Alejandro Zambra - My Documents

“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.

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.