Never smoke again! Such an innocent, that dear Dr. Dupont. He had no idea what kind of patient he was dealing with. Two months later, having returned to my job at the news agency, surrounded by hundreds of rabid smokers, I tossed into the trash a couple of empty packs of Marlboros every day. M-a-r-l-b-o-r-o. My lexical game grew richer: broma, robar, rabo, ola, romo, borla, et cetera. This might have been charming, but along with finding new words, I had new hemorrhages, and new ambulances carried me to the hospital, with sirens and horns, depositing me lifeless in front of the horrified eyes of Dr. Dupont. It could be said that the ambulance had become my most common form of transportation. Dr. Dupont always patched me up and returned me home, after I swore I would quit smoking and after he threatened me that the next time he would forego palliatives and put me under the knife without a second thought. His threat left me undaunted, as evidenced the third or fourth time I was hospitalized, when I realized that in order to smoke I didn’t have to wait to be released: all I had to do was bribe a nurse to get her to buy me a pack. Of Marlboros, naturally: lora, orla, ramo, ropa, paro, proa, et cetera. I would hide it in the closet, or inside a shoe. Two or three times a day I’d pull out a cigarette, lock myself in the bathroom, take several frantic puffs, and flush the rest down the toilet.
I will say, in my own defense, that what contributed to the demise of my best intentions and therefore strengthened my vice was a fleeting but decisive vision I had in the hospital. Dr. Dupont, no matter how good a specialist he might have been, held only an intermediary rank among the gastroenterologists at the hospital. At the top sat Dr. Bismuth, who had reached his position thanks, possibly, to his prophetic last name. Dr. Bismuth dealt only with extremely important cases, but since mine was on the verge of turning into one, the good Dr. Dupont arranged for me the privilege of an appointment. He announced this to me with great solemnity, and only minutes before the scheduled meeting, an older nurse came in to see if everything was in order. Shortly thereafter the door opened and in a fraction of a second I glimpsed a tall, scrawny, gray-haired man who, in a furtive movement befitting a magician, pulled a cigarette out of his mouth, put it out under the sole of his shoe, and stuffed the butt into the pocket of his coat. I thought I was dreaming. But when the wise man approached my bed, surrounded by a retinue of interns and nurses, I saw on his yellowed mustache and long brown fingers the ignominious signs of a smoker.
•
What kind of compensation did I derive from cigarettes that made me submit to their rules and turned me into a zealous minion of their caprices? It was, undoubtedly, a vice, if by “vice” we understand a repetitive, progressive, and dangerous act that gives us pleasure. But upon deeper examination, I realized that pleasure had nothing to do with smoking. I’m talking here about sensory pleasure, connected to a particular sense, such as the pleasure of gluttony or lust. Perhaps for my first years as a smoker, I experienced the pleasant taste or smell of tobacco, but over time this sensation had been spoiled, and one could even say that smoking had become unpleasant, for it left a bitter taste in my mouth and made my throat burn and my stomach acidic. If there was any pleasure, I told myself, it must have been mental, such as that derived from alcohol or drugs, such as opium, cocaine, or morphine. But that wasn’t it, either, for smoking did not make me euphoric, lucid, ecstatic, or give me supernatural visions, and it did not eliminate pain or fatigue. What, then, did tobacco give me, in the absence of sensory or spiritual pleasures? Perhaps more diffuse or subtle pleasures, difficult to locate, define, or measure, linked to the effects of nicotine on our organism: serenity, focus, sociability, adaptability to our environment. I could say, then, that I smoked because I needed nicotine to feel well emotionally. But if what I needed was the nicotine contained in a cigarette, why the hell did I not turn to the cigars or the pipe tobacco I had within reach when I didn’t have cigarettes? And I never did, not even at my worst moments, for what I needed was that thin, long, cylindrical object wrapped in paper and containing tobacco leaves. It was the object itself that subjugated me, the cigarette itself, its form as much as its contents, the holding of it, its inclusion in the web of my movements, occupations, and daily habits.
This reflection led me to think that cigarettes, besides being a drug, were for me a habit and a ritual. Like all habits, it had become attached to my nature until it had become an integral part of that nature, whereby removing it would be the equivalent of a mutilation; and like all rituals, it was subjected to strict protocols, sanctioned by the execution of precise actions and the use of occult objects that were irreplaceable. From there I was able to reach the conclusion that smoking was a vice that lent me, in the absence of sensory pleasure, a diffuse feeling of calm and well-being, the effects of the nicotine contained in the tobacco, and that was made manifest in my social behavior through ritual actions. All of this is just fine, I told myself, coherent and even beautiful, but it didn’t satisfy me, for it did not explain why I smoked when I was alone and had nothing to think about, nothing to say, nothing to write, nothing to hide, nothing to pretend, and nothing to portray. The tyranny of cigarettes had to have, therefore, deeper causes, probably subconscious. It would, however, be a big stretch for me to take refuge in Freud, not because of him but because of his fanatic and mediocre exegetes, who saw phalluses, anuses, and Oedipuses everywhere. According to some of his proselytizers, addiction to cigarettes could be explained by infantile regression, the search for the maternal nipple, or by a cultural sublimation based on the desire to suck a penis. Reading these idiocies I understood why Nabokov—with undoubted hyperbole—called Freud “the quack from Vienna.”
