ABSTRACT
Like many Argentines born in the first decades of the twentieth century, the period of greatest immigration from Europe and beyond, Julio Cortzar was negotiating between the New World and the Old from the start more than most, for he was born in Brussels where his father was on a diplomatic mission. By the time the family was able to return to Argentina at the end of the war, he was speaking mostly French. He grew up in a suburb of Bueno Aires, raised by his mother, who was of French and German-Jewish origin. One of Cortzar's last stories, The School at Night, merges the fantastic into a terrifying premonition of Argentine politics. Yet, despite the feeling among some admirers that his activism had caused him to lose his way as an artist, his stories even those with a clear political dimension remained as always alert to the interstitial spaces where the fantastic intruded and reality showed its true aspect.
