THE LAST CIGARETTE

When I spoke to the doctor about my weakness for smoking, he told me to begin my analysis by tracing the growth of that habit from the beginning.

“Write away!” he said, “and you will see how soon you begin to get a clear picture of yourself.”

I think I can write about smoking here, at my table without sitting down to dream in that arm-chair. I don’t know how to begin. I must invoke the aid of all those many cigarettes I have smoked, identical with the one I have in my hand now.

I have just made a discovery. I had quite forgotten that the first cigarettes I ever smoked are no longer on the market. They were made first in 1870 in Austria and were sold in little cardboard boxes stamped with the double-headed eagle. Wait a minute! Suddenly several people begin to collect round one of those boxes; I can distinguish their features and vaguely remember their names, but this unexpected meeting does not move me in any way. I must try and look into it more closely. I will see what the arm-chair can do. No, now they have faded away and changed into ugly, mocking caricatures.

I came back discouraged to the table.

One of the figures was Giuseppe, a youth of about my own age with rather a hoarse voice, and the other was a brother of mine, a year younger than me, who died some years ago. Giuseppe must have been given quite a lot of money by his father, and treated us to some of those cigarettes. But I am positive that he gave my brother more than me, and that I was therefore obliged to try and get hold of some for myself. And that was how I came to steal. In the summer my father used to leave his waistcoat on a chair in the lobby, and in the pocket there was always some change to be found; I took out the coin I needed for buying one of those precious little boxes, and smoked the ten cigarettes it contained one after the other, lest I might be betrayed if I carried about with me such a compromising booty.

All this was lying dormant in my mind and so close at hand. It had never come to life before, because it is only now that I realise its possible significance. So now I have traced my bad habit back to the very beginning and (who knows?) I may be cured already. I will light one last cigarette, just to try, and probably I shall throw it away in disgust.

Now I remember that my father surprised me one day whilst holding his waistcoat in my hand. With a brazenness which I should never have now and which horrifies me even so long after (perhaps this feeling of disgust is going to be very important in my cure), I told him that I had suddenly felt a great curiosity to count the buttons. My father laughed at my mathematical or sartorial bent and never noticed that I had my fingers in his waistcoat pocket. To my credit be it said, his laughing at me like that for being so innocent when I knew I was guilty was quite enough to prevent me ever stealing again. At least, I did steal afterwards, but without realising it. My father used to leave half-smoked Virginia cigars lying about on the edge of a table or of a chest of drawers. I thought it was his way of getting rid of them and I really believed that our old servant Catina used to throw them away. I began smoking them in secret. The very fact of hiding them sent a kind of shudder through me, for I knew how sick they would make me. Then I would smoke them till cold drops of perspiration stood on my forehead and I felt horribly bad inside. No one could say that as a child I lacked determination.

I remember perfectly how my father cured me of that habit too. I had come back one summer’s day from a school excursion, tired and very hot. My mother helped me to undress and then made me lie down in a dressing-gown and try and go to sleep on the sofa where she was sitting sewing. I was very nearly asleep, but my eyes were still full of sunlight and I couldn’t quite get off. The delicious sensation one has at that age, when one is able to rest after being very tired, is so real to me even now that I almost feel as if I were still lying there close to her dear body.

I remember the large airy room where we children used to play and which now, in these days when space is so precious, is divided in two. My brother plays no part in the scene, which surprises me because he must have been on that excursion too and would surely have been resting with me. Was he asleep, perhaps, at the other end of the great sofa? I picture the place, but it seems to be empty. All I see is myself resting there so happily, my mother, and then my father whose words still echo in my ears. He had come in without noticing I was there, for he called out aloud:

“Maria!”

My mother made a soft hushing sound and pointed to me, lying as she thought drowned in sleep, but in reality wide awake, and merely afloat upon the ocean of sleep. I was so pleased at my father having to treat me with such consideration that I kept perfectly still.

My father began complaining in a low voice:

“I really think I must be going mad. I am almost sure I left half a cigar lying on that chest half an hour ago, and now I can’t find it. I must be ill. I can’t remember anything.”

Only my mother’s fear of waking me prevented her from laughing. She answered in the same low voice:

“But no one has been into this room since luncheon.”

My father muttered:

“I know that. And that is just why I think I am going mad.”

He turned on his heel and went out.

I half opened my eyes and looked at my mother. She had settled down again to her work, and she still had a smile on her face. She would surely not have smiled like that at my father’s fears if she believed he was really going mad. Her smile made such a deep impression on me that I immediately recognised it when I saw it one day long afterwards on my wife’s lips.

Later on, lack of money was no obstacle to my satisfying my craving, but any prohibition sufficed to excite it.

