Hypothermia

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 .
    After carefully reading the contract I thought of asking for six months to deliver the book. My wife, however—reading over my shoulder in a most irritating way—pointed out that it would perhaps be worth my while to make more of an effort: she was already seven months pregnant and my credit cards couldn’t even bear the brunt of her hospital registration fee. I went ahead and signed.
    At first I tried to maintain the schedule I’d been enjoying, unearned—playing the literary celebrity: rise at noon, eat lunch with some minor luminary with whom I would then, preferably, spend the afternoon drinking, then head home—if there wasn’t some book launch or publishing house cocktail party—eat dinner, drink several cups of coffee, and spend half the night writing.
    I quickly realized that if I kept working that way I would never finish the damn thing. The pressure of the coming birth was considerable, but what really spurred me on was my own twisted sense of dignity—I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my drunken boast. And then, my lifestyle didn’t even give me the time I needed to be able to read the books and write the reviews and articles thanks to which we barely paid for the rent on our garret and our necessarily vegetarian diet. So I began to get up at the same time that Cathy left for her walk in Venados Park, to write more or less mechanically for the first two or three hours of the morning. Then I would make corrections nonstop until lunchtime. In the afternoon I worked on my old hard-line articles then went to bed at a reasonable hour so I could be up and writing the goddamn self-help book at the break of dawn the next day.
    I don’t have a very happy memory of those rather melancholy weeks, but the robotic routine of concentrated work made me feel, for the first time, like a responsible adult