My Documents (14 page)

There are also those rumors about Champix that tend to appear in the paper’s science section, which I don’t give any credit to because I don’t believe in the paper’s science section. What a giant lie, the science section: on Monday they report on important studies at prestigious universities about the virtues of wine or almonds, and on Wednesday they say that both are bad for you. I remember that verse from Nicanor Parra: “Bread is bad for you / all foods are bad for you.” It’s like the horoscope section: last week it said the same thing on Monday for Libra that it said on Saturday for Pisces.

In any case, the rumors are that many people who take Champix start having suicidal thoughts. I read on the Internet that in the span of a year, 227 cases of attempted suicide were reported, along with 397 cases of psychotic disorders, 525 cases of violent behavior, 41 cases of homicidal thoughts, 60 cases of paranoia, and 55 cases of hallucinations. I don’t believe any of that.

My big problem up to now has been my hands. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I hold on to my pockets, railings, my cheeks, Bubble Wrap, cups. Most of all to cups: I get drunk faster now, which isn’t really a problem—everyone around me understands.

It bothers me, that unanimous approval of what some people call—cigarette in hand—“my brave decision.”

“I admire you,” one horrible person told me today, and then added, with a studied, somber gesture: “I sure couldn’t do it.”

•

“Are you smoking?”

“No, Mom, I’m praying.”

•

It’s day thirty-five of the treatment, day twenty-one without smoking.

I had lunch with Jovana, downtown. She can’t believe that I’ve stopped smoking. She smokes happily and I’m envious, although I must admit that, secretly, I have a newfound feeling of satisfaction, though it’s ambiguous, because this hasn’t taken any effort on my part: the medicine has simply taken over.

“We are the only minority that no one defends,” Jovana told me, laughing, speaking in that warm, thick voice of hers, that smoker’s voice. Right away she adds, as if representing all the world’s smokers: “We were counting on you.”

Then she told me it was impossible for her to remember her father—who died recently—without a cigarette between his lips. He would sometimes go out very early, unexpectedly, and when someone asked where he was going, he would answer, energetically: “To kill off the morning!” What great wisdom, I think. To walk: to just walk and smoke to kill the morning.

I think that I am reeducating myself in some unknown aspect of life.

I move some old files, and I find this note from a year ago:
I have a cut on my finger that keeps me from smoking well. Everything else is okay
.

•

What for a smoker is nonfiction, for a non-smoker is fiction. That majestic story by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, for example, about the smoker who desperately jumps out the window to rescue a pack of cigarettes, and who, years later, very ill, his wife keeping a vigilant watch over him, escapes to the beach every day to unearth, with the skill of an anxious puppy, the pack of cigarettes he had hidden in the sand. Non-smokers don’t understand these stories. They think that they’re exaggerated; they read them cavalierly. A smoker, on the other hand, treasures them.

“What would have become of me if the cigarette hadn’t been invented?” writes Ribeyro in 1958, in a letter to his brother. “It’s three in the afternoon and I’ve already smoked thirty.” Then he explains, quoting Gide, that writing is “an act that complements smoking.” And in a later message he signs off with: “I only have one cigarette left, and so I declare this letter over.”

I could smoke without writing, of course, but I couldn’t write without smoking. That’s why I’m scared now: what if I quit writing? The only thing I’ve been able to write since I quit are these notes.

•

I’ve just arrived in Punta Arenas. I was able to read on the plane for the first time ever. Because I started traveling when I was already grown up, I was never on a flight where you could smoke,
and if I couldn’t smoke, I couldn’t read either. The presence of the ashtrays in the armrests made me nervous.

I remembered that brilliant and unequivocal phrase of Italo Svevo’s: “Reading a novel without smoking is impossible.”

But it’s possible, it is. I don’t remember anything I read, though. I read badly. I don’t know if I’ve just read a good novel badly or a bad novel well. But I read, it’s possible.

