We just sat there talking. Now and then he would puff on his cigarette or tap it to shake the ash off, and when it became too short for smoking, stub it out in the ashtray, whence it would give off a curlicue of smoke—the sign of extinguishment.
I had caught him at a table outside the coffee shop, hunched over a stack of papers, the manuscript of his next book. Seeing as how he might not want to be disturbed, I decided to just leave him to his work and get my own table inside the coffee shop. But he saw me, and insisted that I join him, and so I did, after I got myself a cup of cappuccino.
This was three days ago and still the sky is overcast. Perhaps the haze resembles the fogginess that covers a city of smokers (myself an occasional early bird, I know a similar cloud that rises from the homes early in the morning, when the kitchens, most of them using firewood, get ready for breakfast).
I was about to comment on the weather when he let on about a study, I’m not sure if his or someone else’s, about cigarettes in the movies. We’re very self-conscious about fags now, but they were once upon a time taken for granted, and because a gentleman was expected to have enough of toughness and cynicism to be his own man, he always had a cig or stogy, lighted or unlighted, within an arm’s length. Anent which, without any hesitation, I mentioned Humphrey Bogart, because a photograph of the actor came to mind, his head tilted to one side, his right hand raised to the level of his chin, and a cigarette between his index and middle fingers. But, rather than taking it up and expounding on Rick Blaine or Sam Spade or any of the other chain-smoking Bogart characters, he held forth about local movies and his pet regret that the old, classic LVN and Sampaguita films might have been lost to time and disregard. Or gone up in smoke, I told myself.
Which might have been the fate of the homes of the tenants in Jesus’ parable, although in Matthew’s account Jesus did not say that torching was part of the punishment that the vineyard owner meted out to the tenants, who had beaten up and killed the servants he had sent to collect his share of the fruits. The servants came to dun the tenants in two batches, the second a larger contingent than the first, who were clubbed, stoned and killed. When the servants of the second batch were similarly dispatched, the vineyard owner decided to send his dearest son to deal with the tenants in the hope that they would at least respect him. But when they saw him, the tenants said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.” And at once they got hold of him, cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
Clearly, the parable is about Jesus himself. When the church readings assume such a tone, it may mean that we now can glimpse the end of the liturgical year, which precedes that of the calendar year by a month. In other words, that it is now October, and we are crossing the threshold to the last quarter of the current year.
Nothing dramatic about it. In fact, when I got up this morning, I had to say to myself, October, October, as though afraid that I might forget. And because the sameness that characterizes the passage of time can dull me into mistaking appearances for the things that really matter, I need the reminder of such as parables so I will not be misled like the Pharisees: “The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner.”
After we parted ways that evening and I stood on the sidewalk waiting for a taxicab, which took time to turn up, I had time to muse on just about anything. If it were a movie scene, I would have been shown smoking a cigarette. And when at last a taxicab pulled up, I would do what the ruminant man on Dublin’s Baggot Street did in Thomas Kinsella’s poem, before he turned himself in—flick the stub into the darkness:
“My quarter-inch of cigarette
Goes flaring down to Baggot Street.”