I smoked continually, hidden in all sorts of secret places. I particularly remember one half-hour spent in a dark cellar, because I was so terribly unwell afterwards. I was with two other boys, but the only thing I remember about them is the childish clothes they wore: two pairs of short knickers which I see standing up quite solidly as if the limbs which once filled them had not been dissolved by time. We had a great many cigarettes and we wanted to see who could smoke most in the shortest time. I won, and stoically hid the physical distress this strange experiment caused me. Afterwards we went out into the sunshine again. I had to shut my eyes or I should have fainted on the spot. By degrees I recovered and boasted of my victory. Then one of the boys said:

“I don’t care about losing. I only smoke so long as I enjoy it.”

I remember his sensible words, but have quite forgotten the boy’s face, though it was probably turned towards me while he spoke them.

But at that time I didn’t know whether I liked or hated the taste of cigarettes and the condition produced by nicotine. When I discovered that I really hated it all, it was much worse. That was when I was about twenty. For several weeks I suffered from a violent sore throat accompanied by fever. The doctor ordered me to stay in bed and to give up smoking entirely. I remember being struck by that word entirely which the fever made more vivid. I saw a great void, and no means of resisting the fearful oppression which emptiness always produces.

When the doctor had left, my father, who was smoking a cigar, stayed on a little while to keep me company (my mother had already been dead some years). As he was going away he passed his hand gently over my feverish brow and said:

“No more smoking, mind!”

I was in a state of fearful agitation. I thought: “As it’s so bad for me I won’t smoke any more, but I must first have just one last smoke.” I lit a cigarette and at once all my excitement died down, though the fever seemed to get worse, and with every puff at the cigarette my tonsils burned as if a firebrand had touched them. I smoked my cigarette solemnly to the end as if I were fulfilling a vow. And though it caused me agony I smoked many more during that illness. My father would come and go, always with a cigar in his mouth, and say from time to time:

“Bravo! A few days more of no smoking and you will be cured!”

It only needed that phrase to make me long for him to get out of the room instantly so that I might begin smoking again at once. I would pretend to be asleep in order to get rid of him quicker.

This illness was the direct cause of my second trouble: the trouble I took trying to rid myself of the first. My days became filled with cigarettes and resolutions to give up smoking, and, to make a clean sweep of it, that is more or less what they are still. The dance of the last cigarette which began when I was twenty has not reached its last figure yet. My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses. When one is old one can afford to smile at life and all it contains. I may as well say that for some time past I have been smoking a great many cigarettes and have given up calling them the last.

I find the following entry on the front page of a dictionary, beautifully written and adorned with a good many flourishes:

2 February, 1886. To-day I finish my law studies and take up chemistry. Last cigarette!!

That was a very important last cigarette. I remember by what hopes it was attended. I was irritated by Canon Law, which seemed to me so remote from life, and I fled to science in the hope of finding life itself, though imprisoned in a retort. That last cigarette was the emblem of my desire for activity (even manual) and for calm, clear, sober thought.

But when I could no longer accept all the endless combinations of carbonic acid gas I went back to Law. That was a mistake, alas, and that too had to be celebrated by a last cigarette. I have come across the date on the cover of a book. That was an important one too, and I applied myself, with the utmost ardour, to the intricate problems of “mine” and “thine,” and shook off for ever the series of carbon combinations. I had proved myself unsuited to chemistry because of my lack of manual skill. How was it possible for me to have any when I went on smoking like a Turk?

While I sit here analysing myself a sudden doubt assails me: did I really love cigarettes so much because I was able to throw all the responsibility for my own incompetence on them? Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt which bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one’s own latent greatness. I only put this forward as a possible explanation of my youthful weakness, but without any very great conviction.

Now that I am old and no one expects anything of me, I continue to pass from cigarette to resolution and back again. What is the point of such resolutions to-day? Perhaps I am like that aged dyspeptic in Goldoni, who wanted to die healthy after having been ill all his life!

Once when I was a student I changed my lodgings, and had to have the walls of my room repapered at my own expense, because I had covered them with dates. Probably I left that room just because it had become the tomb of my good resolutions, and I felt it impossible to form any fresh ones there.

I am sure a cigarette has a more poignant flavour when it is the last. The others have their own special taste too, peculiar to them, but it is less poignant. The last has an aroma all its own, bestowed by a sense of victory over oneself and the sure hope of health and strength in the immediate future. The others are important too, as an assertion of one’s own freedom, and when one lights them one still has a vision of that future of health and beauty, though it has moved a little farther off.

