Hypothermia

by Enrigue, Alvaro

  Once at the hotel, after agreeing that he’d take me back to the airport on the following Sunday at five o’clock in the afternoon—I kept insinuating that he’d receive his tip then—he offered me his hand and I shook it with a vigor that I never use in D.C. I thought then that if he’d invited me for a few beers I might have roused myself to tell him how Teresa had run off with one of my history students, one whom I had personally helped to secure a scholarship at the University of Chicago.

  Another luxurious envelope awaited me in my hotel room—this time handwritten with a fountain pen, on equally expensive paper—welcoming me and issuing the threat that I’d have to eat breakfast at seven A.M. because the makeup people were arriving at eight o’clock and the six different production teams would depart a half-hour later to film the guest chefs in various sequences around Lima. Alongside the letter was a box of chocolates and a lavishly printed catalog that related the amazing history of Lard. As I leafed through it I was able to recognize other chefs who, like me, were born in the ’60s, and I felt retrospectively offended for not having been invited to the program until so late in life. I went downstairs to the bar to have a whiskey and something to eat before going to bed. There were no bald, lipless, red-faced men in sight, which seemed natural enough to me: Calvinists go to bed early.

  At last it turned out that the Swiss did indeed look like gringo students, albeit without lips: my Colombian waiter, it seems, really does know it all. When I went downstairs at seven thirty the next morning, the hotel restaurant was already crowded with people—it had been years since I’d gotten up at such an insulting hour, perhaps not since the remote but haunting days when I’d been a history professor, watched television, and lived with Teresa in Mexico. The majority of the tables were occupied by regular tourists, but in the back of the room there was a group to which I obviously belonged: five tables, each one with two gringo students and a Latin American one, and then a sixth with only two students, which was obviously my table. I introduced myself there with the same sense of ennui that permits us artists to live so barbarously without ever paying the consequences. My producer was the young Swiss woman with the neutral French accent whom I’d spoken to on the telephone. She told me very cordially and efficiently that we had to hurry up if we wanted to film all the necessary footage, then she introduced herself and the cameraman who would be accompanying us. He was red-faced and blond, but he had a spectacular mass of hair between his head and his neck, and to be honest, more ennui than I did. I told them there was no problem, that I only drank coffee for breakfast—a lie—and as I looked around for a waiter, I took advantage of the moment to sneak a glance at the competition. None of the faces—each of which offered me a hostile glance—seemed familiar.

  I had exactly fifteen minutes to get halfway acquainted with what we were going to do and to take three sips of my coffee. At seven forty-five people began heading up to their rooms to brush their teeth. At eight o’clock they combed and brushed our hair, got us into makeup in the hotel salon, where they also gave us some general instructions, and at eight thirty each group departed for its filming.

  While they were getting us ready, I was unable to talk with any of the other chefs: they seated us well away from each other, whether to avoid friction or to keep us from communicating with each other I don’t know. I was constantly flanked by my producer and my cameraman. One chef—his height and hair suggested he might be Argentine—gave me a look that suggested that it was ridiculous to put up with such things. I spotted the other Mexican right away by his pointed loafers and impossible hair. He gave me a nasty look, partly as a result of the fact that he knew I was better than him and partly because if there’s one thing that people can’t stand, it’s when one of their compatriots gains a bit of recognition outside their country.

  When the chief producer finished giving us the necessary instructions for the rest of the day, they started calling us individually, and we headed out, each tightly surrounded by our crew, straight to the parking area. There, six minivans awaited us, in which we departed the hotel one by one, like children heading out on a scavenger hunt. Descending into the hazy light of Lima and seeing by day how much it resembled Mexico City, I had the dizzy feeling of a Spanish speaker who hears Portuguese for the first time: you feel like you should understand it but something is out of place; it’s your language and it’s not your language—a parallel reality. I was coming back to a place that seemed like home but just wasn’t.

