Hypothermia

folk-dancers, insulting them however possible whenever they passed near the table. Between one savage comment and another he maintained long, guarded silences, his eyes fixed on a woman—also middle-aged, very blonde and extraordinarily good-looking—who spent the whole evening hanging on Terapia’s arm. Every once in a while he assumed an air of tremendous gravity, explaining to me with an anthropologist’s precision the regional motifs one should look for in a dance. In those moments he showed himself to be far more fragile than his bastardly attitude revealed the rest of the time.
    We got out of there around two o’clock in the morning, by which time I had the Swiss woman’s heart in the palm of my hand, like a fresh-squeezed orange. I no longer remembered that the idea had been to spend the evening with Terapia when he said goodnight to us all in the aisle of the bus, followed out by a long line of his friends. The café owner was last. He had the arm of the middle-aged blonde woman, who barely said goodnight to us, attentive as she was to every gesture from the star chef up ahead.
    Pablo told me he would call me early on Sunday, once the contest was finished, to show me around Lima: we’d ended up on friendly terms after I’d gotten totally fed up with his anthropological sentimentality: among the many dances that we saw, the one from Cuzco was the most peculiar because it had almost no traces of the Hispanic, African, and Chinese cultures which shaped modern Peruvian tradition. It was a leaping line of uproarious male dancers dressed in outfits with very wide sleeves. With each leap they made, they extended their arms and gave a harsh, ferocious, birdlike cry. With glassy eyes—whether from drunkenness or nostalgia for everything that we’ve all lost forever, I don’t know—my confidant told me that it was a dance of the fallen Incas, of princes to whom nothing remained but the memory that they’d once been condors. Recalling how invincible Teresa made me feel when she believed that I was the historian Mexico needed, I thought I might collapse there and then. I felt obliged to explain the sadness that came upon me so visibly—Pablo put his arm around me—saying how the defeat of the Incas, the bottomless pit, reminded me of the Mexicans’ own fall. Pablo told me not to worry, that people from Lima understood passion.
    IV
    I didn’t go to bed with the Swiss woman that night because it wouldn’t have been very ethical before the contest was finished—that’s what she told me, anyway, though the idea had never crossed my mind. I didn’t sleep with her the next night either because it would have been too depressing after my complete and utter defeat.
    I was knocked out in the first round. I didn’t even make it to the improvisations, which, given that I’m a methodical and insecure man, was where I thought I’d be disqualified. After the terrible moment when I found out that I’d been eliminated, the Argentine told me not to take it personally, that a Peruvian fellow like Terapia would never give the prize to a Mexican Creole like me. He said that both countries were too much alike, and that the Paraguayan was the one who was going to win: nobody had ever heard of his restaurant in Asunción, which would mean no new competition for Terapia. I don’t know about the accuracy of every element of his theory, but regarding who would emerge as the winner, he was speaking with the voice of a prophet.
    I didn’t want to wait for them to finish filming, so I said that I was stepping outside the studio to smoke a cigarette, then kept walking to the street. I caught a taxi back to Miraflores where I drank three vodkas in a row at the hotel bar. After taking a nap I went out looking for bookshops to see if I could find some titles about convent life during Peru’s viceregal era.
    When I got back to the hotel, now late in the afternoon, I found a message from my producer—she was mostly angry because I hadn’t been there to be filmed congratulating the winner, but still invited me out to dinner.
    We went to a restaurant located at the foot of the magnificent ruins that Mr. Hinojosa had driven me past the night I arrived. We chatted like old friends: every defeat, I’ve noticed, brings us closer to our fellow sufferers, bound by that fatal, dispassionate knot that joins the survivors of great calamities. I didn’t insist that she have a glass of wine. We talked a little bit about her job and a lot