The dates on my walls displayed every variety of colour and I had painted some of them in oils. The latest resolution, renewed in the most ingenuous good faith, found appropriate expression in the violence of its colours which aimed at making those of the preceding one pale before it. I had a partiality for certain dates because their figures went well together. I remember one of last century which seemed as if it must be the final monument to my vice: “Ninth day of the ninth month, in the year 1899.” Surely a most significant date! The new century furnished me with other dates equally harmonious, though in a different way. “First day of the first month in the year 1901.” Even to-day I feel that if only that date could repeat itself I should be able to begin a new life.

But there is no lack of dates in the calendar, and with a little imagination each of them might be adapted to a good resolution. I remember the following, for instance, because it seemed to me to contain an undeniable categorical imperative: “Third day of the sixth month, in the year 1912, at 24 o’clock.” It sounds as if each number doubled the one before.

The year 1913 gave me a moment’s pause. The thirteenth month, which ought to have matched the year, was missing. But of course such exact mathematical correspondence is hardly necessary to set off a last cigarette. Some dates which I have put down in books or on the backs of favourite pictures arrest one’s attention by their very inconsequence. For example, the third day of the second month of the year 1905 at six o’clock! It has its own rhythm, if you come to think of it, for each figure in turn contradicts the one that went before. Many events too, in fact all from the death of Pius IX to the birth of my son, I thought deserved to be celebrated by the customary iron resolution. All my family marvel at my memory for anniversaries, grave or gay, and they attribute it to my nice sympathetic nature!

In order to make it seem a little less foolish I tried to give a philosophic content to the malady of “the last cigarette.” You strike a noble attitude, and say: “Never again!” But what becomes of the attitude if you keep your word? You can only preserve it if you keep on renewing your resolution. And then Time, for me, is not that unimaginable thing which never stops. For me, but only for me, it comes again.

Ill-health is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction. I should not remember much about the illness I had when I was twenty if I had not described it to a doctor at the time. It is curious how much easier it is to remember what one has put into words, than feelings which never vibrated on the air.

I went to that doctor because I had been told that he cured nervous diseases by electricity. I thought I might derive from electricity the strength necessary to give up smoking.

The doctor was a stout man and his asthmatic breathing accompanied the clicking of the electrical machine which he set in motion at my very first visit. This was rather a disappointment, for I thought the doctor would make an examination of me and discover what poison it was which was polluting my blood. But he only said that my constitution was sound, and that since I complained of bad digestion and sleeplessness he supposed my stomach lacked acids and that the peristaltic action was weak; he repeated that word so many times that I have never forgotten it. He prescribed me an acid which ruined my inside, for I have suffered ever since from over-acidity.

When I saw that he would never discover the nicotine in my blood himself, I thought I would help him, and suggested that my ill-health was probably due to that. He shrugged his great shoulders wearily:

“Peristaltic action—acid. It has nothing to do with nicotine!”

He gave me seventy electric treatments, and I should be having them still if I had not decided I had had enough. I did not hasten to my appointments so much because I expected miraculous results, as because I hoped to persuade the doctor to order me to give up smoking. Things might have turned out very differently if I had had a command like that with which to fortify my resolutions.

This is the description I gave the doctor of my illness:

“I am incapable of studying, and on the few occasions when I go to bed early I lie awake till the first bells begin to ring. And that is why I continue to waver between law and chemistry, because both those sciences oblige one to begin work at a stated time, whereas I never know at what time I shall be able to get up.”

“Electricity cures every form of insomnia,” pronounced Æsculapius, his eyes fixed as usual on his quadrant instead of on his patient.

I began talking to him about psycho-analysis as if I expected him to understand it; for I was one of the first, though timidly, to dabble in it.

I told him of my troubles with women. I was not satisfied with one or even with many; I desired them all! My excitement as I walked along the streets was intense; whenever I passed a woman, I wanted to possess her. I stared at them insolently, because I wanted to feel as brutal as possible. I undressed them in imagination down to their shoes. I held them in my arms and only let them go when I was sure that I knew every part of them.

I might have spared my breath. All my sincerity was wasted. The doctor snorted:

“I hope the electrical treatment won’t cure you of that disease. A fine state of things that would be! I would never touch a high frequency again if I thought that it was going to have that effect.”

He told me what he thought to be a very spicy anecdote. Someone who was suffering from my complaint went to a famous doctor hoping to be cured; but the doctor having treated him with complete success was obliged to leave the town, otherwise the patient would have torn him limb from limb.

“My excitement is not normal,” I yelled. “It comes from the poison burning in my veins!”

The doctor muttered sympathetically:

“No one is ever satisfied with his lot.”

And it was in order to convince him that I did what he had neglected to do, and studied all the symptoms of my disease in detail.

