My Documents

by Megan McDowell Alejandro Zambra

  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.

  We resembled each other completely, except for four obvious differences: the color of his pants (I would never wear that shade of “waffle cone”), the hook-shaped earring that hung from his left ear, his clean-shaven face (versus my growing stubble), and, of course, that cigarette in his mouth, which in the past I’d always had too.

  •

  I read on the cover of a book of Fogwill’s:

  I sailed a lot, I planted many trees, and I had four children. As I finish editing the works that will make up this volume, I await the birth of the fifth. To think in the sun, to sail, and to produce and serve children are the activities that feel best to me: I’m confident I will go on repeating them.

  Then I remember that text of Nicanor Parra’s, “Mission Accomplished”:

  Trees planted

  17

  Children

  6

  Works published

  7

  Total

  30

  I won’t commit the folly of going over my own life in those terms. But yesterday, at the office, Jovana and I were playing around with Excel, and we got caught up in some dangerous accounting. Now I have the approximate calculation of how many cigarettes I’ve smoked in my life. And the total amount of money I’ve spent on cigarettes. I’m keeping this notebook out of a kind of therapeutic intention, but I don’t dare write those numbers down here. I’m ashamed. I do a little division and determine that the monthly amount I’ve spent on cigarettes, for years now, is roughly equivalent to a mortgage. I am a person who has chosen to smoke rather than have a house. I’m someone who has smoked a house.

  •

  Another relapse. The details aren’t important. I was desperate and smoking didn’t solve the problem (because the problem doesn’t have a solution). I felt disgusted again, but at least I managed to distract myself.

  •

  Relapsed again: a prolongation of the one before, really. A semi-headache that I couldn’t soothe with the old medications. I don’t think it was a cluster, the pain was different. Also, my throat hurts, and my stomach, and my whole body.

  “Sir, the tobacco on the tip of your cigarette is on fire,” said a character of Macedonio’s.

  •

  Day I-don’t-know-which of the year two thousand a
nd never.

  I remember when I was living in a godforsaken room in Madrid, in Vallecas, on La Marañosa street, sharing an apartment with three Spanish security guards (two men and a very pregnant woman, who worked in Barajas) and an Argentine ex-cop who was seeking his fortune. One morning, when I had a fever and had almost completely lost my voice, I lit a harsh Ducados cigarette, looked out the window, and recited aloud, in a tempered but exhilarated cry, Enrique Lihn’s poem about Madrid:

  I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here

  Old, tired, sick, and thoughtful.

  The Spanish I was spawned with

  Father of so many literary vices

  and from which I cannot free myself

  may have brought me to this city

  to make me suffer what I deserve:

  a soliloquy in a dead language.

  It was as if I were greeting everyone and no one from my balcony, taking revenge on the city, but also, in a manner, in my own way, courting it. I think that morning’s Ducados is on the list of the best cigarettes I’ve ever smoked.

  •

  “To smoke the dark with will and great resolve,” says a poem by R. Merino. The image is exact: the last ember, raising one’s head to keep that bit of fire from falling, to avoid the disaster of losing it in the blankets and having to fumble around like a blind person, trying to put the cinder out. The danger of pulling a Clarice Lispector.

  Another iamb, also by Merino, compassionate: “The one you smoke right now is all there is.” Onetti in bed without cigarettes, furious, bad-humored, writing The Well. It wasn’t existentialism, nothing of the kind: just lack of tobacco. “I’ve smoked my cigarette to the end, unmoving.”

  I stopped smoking because of my clusters, but maybe that wasn’t the main reason. The thing is, I’m cowardly and ambitious. I’m such a coward that I want to live longer. What an absurd thing, really: to want to live longer. As if I were, for example, happy.

  I’ve finished the pills now—day ninety has come and gone. And I’ve stopped counting the days. I don’t smoke now. Now I say it with certainty: “No, I don’t smoke.” I want to smoke, but it’s an ideological desire, not a physical one.

  Because life without cigarettes is not any better. And the fucking headaches will come back sooner or later, whether or not I smoke.

  •

  “Violent headache today, but pretty happy,” notes Katherine Mansfield in her journal. Does she mean the headache is violent, but less so than usual, and thus pleasant? I don’t get it.

  Jazmín Lolas interviews Armando Uribe:

  “You’ve never worried that cigarettes will kill you?”

  “You know, I don’t care; I don’t support the idea that human beings, on average, should live for so many years.”

  •

  The best-selling Mexican author Fernanda Familiar—TV star, blogger, and close friend of Gabriel García Márquez—strolls around the Lima Book Fair with an electronic cigarette. It’s the newest invention for quitting smoking, and right now it’s the product I desire most. They don’t sell them at the fair, unfortunately, and I hear they’re expensive. What’s more, I’ve already quit smoking. How idiotic: now I can’t even try to quit smoking.

  Not only did I quit smoking, I also quit trying to quit smoking.

  For two hundred soles—approximately seven double pisco sours, extra large—I buy first editions of Agua que no has de beber by Antonio Cisneros and Los elementos del desastre by Álvaro Mutis, random finds that would justify any trip. But I don’t read them. It seems that I no longer like books.

  •

  I should say, copying Pessoa: “I arrived in Santiago, but not at a conclusion.”

