Hypothermia

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