Niño Bien

03:00. I fancied an early night. Waitresses Sandra and Paula at Niño Bien made my day by looking delighted to see me and coming over to my table to say hello. I’m famous for forgetting to pay my bill, (it happened twice,) but coming back the next day with a with a pleading smile, a sheepish apology and a tip.

This evening, I hooked up with a girlfriend I met last visit. I was really pleased to have re-established contact, but lost her, I fear, almost as easily as I found her. We were both on the overcrowded dance floor, when I made a small, low back voleo, (my toes stroking the floor) and accidentally spiked her ankle with my heel. I got a ticking off, I can tell you.

‘This is Buenos Aires,’ she said. ‘You keep your heels down.’

Having sustained an injury for months from a heedless tango teacher’s high voleo at a milonga at the Negracha, I sympathised. So when she left early, I felt terrible, but it had been an accident, a mistake. I had presumed low voleos were acceptable at a milonga. I hope I manage to wake up in time tomorrow, to meet up with the girls for coffee as arranged or I shall end up losing the lot of them. Friendship matters.

This evening, I danced mainly with an Italian called Mario – not the one I met at the Milonguita. No, this is Italian Mario, mark 2, who is only in Buenos Aires for two weeks. Another good dancer. As I left, he asked me where I’d be dancing tomorrow night and I said Canning, hoping for a final glimpse of CFBS, my irresistible, if faithless crush from the first visit.

I walked home. Scrawny alley cats gambolled and frisked between parked cars. Sleek, black rats, disappeared under front doors. Cartoneros sorted through the garbage or trailed flapping bundles of cardboard that looked like urban sculptures. There was a half-naked man, stretched out as if sunbathing, asleep on a discarded sofa on Humberto Primo. I got offered lifts by the cab-drivers queuing up for diesel at the gas station on Avenida 9 de Julio and even solicited for business a couple of times, as I walked home in my slashed trousers and décolleté. I sailed past with an understanding smile and arrived home to find a message from Jose asking whether I’d like to go out again tomorrow.