In Julio Cortázar's wonderful book "Hopscotch" - "Rayuela" in the original - the hero, trying to find order in the world, recites as a mantra a list of addresses of late-night chemists in Buenos Aires. I visited each of these addresses in turn as a way of playing hopscotch through the city, which I'd never visited before. This (longish) posting is the result, a virtual postcard from Buenos Aires, with Tangos and recipes. I apologize for writing in English.

446 Reconquista
Reconquista seems an appropriate street for me to start the game, since, as Cortázar says, it's "something we did to the English". Number 446 has been swallowed by a US bank. There hasn't yet been a Reconquista from the States. Outside the bank two skateboarders collide and are flung into an airbourne embrace. They remind me of the schoolchildren who were on the plane to Argentina with me; there must have been a hundred of them. At midnight they all went around the plane to embrace each of the others in turn and say ¡Felicidades! The hubbub was tremendous, like a sea.

Mi Buenos Aires querido,
cuando yo te vuelva a ver,
no habrá má penas ni olvido.

(From "Mi Buenos Aires Querido",
A.Le Pera, C.Gardel)

366 Córdoba
This is no longer a late-night pharmacist, as it was when "Hopscotch" was written; it's a late-night bookshop. Specializing in Naval books. The possibility of visiting a bookshop at 1am seems to me the epitome of civilization.
Cortázar says that Córdoba has wonderful sweetshops, so I stop at one and buy a white chocolate filled with dulce de leche. It is, indeed, wonderful. I've spent much of my life in search of the perfect chocolate icecream. I found it on Santa Fé near Callao. It's called Chocolate Amargo, it's served at Heladeria Freddo, and words cannot describe it. Freddo's Banana Split icecream - ingredients: banana icecream, chunks of bitter chocolate, dulce de leche - is not bad, either.

DULCE DE LECHE
Cocinar un lata de leche condensata a baño maria durante dos o tres horas. Si quieren abrir la lata y revolver con una cuchara de madera y ver el color del dulce pueden hacerlo. IMPORTANTE: Poner la lata de costado, no hay que ponerla parada. Caso contrario se hace solo dulce la parte del fondo.

There are more dentists per head of population in Buenos Aires than in any other city in the world.

599 Esmeralda
is a beauty shop. A sign in the window says 28 de Julio, Día de la Empleada Doméstica: Day of the Maid. A very elegant Señora dressed in the fur of a rare animal enters. She doesn't see the sign, she is examining her fingernails nervously.

I saw many such Señoras in Recoleta, the expensive part of the city. Recoleta cemetary is where the elite families worship their ancestors. The dead lie in family vaults of porphrey and black marble, many several stories high. In Buenos Aires there are corpses with more space than some of the living. It felt as though this graveyard was the real Recoleta, the living existing only to service it. I imagined being a Recoleta Señora, praying at the family tomb, bringing fresh flowers, keeping the silver crucifix shiny and the glass of the vault window clean, passing my life carrying out the wishes of the dead with a straight back and remembering the Day of the Maid and always keeping my fingernails polished, until the day came for me to take my place on the shelf reserved for me.

Outside the cemetary, the Café La Paix serves a salad for the refreshment of the servants of the dead. I give you the recipe here to spare you the possibly lethal shock of the bill.

ENSALADA LA PAIX
Cover the bottom of a large bowl with very thin slices of chicken breast. Add pineapple chunks (fresh pineapple, not tinned), slices of peach and kiwi, and sliced red peppers. Stir in generous dollops of cream. Serve with toast. Eat at a table in the open air, wearing a tan coloured knee-length coat, a silk scarf, and sunglasses.

581 Sarmiento
hasn't changed from when Cortázar wrote down the list, it's still the Farmacia Franco-Inglesa. The building is very grand. From a photo I would have guessed Paris 5ème. Two girls ask me where we are. They discover I can't speak Spanish, consult a map and walk off. A man eating chocolate-covered almonds arrives and asks me where we are. I still can't speak Spanish. The two girls return, giggling, and walk in the other direction, holding their map upside down.

I learned of Buenos Aires from Borges and Piazzola.
I imagined a city of the unconscious, weird and extreme. Discovering that parts of Buenos Aires look like Paris, or even London, was particularly disorienting. If it were all strange to me it wouldn't have found it so strange, so to speak.

That night I wake up thinking "What am I? Who am I? Where am I?" The answers come: I am Miranda, an english mathematician, I'm in Buenos Aires, and on the bedside table there is a programme for a Tango show and a pink flamingo feather I found on a beach in Patagonia. "Ridiculous", I think, "This must be a dream". I turn over and go back to sleep.

Adiós, Pampa mia..
Me voy camino de la esperanza.
Adiós, llanuras que he galopado,
sendas, lomas y quebradas,
lugares donde he soñado.

(From "Adiós Pampa Mia"
I.Pelay, F.Canaro, M.Mores)

I walk down Florida and stop, lassooed by a Tango.
Florida has a succession of record shops, all of which play loud music to rope in customers. The accordian solo wraps itself around parts of my mind I didn't even know I had. I notice that Tango lyrics aren't about Buenos Aires; they're about leaving Buenos Aires, missing Bs As, returning for the last time to Bs As, dying in Bs As, missing your loved one who is far from Bs As, missing your loved one who is in Bs As but this time unfortunately you are not - in short, they're about Not Buenos Aires.
But perhaps most songs of cities are songs of absence and longing. Perhaps what we need from a culture is not songs to be happy with, but ways to be lonely, angry, sad, or nostalgic.

