Draft:La noche boca arriba

La noche boca arriba

Author	Julio Cortázar
Language	Spanish
Series	Final del juego
Genre	fantasy
Publication date	1956
Publication place	Argentina
Preceded by	«Axólotl»
Followed by	« Final del juego»

La noche boca arriba (The Night Face Up) is a short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. It is included in the short story collection Final del juego, originally published in Mexico in 1955. A second expanded edition was published in 1964.

Plot

A young man leaves a hotel on his motorcycle, and tours the city surrounding it. While driving, he does not notice that a woman is crossing the road, and he accidentally hits her. She only has a few scratches on her legs, while the man has several serious injuries. He is taken to the hospital. There, he falls asleep, and dreams that he is a Moteca man running through the jungle at night. He is fleeing from the Aztecs, who are looking for prisoners to sacrifice within the ritual of the Flower war. Later, he wakes up in the hospital, lying on a bed with his wounds healed. He falls asleep again, due to fever. He locates himself in a jungle where he hides. He sees torches approaching, and prepares to attack his pursuers with a knife. He does so, but is captured. He wakes again, feeling thirsty. He drinks water, and sleep invades him again. He once again finds himself in the dark, tied up, while he waits for his turn to be sacrificed. The acolytes of the temple arrive to carry him – face up – to the sacrificial stone. When he closes his eyes he realizes that he is in the hospital room, and doesn't want to drink again in case he is sent back. He gives into his thirst, but before taking the bottle, he returns to the dream. He hears the sounds of the drums, observes the bodies of the sacrificed and looks at the priest, preparing to kill him with a knife. Right before he dies, the man desperately wants to wake up from the nightmare, but he realizes that he is not dreaming. The real dream was the other one, where he was in the hospital.

Analysis

The story takes place during the flower wars waged by the Aztecs, during the centuries before the Conquest of America. In this war, instead of killing their enemies in battle, the objective was to capture them and take them alive to their capital, where the priests sacrificed them on one of their pyramids, placed them on a stone "face up" and removed their hearts with a stone dagger. It was the custom of the Aztecs to provide prisoners for the sacrifices they made to their gods.

There is a confusion between dream and reality. The main character, despite actually living during the time of the Aztecs, dreams of realities that he does not know. It seeks to produce a feeling of uncertainty and hesitation in the reader, who hesitates between a rational explanation.