Hypothermia Read online

  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 universities—without a doubt the people in this world who work least for the most money—so proudly pay lip-service during our frivolous sabbaticals:

  Locked away in the peace of these deserts,

  With a small, learned gathering of books

  I live conversing with those expired

  My eyes listening to the resting dead.

  Guzmán’s periods of exile, like those of Quevedo, were authentic and obligatory. Both of them were men of action who were condemned, from time to time, to quiescence—a curse for which we, their readers, should be selfishly grateful. Sometimes I feel a bit like an exile, but for the most part I have to admit that I’m really nothing more than a high-class wetback.

  My wife and son should have returned by now. If they get home any later we’re going to have to go out for dinner.

  8:35 P.M. I got back to the house a while ago. I went to the pool but no one else was there and it was terribly boring. I can’t read either, I’m too worried that they’re not back yet. I turn on the TV to catch the baseball game without anybody suggesting we change the channel and watch cartoons instead. I open the giant-size bag of Tostitos and pour a Diet Coke. The silence has become unbearable so I turn up the volume. The poet Julio Trujillo is right when he says that baseball is an Odyssean sport: the batter has to circle round the archipelago of the bases to get back home.

  Between innings I step out onto the balcony. I see that all the neighbors who hate the ocean without realizing it have returned home. Now they’re out taking walks to make their vacations tolerable. I wonder if my family’s ship might have had engine troubles and sunk.

  11:15 P.M. The game’s finished. They still haven’t gotten home or called.

  1:00 A.M. I can’t get to sleep. I take out the trash and check to make sure all the outside lights are on: maybe in the dark they couldn’t recognize the house and just drove past. Coming back inside I see a sign above the door I hadn’t noticed before: Ithaca.

  HEAVY WEATHER

  1. AIR

  Things out of order are restless; restored to order, they are at rest.

  ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, XIII, 9

  The first things that went flying by the window were newspapers and plastic bags. This wouldn’t have been unusual for autumn, but we were sitting in a third-floor classroom at the time. We were talking about how Rubén Darío had been abandoned as a baby, and I interrupted the discussion to comment on the disgusting weather found on the East Coast of the United States. My students just sat there, staring back at me with hostility—for my own sanity I’ve decided that they always look that way—so I simply continued with my lecture. By now we were talking about Darío’s arrival at Valparaíso, when something else went flying by the window; it might have been a tarp from a construction site, the hood of a car, or a calf. Instantly, the Wizard of Oz file in my mind clicked open and I proposed that we head downstairs to the basement and finish class in one of the lecture halls there. They followed my instructions—for the first time—with military discipline.

  The Foreign Languages building where I teach usually empties out around three o’clock each afternoon. The hallways end up littered with garbage, like in the aftermath of a summary execution: open notebooks, disposable cups rimmed with lipstick traces, a sweatshirt or cap flung into the corner. The hastily abandoned classrooms exude the same feeling one must get while staring at the charred, smoking remains of a massacre. The whole place smells like a bombed-out city. To avoid further distractions, I chose a windowless classroom, and managed to get as far as Darío’s move to Buenos Aires. I told them that as soon as the Nicaraguan poet stepped off the boat, the Spanish language was never the same, that the known world ended right then and there, and that another one—possibly better, but certainly different—began. Darío, I declared, in a rapture of lyricism that earned me a variety of odd looks, from hostile to confused, was the writer who’d flushed all the old crap down the toilet.

  After that, we managed a fairly decent review of several of Darío’s poems, with time still left for me to discuss the details of an assignment they had to turn in for the next class. As always, I thanked them for their patience. Nobody said you’re welcome, so I figured they’d had enough of me.

  After class, I took my time gathering up my papers and books to avoid running into one of my students at the bus stop or, later, on the Metro. I never really know what to say when I do. I feel as though I’m going to end up sounding like a pervert, no matter what I say. Adjusting my glasses on the bridge of my nose every few moments, I pretended to be absorbed with my roster. I briefly looked over my notes again and then, with exaggerated care, packed everything into my briefcase. I left the building only when I was sure they’d all melted away into the sprawling campus.

  Outside it was odd to see no one sitting on the patio. Thanks to its comfortable tables in the shade right outside a building frequented by foreign exchange students, it’s usually populated by packs of smokers. A heavy, humid breeze, more appropriate to August than the end of September, was stirring the astonishing amount of sodden trash left by the storm in the corners of the patio and all around the legs of the chairs. Then I heard the sound of sirens in the distance, and realized how uneasy I was already feeling.