Nostalgias
de escuchar su risa loca
y sentir junto a mi boca
como un fuego su respiración
Angustias
de sentirme abandonado
y sentir que otro a su lado
pronto, pronto le hablará de amor

(From "Nostalgias",
E. Cadicamo)

749 Yrigoyen
Between Florida and Yrigoyen I get lost. Passers-by see me looking perplexed and help me, patiently deciphering my attempt to say Yrigoyen. (I guessed wrongly which of the two Ys is pronounced zh). They were so friendly and so polite to me, the citizens of Buenos Aires.

It is dark when I reach Yrigoyen. Number 749 is a car parking lot. It is empty. High up in the back wall is a single lighted window with a red velvet curtain. I stand in the middle of the parking lot and sing. No-one comes to the window.

Las ventanitas de mis calles de arrabal,
donde sonrie una muchachita en flor;
quiero de nuevo yo volver a contemplar
aquellos ojos que acarician al mirar.

(From "Mi Buenos Aires Querido",
A. Le Pera, C. Gardel)

In the mural dancers and drummers wearing huge masks appear and metamorphose, the stripes of a carnival tent turn out to be the striped trousers of a stiltwalker, a skeleton pushes a terrified man on a horse, the horse is not real but part of his costume, someone in a long-nosed mask blows a trumpet with a cup-shaped bell towards a monster breathing fire. In the middle of it all is a staid, soberly dressed man, with his well-behaved family around him, a glass of champagne on the table to his right, and his servants standing behind him to his left. He is ignoring everything that surrounds him, oblivious of the fact that his servants are masked. And that even his wife, standing beside him, is wearing a mask.

Eche mozo, más champagne
que todo mi dolor
bebiendo lo he de ahogar.
Y si la ven, amigos, diganle
que ha sido por su amor
que mi vida ya se fue.

(From "La Ultima Copa",
F.Canaro, J.Caruso)

1117 Corrientes
is another clothes shop. I pass it on my way to a Tango show on Corrientes, which is the main theatrical street.

As I wait in the half-lit foyer, an accordian is playing inside the theatre. A yellow glow from the box office falls from one side on the dark slick hair of the usher. I watch, amazed, as he slowly raises the side of his left foot up his right leg until it is just below his knee. Then he turns his knee outward and twists his body so that he's looking at the sole of his foot. He is grave, concentrating. His muscles move beneath his shirt like a jaguar walking. I think about what it would be like to dance with him. The accordian reaches the end of its Tango with a juddering chord. In the silence I see a perfectly ordinary theatre usher with an unfortunate moustache who has just found a piece of chewing gum on the sole of his shoe.
I realize that I had just seen him as he really is, and that this polite nonentity who is now gesturing for me to enter the theatre is a fiction, a hallucination caused by the lack of Tango.

Y todo a media luz,
crepusculo interior.
¡Qué suave terciopelo
la media luz de amor!

(From "A Media Luz",
E.Donato, C.Lenzi)

1301 Rivadavia
is a telephone centre with a thick pile carpet. You can phone abroad from plush booths, send a fax, or buy a yoga book. An old man is walking his dog down Rivadavia. The dog's coat has pearl buttons. The man carries the dog's chain coiled around his hands behind his back, fingering it as though it were a rosary.

Como perros de presa
las penas traicioneras
celando mi cariño
galopaban detrás,
y escondidas en las aguas
de su mirada buena
la muerte agazapada
marcaba su compás.

(From "Sus Ojos Se Cerraron",
A. Le Pera)

I wish I knew how to make carne asado like I ate in Buenos Aires. I think you have to start by giving the cow lots of space. Here's the recipe for the sauce, at least.

CHIMICHURRI SAUCE
Mix together vigorously 4 tablespoons olive oil, a cup of red wine vinegar, 4 teaspoons paprika, 4 large crushed garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon black pepper, 1 teaspoon oregano, a crushed bay leaf, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Bottle.
Leave 5 days (minimum) before use.

1501 Cangallo
no longer exists; the street is now called Perón. Number 1501 is a shop for office furniture. It's the time of the coffee break in the offices. A travelling coffee vendor pushes his handcart full of shiny thermoses. A boy in waiter's uniform carrying a tray of coffee cups waits to cross the street. I sit down at a café counter and ask for a cortado. As I drink it, a man buys ten small gold chocolate coins for a peso, gives one to me, and leaves the café before I have time to say anything. I stare at the treasures of South America - gold and chocolate - lying in my hand, a gift from a stranger.

Llega tu recuerdo en torbellino
vuelve en el otoño a atardecer,
miro la garua y mientras miro,
giro la cuchara del café.

(From "El Ultimo Café",
H.Stamponi, C.Castillo)

Caminito que el tiempo ha borrado
que juntos un día nos viste pasar,
he venido per ùltima vez,
he venido a contarte mi mal.

(From "Caminito",
Juan de Dios Filiberto)

PIZZA FILO
According to the menu, this is a creazione istantanea di Gianni Marras. To cook one, take a pizza base and an assortment of toppings, put on a jazz record, (Cortázar can recommend you some good ones) and improvise. Alternatively, copy the following instantaneous creation; Pizza base (no tomatoes), mozzarella, parmesan, fresh basil, thinly sliced wild mushrooms, a fried egg in the middle.

Emerging from Filo I see the Southern Cross. I remember the first night I saw it, not long ago. I was walking down a dirt track away from the village of Puerto Iguazù. I saw so many stars that night, so bright, the sky swarming with them, not like the faint solitary northern stars. I kept on walking until I was out of sight of the lights of the village. A distant thought, seeming to belong to someone else, said that it would be better to go back now, there might be jaguars, I might lose my way. I kept on walking. I could just make out the track by its phosphorescence in the moonlight. The air was mild. Birds, frogs and insects sang. I detected changes in the vegetation by the change in smell from resinous to sweet to spicy. Each smell was fresh and delicious. The stars thronged and clustered over me. I don't remember when I turned back. Perhaps I never did.