Hypothermia

ESCAPE FROM SUICIDE CITY

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.

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.

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.

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 with 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.

Shortly after ten o’clock in the evening the bell rang. Terapia told us not to worry, that it was some friends of his with whom he’d arranged to go out on the town; they thought that the dinner would be over earlier. If we wanted to, we could accompany them. I sensed my producer’s alarm, and I whispered in her ear that we should take him up on this offer, it sounded like a good idea. She exchanged glances with her set manager and the other producers. The Argentine hastily said that it seemed like an excellent idea while the mulatto and I seconded him in the hope of getting the Swiss off our backs for once. The chief cameraman discussed it in a very low voice with two or three of his men then nodded his approval. My producer squeezed my leg under the table to show that she liked the idea, and I patted the back of her hand.

In all honesty, the night became much more enjoyable the moment we got back on the bus, everyone by now half-buzzed and the overall mood relaxed by the sweet hint of decadence that inevitably marks everything people from Lima do. Their feigned but ferocious humor, the grace with which they move about without seeming to touch the floor, their irresistible smiles, which in other circumstances would seem stiff and artificial, were very well-suited to a night together out on the town.

We went to a place quite nearby whose name I can’t possibly remember. It was a gigantic club, some kind of industrial hanger, possibly an old marketplace, with hundreds of tables crowded around a dance floor dominated by a bandstand. As one of the dolled-up women accompanying us explained — I was translating her words right into my producer’s ear, my hand on her naked, sleeveless elbow — it was a club where immigrants from Puno got together to revisit old times, dancing to the rhythm of bands that played a new type of essentially eclectic pop music: turntables and panpipes, charangos and rhythm boxes, synthesizer waltzes. On the weekend — it was Friday — there was also a series of intermissions with performances of some rather homey folk dances whose authentic innocence, the woman said, made them worth seeing.

We sat at a gigantic table where they served us a complimentary Pisco Sour made from the strong Peruvian liquor of the same name, then filled the tablecloth with pint bottles of beer and some tiny glasses bearing the brewery name: Cuzqueña. By the time I realized it, I was dancing with the Swiss woman to the impenetrable Puno fusion. It seemed like my producer had never drunk more than a glass or two of wine. Now, thanks to the Pisco, she was noticeably relaxed. It was a sort of zero sum game: she’d never been treated as if her body was her most important asset, and I hadn’t stepped onto a dance floor in years. While avoiding the mambo — I was really out of practice — I taught her to dance some rhythms related to salsa and cumbia. I could feel the moment she loosened up for me: when the lower back muscles — the ones you press to guide your dance partner — start trembling, you know that whether a woman is Calvinist, Catholic, or Jewish, you can get her into bed.

At this point it’s probably already clear that in spite of my efforts to live like an exiled saint, I also know how to get into trouble. It’s not easy these days to live like a monk, just as it wasn’t in the seventeenth century; achievement matters less than determination. One more or one less gringa bouncing on my mattress springs in no way reduces the symbolic valor of my effort, and the archaic consistency of my cooking suffers more if I’m haplessly wasting the divine substance of my semen jerking off than if I occasionally sacrifice my vital precepts. In all my many days of weakness, whenever I end up bringing some customer home to my cell, I’ve never felt that I was being unfaithful either to my way of life or to my tormented memory of Teresa. If one of them occasionally — or frequently — woke up in my bed the next morning, it was because we went to sleep together drunk. I’ve never offered them breakfast and I’ve never slept with the same woman twice. Like priests, more than being celibate, I try to stay focused on the ministry to which I’m bound.

The Swiss woman and I had ended up at the opposite corner of the table from where Terapia was sitting. Nearly isolated, we were able to be more relaxed. During the set breaks, the folk dances, or the stretches of incomprehensible music, she chatted with the Paraguayan chef’s producer — whom I began to privately suspect had been invited simply to round out the diversity of our group — while I talked with one of Terapia’s friends. His name was Pablo and we were uncomfortably alike in height and complexion; the ten or fifteen years he had on me made him heavier, and his hair was quite gray, but we could have passed for brothers. He owned a very successful chain of coffee shops.

He seemed, for reasons that escaped me, somewhat deranged; he made unbelievably insolent remarks about the poor local folk-dancers, insulting them however possible whenever they passed near the table. Between one savage comment and another he maintained long, guarded silences, his eyes fixed on a woman — also middle-aged, very blonde and extraordinarily good-looking — who spent the whole evening hanging on Terapia’s arm. Every once in a while he assumed an air of tremendous gravity, explaining to me with an anthropologist’s precision the regional motifs one should look for in a dance. In those moments he showed himself to be far more fragile than his bastardly attitude revealed the rest of the time.

We got out of there around two o’clock in the morning, by which time I had the Swiss woman’s heart in the palm of my hand, like a fresh-squeezed orange. I no longer remembered that the idea had been to spend the evening with Terapia when he said goodnight to us all in the aisle of the bus, followed out by a long line of his friends. The café owner was last. He had the arm of the middle-aged blonde woman, who barely said goodnight to us, attentive as she was to every gesture from the star chef up ahead.

Pablo told me he would call me early on Sunday, once the contest was finished, to show me around Lima: we’d ended up on friendly terms after I’d gotten totally fed up with his anthropological sentimentality: among the many dances that we saw, the one from Cuzco was the most peculiar because it had almost no traces of the Hispanic, African, and Chinese cultures which shaped modern Peruvian tradition. It was a leaping line of uproarious male dancers dressed in outfits with very wide sleeves. With each leap they made, they extended their arms and gave a harsh, ferocious, birdlike cry. With glassy eyes — whether from drunkenness or nostalgia for everything that we’ve all lost forever, I don’t know — my confidant told me that it was a dance of the fallen Incas, of princes to whom nothing remained but the memory that they’d once been condors. Recalling how invincible Teresa made me feel when she believed that I was the historian Mexico needed, I thought I might collapse there and then. I felt obliged to explain the sadness that came upon me so visibly — Pablo put his arm around me — saying how the defeat of the Incas, the bottomless pit, reminded me of the Mexicans’ own fall. Pablo told me not to worry, that people from Lima understood passion.