I just closed this document without mentioning my relapse. Marvelous, you lied to your journal, asshole. I have to record it. It was in the Punta Arenas cemetery. I wanted to go there to remember a poem of Lihn’s that talks about “a peace that fights to smash itself to bits.” It’s the impression that remains after looking at the cypresses there (“the double row of obsequious cypresses”), the inspired mausoleums, the cradle-shaped graves of dead babies, the headstones with words in other languages, the meticulously tended alcoves, the miraculously fresh flowers. I looked at the sea while Galo Ghigliotto played with some blocks of ice in the birdbath, and my host, Óscar Barrientos, visited some family graves. Then we left, walking in silence. I was thinking about the peace Lihn wrote about, that peace that fights to smash itself to bits. And suddenly, as if it were nothing, I asked Galo for a cigarette, and only on the fourth or fifth drag did I remember that I had quit smoking. Only then did I taste the bitterness, feel the intense aversion. I finished it, but it took effort.

•

I really don’t smoke anymore, I think.

I really don’t think anymore, I smoke.

The medicine won’t let me smoke.

•

Day forty / twenty-six.

I carry Sacks’s book in my bag, underlined, ready to show the doctor that nothing points to a relationship between smoking and cluster headaches. “Sacks is entertaining,” the neurologist replies. But he says he’s not sure he’s read him. I point out the contradiction in what he has just said: how does he know that Sacks is entertaining if he hasn’t read him? He doesn’t hear me. I get aggressive. “Doctors used to read,” I tell him. “In the past, doctors were cultured.”

He doesn’t seem offended, but he looks at me the way someone would look at an alien—the way someone like the doctor would, not someone like me. I would certainly never look at an alien like that, showing such clear surprise.

I offer to lend him Sacks’s book, but he declines. Now he does get mad. He lectures me like I’m a child. He rails against cigarettes with such insistence that I feel like he is telling off someone that I love, someone who doesn’t deserve this kind of criticism. But what I want most in the world is for my head to never hurt again. I’ll go on with the treatment, of course I will. I have faith.

I remember those verses that Sergio likes, from a poem by Ernst Jandl, I think: “The doctor has told me / that I cannot kiss.”

As for me, the doctor has told me that I cannot smoke.

•

At eleven years old, more or less, I became, almost simultaneously, a voracious reader and a promising smoker. Then, in my first years at university, a more lasting bond formed between reading and tobacco. In those days Kurt was reading Heinrich Böll, and since all I ever did back then was imitate Kurt and try to be friends with him, I got my hands on
The Clown
, a very beautiful and bitter novel in which the characters smoke all the time—on every page or at least every page and a half. And every time they lit their cigarettes, I would light mine, as if that were my way of taking part in the novel. Maybe that’s what the literary theorists mean when they talk about the active reader: a reader who suffers when the characters suffer, who is happy when they are happy, who smokes when they smoke.

I went on reading Böll’s novels, and every time someone smoked in them, I would smoke too. I think that in
Billiards at Half Past Nine
and
And Never Said a Word
and
House Without Guardians
, the books I read next, the characters also smoked a lot, although I don’t really remember. In any case, by the time I finished those novels I had become a compulsive smoker. Or, to put it more precisely, I had become a professional smoker.

I’m not stupid enough to claim that it was all Heinrich Böll’s fault. No: it was thanks to him. How frivolous all this must sound. Thanks to those novels, I understood my country and my own history better. Those novels changed my life. But will I be able to read them again without smoking?

In a venerable passage from his
Irish Journal
, Böll himself says
it was impossible for him to watch a movie in the cinema if he couldn’t smoke. My dear dead friend, you have no idea how many times, because of my desire to smoke, I have fled the theater in the middle of the movie.

•

Fiftieth / thirty-sixth.

It took two cigarettes to get from my house to the pool hall. This was in 1990, when I was fourteen years old. Two cigarettes: the first when I left the house, followed by a pause, and then the second, which I would finish just before entering the pool hall on Primera Transversal, where I’d light another one that was not the third but rather the first of a long night of pool cues and lucky shots. At any given moment there was a lit cigarette balanced between someone’s lips.

