Hypothermia

by Enrigue, Alvaro

  The version that I wrote at that time was the worst of them all, because by then I was loaded down with other humiliations, and consumed, as a result, with the sort of moral outrage that makes us find certain forms of hypocrisy preferable to others. That version of the story was called “Taking Democracy to California.” The title alone is bad enough.

  There is another story, a very good one, by Bernardo Atxaga, who tells how one day, walking through a town in his native region of the Basque Country, he suddenly found himself facing an old man outside a door with a hole in it. They spoke a little bit and at last the old man asked him if he knew why there was a hole in the door. Atxaga says that he answered that it must be for the cat. No, the man told him, it was made years ago so they could feed a little boy who turned into a dog after being bitten by one.

  The stories that I like, the ones that make me jealous and fill me with a wild desire to write ones just like them, have the same dazzling logic as the old Basque man; there’s a piece missing, and that gap transforms them into myth. They appeal to the lowest common denominator, which makes us all more or less the same.

  If a dog bites a little boy and gives him rabies, the illusion of a universal rule of cause and effect is maintained; order exists, for which reason there are categories. If, on the other hand, the boy turns into a dog, the world is uncontrollable—like our affections, our inability to live up to our own standards, and our undeserved misfortunes, which is to say, almost all of them. Atxaga’s friendly old man would never wear a T-shirt that said Old Man; his words alone suffice, for the same reason that when writing literature or making movies, the best stories are love stories that go wrong: they’re preloaded with everything required for A to lead to B and from there to little children, but something gets fucked up without anyone knowing what happened, exactly, and so A leads to the cliffs of W and the S curve of suicide.

  In spite of the fact that he lived almost his entire life in the most acute loneliness, Ishi always resisted the temptation of killing himself—but the silence of a museum is even worse than that of an unpromising professor’s apartment, so that reading about a solitude like Ishi’s, which couldn’t even derive any pleasure from the chic touch of being self-inflicted, makes me feel something similar to what I was made to feel by reading about the solitude of the boy who turned into a dog. It fills me with the hope that someday the futures that slip through my fingers like marbles will seem like a mythology.

  Ishi’s third and final misadventure with white people before surrendering at the slaughterhouse in Oroville was the definitive one. Several months went by before he gave himself up, and it reflects what was going to be his final destiny: the lean-to in which he lived with his mother and his sister was discovered by a group of geology professors accompanying a mining expedition. Although they never met face to face, the disorder that the scientists left behind in their camp was sufficient to make the Indians decide to escape to save what remained of their skins. They scattered. Ishi never again saw either his sister or his mother, who probably died a terrible death during their flight, but who surely left this world with the epic aplomb of those who endure without surrender.

  Ishi gave himself up because he was trying to find something to eat, thinking perhaps that if he was going to die one way or other, it was better to do so with a full stomach. Having made that decision paints him as weak, and for those of us who have tried to tell his story it brings us very close to the abyss of literalness. Being the last survivor of an entire world, who also happens to live in a museum, is meaning itself: there are no missing pieces, and without mystery there is no mythology.

  It’s for that reason, I believe, it is better to imagine him in the days when, instead of being an Indian in a glass display case, he was only the densest of the museum’s custodians. One must think of him resigned to be the last of something, and thus mopping the hallways in a state of holy calm.

  A few months after Ishi arrived in San Francisco, the problem arose that, because of museum regulations, he couldn’t live in the guest rooms forever. So they decided to make him a maintenance worker and pay him a salary so that he could live with the staff. To everyone’s surprise, he didn’t understand that it was all about solving the problem of his being the last of something and there being nowhere to keep him. The next day he put on some worker’s coveralls and asked for a bucket.

  He used almost no money, except for buying a few things to eat, always simple: honey, corn meal, squash, apples, coffee: he was a very small man and notoriously frugal. He also spent some money taking the trolley car from Golden Gate Park out to see the ocean. He spent all his days off there: the sea is the place where we forgive ourselves for the marbles that slipped through our fingers without our understanding why. The rest of his wages he saved up in the safe at the museum: he kept the money in some boxes for medicine ampules that his doctor gave him, each of which had the exact size, shape, and width to snugly hold ten silver-dollar coins. At the end of his life he became fond of staring at them: he would ask the director to open the safe for him; he would set his boxes of dollars on a table and spend the afternoon looking at them, without ever saying anything or taking the coins out. As if they were something else.

  If one is the last of something, his hoardings are not savings, but the balance of an entire universe: we find it there, in Ishi’s untellable story, when the bitten boy turns into a dog, the forest is called “Desert,” and the redheaded girl wears a T-shirt that doesn’t say pendeja.

  Sometimes writing is a job: obliquely tracing the path of certain ideas that seem indispensable to us, that we have to set down. But other times it’s a question of conceding what remains, accepting the museum and contemplating the balance while awaiting death, asking forgiveness of the sea for whatever was fucked up. Placing our little boxes on the table and knowing that what came to an end was also the whole universe.

  Two Waltzes Toward Civilization

  After this we’ll know how to eat against death, to

  devour only dead things, cooking to kill them again.

