The Word of the Speechless

by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

  From that day on, Panchito, I, and the Pall Malls made an inseparable trio. Panchito took me on as his companion, the equivalent of giving me a job, which I undertook with professional zeal. My job was to be with him. We walked through the Latin Quarter, drank aperitifs on the terraces of cafés, ate together, played one or another game of billiards, infrequently went to the movies, but most of all we talked all day and into part of the night. He paid for everything, and when we parted, he always slipped a few bills into my hand along with, unfailingly, a pack of Pall Malls.

  In spite of all the time we spent together, I didn’t really know who Panchito was or what kind of work he did. I gleaned many things from my long conversations with him but not enough to attain any certainty. I knew that he had spent his impoverished childhood in Lima; that as a young man he had left Peru and traveled all over Latin America; that he loved to dress well, with a jacket, hat, and Weston shoes with very high heels (which is why the first time we went out I thought he had gone through a growth spurt); that he adored gold—his watch, pen, cuff links, lighter, ruby ring, and tie clips were all gold; that he hated officers of the law and did the unspeakable to make himself invisible every time he crossed paths with a policeman; that the wad of bills he carried in his pants pocket was apparently inexhaustible; that at midnight he would disappear into the shadows for an unknown destination, without anybody ever knowing where he was staying.

  After a while, some of my friends met him, and there formed around him a retinue of starving artists who had been rescued by this enigmatic Peruvian cholo. Panchito loved to be surrounded by those five or six white guys from Miraflores, sons of the same Peruvian bourgeoisie that had always belittled him, whom he supplied with food, drink, and housing, as if he derived an aberrant pleasure in repaying with gifts what he had received in humiliation. He paid for Santiago’s violin lessons, found a studio where Luis could paint, and he financed the publication of an unsellable volume of Pedro’s poems. That’s how Panchito was, among other things, a patron of the arts, but he accepted nothing in return, not even gratitude.

  One of the last memories I have of him, before his final disappearance, was of an event that took place on a wintry, electric, and cruel night. It was after midnight, and Panchito, Santiago, and I were sipping our last glass of wine, the one for the road, at the counter of the Relais de l’Odeon. They had closed the bar, we were the last clients, and the waiters were piling the chairs on the tables and sweeping the floor. In the mirror above the bar we saw three motionless silhouettes on the sidewalk: three Arabs dressed in heavy black coats. Santiago told us that days before, at that same bar, an Arab had tried to grope a French woman, and he, motivated by an unwary Latin sense of justice, had defended her and come to blows with the Muslim, who was forced to flee after Santiago broke a chair over his head in the best tradition of Hollywood Westerns. Speaking of the cinema, we were now living a thriller, for according to Santiago, one of the three Arabs on the sidewalk was the one he had defeated, a man who swore vengeance as he was leaving. There he was now, in that lonely and inclement night, accompanied by two henchmen, waiting for us to leave the bar so he could carry out his vendetta. What were we to do? Santiago was tall, agile, and a good fighter, but I was a scrawny intellectual, and Panchito a short Peruvian in a hat and jacket. How to confront those three sons of Allah, possibly armed with daggers with curved blades?

  “Let’s walk out calmly,” Panchito said. And that’s what we did, and we made our way down the middle of the deserted and gloomy street toward Rue de Buci. Fifty meters on we turned and saw the three Arabs, hands in the pockets of their shaggy coats, quickening their steps as they approached us. “You two keep going,” Panchito said, “I’ll catch up with you shortly.” Santiago and I continued along our way, then stopped to watch what was happening. We saw that Panchito, his back to us, was speaking with the three Muslims, who looked like three dark mountains looming over him. One of them was holding a knife that glinted in his hand, but far from being intimidated, Panchito kept advancing as his opponents took one step back, then another, and another, as they kept getting smaller and Panchito kept getting bigger, until finally they vanished into the darkness and disappeared. Panchito calmly returned to us, lighting one of his very long Pall Malls on the way. “Problem solved,” he said, laughing. “But, what did you do?” Santiago asked him. “Nothing,” Panchito said, and a short while later he added, “Touch,” and pointed to his chest. Santiago and I touched his coat, and under the cloth we felt the presence of a long, hard, disconcerting object.

