The dead

Last night I dreamed that the news was reporting that the writer Julio Cortázar had been arrested after fatally stabbing his friend and translator Paul Blackburn during an argument in a Paris bar. While browsing through accounts of the incident and reflecting on how tragic it was, it suddenly stuck me that the reports could not possibly be true, as Blackburn in fact died years ago, in 1971, of lung cancer. In the dream it did not similarly occur to me that Cortázar has himself been dead for twenty-eight years.