In his office, Musa said, “As for you, García, I’m going to think very seriously about letting you participate in graduation. Tomorrow, first thing, I’m going to have a talk with your parents.” Only then, when I looked at García Guarda’s black and weepy eyes, did I realize that I had made everything worse, that the thing should have ended with a reprimand, with just one more humiliating moment, and García Guarda would have preferred that, but because of my intervention, it had all gotten worse. They involved parents only in the worst of cases, because at my school, parents didn’t exist. “Expel me instead,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t how this went: his way of punishing me was to torture García. I almost insisted again, but I held back, knowing I would only make things worse still.
“I’m not going to expel you, nor will I keep you from attending the ceremony,” Musa told me, and again I thought about how unfair it was for me to receive a lesser punishment than García. And I also thought that I couldn’t care less about a stupid graduation ceremony. But maybe I did care. I felt indestructible. Rage made me indestructible. But not only rage. There was also a blind confidence or a kind of stubbornness that had always been with me. Because I spoke softly, but I was strong. Because I speak softly, but I’m strong. Because I never shout, but I’m strong.
“I shouldn’t let you go to that ceremony, I should expel you right now,” he told me. “But I’m not going to.” Thirty seconds went by, but Musa hadn’t finished. I was still looking out of the corner of my eye at the tears sliding down García Guarda’s face. I remember that he wrote poems too, but he didn’t show them to people like I did—he didn’t play at the spectacle of poetry. We weren’t friends, either, but we talked every once in a while, we respected each other.
“I’m not going to keep you from graduating, I’m not going to expel you, but I’m going to tell you something that you will never, in your whole life, forget,” Musa said. He emphasized the word never, and then the words whole life, and he repeated this phrase another two times.
“I’m not going to keep you from graduating, I’m not going to expel you, but I’m going to tell you something that you will never in your whole life forget.” I don’t remember what he told me. I forgot it immediately. I sincerely don’t know what Musa told me then. I remember that I looked him in the face, bravely or indolently, but I didn’t retain a single one of his words.
I SMOKED VERY WELL
For Álvaro Enrigue and Valeria Luiselli
The treatment lasts for ninety days. Today is the fourteenth day. According to the information pamphlet, I get one last cigarette.
The last cigarette of my life.
I just smoked it.
It lasted six minutes and seven seconds. The last smoke ring dissolved before it reached the ceiling. I drew something in the ash (my heart?).
I don’t know if I’m opening or closing parentheses.
What I feel is something like pain and defeat. But I look for positive signs. This is good, it’s what I have to do.
I was good at smoking; I was one of the best. I smoked very well.
I smoked naturally, fluidly, happily. With a great deal of elegance. With passion.
And it’s been easy, unexpectedly. The first days, almost without realizing it, I went from sixty to forty cigarettes. And then from forty to twenty. When I realized that my quota was going down so fast, I smoked several in a row, as if trying to get back in shape, or reclaim my ranking. But I didn’t enjoy those cigarettes.
Yesterday I smoked only two, and I didn’t even want them really—I was just taking advantage of what I was allowed. Neither of those cigarettes felt complete, or true.
•
Nineteen days, five without smoking.
Up to now there’s been nothing dramatic in the process, but I’m searching for a hidden compartment, something else to train my eyes on.
The speed of the whole thing is alarming. As is the docility of my organism. Champix invaded my body, and there was nothing to counterbalance it. Even with my debilitating headaches, I used to think of myself as a strong man, but this drug has changed something essential in me.
It’s absurd to think that this medicine is going to do nothing but turn me away from this one habit. Surely it will also distance me from other things, though I haven’t yet discovered which. It will carry them so far away from me that I won’t be able to see them.
I’m going to change a lot, and that is something I don’t like. I want to change, but in a different way. I don’t know what I’m saying.
I feel perplexed, and bruised. It’s as though someone were gradually erasing all the information related to cigarettes from my memory. And that strikes me as sad.
I’m a very old computer. I’m an old but not entirely broken computer. Someone touches my face and keyboard with a kitchen rag. And it hurts.
•
For over twenty years, the first thing I did when I got up was smoke two cigarettes in a row. I think that, strictly speaking, that’s what I woke up for, in order to do that. I was happy to find that, in the first lucid blinking of my eyes, I could smoke immediately. And only after the first drag did I really wake up.
