Quicker than the Eye?

By John Skow

ALL FIRES THE FIRE by JULIO CORTAZAR 152 pages. Pantheon. $5.95.

To deal in illusion but not be dismissed as an illusionist is the nearly unsolvable problem of a writer like Julio Cortazar. For him the short story is the perfect form -- a fine dazzle, then a quick curtain and nothing left but spots on the retina. But an entire collection of Cortazar's glittering tricky fiction invites the reader's eye to outguess the magician's hand. The mood that results is a profitless mixture of admiration and something not unlike contempt.

The only cure is to wait two months between short stories, and this the reader is urged to do. One of the best stories in the first of the collection (thus readable immediately, with no waiting) is called Southern Throughway. It concerns a monstrous traffic jam that develops when vacationers make the mistake of trying to return to Paris one hot Sunday afternoon. As sweat, futility, broiled metal and curses coagulate into semi-permanency (the jam continues through the night, through the next day, the next night, endures for a week, persists for a month, maybe for two months, well into snowy weather), the response of the afflicted motorists is, astonishingly, to become human. They leave their cars, sporadically talk, exchange rumors and even pool provisions.

Tribes develop among drivers trapped near each other. Foraging parties are appointed (but for the most part are repulsed by landsmen living near the motorway), and the sick are cared for.

Then, with a rumble of tires on concrete, traffic at last begins to move. The new society disintegrates.

The special quality of Cortazar's subtle nuttiness deserves much patience.

Its essence is caught in a simple story called The Health of the Sick. Alejandro, the favorite son of a large and loving Argentine family, is killed in an auto accident, the author explains. It is felt that his aging mother could not stand the shock of this news, so family members conspire to pretend, through an elaborate series of forged letters, that the son has suddenly been called abroad by his employer. The fraud continues for a year or so, until the mother dies. Three or four days later the last of the forged letters from "Alejandro" arrives for his mother. One of Alejandro's sisters opens it, and finds herself in tears. "She had been thinking," Cortazar writes bemusedly, "about how she was going to break the news to Alejandro that Mama was dead."

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