My absent-mindedness! That was another obstacle to my studies. When I was at Graz preparing for my first examination I carefully made a note of all the texts I should need up to the very last exam. The result was that a few days before my examination I discovered I had been studying things which I should only need several years later. So I was obliged to put off taking it. It is true that I had not studied anything very closely, but that was the fault of a girl who lived over the way, and who flirted outrageously with me, though it went no further.

If she appeared at the window I had no eyes for my books. What a fool, to waste one’s time over such things! I remember her small, pale face at the window, its oval framed in gay auburn curls. I used to sit and gaze at her and dream of crushing her whiteness and ruddy gold on my pillow.

Æsculapius murmured:

“Nevertheless flirting has something to be said for it. At my age you won’t want to flirt any more.”

To-day I am convinced he knew nothing whatever about flirting. I have reached fifty-seven and I can guarantee that if I don’t give up smoking, and if psycho-analysis does not cure me, my dying eyes will be lifted in desire to the nurse by my death-bed, supposing she does not happen to be my wife, and that my wife allows me to have a pretty one!

I was as frank as if I were making my confession. I was not in love with women as a whole, but only with parts of them. I was always attracted by small feet, especially if well shod, by a slender and well-rounded neck, and by very small breasts. I was proceeding to enumerate all the other parts of the female anatomy when the doctor interrupted with:

“All those parts make up the woman as a whole.”

Then I said something which seemed to me of great importance:

“Sane, normal love embraces the whole woman with every quality of mind and character.”

Up to that time I had never experienced such a love, and when I did, even that did not restore me to health, but it is worth recording that I detected symptoms of disease in what the specialist regarded as healthy, and that my diagnosis turned out to be right.

I found more understanding of my complaint in a friend of mine who was not a doctor. It is true he could not cure me, but he struck a new note in my life which still echoes there.

My friend was a rich man who employed his leisure in reading and writing. He talked much better than he wrote, so that few suspected how profoundly learned he really was. He was a great fat man, and when I knew him he was very energetically undergoing treatment for getting thin. In a very short time his success was such that people made a point of walking beside him in the street, in order to enjoy the contrast between their own robustness and his emaciation. I envied him his strength of will, and so long as his cure lasted I was always going to see him. He invited me to feel how his stomach was getting smaller day by day, and out of pure envy I said to him one day, maliciously hoping to weaken his purpose:

“But what will you do with all that loose skin when your cure is finished?”

He replied with the utmost calm, which gave quite a comic expression to his emaciated face:

“In two days’ time I shall begin my massage treatment.”

He had arranged every detail of his cure beforehand, and one felt sure he would keep to it with the utmost regularity.

It gave me a great feeling of confidence, and I described my malady to him. I remember the description quite well. I explained to him that giving up three meals a day seemed to me nothing compared with the task of making a fresh resolution every moment not to smoke another cigarette. If you use up all your energy in making resolutions you have no time for anything else, for it takes a Julius Cæsar to be able to do two things at once. It is true there is no need for me to do any work so long as my agent Olivi is alive, but didn’t he think it a disgrace for somebody like me to spend his whole time dreaming, or strumming on the violin for which I have really no aptitude?

My fat friend, now so much reduced, was silent for a while. He was a man of method and first he had to think it all out. Then with a magisterial air, very becoming to one with his reasoning powers, he explained that I was really suffering from my resolutions much more than from the cigarettes. I ought to try and cure myself without making any resolutions. According to him my personality in the course of years had become divided in two, one of which gave orders while the other was only a slave which, directly the supervision was relaxed, disobeyed its master’s orders out of sheer love of liberty. So that what I ought to do was to give it absolute freedom and at the same time look my vice in the face as if it was something new and I were meeting it for the first time. I must not fight it, I must first forget it and treat it with complete indifference, turning my back on it as if it were not worthy to keep me company. Simple, wasn’t it?

In fact it did seem to me quite a simple matter. And it is true that having with much difficulty banished every resolution from my mind I managed to refrain from smoking for several hours. But when my mouth was cleansed from the taste of smoke it had an innocent feeling like that of a new-born baby, and I felt a longing for a cigarette. Directly I had smoked it I felt remorse and again began making the very resolution I had tried to suppress. The way was longer, but the end was the same.

That wretch Olivi suggested one day that we should have a bet together in order to strengthen my resolution.

I think that Olivi must always have looked exactly the same as he does now. I always see him like this—rather bent, but solidly built; and to me he has always looked just as old as he does to-day, when he is eighty. He has always worked for me, and he still does; but I don’t really like him, for I always think he has prevented my doing the work he does himself.

