Julio Cortázar Died Of AIDS, Not Of Cancer, Claims Writer’s Ex-Lover

Cristina Peri Rossi, the Uruguayan poet, novelist and journalist who was both a lover and close friend to Julio Cortázar, told Argentina’s Clarín magazine in an interview published on Wednesday that the esteemed Argentine author’s death in 1984 was caused by AIDS contracted by a blood transfusion. “Julio Cortázar didn’t die of cancer or leukemia as is speculated, but rather of AIDS,” Rossi said. “Unfortunately, he also passed it onto his dear wife, Carol Dunlop,” who died two years before him.

Peru’s El Comercio notes that Rossi first broached this idea back in 1999, to considerable commotion. But in the Clarin interview, which marks 30 years since Cortázar’s death, Rossi cites letters she says she received from the writer in backing up her claim.. “AIDS hadn’t yet been identified when Julio contracted it,” she said. “It was a nameless illness consisting of an unidentified retrovirus. He got it because he suffered a stomach hemorrhage in August 1981 when he was living in southern France.”

“They hospitalized him and gave him a transfusion of several liters of blood, which came from the Red Cross and was discovered later, to amidst great controversy, to be contaminated…the blood was being bought from poor emigrants. No tests or analyses were done on it because the illness AIDS was unknown.” Rossi acknowledged that the author thought at the time of his death that he could be suffering from cancer, but added, “The diagnosis didn’t exist. The truth is the illness Julio was suffering from still hadn’t been diagnosed. It didn’t have a specific denomination, they were just calling it ‘loss of immunological defenses.’”