  A few days later Panchito disappeared without warning. I waited for him for hours at Café Mabillon, where we would meet every day before lunch for our first aperitif and to initiate one of our long and erratic days. I went to see my friend Carlos, who said he had no idea where he was. “You’ll hear about it in the news,” he added prophetically. And I did, but years later, when I was working for a news agency, in charge of selecting and translating news from France to be sent to Latin America. From Nice there arrived a telex with the title, “Peru Special. For newspapers in Lima.” The telex stated that a Peruvian criminal, Panchito, sought for years by Interpol, had been arrested in the hallways of a large hotel on the Côte d’Azur just as he was about to enter a suite. I remembered that for his mother and siblings in Lima, to whom he regularly sent money, Panchito was a distinguished engineer with an important job in Europe. After crumpling up the telex, I tossed it in the trash.

  •

  The vicissitudes of life continued to carry me from one country to another, but above all from one brand of cigarettes to another. Amsterdam and oval-shaped Murattis with fine gold filters; Antwerp and Belgas in their red pack with a yellow circle; London, where I tried to smoke a pipe, then gave up because it seemed too complicated and because I realized I was neither Sherlock Holmes, nor a sea dog, nor English . . . Munich, finally, where instead of completing my doctorate in Romance philology, I graduated as an expert in Teutonic cigarettes, which, not to put too fine a point on it, I thought were mediocre and lacked style. But, if I mention Munich, it is not for the quality of its tobacco but because I committed an error of judgment, which placed me in a situation of desperate need, comparable to the worst moments of my Parisian era.

  I was the beneficiary of a modest scholarship, which allowed me to buy my pack of Roth-Händles at a street kiosk every day before taking the streetcar to the university. This act, by dint of its repetitive nature, established between the elderly Frau of the kiosk and me a friendly relationship, which I assumed went beyond the formalities of a commercial exchange. After two or three months of a routine and thrifty existence, however, I spent the entirety of my scholarship on a portable turntable, for I had started to write a novel and deemed it necessary, in order to finish it properly, to have background music or a sound curtain to protect me from the noise outside. I obtained the music as well as the curtain, and I was able to make progress on my novel, but a few days later I was stranded without cigarettes and without money to buy any. Since “writing is an act that complements the pleasure of smoking,” I found myself unable to write, no matter how much background music I had. The most natural thing to do seemed for me to go to my daily kiosk and plead my case, requesting that I be sold a pack of cigarettes on credit. And that is just what I did, claiming that I had forgotten my wallet and would pay the following day. I was so confident in the legitimacy of my request that I innocently stretched out my hand to receive the pack. But I had to immediately pull it back, for the Frau slammed the kiosk window shut and stood staring at me from behind the glass, not only scandalized but terrified, as well. Only at that moment did I realize the mistake I had made: to think I was in Spain when I was in Germany. That prosperous country was in reality a backward country with no imagination, incapable of creating mutually beneficial institutions based on trust and conviviality, such as the institution of buying on credit. For the Frau of the kiosk, a person who asked to pay for something tomorrow could be nothing but a s
cam artist, a criminal, or a madman, ready and willing to murder her if necessary.

  Hence, I found myself in a terrible situation—unable to smoke and as a result unable to write—and with no solution in sight, for I knew almost nobody in Munich, on top of which a dreadful winter had just been unleashed, and the meter of snow in the streets condemned me to forced confinement. I did nothing but stare out the window at the polar landscape, throw myself on the bed like a wet rag, and read the heaviest books in the world, such as the seven volumes of Charles Du Bos’s Journal intime and Goethe’s pedagogical novels. That was when Herr Trausnecker came to my rescue.

  I was living in a proletarian suburb in the apartment of a metalworker, who rented me a room with breakfast and one other meal. Once or twice a week he came to my room at night to see if I needed anything and to chat with me for a while. He was an uneducated but discerning man, and he soon realized that something was tormenting me. When I explained my problem, he immediately understood and, apologizing for not being able to lend me money, he gave me a kilo of cut tobacco, some rice paper, and a little machine to roll cigarettes.

  Thanks to that little machine, I was able to subsist for the two interminable weeks I still had to wait before collecting my next month’s stipend. Every morning when I got up, I rolled about thirty cigarettes and arranged them on my desk in small stacks. These were the worst and the best cigarettes of my life, the most harmful and the most propitious. The tobacco was very dry, the paper harsh, and the artisanal manufacture clumsy and wretched to look at, but what did I care? These cigarettes allowed me to ride out the weather and return to my abandoned novel with brio. The fact that I finished it is due in large part to the little machine Herr Trausnecker gave me, thereby washing away the insult I had received from the elderly Frau and reconciling me with the German people.

