Hypothermia

paper from front to back while watching cartoons. With their tousled, matted hair and pasty mouths, the sleepy denizens of the house will be pouring themselves their first cups of coffee while I‘ll be ready to crack open my first beer.
    My wife and son must have eaten lunch by now. Studying a chart of famous shipwrecks on the Outer Banks of North Carolina that I bought at a local souvenir shop, I imagine they must have already reached the bird sanctuary at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. I’ve honestly never understood the fascination of bird-watching, a pastime so dear to the gringo heart. I remind myself to make a note about the Froot Loops: I’d rather not have to face down any of my brothers-in-law in a stone-throwing duel.
    4:30 P . M . Ancient history resembles the old Mother Goose nursery rhymes that are still used to help English-speaking children learn to read. Once upon a time those rhymes probably described political and social realities that everybody understood, but nowadays all such references have been lost. All we can do now is enjoy the cadences of a highly stylized imaginative code, preserved in print. And like Mother Goose rhymes, the chronicles of the conquest of the Canary Islands—by Cerdeño, by Gómez Escudero—make for good reading, but you can only take them in small doses. I’ll opt for The Odyssey on the beach.
    It’s pretentious, I admit, taking such a high-caliber classic out to play in the sand. But it was meant to be. I usually travel with just one or two novels and a single book of poetry, but on this trip I couldn’t avoid bringing a huge load of material for my work. Besides the volumes I checked out on the history of the Fortunate Isles, I’ve also got—I’m a professor of literature—volume one of the Complete Works of Martín Luis Guzmán. It’s practically a solid cube—perhaps the most single difficult work in the history of literature to get into a suitcase.
    I’ve been reading Guzmán at night and the historians when my son takes his nap. For going to the beach I scoured the anonymous selection of books that belong to this house. On other trips and in other cities I’ve found books that ended up profoundly affecting me, such as Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War or The Loss of El Dorado by V. S. Naipaul. I was looking for some kind of detective thriller when I found the Penguin Pocket Classics edition of Homer and sat down to have a look at it. My son was watching Bambi . He asked me what kind of book could possibly distract me from such a movie—another kind of classic. I told him that it was about mermaids (not sirens)—that seemed to satisfy him. Later on he wanted me to tell him about the mermaids. I told him a fairly faithful version but made a few subtle changes; the mermaids still fed on sailors but I omitted the abundant sadomasochistic details of the original text. That’s a good story, he replied, with a hint of menace in his voice. You can tell me the rest of it tonight. I got busy reading The Odyssey so that I’d have something else to tell him by bedtime.
    5:00 P . M . Before settling down to read in the sand with all the quiet calm of my bachelor days, I walked along the beach. Staring out at the sea, I figured that by now my family must be on the ferry from Cape Hatteras to Ocra-coke Island. It was those shallow waters that swallowed the ship of Blackbeard, last of the legendary pirates. In 1718, Edward Teach—his real name—was resting after one of his atrocious raids. Like all his forerunners, Blackbeard knew he would be left to his own devices as long as he laid low in the Carolina estuaries. That very fact enabled the British to set up a blockade. Two navy schooners launched a surprise attack against his ship, and their broadsides sent him to the bottom without much of a fight. My wife and son, and some of their relatives on today’s outing, count among their ancestors the admiral who commanded the mission. It brought an end to piracy, once so lucrative for the English crown, but which political and economic developments had rendered obsolete.
    As I walk along, I also think about Guzmán, quite possibly Mexico’s best storyteller. He was also a man who found politics so tempting that he could only write during his periods of exile, when he had no other way to make a living except by writing. No writer is more deserving of Quevedo’s oft-quoted praise of quietude, to which we professors at American