Hypothermia

neighborhood video store the Mexican movies were catalogued in the Foreign Films section, alongside ones by Fellini or Kurosawa. I spent fifth grade as an exchange student at a school in New Orleans, and my MBA is recognized by Harvard but not by the Universidad Nacional in Mexico.
    The United States was always familiar territory for me and I always thought it was a place very similar to Mexico, except better. Even so, when, as an adult, I moved to Atlanta for my brand new job at AT&T, I had the impression that I’d moved to China or Romania; that’s how little I really understood my new environment. I never got used to life in Georgia. So, as soon as I could, I found a job at the World Bank and moved to Washington, D.C. I’d been told that the East Coast is a little more traditional and laid back, more like Mexico.
    On my first weekend in D.C. I drove up to New York City to see an old high school friend who’d been living in the United States for seven or eight years. It didn’t take more than one tequila for me to start telling him about my troubles. He sat there thinking about it for a minute, then said to me: What do you want me to tell you, ’ mano ? The USA is a country where soccer is a sport for little girls.

SALIVA

    Out of all the connections he’d made at the World Bank, that city within a city, Malik was the closest thing he had to a friend. They’d shared a tiny cubicle when he started at the organization, and they developed an open, easygoing working relationship: they chatted at break time, strolled out together for a midmorning coffee, and shared part of the commute home to the suburbs on the Metro. Their conversations always had something of the comic routine in them, which the other employees in the Development Projects office found a little shocking.
    The difference between his relationship with Malik and those he had with the rest of his acquaintances at the Bank lay exclusively in what they talked about. Malik had been born in Sri Lanka and raised in Boston. He was intelligent, cultured, progressive, and nobody among the few who knew him understood very well why he worked there. I’ve got four little savages to feed, was the most he offered as an explanation. The extent of his erudition regarding almost everything showed that he was essentially a reader: between the ruckus from his children and his wife’s Hindu relatives, about whose endless visits he never stopped complaining, he must have spent his afternoons and evenings in some armchair in a little white house with a yard and garden, reading up on world culture.
    The problem with gringos, Malik said to him one day, is that they don’t know how to make conversation. They share their opinions when they feel authorized to do so, but they don’t know how to sit down and talk about anything just to talk about it, without getting impatient. In Boston I used to live in the Hindu neighborhood, which is really something else, but since I came to the Washington suburbs, I’m like the deaf-mute of Sidon.
    He recognized the Biblical sound of this deaf-mute reference, but he preferred not to ask: on a previous occasion when he’d shown his ignorance about Christian tradition, the Sri Lankan had worn himself out laughing at him. He waited until Malik went to the bathroom to make his ablutions—he was notoriously slow about it—to look up the reference on the Internet. He found it in a moment: it came from the Gospel of St. Mark.
    Jesus departed the rich, illustrious, and orthodox region of Tyre, where he had been preaching in synagogues to his own class. He entered the poor Gentile region of the Decapolis, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where the people who had heard tell of him were more interested in his shamanic healing powers than in his reputation as a rabbi. During his first day staying in the Decapolis, a large crowd brought to him a man who was a deaf-mute. Resigned to his fame, Jesus drew apart a little from the spectators; he took the man by the shoulders and violently pushed him down onto his knees. He vigorously thrust a finger in the man’s ear. With his free hand he forced open the deaf-mute’s mouth, and in a single motion stretched out the man’s tongue, letting fall on it a drop of his own saliva. He shouted at him Ephphatha! —which means Be opened! —and he tugged on the man’s hands for him to rise. The man thanked him with perfect diction then asked what he could do to repay him. Jesus told him to keep his