  II

  The truth is that once alone together inside the minivan, my Swiss companions turned out to be fine, warmhearted people. We went along the whole way chatting about everyday things, almost having fun. Every so often they revealed some detail about my life—my time spent in Christian Brothers schools, for example—or they quoted something I’d said in some old interview. They left me with the impression that they knew everything about me while I knew nothing about them: another dream, like the city of Lima itself, sprawling out with all its traffic and all its ugliness, behind which hid a sweetness that was only now becoming apparent to me.

  Our first round of filming took place in a convent in the center of Lima. We spent hours shooting scenes in the cloister—one take after another, visits to the kitchen, exhaustive close-ups panning along the library shelves, moments of meditation in the refectory; all of it an atrocious pretense, tacky affectation.

  The producer counted down from ten to three, then signaled the final numbers with her fingers, and I feigned the kind of distraction of which I’m fully capable—but not with a cameraman breathing down my neck and a gaggle of little Peruvian girls following us everywhere. I suppose that I’d never had so much attention in my whole life and I probably never would again. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking about the days I’d spent digging up old recipes from the General National Archive in Mexico. I would have traded all those staring faces, which looked so much like success—the little girls’ curiosity, the cyclopean eye of the camera—for one second of the enormous attention Teresa once paid me as I expounded on the finer points of Mexican convent life in the seventeenth century, and cooked my colonial concoctions just for her.

  We did additional shoots, similar to the one at the convent, at three other fairly important locations around Lima: the train station for the Cuzco line, a beach resort in Barranco, and the Parque del Amor, where the Swiss were horrified to see young couples in the shadows of the trees making out and groping each other with truly impressive inventiveness.

  At the train station, the cameraman suggested some refreshment. I was faint from hunger, so it seemed like a magnificent idea. I could already taste my beer and whatever we were going to order for a snack when I saw that the Swiss woman had ordered water, nothing else. I looked at the cameraman with desperation and he looked back with the same. I ordered another coffee. We finished our “snack” in five minutes flat and then continued filming. I promised myself that once I got back to D.C. I’d give my Colombian waiter a raise.

  On the way from the train station to the Parque del Amor I noticed how strange the façade was on the only really tall building—in no way did it qualify as a skyscraper—in the center of Lima. The cameraman pointed it out to me: it’s dark gray, made of concrete, without decorations or markings, like my life; a true visual nullity, an almost non-space with that very somber look one associates with the headquarters of some sort of secret police. I asked the driver what it was. He became quite serious and told me, in a very low, conspiratorial tone of voice, that it was the Suicide Building. What? I said to him. Those are the Ministry of Commerce offices, he explained to me, but they had to close them to the public because people would go up to the roof and jump off. Look up there at the top, he pointed with his finger, they put up a fence. It didn’t do any good, though—after they installed it people would take the elevator up to the ninth or tenth floor and jump out any window they found open.

  I asked him with genuine interest if the suicide rate in Lima was very high. Extremely high,
he told me with a sadness I did not expect. When they closed the Ministry of Commerce to the public, he continued, people started jumping off a new bridge across the Miraflores ravine. We were rounding a traffic circle, making the Suicide Building appear to turn away, revolving on an axis counter to our own, like a disgraced planet. My field of vision was moving past it, every moment further beyond the façade. I asked him if it could be the economic crisis, remembering that when I first started going out with Teresa everybody in Mexico was losing their job, so there was a net increase in the number of people who threw themselves in front of Metro trains. No, he told me, the ones who’ve got no money just steal, or they shoot themselves. The ones who jump do it because of love.

  I caused a minor scandal during lunch by ordering normal-sized portions of food for a healthy adult; even worse, I drank two beers. It was a seafood restaurant located across the street from the wharf. We ate on the second floor, which had a view of the ocean. All the locals from Lima—businessmen, office workers having affairs, leisurely young millionaires—were eating lunch downstairs, watching the parking lot and the street, ignoring the heaving, steel-colored sea that was, perhaps, too menacing for their fragile, decadent, Creole aplomb. The crowded tables, the cut of the suits, the gelled and sprayed hairdos, the waiters conscious of their inferior birth, all reminded me again of Mexico.

