Alvaro Enrigue - Hypothermia

Unlike me, Sebastián is the kind of person who loves and respects his job. Thanks to which we have ammunition for another of our endless arguments. He says that his profession demands a great deal of responsibility — I can forget to sign a check and it’s no big deal: a slight delay for some anonymous payee; whereas if he miscalculates the weight of this or that material going into some structure, his oversight could cost countless lives. Whenever he mentions it, I remind him that I was opposed to his studying engineering. A career like that, I always told him, will bring you nothing but problems and frustrations. But in spite of the never-ending sarcasm that I heap on him, he often seems proud of having succeeded in his profession. Once he even told me that if I’d let him watch television like other kids, he would’ve studied humanities; he’s sure that the torturous afternoons I spent expounding on the virtues of the Young People’s Treasure Chest Encyclopedia turned him away from culture for good. Today I tell myself that he might actually have a point, but it’s far too late for regrets.

While I watched him struggling to get his jacket off without standing back up, it occurred to me that I might be able to make him suffer just a little bit more if I pretended to be depressed. Then again, that might suck all the life out of the act I was about to perform. I put on a radiant expression. Sebastián said that I seemed to be in a much better mood than when we’d spoken on the phone. I told him that things had gotten better at the office, and then I signaled the waiter. Your usual? he asked. Yes, I answered with satisfaction, then said nothing. After a rather uncomfortable silence Sebastián said, I see you’ve got Dumbo’s feather. Are you starting a new novel? Such a blatantly conciliatory reference to my literary problem meant that he really was worried about his idiotic comments the night before. No, I replied, and lapsed back into silence, enjoying his nervousness.

There was nothing more to say until the waiter returned with our drinks. Sebastián’s vodka was served on the rocks along with a small bottle of tonic. I threw back my tequila in a single gulp. Another, sir? the waiter asked. The same. Sebastián was alarmed: he’d never seen me drink like that. He mustered his courage, took the bull by the horns, and said: I went too far last night. Instantly I raised my hand, cutting him off: Before you say another word, just pour your tonic. To his credit, he obeyed me, which — it’s worth saying — he’s almost always done, except when it came to engineering. While he poured the tonic water into his vodka I took Dumbo’s feather out of my shirt pocket and ceremoniously unscrewed the cap right under his nose. If that startles you, I said to him, I don’t even want to imagine what you’ll think about this. And for my next act I sank the pen right into his glass. The ink billowed out, rising toward the ice cubes like a plume of smoke from a cigarette. He looked scandalized, I’m not sure whether this was on account of my strange behavior or because I was spoiling his vodka. Then I stirred his drink with my personal swizzle stick, saying: Here, this is a gift. Dumbo’s feather, especially for you. I’m only a run-of-the mill pen pusher at a second-rate paper but I’m doing just fine. Then I got up and walked straight out of the restaurant, right past the astonished face of the waiter who was just coming back with my second tequila.

Estela didn’t bring it up during dinner, so I have to assume Sebastián is so confused he hasn’t even called her. Maybe he actually thinks his rude remarks last night killed off what remained of my sanity. He might be right. Here I am sitting in front of the computer with my anís and my cigarette, and the words are flowing like never before. Perhaps tomorrow after dinner I’ll feel like a smoke, and not in the bathroom. I’ll plant myself here, and to justify my drinking I’ll begin some story; nothing literary, just a sad little story, to be followed by others like it. They’ll be stories about people who aren’t working through difficult questions or pathetic feelings; minor characters — people who’ve never visited Paris, people nobody cares about. Gringos, for example. Normal, everyday gringos like the tourists you see on the street in their Bermuda shorts. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll donate all the books that I’ve taken such pains to collect. I’ll give away my computer and sell my writing desk. Then I’ll buy myself a soft, overstuffed couch and a big screen TV, and I will make this den my masterpiece.

In the ever-dreadful and overvalued popular imagination, a commercially successful writer is something that one comes to be, not something that one once was. For a surprising number of months, I was the rather relieved, but secret, author of a bestseller. Perhaps that’s hard to believe, but I swear it’s true.

My stunningly casual and entirely wasted trip through the bestseller list happened even before the beginning of my laborious and, frankly, long-suffering career as a writer. I was about twenty-five or twenty-six, living a disheveled sort of life that got rolling each day around noon — at the earliest. I had a certain reputation as a hard-line literary critic, but little else. It was a disaster in the making, thanks to these and a few other factors. For one, I’d recently lost a good job at a private university press: they’d discovered that I was using office hours to translate self-help books — for which I was miserably paid. For another, my wife, Cathy, made the unilateral decision that the time had arrived for making babies, so she stopped teaching classes at an English-language academy the better to cook one up. And then, the last straw, I’d run up an enormous debt on the three different credit cards which were burning a hole right through my wallet.

During one of those elegant lunches that nobody in our austere literary republic can really afford, I blamed the editor of the self-help books whose translations had cost me my job with its medical insurance and supermarket vouchers. I was already drunk enough that, with all the ingratitude appropriate to my condition, I made a number of unflattering remarks about the guy’s business. Responding with an unexpected professional pride — which itself probably only flourished when watered with tequila — he said that if I’d ever paid any real attention to the books he published, my own life might not be so depressing and miserable. I put up with his gibe mainly because I agreed with him about the depression and misery, but I told him that his books were so terrible I’d never even read the ones I’d translated. Sitting there, staring at me with the superior look of one who’s had slightly more to drink than his companion, the editor puffed out his cheeks, pressed his lips together, and said that that was impossible: one necessarily reads what one is writing as you go along. Then, mea culpa , instead of pissing myself laughing, I decided to brag. I told him that I could write one of his books from beginning to end by working just one hour a day and without rereading a single fucking word. He replied that he’d be sending me a contract the next day to see what I was really made of. The company courier woke me up at eleven o’clock the next morning to sign for it.

Unlike contracts for completed literary works, the ones for self-help books include a sort of instruction sheet about how to write them: being strictly commercial products, they follow tight guidelines that come spelled out in precise legal terms: the book must have a certain number of chapters and each chapter must be composed of X number of pages made up of paragraphs of no more (or less) than, for example, five sentences, each with a maximum of three clauses. The book’s theme and even the title come pre-specified — the result of a marketing survey — and you’ve got to promise, or risk forfeiting your advance, to deliver the book by a certain date, which in my case was four weeks from the day of signing. The book’s title, as assigned me by the publisher, was: Discipline: White Magic for the Successful Man .