Hypothermia Read online

  It didn’t take long before money was tight again. You’re going to have to nurse him until he’s fifteen, I told my wife, but then we received the first sign of a positive change in my professional life: the public relations woman at my publisher began to call every day asking me if I would give interviews. It sounded like fun so I did a few over the telephone, but to avoid tarnishing my proud career as a readerless critic I never consented to do them for radio, or television, or for anybody, really, who might want to broadcast any evidence of my real identity. On the phone I made sure to project a zealous belief in all the ridiculous bullshit my book contained.

  I had just asked to borrow some money from my father—my credit cards were now more maxed out than ever—when I received the first check, the first amazing royalty check from sales of the book. I’ll just say this: we went to Italy for six months so we could take care of the baby in comfort and ease. When we returned there were two more checks waiting: we bought a car and there was so much money left over that when the next one arrived we bought the whole apartment that contained the little au pair suite where we had been living. From then on our capital gains grew thinner, but we didn’t notice it so much because I was already earning more, working in the mornings translating better-paying books for a more respectable press.

  I’m not going to say that we weren’t disappointed the first quarter when a royalty check didn’t show up, but by then it wasn’t such a big deal. Cathy had taken on some private students and I was completely focused on spending the afternoons working on what turned out to be my first novel, which sold a grand total of four hundred and twenty-three magnificent copies.

  GULA, OR: THE INVOCATION

  One fine day, with no particular destination in mind, we found ourselves brainstorming ideas about how to escape from Mexico City. For my part, at least, I couldn’t stand the place anymore. The current government as well as the opposition party; my coworkers; my neighbors and their endlessly rude, spoiled children; having to wait in line at the bank to file my quarterly tax returns: it had all become insufferable. As we had a little money saved up, we figured we could move—without too much hardship—to some new and exciting foreign city. After shuffling through a bunch of possibilities, our deliberations ended with our settling on two possible locations: one, glamorous and risky, where we could continue living out our intensely bohemian life; the other, more secure, where I could work as a university professor. It was July; we set our departure for January and decided to let fate choose our destination.

  Moving abroad is a lot more work than it seems: we ended up spending nine months getting everything in order. Then, on a day like any other, I ran into an old astrologer friend—as serious and professional a fellow as his profession allows—in the produce aisle at the supermarket. Being well-versed in the Ancient Greek tragedies, I’ve always been reluctant to visit him for advice. He did draw up my star chart once, but I was altogether too anxious to sit down and read the results.

  That day in the store he told me that he’d been thinking about me and that perhaps it was time for us to have a proper consultation. So I went, casting my lot with ancient superstitions—who knew, perhaps it would give our life a direction, pointing out which city would be luckiest for us.

  On my one and only visit to his study, I quickly learned the cold, hard truth about the stars: nothing so banal as points on a map ever show up in your horoscope. What I was shown instead was a descent into hell, with death at either end. First, a terrible one in February. Someone in your family, he said, your mother, your son, Cathy, one of your brothers or sisters. Then another one, later on, between April and August, which, if I didn’t take precautions, would be my own.

  There was even more bad news to come, albeit of a less fatal variety. You’re going to lose your job in December, he told me, by way of example. That’s because I’m giving notice, I answered. I’m moving away in January. No, he insisted, they’re going to fire you and you’ll leave town after April. If you stay alive, that is. My favorite cat also showed up in my friend’s visions, an ill-tempered black Persian. There’s an animal here, he told me, who seems to be the protector of your house. That’s Gula, I told him. She’d give her life, he added, to save you or any of your family.

  Now that we’d finished I asked him if there were any sort of talisman he could recommend that might protect me. We were staring out his office window at a dingy, trash-strewn street. You’re a writer, aren’t you? he asked. More or less, I told him. So write it all out. Sometimes that can work like a lightning rod.

  Remembering, like storytelling, means creating order where none existed. The truth is that my session with the astrologer was much more confusing than the above, and his statements far less clear. But, regardless, I left his office feeling disturbed by something but uncertain of what this might be—sort of like the way you feel after drinking too much coffee. Back home I gave my wife a deliberately abbreviated version of my session, minus all the disgraceful catastrophes that were looming ahead. And because it’s better to prevent than lament, I began to write, almost furtively, a story about a cat that sacrifices itself for a man and his children.

  December arrived and they fired me from the company where I’d worked for years. You said that you were leaving in January anyway, so we made our own plans, my boss told me, trying to make it sound like it was nothing personal. As if it could ever not be personal. Around the beginning of February, during the same weeks I was fleshing out my story about the cat’s death, the police rang my doorbell in the middle of the night. They had my brother—one of nine siblings—locked up in the back of their patrol car with a cracked sternum and fractured ribs. They brought him like that, and at such an unlikely hour, because in a near-fatal accident he’d flattened a lamppost, which constituted a civil offense.