  Ever since the mournful days of the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, the sound of ambulances fills me with an anxiety that I’m always slow to identify. For the better part of two weeks, sirens provided the only soundtrack to our paralyzed lives. I’ll never forget the mornings I spent as part of a team of senior high school students hauling and delivering food in Tepito, a neighborhood that had been completely destroyed. This is what Mexico City will look like when the gringos declare war on us again,
El Pollo said to me. He was hard at work playing the role of emergency driver in the improvised ambulance we’d made out of his truck, sticking giant crosses of red tape to its sides. Afterward—as with Darío and tradition—nothing in Mexico was ever the same: we flushed the toilet on sixty years of half-assed tyranny. Although the older generations have a hard time accepting it, we had ourselves a real revolution, a la Hemingway: by carrying stretchers.

  To get to the street that runs through the center of campus you have to traverse a long meadow bordered by oak trees. Normally this walk cheers me up when I’ve had enough of being an insignificant foreigner: teaching classes in Latin American literature at a gringo university is like cutting trees in a deserted forest with no one around to hear them fall. As I walked, I felt increasingly sure that something ominous was afoot: not a soul in sight on the paths, and the whining sirens were growing more intense as I approached the university’s main road. At that point I was still sufficiently unaware of events to be annoyed by the idea that, whatever had happened, the road would be clogged with terrible traffic and I’d end up taking forever to reach the Metro. I checked my pocket and made sure I had enough change to call my wife from a pay phone. I wanted to let her know that she should go ahead and give the kids dinner. I’d be home as soon as possible.

  Which turned out to be the last ordinary worry I’d have, that evening: I got to the main drag only to find it closed off and deserted. The bus stop was encircled by yellow police tape. The ambulances sounded farther away now. Seized by a ferocious dread, I walked toward the student commons where the cafeterias, bookstores, and post office were located. All deserted. I walked the hallways, climbing and descending staircases. Everything was closed and lonely. In the main dining room the tables were covered with dozens of abandoned meals: half-eaten hamburgers, full cups of soda, plastic spoons navigating melted sundaes. At the reception desk, I rang the visitors’ bell over and over in a sort of hysteria.

  Before going back outside and starting my long walk to the Metro station—I’d had to do the same thing once before, when a snowstorm shut down bus service while I was busy in the library—I stopped at a bank of pay phones to call my wife and ask her what was going on. The line was dead. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a whole crowd of people walking together in silence.

  I ran upstairs and came face to face with a huge line of students shuffling along in a tight, orderly, disciplined column, following a volunteer wearing a florescent orange vest over his everyday clothes. In the crowd, I recognized a woman from Panama who was a former student of mine. I pulled her out of line and asked her what was going on. There was a tornado, she told me in a stupefied voice that seemed to come not from her throat but from somewhere deep inside her.

  What happened? It hit the dorms by the football stadium. I felt a new surge of fear: the university nursery school, which my children attended, was in the same complex of buildings. What time had it happened? I asked her. She wasn’t sure. I’d just come out of psychology class, she said, and they locked us inside the first-floor classrooms. I was on my way to my next class, it must have been about four o’clock, right now they’re rounding everybody up because there’s another one coming. But the rest of the school’s deserted, I told her. They’re underground, she said, they’ve got half the university in the basement.

  Without saying good-bye I ran toward the outer doors. Another volunteer blew his whistle when he saw me go past. I ignored him: Cathy picked up the kids at five o’clock, which meant they would have been evacuated with everybody else.

  I often had to swing by and grab the kids when my wife’s job at that insurance company required her to work into the evening. I also had transportation duty on Fridays, which was my only day off. The nursery school—a low, wide building, with a tornado watchtower on the roof—was located on the flattest, most open part of the campus, between the sports complex and some Soviet-style dorms that provided cramped housing for most of the undergraduates. When there was bad weather—in this country it’s always either too hot or too cold, or it rains or floods or freezes or hails—I’d take the campus loop bus; otherwise, I’d make the half-hour walk, generally arriving late. The principal would greet me with a reproving stare, all her stereotypes about Mexicans confirmed as I came through the door dripping sweat, a good ten or fifteen minutes past closing. In the three years my kids had spent at the school, the only expression I’d ever seen on her, even when I arrived on time, was that of the Protestant matron enraged at the world’s immorality.