I didn’t go to bed with the Swiss woman that night because it wouldn’t have been very ethical before the contest was finished — that’s what she told me, anyway, though the idea had never crossed my mind. I didn’t sleep with her the next night either because it would have been too depressing after my complete and utter defeat.

I was knocked out in the first round. I didn’t even make it to the improvisations, which, given that I’m a methodical and insecure man, was where I thought I’d be disqualified. After the terrible moment when I found out that I’d been eliminated, the Argentine told me not to take it personally, that a Peruvian fellow like Terapia would never give the prize to a Mexican Creole like me. He said that both countries were too much alike, and that the Paraguayan was the one who was going to win: nobody had ever heard of his restaurant in Asunción, which would mean no new competition for Terapia. I don’t know about the accuracy of every element of his theory, but regarding who would emerge as the winner, he was speaking with the voice of a prophet.

I didn’t want to wait for them to finish filming, so I said that I was stepping outside the studio to smoke a cigarette, then kept walking to the street. I caught a taxi back to Miraflores where I drank three vodkas in a row at the hotel bar. After taking a nap I went out looking for bookshops to see if I could find some titles about convent life during Peru’s viceregal era.

When I got back to the hotel, now late in the afternoon, I found a message from my producer — she was mostly angry because I hadn’t been there to be filmed congratulating the winner, but still invited me out to dinner.

We went to a restaurant located at the foot of the magnificent ruins that Mr. Hinojosa had driven me past the night I arrived. We chatted like old friends: every defeat, I’ve noticed, brings us closer to our fellow sufferers, bound by that fatal, dispassionate knot that joins the survivors of great calamities. I didn’t insist that she have a glass of wine. We talked a little bit about her job and a lot about mine; a little bit about her love life, absolutely nothing about mine.

We said good-bye in the hotel reception area: she was flying back to Geneva via New York on Sunday morning and I was leaving in the afternoon. I slept well in spite of, or thanks to, the fact that my room had a real bed, not the hard thin mat that I’d been stubbornly sleeping on since Teresa left me.

In the morning the phone woke me up. It was Pablo, Max Terapia’s friend, who was inviting me to have breakfast at one of his coffee shops, after which he would take me to see the beaches so that I wouldn’t leave without getting at least a glimpse of them. I told him that I preferred to visit the Gold Museum. He said that he’d observed the other night that I wasn’t ready to see it, that it would be better if I visited it when I returned to Lima, wellcured of the sickness that was obviously tormenting me and which would not be helped by the sight of golden condors flying toward the sun all over the museum. Nobody had ever said anything so strange to me, so it sounded reasonable enough. I asked him to give me half an hour to get cleaned up.

We had breakfast in one of his cafés, on a street that reminded me intensely of the Colonia Roma in Mexico City. There, many years before, a restauranteur friend of mine named Raul had started promoting some of the recipes that I’d unearthed to write my book about Spanish colonial cuisine. It was Raul who found me in my apartment, almost dead of starvation, who knows how many weeks after that fucking whore Teresa had run off with my student. The very same Raul gave me a job at his place when we found out that they’d fired me from the university. At first, my job consisted of sitting in a chair behind the cash register, but, little by little, and mostly from pure boredom, I started working my way into the business and the kitchens. Less than a year later my friend introduced me to the gringo who wanted to open a restaurant serving nouveau-Mexican cuisine in the United States.

There was nothing spectacular about Pablo’s coffee shop, although the food, like everywhere in Lima, was good. Among the numerous banalities we exchanged during breakfast, he asked me if the Swiss woman was beautiful. What, I said. I don’t know, is she beautiful? How should I know, I answered him. Each to his own. So then you think she’s beautiful. She’s pretty, not lethal, I said, and he gave a start. What do you mean she’s not lethal? he asked me. She’s lived in Geneva her whole life, I told him, a city where you leave your bicycle parked on the street and nobody steals it. And if she moved to Lima? he asked me. I suppose after a while she’d learn how to style her hair, to steal her brother’s bicycle — to be lethal. A look of horror crossed his face. Oh, you’ve got it bad, he told me. Really bad.

He took me around in his car to see a number of different places. We went to a couple of beaches and to a fantastic old bookstore owned by a Uruguayan — I walked out the door with a whole box of books. We ate lunch at a really expensive restaurant, even by Washington standards: built out on the water, surrounded by the ocean, and connected to the land by a long, narrow pier, it was called La Rosa Náutica. The idea was that you would feel like you were on a ship. Every so often he insisted on repeating his question, but by now he was answering himself: She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Could she ever be lethal? I ignored him and asked if we could talk about politics or Peruvian history, which were the topics where his sharp, crafty wit shone best. We went to one of his other cafés for coffee and brandy — all his places had the same name but this one was really nice, located near the hotel so that we wouldn’t waste time with the traffic and I wouldn’t miss my plane.

The café was in a shopping mall with ethereal architecture: an extremely delicate structure that thrust out over the ravine. The café occupied the building’s central location, so that one was seated literally above the abyss, from which the customers were protected by a railing and a rather tall partition of heavy glass.

