Zeno's Conscience

  Now, having dined, comfortably lying in my overstuffed lounge chair, I am holding a pencil and a piece of paper. My brow is unfurrowed because I have dismissed all concern from my mind. My thinking seems something separate from me. I can see it. It rises and falls… but that is its only activity. To remind it that it is my thinking and that its duty is to make itself evident, I grasp the pencil. Now my brow does wrinkle, because each word is made up of so many letters and the imperious present looms up and blots out the past.

  Yesterday I tried to achieve maximum relaxation. The experiment ended in deepest sleep, and its only effect on me was a great repose and the curious sensation of having seen, during that sleep, something important. But it was forgotten by then, lost forever.

  Today, thanks to the pencil I’m holding in my hand, I remain awake. I can see, or glimpse, some odd images that surely have nothing to do with my past: a puffing locomotive dragging countless coaches up a steep grade. Who knows where it’s coming from or where it’s going or why it has now turned up here?

  As I doze, I remember how my textbook claims that this method will allow you to recall your earliest infancy, your cradle days. I see immediately a baby in a cradle, but why should that baby be me? He doesn’t look anything like me; on the contrary, I believe he was born a few weeks ago to my sister-in-law, who displayed him as a miracle because he has such tiny hands and such big eyes. Recall my infancy? Hardly. Poor baby! I can’t even find a way to warn you, now living in your own infancy, how important it is to remember it, for the benefit of your intelligence and your health. When will you discover that it would be a good idea to memorize your life, even the large part of it that will revolt you? Meanwhile, unconscious, you are investigating your tiny organism in search of pleasure, and your delightful discoveries will pave the way toward the grief and sickness to which you will be driven even by those who would not wish them on you. What is to be done? It is impossible to keep constant watch over your crib. In your breast—you poor little thing!—a mysterious combination is forming. Every passing minute provides a reagent. Too many probabilities of illness surround you, for not all your minutes can be pure. And besides—poor baby!—you are the blood relation of people I know. The minutes now passing may actually be pure, but all the centuries that prepared for your coming were certainly not.

  Here I am, quite far from the images that precede sleep. I will make another attempt tomorrow.

  SMOKE

  the doctor with whom I discussed the question told me to begin my work with a historical analysis of my smoking habit.

  “Write it down! And you’ll see yourself whole! Try it!”

  I believe I can write about smoking here at my desk, without having to sit and dream in that chair. I can’t seem to begin, so I must seek help from my cigarettes, all very like the one I am now holding.

  Today I discover immediately something I had forgotten. The cigarettes I first smoked are no longer on the market. Around 1870 in Austria there was a brand that came in cardboard boxes stamped with the two-headed eagle. Now, around one of those boxes I see a few people gathering, each with some characteristic, so distinct that I can recall their names, but not distinct enough to prompt any emotion at this unforeseen encounter. I want to delve deeper, so I go to the armchair: the people fade and are replaced by some clowns, who mock me. Dejected, I return to the desk.

  One of those figures, with a somewhat hoarse voice, was Giuseppe, a youth my own age, and with him was my brother, a year younger than I, who died many years ago. It seems Giuseppe received a generous allowance from his father, and used to give us some of those cigarettes. But I am certain he offered more of them to my brother than to me. Hence I was faced with the necessity of procuring some for myself. So I stole. In summer my father hung his waistcoat over a chair in the breakfast room, and in its pocket there was always change. I procured the ten pennies necessary to purchase the precious little packet, and I smoked its ten cigarettes one after the other, rather than hold on to the compromising fruit of my theft.

  All this lay in my consciousness, within reach. It resurfaces only now because previously I didn’t know that it could be of any importance. So I have recorded the origin of the filthy habit and (who knows?) I may already be cured of it. Therefore, I light a last cigarette, as a test; perhaps I will throw it away at once, revolted.

