The smoke from that first cigarette

Miguel decided to smoke at the age of 18, seeing how Hollywood actors did it in movies.

The one she liked best was Robert Mitchum because he was squinting at you through the cigarette smoke with a lowered eyelid, which gave him an air of dismissive life-forgiveness.

Maybe that's the only way a girl could fall in love, Miguel thought.

On the other hand, despite the fact that he took puffs with a measured cadence, Humphrey Bogart exhausted his butts too much and the camera showed his always wet lips, which no girl would want to kiss.

Miguel does not remember where he smoked his first cigarette, since memory at a certain age also turns to smoke.

It may be that he was sitting on the terrace of the bar in the town square at the summer festivals during a festival.

“Robert Mitchum and Bogart take the smoke, because they are real men”,

a friend tempted him.

He would be black tobacco, a Ducados or a Celta Largo without a filter, very much in keeping with the popular revelry that surrounded him.

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When the left conquered the palate

Or perhaps it was in one of those parties one Sunday afternoon in Valencia in a very bourgeois house that had four balconies overlooking the Gran Vía and a lot of silver in the sideboard cabinets, hunting canvases in the living room whose armchairs and sofas had been separated and the carpets raised so that the group of friends could dance and kiss behind the curtains when at the end the clarinet from

played very slowly .

That girl's parents were so complacent, they had gone to the movies with the promise not to return until after 11 at night.

It was a song by the Platters that Miguel remembered while he had a cigarette between his fingers.

There was also another beautiful Duke Ellington tune sung by Ivy Anderson.

"Love is like a cigarette that burns as it gets closer to your lips."

The art was knowing how to turn it on by looking at the girl you liked.

It would be a lucky strike.

Until then, tobacco had produced a certain repugnance in him, especially since he had not been able to forget how that dark confessional smelled where, as a child, he poured out the string of his venial sins and the priest, who smoked two packets of select picada a day, also called caldo de hen, breathed into his face while he stroked his cheeks with soft pats.

As a child, he had only seen the day laborers and the old farmers smoke a stinking black tobacco that the government distributed with the saca in the sunrooms, but one day when his mother took him to Valencia to buy him clothes and shoes, Miguel began to walk the Train wagons.

The third-class travelers, subaltern people and crushed by life, were all crowded together under a thick smoke of tagarnina;

instead,

Driven by curiosity, he reached the silent carriage of the sleeping car that had a carpeted corridor and in one of its apartments he discovered a young man with blond hair, in a blue jacket, gray flannel pants, a tie and shiny shoes who was smoking a cigarette. whose smoke formed rings in the air and filled it with a pleasant aroma of chocolate.

It is an image that Miguel has not abandoned.

Over the years he has been recreating it in his memory.

He remembers that that solitary man, so attractive, smiled at him and seeing that the boy seemed to be entranced by that aroma, he uttered a mysterious word, Camel, while showing him the package with the image of a camel that shone behind a transparent wrapper.

That character was always a reference in Miguel's life,

There was a time when for Miguel the class difference was not established between poor and rich, employers and employees, exploiters and exploited, but between those who lit cigarettes with a gold lighter and those who did so with a wick spark plug.

One smoke smelled good and another smelled bad.

In the midst of this class struggle was the stinking taste of sin exhaled by the darkness of the confessional.

Throughout his life, Miguel moved up the social ladder depending on the brand of cigarettes he smoked.

Celtas y Ducados during the dictatorship and Rubio in the transition, Lucky, Chester, Winston, Marlboro until reaching the disenchantment where Pall Mall awaited him. After having read so many books through the smoke and having invoked the right adjective with each puff, one day, while waiting for that word that did not arrive,

he was surprised with a lit cigarette in the ashtray and another on his lips.

Realizing that tobacco had taken over her soul, she gave it up.

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