  By that time we had already closed out our bank accounts, so I ran upstairs for a roll of cash. We settled on a price and I paid up. I also tipped generously so that they would dispose of my brother’s horrifyingly wrecked car, and so that the officers would forget our names and addresses forever. I took my brother to the hospital.

  When I returned home many hours later, Cathy asked me if this had been the trouble I’d been expecting. What trouble? I asked her. What the astrologer predicted for you. Astrologers don’t predict anything, I told her. My brother’s going to be fine, don’t worry. I left the story about the cat unfinished and went back to work on the book that was due to be published before we moved.

  At last, my wife and I finished almost everything that we had begun in Mexico City, and in the middle of May, in one momentous effort, we left the country with our little boy, our cat, and our piano. Since my second book had already gone on sale and our university jobs in the hardly glamorous city to which we’d moved didn’t begin until after August, I decided to get back to my story about the man and the cat before classes started. As much as I disliked the idea of having to finish the poor beast off, I felt an overwhelming sense of metaphysical responsibility demanding I write out its demise. You always have to finish what you start, especially if the warring stars above augur your misfortune.

  At the beginning of August we moved to our new, permanent address. There, Gula and I and our little boy began to enjoy spending time in the garden, a real novelty for us. At night I worked on the story about the cat and the man.

  Gula had always been insufferably independent, but she’d never had any direct experience of the outdoors. Now she spent entire days hunting mice and exploring trees: she’d never even seen one before. Meanwhile, I finally killed the cat in the story I was writing.

  When one’s imagination runs dry, superstition is its last refuge, but superstition—once invoked—goes right on menacing us even when we have no need of it anymore, even when we deny its reality: no one really believes that such invocations have any effect on the world; we’re rational people after all, but we still knock on wood! One morning we noticed that Gula hadn’t come home to sleep in our bed for a few nights
. I went down to the basement and found her—the epitome of feline vanity—stretched out, feverish and dusty, under an air-conditioning duct. We took her to the vet. It turned out that she’d eaten a poisonous root that had destroyed her liver—she had only a few hours left to live. We carried her back home. There we made her a comfortable bed of towels and old scraps of flannel, and we let her die in peace.

  DIARY OF A QUIET DAY

  9:00 A.M. Before my son was born I used to spend whole days at the beach, as though I were already retired. Not that I ever went out to dance clubs or sipped cocktails from coconut shells, nor was I ever one of those adrenaline junkies who risk their necks parasailing. Instead I’d sit, just planted in the sand, reading a book. It runs in my family. When we were kids, my parents frequently took us to spend weekends at the beach. These were only weekend trips, so we made sure to enjoy every moment to the fullest extent. We’d arrive late on Friday evening. Then, on Saturday morning, we’d eat breakfast in shifts so that we could secure a palapa facing the sea, right at the edge of the surf, where we would all settle in for the day: my parents imperiously enthroned in the shade, and the nine of us children—brazenly lazy, almost obscenely identical—stretched out reading in a row of beach chairs like a flank of cavalry.

  Ever since my son was born, however, a day on vacation is more like a feverish trance: from six A.M. to eight each morning we’re in the swimming pool; then it’s time for breakfast and off to the beach. There we tumble in the waves, dig holes, build sandcastles, make seaweed wigs, and poke around for crabs to torture. I end up with sand encrusted on parts of my body I didn’t even know existed. Around noon we retreat to the house’s air-conditioned embrace. We eat lunch, then I put my son down for his nap. In the afternoon, while Cathy is looking after him, I settle down—as in days gone by—to read a paperback edition of The Odyssey. Perhaps being a father now helps me to see that all the tension in Homer’s epic comes from the friction between the hyperkinetic Odysseus and the placidly dim-witted Telemachus, a good-for-nothing son who neither defends his mother from the pretenders who accost her, nor sets sail in search of his father.

  Today is different. We’re staying at an enormous house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a strip of sandbars and islands which begins at Cape Henry, just a few miles from Norfolk, and stretches south more than three hundred miles, beyond Cape Fear and Wilmington—a haven for pirates, once upon a time. We—my wife, our little boy, a pair of grandmothers, two dogs, and a cat—opened up the house last Sunday and we’ll close it next week. It’s now Wednesday, maybe Thursday. The day before yesterday the rest of my wife’s family arrived. Because they live far inland, up in the hills, they hate—possibly without realizing it—the sea and everything to do with it. One day at the beach was enough to convince them that there’s no sport in tormenting crabs—they walk backward, after all—and spur them to organize a few outings in the car, with seat belts properly buckled and the air-conditioning high enough to blow-dry their hair. Through gritted teeth, my wife angrily gave in to her family obligations—the inexorable summons of her bloodline—so she and our son are heading out with them for the day. I’m staying here to get some work done.