  Then, I remember, one day my father caught me with his waistcoat in my hands. With a shamelessness I could not muster today, which still disgusts me (perhaps—who knows?—that disgust is highly significant in my life), I told him I had felt a sudden impulse to count the buttons. My father laughed at my mathematical or sartorial leanings, failing to notice that I had my fingers in the watch pocket. It should be said, to my credit, that this laughter, inspired by my innocence when it no longer existed, sufficed to keep me from ever stealing again. Or rather… I stole again, but unawares. My father left some half-smoked Virginia cigars around the house, perched on table edges and armoires. I believed this was how he threw them away, and I believe our old maidservant, Carina, did then fling them out. I carried them off and smoked them in secret. At the very moment I grabbed them I was overcome by a shudder of revulsion, knowing how sick they would make me. Then I smoked them until my brow was drenched in cold sweat and my stomach was in knots. It cannot be said that in my childhood I lacked energy.

  I know perfectly well also how my father cured me of this habit. One summer day I returned home from a school outing, tired and soaked in sweat. My mother helped me undress, and wrapping me in a big towel, she made me lie down to sleep on a sofa where she was also seated, busy with some sewing. I was almost asleep, but the sun was still in my eyes, and it was taking me a while to lose consciousness. The sweetness that, in those tender years, accompanied repose after great weariness is clear to me, like an image on its own, as clear as if I were there now, beside that beloved body that no longer exists.

  I remember the big, cool room where we children used to play; now, in these times when space has become so precious, it is subdivided into two parts. In this scene my brother doesn’t appear, and I am surprised because I think he must also have participated in that excursion, and should have shared in the rest afterwards. Was he also sleeping, at the other end of the sofa? I look at that place, but it seems empty to me. I see only myself, in the sweetness of that repose, my mother, then my father, whose words I hear re-echoing. He had come in and hadn’t immediately seen me, because he called aloud: “Maria!”

  Mamma, with a gesture accompanied by a faint sound of the lips, nodded toward me, whom she believed immersed in sleep, though I was only afloat on the surface, fully conscious. I was so pleased that, for my sake, Papà had to control himself that I kept absolutely still.

  In a low voice my father complained, “I think I’m going mad. I could swear that, not thirty minutes ago, I left half a cigar on that cupboard, and now I can’t find it. I’m getting worse. I’m losing track of things.”

  Also in a low voice, yet betraying an amusement restrained only by her fear of waking me, my mother replied, “But no one’s been in that room since dinner.”

  My father murmured, “I know that, too, and that’s why I feel I’m going mad!”

  He turned and went out.

  I half opened my eyes and looked at my mother. She had resumed her work, but was still smiling. Surely she didn’t think my father was about to go mad, if she could smile at his fears like that. Her smile was so imprinted on my mind that I recalled it immediately one day when I saw it on the lips of my wife.

  Later, it wasn’t lack of money that made it difficult for me to satisfy my craving, but prohibitions that helped stimulate it.

  I remember I smoked a great deal, hiding in every possible corner. Because of the strong physical disgust that ensued, I recall once staying a full half hour in a dark cellar, together with two other boys of whom I remember nothing but their childish clothing. Two pairs of short socks that stand erect because there were then bodies inside them, whic
h time has erased. They had many cigarettes, and we wanted to see who could consume the most in the shortest time. I won, and heroically I concealed the sickness produced by this strange exploit. Then we came out into the sun and air. Dazed, I had to close my eyes to keep from falling. I recovered, and boasted of my victory. One of the two little men said to me: “I don’t care about losing: I smoke only when I need to.”

  I remember the healthy words but not the little face, also surely healthy, which he must have turned toward me at that moment.

  At that time I didn’t know whether I loved or hated cigarettes, their taste, the condition nicotine created in me. But when I came to realize that I hated all of those, it was worse. And I had this realization at the age of about twenty. Then for some weeks I suffered from a violent sore throat accompanied by fever. The doctor prescribed bed rest and absolute abstention from smoking. I remember that word, absolute! It wounded me, and my fever colored it. A great void, and nothing to help me resist the enormous pressure immediately produced around a void.

