My Documents

NATIONAL INSTITUTE

1

The teachers called us by our number on the list. I say that in apology: I don’t even know my character’s name, though I remember much about 34 very well. At that time, I was 45. Because of the first letter of my last name, I enjoyed a more stable identity than the others. I still feel a certain familiarity with that number. It was good to be last, number 45. Much better than being, for example, 15, or 27.

The first thing I remember about 34 is that he sometimes ate carrots during recess. His mother peeled them and placed them harmoniously in a little Tupperware that he opened by cautiously loosening the corners. He measured the exact amount of force necessary, as if practicing a very difficult art. But more important than his taste for carrots was the fact that he had been held back: he was the only student in our grade who was repeating it.

For us, repeating a grade was a shameful affair. We had never gotten close to that kind of failure in our short lives. We were eleven or twelve years old, we came from all kinds of backgrounds, and we had been selected to enter Chile’s gargantuan and illustrious National Institute: our files were impeccable. But then there was number 34: his presence was proof that failure was possible, and that perhaps it wasn’t even that bad, because he wore his stigma with ease, as if he were, ultimately, happy to go back over the same subjects again. “You’re a familiar face,” a teacher would sometimes say to him, sarcastically, and 34 would respond graciously: “Yes, sir, I’m repeating this grade. I’m the only one repeating in the class. But I’m sure that this year is going to go better for me.”

Those first months at the National Institute were hell. The teachers made sure to tell us over and over how difficult the school was; they tried to make us regret coming there, tried to make us go back to “the school on the corner,” as they said, contemptuously, in that terrifying, gargling tone of voice.

I don’t know if it’s necessary to clarify that those teachers were some real sons of bitches. They did have names, first ones and last ones: the math teacher, Mr. Bernardo Aguayo, for example — he was a total son of a bitch. And the shop teacher, Mr. Eduardo Venegas. A real motherfucker. Neither time nor distance has dampened my rage. They were cruel and mediocre. Frustrated and stupid people. Obsequious Pinochetistas. Fucking assholes. But I was talking about 34, and not those fucking bastards we had for teachers.

***

Number 34’s behavior was not what you would expect from someone who was repeating a grade. You’d think that a kid who gets held back would be sullen, out of step with their new class, reluctant to join in, but 34 was always willing to experience things right along with us. He didn’t suffer from that attachment to the past that makes kids who repeat grades into unhappy and melancholic characters, perpetually trailing along behind their classmates from the previous year, or waging a continuous battle against those who are supposedly to blame for their situation.

That was the strangest thing about 34: he wasn’t resentful. Sometimes we would see him talking with teachers who were unknown to us, teachers from other seventh-grade classrooms. They were happy conversations, with hand gestures and pats on the back. He maintained cordial relations with the teachers who had failed him, it seemed.

We quaked every time 34 showed signs of his undeniable intelligence during class. But he never showed off; quite the contrary, he interjected only to suggest new points of view, or to give his opinion on complex subjects. The things he said weren’t written in the books, and we admired him for that, but our admiration for him frightened us: if someone so smart had failed, it made it seem all the more likely that we would fail too. We speculated behind his back about the real reasons he’d been held back: intricate family conflicts, long and painful illnesses. But deep down we knew that 34’s problem was strictly academic — we knew that his failure would be, tomorrow, our own.

Once, he came up to talk to me unexpectedly. He looked alarmed and happy all at once. It took him a moment to start talking, as if he had thought for a long time about what he was going to say to me. “You don’t have anything to worry about,” he finally blurted out. “I’ve been watching you, and I’m sure you’re going to pass.” It was so comforting to hear that. It really made me happy. It made me irrationally happy. 34 was, as they say, the voice of experience, and knowing what he thought about me was a relief.

Soon I found out that the same scene had been repeated with others in our class, and a rumor spread that 34 was messing with us. But then it occurred to us that this might be his way of instilling confidence in us. And we needed that confidence. The teachers tortured us daily, and we lived in fear of our report cards. There were almost no exceptions. We all felt we were headed straight for the slaughterhouse.

The key was to figure out if 34 was communicating the same message to all of us, or only to a chosen few. There were seven students who still had not been absolved by 34; they went into a state of panic. 38—or 37, I don’t remember his number well — was one of the most worried. He couldn’t stand the uncertainty. His desperation grew so intense that, one day, defying the logic of the nominations, he went up to 34 and asked him directly if he would pass. 34 seemed uncomfortable with the question. “Let me study you,” he proposed. “I haven’t been able to watch everyone — there are a lot of you. I’m sorry, but until now I haven’t paid very much attention to you.”