  The Swiss ordered a plate of ceviche to share between the three of us, and a salad for each; to drink, water. I couldn’t hold back any longer, so I went for a second dish, simple with plenty of food: grilled fish served over puréed potatoes, with a caper salad on the side. I had to eat quickly so that I could order dessert and coffee before they called for the check and dragged me outside to keep filming.

  On our way back to the hotel in Miraflores, toward the end of the afternoon, despite the heavy traffic, a fresh, stiff breeze was blowing in through the car windows. At the corner of one street we came to a bridge connecting the outcroppings on either side of a ravine which led out to the district’s local beaches. We were driving slowly, so I was able to see that the bridge crossed over a truly frightening drop. Is this the Suicide Bridge? I asked the driver. He nodded his head. I noticed that one side of the bridge already had a fence, while another was being installed on the opposite side. I had an atrocious attack of vertigo, perhaps because during the conversation that morning I’d imagined the driver was exaggerating—fueled, like all his colleagues, by the morbid trivia disseminated by radio newscasts. They’re putting up a fence so people don’t jump off anymore, I said, almost to myself. The driver maintained such a grave silence while we crossed the bridge that I imagined it was, for him, a cursed spot: like me, he might have suffered from incurable lovesickness.

  It’s the cholo blood, he said to me when we’d returned to solid ground; to fly away when the earth has lost its dignity, like a condor. I couldn’t resist asking him if the Incas were cholos. With an indifference that bespoke his empty life, he said that he imagined they were.

  III

  Once back at the hotel, I barely had time to change my shirt, tie, and jacket for the dinner at Terapia’s house, which was the thing that interested me most about the whole trip. Despite dressing in such a terrible hurry, I still ended up getting back down to the reception area late and rather disheveled: the rhythms of a man inhabiting an imaginary seventeenth-century apparently don’t mix with those of the lunatic tribes running amok in the clamorous twenty-first.

  The other chefs and producers were already sitting in the armchairs by the vestibule leading to the street. For the first time, I noticed that my producer was very good looking. She’d put on a flowered dress and brushed on the very slightest hint of makeup. Her hair, untouched, hung loose.

  Swiss women, like their gringo counterparts, have an infantile notion of beauty; they want to be pretty, not lethal. They come from cities untouched by Baroque liturgies, and societies that never enjoyed the dubious privilege of being shaped by the customs of a Bourbon court. They don’t know that the body is simply a corpse in the making, that seduction is an assassin’s game, that beauty is not bright but monstrous. As Rilke said, it’s as much terror as we can endure. It’s what the one who falls in love loses because it has to stay here on earth, a pilgrim stripped of its own soul.

  But Swiss women aren’t birds, and she could never understand the flighty anxiety of lovers from Lima. Like gringos, the Swiss long to be happy, while we Latin Americans aspire to burn, nailed to the axis of piety. I was Teresa’s pilgrim, and I couldn’t stop wondering if my stay in Lima wouldn’t end up turning me into her condor.

  I was able to approach, albeit briefly, the presumably Argentine chef, who was speaking with a Venezuelan mulatto. The other three chefs—especially the other Mexican—kept their distance, clinging tightly to their producers out of a crazed desire to win.

  This time a bus was waiting for us outside the hotel. I was nervous but excited: during one of the endless breaks throughout that day’s filming, the producer had explained to me that as charisma was one of the criteria in judging the winner of the Lard broadcast, each contestant would have a chance for a private, pre-dinner conversation with Max Terapia.