I had no choice but to invent my own theory. An absurd and philosophical theory, which I mention here as a mere curiosity. I told myself that, according to Empedocles, the four primordial elements of nature are air, water, earth, and fire. All of these are linked to the origins of life and the survival of our species. We are in permanent contact with air, for we breathe it in, we breathe it out, we change its temperature. With water as well, for we drink it, wash with it, enjoy it when we swim or go diving. With earth also, for we walk on it, cultivate it, we shape it in our hands. But we have no direct relationship with fire. Fire is the only one of Empedocles’ four elements from which we shrink, for proximity to it or contact with it brings us harm. The only way to be connected to it is through a mediator. And this mediator is the cigarette. Cigarettes allow us to be in communication with fire without being consumed by it. Fire is on one end of the cigarette, and we are on the other. And the proof of the closeness of this contact resides in the fact that the cigarette burns, but it is our mouth that blows out the smoke. Thanks to this invention, we fulfill our ancestral need to bind ourselves to the four fundamental elements of life. This relationship was sacralized by primitive peoples through a variety of religious cults, earthly or aquatic, and, as for fire, through sun cults. The sun was worshipped because it embodied fire and its attributes: light and heat. Secular and nonbelieving as we are, we can render homage to fire only with cigarettes. Cigarettes then become a substitute for the ancient solar deity, and smoking, a way of carrying on the cult. A religion, in short, however banal that may seem. Hence, giving up cigarettes is a serious and harrowing act, similar to an abjuration.
•
Dr. Dupont’s knife was my sword of Damocles, except that it actually fell on me. This happened years later, when Marlboros and that stupid word game—bar, lar, loma, ralo, rabo, et cetera—had been replaced by Dunhills in their beautiful maroon pack with gold lettering. At that time I lived in Cannes, undergoing a new treatment to quit smoking after yet another stay in the hospital. Dupont had prescribed distraction, athletics, and rest, a recipe that my wife, converted into the most avid guardian of my health and eradicator of my addiction, took charge of scrupulously measuring out and monitoring. My days consisted of a morning jog, a lounge in the sun, a swim in the sea, a long siesta, a row in a rubber dinghy, and an evening bicycle ride. In between were healthy meals and
activities for the spirit that tended to be low-key, such as playing solitaire, reading spy novels, and watching soap operas on television. This schedule did not leave a single crack into which I might squeeze a cigarette, especially because my wife didn’t leave my side either day or night. A month later I was tanned, buff, healthy, and one could even say handsome. But deep down, way deep down, I felt dissatisfied, uneasy, at moments incredibly sad. It did me no good to perceive more fully the purity of the sea air, the aroma of the flowers, and even the taste of food, when existence itself had become, for me, insipid.
One day, I could tolerate it no longer. I convinced my wife that from then on I would go to the beach an hour before her and our son, in order to take better advantage of the benefits of that recreational and healthful life. On the way, I bought a pack of Dunhills; as it was risky to keep them on me or hide them in the house, I found an out-of-the-way corner of the beach, where I dug a hole and buried them, covering them with sand and placing an oval-shaped rock on top to mark the spot. Very early in the morning I would walk out of the house with a vigorous stride under the amazed gaze of my wife, who would watch me from the balcony and beam with pride at my athletic aptitude, never suspecting that the goal of that run was not to improve my fitness or set any record but rather to get to my hole in the sand as quickly as possible. I would dig up my pack and smoke a couple of cigarettes, slowly, focused, and even anxious, for I knew that they would be the only ones of the day. This scheme, I admit, gave me pleasure and flattered my ingenuity, but it debased me in my own eyes, for I was conscious of failing to live up to my promises and of betraying my wife’s trust. Besides, my plan was not immune to unforeseen occurrences, like the morning that I arrived at my citadel and failed to find the oval stone. The worker who raked and cleaned the beach had been replaced by another, more diligent one, who didn’t leave a single pebble in the sand. No matter how much I dug here and dug there, I couldn’t find my pack. So I decided to buy five packs and make five holes and place five markers and thereby have five probabilities available for my passion.
•
A full and detailed account would go on forever. But everything must come to an end, so I intend to conclude this confession.
We now come to the most dramatic part of the story, the reappearance of Dr. Dupont, his tubes and his sermons, and above all, his foreboding knife. For better or for worse, in spite of my ailments and other problems related to my abuse of tobacco, I learned how to live with them and carry on, as they say, one puff at a time. Until I fell victim to a problem that I had never experienced before: food got stuck in my throat and I was unable to swallow. This began to happen so frequently that I went to see Dr. Dupont, though this time, and for a change, not in an ambulance. Dupont was quite alarmed, checked me into the hospital, and had me undergo new and complicated exams, and a few days later, without any clear explanation, I was on a bed being rolled toward the operating room. I awoke seven hours later, cut up like a slab of beef then sewn up like a rag doll. Tubes, catheters, and needles were sticking out of every one of my orifices. They had removed part of my duodenum, almost all of my stomach, and a big chunk of my esophagus.