  Yesterday some people asked me what, in my opinion, was the main problem with Chilean literature. Now, to begin with, it’s pretty absurd that a hallway conversation can lead to a question like that—hallway conversations always fail, or at least that’s how it seems to me—but I answered, with conviction, that the problem with Chilean literature was the custom of writing cigarrillo instead of cigarro. In Chile no one says cigarrillo, we say cigarro, I argued, as if pounding on an imaginary table, but Chilean authors always write cigarrillo, and I ended with this absolutely demagogical sentence: “I am a writer who writes cigarro.”

  The declaration had an immediate effect. They seemed to approve of it, but then the conversation went downhill. Conversations between more than four people never end well, especially if they take place in a hallway. I have to accept, of course, that I’m depressed and a little irritable. My behavior exasperates me.

  •

  To burn the midnight oil, as they say. Nights without sleeping, spent reading or writing, the ashtray overflowing. Just before dawn, I’d be putting out cigarettes in the dregs of my coffee cup, which, with all of the butts sticking out of it, ended up looking like some sort of horrific pincushion. I remember it now with nostalgia.

  How old was I when I read Zeno’s Conscience? I think I was twenty or twenty-one. I have almost never laughed so much, although at the time I thought you weren’t supposed to laugh at books. “It’s bad for me, so I will never smoke again. But first, I want to have one last cigarette.”

  “Everything is infinitely lamer now,” Andrés Braithwaite confessed to me two years ago, when he was on Champix. He looked defenseless, a timid puppy barking at the abyss. Then he told me that, without smoking, no book was good—he didn’t enjoy reading anymore. I saw him again months later, and he looked so handsome when he lit a cigarette and told me, looking me in the eyes: “I’m cured.” That afternoon my friend talked to me about fabulous authors he had just discovered, about unthinkable novels and brilliant poems. He had regained his passion, his roguishness, and his decorum. And the love for the vibration of his own voice. And his beauty.

  Today, at some point, I felt this: an orphaned relief. And I accepted that it’s true, that everything is infinitely lamer. Literature, for sure. And life, above all.

  I am a person who doesn’t smoke due to the invasive effect of a chemical that ruined his spirit and his life. I am a person who now doesn’t even know if he’s going to go on writing, because he wrote in order to smoke and now he doesn’t smoke; he read in order to smoke and now he doesn’t smoke. I am a person who no longer creates anything. Who just writes down what happens, as if it would interest someone to know that I’m sleepy, that I’m drunk, that I hate Rafa Araneda with all my soul.

  Structural jam: in the pool halls, there’s always a table where there’s not enough space to get a good shot at the ball. That’s called a structural jam.

  That’s what my life is like now.

  Last night I wrote this beginning of a tango:

  Sad and serene

  expecting nothing

  maybe one day

  no sun and no rain

  I can look with ease

  upon the ashtray

  my voice now gutted

  of light and of love

  I like the image of the ashtray, empty like never before, like now: incomprehensibly empty. What a terrible tango, anyway.

  •

  Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem.

  I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or the absence of an answer. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon.

  To live without music, in an unbearable continuity.

  I’m reading Richard Klein, and I think I should celebrate his words by smoking. He’s completely right. “Smoking induces forms of aesthetic satisfaction and thoughtful states of consciousness that belong to the most irresistible kinds of artistic and religious experience,” he says.

  Among my first musical memories is that song by Roque Narvaja with this beautiful refrain: “I await the morning awake / smoking my time in bed / filling the room with your face /
cinnamon and charcoal.” Back then, at six or seven years old, I was impressed by the image of a man smoking time. I’m sure that was the first time I associated smoking with the passage of time.

  What a good song that was: “Along the streets of my life / I go, mixing truth and lies.” I like it when the guy says, “I’ve stopped drinking / and now I eat your favorite fruit.”

  And it’s true that I mix, along the streets of my life, truth and lies. As for a favorite fruit, I don’t think I have one. It is absolutely not that disgusting thing that, at first glance, looks like a watermelon, and in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador, and I think also in Venezuela, is called a papaya, even though it is nothing like the Chilean papaya. (They say it’s the same fruit, but it’s hard to believe. And I don’t want to look online.) I haven’t stopped drinking—I should—but five months ago I stopped smoking, and that has made me into a much healthier and less happy person.

  I open the newspaper supplement and mistake the words SOLIDARITY AT CHRISTMAS for SOLITARY CHRISTMAS. I don’t know why they’re talking about Christmas, anyway, when it’s so far away.

  I think that we are heading toward a shitty world where all songs are sung by Diego Torres and all novels are written by Roberto Ampuero. A world where it’s better not even to think about dessert, because the only option available is a giant bowl of disgusting rice pudding.

  •

  I’m a correspondent, but I’d like to know of what.

  •

  I don’t want the day to come when someone says of me: “He’s finished. He doesn’t even smoke anymore.”

  This treatment has been absurd.

  I’ve won a satisfaction that is very false. I have to learn, again, to smoke.

  It’s bad for me, so I will never smoke again. But first I want to have one last cigarette. One more. A thousand more. I’m only going to smoke a thousand more. The final thousand cigarettes of my life.

  I don’t know if I’m opening or closing parentheses.