Happiness demands a titanic effort to obtain ephemeral results. When I exiled myself to Ciutat Vella, it was partly to fulfill the illusion (endearing and petty-bourgeois minima moralia) of having an interior gallery from which to smoke a cigar after lunch or at night. I write the word illusion knowingly, because the beatitude that smoking provokes in me, the only intoxicating activity that has not yet been forbidden to me, lasted only a few days. My upstairs neighbors (in architectural height, I clarify) notified me that the smoke from my cigar flooded their windows, causing them headaches. To my natural condition as an aggressor – by the chance of having been born a man, white, heterosexual, and son of the middle class – was thus added the condition of a smoker, which is not only persecuted in bars and restaurants of the city but, in case the tribe continues with the dreadful habit of copying Yankee life only in its castrating aspects, will soon extend to most terraces and public spaces of this tedious Barcelona.
The condition of being annoying or polluting must be resolved with creativity, and that is how I began to smoke stoically at my apartment windows, a swordsman's feint equally ephemeral; Davidoff cigarillos and my beloved Hupmann Half Coronas produce a sticky smoke that, no matter how hard you blow and exercise the impossible grimace, ends up entering the neighbors' dining room. Eight windows, eight, we have at home, and none of them has allowed my condition as a smoker, not social or occasional, but totally vocational, to be carried out without complicating others' breathing. My situation as an outcast has forced me to smoke outside the house (we used to say "in the fucking street," but surely that expression offends more than one group). I don't complain; not only am I lucky enough to be able to do it accompanied by the fascist shrapnel and the aimless tourists of Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, but by smoking I add the pleasure of searching for the adjectives that I later share with the readers of my Punyalada.
There are activities, from the art of bullfighting to addressing fishmongers in Catalan, that will soon become Neolithic customs. I am aware that the life of a smoker is one of them, and even more so if the smoke of tobacco is joined by the perfume of a cigar, which is one of the noblest things that exist (of progressive imaginary, by the way, not conservative!), but of an intensity that our liquid present cannot afford. Politics has gone from the Olympic years, in which doing and proposing was considered opportune, to the CUP-like taste for prohibiting everything; it will take more or less time, but if something the post-pandemic reality holds for us, it is the frenzy of the common to live in a bubble of immunity against which smoke will be totally impotent. In August of last year, the Government already prohibited the recklessness of smoking for those who could not comply with what we called "safety distance" and it matters little that the relationship between smoke and Covid is still to be demonstrated when the moral and political imperative demands to castrate you.
Politics has gone from the Olympic years, in which doing and proposing was considered opportune, to the CUP-like taste for prohibiting everythingFirst it was the football fields, then the beaches and soon it will be the terraces. The hunt for the smoker will continue until the activity of breathing smoke, as with marijuana, is only passable if you enlist in a club.It's funny that smoking cannabis in Barcelona is much easier than lighting a cigarette in a restaurant's private room or in some tobacconists where tastings ofpureare part of good practice (there are exceptions to the rule, but I'll spare them so as not to compromise the brave ones who still allow us to get intoxicated between six walls).Tenacity means that collectives like the Pipa Club, which was one of the most beautiful bars in Barcelona, still surviveand that for a few years now has resisted in a beautiful Gràcia establishment on Santa Eulàlia street (they open every Wednesday and Friday from six in the afternoon). Like it or not, the activity of smoking will end in places like Pipa, as friendly as it is non-profit, which assures them a future similar to that of Antarctic seals.
That atavistic customs end up dying is a logical consequence of the passage of time, but I would say that the act of smoking is today prohibitive due to the level of pleasure it entails. Conversation is softer in the shadow of smoke, the pipe requires us to think about the argument put forward in each puff, and anything that is a slowdown of living or a joyful activity must be seen as a form of aggression towards others. I do not regret the castration of that pleasure from offense (I must be one of the few Catalans who does not base his life on grievance), but from the shared enjoyment of the white fumata that I can now almost only perpetrate within the walls of my home, and in this I am fortunate to have been born in 1979 and, statistics say, to end up dying within thirty or forty years, that is, before a new municipal, autonomous or state agent enters my house to steal my matches. I hope the vice kills me in time, because among the advantages of smoking is the undisputed success of working on the end of life, day after day.
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