Thrown into Nature

6. On the Connection That Some Representatives of the Common Folk See Between Tobacco and the So-Called “Devil.” A Concrete Example of the Driving Out of the Latter and How He Flees from Tobacco As from Incense

After the barn burned down, I did not go out with the doctor for some time. I stayed at the house to help Jesús build a new one. Many details surrounding the fire remain obscure, but let me first state that which is known: thanks to Pablito’s squealing and the fact that Jesús was outside, the fire was noticed right away. Jesús came into the barn and woke me up — it is a true miracle that I escaped unscathed, since the fire was raging all around me, and its poisonous smoke could have killed me in my sleep. When I woke up, my first thought was that I’d ended up in hell — flames curled all around me and a suffocating black smoke was drifting about. My second thought was that Jesús, whose sweaty and somehow enormous-looking face was bending over me, had ended up there, too, but this surprised me far less. Fortunately, I managed to come to my senses quickly and got out of the barn after helping Jesús free the frantic Pablito. It’s no accident that they say something “burns like straw.” The fire was crackling and swallowing up the barn with unbelievable swiftness, almost like the wind, and if it hadn’t been for the rain, which, as luck would have it, had begun in earnest, and if Jesús hadn’t been awake, thus allowing us to take measures quickly, not only would the barn have burned down, but the house next to it, too, and perhaps the neighboring ones, as well. To say nothing of me. I got extremely lucky, indeed — I must admit that the rain, Pablito, and most of all Jesús saved my life.

Other troubles awaited me, however. I hardly need describe how Dr. Monardes looked when he saw his barn burning and what kind of mood he was in thereafter. As we put out the fire in the barn, he was occupied with that thought alone, but on the following morning he began to ask himself — and to ask us, as well — how the fire had come about. I had expected something of the sort. I was also not surprised by Jesús’ ugly insinuation that I was to blame for the fire. He suggested that I had lit a cigarella, fallen asleep, and that the cigarella had set fire to the straw. Of course, I categorically denied this. To be perfectly honest, I remembered that I had lit a cigarella, but I also remembered clearly that I extinguished it. If I were to admit this, however, the doctor would never believe me and I would pay very, very dearly. Farewell, studies! Farewell, medicine! Back out on the streets and into the pubs to earn my keep doing tricks with smoke. . No, I couldn’t let that happen.

The doctor, however, was very inclined to believe Jesús. I raised one eyebrow skeptically, cocked my head to the side, made a face which is very difficult for me to describe, but which I intuitively felt was very convincing, and said (all of that simultaneously): “Señor, a bit of logic, please! If I had really fallen asleep with a lit cigarella, it would have first set fire to the straw around me and I would’ve been the first to burn. But as Jesús himself said, the fire did indeed start at the far end of the barn where I was, but from the other side.”

“It could’ve rolled over there or something,” Jesús objected.

“Bah!” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “What is this, a hill by the river? That’s not the way things work.”

I will risk digressing here for a moment with the suggestion, which may come as a surprise to the reader, that my highly developed facial musculature, perfected via my masterful smoking in pubs, played an exceptionally important role in this case. Naturally, given the situation, I pushed its possibilities to the limit and tried to accompany my words with such convincing expressions so that no one would be able to resist them. Happily, I must say that this appeared to have had an effect.

The doctor lowered his eyes from me, slowly turned towards Jesús, and fixed him with his heavy, icy gaze. I felt the rage growing within him.

“Oh no, no, señor,” Jesús said in a frightened voice, waving his hand in front of his face.

“That was a big mistake,” I thought to myself.

“I’ll kill you, you lout!” the doctor cried. “Just what were you doing awake at that hour?”

Jesús took off running and the doctor chased him with his cane in hand. As I have noted on a previous occasion, the doctor carried that cane only for elegance and, in fact, ran quite quickly.

