Hypothermia

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. A IR

    Things out of order are restless; restored to order, they are at rest.
    S T . A UGUSTINE , 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