Both my parents were smokers. My dad smoked until he died; my 78-year-old mother still smokes and we both say that this is what will end up killing her. She’s well aware of the dangers of smoking but her addiction is so deeply ingrained that there is absolutely no way she can quit. I’ve seen her in tears, literally, broken and moody, when she’s out of cigarettes. It hurts my heart to see her so desperate for someone to drive her to the convenience store for her next fix. She’s tried many, many times to stop to no avail. She has lung problems and whatnot, all associated with her chronic smoking.
When I was growing up, I was grossed out by my parents smoking, especially my mother’s. I cannot explain why. But all the paraphernalia around the act of smoking caused me physical repulsion, be it the ashtray, the matches, the box that contained the cigarettes. I couldn’t contemplate the idea of touching any of these items, much less the actual cigarettes. Such was my repulsion, that when I was forced to bring to my mother any of these things, I could feel the reflex of gagging, alive and strong as I grabbed, say, the box of matches.
One day (I was about 20) some classmates and I, we decided to play hooky and go to a pool hall in downtown Guadalajara. Most of them were boys and smokers. I didn’t know one bit about playing pool, except that my papi really liked to play himself. At one point, I see myself standing with my cue in hand, lost in observing and feeling, liking, this dark smoky strange world: the music under the chatter and the laughter, the taste of ice-cold beer. I see my friends taking long drags at their cigarette. And to my naïve-girl eyes they looked so sophisticated, so worldly, so knowing, so cool, so hip, that the next thing I know I’m asking them to teach me how to smoke. Of course, they were happy to induct me into the hall of new smokers. I remember they argued about the brand to start me on. Finally someone pulled out a “soft” brand. Viceroy, they were called. And I tried my hardest to learn. I kept at it, until it was time to go home.
My bus stop was a block away from the pool hall. As I’m standing there in the smoggy afternoon of my hometown I began feeling sick to my stomach, convinced I was going to throw up within minutes if I didn’t get some fresh air fast. So sick was I that I had to take a cab home, sweating cold on the ride home, with the window down letting the air come in and cool me down.
The next day, I bought myself my first pack of Marlboros, the red ones, which was the brand most commonly smoked by my friends and I became a smoker. Not a good smoker. I never really felt the smoke settling deep into my lungs, but I hoped I borrowed some of that “hipness” I had witnessed in the pool hall.
I smoked for about two decades. I quit cold turkey the day I found I was pregnant on April 22nd or 23rd of 1998. It was something I--the strange abnormal woman I thought I was--could do for the person being formed in my uterus to help her be as healthy as possible; it was what I minimally could do to give her my best internal environment. Unlike my mother, it wasn’t hard for me to quit. My body was receptive and happy to let go.
Valentina was born in November. By New Year’s Eve 1998 we had a friend visiting from Guadalajara. After dinner and a couple of glasses of red wine, I asked him for a cigarette, wanting to recover the “cool look” of the black and white movie smoker. I took a puff and was totally surprised by the god-awful taste of the cigarette. I couldn’t believe the horrible taste it had and that I had endured it for almost two decades. I just gave the cigarette back after that first drag and haven’t touched one since.
Happily, my husband, once a heavy smoker himself, also quit cold turkey two or three years after I did, and our home has been smoke-free since then. When my mother stays with us, she knows she has to smoke outside. So, I’m glad we have a covered patio she can use for her vice.
I can’t deny that sometimes, especially in gloomy, gray, cloudy, cold, wet days, when I’m drinking my coffee, something in me stirs and then I crave for a cigarette. That’s the image that stays: a woman, pensive and quiet, be it reading or writing, with a cup of coffee in hand, looking out a window into a rainy cityscape, feeling the longing for a lover perhaps, the nostalgia of a youthful indiscretion, sighing, taking a sip of her java and a drag at her cigarette while her memories come alive and the rain continues outside…
Stop, Margarita, stop, right now, that the convenience store, you know, is conveniently nearby…
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