But Jesús also runs quickly, and he is quite a bit younger, besides. The two of them crossed the lawn in front of the house and disappeared around the other side. I leaned against the pear tree I was standing near and lit up a cigarella, relieved. I had a slight headache. I wondered whether Jesús really had started the fire. But no, to be frank, that seemed rather farfetched to me.

In any case, the doctor finally got us together and said: “I don’t know which of you good-for-nothings caused that fire and what exactly happened. If one of you is guilty, he can consider himself very lucky. Very lucky! The two of you will get to work immediately, this instant! I want that barn rebuilt within a month. In the meantime I’ll hire a new coachman to make my calls, since you won’t be available, idiot,” the doctor cried, and he took a swing at Jesús with his cane, but the latter quickly jumped back. “And you both,” the doctor continued, a bit more calmly, “will work day and night if need be, but in one month I don’t want to see any sign that there was a fire here. No fire at all! Not a trace! Like an ice rink! Like Denmark!”

Denmark — ah yes, that was a country to the north. How could I have forgotten?

And that’s indeed what happened, although it took not one month, but two. Since in any case I could not accompany the doctor during that time, I will take this opportunity to go back and recount why the two of us went to England in the first place — a not insignificant detail, I dare say. Señor Frampton had long been inviting Dr. Monardes to England, but the latter certainly would never have gone if Frampton had not sent him an intriguing letter, whose text I will cite here verbatim, since I found it one day while rummaging through the doctor’s drawers (I was looking for something else, which I could not find, with the exception of some ducats, which I found along with a note saying how many there were in total and the count was exact; the doctor incidentally had gone on a house call all the way in Frontera, while that numskull Jesús was pounding away downstairs with a hammer and calling to me ceaselessly, as if I were his wet nurse). But getting back to the letter. Here is that part which particularly interested Dr. Monardes:

“I have been told about a layman,” wrote Señor Frampton, “who lives in Haslingdon (a quite poor man) and who supposedly smoked all day long and squandered the money he could have used to ease his impoverished family’s suffering on tobacco — as the local ignoramuses there constantly reproached him. I will refrain from commenting on their foolishness and move directly to the more interesting part of the story. This man dreamed that he was smoking tobacco, and that the devil was standing next to him and filling the pipes for him one after the other. Despite everything, in the morning he again took up his old habit, telling himself that it was just a dream. But when he lit his pipe, he was overcome with such a strong feeling that the devil was really standing next to him and doing the deed he had dreamed of him doing, that the man was struck dumb with shock for several minutes, and when he came to his senses, he got up and opened the Bible that was on the table and came across Isaiah 55:2. Upon which he hurled the tobacco into the fire and smashed his pipes against the wall.”

“What does Isaiah 55:2 say?” the doctor asked.

I opened up the Vulgate and read aloud: “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfies not? Listen diligently to me, and eat you that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”

“What a loathsome passage!” the doctor exclaimed. “From that, it follows that man is some king of pathetic animal who must think only about how to fill his belly.”

“It seems like a metaphor to me, señor,” I said. “For the Heavenly Kingdom and so forth.”

“Of course it’s a metaphor,” the doctor replied, looking at me coldly. “Do you honestly think I can’t recognize a metaphor?! But it is a bad, tasteless metaphor. As if only bread is important, and fatness.”

I preferred not to argue with him.

“We must meet this man,” the doctor said and stroked his beard. “Señor Frampton has long been inviting me to England. We’ll go.”

And that’s how we ended up on the Hyguiene.

That man was named Thomas Jollie and we visited him, accompanied by Mr. Frampton. We saw him one very frosty morning in the yard of his house, standing stripped to the waist, splashing himself with water from a pail, snorting and bending this way and that, which in the first instant made me ask myself what on earth he was doing, but then I realized he was doing exercises.

“This chap is crazier than a German soldier,” Dr. Monardes said as soon as he saw him. “That’s how they toughen them up there. Whoever doesn’t die from that kind of toughening up really does become very dangerous.”