  As I helped to pack the Diet Cokes and the party-size bags of Tostitos as big as TV sets, I was seized by the dizzying prospect of spending an entire day of perhaps immoral peace and quiet: in the gringo universe, where having children is more a self-indulgent whim than a real decision, one quickly learns that if your kids aren’t driving you crazy, it’s because they’re driving someone else crazy, somebody without kids of their own.

  10:30 A.M. From the spacious third-floor balcony you can see the ocean. Between our place and the beach is another row of houses similar to this one. People around here christen their homes as they do their yachts. Each one has its own sign emblazoned with some quasi-nautical name: Circe, Ogygia, Poseidon. The breeze is not especially refreshing and I feel sorry for my relatives driving around out there. By now they must have reached the town of Kitty Hawk where, in 1903, the Wright Brothers defied gravity with their tiny, pathetic first flight, which lasted all of twelve seconds. Since then we’ve never stopped perpetuating that defiance: we fly to Tokyo, we stay up all night drinking Diet Coke, we make babies for the hell of it.

  The ocean is tempting but the books I’m reading are checked out from the university library, and it looks bad if you return them all greasy, stained with Coppertone. This house—somebody else’s—feels very strange, its quiet emptiness closing in around me. I never really thought I could miss my oversized brothers-in-law.

  11:00 A.M. The conquest of the Canary Islands was a strange thing, really more of a sudden interruption in the midst of timeless tranquility. In one of her books, the Cuban Professor Eyda Merediz—like myself, an émigré to Washington, D.C.—writes that Spain’s incorporation of the Fortunate Isles into its Empire provided a model for subsequent Spanish incursions into the Americas: Columbus’s bizarre descriptions of his first landing in the West Indies result from his perceiving Atlantic America through the nascent mythology of the Canary possessions. This probably also accounts for the perverse insistence on seeing our own tormented continent as an Edenic territory: what those Spanish captains found on the Canaries was nothing like the complex, militarized civilizations that Cortés or Pizarro fought to conquer, but a separate universe, infinitely isolated in its megalithic serenity. The German anthropologist Hans Biedermann has shown that, before being assimilated into Spanish culture, the Guanches were the last bastion of the European Stone Age: despite a reliance on draft animals they neither used wheels nor forged metals.

  In settling personal feuds, the Guanches practiced a custom that, as recorded by various historians, seems to me particularly disturbing. When two villagers had a falling out, the whole community would accompany them to a special enclosure, in whose center were two raised stones set in the earth at a certain distance from one another. Armed with small sacks of rocks, the enemies faced off from atop these stone-age pitching mounds and took turns hurling their projectiles at each other’s head. The Guanches’ aim was legendary, so deadly that the excitement of the contest came not from the combatants’ striking each other but from seeing who was best able to dodge the rocks. Losing typically meant getting killed; naturally, there were plenty of bets on both sides. Maybe our own contemporary forms of violence—guzzling Diet Coke on night flights to Tokyo alongside the kid you had for kicks—provide a better way of settling things.

  2:00 P.M. It took several moments of severe uneasiness before I realized that I’m hungry. I missed lunch because there was nobody here to ask me for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’ve been married for quite a few years, long enough so that I can no longer remember any whole day when I was a bachelor. On top of that, I’ve now been a father for five years.

  Not long ago, Cathy and our little boy traveled to the Midwestern plains for the eightieth birthday celebration of one of her grandmothers. I don’t recall why, but I had to stay home. In less than twenty-four hours I resumed the rhythm that I’d lost after our son was born: I worked all night and woke up in the middle of the afternoon. I ate a dozen doughnuts a day. When they returned home, the fruit in our bowls was swarming with flies and the milk had gone sour. I wonder if that’s how all bachelors live. Do they ever cook themselves a nice chicken almondine or toss a Greek salad? I suppose that every time Odysseus ate a vegetable, during all those years he spent sleeping around, away from his wife and child, it counted as a Greek salad. But what does a bachelor do when faced with the endless horizon of a Saturday alone?

  In the kitchen pantry I find a box of Froot Loops the size of a suitcase. A lot of it has already been eaten, making me think that it must be a daily staple for one of my brothers-in-law. Setting the box out on the table, I figure I can finish it off without leaving anybody malnourished: tomorrow morning, between the pool and breakfast, I’ll have time to visit the supermarket and replace it before everybody gets up. By the time they’re all
out of bed I’ll have already played soccer, outfitted Buzz Lightyear with his galactic armor, and read the 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.