We made a bet: the first who smoked was to pay and then we should both be released from all obligation. In this way my agent who was appointed to see that I did not waste my father’s fortune was doing his best to diminish my mother’s over which I had complete control!

That bet proved excessively damaging to me. I was no longer alternately master and slave, but only a slave, and to Olivi, whom I hated. I immediately began to smoke. Then I thought I would cheat him by going on smoking in secret. But in that case why have made a bet at all? So I set about hunting for a date which should match the date of the bet, in order to smoke one last cigarette to which I should somehow feel that Olivi had given his consent. But I continued to rebel, and smoked so much that I got into a state of acute mental agony. In order to shake off the burden I went to Olivi and confessed.

The old man smiled as he pocketed his money, then immediately drew from his pocket a huge cigar which he lit and smoked with immense enjoyment. It never occurred to me for an instant that he might possibly have been cheating too. Evidently I am made quite differently from other people.

My son was just three years old when my wife had a bright idea. She advised me to cure myself by going for a while into a sanatorium. I at once agreed, first because I wanted my son when he grew old enough to form judgments of his own, to find me calm and balanced, and secondly because Olivi was ailing and spoke of leaving; in which case I might be obliged to take his post at a moment’s notice, and felt quite unequal to such an exertion with all that nicotine in my body.

We thought first of going to Switzerland, the traditional home of sanatoriums, till we heard of a Doctor Muli, who had opened a place of the sort in Trieste itself. I got my wife to go and see him, and he offered to put a small suite at my disposal, with a special attendant to supervise me, and several others to assist her. My wife smiled as she described it to me and occasionally burst out laughing. She was so amused at the idea of my being shut up, and I laughed quite as heartily myself. It was the first time she had ever joined in my efforts to cure myself. Up till then she had refused to take my disease seriously and only said that smoking was one way of living, and not such a bad one either. I think that after our marriage she was relieved to find I never regretted my liberty; I was much too occupied in regretting other things.

We went to the sanatorium the very day on which Olivi had told me he could on no account stay on after the following month. We packed some fresh linen in a trunk and went off that evening to Dr. Muli’s. He let us in himself. In those days Dr. Muli was a good-looking young man. It was midsummer, and he looked the picture of elegance dressed in white from top to toe, with his small nervous figure and sunburnt face which set off his piercing black eyes. He at once roused my admiration, and evidently the feeling was mutual.

I guessed the cause of his admiration and felt slightly embarrassed. I said:

“I suppose you don’t believe I need a cure and can’t understand why I take it so seriously.”

With an almost imperceptible smile which I found rather insulting, the doctor replied:

“But why not? It may very well be that cigarettes do you personally more harm than we doctors generally admit. I only can’t understand why, instead of giving up smoking suddenly altogether, you did not make up your mind to cut down the number of your cigarettes. There is no harm in smoking, but of course it is bad for one to smoke to excess.”

I must confess that in my anxiety to give up smoking altogether the possibility of smoking less had never occurred to me. I said with decision:

“In any case, now that I am here let me try your cure.”

“Try?” The doctor smiled condescendingly. “Once you have submitted to it the cure is bound to succeed. It will be impossible for you to escape unless you use physical force on poor Giovanna. The formalities which would have to be gone through before you were free would last so long that in the interval you would quite have forgotten your vice.”

We had arrived at the suite of rooms destined to me, which could only be reached by going up to the second floor and then coming down to the ground floor.

“Do you see? That door, which is locked, is the only means of communication with the rest of the ground floor, where the exit is. Even Giovanna hasn’t got the key to it. If she wants to get out she is obliged to go up to the second floor, and she keeps the key of that door we came through on the small landing. Besides, there is always someone in charge on the second floor. Not so bad, is it, for a maternity home, which is what this was meant for?”

And he laughed, perhaps at the idea of shutting me up with babies.

He called Giovanna and introduced her to me. She was a little woman of uncertain age, which one might put somewhere between forty and sixty. She had small, very bright eyes and her hair was quite grey. The doctor said to her:

“This is the gentleman whom you have got to be prepared to box with.”

She looked me up and down, blushed and said in a shrill voice:

“I shall do my duty, but I am certainly not going to fight with you. If you threaten me I shall call the male attendant who is very strong, and if he doesn’t come at once I shall just let you go wherever you like. I’m not going to risk being killed by you.”

I heard afterwards that the doctor had promised her a considerable bonus for looking after me, and this had made her thoroughly nervous. But at the moment her words made me very angry. A nice position I had put myself in of my own accord.

“Go to blazes!” I shouted. “Who’s going to touch you, I should like to know?” Then, turning to the doctor, I said: “Please see that I am not annoyed by this woman! I have brought some books with me and I wish to be left in peace.”