Last fall I tried to fight the urge, to put off the day’s first cigarette as long as I could. It was disastrous. I stayed in bed until 11:30, disheartened, and, at 11:31, I finally took my first inhale.
It’s day number twenty-one of the treatment—and the seventh without smoking. The clouds scribble on the sky.
•
Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life.
•
I spend the afternoon reading Migraine, a book by Oliver Sacks. From the beginning, he warns that there is no infallible cure for migraines. In most cases, the patients are pilgrims who roam from one doctor to another, from one medicine to another. That’s what I am, and what I have been for too many years now.
The book demonstrates that migraines are interesting and not devoid of beauty (the beauty that throbs within the inexplicable). But what good is it to know that you suffer from a beautiful or interesting illness?
Sacks dedicates only a few pages to the kind of headache that I suffer from (my headache): it is the most savage kind of them all, but not the most common. Mine has many different names: migrainous neuralgia, histamine headache, Horton’s cephalalgia, Harris-Horton’s disease, cluster headaches. But much more revealing is its nickname: suicide headache. When you’re in its clutches, that’s the urge that takes over. More than a few patients have tried to alleviate the pain by banging their heads against the wall. I’ve done it.
It hurts on one side of the head, specifically in the area that falls under the influence of the trigeminal nerve. It’s a feeling of trepidation accompanied by photophobia, phonophobia, watery eyes, facial sweat, and nasal congestion, among other symptoms. I memorize the numbers, recite the statistics: only ten out of every hundred thousand people suffer from cluster headaches. And eight or nine of those ten people are men.
The cycles, the clusters, are unleashed without any apparent trigger, and they last for two to four months. The pain explodes uncontrollably, especially at night. The only thing you can do is surrender. You also have to accept with a brave face the variety of advice your friends will give you, all of it useless. Until one fine day, they disappear—the headaches, not the friends, although some friends will also get sick of your headaches, because during those months you’ll never be around, you will inevitably focus only on yourself.
The joy of being back to normal can last for one or two years. And just when you think you’re finally cured for good—when you think of the headaches the way you’d think of a former enemy whom you’ve come to appreciate a little, even care for—the pain comes back: at first shyly, then with its usual insolence.
I remember an episode where Gregory House treats a patient complaining of cluster headaches straightaway with hallucinogenic mushrooms. “Nothing else works,” says House, scandalizing his medical team, as usual. But even mushrooms don’
t work on me. Nor does sleeping without a pillow, or yoga, or avidly accepting the acupuncturist’s needles. Not reexamining my entire life to the beat of psychoanalysis (and discovering many things, some of them atrocious, but nothing that would banish the pain). Not giving up cheese, or wine, or almonds, or pistachios. Not swallowing a pharmacy and a half of aggressive medicines. None of that has freed me from the insidious and sudden arrival of the pain. The only thing I hadn’t tried was this: quitting smoking. And of course, to make things worse, Sacks says there is no proof of the relationship between migraines and cigarettes. As I underlined that passage, I felt dizzy, desperate.
The thing that worries me most is that right now I’m in the middle of a truce with my illness. I could quit smoking, think that everything is fine, and then have a cluster within the year. My neurologist, however, is positive that quitting will cure me. He studied general medicine for seven years, and then he studied another three to become a specialist; all of that so he can tell me: smoking is bad for your health.
•
Day twenty-six of the treatment, fourteen days without smoking.
Other than a slight nausea that quickly disappears, I haven’t experienced any major issues. I’ve just looked over the list of side effects again, and I’ve got none of them. Just two “headaches”—I’m against ironic quotation marks, but they feel justified here. Such ridiculous little headaches—the kind you can take aspirin for. I have no respect for them.
According to the Champix information brochure, in addition to the nausea and cephalalgia, possible side effects include abnormal dreams, insomnia, drowsiness, dizziness, vomiting, flatulence, dysgeusia, diarrhea, constipation, and stomach pain. The abnormal dreams don’t bother me, because my dreams have never been normal. But I’m troubled by the bit about insomnia and drowsiness; I wonder if they can happen at the same time, like love and hate. Dysguesia (change in taste) is great. I would love to excuse myself sometime by saying, “I’m sorry, but I have dysguesia.” What supreme elegance.
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.
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