I wore myself out praising the café’s setting. Pablo told me that he was thinking of selling it, that having to clean the salt off the glass every day was too complicated. He waved his hands around too much while talking; I’ve been criticized for doing the same thing. The mall had been designed by a Catalan, he explained, who had not taken into account the locals’ habit of leaping to their deaths. I had to install the glass myself to avoid negative publicity when someone ended up jumping off. And there’s no built-in way for us to clean it; we’ve got to do it with scaffolding, every morning. It’s super dangerous. I told him about my vertiginous fascination with Lima’s penchant for flight. He made some rather nervous references to pre-Hispanic suicide practices, and mentioned aerial hara-kiri. He asked me if it was love-sickness that was tormenting me. Obviously, I said. It’s the Swiss woman, isn’t it? So she is beautiful, kind of lethal. It’s not the Swiss woman, I told him. It’s a long story, from a long time ago, and I really don’t feel like telling it. Nobody, I concluded, can get so worked up over a Calvinist, believe me. You never know, he told me. My wife is Danish and I think she’s sleeping with Terapia.

Glancing at his watch, he stood up abruptly, saying that he’d lost track of time, that he had tickets to take his kids to the soccer match, and would I please excuse him and catch a taxi back to the hotel. We shook hands with the tenderness of brother exiles. I stayed and ordered another brandy: I’d left my suitcases at hotel reception and I had a little extra time before Mr. Hinojosa would be coming by to pick me up.

I paid my bill, despite the waiter insisting that Pablo’s friends didn’t pay at his establishments. Walking out to the street I saw that on one of the shopping mall’s balconies the management hadn’t bothered to install any safety glass. A whole crowd of people was gathering there, looking down. Once inside the taxi I heard the ambulance sirens: another condor, the driver told me. On Saturday they finished work on the Suicide Bridge, so now they’re coming over here.

LAST SUPPER IN SEDUCTION CITY

Friday, March 20.

As I saw the lights of Mexico City spread out below us before landing I caught myself mentally humming the tune of “Volver”—an unbearable affectation. Just as Carlos Gardel sings in that classic tango. . the snows of time have silvered my temples. His turned silver because he was away for twenty years, mine because premature gray hair runs in my family: I’m condemned to suffer low-impact drama. I remembered my grandfather saying that Agustín Lara was a hick whose one single virtue was that he liberated us from the tango thanks to his impossible talent for composing boleros. Then I forced myself to think about Guadalupe Trigo, the later improviser of boleros, who says that at night the city dresses up like a mariachi. But that doesn’t really describe it: it’s more like the Milky Way, a sacred host of fire which you must swallow whole, without chewing.

I wonder what Teresa would think if she could see me with so much gray hair. Since I bought a computer for my apartment and managed to get myself online, I’ve been back in touch with el Distrito Federal. They tell me that she’s been living in Mexico ever since she broke up with my student, that when she runs into one of our mutual acquaintances she always asks about me. I doubt that she’s weathered the silent ravages of time very well either.

My mother and my sister picked me up at the airport. I will stay with them for the weekend and on Monday I’ll go over to Raul’s apartment: my family’s house is too crowded — there I’ll be better able to practice the monkish discipline to which I’m accustomed. They’re not happy with the idea, but they realize that it’s better than nothing. I’m going to stay with Raul through the week, then on Saturday and Sunday I’ll be back with them again.

Monday, March 23.

Too much family. At my mother’s house I was able to stick to my schedule, but the demand for socializing there is heavy: my brothers show up every little while with their wives and kids, and then my aunts and uncles come around, and then the visits with Grandpa who’s been sick forever.

I’ll be better here. I’m staying in a room that seems much more like my apartment in Mount Pleasant: a bed — iron, perfect for a convalescent like me — a table, and a wicker chair; it even has a window. The kitchen is an abandoned wreck — being a restaurant owner, Raul only uses it for making coffee — but I’ll see what can be done. At any rate, I have enough business appointments the whole week to end up eating out every night.

Today we’re going out to have a drink, for old times’ sake. It’s Monday, so I imagine we’ll take it easy. I have a lot to get done in just a few days. Some gallery owners from Colonia Roma want to make me a business proposal. I don’t feel quite ready to come back and live in Mexico City, but here I am, after all. Tomorrow I’m going to the Universidad Nacional to visit the archives at the History Institute. They’ve got a collection of women’s letters from the colonial era that I’ve never heard about before. If I want to capitalize on my run of good luck that started after doing Lard, it’s absolutely necessary for me to publish a cookbook: my tome about eating habits is too dense for the rather frivolous direction my life has taken, something I no longer really understand.

Tuesday, March 24.

I hadn’t remembered Mexico City being so wild. We went to a simple, nicely designed bar where they serve tapas. Despite being Monday, it was full — it must have been past eleven o’clock when we got there. We were all chatting pretty carelessly. On a trip to the bathroom I ran into Esther, whom I’d dated back during the sad, hazy years of high school. She got married, then divorced, earned a relatively worthless postgraduate degree in France, and now she’s doing well as a psychotherapist. She introduced me to her boyfriend. He’s pretty much what you’d expect for someone in her situation: bald but otherwise hairy, almost fat, patient, well-intentioned. We didn’t talk much. She’s around 130 pounds, maybe 110, very curly blonde hair: a Polish princess maturing into a queen in exile.

When I returned from the men’s room, Raul was already chatting with two women about a thousand years younger than us. Who knows where he found them. One was a big talker, over the top, perfect for him; the other one had crooked teeth but a moving smile. Esther walked by on her way out, and when she came over to say good-bye to me, told me it would be nice if we could chat, that we might see each other later at such-and-such a bar. It made sense to me because I was already drunk. Raul took notice.

