My Documents (13 page)

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

For Álvaro Enrigue and Valeria Luiselli

T
he 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.