  We’ll know that feeding means dealing with other

  bodies, that desire makes us itch, and it only finds

  relief in order to get worse, that to love is to devour.

  ANTONIO JOSÉ PONTE

  ESCAPE FROM SUICIDE CITY

  I leave the Soul behind; bearing onward,

  my pilgrim body, deserted and alone.

  QUEVEDO

  I

  Mr. Hinojosa was waiting for me outside the Lima airport in the sinister black Mercedes Benz the Swiss television producer had rented to pick up the guests for Lard, the highly successful European TV cooking show that had been a minor cable hit in the United States and Canada.

  Although I’d heard some of my colleagues express their admiration, and even reverence, for the program, I never watched it because I don’t own a TV. My own gastronomic principles require me to live in total retreat from the world; I don’t believe that one can recreate seventeenth-century Mexican conventual cooking unless one exists in harmony with the ways of life that gave rise to it.

  This vision that I’ve nurtured my entire life was by no means easy to make a reality, especially because my restaurant is located in Washington, D.C., the world’s most shameless city, with its ten-foot-wide sidewalks, its streets the size of soccer fields, and its monuments standing as an architectural prelude to national obesity. Nevertheless, it was here that I found a financier to invest in my talents, and I do what I can to recreate those customs and conditions. Both my sesame honey glazed squid, and my chilpachole verde—a spicy green crab soup—have earned me some slight recognition in the pages of the local food section.

  The concept behind Lard is that six young, promising chefs compete to eliminate each other by passing a series of trials putting to the test their charisma, manners, and hygiene, as well as their ability to improvise with unusual ingredients. The producers film the whole competition—in itself, quite boring—then jazz it up in
editing. Each episode takes place in a different location and is judged by a different celebrity from the world of international gastronomy. The broadcast I was invited to was filmed in Lima because the theme was “Latin American Seafood Cuisine” and Max Terapia was the guest star.

  Like all chefs of my generation, I admire and envy Terapia, although I realize that I’m never going to achieve his level of celebrity: when his star began to rise, in the ’60s, Latin American cuisine enjoyed no international cachet, while European cuisine was still trapped in the excessive experimentation that characterized that decade. So, thanks to his creations, as fine and transparent as a razor blade, he scooped up all the prizes and honors without any competition. They called him the master of gastronomy povera, an authentic revolutionary in an eminently bourgeois art. These days he’s based in Miami, where he owns a restaurant catering to an exclusive clientele and which is only open during the cooler months of the year. The place has neither a name nor a front door; you enter by car, through a rolling metal shutter at the rear of the building. Terapia spends the rest of his time as a guest chef at important, high-level culinary events, and at his nineteenth-century house in the center of Lima, which is said to have, and which I confirmed, its original kitchen intact, with a stove that burns charcoal and guano, a cool room, and a hand-powered water pump. A kitchen, it must be said, on account of which I’m almost dying with envy. All my silent partner would pay to have installed in my own place was a bread oven and a wood-fired grill; he told me to buckle down, get busy, and use them to make something wonderful, which I’ve never stopped trying to do since Teresa left me years ago, and I turned my back on the world.

  The Swiss, it seems, are naturally mysterious. One day, an enormous glossy envelope arrived at my office. Inside it was a signed letter from some enigmatic Secretariat, informing me that I’d been nominated to compete in Lard. I answered them the very same day, that I was quite honored to receive their invitation but that I had no idea what Lard was—of course I knew, but I wanted to keep them on their toes—and could they do me the favor of explaining things to me. I said that I’d be grateful if they could tell me who’d nominated me so that I could thank them: as far as I know, the only people who eat at my restaurant are Adams Morgan residents and a few Mexican diplomats and professors who tend to be excessively nostalgic—as if the food that I make really has something in common with the country that we were all so happy to escape from.

  The same, mysterious Secretariat answered with another extremely pompous letter, along with a promotional flyer for the program, informing me that under no circumstances could they reveal the identity of their advisory committee. In the coming weeks a new panel of connoisseurs would visit my restaurant—they would make the final decision about who would and who wouldn’t take part in Lard.

  Again I requested more precise information, to be sure that we would treat the visiting committee well when it showed up. They replied by saying that the anonymity of the visit was sacrosanct. I felt humiliated, and in one of those crazy, headstrong moments that make us lose World Cup games we’ve already won by committing fouls, I demanded that they at least tell me who my competition would be. Another giant envelope from the Secretariat, another refusal.

  I’ve lost too many contests—including one that was rigged in my favor—for the likelihood of my being judged to keep me awake at night. Even so, I was on the alert for several weeks, awaiting the arrival at my restaurant of a contingent of Swiss gentlemen—tall, balding, red-faced, and wearing thick eyeglasses. In the fantasies produced by my abominably boring and friendless life, in an apartment without a TV, that’s precisely how the Swiss appear.

