Parks´ continuity, by Julio Cortázar

"He had started to read the novel a few days before. He abandoned it due to urgent business, opened it again when returning by train to his country house; letting himself get interested again by the plot, by the characters  drawings. That afternoon, after sending a letter to his agent and discussing a sharecropping matter with his butler, he went back to the book in the quietness of the studio that looked over the oak park. Leaning back on his favorite couch and with his back facing the only door that could have bothered him with the irritating possibility of intrusions, he let his hand stroke over and over again the green velvet and started to read the last chapters. His memory held easily the main characters´ names and images; the fictional illusion took him almost instantly. He was enjoying the almost wicked pleasure of breaking himself off line by line from his surroundings, and feeling at the same time that his head leaned confortably on the high velvet backrest, that the cigarettes were still within easy reach, that beyond the windows and under the oaks, sunset air was dancing. Word by word, absorbed by the heroes´ sordid dilemma, leaving himself go towards the images that arranged and acquired color and movement, he witnessed the last meeting at the forest cabana. First arrived the woman, suspicious; then arrived the lover, his face injured by the lash of a branch. She dried his blood with kisses, admirably, but he rejected the petting, he had not come to repeat the ceremonies of a secret passion, sheltered by a world of dried leafs and furtive pathways. The dagger warmed upon his chest, under which the freedom pulsated lurking. A longing dialogue ran through the pages like a serpents river, and one could feel that everything was planned from always. Even that necking that wrapped the lover as if looking to hold him or dissuade him, drawn the unspeakable shape of other body that had to be destroyed. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, chances, possible mistakes. From that hour on, every instant had a meticulously assigned task. The ruthless second review was barely stopped for a hand to stroke a cheek. It was getting dark.
Without looking each other already, rigidly attached to the tasks awaiting, they split at the cabana´s door. She had to follow the north heading pathway. From the opposite way he looked back for a moment, to see her run with loose hair. He ran in turn, crouching behind trees and fences, until distinguishing, through the mallow mist of dusk, the walk that headed to the house. The dogs should have not barked, and they didn't. The butler should have not been at home, and he wasn´t. He went up the porch stair and got inside. The woman´s words came from the galloping blood on his ears: first, a blue livingroom, then a gallery, a carpeted staircase. Two doors at the top. No one at the first room, no one at the second. The lounge door, and then the dagger on the hand. The light coming from the window, the high backrest of a green velvet couch, the man´s head over the couch reading a novel..."
--Julio Cortázar, 1956.