You have to understand, 34 was not putting on airs. Absolutely not. There was a permanent note of honesty in his manner of speaking. It was never easy to doubt what he was saying. His frank gaze helped too: he made sure to look you in the eyes, and he spaced out his sentences with brief but suspenseful pauses. A slow and mature rhythm beat within his words. “I haven’t been able to watch everyone. There are a lot of you,” he had told 38, and no one doubted this. Number 34 spoke oddly and he spoke seriously. Although perhaps back then we believed that in order to speak seriously, you had to speak oddly.

The next day 38 asked for his verdict, but 34 answered only with excuses, as if he wanted to hide — we thought — a painful truth. “Give me more time,” he said. “I’m still not sure.” By then we’d all given him up for lost, but a week later, after completing the observation period, 34 went up to 38 and told him, to everyone’s surprise: “Yes, you will pass. It’s definite.”

We were happy, of course, and we also celebrated on the following day, when he rescued the remaining six. But there was still something important to resolve: now all of the students had been blessed by 34, and it was unusual for everyone to pass. We did some investigating and we found that never, in the almost two hundred years of the school’s history, had all forty-five students in a seventh-grade class passed.

During the following, decisive months, 34 noticed that we had begun to doubt his predictions, but he didn’t acknowledge it: he went on faithfully eating his carrots, and he regularly spoke up in classes, volunteering his brave and attractive opinions. He knew we were watching him, that he was in the hot seat, but he always greeted us with that same warmth.

At the end of the year, when final exams came, we learned that 34 had hit the bull’s-eye with his predictions. Four classmates had jumped ship early (including 38), and of the forty-one who remained, forty of us passed. The only one who didn’t pass was, once again, 34.

On the last day of classes we went over to talk to him, to console him. He was sad, of course, but he didn’t seem beside himself. “I was expecting it,” he said. “I’m really bad at studying. Maybe things will be better for me at a different school. They say that sometimes you have to just step aside. I think this is the moment to step aside.”

It hurt all of us to lose 34. His abrupt departure was, for us, an injustice. But then we saw him again the next year, falling in line with the seventh graders on the first day of class. The school didn’t allow students to repeat a grade twice, but for 34 they had, for some reason, made an exception. Many students claimed that it was unfair, that 34 had gotten help from friends in high places. But most of us thought it was good that he stayed — even though we were surprised that he would want to go through that experience a third time.

I went over to talk to him that same day. I tried to be friendly, and he was cordial too. He looked thinner, and you could really see the age difference between him and his new classmates. “I’m not 34 anymore,” he told me finally, in that that solemn tone that by then I knew well. “I appreciate that you’re asking about me, but 34 doesn’t exist anymore,” he told me. “Now I’m 29, and I have to get used to my new reality. I’d rather be part of my new class and make new friends. It’s not healthy to get stuck in the past.”

I guess he was right. Every once in a while we’d see him from afar, hanging out with his new classmates or talking with those same teachers who had failed him the year before. I think that time he finally managed to pass the class, but I don’t know if he stayed at the school much longer. Little by little, we lost track of him.

2

One winter afternoon, when they came back from gym class, they found the following message written on the board:

Augusto Pinochet is:

a) a motherfucker

b) a son of a bitch

c) an imbecile

d) a piece of shit

e) all of the above

And underneath it said:

IOP

They were going to erase it, but there was no time, because right then Villagra, the Natural Sciences teacher, entered the room. There was a nervous murmur and some timid laughter, and then absolute silence — the silence that always accompanied Villagra’s classes. Villagra looked at the board for a few long minutes, his back to the students. That writing, with its firm strokes and perfect calligraphy, was not that of a twelve-year-old boy. Moreover, it wasn’t very common for seventh graders to be members of the IOP, the Institutional Oppositional Party.