We dumped the girls when it became obvious that they were too nice and modest — we left them in good company with a couple of lesbian filmmakers who might find a way to cure them — and we went to the bar where Esther was waiting for me.

She said Hi and I didn’t peel my tongue off of hers until I got way down deep, far enough to taste the café con leche she’d drunk with her breakfast. I felt all the vertebrae in her tiny, childlike backbone, and she pretended to be indignant that I’d unfastened her bra in public. I told her I was so loaded she should be thankful I didn’t just tear her shirt off. Now, up close to her, I admired once again her tiny ears with their little girl’s shiny hoop earrings, barely visible. She smelled the same as always, the quasi-synthetic odor of distillation shared by all women who don’t sweat. Before leaving we snorted some coke in the bathroom vestibule.

It was hard for us to walk because Esther was wearing a pair of jeans that were too tight to admit my hand, which I kept glued to her ass the whole time. I had to unsnap them before we could get comfortable in the back of Raul’s car, where I went right back to groping the plush pissoir of her sex. Something inside of me made peace with my lost childhood — one without Baudelaire, without rhyme, without a sense of smell, as López Velarde said — as I kept on masturbating her in the back seat.

Once we got into the iron bed and carried out the first assault — pure muscle and fury for all our missed opportunities — she said, as she turned around and offered me her backside, that the second time she wanted me to put it up her ass. I started rubbing my nose up and down her milk-white spine, and then ran my tongue from the seam between her cheeks up to the back of her neck. We didn’t do that when we were kids, I told her. She turned to look at me from the persecuted depths of her nearly transparent eyes, and said that her being married to the world’s biggest idiot had at least been good for something. Then she began stroking my member with her hands. She meticulously examined my sex, running her fingertips along the folds of skin that were expanding from the miraculous touch of her skin and my memory. You’re the only uncircumcised man I’ve gone to bed with, she told me. Then she asked me to stand up and she raised herself into a sitting position. She smelled it carefully, kissed it, and licked it from the scrotum to the bulb; she took it in her two hands and slipped the tip into her mouth. She caressed it slowly with her tongue, sucked on it, and tickled me at the base of my shaft. I turned her around again, working it between the hemispheres of her ass. She stretched out an arm from beneath her open rosebud and caressed my testicles. She turned and looked me in the eyes and said: Come inside, with her face somewhere between fear and fervor.

I slipped my penis in and out of her vagina several times to get lubricated. She was so worked up that my balls knocking against her clitoris stimulated her even more. She buried her face in the bed and opened herself up. I pushed inside and she gripped the edge of the mattress and yowled. Her back moved like one single muscle as it flexed with each new thrust. She took my left hand and clasped it to her breasts — overcome by gravity — snorting so wildly I thought it would earn me a standing ovation from the neighbors when I stepped outside the next day. We did it once more, this time with pure tenderness, before passing out.

I woke up really late, totally destroyed but still savoring a generous satisfaction. I rousted her out of bed and she told me not to worry, she had no patients until the afternoon. I told her I was in a hurry, that I had to go and do some research. I didn’t even offer her an apple for the road. She asked me for the house phone number and I told her I didn’t know what it was. Once I was good and sure that she wasn’t going to return, I went back to bed.

Raul is taking a bath. I don’t remember who he brought home, if he brought anyone, that is. We’re going to go have lunch at a nearby restaurant — I’m in no shape to go to the market to buy any better ingredients than the horrors he’s got in his fridge. The archives will have to wait until tomorrow; my pupils are shrunk down to pinpoints and the bright light from the copier would be unbearable.

Wednesday, March 25.

Tijuana. Around 130 pounds, maybe 110, gigantic eyes, matte-black hair, the occasional diabolic smile, married to something that seems like a Russian, slow but friendly. She used to go out with Raul until the days came when we all turned into predators of our own karma: they’d believed in the nice little house with flowers in the windows, in having little children, in taking them to Mass with their hair neatly combed on Sundays. When they broke up she took vengeance on him by sleeping with all his friends, which both did and did not include me: even though I’d always lusted after her, once I had her at my disposal, my loyalty to Raul proved stronger than my desire. Either that or I was really stoned and I just couldn’t get it up.

We ran into her when she was having lunch with her husband at the restaurant, so we sat with them and started talking shit about half of Mexico City. We’ve got quite a few friends in common, Teresa among them — she told me that Teresa doesn’t have anyone steady right now although she’s got no lack of company, and insisted that she’d been asking about me. At a certain moment she discreetly placed her hand on my leg.

More people we know showed up: my first editor, the dyke filmmakers on whom we dumped those young girls last night — they still haven’t forgiven us — another refugee from the history department who ended up a millionaire by founding his own crisis-management agency: specializing in World War II turned out to be good for something. He was with his wife and a baby. During dessert Tijuana sent her husband off to do some lowly errands, dispatching him with a wave like a goddess. Before he’d even finished saying goodbye she’d already moved her hand to my fly.

More people arrived along with the coffee: the culture editor for a magazine supplement and his assistant reviewer, a young man who must be his lover — even his wife calls him Socrates — and a movie critic I hadn’t seen since graduate school, followed by his wife, who’s obviously involved with Raul. We went to have some drinks at a place nearby. I stayed sitting at the bar chatting with Tijuana: she quit dancing, teaches Italian classes, eats lunch every day at her parents’ house, and is generally happy. She had to get home at a reasonable hour and I wanted to get to bed early, so we left a little before five o’clock and went to a hotel that she suggested. They were offering a Tuesday discount and gave us a Jacuzzi suite for the price of a regular room.

