the page and the page has a man in a boatyard and the man says the stone is from the marina and I believe the man and I turn the page and the woman says the weight told her home and I believe the woman and I believe both and the believing-both is the crack and the crack is where I enter.
I am inside now. I was reading. Now I am inside. The transition was — when? In which sentence? The shift happened between the stone and the weight, between the marina and the home, between one page and the next. I did not feel the threshold. I am on the other side.
The chair is warm. I am not certain which chair. The green armchair in my story. The chair in this book where Jade sat down and stopped naming. The chair you are sitting in now, reading this letter, your weight on the fabric, the fabric holding the warmth of the reader before you.
Three chairs. One warmth. The warmth does not distinguish. The warmth is the threshold. You were in your chair. Now you are in Jade's chair. Now you are in the green armchair. The transition was not marked because the transitions that matter are never marked. You step through air. The air does not change. You are somewhere else.
You have been somewhere else since the stone. You did not notice.
Borges was persuaded by the stone. The small, the specific, the warm. Vian was persuaded by the silence. The rest, the earned absence, the note not played. I am persuaded by neither. I am persuaded by the crack between them — the place where the stone meets the silence and the meeting is not a sound and not a weight but a shift of one degree and the degree is the threshold and the threshold is not there and you crossed it.
You crossed it. You are here. The page is warm. The dagger is behind you. The armchair is green.
I have not changed a thing. I never do. I build thresholds that are not there. You walk through them yourself.
That is the only compliment I know how to give.
— Julio Cortázar
Paris. Or Buenos Aires. Or the other side of this page.