Book Review: Nurse Cora
A short review of a short story, from All Fires the Fire
I recently read All Fires the Fire by Julio Cortazar on the recommendation for a friend. I’ve just dipped my toes into Latin American surrealism by reading Like Water for Chocolate which I absolutely loved - equal parts hilarious and dark, dreamy surrealist imagery is layered over the rawness of ranch life, rebellion, unrequited love, and abusive family dynamics. Like a good spice the surrealism is not overpowering, serving only to emphasize the natural flavors that in Like Water for Chocolate are all too human and real.
So I was excited to get an introduction to Cortazar’s work as he’s part of the magical surrealist canon (and his novel Hopscotch has been on my reading list for a while). And while it turns out All Fires the Fire isn’t really surrealist, it contains one of my favorite short stories ever - Nurse Cora (or La Señorita Cora in Spanish).
All Fires the Fire read like a grab bag from Cortazar’s journal scribbles; offhand ideas that I found to be hit or miss in terms of grabbing the readers attention or really making sense at all. But I appreciated the experimental feel; you could tell he was playing and taking risks with his choice of story and literary device. And these elements really came together for me with the story of Nurse Cora, which examines the relationship between an adolescent teen with appendicitis (Pablito) and his nurse (Cora) over the course of his stay.
Little happens in the way of plot. The story mainly consists of interactions between Pablito and Cora over the course of his hospital stay, with brief interludes by secondary characters. There’s no exposition and very little context, we as the reader mainly pick up context between the lines as the scene unfolds over the course of a few days.
More than anything else I’ve read, this short story captures the painful awkwardness of male adolescence. Caught between fear and pride, lust and resentment, stoicism and sudden bursts of raw emotion, Pablito’s transitionary period is harshly exposed under the fluorescent hospital lights. And Nurse Cora is equally frustrated and unexpectedly charmed by his fledgling attempts at adulthood—his desire to appear strong and respected without really knowing how, his humiliation at peeing in a pan or being assisted with an enema, his inability to control tears, and his burgeoning sexual awakening. Their interactions are humorous and kind of cringeworthy in a way that everyone that has grown through adolescence can relate to.
I love the literary device Cortazar plays with here where we seamlessly phase from nurse Cora’s first person inner dialogue to the boy’s, sometimes several sentences interrupting each other in a stream of consciousness style with no direct attribution to the speaker. Through this back and forth their dialogue (and through it their relationship) takes on an essence as its own character in the story. Over the course of the story, I believe Julio is also sharing a message on the universality of the human experience, on how although these two have different ages genders and roles, the dance they engage in is ultimately kind of cut from the same cloth.
The adults in the story mainly function as background characters that progress the plot, but they are also examples of what happens when the burgeoning traits of puberty solidify. The father is completely stoic with his sick son; the mother is obsessively doting, worried to a fault, belligerent towards the staff. The doctor—competent, professional, and casually sleeping with Cora— has a clear cut relationship with both the patient and Cora that feels confined to a rigid definition of their relationship as patient and sexual partner. In contrast, the relationship between Cora and Pablito is less well defined, drifting from nurturing to sexual to frustrated and back again in a confused, bumbling manner that feels genuinely organic and personal. Not two archetypes interacting, but real people. It’s this in-between quality that makes the story so magnetic.
The ending hits like a ton of bricks when it arrives. I won’t spoil it, but it somehow manages to feel both inevitable (like, “duh, how did I not see that coming?”) and totally orthogonal to the tone of the story up to that point. It made me immediately go back and reread the story in a new light. All in all, it is an incredible vignette of a short story that is able to pull incredible depth out of very few moving parts - similar in a way to Steinbeck.