Primo Jim Tanya Huntington Hyde - Literal

As soon as
I felt it was
possible to
exist without
smoking, I
quickly lit up a
cigarette. That
was the fi rst
of my
next-to-lasts.
into a post-op clinic in order to learn how to eat again
and, above all, how to live without tobacco. Just when
he’s about to give in to resignation, or as he puts it,
to unbelievable despair, he looks out of the window in
his room and sees some construction workers on their
lunch break at a building site. He feels a rush of envy;
after a few sentences, things get worse: “...at the end
of their meal, I saw them take out packs, pouches, rolling
paper, and light up their after-dinner smokes.” The
scene saved him: he fi nally understood that being cured
was worthwhile, because one day he’d be able to smoke
again.
Something similar happens to Hans Castorp, but it’s
the other way round. When he arrives at the Berghof
sanatorium, his waning health is somewhat reconstituted
upon comparison with that of the other patients, particularly
because he’s able to smoke: “I can’t understand
it,” he says. “I’ve never been able to understand how
someone can not smoke: it deprives man of the best in
life...at least, of a fi rst-rate pleasure. When I awake in
the morning, it makes me happy to know I’ll be able to
smoke all day and, when I eat, I look forward to smoking
afterwards; I could almost say that I only eat in order
to be able to smoke... A day without tobacco would be
empty, insipid and of little use... If I had to say to myself
tomorrow: ‘No smoking today,’ I believe I wouldn’t have
the courage to get out of bed... I’d stay put.” But as
his stay on the mountain is drawn out, Castorp sees his
pleasure fade away: smoking becomes more laborious
to him; it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. And this obligatory
abstinence is the sign that he’s come down with
the spirit of the disease itself, that he’s now a member
of its sect: “exhausted and nauseated, I threw the cigar
as far away as possible.”
Hopscotch ends with a cigarette. Oliveira asks for
a light. Etienne remonstrates: “No smoking in the hospital.”
But, “we are the makers of manners,” Oliveira
responds, and then pronounces the last words of the
novel: “Just let me fi nish my smoke.” Over 598 pages—in
my edition—of the novel, surely La Maga and
Oliveira smoke around 400 cigarettes between them,
an anonymous brand at fi rst which is transformed into
42 4 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2008
Gauloise starting on page 155: “La Maga had lit up another
Gauloise, and she was singing softly.” Cortazar’s
“smokes”—unlike his jazz, or the turtleneck sweaters
that are the uniforms of so many of his characters, or his
eroticism restrained by the tutelage of love, or even of
his almost earthly cats—are not mythical; they’re more
like an inevitable condition: as if no act could take place
without the corresponding smoke: “sitting on a pile of
garbage, we smoked for awhile,” (this is the inaugural
cigarette of Hopscotch); “...one left one’s wallet on the
table, searched for one’s cigarettes, looked out at the
street, and breathed in the smoke”; “against his face,
he felt her cry with happiness that another cigarette had
brought nighttime back to the room and the hotel”; “...
Horacio oscillating rhythmically in tobacco... chatting up
La Maga through the smoke and the jazz.”
All these cigarettes prove nothing except the simple
fact that, faithful to their nature, they are accumulated.
“Now that I’m old,” Zeno writes in his diary, “and no
one demands anything of me, I continue passing from
cigarette to purpose, from purpose to cigarette.” In his
story, disease possesses the resistance of conviction, and
smoking is one of its essential symptoms. Zeno tries to
cure himself, but along the way, he discovers that there’s
a pleasure more powerful than his dream of health: that
of the last cigarette. “I believe... it has a more intense
fl avor. The last one gets its taste from the sense of victory
over oneself, and the hope of a strong, healthy
future close at hand.” Zeno smokes it throughout the
book and only towards the end does he manage to free
himself: “I’m cured!” Now all that remains is to die.
Out of superstition and likelihood, I don’t call mine
the last, but rather the next-to-last. Among other things,
I can prolong the effect of certain decisions that way. For
example, not long ago, on a Sunday around midnight, I
repeated once again the solemn scene of stubbing out
my cigarette and promising some scant divinity that as
of the next day, I would no longer smoke. I sustained
myself in a limbo of pristine air for 47 hours. As soon as
I felt it was possible to exist without smoking, I quickly
lit up a cigarette. That was the fi rst of my next-to-lasts.
[2001]