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Home > What's New > Peter Weller's Cigar Paradise
Peter Weller's Cigar Paradise
Posted: Monday, May 19, 2003
So. Having finished the Syracuse research the day before Thanksgiving, I left the town by way of rental car (as the Amtrak group would not accept my newly purchased printer on board) I arrived in N.Y., dumped the gear, and immediately split for New Orleans to holiday and write the paper. Both of these I accomplished, including a short excursion to Texas, sadly, to bury my mother. A Missouri girl raised in Wisconsin who lived most of her adult life in Texas and then Atlanta, she was a pal to all my friends from grade school to this day; a very hip and funny chick, who traveled the world with me in her later years and passed in dignity in her sleep after a long and fascinating life. She had a great ride, went with no pain, and I have no regrets -- other than I miss her fiercely, even as I write.
Returning from New Orleans and Texas to New York, the very eve of December 19, I enlisted Brightman and Paratore to edit said paper before my departure for Venice the next day. After the two Hoyos apiece, eight hours work and 2 1/2 hours sleep, I awoke at 5 A.M., proofread the footnotes, left the thing to be Fed Exed to Syracuse and split to Venice for my Xmas ritual. After the two glorious weeks in my preferred winter locale, where I smoked up half my stash of stogies, I traveled 150 miles southwest to return and suffer three months of the slings and arrows of outrageous American Youth to teach Renaissance Art History (my "hobby," and form of societal payback) in my prison of penance… Florence, Italy.
Florence. You the reader, having passed your exam on previous Web reviews by this writer, will remember as a memory of hell, disguised as the Italo version of the Epcot Center.
"Oh! Florence is my favorite town," says the tourista Americana.
My response: "What… was it four days you were at the Hotel Savoy situated on one of two piazzas where let there be light for a max of two hours and the cappuccinos are 10 Euros a shot?"
"Two. Yes, and we ate at Cibreo, and Garga, and I Lattini."
"Indeed! Three of the only six good restaurants in the town." (Other than these six, to get the great cooking one must leave Florence and go to Tuscan surroundings, Greve, Fiesole, Colle Val'Elsa, etc.)
I love dissing Florence, but enough of this rant, because it is now May; I finished my teaching term, and now I sit in this town of Nowhere. You see living in Florence is an entrée to cynicism. But I realize in this town that it is actually difficult to be cynical. It demands effort. Was it Rousseau who said, and I paraphrase, "Between believing in God or not, it is better to hedge your bets"? Thus the town in which now I sit and write—at this dwarf desk for ancients in this quaint hotel sitting room, and in which I have found no cigars of note—defies cynicism. Because, here, I am – and I am not, by any means, the first—punched in the heart by the blues. And no, it is not the loss of my mother that is the source of these blues; it is this town. And, perhaps, its vacuum of good smokes.
Now, I know the blues are not cynical. And they are also not a funk; a simple feeling low. The blues are an ethereal dreamlike swim in a sea of weldschmerz… a world moving. And it is your personal world moving, as if the rest of the planet has stopped still. The blues are not political, artistic, religious, social, poetical nor philosophical, nor any of the realms onto which one may heave the culpa sua of intellectual conflict. There is no "philosophy, Horatio" in the blues. The blues throw one into a caretaker's suspension of the soul waking up, and it is not a choice. The blues are personal and they carry nothing but one's own Prada baggage. (Or whatever brand you tote.) Cynicism demands just enough promise in order to judge; a judgmental mind game -- the set defense against a 'dilemma'. You don't want to dislike or like too much for fear the promise of doom or thrill will be short. It is easy to be cynical. The blues are not easy. And the gift from this town is that distinction.
"There are places," as the Fab Four said, we "may wander." Or, "I wonder as I wander," in Martin Luther King's spin. And some of these wanderings may be particular, in so much as the examination is intense. And I do not mean exquisitely meditative. For, as I said, the blues bring an introspection that is not by choice. There are certain places where the place itself demands, nay pulls the self-exam from you, and I am not referring to Buddhist retreats in San Francisco. We arrive. We search the place for amusement, because we, as humanity, search for fun and not confrontation. Thus we arrive at a place and instantly feel the place is on point awaiting some strange pas de deux with us. We have come to explore or simply see; but the chink in the dream, the quick crackle in our minds flashes an oh-so-brilliant nanosecond ray on the reality that -- when all is said and done -- we die alone. And it is ever pervasive in the particular place after that second. Family and friends may watch or not, but the entrance to where Woody Allen doesn't "like the hours" is solitary. I have sat in rain forests, as gorgeous as God may have painted. Living coral islands (two thirds of the world are dead, so if you dive and have not seen living coral, go immediately and find some) where yellow fish in hundreds passed undulating by iridescent purple underwater rock. Sitting on the cusp of a volcano, looking at a larger one ten miles away. In rice fields so green I needed Ray Bans. Will I go again to all of these locales? Probably not. Why did I go? "Because it was there." Yet I have not the desire to return. Why? No cigars, you may say. Yes. And more. The blues. Yet, had I not gone and seen, I would have regretted. Which is worse than the blues. This city is beautiful, but it gives me the blues.
And this is not a "bad thing." The bad thing is I have found no cigars. (I pray I am paid for this piece.) Of the stogie side of the wandering, I have perused tobacco shops all over the city, only to find friendly folks with the usual Montecristo No. 4 five-pack, but no real choice heaters.
However, for a moment this evening, the blues have been cowered by a remarkable fish dinner at a joint the size of this sitting room. The concierge said the fish place "was small and had no room." I said, "Drop my name and Faith Willinger's" (foremost American connoisseur of Italian food) and off I went for a run. Passing by the restaurant by accident, I dropped in, and there the wife of the owner and the cook smiled, big kisses all around and "of course you can come in". When I returned to the hotel, however, the concierge said, "I am sorry, Mr. Weller, but the owner says again there is no room." Confusing to me, this.
"No problem," I riposted. "I just stopped by on my run, and they said it is okay."
Concierge confused now. "I don't understand. I called the owner five minutes ago, and he, very shortly, said there is no room."
I smiled the smile of knowitallgetanyseatatarestaurantmovieactor at the concierge, changed my clothes, walked to the fish place, and encountered the owner, himself, sitting at a desk under a life-size portrait of himself – in the very same seat and the very same clothes in which he now spoke to me. And in the portrait he was smoking a very long cigar. Aha! A cigar! He must be a friend. Or so I thought.
"I don't care what my wife told you, I make the reservations in my restaurant!" Frosty. Some marital thing, easily recognized. I bid him an immediate adieu and started to split.
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