In these dark, tragic, harrowing times, I watch many humorous television shows to lift my spirits. My favorites are Capusotto at ATC and Majul at La Nación Macri. It was precisely on that last day that I saw an interview with Carrió, which caught my attention: Carrió smoked. As he spoke, he moved his hands and you could see that, on his right, he had a lit cigarette. Of course the interview was by Zoom, so Carrió was at home, in his privacy, doing something – in this case smoking – that is frowned upon to show in public. Because for years you have not seen people smoking on television, or in movies, or those insipid Netflix series that pass through the new masterpieces of our time, or in the photos of the newspapers, not even in the photos and videos of social networks where people pose with their cat, or photograph their cat, or ask for a recommendation to find a good and cheap plumber. While in the cinema, series, television and other media, we see every day, all the time, movies or soap operas or series where people consume what we usually – due to intellectual laziness – we call “drugs”, or sell drugs, or drink alcohol, or use weapons, or there are deaths and murders due to drugs and alcohol, or deaths and shootings due to many other things; films and soap operas and series in which there are scenes of torture, bombings, crimes, corruption, explosions, physical and psychological violence, all kinds of threats, kidnappings, rapes and killings, scenes of heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, non-binary sex, duos , threesomes, massive orgies, yet in all those productions, no one smokes. The cigarette was the first canceled in contemporary Puritan culture. It is allowed to see TN, La Nación Macri, América TV, the Telefé newscast, Telenoche and other opprobriums, but not a mere pucho on the screen! Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
I thought about everything while remembering photos, texts and other matters around cigarettes. For example, the famous photo of Cortázar – taken by Sara Facio – with a cigarette between his lips. But it is a stubborn cigarette. Or rather: a cigarette that was not lit. Will the photo enclose a secret definition of all of Cortázar’s work? Cortázar: a cigarette that was never lit. Conversely, I remember beautiful photos of Fogwill, Saer, Libertella, Laiseca, Zelarayán, cigarette in hand or in mouth, full of smoke, ideas, and talent. Also near death. I also think of the great movie scenes: Lauren Bacall lighting a cigarette with fire in her eyes. Belmodo dying on the back, cigarette in the mouth, in Breathless. Sean Connery playing Bond (by the way, Ian Fleming smoked more than two packs a day). Bacall again, but now lighting Bogart a cigarette in Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not. And he also remembered the greatest story on the subject: Only for smokers, by Julio Ramón Ribeyro (of whom there are also great photos smoking, and also with a whiskey in hand, like the one in the 1969-2009 Tusquets Catalog) . This is how Ribeyro ends the story (and I this little column): “I also see with apprehension that I have only one cigarette left, so I say goodbye to my readers and go to town in search of a pack of cigarettes.”
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