Hypothermia

it’s because they understand their body as one single harmonious mass, or because the bad taste of the hairdressers at large is so awful that they have to find some way to defend themselves. Contrary to all my own expectations, I acted like a wholesome, self-assured, grown man. She’d called in sick to work, so we had the whole day ahead of us.
    We spent breakfast arguing, as if we were friends, the advantages and disadvantages of my moving back to Mex-ico, and some other minutiae: the eternal difficulty of her relationship with her parents, Tijuana’s shortcomings, how fucked life in the United States really is—the word Chicago never passed her lips—her fantasy of being a professional hooker, and her inability to carry it off: I turned out more prude than slut, she told me. Up until that moment I’d had all my senses focused on the spiritual quality of her mature beauty: I’d arrived at the café with my fear of another rejection weighing much heavier than my desire to have her, but the image of her receiving a succession of unknown men gave me an electric jolt that was immediately translated into the memory of her body beneath mine and a rending of the veil way down deep in my testicles. I asked for the check. What are we going to do? she asked me. I told her we should stop by the market then go cook something at Raul’s house. She thought that was a good idea.
    Leaving the café, it was no trouble at all to hold her hand while we walked along; I was telling her about the success my restaurant was enjoying thanks to the enormous public humiliation of being the first contestant eliminated from Lard . My clients began bringing their friends out of pure sympathy—it’s true, I didn’t say it just to amuse her.
    I bought a big piece of rump roast so I could stuff it with pulped carrot and guava; also dried shrimp and rosemary for a broth; dragon fruit with cream and honey, amaranth, a chunk of heavy brown cane sugar, and pumpkin seeds to make alegría balls. We stopped to pick up a bottle of Ribera del Duero wine, and some Tehuacán spring water. Loaded down with shopping bags, we walked the four or five blocks that separated us from Raul’s house, the sunlight streaming through the blossoming jacarandas.
    While I unpacked the bags, she crouched down to check the oven—we had no idea if it worked. As she was walking by, taking the meat and the dragon fruit to the fridge, I calmly reached out and grabbed her ass as if we had never been apart. She stood straight up, turned around, and planted a tight, high-pressure kiss on my lips. We went running upstairs to the bedroom.
    We undressed without any formalities. There was no strategic foreplay, simply the dialogue of tongues working as a metaphor for the communal vortex of the flesh and the desperate wish to disappear into its depths. To enter her body, to feel again the clean, precise embrace of her vagina—we’re tailor-made for each other—was to return to a state of original, mysterious grace: achieving the shamanic power of entering the other, being transformed inside her, with her; becoming indistinguishable, like the spiraling, entwining strands of DNA in their mesmerizing chromosomal dance at the wondrous instant of conception.
    I can scarcely recall the ghost of her tight lips, the color rising in her cheeks, her eyes so wide yet seeing nothing, because I no longer possessed a body. We synched up with the same steady rhythm as always. Our extremely slow ascent toward orgasm raised a heat wave that shook the curtains in the room. I clenched her hair in my teeth. Coming was like momentarily abolishing the opacities of the world and making it transparent, like a drop of saliva that contained the sketch of the universe that God never showed to anybody.
    That’s the paradox of what English speakers call true love, which I can find no way of correctly translating to Spanish, perhaps because in the end we always turn out to be bigger bastards. To be able to use the body to escape the body, to be transubstantiated into a mortal mess of secretions, to forget about oneself and the other, to be nothing but a surface: the odor we give off, the oils that lubricate us, the skin that protects us. To be a nameless sum of muscles and fat. To feel pleasure is to trade the body for bodily sensation; sex at its best is the most spiritual experience available to us.
    I returned to wandering her back, the ridge of her coccyx, her buttocks. I let my fingers play in