Love on the highway

In 1981, Julio Cortazar wrote the story “AUTOPISTA DEL SUR”, which was very well received by readers and critics. Based on this story, he tells his wife, photographer Carol Dunlop, the idea of making an anthropological journey along that same highway, linking Paris with Marseille.But what motivates him to make the trip is a kind of farewell: doctors have told him that the discomforts that Carol has suffered from a while back are due to leukemia in its final stage; diagnosis that she does not know. Carol accepts the proposal very willingly because he knows, doctors have confessed to him, that the weakness that cares on her husband is the last stage of a rare disease, diagnosis he does not know.On May 24, 1982, they leave from Paris aboard a red Volkswagen kombi, which Fafner has been christened, as the Wagner's dragon. The dynamics of the trip is to stop at two paradores per day and always spend the night in the second of them. Since the highway has 68 stops, the trip runs for 33 days. In each of the stops, they make a topographic survey of the fauna and flora, statistics on the dimensions of the viandas and the temperature and quality of the coffee. In the stories they two intervened with pseudonyms Lobo and Osita and several characters from the book “62 MODELS TO ARM”, with desopilating dialogues and comments “We do not know what we are going to discover when entering this time of camels, after so many trips by plane, metro, train”.  Cortazar, later, adds to seeing the fervent activity of an anthill, “ Ants are like Nazis or rock and roll fans, they never come alone.” Passing with the Fafner through a bridge over the Burgundy Canal, he says to his wife,  “I don't pretend to be the Werner Herzog of this expedition, here there are no arrows with curare and the Indians would come to be the French, who unintentionally stop our slow advance from north to meridión.oacute; n”. The entire trip was portrayed in one of the funniest books, which, as Cortazar said, was a somewhat crazy and surreal adventure, titled “THE AUTONOMOUS OF THE COSMOPISTA” .Carol Dunlop died 6 months after finishing the trip and Julio Cortazar in 1984.