The doctor said a few soothing words to Giovanna. She tried to excuse herself by a fresh attack upon me.

“I have my children to live for, two sweet little girls.”

“I shouldn’t stoop to kill you,” I replied, in a tone hardly calculated to reassure the poor woman.

The doctor sent her away on pretence of fetching something from the floor above, and to pacify me he proposed replacing her by someone else, adding:

“She is not a bad sort, and if I tell her to behave more tactfully I don’t think she will give you any cause for complaint.”

As I did not want to seem to attach so much importance to the person who would have to look after me, I said at once that I would put up with her. I was in an excited state and felt the need of controlling myself, so I took out my last cigarette but one and began smoking it greedily. I explained to the doctor that I had only brought two and that I was going to stop smoking on the stroke of midnight.

My wife said good-bye and went away at the same time as the doctor. She smiled and said:

“Be strong and carry it through.”

I suddenly felt that her smile, which I loved so much, was mocking me. Immediately a new suspicion awoke in my mind, which was to be responsible for the swift failure of an undertaking on which I had entered with such serious purpose. I felt suddenly unwell, but it was only when I was left alone that I realised the nature of my disorder. I was frantically, madly jealous of the young doctor. He was handsome, he was free! His colleagues called him “The Venus de Medici.” What was there to prevent my wife falling in love with him? As he went out after her I saw him looking at her elegantly shod feet. It was the first time I had been jealous since we were married. How miserable I felt! No doubt my abject state as a captive had something to do with it. I fought against the idea. That smile was just my wife’s usual smile and not one of mockery because she had succeeded in getting rid of me. Yet it was she who suggested my being shut up, though she attached no importance to my vice. But surely she had only done it to humour me. Surely I had not forgotten that one did not so very readily fall in love with my wife? It is true the doctor eyed her feet, but of course he had only been planning what shoes he should buy for his mistress. Suddenly I discovered I had smoked my last cigarette; and it was not yet midnight but eleven o’clock, an impossible hour for a last cigarette.

I opened a book. I read it without understanding a word. I saw visions. The page I was looking at suddenly turned into a photograph of Dr. Muli in the full glory of his beauty and elegance. I could bear it no longer! I called Giovanna. Perhaps if I talked a little I should feel calmer.

She appeared, and at once eyed me suspiciously. She cried in her shrill voice: “Don’t imagine that you will be able to make me neglect my duty.”

For the moment I invented some lies to set her mind at rest. I said I had never dreamt of such a thing, but that I was tired of reading and should prefer to have a chat with her. I made her sit down facing me. I was completely put off by her elderly appearance, contrasting strangely with her eyes which were still young and restless like those of a timid animal. I felt very sorry for myself, having to put up with such a companion! It is true that even when I am at liberty I am not very good at choosing the companions who would be most congenial to me. On the contrary it is generally they who choose me, as in the case of my wife.

I begged Giovanna to entertain me a little, and when she said she couldn’t think of anything that would interest me I asked her to tell me about her family, adding that almost everyone living had at least one.

She readily obeyed and told me that she had been obliged to put her two little girls into a home.

Her story entertained me and I could not help laughing at the thought of how easily she had dismissed the result of her two pregnancies. But she was of a very argumentative disposition, and when she wanted to prove to me that it was impossible for her to do otherwise, seeing how badly she was paid, and that it was very unfair of the doctor to say that two kronen a day were quite enough for her, since the home looked after her children, I soon began to have enough. But it was impossible to stop her.

“What about all the extras?” she shouted. “They only give them food and clothing, but there are heaps of other things they need.” And out she came with a whole list of things she was obliged to get for her children, which I have forgotten now, for I tried to concentrate on other things so as to escape from her piercing voice. But my ears were already too full of it, and I felt as if I deserved some recompense.

“Don’t you think I might have just one cigarette? I would willingly pay you ten kronen for it, but you will have to wait till to-morrow for I haven’t got a penny here.”

Giovanna was terribly shocked at my suggestion. She literally screamed, and said she should call the attendant at once. In fact she got up and went to the door.

To pacify her I had at once to withdraw my suggestion, and more with a view to keeping myself in countenance than because I really wanted it, I said casually:

“I suppose one can at least get something to drink in this prison?”

To my surprise Giovanna replied at once in quite a natural conversational voice:

“Yes, of course! The doctor gave me this bottle of brandy before he went away. Look! it is still unopened. It was quite a fresh bottle.”

I was in such a state that my only hope seemed to lie in getting drunk. So this was the result of having trusted my wife so implicitly.

