Our First Cigarette · I

No period of greater joy than that which our aunt provided María and me with her death.

Inés was returning from Buenos Aires, where she had spent three months. That night, as we were going to bed, we heard Inés say to mother:

“How strange!... My eyebrows feel swollen.”

Mother surely examined our aunt’s eyebrows, for after a moment she replied:

“It’s true... Don’t you feel anything?”

“No... sleep.”

The following day, toward two in the afternoon, we suddenly noticed great commotion in the house, doors opening and not closing, dialogues cut short by exclamations, and frightened countenances. Inés had smallpox, and of a certain hemorrhagic sort prevalent in Buenos Aires.

Naturally, my sister and I were thrilled by the drama. Children almost always suffer the misfortune of having great things not happen in their own homes. This time our aunt—by sheer chance, our aunt!—sick with smallpox! I, a happy boy, already boasted in my pride the friendship of a police officer, and contact with a clown who, leaping the bleachers, had taken a seat beside me. But now the great event was happening right in our own house; and upon communicating it to the first boy who stopped at the front door to look, there was already in my eyes the vanity with which a child in strict mourning passes for the first time before astonished and envious neighbors.

That very afternoon we left the house, settling into the only one we could find with such haste, an old country house in the outskirts. A sister of mother’s, who had had smallpox in her childhood, stayed by Inés’s side.

Surely in the first few days mother suffered cruel anguish over her children who had kissed the smallpox victim. But we, on the other hand, turned into furious Robinsons, had no time to remember our aunt. For a long time the country house had been sleeping in its somber and damp tranquility. Whitish-scale infested orange trees; peach trees split at the fork; quinces with the appearance of wicker; fig trees creeping from sheer neglect—that gave, amidst its dense foliage that muffled footsteps, a strong sensation of paradise.

We weren’t precisely Adam and Eve; but rather heroic Robinsons, dragged to our destiny by a great family misfortune: the death of our aunt, occurring four days after our exploration began.

We spent the entire day ferreting around the country house, though the fig trees, far too dense at the base, unsettled us a little. The well also provoked our geographical concerns. This was an old unfinished well, the work on which had stopped at fourteen meters above the stone bottom, and which now vanished among the maidenhair ferns and spleenworts of its walls. It was, however, necessary to explore it, and by way of an advance party we managed with infinite effort to roll a large stone to its edge. Since the well remained hidden behind a thicket of reeds, this maneuver was permitted us without mother finding out. Nevertheless, María, whose poetic inspiration always prevailed in our enterprises, had us postpone the phenomenon until a heavy rain, filling the well, would provide us with artistic as well as scientific satisfaction.

But what above all attracted our daily raids was the reed bed. It took us two full weeks to properly explore that antediluvian tangle of green stalks, dry stalks, vertical stalks, bent stalks, crossed, broken toward the ground. The dry leaves, caught in their fall, interwove the thicket, which filled the air with dust and chaff at the slightest touch.

We cleared up the mystery, however; and seated with my sister in the shady lair of some corner, pressed close together and mute in the semi-darkness, we enjoyed for hours on end the pride of not feeling afraid.

It was there that one afternoon, ashamed of our lack of initiative, we invented smoking. Mother was a widow; two of her sisters habitually lived with us, and at that moment a brother, precisely the one who had come with Inés from Buenos Aires.

This uncle of ours of twenty years, very elegant and vain, had assumed over the two of us a certain authority that mother, with her current distress and lack of backbone, encouraged.

María and I, for our part, professed the most cordial antipathy toward the little stepfather.

“I assure you,” he would say to Mama, pointing toward us with his chin, “that I wish I could live with you always to keep an eye on your children. They are going to give you a great deal of trouble.”

“Let them be!” mother would reply wearily.

We said nothing; but we looked at each other over our soup bowls.

From this severe personage, then, we had stolen a package of cigarettes; and although the temptation to suddenly initiate ourselves into the manly virtue beckoned, we waited for the gadget. This consisted of a pipe I had made with a piece of reed for the bowl; a curtain rod for the mouthpiece; and for cement, putty from a recently glazed window. The pipe was perfect: large, light, and multicolored.