  The day of the tornado I covered the last five hundred or thousand yards by cutting across lawns and meadows. The police had all the roads and sidewalks blocked off and I didn’t want them to pick me up for evacuation before finding out if the kids had been taken to a safe location in time. The damage got worse as I neared my destination, going from upsetting to catastrophic. I finally found my way blocked by a massive tangle of uprooted trees and chunks of asphalt; the only way forward was to scramble over it all. An entire lamppost had been plucked from the ground and coiled like a corkscrew around the trunk of an oak tree. The image of that hideously twisted metal is burned into my memory, I fear, forever.

  The street leading to the nursery school’s front entrance was blocked by cars crushed by fallen trees. I was clambering over the debris when I felt someone grip my shoulder. It was a policewoman in full riot gear. She shouted at me that the whole area was off limits. I realized then that I’d managed to tune out the hellish racket of sirens and hammering combined with the sound of the wind, which was starting to pick up again now. I pulled away from the woman without answering, but only made it a few yards before she caught me again. I told her my kids had been inside when the tornado hit. Everybody was very worried, she said, but she could not, unfortunately, let me through. I asked if she’d heard about any victims. She said there were some casualties but didn’t know how many or if any were from the school. The children and teachers had all been evacuated to the sports complex. This time I escaped by scrambling over the roof of a car, but in a few moments she collared me again, twisting my right arm up behind my back. She threatened to arrest me if I tried running again, and in that case I certainly wouldn’t find out about my children any time soon. She frog-marched me away and turned me over to a volunteer with a blond crew cut who weighed at least 450 pounds. Without releasing my arm he more or less carried me into the gymnasium. I remember scanning the scene in desperation and noticing that the whole roof had been peeled off the daycare building. My last sight of the emergency zone was two firefighters cutting open a car to remove the passengers, their only available light cast by the spinning beacons on nearby rescue vehicles.

  Gringos are an obedient sort of people: in full compliance with the authorities they were now organized into assigned groups and distributed throughout the gigantic subterranean sports complex. The ground floor, with its swimming pools under glass domes, was off-limits. The huge volunteer dumped me into a human river flowing downstairs to the lower levels. I asked a number of people if they knew the whereabouts of the kids from the nursery school, but nobody had news.

  I left the spiral stairway on the first floor below ground level and went looking for the gymnasiums. Large tribes of young people seated in big circles were playing cards or talking and shouting to one another. One group told me they had seen a woman with a bunch of little kids on the basketball courts on the fourth floor, two more flights down.

  As soon as I got back into the river of people heading downstairs, I noticed that the lower levels were much warmer: the electricity must have been knocked out; what little power we still had was thanks to the university’s generator. That explained why there was no air conditioning. The crowd advanced slowly, like a mob of sleepwalkers.

  The basketball courts filled an immense cavern. All the times I had made the walk to the nursery school, I’d never imagined that such a space existed beneath my feet. Students were camped out in groups, reading, sleeping, or doing homework. A volunt
eer signaled to me, index finger raised to his lips, that it was forbidden to make noise there. I couldn’t imagine that they would try to keep children there, under such conditions, so I kept moving.

  In the hallway I ran into a Korean professor of economics I knew, an acquaintance from some of the Fathers’ Nights at the nursery school. He was leading his son by the hand so I latched onto his coattails and asked him where the other kids were. At first he looked disconcerted, as if staring at me from inside a thick bubble. Then he seemed to recognize me. In one great rush he began to give me a scattered account of how a falling tree had smashed the hood of his car. He and his kid had waited quietly inside until the storm passed and then run to the school, which by then had had its doors ripped off and windows shattered, and was missing part of its roof. He kept saying that he didn’t know what he was going to do: he had just bought a house, and his insurance wouldn’t pay for the car because he hadn’t gotten any coverage for Acts of God. It took some effort to snap him out of it so that he could give me some more pertinent details: everyone at the school had been evacuated, they were in the women’s locker room down on the lowest level. It was pretty dark down there, he said, and really hot, so he was looking for someplace to buy his son a cold drink.

  I headed downstairs, leaving him to his monologue about the irrationality of a culture that attributes natural phenomena to God, as if he were chief clerk in charge of the weather. Past the fifth level it grew noticeably darker: only a few lights were on, and the red emergency lights gave the place a twilight atmosphere. The heat was so intense that there were only a few students still moving around.