At that moment it seemed to me that the vice of smoking was really not worth all the trouble I was taking about it. I had not been smoking for the last half-hour and I had already forgotten all about it, so occupied was I in thinking of my wife and Dr. Muli. So I was already completely cured, but I had made a hopeless fool of myself.

I drew the cork and poured out a small glass of the yellow liquid. Giovanna stood watching me with her mouth wide open, but I did not venture to offer her any.

“Can I have some more when I have finished this?”

Giovanna politely assured me that I could have as much as I liked and that the housekeeper had orders to get up at midnight even, if I expressed a wish for anything.

Meanness has never been a fault of mine and I had soon filled Giovanna’s glass to the brim. She emptied it almost before she had finished thanking me, and her eyes were already fixed eagerly on the bottle. So it was really she who put into my head the idea of making her drunk. It was none too easy!

I can’t remember exactly what it was she said, in the pure Triestian dialect, after swallowing several more glasses, but I had quite the feeling that I was sitting by someone to whom I could have listened with considerable pleasure had I not been occupied with quite other thoughts.

First of all she confided to me that this was just the kind of work she really enjoyed. She thought everyone ought to have the right to pass an hour or two every day in a comfortable arm-chair, with a bottle of really good brandy in front of them.

I tried to converse a little too. I asked her if that was how her work had been arranged while her husband was alive.

She burst out laughing. In her husband’s lifetime she had had kisses and blows alternately and, compared with all she had had to do for him, what she did now was child’s play, even before I had arrived with my cure.

Then Giovanna grew thoughtful and asked me if I thought the dead could see what the living were doing. Yes, I thought so. But then she wanted to know whether, when people were dead, they would discover everything that had happened while they were alive.

For a moment this question actually succeeded in distracting me from my own troubles. It was pronounced in a very soft voice as if Giovanna had purposely lowered it so that the dead should not hear it.

“Were you unfaithful to your husband, then?” I asked.

She begged me not to talk so loud and then confessed that she had been unfaithful, but only during the first few months of their marriage. Then she had got used to blows and had loved her husband.

To keep the conversation going, I said: “Did you have your first child then by the other man?”

Still in low voice she said yes, she thought so, on account of certain resemblances. She regretted very much having betrayed her husband. She laughed as she said this, because for some reason one always does laugh at it, however much one may mind. But she had only minded since his death, for it was of no importance before that, as he knew nothing about it.

Moved by a certain brotherly sympathy, I tried to diminish her grief by saying that I thought the dead probably did know everything, but that there were certain things they would not bother their heads about.

“It is only the living who care!” I cried, banging my fist on the table.

I bruised my hand, and there is nothing like physical pain for awaking new ideas. It suddenly occurred to me that while I was torturing myself with the thought that my wife was taking advantage of my being shut up to betray me with the doctor, he might possibly be in the house all the time, in which case I could set my mind at rest. I asked Giovanna to go and see, telling her I had something urgent to say to the doctor and promising her another bottle as a reward. She protested that she didn’t care to drink so much, but at once agreed to go, and I could hear her staggering up the wooden staircase which led to the second floor where our clausura ended. She slipped as she was coming down again, making a great deal of noise, and screaming.

“Curse you!” I muttered fervently. If only she had broken her neck my position would have been simplified a good deal.

However, she came back wreathed in smiles, for she had reached a stage when bodily pain makes very little impression. She said she had spoken to the attendant who was just going to bed, but that she could always call for him in case I gave any trouble. She shook her finger at me threateningly as she said this, but with a sly smile. Then she added more dryly that the doctor had not returned since he went away with my wife. Quite a long time! In fact the attendant had been hoping he would come back because there was a patient he wanted him to see. But he had given up all hope of his coming now.

I watched her carefully to see whether the smile on her face was an habitual one or whether it was quite new and occasioned by the fact that she knew the doctor was with my wife instead of with me, his patient, as he ought to have been. I was in such a rage that my brain positively reeled. I must confess that even at such a moment two personalities seemed to be at war within me; the more reasonable of which said: “Idiot! Why should you imagine your wife is unfaithful to you just now? There is no need for her to shut you up. She gets plenty of other opportunities.” The other, the one which insists on smoking, called me an idiot too, but in quite a different sense: “Don’t you see how easy it becomes with her husband away? And with the doctor too, who is paid by you!”

Giovanna, who went on drinking steadily, said: “I forgot to shut the door on to the second floor. But I don’t want to have to go up those two flights again. There is always someone about up there, and you would cut a fine figure if you made any attempt to escape.”