Tennis, too. It took me two and a half cigarettes to get to my cousin Rodrigo’s house, and then one more for us to reach an empty lot where some generous or forgetful person had set up a net. Every once in a while we stopped to smoke, and I remember that on several occasions we smoked while we played. He always beat me at tennis, but I was the better smoker.

•

Another relapse, last night, in Buenos Aires, all because of this new friendliness I’ve contracted.

My newfound friendliness makes me get too close to people too soon; I’m like those guys who go in for a hug when you least expect it. I’m imitating people I’ve always looked down on. That’s what I’m turning into: I now allay my anxiety by expressing premature emotions. But I don’t pounce on just anyone—I approach huggable people, people who, according to my first impressions, seem to deserve that closeness. My gesture is not exactly a hug, either, it’s more like a slight movement accompanied by undignified, nervous laughter.

I was with Maize, Matron, Libreville, Merlin, Canella, Valeria, and several other recent acquaintances and, before long, I was already thinking of them as close friends. On top of the beer—which I can drink again, after unfairly blaming it for the headaches for years—there was an important factor contributing to my euphoria: the happiness of the tourist, the blessed state of passing through. From that comfortable vantage point, I followed the terrible discussions about the local literary goings-on. They confronted one another, really laying into each other, invoking diffuse but still legitimate principles, and, miraculously, a sort of harmony or camaraderie prevailed. I demonstrated my gratitude through obedience: I wrote down the titles of all the books they recommended to me on a napkin—which, in the end, in a regrettable lapse of attention, I used to wipe my mouth—I ate some atrociously greasy food, and I took each sip of beer with an urgency that matched their own.

Suddenly an interest in my process arose, and I found myself explaining, in my awkward Chilean dialect, that I had stopped smoking, not by choice but by medical prescription, because of
my malady. Oddly, no one at the table started talking about how they suffered or had suffered from headaches, which is the natural course that conversation takes. I noticed that they were focusing a lot on my way of speaking, and then the critic from Rosario or Córdoba—a sullen but agreeable guy who up until then had participated only intermittently in the conversation (sometimes he seemed interested, but most of the time he observed us with a sneer of disdain)—looked at me with his crazy, shining eyes and said, “Do me the favor of smoking again, Chileno.” Maize supported him, Matron seconded it, Libreville too, and soon they were all shouting: “Come on, Chileno, have another smoke. Do it for Chile.”

I obeyed. In a split second I had grabbed, lit, and taken a drag of a Marlboro Red. It was horrible, but by the second inhale I already liked it better. My concession brought us back to normal, and the Rosarian critic—who was maybe from Córdoba or Salta—started in on a story about his experiences with group sex. At a certain point I thought his goal was to take us all to bed, but really he just wanted to talk about the details of his private life for a while. Very soon, as if sticking to a capricious script, he went back to his natural state of intermittent participation in the conversation.

The night’s final cigarette was to accompany a couple of whiskies that Pedrito Maize treated me to in the hotel bar. I woke up at noon, with barely enough time to pack my suitcase and set out for Ezeiza. The dreaded day after seemed doubly bad; it was as though I could distinguish the layers, the different levels of hangover. The fallout from the alcohol was slight, but the aftereffect of the eight or nine cigarettes stuck around. Maybe the medicine prolongs, as
a kind of punishment, that sense of disgust. From now on, I’ll find a way to keep my new friendliness in check.

•

Walking down Agustinas this morning, I saw a man approximately my age and height and also my coloring who was smoking as he walked. I watched him take a drag of his cigarette, and for an instant the movement struck me as very odd. It was a long drag, as though in slow motion. Suddenly, I wanted to absorb or devour his face. I felt astonishment, then revulsion. The man was disgusting to me. Later on—soon, right away, but later—I understood that he revolted me because we were so similar.