Hypothermia

mulatto and I seconded him in the hope of getting the Swiss off our backs for once. The chief cameraman discussed it in a very low voice with two or three of his men then nodded his approval. My producer squeezed my leg under the table to show that she liked the idea, and I patted the back of her hand.
    In all honesty, the night became much more enjoyable the moment we got back on the bus, everyone by now half-buzzed and the overall mood relaxed by the sweet hint of decadence that inevitably marks everything people from Lima do. Their feigned but ferocious humor, the grace with which they move about without seeming to touch the floor, their irresistible smiles, which in other circumstances would seem stiff and artificial, were very well-suited to a night together out on the town.
    We went to a place quite nearby whose name I can’t possibly remember. It was a gigantic club, some kind of industrial hanger, possibly an old marketplace, with hundreds of tables crowded around a dance floor dominated by a bandstand. As one of the dolled-up women accompanying us explained—I was translating her words right into my producer’s ear, my hand on her naked, sleeveless elbow—it was a club where immigrants from Puno got together to revisit old times, dancing to the rhythm of bands that played a new type of essentially eclectic pop music: turntables and panpipes, charangos and rhythm boxes, synthesizer waltzes. On the weekend—it was Friday—there was also a series of intermissions with performances of some rather homey folk dances whose authentic innocence, the woman said, made them worth seeing.
    We sat at a gigantic table where they served us a complimentary Pisco Sour made from the strong Peruvian liquor of the same name, then filled the tablecloth with pint bottles of beer and some tiny glasses bearing the brewery name: Cuzqueña . By the time I realized it, I was dancing with the Swiss woman to the impenetrable Puno fusion. It seemed like my producer had never drunk more than a glass or two of wine. Now, thanks to the Pisco, she was noticeably relaxed. It was a sort of zero sum game: she’d never been treated as if her body was her most important asset, and I hadn’t stepped onto a dance floor in years. While avoiding the mambo—I was really out of practice—I taught her to dance some rhythms related to salsa and cumbia. I could feel the moment she loosened up for me: when the lower back muscles—the ones you press to guide your dance partner—start trembling, you know that whether a woman is Calvinist, Catholic, or Jewish, you can get her into bed.
    At this point it’s probably already clear that in spite of my efforts to live like an exiled saint, I also know how to get into trouble. It’s not easy these days to live like a monk, just as it wasn’t in the seventeenth century; achievement matters less than determination. One more or one less gringa bouncing on my mattress springs in no way reduces the symbolic valor of my effort, and the archaic consistency of my cooking suffers more if I’m haplessly wasting the divine substance of my semen jerking off than if I occasionally sacrifice my vital precepts. In all my many days of weakness, whenever I end up bringing some customer home to my cell, I’ve never felt that I was being unfaithful either to my way of life or to my tormented memory of Teresa. If one of them occasionally—or frequently—woke up in my bed the next morning, it was because we went to sleep together drunk. I’ve never offered them breakfast and I’ve never slept with the same woman twice. Like priests, more than being celibate, I try to stay focused on the ministry to which I’m bound.
    The Swiss woman and I had ended up at the opposite corner of the table from where Terapia was sitting. Nearly isolated, we were able to be more relaxed. During the set breaks, the folk dances, or the stretches of incomprehensible music, she chatted with the Paraguayan chef’s producer—whom I began to privately suspect had been invited simply to round out the diversity of our group—while I talked with one of Terapia’s friends. His name was Pablo and we were uncomfortably alike in height and complexion; the ten or fifteen years he had on me made him heavier, and his hair was quite gray, but we could have passed for brothers. He owned a very successful chain of coffee shops.
    He seemed, for reasons that escaped me, somewhat deranged; he made unbelievably insolent remarks about the poor local