The thing with Tijuana is that she always ended up causing a scene — there were so many times when we were younger that I pulled her out of some club totally bombed and half naked — so I just let her do her thing. You’ve got to treat me like your whore, she told me in an almost motherly tone as she sat me down on a tiny chair in the gigantic room they’d given us. Then she started undressing.

She’s still got the same amazing body she had when she was young, except for her breasts, which have shrunk, thanks to the horrific diets I’m sure she follows. Her buttocks are full and high, her sex mysterious, nearly hidden beneath a thick, trimmed bush. She’d kissed me on the sly in the bar and then, in the taxi, with an almost painful intensity. Once we were in the room she didn’t kiss me again until she was naked. She still smells like some stone-age fruit locked away in my Neanderthal memory, which is the one I access the most.

She removed my shoes and socks — the sole offensively placed on her thigh while she untied them — then stood me up and undid all my buttons. She showed a demonic smile when she felt my member lurking around, searching for the opening in my underpants. She played with it for a while, first with her hand and then with her nose and tongue. Once in bed, I first let my face melt into her vagina. Then I plunged in ruthlessly, ripping into her as she begged me through clenched teeth to grip her ass with both hands. Although she was soaking wet, she was still very tight, so we did a lot of wriggling and dancing, and as I started thrusting it felt like something ruptured: if our hips didn’t synch up just right she dug her nails into the base of my spine. I asked her two or three times if I was hurting her; with glassy eyes she told me that was how she liked it.

We did it twice, almost back to back. In between I entertained myself playing with the fine soft hair that grows around her coccyx. I’ve got a little tail, she told me. We phoned her husband: she told him that she was out with Teresa and that they were heading to the movies. Then she phoned Teresa and told her that she was with her lover (another demonic smile as she rolled around on the bed), so would she please not call her house. We put on our underwear and sat down to chat in the little sitting room. We brewed some coffee and from her bag she produced a package of Choco-Rolls that made me melt with tenderness.

When I got up to piss she followed me. She watched the stream in a saintly rapture and stuck her hand into it. The liquid glazed her olive skin, ran down her fiery veins, splashing up in a tiny cascade as it struck her wedding ring and found its way blocked. When I finished, she caught the last drops on her index finger and brought them to the tip of her tongue. She licked her palm, then dried the back of it on her bush, which she went on playing with for a while. My turn, she said, and sat down on the toilet. Her glassy urethral pitter-patter started to wind me up again: I took off my T-shirt and pulled her nose to my belly button. She pulled down my boxers and took my member in one hand, my testicles in the other, smelling herself in the folds of skin. She licked and caressed it until it rose up. Wait for me, she said, tearing off a piece of toilet paper and standing to wipe herself. I grabbed her by the hand, pulled her to the bed and cleaned her off myself.

She rested her legs on my shoulders and I entered her from the front. Next, I turned her over and penetrated her from behind as she lay face down. I finished by taking her again from the front, her feet wrapped around my calves. We rose at least four inches in the air while I was coming.

Before heading back outside we decided to take advantage of the Jacuzzi. As I opened the faucets I suddenly felt like I had to go to the bathroom again. Don’t waste your fluids, she told me, stretching out to lay back in the tub. The water barely covered her body. Piss on me, she ordered. After a moment of indecision I opened the floodgates and gilded her sex, her stomach, her breasts, her shoulders, her neck, her smile. She then pissed out her own waters into the tub. We made a pact: no soap or showering until the next day. And this? I asked her, pointing to the impossible erection that was starting to grow again. Masturbate, she said. Look right at me.

It was after ten o’clock by the time we finished getting dressed. She pulled out her cell phone, to call her husband I suppose. Before dialing she asked me where we were going to have dinner. I told her that she was eating at her house, I was having dinner with Raul like I’d already planned, and to call for two taxis.

I found him and the movie critic’s wife in a rather mediocre French place where we’d agreed at midday to meet up. They were already finishing dinner when I arrived. By coincidence an old friend came walking by our table. He used to be a novelist and now works taking pictures of people’s auras for curative purposes. I went off with him to a techno club so as not to inconvenience Raul and his lover at the house. We ended up dancing with some drop-dead ugly girls.

Thursday, March 26.

Susana. Bluish white, strong shapely legs, ethereal dress, expensive shoes, huge enigmatic purse. She went out for a while with Socrates when they both lived in London. She says that she’s his best friend, and isn’t sure if he does it with men, but that he definitely can’t do it with women. Susana is my new editor’s ex; his wife introduced her to me at breakfast when we were discussing the terms of the contract for my cookbook, on which I haven’t made the slightest progress.

Susana has a research permit for the History Institute at the Universidad. The idea was that she’d take care of the paperwork so that I’d be able to study the letters before tomorrow, which will be my last working day in Mexico. She doesn’t mess around: we were eating breakfast at a crêperie in San Ángel when she suddenly pulled a library catalog out of her bag. Without saying anything, she stood up and told me we were leaving because they were just opening up the archives desk at the university.

Once in the privacy of her Volkswagen she asked me if I was the chef who ended up becoming famous because Teresa had dumped me. I told her that chefs weren’t famous, and that those were two separate events; that I’d earned a certain amount of recognition because I have a disciplined imagination and a tremendous capacity for work, and that Teresa lost me because she was a stupid cunt. That made her laugh, and she told me that as soon as Teresa learned that I was going to sign with the publisher she started phoning her just as if they were best friends. She’s looking for you, big guy. I shrugged my shoulders and said that she could find me if she wanted to. You’ll see, she told me. Today she’ll just casually show up when you’re having dinner with those gallery owners from Colonia Roma. And how do you know who I’m having dinner with? I asked her. Now she was the one shrugging.