I regretfully tossed my cigarella into the snow. It was unthinkable to smoke before such a man. Besides, you never know what to expect from such types.

In fact, the man turned out to be good-natured, while the conversation was far more humble than we had expected. The said Thomas described his dream and how he had opened the Bible and come across Isaiah, and other things which we already knew from Señor Frampton’s letter. The doctor seemed interested in what the devil looked like exactly and asked him to describe him in the greatest possible detail.

“I don’t know, sir, I didn’t see him too clearly,” the man replied. “I’d say: a tall goatman with graying hair and a thin, longish face.”

The doctor asked him what “goatman” meant exactly, and after some time we arrived at Señor Frampton’s suggestion that this was something like a centaur with two feet.

“How was he dressed?” Dr. Monardes asked.

“As normally as can be, sir,” Thomas replied, “except that he had hooves instead of shoes. And above that he was dressed in trousers, a workman’s jacket like the ones the tradesmen wear, and a loose shirt with a low collar, all dark in color, but which color exactly I couldn’t say. Don’t forget that I saw him in a dream and my attention was focused mostly on his hands as he filled my pipes and kept giving them to me one after another.”

“So that means he had fingers,” Mr. Frampton broke in, “and not pincers or eagle’s talons or hooves or something like that?”

“The hooves were on his feet, sir,” Thomas said, and — who knows why — he pointed at Mr. Frampton’s feet.

Dr. Monardes and I both looked in that direction, and Mr. Frampton crossed his legs.

“No, sir,” Thomas continued, “he had your most average, ordinary human fingers. Perhaps a bit longer and bonier.”

The doctor asked him what exactly this so-called “devil” had done in his dream to incite him to make such a “fateful decision,” as the doctor put it, to give up tobacco. Mr. Jollie merely repeated that he had filled the pipes—“very skillfully,” Mr. Jollie noted — and handed them to him one after the other. He didn’t remember him doing something else or saying anything. He just filled the pipes and gave them to him.

“And he didn’t make any kind of a sign or a face at you, he didn’t wink?” Dr. Monardes asked.

“I don’t remember him winking at me,” Mr. Jollie replied. “No, no sign at all,” he added categorically after a short pause. “He just filled the pipes and gave them to me.”

It’s astonishing how when they hear trivialities, all of them utterly unsurprising, people assume a thoughtful expression. At that moment, Dr. Monardes, Mr. Frampton, and I all wore thoughtful expressions. I suspect this is due to the boredom trivialities inspire. Somewhere deep inside you sleep begins to take over. Add to that the exhaustion of disappointment as well, when you’ve been waiting to hear something particularly interesting, and you get a thoughtful expression. That’s the alchemy at work here, if you ask me. Moreover, people with thoughtful expressions usually aren’t thinking about anything. They’re actually falling asleep. Well, that was the case with me, at least. I looked thoughtfully ahead with an utterly empty head. There was a workbench in front of me covered in sawdust and strewn with a few tools. “How depressing”—this thought flashed through my mind. No wonder that the devil himself went gray here, or perhaps he had left all the grayness in his wake.

We finally left Mr. Jollie’s — in fact, we had spent only a short time there, as the clock in the carriage showed us, even though it had seemed very long to me indeed — and we continued on towards Eton College, where Dr. Monardes was to give a lecture about tobacco and other new medicines brought from the Indies. The dean of the college, Mr. Whittaker, was a great admirer of Dr. Monardes’ work, an inquisitive man open to knowledge who wanted to be in step with the latest developments in science and particularly medicine. He was the same person who, several years earlier during the most recent plague epidemic in the region, had arranged for all the boys at Eton to smoke a pipe every morning as a disinfectant, and it comes as no surprise that not a single one of them suffered from that terrible disease. The same was true of all the owners of tobacco shops in the vicinity, Mr. Frampton assured us. The evil contagion did not dare cross any tobacconist’s doorstep. The doctor listened to this, his face glowing, and nodded in satisfaction. Yes, he had perhaps discovered the greatest medicine in the history of mankind and he had every reason to be proud of that. But his satisfaction exceeded all bounds when we entered the courtyard of the college and saw all the boys officially dressed in their black students’ togas, lined up in formation along the parade alley, each one with a lit pipe in his hand. They all took a drag at a sign from the dean, as he walked towards us with a smile, his arms outstretched, accompanied by the teachers’ thunderous applause. An indescribable moment! The doctor’s eyes teared up with emotion. My eyes also teared up, but for other reasons.