I prefer not to recall the weeks I spent in the hospital, fed intravenously and then by mouth with teaspoons of baby food. Or my second operation, for it seems Dupont had forgotten to cut something, and he opened me up again along the same lines, taking advantage of the seam on my skin that he’d already sewn. But I really must say something about the establishment where they sent me to convalesce, converted as I had been into a human wreck after such crude interventions.
It was called a “Dietary and Post-Operative Rehabilitation Clinic,” and was located on the outskirts of Paris in the middle of a vast and beautiful park. Its rooms were quite spacious, each equipped with its own private bathroom, terrace, television, and telephone. Those who had undergone serious operations on their digestive tracts were sent there to relearn how to eat, digest, and assimilate their food, until they had recovered lost muscle mass and weight. I spent the first few weeks unable to get out of bed. They continued to feed me liquids and puddings, and every day a strapping physical therapist would come to massage my legs and have me lift small weights with my arms and sandbags they placed on my thorax with my breath—all of which kept getting heavier. Thanks to all that, I could finally stand up and take a few steps around the room, until one day the head nurse announced that I was in good enough shape to undergo daily monitoring.
The next day, I found out the nature of the monitoring when they came to get me after breakfast. It was the first time I had left my room and my first contact with the other clinic inmates. What a horrible sight! I found myself amidst a legion of sad, exhausted, and gaunt beings wearing pajamas and slippers just like me, standing in line in front of a Roman balance. One nurse was weighing them and another was writing down the results in a thick logbook. Then they dragged themselves laboriously down the corridor and disappeared into their rooms for the rest of the day.
Horror was followed by reflection: Where the hell had I ended up? What was being hidden behind this parody of a rural retreat? During the following sessions, I thought I caught a glimpse of reality. Maybe this was not a clinic but rather the waiting room for the irremediable. This is where they sent the castoffs of science so that, among trees and flowers, they could live out their dying moments surrounded by all the trappings of a holiday. The weigh-in was simply the final test that confirmed for them that there was no longer any possibility of a miracle. The patient who gained weight was the one who—among a hundred, a thousand, or more—had hopes of getting out of that place alive.
My suspicions were confirmed when two of my neighbors along my corridor stopped showing up to be weighed, and then, overhearing a conversation between nurses, I found out that they had “gently passed away.” This redoubled my anxiety, which prevented me from eating and therefore from gaining weight. The dishes they brought me, insipid and unctuous, got flushed down the toilet or wrapped in tissues and thrown in the trash. My wife and a few faithful friends visited me in the afternoons and achieved the impossible, with admirable fortitude, of not showing their alarm. Certain gestures, however, betrayed them. My wife brought me elegant silk pajamas, which I interpreted through tortured reasoning as, “If you have to die, it might as well be in Pierre Cardin pajamas.” Certain friends insisted on taking pictures of me, which made me realize that they were posthumous pictures, ones I would never see in any family photo album.
I was, then, dying, or rather “gently passing away,” as the nurses would say. Every day I lost a few more grams, and undergoing trial by weight increasingly tired me out. The chief of the clinic came to see me and gave orders, as a final measure, to force-feed me. They stuck a rubber tube down my nose; using a huge piston, they shot ground-up food through it into my stomach. The tube had to remain permanently in place, its visible end stuck to my forehead with a bandage. It was so horrible that two days later I pulled it out and threw it on the floor. The chief of the clinic returned to chastise me, and when I resisted its reinsertion, he left in a rage, but not before saying: “I don’t give a damn. But you aren’t getting out of here until you gain weight. It’s wholly your responsibility.”
I never saw that idiot again, but I did see some hairy, dirty, and shirtless individuals who started appearing behind the shrubbery I could see from my bed through the large windows. They were building a new pavilion behind those shrubs, and as they had already built the first floor, the workers and their work were visible from my room. Based on their olive complexions, I deduced that they hailed from hot and poor places—Andalucía, southern Portugal, North Africa. What surprised me at first was the speed and variety of their movements. They appeared and disappeared, carrying bricks, bags of cement, water barrels, construction tools, all in a constant to-ing and fro-ing that was devoid of missteps or improvisations. I imagined the effort it took and through a kind of mental exchange I grew extremely exhausted, so much so that I closed
the blinds on the window. At noon, however, I opened them and saw that those men, whom I imagined would have succumbed to fatigue, were sitting in a circle on the roof, laughing, conversing, and communicating with vivid gestures. They were on their lunch break, and out of lunchboxes and plastic bags they took food that they gobbled down greedily and wine that they drank straight from the bottle. These men, apparently, were happy, and for at least one reason: they embodied the world of the healthy, whereas we were the world of the sick. Then I felt something that I have rarely felt, envy, and I told myself that fifteen or twenty years of reading and writing had done me no good at all, locked up as I was among the dying, while those simple and illiterate men were solidly rooted in life, from which they derived their most basic pleasures. And my envy increased when, upon finishing their meal, I saw them take out their packs, their pouches, and their rolling papers, and light their after-meal cigarettes.
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