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The Cuban cigarettes, however, were too strong for pleasure; for, while the preference for a strong cigar was admissible, cigarettes should be mild. All those famous were. Strangely enough, good cigarettes had never been smoked in the United States, a land with an overwhelming preference for the cheap drugged tobacco called Virginia. No one would pay for a pure Turkish leaf; with the exception of a few hotels and clubs it was not procurable. There was a merchant on the Zulueta with a large assortment of Cuban cigarettes, made in every conceivable shape and paper, hebra and arroz and pectoral. They had tips of gilt or silver paper, cork, straw, and colored silks, and were packed in enticing ways and odd numbers. But, after trying their apparent variety, they all seemed alike, as coarse and black in flavor as their tobacco.
There were, of course, men who disagreed with me—though women never liked a Cabañas or Henry Clay cigarette—and a connection of mine, a judge, long imported from Cuba, through Novotny of New York, the Honoradez tobacco for his cigarettes. He had been in Havana during the Spanish occupation, and later; and, recalling him, I could see that he, like myself, possessed an ineradicable fondness for it. In his case, even, his memories might have affected his exterior, for he had a lean darkness more appropriate to the Calzada del Cerro than to Chester County. In summer particularly, with his immaculate linens, and the brown cigarette casting a pungent line of smoke from his long sensitive fingers, he was the image of a Spanish colonial gentleman.
He had known Havana at a better time than now, when it was more provincial, simpler; the hotels then were uncompromisingly locked at ten in the evening, and if he returned later he was forced to call the negro sleeping in the hall. I don't remember where he stayed—probably at the Inglaterra. I was young and ignorant of Cuba when I saw him, with a certain frequency, before he died; and I heard his talk about the Parque Central with no greater interest than his discussions of salmon fishing, of Sun and Planet reels and rods split and glued. I realized sharply what I had missed, both in the way of detail—the detail most important to a mental picture and always missing—and in intimate understanding of Cuban affairs. For he had a tonic mind, rare in America, unsentimental and courageous, and touched with a satirical quality disastrous to sham, social, religious, or political.
The cigarettes came to him in bright tin boxes of a hundred; and, after his death, I bought seven from Novotny and smoked the contents almost by way of memorial; for he was a personality of a type almost gone. Judges of County Courts no longer wore immaculate high hats to the Bench, with the vivid corner of a bandanna handkerchief visible in the formality of their coat tails.
The silk-tipped cigarettes were for women, but the silk was principally a villainous carmine, a color fatal to the delicate charm of lips, and I hoped that I should see none so thoughtless as to smoke them; while the cigarettes all of tobacco were, frankly, impossible. Why, I couldn't say; they simply wouldn't do. What women I saw smoking in public, in the cafés and at the races, were not Cubans. They, on view, neither smoked nor drank anything but refrescos. But a different feminine world, at their doors or over the counters of bodegas, enjoyed long formidable cigars.
An amusing convention, a prejudice really; an act, in women, condemned from the associations in men's minds, synonymous with that gaiety they so painstakingly kept out of their homes. Yet, in spite of them, women smoking had become a commonplace in the United States. In Havana men were still paramount ... and Victorian. On the Obispo cigarette-cases from Toledo, of steel inlaid with gold, were for sale; but I'd had experience with Toledo work—the steel rusted. For years I'd bought cigarette cases and holders before I finally learned that the former were a nuisance and that the latter destroyed the flavor of tobacco. I had owned cases in metal and leather and silk, patented and plain, and one by one they were mislaid and given away. I had smoked with holders of ivory and jet and tortoise shell, wood and amber and quills, and they, too, had disappeared. All that could be said for them was that they looked well and saved the fingers from nicotine stains.
The Turkish cigarettes in Havana were unremarkable, yet, for the Cuban youth, the sign of worldliness. They disdained the local brands, but even Cuba was powerless to depreciate her cigars, the best of all countries and all times. Here was an accomplishment, a possession, of unique importance and excellence, for tobacco belonged to the irreducible number of necessities. I had survived prohibition, with the assistance of a forethought unhappily limited in execution; but if the absurdity of my country abolished tobacco, I should be forced to move to England; that would be too much. I could imagine, in this case, what comments would appear in the press, reminding the virtuous and patriotic that my books had always been chargeable with immorality and a blindness to the splendor of our national ideals.
In the past I had suffered a particularly wretched nervous breakdown—it hit me like a bullet in the Piazza della Principe in Florence; and when I had politely been sent to Switzerland to die, an English doctor at Geneva cured me, for most practical purposes, by impatience, black coffee, and Shepherd's Hotel cigarettes. I had no doubt that smoking was, in many ways, a very deleterious habit; but life itself was a bad habit condemned to the worst of ends. I was, as well, very apt to have little in common with men who didn't smoke, or, I should say, with men who had never smoked. They were, with practically no exceptions, precisians, and ate, lived, for their health rather than for the tang of delicate sauces and sensations. And a long while ago a wise and charming woman had lamented to me the fact that all the generosity and attractiveness she met in men belonged to what were colloquially called drunks.... Her feeling was the same as mine.
I wasn't defending drunkenness or attacking the statistics against smokers; what I felt, I think, in such men was the presence of a fallibility to which, at awkward or tragic moments, they yielded and so became companions of sorrow and charity, the great temperers of humanity. At any rate, I demanded enough liberty, at least, to fill my system with smoke if I willed. The possibility that my act might hurt someone else failed to excite me—why should I bother with him when I wasn't concerned about myself! There was too much officious paternalism in the air, too many admonitions and not enough lightness of heart—of tobacco heart if necessary.