After that the doctor gave an inspired and stirring speech in the ceremonial hall. I just met, he said in a joking voice, a man who claimed to have seen the devil in a dream and that the devil drove him to give up tobacco. The public reacted to this with condescending laughter, which Mr. Frampton and I joined in as well. “Look,” the doctor noted, “what superstition leads to!” Then he spoke of modern times, of the fact that we need to leave medieval superstitions behind and to embrace science’s new discoveries, to rush towards those limitless horizons which science opens before us. We live in a new time, the doctor said, in which science has triumphantly stepped over the prejudices of the past (I thought of that bum lying on the streets of Sevilla), an exciting and volatile time, in which new foundations are being laid, whose golden fruits will be harvested by future generations; a time — the doctor continued — of rebirth, of Renaissance, of the triumphant might of knowledge and of science, that sun that rends the darkness, which you — he turned towards the audience — my young friends, have been nobly called to dedicate yourselves to, under the deft guidance of your wise teachers and especially Mr. Whittaker, one of the age’s brightest minds. Wild, long-lasting applause ensued, as the public got to its feet. Smiling, with hand on heart, Dr. Monardes took a slight bow from time to time in various directions. Then he spoke of new medicines that had come to us from the Indies, and particularly about tobacco and the huge number of illnesses this newly discovered substance could cure. He predicted a long and distinguished life for this new medicine. Some day, the doctor said, even the lowliest peasant in the Old World will know what tobacco is and perhaps will even use it himself, tobacco will be everywhere — on the streets, in the alehouses, in the inns, in the homes of the rich and the poor, in the houses of the nobility, of merchants, tradesmen, villagers — everywhere. It will become the most celebrated plant in the world, more famous even than tomatoes and peppers, mark my words. It will triumph as very few things in the world ever have, the doctor said, and this will come about far sooner than most think. We are already seeing the first harbingers of this eminent epoch, he said. The spirit of the new knowledge will spread gradually, little by little and invisibly at first — it will spring up here, it will spring up there, in this college, in that city, on that street. And so on until that day when suddenly and seemingly out of the blue the world will change completely. The self-satisfied ignoramuses of the past will see how it comes crashing down on their heads, how the habitual routine of the life they know flows away like water running through their fingers, they will look on bewildered and ask themselves: How so? What’s going on? And they will have to trace the answer far back into the past. But we know. “The world will change completely some day,” the doctor concluded. “And thanks to us in no small part.”

A magnificent, superb, stirring speech by Dr. Monardes! I was proud to be the student of such a man. With the power of an ancient orator, he stood before an unfamiliar audience and conquered them with his mighty speech, his extraordinary knowledge, and his sharp insight. Mr. Frampton was beside himself with ecstasy. I was, too, in a certain sense. Bravo, Dr. Monardes!

“Dr. Monardes is my teacher!” I turned to a tutor standing near me, involuntarily pointing a finger at my own chest. “I am a student of Dr. Monardes!”

“An enviable fate!” he replied. “I truly envy you, sir!” the man added, applauding all the while.

