Bryan, I am living in Vancouver with my wife of 50 years. I was born in Buenos Aires and finally left it in 1967 when I finished my two year stint in the Argentine Navy as a conscript. In 1966 I read Rayuela and nothing remained in my memory. As a retired magazine photographer and writer (77) I like to mate my photographs with stories and quotes by Latin American writers (and Emily Dickinson). No matter where you look you will invariably run into Cortázar. I wrote here http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2006/08/english-boy-from-coghlan_25.html

how it happened that in 1950 I would buy Arizonas (an Argentine brand of cigarettes for Julio Cortázar). It is amazing how much YouTube activity can be found of Cortázar reading from his own works or of experimental videos for some of his short stories, not to mention various films (I will have to look for them when I next go to BA) based also on his stories. This recent Medium essay of mine (repurposed from my blog)

https://medium.com/latin-american-literature/circe-esa-femme-fatale-44b42e87508b

will show you my present obsession with Cortázar. I am unable to read more than 20 pages per night of my present project to read Rayuela again. I find it amazing that in some way Gregory Rabassa was able to translate Cortázar’s on purpose giberish into English. In his short story Patio de tarde

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2018/10/an-afternoon-patio.html

the secret to the surprise ending hinges on the fact that in Spanish cola means tail but also old-fashioned carpenter’s glue. I have no idea how Rabassa could have possibly translated it. It was your essay that has now rendered that particular chapter which I will eventually get to some level of understanding. You might find his El perseguidor (The Pursuer) which is a biography of Charlie Parker that is quite accurate as Cortázar was indeed in Paris when Parker was there.