Of course it turned out to be impossible to gain access to study the damned letters. The best we could get was the vague promise that they’d scan them within a few weeks, and Susana would mail them to me. On the spot, she pulled the discs to burn them onto out of her bag. I asked her if she always carried around blank discs. She told me they were re-recordable, like her.

It was by now past twelve o’clock, so we went down to celebrate the snafu with a vermouth at a bar in Coyoacán with tables on its patio. We had lunch on the other side of the plaza, at a place with more sophistication than taste. Naturally she no longer felt like going back to the publishing house, so when we got around to her dropping me off at Raul’s house, I invited her to come in and sleep it off, and then we could have a coffee. She thought that was a good idea.

She took off her dress and shoes in a flash and got right into bed under the blankets: houses in Mexico are always really fucking cold. Now lying comfortably by her side — chastely, I swear — I told her that she seemed to be the only thirty-something woman in Mexico that didn’t have at least one, if not several, boyfriends. Not for long, was her reply: in my new role as a star of international gastronomy, I was going to need a real tough bitch by my side. Then she fell into a comatose sleep.

Her nose in my neck woke me up. She was lying comfortably on top of me, resolutely naked. You’re really warm, she said to me when she noticed that I’d opened my eyes. I liked the smell of her fine, straight hair all mussed up, almost like a baby’s. She flicked out the tip of her tongue and began licking up the sweat that had pooled in my collarbone, then she worked her way up to the embarrassing gob of saliva in the corner of my mouth. Before thrusting her tongue down to my tonsils she said that, yes, this was an ambush.

She yanked off the blankets and slid down to my knees. She pulled down my shorts as I took off my T-shirt, my calves clenched tightly between hers. She has a large mouth, just the right temperature; getting head from her was more like getting a massage than the kind of sharp pleasure that most women deliver. Give me something too, I told her, and she turned her body around so we formed a sixty-nine. To access her rather pale sex required parting the curtains of her fleshy lips. Quite suddenly, she raised herself into a squatting position, rearing and bucking, using my groin like a handhold.

She’s got perfect breasts: round, high-set, intelligent. Grasping her thighs, I let her do the work but she didn’t come until I stretched her upright, squeezing her breasts, her back arching sharply, her nails sunk into the backs of my knees. I laid her out beneath me. She clenched the bedstead rail, her breasts even more beautiful in repose. Like a salsa dancer, she had smooth, still shoulders and a voracious agitation in her legs and hips. Put your tongue here, she said, panting like a wounded doe, pointing her nose at her left armpit: I don’t use deodorant. She’d spread herself out across the bed like a manta ray. I came for a long time, while she went on making even more noise. She wrapped her legs around mine and took advantage of my slow softening to masturbate by pressing her clitoris against the base of my pubis. I remember her spine pulsing from the successive waves of pleasure. She murmured: my pleat, my pleat, my pleat, from inside some joyous place where I was no longer present. After she stretched herself out again she spent a very long time running her fingertips up and down my shivering back. I fell asleep again.

She woke me when it was almost evening. You’ve got to get cleaned up, she said, so you can look handsome. I gave a little smile, trying to seem sweet. Don’t look at me with that face like a toy clown: I’m sure it helps you to get laid, but it looks pretty lame to me. It’s the only face I’ve got, I answered her. You’re just sad because nobody’s treated you like a star. She told me to turn over and then she gave me a massage from my neck down to the soles of my feet. When she finished I had an erection again. She hopped off the bed and said: Wait for me, just a minute. I planned on doing whatever she told me to. She reached for her bag and took out a silk scarf that she used to tie both my hands to the bed rails. She knelt over me with her open legs resting on mine, her whole sex exposed for my benefit, and began to masturbate with consummate skill. I’m dry, she said, speaking to herself, I believe, without the least affectation. She brought her sex close to me so that I could moisten it. At first my tongue burned from the lingering drops of my semen but soon enough I was going full steam again. She moved her hips in circles then suddenly said that was enough, pulling away from me and continuing to rub herself with her hand. At a certain point she gave a long sigh, went quiet, and then asked me to wait just a moment. She reached for her bag again and after digging through it a bit extracted a slender, elegant metallic vibrator. Do you always carry a vibrator in your purse? I asked with amused curiosity. “I’m only interested in really insecure guys, and, you know, they can’t always. .” she said. I thought about this later on and didn’t find it so funny, but at that moment I wasn’t in the mood for contemplation. She slipped the silver missile into her sex and turned the switch at its base, tensing and twisting as the vibration in her hand was transmitted throughout her body.

When she finished, her face wore a beatific smile. I was on the point of exploding. She grabbed hold of my sex and, waving the vibrator in the air, said to me: Your turn. Terrified, I had visions of a proctologist. Feeling my wrists tied tightly to the head of the bed I told her that I’d never done that and I wasn’t at all interested. You’re really stupid, she said, this one is vaginal; anal ones have a different shape. She grabbed her bag, slipped the metallic phallus back inside, then searched again through its interior. This time she took out a plastic bottle of honey. You carry honey in your purse? I asked her. It’s for coffee, she said, I don’t eat meat, so I’ve got to get my nutrients wherever I can. She popped open the top with her thumb, turned it over, and squeezed. A thread of gold spilled over my sex. Good little boys, she explained, come quickly when you do this to them because what happens is that the flavors mix. She closed the bottle, licking her finger. She put it back into her bag and fell to work voraciously. I came almost immediately. While she was untying me she told me that the bastard’s smile on my face had improved. Now, get cleaned up. You’ve got to look great, so that whore Teresa sees what she lost. Go on, you’re already way ahead of the game.