“Rather!” said I, with the very small degree of hypocrisy now necessary to take in the poor little woman. I swallowed some more brandy myself, and said that now I was allowed so much drink I didn’t care two straws about the cigarettes. She believed me at once and then I said it was not really I who wanted to give up smoking. It was my wife who insisted on it. I ought to tell her, I added, that after I had smoked about ten cigarettes I became a perfect terror. No woman would be safe who happened to meet me at such a moment.

Giovanna threw herself back in her chair and burst out laughing noisily.

“So it is your wife who prevents you smoking the necessary ten cigarettes?”

“Yes, that’s it. At least she used to prevent me.”

With all that brandy inside her poor Giovanna was by no means such a fool. She was suddenly overcome by such a fit of laughing that she almost fell off her chair. When she recovered her breath she sketched, in broken words, a wonderful little picture suggested by my disease:

“Ten cigarettes ... half an hour ... set the alarum ... and then....”

I corrected her: “Ten cigarettes take me about an hour to smoke. It takes about another hour to produce the full effect—sometimes a few minutes more, sometimes less.”

Giovanna suddenly became quite serious and got up from her chair without too great difficulty. She said she must go to bed as she had rather a headache. I invited her to take the bottle with her, because I had had quite enough. I hypocritically said that next day I should ask them to order me in some good wine.

But it was of something else than wine she was thinking. As she left the room with the bottle under her arm she gave me a look which made my blood run cold.

She had left the door open and a few moments later a packet of cigarettes fell in the middle of the floor. I at once picked it up. It contained eleven cigarettes. To be on the safe side, poor Giovanna had put in one extra. They were common Hungarian cigarettes; but the first I smoked was delicious. I experienced a great sensation of relief. At first I only thought what fun it was to have scored off that house which might be good to shut babies up in, but not me. Then came the thought that I had scored off my wife too and paid her back in her own coin. Otherwise why should my jealousy have suddenly changed to a quite harmless curiosity? I sat quietly in my chair smoking those vile cigarettes.

After about half an hour I remembered that I must escape from the house where Giovanna was waiting for her reward. I took off my shoes and went out into the corridor. The door of Giovanna’s room was ajar and, judging by her loud regular breathing, she must be asleep. I went cautiously up the two flights of stairs to the second floor and, once on the other side of that door of which Dr. Muli was so proud, I put on my shoes. I went through to another landing and began slowly to go downstairs, so as to arouse no suspicion.

When I had reached the first-floor landing, an elegant young woman dressed as a nurse followed me and said politely:

“Are you looking for anyone?”

She was very pretty and I should not at all have minded finishing my ten cigarettes in her company. I smiled at her rather aggressively, and said:

“Is Dr. Muli not in?”

She looked extremely surprised and said: “He is never here at this hour.”

“I wonder if you could tell me where I should be likely to find him. Someone is ill in my house and wants to see him.”

She kindly gave me the doctor’s address, and I repeated it several times to make her think I wanted to be sure of remembering it. I was in no great hurry to be gone but she turned her back on me impatiently. I was positively being thrown out of my prison.

In the hall the door was opened for me at once by a woman. I had no money with me, so I muttered: “I’ll give you something another time.”

You never can tell what will happen in the future. Things often repeat themselves with me: it was not at all impossible that I might pass that way again.

It was a warm, clear night. I took off my hat to enjoy the free fresh air. I marvelled at the stars as if I were seeing them for the first time. I felt that next day, when I was well away from that sanatorium, I should want to give up smoking. Meanwhile I got some more good cigarettes in a café which was still open, because I really could not end my career as a smoker with one of poor Giovanna’s cigarettes. The waiter knew me and let me have them on tick.

When I got to my house I rang the bell furiously. The servant came to the window first, and after a certain time my wife appeared. While I waited I thought with perfect calm: it would seem that Dr. Muli really is here. But directly she saw who it was, my wife made the empty street ring with her laughter, so obviously sincere that it ought to have banished all my doubts.

When I got in I cast an inquisitive and suspicious eye round the house. I promised to tell my wife my adventures on the following day, though she seemed to think she knew all about them already.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” she asked.

I replied, just as an excuse: “I believe you have taken advantage of my absence to change the position of that chest of drawers.”

The fact is I often feel the furniture has been moved, and my wife very often does move it, but at that moment I was hunting in every corner to see if I could find a trace of the elegant little body of Dr. Muli.

My wife had some good news for me. On her way home from the sanatorium she had run into Olivi’s son, who told her the old man was much better, after taking some medicine prescribed by a new doctor.

As I fell asleep I thought what a good thing it was that I had left the sanatorium, for now I could cure myself slowly at my leisure. My son, sleeping peacefully next door, was certainly not likely to begin either criticising me or imitating me for a very long time. There was absolutely no hurry.