With the same gravity, the same theatricality as always, Villagra went to the door and looked out to make sure he wasn’t being spied on. Then he picked up the eraser and slowly started to erase the options one by one, but before he got to the last one, “all of the above,” he stopped to brush away the chalk dust that had fallen onto his jacket, and he let out a cough that resounded exaggeratedly. Then, from the last row, Vergara — better known to his classmates as Verga-rara—asked if the correct answer was e). Villagra looked at the ceiling as if searching for inspiration, and his face really did take on an expression of enlightenment. “The question is poorly designed,” he said. He explained that options a) and b) were practically identical, as were c) and d), so it was obvious, by default, that the answer was e).

“So the right answer is ‘all of the above’?” asked González Reyes.

“As I said, it is the correct answer by default. Open your books to page 80, please.”

“Aaaaahhhhhh,” said the boys.

“But, sir, what do you think of Pinochet?” insisted a different González, González Torres (there were six boys named González in the class).

“That doesn’t matter,” he said, serenely and decisively. “I’m the Natural Sciences teacher. I don’t talk about politics.”

3

I remember the cramp in my right hand, after history class, because Godoy dictated for the entire two hours. He taught us Athenic democracy by dictating the way you dictate in a dictatorship.

I remember Lavoisier’s Law, but I remember the law of the jungle much better.

I remember Aguayo saying that “in Chile, people are lazy, they don’t want to work; Chile is a country full of opportunities.”

I remember Aguayo failing us, but offering make-up classes with his daughter, who was beautiful, but whom we didn’t like, because in her face we recognized the dog-like face of her father.

***

I remember Veragua wearing white socks to school and Aguayo telling him: “You are trash.”

I remember Veragua’s hair, and his big green eyes that filled with tears as he looked at the ground, in silence, humiliated. He never showed up at school again.

I remember Venegas, the head teacher, telling us the following Monday: “Veragua’s parents withdrew him. He couldn’t hack it.”

I remember Elizabeth Azócar teaching us to write during the final hours of each Friday. I was in love with Elizabeth Azócar.

I remember Rodrigo Martínez Gallegos, and Hugo Puebla, and Álvaro Tabilo.

I remember Gonzalo Mario Cordero Lafferte, who used to tell jokes during our free hours. If any teachers happened to walk by, he would pretend we were studying French: la pipe, la table, la voiture.

***

I remember that we never complained. How stupid, to complain — we had to bear it all like men. But the idea of manliness was confused: sometimes it meant bravery, other times indolence.

I remember when someone stole the money I was carrying so I could make the optional annual payment at the Parents’ Center.

Later I found out who stole it, and he knew I knew. Every time we looked at each other we said, with our eyes: I know you robbed me, I know you know I robbed you.

I remember the list of Chilean presidents who had studied at my school. I remember that when teachers reeled off that list, they omitted the name of Salvador Allende.

I remember saying “my school” with pride.

I remember the Subordinate Noun Clause and the Subordinate Adjective/Relative Clause.

***

I remember the vocabulary exercises, which were full of strange words that we’d repeat later, dying of laughter: commiseration, skirmish, bauble, knickknack, iridescent, vindicate, craggy, succinct.

I remember that Soto got dropped off at school by the chauffeur who drove for his father, a military man.

I remember that the English teacher gave a bad grade to a student who had lived in Chicago for ten years, and later said, ashamed, “I didn’t know he was a gringo.”

I remember stupid teachers and brilliant teachers.

I remember the most brilliant of all, Ricardo Ferrada, who, during the first class of the year, wrote a Henry Miller quote on the board that changed my life.

I remember teachers who wanted to sink us and teachers who wanted to save us. Teachers who thought they were Mr. Keating. Teachers who thought they were god. Teachers who thought they were Nietzsche.

***

I remember that gang of homosexuals in the fourth grade. There were five or six and they always sat together, talked only to each other. The fattest one wrote me love letters.

They never played any sports, and the few times they went out to recess, they got teased and hit. They stayed in the classroom instead, talking or fighting among themselves. They shouted “Bitch!” and threw their backpacks at each other’s faces or onto the floor.

I remember one morning during free time, we were warming up for a math test with no teachers in the room, and the fat one was talking nonstop with his seatmate. Little Carlos shouted at him: “Shut up, you fat faggot.”

I remember the fat one got up, furious, more effeminate than ever, and answered: “Don’t you ever call me fat again.”

I remember smoking marijuana during recess, in the basement, with Andrés Chamorro, Cristián Villablanca, and Camilo Dattoli.

***

I remember Pato Parra, one of four people repeating junior year. I remember his drawings.

I remember he sat on the first bench in the middle row, and the only thing he did during class was draw.