In our reed-bed hideout, María and I loaded it with religious and firm unction. Five cigarettes surrendered their tobacco inside; and sitting then with our knees high, I lit the pipe and drew. María, devouring my action with her eyes, noticed that mine were welling with tears: never has anything more abominable been seen or will be seen. I swallowed, however, bravely orchestrating the nauseating saliva.

“Good?” María asked me anxiously, holding out her hand.

“Good,” I replied, passing her the horrible machine.

María took a puff, and with even greater force. I, who was watching her closely, noticed in turn her tears and the simultaneous movement of lips, tongue, and throat, rejecting the thing. Her courage was greater than mine.

“He’s rich,” she said with tearful eyes and almost pouting. And heroically she brought the bronze stem back to her mouth.

It was imperative to save her. Pride, and pride alone, was plunging her back into that infernal smoke tasting of Chantaud salt, the very pride that had made me praise the nauseating bonfire.

“Shh!” I said abruptly, straining my ear. “It sounds like the nightjar from the other day... it must have a nest here...”

María sat up, setting the pipe aside; and with attentive ear and searching eyes, we moved away from there, apparently anxious to see the little animal, but in truth clinging like the dying to that honorable pretext of my invention, to retreat prudently from the tobacco without our pride suffering.

A month later I returned to the cane pipe, but with a very different result then.

Because of some mischief of ours, the little stepfather had already raised his voice at us much more harshly than my sister and I could allow. We complained to mother.

“Bah, pay no attention,” she replied, hardly listening to us. “He’s like that.”

“The thing is, he’s going to hit us one of these days!” María whimpered.

“If you don’t give him reason to, he won’t. What have you done to him?” she added, turning to me.

“Nothing, Mother... But I don’t want him to touch me!” I objected in turn.

At that moment our uncle entered.

“Ah! Here is that rascal of your Eduardo... This son is going to give you gray hairs, you’ll see!”

“They’re complaining that you want to hit them.”

“Me?” exclaimed the little stepfather, measuring me with his gaze. “I haven’t thought about it yet. But the moment you disrespect me...”

“And you’ll be right,” mother assented.

“I don’t want him to touch me!” I repeated, sullen and red. “He’s not my father!”

“But in the absence of your poor father, he is your uncle. Anyway, leave me in peace!” she concluded, pushing us aside.

Alone in the patio, María and I looked at each other with haughty fire in our eyes.

“No one is going to hit me!” I asserted.

“No... neither am I!” she backed me up, for her own sake.

“He’s a fool!”

And inspiration came suddenly, as always, to my sister, with furious laughter and a triumphant march:

“Uncle Alfonso... is a fool! Uncle Alfonso... is a fool!”

When a while later I ran into the little stepfather, it seemed to me, from his look, that he had heard us. But we had already devised the story of the Kicking Cigar, an epithet coined to the greater glory of the mule Maud.

The kicking cigar consisted, in its basic outlines, of a firecracker wrapped in rolling paper, placed in the pack of cigarettes that Uncle Alfonso always kept on his nightstand, which he smoked during his nap.

One end had been clipped so that the cigar wouldn’t affect the smoker too excessively. The violent stream of sparks was enough, and in all, the entire success depended on our uncle, half-asleep, not noticing the singular rigidity of his cigarette.

Things sometimes rush on in such a way that there is neither time nor breath to tell of them. I only know that one afternoon nap-time the step-uncle burst out of his room like a bomb, finding mamma in the dining room.

“Ah, you’re here! Do you know what they’ve done? I swear that this time they’ll remember me!”

“Alfonso!”

“What? As if you weren’t bad enough too!... If you don’t know how to educate your children, I’m going to do it!”

Upon hearing the uncle’s furious voice, I, who had been innocently busy with my sister drawing little lines on the cistern’s coping, maneuvered so as to enter the dining room through the second door and place myself behind mamma. The step-uncle saw me then and lunged at me.

“I didn’t do anything!” I shouted.

“Wait!” roared my uncle, running after me around the table.

“Alfonso, leave him!”

“I’ll leave him to you afterwards!”

“I don’t want him to touch me!”