  When the doctor left me, my father (my mother had been dead for many years), his cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, remained a little longer to keep me company. As he went out, after gently running his hand over my blazing brow, he said: “No smoking, eh!”

  A huge uneasiness came over me. I thought: “It’s bad for me, so I will never smoke again. But first I want to have one last smoke.” I lit a cigarette and felt immediately released from the uneasiness, though my fever was perhaps increasing, and at every puff I felt my tonsils burning as if they had been touched by a red-hot coal. I finished the whole cigarette dutifully, as if fulfilling a vow. And, still suffering horribly, I smoked many others during my illness. My father came and went with his cigar in his mouth, saying: “Bravo! A few more days without smoking and you’ll be cured!”

  These words alone made me yearn for him to leave, to go out at once, allowing me to rush to my cigarettes. I even pretended to fall asleep, to induce him to leave more quickly.

  That illness provoked the second of my troubles: the effort to rid myself of the first. In the end, my days were full of cigarettes and of resolutions to smoke no more; and to make a long story short, from time to time my days are the same now. The whirl of last cigarettes, begun at twenty, continues still. My resolutions are less extreme, and my weakness finds greater indulgence in my elderly soul. When we are old, we smile at life and at everything it contains. I can say also that for some time I have been smoking many cigarettes… and they are not the last.

  On the flyleaf of a dictionary I find this note of mine, recorded in an elegant, even ornate, hand:

  “Today, 2 February 1886, I am transferring from the school of law to the faculty of chemistry. Last cigarette!!”

  That was a very important last cigarette. I remember all the hopes that accompanied it. I had become infuriated with canon law, which seemed to me so remote from life, and I was rushing to science, which is life itself, perhaps condensed in a beaker. That last cigarette actually signified my desire for activity (even manual) and for serene thought, sober and solid.

  To escape the chain of carbon compounds in which I had no faith, I returned to the law. An error—alas!—also marked by a last cigarette, which I find recorded in a book. This one was also important, and I became resigned yet again to those complications of the mine, the thine, and the theirs, always with the best intentions, finally throwing off the carbon chains. I had demonstrated scant inclination for chemistry, thanks in part to my lack of manual dexterity. How could I possibly have been dextrous, when I continued smoking like a Turk?

  Now that I am here, analyzing myself, I am seized by a suspicion: Did I perhaps love cigarettes so much because they enabled me to blame them for my clumsiness? Who knows? If I had stopped smoking, would I have become the strong, ideal man I expected to be? Perhaps it was this suspicion that bound me to my habit, for it is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent. I venture this hypothesis to explain my youthful weakness, but without any firm conviction. Now that I am old and no one demands anything of me, I still pass from cigarette to resolve, and from resolve to cigarette. What do those resolutions mean today? Like that old doctor described by Goldoni,* can I expect to die healthy, having lived with illness all my life?

  Once, as a student, when I changed lodgings, I had to have my old room repapered at my own expense, because I had covered the walls with dates. Probably I left that room precisely because it had become the graveyard of my good intentions and I believed it no longer possible to conceive any further such intentions in that tomb of so many old ones.

  I believe the taste of a cigarette is more intense when it’s your last. The others, too, have a special taste of their own, but less intense. The last one gains flavor from the feeling of victory over oneself and the hope of an imminent future of strength and health. The others have their importance because, in lighting them, you are proclaiming your freedom, while the future of strength and health remains, only moving off a bit.

  * Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), Venetian playwright. This prolific writer of comedies of Venetian life (as well as libretti, memoirs, and other works) has remained in the repertoire, not only in Italy.

