Hypothermia

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