Hypothermia

about mine; a little bit about her love life, absolutely nothing about mine.
    We said good-bye in the hotel reception area: she was flying back to Geneva via New York on Sunday morning and I was leaving in the afternoon. I slept well in spite of, or thanks to, the fact that my room had a real bed, not the hard thin mat that I’d been stubbornly sleeping on since Teresa left me.
    V
    In the morning the phone woke me up. It was Pablo, Max Terapia’s friend, who was inviting me to have breakfast at one of his coffee shops, after which he would take me to see the beaches so that I wouldn’t leave without getting at least a glimpse of them. I told him that I preferred to visit the Gold Museum. He said that he’d observed the other night that I wasn’t ready to see it, that it would be better if I visited it when I returned to Lima, wellcured of the sickness that was obviously tormenting me and which would not be helped by the sight of golden condors flying toward the sun all over the museum. Nobody had ever said anything so strange to me, so it sounded reasonable enough. I asked him to give me half an hour to get cleaned up.
    We had breakfast in one of his cafés, on a street that reminded me intensely of the Colonia Roma in Mexico City. There, many years before, a restauranteur friend of mine named Raul had started promoting some of the recipes that I’d unearthed to write my book about Spanish colonial cuisine. It was Raul who found me in my apartment, almost dead of starvation, who knows how many weeks after that fucking whore Teresa had run off with my student. The very same Raul gave me a job at his place when we found out that they’d fired me from the university. At first, my job consisted of sitting in a chair behind the cash register, but, little by little, and mostly from pure boredom, I started working my way into the business and the kitchens. Less than a year later my friend introduced me to the gringo who wanted to open a restaurant serving nouveau-Mexican cuisine in the United States.
    There was nothing spectacular about Pablo’s coffee shop, although the food, like everywhere in Lima, was good. Among the numerous banalities we exchanged during breakfast, he asked me if the Swiss woman was beautiful. What, I said. I don’t know, is she beautiful? How should I know, I answered him. Each to his own. So then you think she’s beautiful. She’s pretty, not lethal, I said, and he gave a start. What do you mean she’s not lethal? he asked me. She’s lived in Geneva her whole life, I told him, a city where you leave your bicycle parked on the street and nobody steals it. And if she moved to Lima? he asked me. I suppose after a while she’d learn how to style her hair, to steal her brother’s bicycle—to be lethal. A look of horror crossed his face. Oh, you’ve got it bad, he told me. Really bad.
    He took me around in his car to see a number of different places. We went to a couple of beaches and to a fantastic old bookstore owned by a Uruguayan—I walked out the door with a whole box of books. We ate lunch at a really expensive restaurant, even by Washington standards: built out on the water, surrounded by the ocean, and connected to the land by a long, narrow pier, it was called La Rosa Náutica. The idea was that you would feel like you were on a ship. Every so often he insisted on repeating his question, but by now he was answering himself: She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Could she ever be lethal? I ignored him and asked if we could talk about politics or Peruvian history, which were the topics where his sharp, crafty wit shone best. We went to one of his other cafés for coffee and brandy—all his places had the same name but this one was really nice, located near the hotel so that we wouldn’t waste time with the traffic and I wouldn’t miss my plane.
    The café was in a shopping mall with ethereal architecture: an extremely delicate structure that thrust out over the ravine. The café occupied the building’s central location, so that one was seated literally above the abyss, from which the customers were protected by a railing and a rather tall partition of heavy glass.
    I wore myself out praising the café’s setting. Pablo told me that he was thinking of selling it, that having to clean the salt off the glass every day was too complicated. He waved his hands around too much while talking; I’ve been criticized for doing the same thing. The mall had been designed by a Catalan, he