Hypothermia

enough business appointments the whole week to end up eating out every night.
    Today we’re going out to have a drink, for old times’ sake. It’s Monday, so I imagine we’ll take it easy. I have a lot to get done in just a few days. Some gallery owners from Colonia Roma want to make me a business proposal. I don’t feel quite ready to come back and live in Mexico City, but here I am, after all. Tomorrow I’m going to the Universidad Nacional to visit the archives at the History Institute. They’ve got a collection of women’s letters from the colonial era that I’ve never heard about before. If I want to capitalize on my run of good luck that started after doing Lard, it’s absolutely necessary for me to publish a cookbook: my tome about eating habits is too dense for the rather frivolous direction my life has taken, something I no longer really understand.
    Tuesday, March 24 .
    I hadn’t remembered Mexico City being so wild. We went to a simple, nicely designed bar where they serve tapas. Despite being Monday, it was full—it must have been past eleven o’clock when we got there. We were all chatting pretty carelessly. On a trip to the bathroom I ran into Esther, whom I’d dated back during the sad, hazy years of high school. She got married, then divorced, earned a relatively worthless postgraduate degree in France, and now she’s doing well as a psychotherapist. She introduced me to her boyfriend. He’s pretty much what you’d expect for someone in her situation: bald but otherwise hairy, almost fat, patient, well-intentioned. We didn’t talk much. She’s around 130 pounds, maybe 110, very curly blonde hair: a Polish princess maturing into a queen in exile.
    When I returned from the men’s room, Raul was already chatting with two women about a thousand years younger than us. Who knows where he found them. One was a big talker, over the top, perfect for him; the other one had crooked teeth but a moving smile. Esther walked by on her way out, and when she came over to say good-bye to me, told me it would be nice if we could chat, that we might see each other later at such-and-such a bar. It made sense to me because I was already drunk. Raul took notice.
    We dumped the girls when it became obvious that they were too nice and modest—we left them in good company with a couple of lesbian filmmakers who might find a way to cure them—and we went to the bar where Esther was waiting for me.
    She said Hi and I didn’t peel my tongue off of hers until I got way down deep, far enough to taste the café con leche she’d drunk with her breakfast. I felt all the vertebrae in her tiny, childlike backbone, and she pretended to be indignant that I’d unfastened her bra in public. I told her I was so loaded she should be thankful I didn’t just tear her shirt off. Now, up close to her, I admired once again her tiny ears with their little girl’s shiny hoop earrings, barely visible. She smelled the same as always, the quasi-synthetic odor of distillation shared by all women who don’t sweat. Before leaving we snorted some coke in the bathroom vestibule.
    It was hard for us to walk because Esther was wearing a pair of jeans that were too tight to admit my hand, which I kept glued to her ass the whole time. I had to unsnap them before we could get comfortable in the back of Raul’s car, where I went right back to groping the plush pissoir of her sex. Something inside of me made peace with my lost childhood—one without Baudelaire, without rhyme, without a sense of smell, as López Velarde said—as I kept on masturbating her in the back seat.
    Once we got into the iron bed and carried out the first assault—pure muscle and fury for all our missed opportunities—she said, as she turned around and offered me her backside, that the second time she wanted me to put it up her ass. I started rubbing my nose up and down her milk-white spine, and then ran my tongue from the seam between her cheeks up to the back of her neck. We didn’t do that when we were kids, I told her. She turned to look at me from the persecuted depths of her nearly transparent eyes, and said that her being married to the world’s biggest idiot had at least been good for something. Then she began stroking my member with her hands. She meticulously examined my sex, running her fingertips along the folds of skin that were expanding from the miraculous touch of her skin and my memory. You’re the only uncircumcised man I’ve gone to bed