  Nobody who looked even remotely like that ever sat down at our tables, so I supposed that they’d forgotten about me, or that the Swiss might have snuck in in the guise of gringo students or Mexican office clerks. One of my waiters—a Colombian know-it-all—told me that the Swiss were Calvinists, and that’s how we’d be able to recognize them. I asked him what a Calvinist would look like. He told me that they’re very strict, practically vegetarians, and that they’ve got no lips. I took note.

  At last a woman with a neutral French accent phoned to let me know that my masterful red snapper in fig vinaigrette had earned me the privilege of competing on Lard. She didn’t speak Spanish but she understood my English, and she was polite, friendly, and obviously very young. It had never occurred to me that there were also Swiss women, much less ones that were young. She was quite insistent that it was the fine quality of my cooking that had won me the honor of participating, that I should be proud and list it as such on my résumé, for which reason I supposed my restaurant to be lacking in hygiene and me in charisma. I asked her if she was from the Secretariat. She didn’t understand and again recommended that I include my status as a finalist on my résumé.

  Once in Lima, Mr. Hinojosa was equally unable to set me straight. The moment I got in his Mercedes I asked him about the people who had hired him. He said that he had no information to give me. He worked for a security agency and all they told him was what to do—he’d spent the whole day delivering foreigners to a hotel in Miraflores. I spoke vaguely about how Mexican chauffeurs made more money from tips than from their nominal wages, then after a pause asked him if he wasn’t authorized to give me that information or if he really didn’t know. Although I’ve lived in the United States for several years, I know perfectly well how to overcome the resistance of my fellow Latin Americans. He told me that if he knew he would tell me because he liked me. Sure, I answered him. Are you attending a conference? he asked me after a while. I was riding along staring distractedly out the window—I’m from Mexico City but still managed to be astonished by the ugliness of Lima, which even surpassed its reputation. No, I told him, with my eyes fixed on the horrific casinos that lined the avenue down which we traveled, we’re here for a dinner, and then a kind of competition.

  The program that they’d sent me once I became a finalist wasn’t very clear, at least not to me, and if there’s something I know nothing about, it’s how the media works: the first day was for individual preproduction filming with each chef, then we were all attending a dinner together at the house of Max Terapia—though he was not expected to be cooking. The next day, the actual competition would be filmed at a studio, they’d pay us our honoraria and a cash prize for the winner, then send us home.

  It’s all a little mysterious, Mr. Hinojosa told me. Normally, people tell me why they’ve come to Lima, but you’re the fifth one that I’ve picked up today and only the first to tell me anything. Is it a conference for secret agents? he asked. I told him it wasn’t, that it was for chefs. Another one of the envelopes that I’d gotten after talking with the perky young Swiss woman contained an astonishingly long contract that forbade me from saying anything about my participating in Lard save to my most discreet, intimate associates. I supposed, however, that the clause was really there to prevent my saying anything to food critics and other chefs, so I saw no reason not to tell Mr. Hinojosa that I was going to a dinner at Max Terapia’s house. He slammed on the brakes, screeching to a halt in the middle of the street, then turned around to face me. Is he here in Lima? he asked me, as if the presence in town of a saucepan artiste was something of great import. He looked out the windows, nervously glancing left and right. I suppose so, I told him, then continued, a bit astonished: Do you really know who Max Terapia is? Shifting into first gear, he answered me with the air of a man well versed in conspiracies: If you mean the same man who’s cooked for kings and popes, of course I do. The look on his face as he shifted into second seemed to indicate that we were both members of some secret fraternity. He’s the Peruvian cosmopolitan par excellence, he continued, the closest thing that we’ve still got to Chabuca Granda, although all the cholo trash around here who resent him are just jealous. Cholos? I asked him, unable to suppress a note of irony: Peruvians use the term cholo for the lowest, most dispossessed Indians, and Mr. Hinojosa himself must have had at least
ninety percent indigenous blood. Peru is full of Indians, as you people call them, he answered me. As we call them? You’re Mexican, if I’m not mistaken. I live in the United States, I told him, immediately recognizing how, thanks to my losing a grievous emotional duel with myself, I’d compromised my principles by seeking refuge in the arms of the enemy.

  We spent the rest of the drive in silence: Mr. Hinojosa now making himself the mysterious one—twirling the world’s rattiest little mustache, checking each intersection with low, sidelong glances—and me thinking that during my first thirty minutes in Lima I’d established a rapport with this stranger that was much deeper than any I’d developed during my four years à la gringo. And why did you move to the United States? he asked me all at once, with terrifying acuity. I answered that I did it for the same reason everyone did, for the money, and he seemed satisfied with that explanation. At a certain moment—by now we were near the hotel—he took a shortcut along a side street so that we’d pass by the ruins of a pre-Columbian military post, which was lit up at night. I was sure that he was going to kidnap me until we reached a dead-end street at whose end rose a man-made hill, which was really quite beautiful. Perhaps still on the defensive, I asked him if the Incas were cholo trash too. He didn’t understand the refined sarcasm of my question, or he understood it too well, because he answered me that the ruins weren’t exactly Incan, that the Inca were condors, winged monsters. The children of the sun, he said with a wholly unself-conscious nostalgia.