  The dates on the walls of my room were written in the most varied colors, even painted in oil. The resolution, reaffirmed with the most ingenuous good faith, found suitable expression in the strength of the color, which was to make the previous vow look pale. Certain dates were favorites of mine because of the harmony of the numbers. From the last century I remember one date that I felt should seal forever the coffin in which I wanted to bury my habit: “Ninth day of the ninth month of 1899.” Significant, isn’t it? The new century brought me dates of quite a different musicality: “First day of the first month of 1901.” Today I still believe that if that date could be repeated, I would be able to begin a new life.

  But the calendar is never lacking for dates, and with a little imagination any one of them can be found suitable for a good resolution. I remember the following, because it seemed to contain a supreme categorical imperative for me: “Third day of the sixth month of 1912, 2400 hours.” It sounds as if each number were doubling the stakes.

  The year 1913 gave me a moment’s pause. There was no thirteenth month, to harmonize with the year. But you must not think so many harmonies are required for a date to lend significance to a last cigarette. Many dates that I find written down in volumes or in favorite notebooks stand out became of their dissonance. For example, the third day of the second month of 1905, at six o’clock! It has a rhythm of its own, when you think about it, because each number contradicts its predecessor. Many events, indeed all, from the death of Pius IX to the birth of my son, seemed to me worthy of being celebrated by the usual ironclad vow. All of my family are amazed at my memory for our anniversaries, sad and happy, and they believe me so considerate!

  To reduce its outlandish appearance, I even tried to give a philosophical content to the last-cigarette disease. Striking a beautiful attitude, one says: “Never again.” But what becomes of that attitude if the promise is then kept? It’s possible to strike the attitude only when you are obliged to renew the vow. And besides, for me, time is not that inconceivable thing that never stops. For me, and only for me, it retraces its steps.

  Disease is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction. Of the disease I had at twenty, I would remember very little if I hadn’t had it described for me at that time by the doctor. It’s odd how you remember spoken words better than emotions, which cannot stir the air.

  I went to that doctor because I had been told he cured nervous disorders with electricity. I thought that electricity could endow me with the strength necessary to give up smoking.

  The doctor had a big belly, and his asthmatic breathing accompanied the clicking of the electric mechanism he employed immediately, at the first session: a disappointment, because I had expected that the doctor would study me and discover the poi
son polluting my blood. On the contrary, he pronounced my constitution healthy, and when I complained of difficulty in digesting and sleeping, he opined that my stomach lacked acids and that my peristaltic action (he used that adjective so many times that I have never forgotten it) was rather sluggish. He administered also a certain acid that ruined me; ever since then, I have suffered from excess acidity.

  When I realized that on his own he would never arrive at discovering the nicotine in my blood, I decided to help him, expressing the suspicion that my illness could be attributed to this cause. With some effort he shrugged his heavy shoulders: “Peristaltic action … acid. Nicotine has nothing to do with it!”

  Seventy applications of electricity followed, and they would continue to this day if I hadn’t decided seventy were enough. Expecting no miracles, I still hurried to those sessions in the hope of persuading the doctor to forbid me to smoke.

  I wonder how things would have turned out if my resolve had been strengthened then by such a prohibition.

  And here is the description of my illness that I gave the doctor: “I’m unable to study, and even on the rare occasions when I go to bed early, I remain awake until the small hours strike. So I vacillate between law and chemistry because both these disciplines involve work that begins at a set time, whereas I never know at what hour I may get up.”

  “Electricity cures any form of insomnia,” my Aesculapius averred, his eyes always on the dial rather than on the patient.

  I went so far as to talk with him as if he were equipped to understand psychoanalysis, into which, timidly and precociously, I had ventured. I told him of my unhappiness with women. One wasn’t enough for me, nor were many. I desired them all! In the street my agitation was immense; as women went by, they were all mine. I looked them up and down, insolently, out of a need to feel myself brutal. In my mind I undressed them, leaving only their boots on, I took them into my arms, and I let them go only when I was quite certain that I had known every part of them.