Hypothermia

lasts forever, he said; bound by duty, the Ugandan woman heeded her community’s call, becoming the regular soloist in the choir at the twelve o’clock Mass with its congregation composed of recently arrived African immigrants.
    Then the war began. Probably angry because the priest, until he found a different singer, preferred to conduct the ceremony solely with organ music, the baritone began to use his whole voice—trained in who knows what conservatory to fill theaters of Soviet dimensions—with the goal of blowing away the other worshipers who, sparse and timid, tried to follow the organist in their blue psalm books. On the two Sundays that it took the priest to place a substitute on the riser, the Pole launched the same string of provocations. He opened by intoning the antiphon at a barbarous volume that he only increased following the Gloria. By the offertory he had become the lord of all the air in the church, such that he raised or lowered his tone just enough to throw the priest off course—even with a microphone clipped to his cassock, the priest had a very hard time competing with him.
    When the moment arrived to exchange the sign of peace, the priest and the congregation had already surrendered, so that the last man standing was the organist, who was also the toughest nut to crack. The baritone’s strategy, nevertheless, was infallible. He faithfully followed the keyboard’s tempo up to the point when he felt that he could flatten it, then unleashed the full power of his voice box, and once he had the melody in his pocket, he slowed or accelerated the time at will. The organist’s bald head glowed red with fury when he discovered—thanks to a slight delay on the parts of the other faithful worshippers—that he had lost control of the music. So that the ceremony wouldn’t lose its solemnity, he had no other remedy but to follow the enemy.
    This was the fat man’s moment of glory. Although he and his brood always occupied the front pew on the right-hand side of the nave, they waited until the paterfamilias had won his duel to the death with the organist to stand up and receive Communion. Their approach to the chalice practically stopped the show. The baritone walked slowly behind his wife, bearing the whole rite in his throat, luminous from the effort, and surrounded by his entire retinue of seven children. When his turn came, he cut off his singing, regardless of their place in the psalm, and bowed his head with a sincerely peaceful gesture that he maintained until finishing his prayers. That, in some way, revealed the irreproachably Catholic quality of his mettle: his body, liberated in full triumph over the banality of its earthly battles, was a perfect lesson on the redemptive power of a god supposedly incarnate in human flesh.
    When he finished praying, he rose to his feet like a triumphant bullfighter and, before sitting down, gave the congregation a happy look—he supposed they were on his side. The organist received a malevolent smile; although he had already recovered his preeminent position, for the time being, he knew that he’d lost his weekly opportunity to show off his middling flights of virtuosity.
    The war of the Polish baritone, he said to her, as if reforming his own front line in preparation for the final assault of the enemy that was the same senseless story he was telling, is the ritual within the ritual found within the walls of Christ the King church. With a certain relief, he heard what sounded like a nasal tone of approval, although it might have just been interference: he usually phoned her from the Starbucks on H Street, two or three blocks from the Bank, to avoid the discomfort of watching her husband walk past while he was trying so hard to make her laugh.
    The priest tried various recourses, each time with worse results. He hired a tall old Puritan woman, clean and ugly, hoping that her persistent, piercing high notes would drill through the baritone’s bulk. She was steamrolled during the Kyrie. This woman returned the following Sunday, better armed: the sacristan had set up a microphone for her on the podium, one even better than the priest’s own. When the poor woman began singing the penitential rite, the Pole raised his eyebrows then pulverized her without removing his hands from his pants pockets. The organist’s bald head turned purple as an archbishop’s mantle. After the Puritan woman’s failure there was a very young Jamaican man whose angelic