Sometimes you step out of the algorithm, it happened to me the other day, I had an important celebration and I wanted to bring a personal touch, some cigar boxes to give away after dinner, table by table. According to my sister, grandpa liked to hand them out. “It must be genetics!”, she tells me.From time to time I go to the local tobacconist to buy some cheap little cigars called Punch that keep me good company. The tobacconist's is as small as a confessional, people have to go in one at a time, and they point with their finger, on the other side of the counter, at their sins of tobacco or gambling. "For the cigars you're asking for," the tobacconist tells me, "you'll have to go to s'Agaró."
The tobacconist of s’Agaró made me enter his large cellar, with glass walls. He advised me and opened boxes of cigars for me like treasure chests, precious cedar boxes, with a border of gilded medals printed on the lid all around the drawing of the brand, the cigars dressed in their finest, lined up in firm positions like tin soldiers in formation, shoulder to shoulder, each with its golden band. Boxes of cigars like jewel cases that will turn into smoke and be freed from the guilty weight of gold. More than a cellar, it was a cave of wonders, as if the tobacconist had opened the door to a paradise of luxury and pleasure, a magical forest with trunks in the shape of cigars and the broad leaves of tobacco already cured and dark, a tropical jungle divided into boxes and arranged in library display cases, a museum of exotic aromas from Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, a catalog of hand-rolled clouds.In the end I took a couple of boxes of Romeo y Julieta Mille Fleurs, the name of which was already intoxicating. The celebration was a dinner with tables outside. For dessert, then, I did as my grandfather apparently used to do, going around offering cigars table by table like a somewhat wine-intoxicated encyclopedia salesman, explaining to the guests that the smoke should not be swallowed and singing the virtues and complexity of cigars like an expert or a tobacco sommelier, while in reality having no idea at all. But we are no longer in our grandfathers' time, and I barely managed to place one cigar per table; people don't smoke and, on top of that, they don't carry lighters. I must also say that those who believed me afterwards were more than grateful for that unexpected pleasure, perhaps from another time, but of absolute, even necessary, relevance. The clouds of smoke told me which tables had a sky, and the torterols, which mouths were lined with moss inside.
