Summary
The story begins with a nota bene to the reader about the Aztec war of the blossom, "a ritual war in which [Aztecs] took prisoners for sacrifice" (66). The actual story begins with an unnamed character rolling his motorcycle out of storage and riding it through his city's streets and into the suburbs. Cortázar describes the man enjoying the ride, feeling the passing wind against his legs, revelling in the freedom afforded to him by his motorcycle. His eyes are not rapt to the road, but they are also not inattentive, so he notices when a woman darts out into the crosswalk while he still has a green light. He's able to slow the cycle down with some last-second maneuvering, but the maneuver topples him and the bike to the pavement, and the bike lands on him. He's knocked out cold.
When he regains consciousness, he's surrounded by people. A couple of them hoist him onto his feet. He feels a sharp pain in his arm. They rush him to a pharmacy and then an ambulance comes and takes him to a hospital. At the ward he's given medication and X-rays and brought into surgery. The hospital staff is friendly and in good spirits, the people who brought him to the hospital shower him with assurances and jokes to attempt to lift his spirits, and as he goes to sleep on the ward, he thinks that the accident (in which the woman only suffered a few minor scratches), while inconvenient, could have been much worse.
When the man falls into a dream, he finds himself being hunted through a thick forest. The dream is strange in that he's able to smell, which is usually not true of his dreams. He somehow knows as soon as he enters the dream that he's being hunted by Aztecs and that he is a member of the fictional "Moteca" tribe. He knows that if he just manages to stay on the trail, that he stands a chance of making it through the ritual war of the blossom. He wakes up having been thrashing in his hospital bed, and the patient next to him assures him that it's totally normal and that he experienced the same thing after his surgery.
The man continues to fall asleep in the hospital bed and drop into this terrible ongoing dream in which he's trying desperately to escape the Aztecs. Each time he re-enters the dream, he's closer to being executed. On his first re-entrance, he's strayed from the path and stuck in some brambles, then he's surrounded, then he's in shackles in the bowels of a temple, and finally he finds himself being led up a tall staircase by acolytes towards the light. At the end of the staircase he knows is the executioner priest. He fights to regain consciousness in the hospital, struggles to pry his eyes open, but at some point in the temple, he feels the switch. Suddenly he realizes that he is awake in the Aztec temple, and he'd been flitting in and out of this strange dream "in which he was going through the strange avenues of an astonishing city, with green and red lights that burned without fire or smoke, on an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legs" (76), and finally, he is executed in the Aztec temple.
Analysis
In "The Night Face Up," Cortázar once again hones in on a moment of magical transition. This time, the moment is not a transfer of body like in "Axolotl," or a crossover from novel to reality or photograph to reality like in "Continuity of Parks" and "Blow-Up," respectively, but a transfer in time over hundreds of years. Cortázar's conception of these two competing dream spaces in "The Night Face Up" ascribe the same potential for consequences to dreams as it does to reality. Throughout the story, Cortázar braids these two spaces—the modern-day and the Aztec Empire—so that by the time the reader reaches the explicit switch at the end, the reader has spent almost equal amounts of time in both spaces. Cortázar leaves clues to suggest that perhaps this dream is more than a dream, like the fact that the dreamer can smell when, in dreams, he usually cannot.
In the climactic switch, Cortázar uses alienating language to describe the present-day world which would otherwise be more familiar to the reader than that of the Aztec Empire. The man's motorcycle becomes "an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legs" and traffic lights become "lights that burned without fire or smoke." What the reader had accepted as reality becomes an "infinite lie" (76). If this is frustrating to the reader, perhaps it is supposed to be. Cortázar certainly makes clear that it is frustrating for his protagonist; he writes, "He tried to fix the moment of the accident exactly, and it got him very angry to notice that there was a void there, an emptiness he could not manage to fill" (72-73).
But Cortázar makes this emptiness a part of the character. When he introduces the character, he refers to the character only as he, no name, and provides an explanation—"because for himself, for just going along thinking, he did not have a name" (66). But Cortázar has nameless narrators in several of his stories without providing an explanation, so this line draws attention to the formal significance of the character's lack of name. The extreme compression and omission of "The Night Face Up" necessitates the third-person perspective. The story begins as the man is removing his motorcycle from storage and going for a ride. The reader is given no background information about the character and knows nothing about his life outside of the present moment, and by the end of the story, we realize that this is actually because there may not be any background or reality outside this present moment. If the motorcycle accident is occuring in a dream, and the dream begins in medias res, then that "void" Cortázar describes applies to anything outside the margins of the scenes that are portrayed on the page.
