Hopscotch: Cortázar's Paris and Buenos Aires

The novel opens with Horacio Oliveira looking for the Maga along the bridges of Paris: "Tantas veces me había bastado asomarme, viniendo por la rue de Seine, al arco que da al Quai de Conti." (So often it was enough to look out, coming along the rue de Seine, at the arch onto the Quai de Conti.) The Pont des Arts is where the two lovers fail to meet, in chapter one. It is a pedestrian bridge over the Seine in the centre of the city, and readers still come looking for the slim figure of a woman leaning over the water.

Visitor guidance: A pedestrian bridge over the Seine.

The Maga lives on rue Sommerard in the 5th arrondissement, and Horacio moves in with her. Here her sick baby Rocamadour is brought to live with them, an old man upstairs keeps thumping the floor, and in the middle of a late argument Oliveira touches the child and finds he is dead. The Club de la Serpiente friends then arrive. The novel gives the street but no number.

Location precision: The novel names only the street, not the building; the pin marks rue du Sommerard.

Sheltering from the rain, Oliveira walks into the Salle de Géographie, where a piano concert by Madame Trépat is under way. Most of the audience leaves midway. He offers to see her home, and they walk past the Luxembourg gardens to no. 4 rue de l'Estrapade, where she slaps him when he offers to find her a hotel. The Rutas Cervantes route reads the hall as the Société de Géographie, still at 184 boulevard Saint-Germain.

Location precision: The novel says only "Salle de Géographie"; Rutas Cervantes identifies it as the Société de Géographie, and the pin marks that building.

During his aimless walk Horacio sees a car hit an old man, and an ambulance carries him away. Much later we learn the victim was Morelli, the writer the Club de la Serpiente keeps arguing about. Horacio and Etienne visit him at Necker hospital, 149 rue de Sèvres, where he asks them to go to his flat and organise his notes. The novel's Paris half circles around that unseen writer.

Part Two begins in Argentina. Traveler and Talita go to the pier to welcome Horacio home, and for a moment he mistakes Talita for the Maga. The novel does not say which pier, so the pin marks the central port area. The present port dates from the late 19th century, and ferries still sail from Buenos Aires to Montevideo and Colonia del Sacramento.

Location precision: The novel mentions only a pier, not which one; the pin marks Puerto Madero, the central harbour area.

Horacio takes a hotel room across the street from the flat of Traveler and Talita, and finds work at the circus where they are employed. In a feverish afternoon he spends hours straightening nails, then persuades the couple to help him build a bridge between the windows of the two buildings. He asks Talita to cross it carrying nails and mate. The street is invented; the novel never names it.

Location precision: The novel never names the street or district of the hotel, flat or circus, so this stop has no pin.

The circus owner sells up and buys a psychiatric hospital, and the three friends follow: Talita as pharmacist, Horacio and Traveler as night guards. The basement morgue holds the dead patients, and there the beer stays cold. One night Horacio sees the Maga playing hopscotch in the garden, only to realise it is Talita. Later he stands at his window above the courtyard while staff and patients watch from below. The clinic is invented, and so is its location.

Location precision: The clinic is the novel's invention, with no named street, district or real model, so this stop has no pin.

In the last chapter, 155, Horacio finds a list of Paris clairvoyants in his pocket and, passing the Montparnasse cemetery, rolls it into a ball and throws it over the wall. Cortázar himself lies in this cemetery beside his last wife, Carol Dunlop, so the walk through the novel ends where its author rests.

Visitor guidance: A public cemetery; the writer's grave is among the sites on the Rutas Cervantes route.