There is disagreement about the official cause of Carol Dunlop's death. According to Cortázar's biographer Miguel Herráez, Dunlop died of "bone marrow failure" ("aplasia medular") and Cortázar of
leukemia. Testimonies given by Dunlop's son, Stephane Hebert, and her first husband, Francois Hebert from Montreal, support the bone marrow illness diagnosis. Similarly, many of Dunlop and Cortazar's friends witnessed Dunlop's prolonged sickness, long before Cortázar's alleged HIV contraction. Her ex-husband, for instance, recalls Dunlop regularly being hospitalized in the early 1970s to undergo blood transfusions, a common treatment for blood marrow failure. Singer-songwriter and poet
Joe Dolce, who took her to his
Harvey High School Senior Prom in 1965 when she was a sophomore at
Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, recalled that she was very fragile and it was common knowledge amongst her closest college friends that she was struggling with a chronic illness. In her book
Julio Cortázar, the Uruguayan writer
Cristina Peri Rossi, who was a friend of Cortázar and Dunlop, stated that both died of
AIDS. Peri Rossi maintained that Dunlop had sexually contracted AIDS from Cortázar, who had himself contracted the illness from a blood transfusion he received a few years earlier in the south of France. There is no concrete evidence available to prove this theory. ==Notable works==