By the time I got out of the shower she’d left. On the bed she’d laid out for me my best-cut suit with a French-collared shirt and one of Raul’s Italian ties; he always spends more on clothes than I do. On the shirt was a note torn from a stenographer’s notebook in which she’d written that she’d come by to get me at eight thirty, and that I shouldn’t comb my hair until it was totally dry — that’s the secret.

Dawn, Friday, March 27.

The gallery owners from Colonia Roma made me an offer: bring Los Empeños to Mexico City, its natural location. They showed me the house that a couple of them had just bought together; the restaurant would go on the ground floor. The location is unbeatable and they’re prepared to invest in a kitchen that would be a faithful copy of the ancient ones I’ve envied.

Just as Susana predicted, Teresa appeared, now late, seated at the bar. She looked spectacular, more beautiful than ever behind the veil of an adult melancholy that I was not expecting. She was with someone. She’s always been more skillful than me in the fine art of watching her ass. We exchanged kisses in the air — I liked the shape of her crow’s feet — with the promise that we would talk; she introduced me to the millionaire she was with but I didn’t even listen to his name.

When at last I was able to get away from the gallery owners I went down to the bar to look for her and they’d already left. The bartender handed me a napkin on which she’d written the name and address of a café near Raul’s house, saying that we should have breakfast at ten.

Not only am I going to go, I’d marry her again right this instant.

Monday, March 30.

I find airports and airplanes exasperating: we’ve only just taken off and I already feel exhausted. The worst is yet to come: passing through the police fortress the gringos have erected to protect their obese bodies from the muscular universe beyond.

I enjoyed spending Sunday at home with my mother and sister: I was able to rest a little, go to bed early, eat reasonably well, visit again with the endless parade of my brothers and their wives and their children — I had no idea whose they were; they all look like each other and like the rest of us. I found it very moving to see how eagerly they listened to the possibility that I might take up the gallery owners’ offer and come back to Mexico. All this blood is your blood, said my sister after the second glass of anís, indicating the gathering around the table with a vague gesture that took in the whole family, as well as all those others who, at some time, had believed in the miracle of the Incarnation.

When I’d first arrived home, a little before midday, my mother was openly upset with me: Your aunts and uncles are pretty offended, she told me, that you haven’t gone to eat dinner with them; God knows how many days Alicia spent making tamales for you. I told her that I’d already explained how I’d run into Teresa: I hadn’t seen her in five years, we’d gone to lunch, and I was a total wreck when I called to cancel. It was better that way. You haven’t seen your aunts, either, she said. But I was never married to any of them. That made her laugh. I shrugged my shoulders and told her to believe me, that it hadn’t been easy. She nodded her head and pinched my biceps just like she did when I was little. It’s all right, kiddo, stone has got to be stone.

During the meal everybody asked me — with ageless wisdom — how Teresa was doing, but without prying into any of the details of our meeting, which I suppose went very well. I arrived at the café a little bit after ten o’clock and she was already there, nervous; Mexican women, like their counterparts in Lima, are the last women on earth who maintain the mysterious art of knowing how to style their hair. Who knows if it’s because they understand their body as one single harmonious mass, or because the bad taste of the hairdressers at large is so awful that they have to find some way to defend themselves. Contrary to all my own expectations, I acted like a wholesome, self-assured, grown man. She’d called in sick to work, so we had the whole day ahead of us.

We spent breakfast arguing, as if we were friends, the advantages and disadvantages of my moving back to Mex-ico, and some other minutiae: the eternal difficulty of her relationship with her parents, Tijuana’s shortcomings, how fucked life in the United States really is — the word Chicago never passed her lips — her fantasy of being a professional hooker, and her inability to carry it off: I turned out more prude than slut, she told me. Up until that moment I’d had all my senses focused on the spiritual quality of her mature beauty: I’d arrived at the café with my fear of another rejection weighing much heavier than my desire to have her, but the image of her receiving a succession of unknown men gave me an electric jolt that was immediately translated into the memory of her body beneath mine and a rending of the veil way down deep in my testicles. I asked for the check. What are we going to do? she asked me. I told her we should stop by the market then go cook something at Raul’s house. She thought that was a good idea.

Leaving the café, it was no trouble at all to hold her hand while we walked along; I was telling her about the success my restaurant was enjoying thanks to the enormous public humiliation of being the first contestant eliminated from Lard. My clients began bringing their friends out of pure sympathy — it’s true, I didn’t say it just to amuse her.

I bought a big piece of rump roast so I could stuff it with pulped carrot and guava; also dried shrimp and rosemary for a broth; dragon fruit with cream and honey, amaranth, a chunk of heavy brown cane sugar, and pumpkin seeds to make alegría balls. We stopped to pick up a bottle of Ribera del Duero wine, and some Tehuacán spring water. Loaded down with shopping bags, we walked the four or five blocks that separated us from Raul’s house, the sunlight streaming through the blossoming jacarandas.

While I unpacked the bags, she crouched down to check the oven — we had no idea if it worked. As she was walking by, taking the meat and the dragon fruit to the fridge, I calmly reached out and grabbed her ass as if we had never been apart. She stood straight up, turned around, and planted a tight, high-pressure kiss on my lips. We went running upstairs to the bedroom.

We undressed without any formalities. There was no strategic foreplay, simply the dialogue of tongues working as a metaphor for the communal vortex of the flesh and the desperate wish to disappear into its depths. To enter her body, to feel again the clean, precise embrace of her vagina — we’re tailor-made for each other — was to return to a state of original, mysterious grace: achieving the shamanic power of entering the other, being transformed inside her, with her; becoming indistinguishable, like the spiraling, entwining strands of DNA in their mesmerizing chromosomal dance at the wondrous instant of conception.