  I’d never spoken with—nor do I believe that I’ll again speak with—one of the chefs from the heroic period of Latin American cooking, so the ten or fifteen minutes allotted me seemed sufficient to avoid any unpleasant silences. I walked to the bus with the Venezuelan and the Argentine. The three of us agreed that the best thing about the trip was meeting Max Terapia. Once aboard the bus they split us up again.

  I made the trip in silence. First, because of the rage I felt thanks to their treating us like children: each one of us had his own assigned seat. Next, because I was so nervous that I’d soon be meeting the legendary chef. Finally, because of how ominous the Suicide Building looked at night—we had to pass right by it to reach the city’s nineteenth-century district. The turn round the traffic circle that ran below the building gave me the shivers once more.

  The house where Max Terapia lives is nothing special: it’s basically an old crumbling building on a commercial street. The ground floor has a rolling iron shutter and the only thing distinguishing it from the other buildings—this isn’t obvious until you get close—is a security buzzer connected to a closed-circuit camera. My producer, the sole woman among eleven men, was also, amid a silence barely broken by sporadic whispers, the only one who dared press it.

  Although I’d expected to be ushered in by some horror movie butler, it was Terapia himself who answered and then, a minute later, opened the door for us. He greeted us all, shaking our hands with a natural ease, the last thing I would’ve expected from a star of his caliber. He knew all six competitors by name. He pronounced mine with a Catholic schoolboy’s accent appropriate to Lima’s upper classes, noticeably weighting the first accented vowel then letting the rest fall into silence with princely disdain. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how my unease also came from the way people in Lima speak Castilian, working it between their tongue and palate with a jeweler’s precision: like people from Mexico City, their delivery is grounded in verbal voluptuousness, not precise meaning. Terapia was dressed in some standard-issue drill pants and a sky-blue shirt. He looked older than the face on his cookbooks and memoirs.

  The room we entered was dark, barely illuminated by the light from an enormous elevator, like one in a museum, standing open at the far end of the room. This is my younger son’s sculpture studio, he explained as he led us toward the elevator. He lives in New York, Terapia continued, but he comes here to work in the winters because it’s too harsh there. He pressed one of the buttons on the panel then turned to me. You live in Washington, don’t you? Until that moment he had simply spoken by way of general announcement, the way famous people do so that everyone can enjoy their witty remarks. Yes, I told him, but the winters there aren’t so cold. D.C. is in the South, two or three hours south of the Mason-Dixon Line. And do you return to Mexico often? The air thickened wi
th a deadly electricity, produced by the others’ jealousy at the prospect of my life seeming more interesting to Terapia than theirs. My producer was the only one who smiled when I said no, that I’d never returned since I left. The elevator stopped. I was like that when I was young, Terapia said, in London for nine years without returning to Peru, partly because I went into exile, and partly because I had no money. Then the door opened and we realized that the time we’d shared in the elevator was to be our moment of greatest intimacy with him: the flat where he lived with his wife had been converted into an enormous set for Swiss television.

  They filmed us stepping out of the elevator, the introductions with Terapia’s wife, our visit to the house’s legendary nineteenth-century kitchen, our time in the living room chatting with the two of them, and the three or four minutes of theoretically private conversation enjoyed by each contestant. Of course they filmed the cocktails—I asked for scotch; my producer, to my surprise, wine—and the starters, ceviche again, this time with shellfish. The first course was fish soup, and the second, pollo al ají—chicken in spicy red pepper sauce. Next came salad to cleanse the palate, and for dessert, Venezuelan white chocolate cake and coffee. It was all very good and prepared with excellent taste, but also, following the style that made the master of the house a celebrity, with just a hint of povera: a constant, very lively flow of flavors with an accent on rawness and frugality.

  At last we met the cook, a woman as old as the Andes from whom Terapia said he’d learned everything. I found that last detail more than usually moving, in part because I too learned everything from the servants and the chauffeur, the ones truly responsible for the sentimental education of young Creoles in Mexico City. Also, the brandy I was drinking had by now helped me block out the cameras’ incessant filming and all the lights surrounding us.