I was knocked out in the first round. I didn’t even make it to the improvisations, which, given that I’m a methodical and insecure man, was where I thought I’d be disqualified. After the terrible moment when I found out that I’d been eliminated, the Argentine told me not to take it personally, that a Peruvian fellow like Terapia would never give the prize to a Mexican Creole like me. He said that both countries were too much alike, and that the Paraguayan was the one who was going to win: nobody had ever heard of his restaurant in Asunción, which would mean no new competition for Terapia. I don’t know about the accuracy of every element of his theory, but regarding who would emerge as the winner, he was speaking with the voice of a prophet.
I didn’t want to wait for them to finish filming, so I said that I was stepping outside the studio to smoke a cigarette, then kept walking to the street. I caught a taxi back to Miraflores where I drank three vodkas in a row at the hotel bar. After taking a nap I went out looking for bookshops to see if I could find some titles about convent life during Peru’s viceregal era.
When I got back to the hotel, now late in the afternoon, I found a message from my producer — she was mostly angry because I hadn’t been there to be filmed congratulating the winner, but still invited me out to dinner.
We went to a restaurant located at the foot of the magnificent ruins that Mr. Hinojosa had driven me past the night I arrived. We chatted like old friends: every defeat, I’ve noticed, brings us closer to our fellow sufferers, bound by that fatal, dispassionate knot that joins the survivors of great calamities. I didn’t insist that she have a glass of wine. We talked a little bit about her job and a lot about mine; a little bit about her love life, absolutely nothing about mine.
We said good-bye in the hotel reception area: she was flying back to Geneva via New York on Sunday morning and I was leaving in the afternoon. I slept well in spite of, or thanks to, the fact that my room had a real bed, not the hard thin mat that I’d been stubbornly sleeping on since Teresa left me.
In the morning the phone woke me up. It was Pablo, Max Terapia’s friend, who was inviting me to have breakfast at one of his coffee shops, after which he would take me to see the beaches so that I wouldn’t leave without getting at least a glimpse of them. I told him that I preferred to visit the Gold Museum. He said that he’d observed the other night that I wasn’t ready to see it, that it would be better if I visited it when I returned to Lima, wellcured of the sickness that was obviously tormenting me and which would not be helped by the sight of golden condors flying toward the sun all over the museum. Nobody had ever said anything so strange to me, so it sounded reasonable enough. I asked him to give me half an hour to get cleaned up.
We had breakfast in one of his cafés, on a street that reminded me intensely of the Colonia Roma in Mexico City. There, many years before, a restauranteur friend of mine named Raul had started promoting some of the recipes that I’d unearthed to write my book about Spanish colonial cuisine. It was Raul who found me in my apartment, almost dead of starvation, who knows how many weeks after that fucking whore Teresa had run off with my student. The very same Raul gave me a job at his place when we found out that they’d fired me from the university. At first, my job consisted of sitting in a chair behind the cash register, but, little by little, and mostly from pure boredom, I started working my way into the business and the kitchens. Less than a year later my friend introduced me to the gringo who wanted to open a restaurant serving nouveau-Mexican cuisine in the United States.
There was nothing spectacular about Pablo’s coffee shop, although the food, like everywhere in Lima, was good. Among the numerous banalities we exchanged during breakfast, he asked me if the Swiss woman was beautiful. What, I said. I don’t know, is she beautiful? How should I know, I answered him. Each to his own. So then you think she’s beautiful. She’s pretty, not lethal, I said, and he gave a start. What do you mean she’s not lethal? he asked me. She’s lived in Geneva her whole life, I told him, a city where you leave your bicycle parked on the street and nobody steals it. And if she moved to Lima? he asked me. I suppose after a while she’d learn how to style her hair, to steal her brother’s bicycle — to be lethal. A look of horror crossed his face. Oh, you’ve got it bad, he told me. Really bad.
He took me around in his car to see a number of different places. We went to a couple of beaches and to a fantastic old bookstore owned by a Uruguayan — I walked out the door with a whole box of books. We ate lunch at a really expensive restaurant, even by Washington standards: built out on the water, surrounded by the ocean, and connected to the land by a long, narrow pier, it was called La Rosa Náutica. The idea was that you would feel like you were on a ship. Every so often he insisted on repeating his question, but by now he was answering himself: She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Could she ever be lethal? I ignored him and asked if we could talk about politics or Peruvian history, which were the topics where his sharp, crafty wit shone best. We went to one of his other cafés for coffee and brandy — all his places had the same name but this one was really nice, located near the hotel so that we wouldn’t waste time with the traffic and I wouldn’t miss my plane.
The café was in a shopping mall with ethereal architecture: an extremely delicate structure that thrust out over the ravine. The café occupied the building’s central location, so that one was seated literally above the abyss, from which the customers were protected by a railing and a rather tall partition of heavy glass.
I wore myself out praising the café’s setting. Pablo told me that he was thinking of selling it, that having to clean the salt off the glass every day was too complicated. He waved his hands around too much while talking; I’ve been criticized for doing the same thing. The mall had been designed by a Catalan, he explained, who had not taken into account the locals’ habit of leaping to their deaths. I had to install the glass myself to avoid negative publicity when someone ended up jumping off. And there’s no built-in way for us to clean it; we’ve got to do it with scaffolding, every morning. It’s super dangerous. I told him about my vertiginous fascination with Lima’s penchant for flight. He made some rather nervous references to pre-Hispanic suicide practices, and mentioned aerial hara-kiri. He asked me if it was love-sickness that was tormenting me. Obviously, I said. It’s the Swiss woman, isn’t it? So she is beautiful, kind of lethal. It’s not the Swiss woman, I told him. It’s a long story, from a long time ago, and I really don’t feel like telling it. Nobody, I concluded, can get so worked up over a Calvinist, believe me. You never know, he told me. My wife is Danish and I think she’s sleeping with Terapia.
Glancing at his watch, he stood up abruptly, saying that he’d lost track of time, that he had tickets to take his kids to the soccer match, and would I please excuse him and catch a taxi back to the hotel. We shook hands with the tenderness of brother exiles. I stayed and ordered another brandy: I’d left my suitcases at hotel reception and I had a little extra time before Mr. Hinojosa would be coming by to pick me up.
I paid my bill, despite the waiter insisting that Pablo’s friends didn’t pay at his establishments. Walking out to the street I saw that on one of the shopping mall’s balconies the management hadn’t bothered to install any safety glass. A whole crowd of people was gathering there, looking down. Once inside the taxi I heard the ambulance sirens: another condor, the driver told me. On Saturday they finished work on the Suicide Bridge, so now they’re coming over here.