This is why in the end I cannot measure the two routes in steps. But after the incident in which I lit a cigarella, I have always taken Amor de Dios and all of my doubts and indecisions have vanished, which is by far the most important thing in this case.
And in closing, a third and final example. Let the reader treat this as the Holy Trinity of the wisdom tobacco inspires — a wisdom that expresses itself in decisiveness, the elimination of indecision, and the ability to make decisions quickly. I have the feeling that an insightfulness of sorts lies hidden behind all this, which tobacco provides or unleashes.
I have a friend in the army who invited me to recruit men for a new campaign against the Dutch. This work is temporary — lasting around a month, sometimes two — and is very well-paid. Your job is to stand at the recruiting posts for soldiers in Sevilla or to travel around the nearby countryside and to enlist volunteers. One needs a certain gift of gab for this, whereas the people in the army, especially among the lower ranks, are dumb as stumps. To them, I, as a student of Dr. Monardes and a learned man in general, was practically a gift from God. None of them, of course, had ever heard of Pelletier du Mans. The interesting thing is that you can’t gather people together on the square in Dos Hermanas and convince them to join the army simply by telling them they’ll make money from it. Those who would find this argument convincing have already gone and joined the army on their own. No, it doesn’t work like that. You, of course, have to mention this as well, but you also have to say that with the army they will see foreign countries they would likely never set foot in otherwise, that a life of adventure and conquest awaits them, you must also somehow hint that the job is actually far less dangerous than it may seem, you must impress upon them what a grand thing brotherly friendship between soldiers is, you must convince them that as soldiers in the army they will enjoy great respect, that the army will never abandon them and other such hogwash. Yet even this is not sufficient and is far and away not the most important thing. The most important thing, as a person such as myself established with surprise, is to fire up their patriotism. You must speak to them — and convincingly, too, of course — about how great our nation is, how good, just, and holy its aims are, how noble our nation is, how we are all part of one indivisible whole, which the good king carefully watches over. How great Spain is, our homeland. (I no longer have any accent whatsoever, incidentally.) This produces striking, unbelievable results, especially if repeated long and emphatically enough. So that’s what I did. The doctor gave me two months off, and I went around to the nearby villages and towns and spoke on the squares while we recruited soldiers. I was hugely successful. Yet inwardly, all of this troubled me greatly. As a man of medicine, I, of course, do not believe such patriotic nonsense at all. I found myself extremely torn as to whether to continue. I had the feeling that while I spoke, a person inside of me was listening to and laughing at me, he was downright convulsed with laughter. I, of course, suppressed this person, and did not give voice to him even for a second, but this is quite difficult to do all day long for an extended period of time. The reader, who has not had such an experience, will be surprised at how difficult this is. I kept telling myself: “It’ll just take me some time to get used to it,” but I had trouble getting used to it and felt somehow extremely strained and exhausted, more than I would be just from the travelling itself or if I had been talking about something else. How lucky, I thought to myself, that I live and work with Dr. Monardes, whom I can tell exactly what I’m thinking. With rare exceptions, of course, where at most he might take a swipe at you with his cane or toss some biting (sometimes very biting) criticism your way. But those people from the army wouldn’t let you get away merely with biting criticism or even just a cane. Oh no, not a chance! Once you’ve joined their game, you’ve got to say what needs to be said, otherwise you’re thrown to the dogs. If I were crazy enough to say what I actually thought, I would be lucky only to end up in the Sevilla prison like Cervantes, but unlike him I wouldn’t get out after a year, but would rot away there.
This, then, was the reason for my hesitation, for my intense indecision. On the one hand, the ducats; on the other, I had the feeling that it was impossible for me to continue constantly saying things that I didn’t believe at all, especially since on top of everything you have to do it enthusiastically and convincingly, as if you believe it with your whole heart, in order to get results. Because if you don’t get results, they start looking askance at you, and they could even get rid of you. So either you do it or you don’t do it.
One evening, on the way back from Carmona, when I was already thoroughly sick of the whole business, I lit a cigarella with the firm intention of making a final decision about whether to continue or to quit the campaign. I was leaning towards quitting. What nation, I said to myself, what nonsense! Your biggest enemies are here in your own country. There, where you live, where you work, where you take part in dividing up the money. There, where the money is divvied up — that’s where you’ll find your biggest enemies. Someone gets in your way, and you get in someone’s way. There you’ll find your most terrifying enemies, and it’s usually in your own country, perhaps even in your own city, and not in faraway Holland. What stuff these crooks have cooked up, I thought to myself furiously. The nation, the Christian world. . Whereas you are simply an animal, living all alone on the earth. Perhaps you have a family and loved ones, and they are the only real things that tie you to anyone. They are created by Nature. The rest is pure chance, without meaning. You could belong to one nation or another. You could speak one language or another. It’s a pure accident. Nothing connects you to those others who call themselves your countrymen or who speak the same language. Absolutely nothing. The world is very, very simple, as Dr. Monardes says. They, however, can’t stand this simplicity and constantly think up various things so as to pull the wool over their own eyes. And of course, there are also shysters who have an interest in that. They think such things up — even though in most cases they have already long since been thought up — and trumpet them left and right, as if they were the indisputable truth. But they’re not. And no nation exists anywhere except in people’s imaginations. There is no nation. There isn’t anything at all. Except you, Nature, and money. This is the true scientific view of the world. The medical view.