The story starts with a busy upper-class man who has a unique passion for books. His passion boarders on obsession described in great detail by Cortazar, “He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him.” The man’s career clearly takes up a large amount of his time, but his velvet green armchair was a safe haven, a place to forget about the world and indulge his obsession. The man’s current fix, was a tale of two lovers. Once the man begins to read and dive into a different world Cortazar begins blurring the lines of reality and the book. The reader’s imagination brings the book he is reading to life. The two lovers meet in a cabin, it was not a meeting of passion, but one with devious intentions. Cortazar uses very specific word choice like continually referencing to blood and describing the dialog as, “raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes,” to underscore the malice intentions they had. The lovers head off into the night, taking separate paths the male lover headed for an estate. The lovers clearly had an in intimate knowledge of the estate, in fact the woman lived there, as they had every detailed accounted for there was no chance for him to be detected. This was not a crime of passion it was one carefully planned, probably for months. He did not need to search extensively through the house for his lover’s husband, he knew where the husband would be. In the last line the husband is revealed to be the very same man reading the novel.