Hypothermia

accompanying a mining expedition. Although they never met face to face, the disorder that the scientists left behind in their camp was sufficient to make the Indians decide to escape to save what remained of their skins. They scattered. Ishi never again saw either his sister or his mother, who probably died a terrible death during their flight, but who surely left this world with the epic aplomb of those who endure without surrender.
    Ishi gave himself up because he was trying to find something to eat, thinking perhaps that if he was going to die one way or other, it was better to do so with a full stomach. Having made that decision paints him as weak, and for those of us who have tried to tell his story it brings us very close to the abyss of literalness. Being the last survivor of an entire world, who also happens to live in a museum, is meaning itself: there are no missing pieces, and without mystery there is no mythology.
    It’s for that reason, I believe, it is better to imagine him in the days when, instead of being an Indian in a glass display case, he was only the densest of the museum’s custodians. One must think of him resigned to be the last of something, and thus mopping the hallways in a state of holy calm.
    A few months after Ishi arrived in San Francisco, the problem arose that, because of museum regulations, he couldn’t live in the guest rooms forever. So they decided to make him a maintenance worker and pay him a salary so that he could live with the staff. To everyone’s surprise, he didn’t understand that it was all about solving the problem of his being the last of something and there being nowhere to keep him. The next day he put on some worker’s coveralls and asked for a bucket.
    He used almost no money, except for buying a few things to eat, always simple: honey, corn meal, squash, apples, coffee: he was a very small man and notoriously frugal. He also spent some money taking the trolley car from Golden Gate Park out to see the ocean. He spent all his days off there: the sea is the place where we forgive ourselves for the marbles that slipped through our fingers without our understanding why. The rest of his wages he saved up in the safe at the museum: he kept the money in some boxes for medicine ampules that his doctor gave him, each of which had the exact size, shape, and width to snugly hold ten silver-dollar coins. At the end of his life he became fond of staring at them: he would ask the director to open the safe for him; he would set his boxes of dollars on a table and spend the afternoon looking at them, without ever saying anything or taking the coins out. As if they were something else.
    If one is the last of something, his hoardings are not savings, but the balance of an entire universe: we find it there, in Ishi’s untellable story, when the bitten boy turns into a dog, the forest is called “Desert,” and the redheaded girl wears a T-shirt that doesn’t say pendeja.
    Sometimes writing is a job: obliquely tracing the path of certain ideas that seem indispensable to us, that we have to set down. But other times it’s a question of conceding what remains, accepting the museum and contemplating the balance while awaiting death, asking forgiveness of the sea for whatever was fucked up. Placing our little boxes on the table and knowing that what came to an end was also the whole universe.

Two Waltzes Toward Civilization

After this we’ll know how to eat against death, to
devour only dead things, cooking to kill them again.
We’ll know that feeding means dealing with other
bodies, that desire makes us itch, and it only finds
relief in order to get worse, that to love is to devour.

    A NTONIO J OSÉ P ONTE

ESCAPE FROM SUICIDE CITY

I leave the Soul behind; bearing onward,
my pilgrim body, deserted and alone.

    Q UEVEDO
    I
    Mr. Hinojosa was waiting for me outside the Lima airport in the sinister black Mercedes Benz the Swiss television producer had rented to pick up the guests for Lard , the highly successful European TV cooking show that had been a minor cable hit in the United States and Canada.
    Although I’d heard some of my colleagues express their admiration, and even reverence, for the program, I never watched it because I don’t own a TV. My own gastronomic principles require me to live in total retreat from the world; I don’t believe that one can recreate seventeenth-century Mexican conventual cooking unless one exists in harmony with the ways of life that