That night, perhaps as a result of the excitement and impressions of the day, I also dreamed of the so-called “devil.” But I dreamed of him in the gardens of Alhambra, standing where two pathways met under a right angle; they were lined with green hedges like a high curbstone, leveled off at knee height. Behind him I could see rose bushes with dark red roses, as well as lighter ones, whose color I cannot see how to define other than as rosy-pink roses. Above them, scattered about a dozen yards apart, towered tall palm trees, and along the length of the pathway the “devil” had come up, just in front of the hedge, red poppies and some purple flowers whose name I don’t know were growing in long stone flowerpots. To the right, perhaps a hundred yards from me, rose the high walls of the labyrinth covered in greenery. A magnificent place, indeed, very picturesque.

But the so-called “devil” was no less picturesque. He bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one Thomas Jollie saw in his dream. On the contrary, this one was dressed in the latest fashions popular with Spanish aristocrats — in green and white striped “pumpkins,” as those greatly puffed-up pants reaching to mid-thigh were sneeringly called, with silk stockings beneath them reaching just to his hooves; on top he wore a black jacket with gold embroidery, cinched at the waist and cropped at the shoulders; from beneath it flowed the sleeves of a loose shirt in the same green and white stripes, with a high pleated collar that reached to his chin; he also wore a short mantel that hung to his waist, gloves, a sword, a cap with a pheasant feather, and a large gold cross on his chest. No, he did not look anything like Señor Jollie’s devil, and if it weren’t for the hooves, I would have taken him for some Spanish courtier. In my dream, everything was bathed in bright colors, as if sparkling in the light of the noonday sun. But there was not a living soul in sight, it was just me and that picturesque figure before me. To my credit, I must stress that I was not frightened in the least.

“You must be an apparition,” I said to him. “The devil does not exist.”

“That’s true,” he replied. “I do not exist.”

And as he said this, he leapt up and spun around in a circle.

“How absurd!” I said. “And what is that cross on your chest?”

“What, don’t you like it?” he replied, lifting it with his fingers. “If so, then you have no taste. This is an exquisite work of goldsmithing.”

I snorted derisively. This was some kind of clown!

Believing in the devil was as absurd as believing in anything whatsoever.

“I can read your thoughts,” he said and pointed his finger at me before continuing: “I’ll test out my new sword on you. Try to defend yourself. This is no joke!” And with that, he hopped twice like a fencer, bringing first his left leg forward and then his right, with the sword in one hand and the other hand clapped on his waist behind him.

“Don’t go looking for trouble!” I said and reached under my jacket to the left where my Spanish dagger was.

“Can you imagine how strange it sounds to be run through by someone who does not exist? In the morning they’ll find you dead in bed, but with no trace of a wound.”

My head was bowed, but I had fixed him with the corners of my eyes. From this distance, he wouldn’t even have time to move. I hurled the dagger at him with a lightning-quick movement, I could hardly tell myself when I’d done it. But there was no one there. It sliced through the air and disappeared into the palms in front of me.

“That won’t work”—I heard a voice behind me, turned around, and saw him about a dozen yards away from me.

“Best to wake up,” I thought to myself and tried to do so, but I couldn’t. “This arrogant Spanish self-confidence is starting to make me go mad,” I said to myself, and for the first time I felt not exactly frightened, but rather confused. At that moment he landed with a giant leap in the rose bushes to my left.

“You ought to join the travelling actors,” I told him. “With that get-up and those leaps you’d enjoy a fine career with them.”

I reached into the right side of my jacket to see whether I happened to have my second dagger, but I knew that I didn’t — I only carry it in very special cases. But my hand did run across my cigarellas and I took one out to try to pull my thoughts together.

“A travelling actor is something far grander than you think,” he replied. “I should invite you to one of my performances so you can see what real fireworks are all about. . What is that reeking thing?”

“This?” I replied, taking the cigarella from my mouth. “This is a cigarella. It’s made of. .”

“I know what it is,” he interrupted me. “But that one smells terrible.”

“Because it is made of rawer tobacco,” I said. “It’s healthier that way.”