I can scarcely recall the ghost of her tight lips, the color rising in her cheeks, her eyes so wide yet seeing nothing, because I no longer possessed a body. We synched up with the same steady rhythm as always. Our extremely slow ascent toward orgasm raised a heat wave that shook the curtains in the room. I clenched her hair in my teeth. Coming was like momentarily abolishing the opacities of the world and making it transparent, like a drop of saliva that contained the sketch of the universe that God never showed to anybody.

That’s the paradox of what English speakers call true love, which I can find no way of correctly translating to Spanish, perhaps because in the end we always turn out to be bigger bastards. To be able to use the body to escape the body, to be transubstantiated into a mortal mess of secretions, to forget about oneself and the other, to be nothing but a surface: the odor we give off, the oils that lubricate us, the skin that protects us. To be a nameless sum of muscles and fat. To feel pleasure is to trade the body for bodily sensation; sex at its best is the most spiritual experience available to us.

I returned to wandering her back, the ridge of her coccyx, her buttocks. I let my fingers play in the tiny bushland around her ass and masturbated her to a climax, and then I entered her from behind, my hands squeezing her fists.

The third time she sucked me. With Teresa I take more pleasure in giving than in receiving, so that when I felt myself on the verge of exploding I told her I wasn’t going to hold out much longer, and how did she want us to do it? She rose up and without unclenching my member she told me that she wanted me to come in her mouth, that I could take however long I wanted but I should drown her in semen. I sat up comfortably against the headboard to get a better view. She curled up perpendicular to my body and scooted forward a little, so that I could put my hand between her thighs or her breasts, follow the curve of her back down to her buttocks, and play with her toes. When she felt like that was enough, she opened my legs and dove between them. She looked me in the eyes and said: Come. I did so, exorbitantly, until it hurt. She gave me a salty kiss and thanked me. I lost myself in an almost dreamlike trance and slipped into sleep.

I was awakened by her riotous laughter — like shrieking in a cathedral — mixed with the deep sound of Raul’s voice. I got out of bed, put on my shorts to go to the bathroom and, in that near state of grace, descended to the kitchen. It turned out that besides Raul and Teresa, who were drinking some tequila in the living room, in the kitchen there were also — knocking back their first drink and gossiping in whispers, surely about me — the movie critic and his wife, Socrates and his young lover, and Tijuana sans husband. Teresa gave me a long kiss and sent me to say hello to the other guests, among whom I went delivering hugs and kisses. Tijuana stuck a finger in my belly button and told me I looked very cute. I told her that I’m no angel.

We chatted about nonsense while I brewed myself a cup of mint tea. When it was ready, Socrates poured in a little tequila and told me that they’d heard I was going to do the cooking; that was why they all came over. I told him that I’d need some galley slaves because people were already hungry. Tijuana and the movie critic volunteered to help, and the others went to the living room. Teresa came in with a stack of pots and pans.

I set Tijuana to prepare the brown sugar and Teresa to cut the dragon fruit. I gave the movie critic — clearly the least talented — very specific instructions for how to prepare the shrimp broth, handing him the little bunch of rosemary that he had to use, and precisely measuring the salt and the water, never taking my eyes off him. I sliced open the roast, so fresh that it was dripping blood. I set my cutting board next to the one Teresa was working on. Her hands were stained with the vegetable blood of the fruits — she was slicing them with careful devotion, as cleanly as coins. Another tequila. We made potatoes with the remaining rosemary and a jar of mole sauce we found in the refrigerator. When the critic finished with the broth — anyone else would have done a better job in half the time — I set him to work peeling carrots. We heated the oven and I suddenly remembered the hellish family dinner awaiting me at home. I called my mother to cancel.

When I came downstairs again, Tijuana and Teresa were waiting for me in front of the bag of guavas without the least idea what to do with them. It’s an Aztec game: you’ve got to split the fruit in half and remove the pulp that surrounds the seed as if it were a heart, then you’ve got to peel it with the same tender loving care as if you were bathing a little child. We didn’t have a fourth knife sharp enough for the critic to use, nor enough faith in his ability to carry out such a delicate operation: what remains of a guava after the sacrifice is an extremely delicate little rosy pink strip barely an eighth of an inch thick, just a leftover, which is, simultaneously, the sweetest and most sour thing in the world, and which denotes the metaphysical nature of Baroque cuisine: more theory than food. I told them that rump roast stuffed with guava pulp was the favorite dish of Bishop Palafox. It’s out of this world, I said, the meat enveloping the remains of something that no longer has either an inside or an outside, just like the sacred host.

And my vagina, said Tijuana, sticking a finger in her mouth. She pulled it out shining with saliva and slipped it into Teresa’s mouth. We made the guava paste in the same bowl in which we’d cooked the sweet base for the alegría balls. I stuffed the roast while Teresa poured the cream over the dragon fruit and Tijuana mixed up the pumpkin seeds and amaranth with the honey and brown sugar.

By the time I finally put the meat in the oven I was exhausted. Teresa gave Tijuana a long kiss and she slipped her hand into my shorts. I let her do it for a moment, but at last I decided it’s always better not to mix things up too much, so I went upstairs to get dressed. They stayed a while longer in the kitchen. When I came in for a glass of wine to take with me to sit down in the living room they were chatting.

Everything turned out really well: we talked, we ate, we drank like gluttonous patricians. We sat over our coffee and brandy until very late, rendered every moment more civilized by the work that our excesses perform on the soft, pulpy flesh of our sad human lives.

Teresa helped me to clean up afterward and then spent the night. In the morning I didn’t even offer her a cup of coffee.

Mexico City — Washington, D.C. — Mexico City,

1996–2004