  I amply repaid him this service, which obliges me to digress, for the incident had nothing to do with cigarettes though everything to do with fire. Frau Trausnecker entered my room one desolate day; more than an hour earlier she had put an apple tart in the oven, but the door to the kitchen was stuck, she couldn’t get in to take the pastry out of the oven, and it was burning. First I tried to open the door with an improvised crowbar, then with blows, but it was impossible, and the smell of burning was getting stronger. I then remembered that the bathroom was next to the kitchen and that their respective windows were side-by-side. The only option was to pass from one room to the other through those windows. I explained my plan to Frau Trausnecker and went into the bathroom, but she came after me shrieking, tried to stop me, insisted it was too risky, there was a struggle, then I managed to lock myself in the bathroom. As she continued to lodge her protests from the other side of the door, I opened the bathtub faucet and told her not to worry, I was really just going to take a bath. Instead, I opened the window and was horrified: not only did the fourth floor of this working-class apartment building give out onto a very low cement patio, but the kitchen window was much farther away than I had imagined. I could not turn back, lest I appear ridiculous and a blowhard. I climbed out the bathroom window, hung onto the ledge with both hands, and using a calculated swinging motion, I jumped onto the contiguous window ledge and entered the kitchen. Just in time, for the room was boiling hot, and the oven was spewing smoke and fire through its cracks. I opened the door and Frau Trausnecker entered, turned off the gas, cut off the electricity, removed the tart—by now a mound of smoking ashes—and threw it in the sink under a stream of cold water. The house filled with steam and the intolerable smell of burning, obliging us to open all the windows to air it out. We were soon sitting in the living room, relieved, satisfied, and happy that we had avoided a fire. But there was a sound that kept distracting us: from the bathroom came the swish of the open bathtub faucet, and at that very moment we saw a tongue of water slinking down the hallway. The bathtub was overflowing! But how could I get into the bathroom? I had locked it from the inside. I had no choice but to retrace my steps in spite of Frau Trausnecker’s renewed protests. From the kitchen window I passed to the bathroom window with a suicidal leap over the abyss. My recklessness saved the Trausneckers from a fire and a flood, in that order.

  •

  On many occasions—the time has come to state this—I have struggled against my addiction to tobacco, for my abuse of it was doing me increasing harm: I always had a cough, and I suffered from acid indigestion, nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, heart palpitations, dizzy spells, and a stomach ulcer, which contorted me in pain and forced me to regularly submit to a diet of milk and ghastly gelatins. I employed all kinds of formulas and strategies to diminish my consumption and eventually stop altogether. I’d hide packs in the most improbable places, fill my desk with candy so I’d always have something within reach to put in my mouth and suck on instead of a cigarette, buy sophisticated filters that eliminated the nicotine, take all kinds of pills supposedly designed to create an allergy to tobacco, and have needles stuck skillfully in my ears by a wise Chinese acupuncturist.

  Nothing worked. I finally reached the conclusion that the only way to free myself from this yoke was not by using more or less spurious tricks but rather through an act of irrevocable willpower that would test the mettle of my character. I knew people—few, truth be told, and I never quite trusted them—who had decided from one day to the next to stop smoking, and had succeeded.

  Only once did I make such a decision. I was in Huamanga, teaching at the university, which had just reopened after being closed for three centuries. That old, small, and forgotten Andean city was a delight. Comrade Gonzalo had not yet appeared on the scene, and his philosophy had not yet pointed out any shining path to follow. The students, almost all from there or the neighboring provinces, were ignorant, serious, and studious young people, convinced that a degree was all they needed to gain access to the world of prosperity. But my goal here is not to evoke my Ayacuchan experience. Let’s return to cigarettes. As a bachelor without obligations and in receipt of a good salary, I could provide myself with as many Camels as I wanted, for this was the brand I had taken up, perhaps due to the affinity that exists between camels and llamas and vicuñas, who could be seen everywhere around town. One night, however, while talking and smoking with my colleagues in a café in the Plaza de Armas, I suddenly felt ill. My head was spinning, I was having difficulty breathing, and I felt stabbing pains in my chest. I returned to my hotel and lay down on the bed, trusting that rest would restore me to health. But my condition worsened: the ceiling was falling on top of me, I was vomiting bile, I actually felt as if I was dying. Then I realized that this was all because of cigarettes, that I was finally paying off the debt I had accrued during my fifteen years of immoderate smoking.

