Woes of the True Policeman

listen to my troubles, he would never let things get blown out of proportion: he would always have the right thing to say, the appropriate levelheaded response to any problem. If there were some disaster—an earthquake, a civil war, a nuclear accident—he wouldn’t flee like a rat or collapse in hysterics, he would help me pack the bags, he would keep an eye on the children so that they didn’t run off in fear or for fun or get lost, he would always be calm, his head firmly on his shoulders, but most of all he would always be true to his word, to the decisive gesture expected of him.
    Readings
    Poems by Amado Nervo ( Los jardines interiores; En voz baja; Elevación; Perlas negras; Serenidad; La amada inmóvil ). Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (Colección Austral, Espasa Calpe). Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior (Hiperión).

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    Of all the habits, remembered Amalfitano, Padilla defended smoking. The one thing ever to unite Catalonians and Castilians, Asturians and Andalusians, Basques and Valencians, was the art, the appalling circumstance of communal smoking. According to Padilla, the most beautiful phrase in the Spanish language was the request for a light. Beautiful, soothing phrase, the kind of thing you could say to Prometheus, full of courage and humble complicity. When an inhabitant of the peninsula said “¿tienes fuego?” a wave of lava or saliva gushed anew in the miracle of communication and loneliness. Because for Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that “night of the soul” the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace. It was in the kingdom of Celtas and Bisontes, of Ducados and Rexes, that his fellow countrymen truly lived. The rest: confusion, shouting, the occasional potato tortilla. And as for the repeated warnings of the Department of Health: rubbish. Though every day, it was said, people smoked less and more smokers switched to ultra-light cigarettes. He himself no longer smoked Ducados, as he had in his adolescence, but unfiltered Camels.
    There was nothing strange, he said, about a condemned man being offered a cigarette before he was executed. As a popular rite of faith, the cigarette was more important than the prayers and blessing of the priest. And yet those who were executed in the electric chair or the gas chamber weren’t offered anything: it was a Latin custom, a Hispanic custom. And he could go on and on like this, dredging up an endless string of anecdotes. The one that Amalfitano remembered most vividly and that struck him as most significant—and premonitory, in a way, since it was about Mexico and a Mexican and he had ended up in Mexico—was the story of a colonel of the Revolution who had the misfortune to end his days in front of a firing squad. His last wish was for a cigarette. The captain of the firing squad, who must have been a good man, granted his request. The colonel found a cigar and proceeded to smoke it, not saying a thing to anyone, gazing at the barren landscape. When he had finished, the ash still clung to the cigar. His hand hadn’t trembled; the execution could proceed. That man must be one of the patron saints of smokers, said Padilla. So what was the story about, the colonel’s nerves of steel or the calming effects of smoke, the communion with smoke? Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, couldn’t say and didn’t care.

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    Sometimes Amalfitano meditated on his relatively recent homosexuality and sought literary affirmation and examples as consolation. All that came to mind was Thomas Mann and the kind of languid, innocent fairyhood with which he was afflicted in his old age. But I’m not that old, he thought, and Thomas Mann was probably gaga by then, which isn’t the case for me. Nor did he find consolation in those few Spanish novelists who, once past the age of thirty, suddenly discovered that they were queer: most of them were such jingoistic butches that when he thought about them he became actively depressed. Sometimes he remembered Rimbaud and drew convoluted analogies: in “Le cœur volé,” which some critics read as the detailed account of the