He never looked at the teachers — he was always hunched over, concentrated on his drawing, wearing his coke-bottle glasses, his hair falling over the paper.

I remember the quick movement that Patricio Parra made with his head to keep his hair from messing up the drawing.

None of the teachers scolded him, not for his long hair or for his absolute disinterest in their classes. And if one of them asked him why he wasn’t participating, he would apologize dryly and politely, leaving no room for discussion.

I got to know him only a little, we talked only a few times. I remember one morning that I spent sitting next to him, looking at his drawings, which were perfect, almost always realistic: comics about unemployment, about poverty, all of them straightforward, free of histrionics.

He drew a picture of me that morning. I still have the drawing, but I don’t know where it is.

I don’t know if it was in June or July, but I remember it was a winter morning when we found out that Pato Parra had committed suicide.

I remember the cold in the Puente Alto cemetery. I remember the teachers trying to explain to us what had happened. And I remember wishing that they would shut up, shut up, shut up. I remember the emptiness afterward, all year, when we looked at the first desk in the middle row.

I remember that the teacher’s assistant told us that life went on. I remember that life went on, but not in the same way.

I remember we all cried in the school bus, which we called Caleuche, on the way back.

***

I remember walking with Hugo Puebla across the playground soccer field, our arms around each other, crying.

I remember the phrase that Pato Parra wrote, on a wall of his room, before killing himself: My final cry to the world: Shit.

4

I remember the final months at that school, in 1993: the desire for everything to be over. I was nervous, we all were, waiting for the big test, which we had spent six years preparing for. Because that’s what the National Institute was: a pre-university school that lasted six years.

One morning we exploded. We all got into a fight, shouting and hitting: an eruption of absolute violence whose origins we did not understand. It happened all the time, but this time we felt a rage or an impotence or a sadness that had never before revealed itself. As a result of this outburst, Washington Musa, the Inspector General, paid our class a visit. I remember that name, Washington Musa. Whatever became of him? How little I care.

Musa adopted the same tone as always, the tone we heard from so many teachers and inspectors during those years. He told us that we were privileged, that we had received an excellent education. That we had taken classes from the best teachers in Chile. And all for free, he emphasized. “But you people aren’t going to get anywhere, I don’t know how you’ve survived this school. You humanities people are the dregs of the National Institute,” he said. None of that hurt us, we had heard that reprimand, that monologue, many times before. We looked at the floor or at our notebooks. We were closer to laughter than tears, a laughter that would have been bitter or sarcastic or pretentious, but laughter still.

And nonetheless, no one laughed. While Musa droned on, the silence was absolute. Suddenly he started to tear into Javier García Guarda. Javier was perhaps the most silent and timid boy in the class. He didn’t get bad grades, or good ones either, and his file was clean: not a single negative mark, not a single positive note. But Musa, furious, was humiliating him, and we didn’t know why. Little by little we understood that Javier had dropped his pen. That was all. And Musa thought he’d done it on purpose, or maybe he didn’t think about it, but he took advantage of the incident to concentrate all his rage on García Guarda: “I don’t even want to think about the education you got from your parents,” he was saying. “You don’t deserve to be at this school.”

I stood up and defended my classmate, or, rather, I stood up and offended Musa. I told him, “Shut up, sir, shut up for once, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re humiliating him and it’s not fair, sir.”

An even more intense silence came over us.

Musa was tall, solidly built, and bald. In addition to his work at the Institute, he ran a jewelry shop, and he greatly enhanced his salary through sales at the school: every so often he would stop in the hallway to praise brooches, watches, or necklaces that he himself had sold to the teachers. With the students he was mean, icy, despotic, as dictated by the nature of his position: his reprimands and punishments were legendary. His defining characteristic was, I thought then and I think now, arrogance. But when I challenged him, Musa didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to react.

“My office, both of you,” he said, thoroughly annoyed.

I remember that on the way to Musa’s office, Mejías came over to give us encouragement. I had acted bravely, but maybe it wasn’t bravery, or it was the indolent side of bravery: I was simply fed up, I didn’t care. Despite how close we were to finishing at the Institute, I would have been happy to go back that very day to “the school on the corner.” I thought I had found an excuse to get myself expelled. But I also knew they weren’t going to expel me. There were teachers who cared about me, who would protect me. Musa knew that.

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

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.

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 and 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.

Now: