Those who spend their time waiting have the deepest connection with cigarettes. A cigarette is a friend that helps pass the time, sharpens memory and concentration, channels inchoate emotion, sands down rough edges, blurs things when need be. Cigarettes occupy the hands, occupy the mouth, segment passages of time like ritual observations, fill the room with a screen of smoke on which anything can be projected. If a cigarette is a
stalwart companion in solitude, in company it is an ally. As if you could supply your own soundtrack or interlinear commentary, cigarettes colour or intensify or counterpoint the message conveyed by your words, face, and body. Simmering anger is
immeasurably more effective when accompanied by wreaths of smoke that seem to emerge from the smoker’s ears, hair, eyes. The transit of hand to mouth and out again, repeated metronomically, can under the right circumstances ratchet up the tension in a room to the point of explosion. The cigarette that is held no more than an inch from the face can act as a mask, a veil, or a fan. Dangling a cigarette head down in nerveless fingers at the end of a dropped arm conveys world-weary languor better than any composition ever written for violin. The already eloquent Mediterranean vocabulary of gestures becomes italicised when it is supplemented with contrails of smoke from between two fricative digits.
Obviously, the cigarette is a powerful erotic metonym. Almost as soon as cigarettes were invented, there were collectors willing to pay money for photographs of women smoking; les fumeuses became a standard trope, illustrated for example by Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s series from the Thirties, for which he recruited women from Parisian brothels to pose, one by one, in headshots, smoking. Although you might at first think that cigarette-smoking connotes fellatio, the range of sexual suggestion is far broader. Consider the cigarette held between bared teeth, like a rose by a flamenco dancer or a cutlass by a buccaneer, which telegraphs passion and menace and glee and danger and dash all at once. Think of how a cigarette disposed in a hand suspended right next to a mouth conveys an ambiguous invitation: you are welcome into my cave, but first you must negotiate with my dragon. Note the effect of a thin downward exhale in combination with heavy-lidded eyes - Marlene Dietrich comes to mind - which sings hello while throwing down a gauntlet. Picture the defiant swagger of a cigarette pointed upward by lips curled in a snarl, and ponder the mechanics of how a gesture of nominal exclusion and self-sufficiency can turn into the friendliest of challenges.
By extension, the cigarette was the metaphorical point of access that allowed you the shirker into the sacred spaces of the great. Even if they thought they were employing their smoke as a way of keeping you at a distance, you knew better. Cigarettes are what you shared, and you had their number. You were smoking that very cigarette yourself. The clope that hung from Serge Gainsbourg’s lips was one you had tapped for him from your own pack of Gitanes. You could just bum a draw from John Lennon’s by casually pointing at it, and he would take it out of his mouth and reverse it in your direction. You might be able to tease the cigarette out from between Bardot’s lips, kiss her, take a puff, and replace it; that would make her laugh. Your cigarette, whether a loosie from the bodega or a member of a pack from a vending machine just outside the men’s room in a bar, was really a smoke you had shaken from James Dean’s pack, or that Bogart had pushed your way. The cigarette between your lips was the same one as in that picture of Sinatra, the very same one, resurrected.
Anyway you can’t smoke any more. You can’t smoke anything - not low tar, not Sher Bidis, not all-natural additive-free tobacco in unbleached paper. It’s not yet illegal to possess the materials and implements for smoking, nor to consume them in the privacy of your own home, but it is increasingly difficult to smoke in public places, even outdoors, even in Europe. It’s true that a certain dark anti-glamour lingers outside the restaurant doorway, as you and people you will never meet again enjoy the rough comradeship of exile, puffing away in your thin jackets in February as if you were doing something heroic. It’s true that in a few Western settings - student life, for example, or among fashion models - smoking remains almost normative. It’s true that if you produce a pack of cigarettes in the right place and at the right time entire roomfuls of confirmed quitters will line up to bum one. And of course everyone knows at least one defiant and unapologetic smoker. In general, though, and especially in prosperous suburbs, you can expect passers by to glare at you with undisguised
contempt, however discreetly you light up.
Smoking went from universal to proscribed with incredible speed. It first became necessary to step out on to the balcony at certain private homes in the Eighties. The majority of Americans who smoked in 1990 seemingly had quit by 1995. California was the first place in the world to ban smoking in bars, as of 1998. You would think that bars would be the last redoubt, short of prison - but many prisons now ban smoking as well, which does seem like a case of unnecessarily cruel punishment. A few decades ago, the traveller who fetched up in Salt Lake City, ignorant of the state’s prevalent mores, and found herself unable to find a place short of the street where she could enjoy a cigarette and a cup of coffee simultaneously, could hardly have realised that this state of affairs would soon prevail in cities of very different character.
Nowadays, no one will defend smoking, even the most unregenerate of addicts being inclined to sermonise against his filthy habit. There is no argument: cigarettes are bad for you, and smoking will kill you, sooner or later, and there is a strong probability that the offloaded fumes will eventually kill non-smoking bystanders as well. Smoking shortens your breath, makes you cough and wheeze,
carbonises your lungs and ravages your larynx and oesophagus, visits indignities upon various other internal organs, discolours your teeth, makes you smell bad (although, oddly, one wasn’t conscious of a bad smell back when everybody smoked). On the other hand, nicotine remains the most elusive and protean of drugs: it sharpens memory, aids concentration, keeps weight down, levels out
emotional swings, perhaps helps prevent Parkinson’s disease…
Maybe there are ex-smokers out there who feel
uncomplicated relief at having quit. I doubt there are many, however. Your cigarette was a friend - the sort of friend parents and teachers warned you against, who would lead you down dark alleys and leave you holding the evidence when things went wrong - but a friend nevertheless. It’s terribly sad that you can’t enjoy a smoke now and again without tumbling into the whirlpool of perdition, the way you can take a glass of spirits on the weekend with no danger that by Monday you will end up filtering the shoe polish after exhausting the cooking sherry. But just as an alcoholic remains an alcoholic even after decades of abstinence, so a smoker is a sinner forever after. You have breathed fire. You have experienced one of the deepest satisfactions of life: the first cigarette of the day in tandem with the first cup of coffee. You have felt that knee-trembling rush upon taking the first drag after suffering an enforced separation from cigarettes - after a trip to the moon, for example. Your friend has come running to your side in the worst moments, and has been there to cheer you on in the best. You have tasted of the fruit of good and evil. Now that you have chosen the path of righteousness, can it be that the decision is fixed and irrevocable? Is it possible that smoking will be legislated or taxed out of existence? Is it possible that the Earth will be wiped so clean of tobacco that, like opium, it will be difficult to find without undertaking hazardous journeys in troubled regions? Is it possible that you will never again be able to enjoy the comfort of knowing that you have traded five minutes of life for five minutes of serenity? We may all have stopped smoking, but we continue to burn.
Extracted from NO SMOKING by Luc Sante, published by Éditions Assouline at £32.95, and available from Books First priced £27.96, plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 160 8080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy.
© Luc Sante 2005