  A radical decision was required. And not only to make it—to not smoke anymore—but also to consecrate it with a symbolic act that would seal its sacramental nature. I rose shakily from my bed, grabbed my pack of Camels, and threw it into the vacant lot outside my window. Never again, I told myself, never again. Liberated by this heroic act, I fell back onto my bed and instantly fell asleep.

  I woke up after midnight, remembered my decision from the night before, and felt not only morally comforted but also physically improved. So much so that I rose from bed in order to consign my renunciation of tobacco to a few lines that I imagined would be, if not immortal, at least worthy of a well-deserved longevity. In fact, I wrote several pages, glorifying my gesture and promising me a new life founded on austerity and discipline. As I continued to write, however, I felt increasingly uncomfortable, my ideas became confused, I had difficulty finding words, mounting anxiety prevented me from concentrating, and I realized that the only thing I really wanted at that moment was to light a cigarette.

  For at least an hour I struggled against this summons, turning off the light to lie down in bed and try to sleep, getting up to play music on my portable turntable, drinking glass after glass of fresh water, until I could tolerate it no longer: I grabbed my coat, and decided t
o go out to look for cigarettes. But I didn’t even make it out of my room. At that time of night, there was nothing open in Huamanga. I then started to look through all the pockets of all my jackets and trousers, all the drawers in the room, the contents of my suitcases and bags, searching for the hypothetical forgotten cigarette, tossing everything into the air; the more fruitless my search, the more tenacious my longing. Suddenly, a light bulb went on in my head: I had found the solution in the pack I had thrown out the window. Looking out, I saw the vacant lot eight or ten meters below, barely illuminated by the light in my room. I didn’t even hesitate. I took a suicidal leap into the void and fell onto a small pile of dirt, twisting my ankle. Then, on hands and knees, I searched the entire lot with the flame of my lighter. There was the pack! Sitting right there in the dirt, I lit a cigarette, lifted my head, and blew the first puff of smoke into the magnificent Huamanga sky.

  This setback was a warning I did not know how to heed or take advantage of. I carried on with my vagabond life through different cities, lodgings, and occupations, leaving in every place swirls of smoke and piles of crushed butts, until I settled once again in Paris, in a three-room apartment, where I was able to assemble a collection of sixty ashtrays. Not because I was an obsessive collector but to always have on hand something into which I could throw butts or ashes. By then I had adopted Marlboros, which were no better or worse than the many I had already tried, but the name of the brand conjured a lexical game that I played assiduously. How many Spanish words could be made out of the eight letters of Marlboro? Mar, lobo, malo, árbol, bar, loma, olmo, amor, mono, orar, bolo, et cetera. I became unbeatable at this game and forced it upon my colleagues at the Agence France-Presse, where I worked at the time. Said agency, I should mention, was not only a news factory but also a smoking emporium. I knew of statistics that showed that journalism was the most tobacco-addicted profession. And I could confirm this because the newsrooms, at any hour of day or night, were spacious dens where dozens of men were desperately typing on their typewriters, sucking nonstop on cigars, pipes, and cigarettes of every brand, and surrounded by a thick nicotine haze, to the point that I often wondered if they were gathered there to write the news or to smoke. It was precisely during my Marlboro period and my job at the agency that I crashed. It is not my intention to establish a relationship of cause and effect between this brand of cigarettes and what happened to me. The fact is, though, one afternoon I fell into bed and started to die, to my wife’s great alarm (in the meantime, apart from smoking, I had married and had a child). My longtime stomach ulcer had burst and an unstoppable hemorrhage was evacuating me from this world through the lower pathway. An ambulance with a raucous siren carried me in a coma to the hospital, and thanks to massive blood transfusions I managed to regain consciousness. This was all quite awful, and I will refrain from sharing too many details to avoid a descent into pathos. Dr. Dupont healed the ulcer with two weeks of treatment and sent me on my way with clear instructions—as well as medicines and a diet—to never smoke again.