Denmark — ah yes, that was a country to the north. How could I have forgotten?
And that’s indeed what happened, although it took not one month, but two. Since in any case I could not accompany the doctor during that time, I will take this opportunity to go back and recount why the two of us went to England in the first place — a not insignificant detail, I dare say. Señor Frampton had long been inviting Dr. Monardes to England, but the latter certainly would never have gone if Frampton had not sent him an intriguing letter, whose text I will cite here verbatim, since I found it one day while rummaging through the doctor’s drawers (I was looking for something else, which I could not find, with the exception of some ducats, which I found along with a note saying how many there were in total and the count was exact; the doctor incidentally had gone on a house call all the way in Frontera, while that numskull Jesús was pounding away downstairs with a hammer and calling to me ceaselessly, as if I were his wet nurse). But getting back to the letter. Here is that part which particularly interested Dr. Monardes:
“I have been told about a layman,” wrote Señor Frampton, “who lives in Haslingdon (a quite poor man) and who supposedly smoked all day long and squandered the money he could have used to ease his impoverished family’s suffering on tobacco — as the local ignoramuses there constantly reproached him. I will refrain from commenting on their foolishness and move directly to the more interesting part of the story. This man dreamed that he was smoking tobacco, and that the devil was standing next to him and filling the pipes for him one after the other. Despite everything, in the morning he again took up his old habit, telling himself that it was just a dream. But when he lit his pipe, he was overcome with such a strong feeling that the devil was really standing next to him and doing the deed he had dreamed of him doing, that the man was struck dumb with shock for several minutes, and when he came to his senses, he got up and opened the Bible that was on the table and came across Isaiah 55:2. Upon which he hurled the tobacco into the fire and smashed his pipes against the wall.”
“What does Isaiah 55:2 say?” the doctor asked.
I opened up the Vulgate and read aloud: “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfies not? Listen diligently to me, and eat you that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.”
“What a loathsome passage!” the doctor exclaimed. “From that, it follows that man is some king of pathetic animal who must think only about how to fill his belly.”
“It seems like a metaphor to me, señor,” I said. “For the Heavenly Kingdom and so forth.”
“Of course it’s a metaphor,” the doctor replied, looking at me coldly. “Do you honestly think I can’t recognize a metaphor?! But it is a bad, tasteless metaphor. As if only bread is important, and fatness.”
I preferred not to argue with him.
“We must meet this man,” the doctor said and stroked his beard. “Señor Frampton has long been inviting me to England. We’ll go.”
And that’s how we ended up on the Hyguiene.
That man was named Thomas Jollie and we visited him, accompanied by Mr. Frampton. We saw him one very frosty morning in the yard of his house, standing stripped to the waist, splashing himself with water from a pail, snorting and bending this way and that, which in the first instant made me ask myself what on earth he was doing, but then I realized he was doing exercises.
“This chap is crazier than a German soldier,” Dr. Monardes said as soon as he saw him. “That’s how they toughen them up there. Whoever doesn’t die from that kind of toughening up really does become very dangerous.”
I regretfully tossed my cigarella into the snow. It was unthinkable to smoke before such a man. Besides, you never know what to expect from such types.
In fact, the man turned out to be good-natured, while the conversation was far more humble than we had expected. The said Thomas described his dream and how he had opened the Bible and come across Isaiah, and other things which we already knew from Señor Frampton’s letter. The doctor seemed interested in what the devil looked like exactly and asked him to describe him in the greatest possible detail.
“I don’t know, sir, I didn’t see him too clearly,” the man replied. “I’d say: a tall goatman with graying hair and a thin, longish face.”
The doctor asked him what “goatman” meant exactly, and after some time we arrived at Señor Frampton’s suggestion that this was something like a centaur with two feet.
“How was he dressed?” Dr. Monardes asked.
“As normally as can be, sir,” Thomas replied, “except that he had hooves instead of shoes. And above that he was dressed in trousers, a workman’s jacket like the ones the tradesmen wear, and a loose shirt with a low collar, all dark in color, but which color exactly I couldn’t say. Don’t forget that I saw him in a dream and my attention was focused mostly on his hands as he filled my pipes and kept giving them to me one after another.”
“So that means he had fingers,” Mr. Frampton broke in, “and not pincers or eagle’s talons or hooves or something like that?”
“The hooves were on his feet, sir,” Thomas said, and — who knows why — he pointed at Mr. Frampton’s feet.
Dr. Monardes and I both looked in that direction, and Mr. Frampton crossed his legs.
“No, sir,” Thomas continued, “he had your most average, ordinary human fingers. Perhaps a bit longer and bonier.”
The doctor asked him what exactly this so-called “devil” had done in his dream to incite him to make such a “fateful decision,” as the doctor put it, to give up tobacco. Mr. Jollie merely repeated that he had filled the pipes—“very skillfully,” Mr. Jollie noted — and handed them to him one after the other. He didn’t remember him doing something else or saying anything. He just filled the pipes and gave them to him.
“And he didn’t make any kind of a sign or a face at you, he didn’t wink?” Dr. Monardes asked.
“I don’t remember him winking at me,” Mr. Jollie replied. “No, no sign at all,” he added categorically after a short pause. “He just filled the pipes and gave them to me.”
It’s astonishing how when they hear trivialities, all of them utterly unsurprising, people assume a thoughtful expression. At that moment, Dr. Monardes, Mr. Frampton, and I all wore thoughtful expressions. I suspect this is due to the boredom trivialities inspire. Somewhere deep inside you sleep begins to take over. Add to that the exhaustion of disappointment as well, when you’ve been waiting to hear something particularly interesting, and you get a thoughtful expression. That’s the alchemy at work here, if you ask me. Moreover, people with thoughtful expressions usually aren’t thinking about anything. They’re actually falling asleep. Well, that was the case with me, at least. I looked thoughtfully ahead with an utterly empty head. There was a workbench in front of me covered in sawdust and strewn with a few tools. “How depressing”—this thought flashed through my mind. No wonder that the devil himself went gray here, or perhaps he had left all the grayness in his wake.
We finally left Mr. Jollie’s — in fact, we had spent only a short time there, as the clock in the carriage showed us, even though it had seemed very long to me indeed — and we continued on towards Eton College, where Dr. Monardes was to give a lecture about tobacco and other new medicines brought from the Indies. The dean of the college, Mr. Whittaker, was a great admirer of Dr. Monardes’ work, an inquisitive man open to knowledge who wanted to be in step with the latest developments in science and particularly medicine. He was the same person who, several years earlier during the most recent plague epidemic in the region, had arranged for all the boys at Eton to smoke a pipe every morning as a disinfectant, and it comes as no surprise that not a single one of them suffered from that terrible disease. The same was true of all the owners of tobacco shops in the vicinity, Mr. Frampton assured us. The evil contagion did not dare cross any tobacconist’s doorstep. The doctor listened to this, his face glowing, and nodded in satisfaction. Yes, he had perhaps discovered the greatest medicine in the history of mankind and he had every reason to be proud of that. But his satisfaction exceeded all bounds when we entered the courtyard of the college and saw all the boys officially dressed in their black students’ togas, lined up in formation along the parade alley, each one with a lit pipe in his hand. They all took a drag at a sign from the dean, as he walked towards us with a smile, his arms outstretched, accompanied by the teachers’ thunderous applause. An indescribable moment! The doctor’s eyes teared up with emotion. My eyes also teared up, but for other reasons.