At a certain age, memory also goes up in smoke. Manuel Vicent says it in his latest book. It is titled A particular story and it is made with fictionalized fragments of his life, his dogs and his cars.
Reading has transported me to a Spain that I never got to know; the Spain of my elders; a country of hunger and repression that, in recent times, went from drinking from the jug to choosing a brand of water in restaurants where the food has too much plate. Anyway, what I came to say here is that reading Manuel Vicent’s latest book has not only taken me to the spittoons and brandy stains on the counters of that time, but it has also given me back the taste of my first cigarette, united with that of the first kiss.
It was in one of those parties that we had in my friend Villeta’s garage, in the Tetuán neighborhood; between bottles of beer and chips from the churrería. “Swallow the smoke,” she told me; but what I swallowed was his tongue. For these things I identify that Bee Gees song with the first cigarette, Fortuna brand. It wasn’t that long ago; We kids dreamed of being like Travolta and we danced on the hoods of cars; We wanted to seduce a little leather princess who looked like Olivia Newton John with a pelvic stroke.
Yes. I learned to swallow smoke, because “a good smoker who knows how to smoke, blows smoke after speaking.” That was the slogan. And suddenly, the first cigarette was followed by others; Celts, Duchies, Winston, Bison, along with other kisses. And as time passed I fell in love again, this time with a girl who smoked Marlboro and who said she knew Manuel Vicent. He took his dog for a walk in the same park where I smoked joints and drank liters. The hashish smoke happily entered my lungs and I looked at her with sea bream eyes while she talked about Dante, Virgil and the winged dragon that guarded the carnal treasure that she still kept hidden.
It was at that time when I started reading Manuel Vicent; I did it to get closer to her, so as to have a topic to go to; I don’t know if I explain myself, but Ballad of Cain It was a novel that meant a before and after in my life. The story of a saxophonist named Cain who, in his New York apartment, remembers his first days, walking through a desert where God had buried the nuclear warheads of a war that the righteous would never win.
I have reread so many times Ballad of Cain that is part of my skin; I have it tattooed at the back of the cheese shop, in my subconscious, where mythological categories mix with the luminous grapes of breakfast every Sunday, which is when I start reading the newspaper from the last page, from Manuel Vicent’s column. ; and with the first bite of the bread and oil, I returned to the place where a girl was smoking Fortuna and another was walking her dog under the trees on a summer night. Her name was Beatriz and her treasure was guarded by a dragon with wings of fire.
#story