“If I run you through,” he said, “you’ll surely stink up my whole sword. It will probably reek for a week after that.”

“Best to give it up then,” I replied, for lack of anything else to say. I didn’t know what to say or what to do. To be frank, absolutely nothing came to mind. I thought about running away, of course, but immediately rejected this idea — first, because with those leaps he used to get around, he would’ve caught up with me immediately, and second, because this was only a dream. Confusion is extremely paralyzing. I’ve noticed this other times as well.

At that moment he landed in the path in front of me with a huge leap.

“Stench or no, I’ll run you through anyway!” he said and minced towards me with tiny quick steps as in a dance, stopping abruptly from time to time.

“In England they tell about a guy like you who could jump over walls and hedges,” I told him. “They call him Spring Heeled Jack.”

“I know,” he replied. And he started running, if that’s the word, towards me with his tiny steps.

Without knowing myself what I was doing, somehow by instinct, I hurled the cigarella at him. Or rather, to be more precise, I established that that was what I had done in the following moment. He was already only five or six steps from me when I saw the cigarella smack him in the forehead. . and he vanished. He simply vanished, disappeared. I whirled around to see whether he hadn’t leapt over me again, and when I turned, I felt a sharp pain in my hip and realized that I had fallen out of bed, that I was in one of the rooms at Mr. Frampton’s house, and that I’d obviously woken up. I reached out and lit a cigarella to make sure of this. The cigarella blazed up with a merry crackle and began glowing in the darkness. Clearly, I had woken up. Yet some doubt still gnawed at me. I got up, opened the door, and stopped for a moment, hesitant, telling myself, “This is very foolish, Guimarães,” but I decided that since I’d already begun I may as well see this business through to its end, so I kept going and went into the neighboring room where Dr. Monardes was sleeping. He was there, in bed, with his white nightcap on his head. I went over and shook him by the shoulders.

“Is that you, señor?” I whispered.

“What?” the doctor replied half-asleep, but opened his eyes.

“Is that you, señor?” I said again.

He looked at me in silence, his eyes open. This continued for some time.

“No,” he yelled finally, “I’m St. Nicholas the Mariner!” And as he said this, he threw a small wooden box that had been on the nightstand next to him at me.

Fortunately, I quickly ducked, the box hit me in the shoulder and two cuff links tumbled out of it onto the floor.

“What do you want, you silly fool?” the doctor yelled angrily.

“Nothing, nothing, señor,” I replied, quickly slipping towards the door. “I just wanted to make sure that it was you.”

“And you woke me up for that?” the doctor yelled — this was most probably a rhetorical question — and felt around on his nightstand, but there was nothing else there, and in any case I had already left the room.

The doctor continued shouting various things from inside. Señor Frampton also appeared. I was forced to give an explanation, so I told them what had happened. Then I went back to my room. I could hear the two of them talking in Dr. Monardes’ room.

“You need to get rid of that fool, señor,” I heard Frampton say. The son-of-a-bitch!

“I know, I know,” the doctor replied, and he said something else I didn’t hear.

And then he began to list my virtues, he stressed my resourcefulness, my studiousness, my quick wit, my increasing and ever-deepening medical knowledge, and proclaimed his certainty that I would be a very worthy successor to him, and foretold a great career for me in the medical profession on the basis of my — as he put it — exceptional qualities. I blush as I recall this! But here are the words of Dr. Monardes, written in his own hand:

Dr. Monardes: Señor Dr. da Silva is my most remarkable and in essence my only student. All the others who declare themselves such are despicable impostors and scoundrels. No one else knows (with the exception of myself) like Dr. da Silva how to cure dozens of illnesses with the healing power of tobacco, and instead of throwing your money down the drain, if you truly would like to be cured of your ills, whatever they may be, or to hear an edifying lecture about tobacco at your college or university (for a modest fee), by all means please apply to Dr. da Silva. By all means to him.

Greetings,

Dr. N. Monardes