How Misplaced Creativity Helped Me Quit Smoking

Martin Eayrs, Patagonia

Martin Eayrs is a retired teacher and university lecturer, and is currently working as an independent consultant. His current interests include writing, photography and bird watching. E-mail: martin@eayrs.com

The time was 1975, the place Santiago, Chile. I had come over on the train from Argentina with the intention of spending a couple of weeks there, perhaps freelancing a couple of pieces for the English language press back home. Agustín Pinochet was in power, and powerful he was. The carabineros were in the streets looking for leftist terrorists. I sported khaki fatigues, long hair and a bushy beard, not yet outlawed in Argentina, and was a walking prototype of the urban guerrilla.

In short and in hindsight I was an accident looking for somewhere to happen. But I was young, the sun was shining and life was good. Good for me, anyway, if not for all the young people herded into Santiago’s football stadium awaiting summary execution. Little did I know how close I would become to being one.

In Argentina I was working as a trainee journalist, and in Santiago I was carrying the tools of my trade: camera and notebook. I was in the habit of snapping and writing down what occurred to me. Innocent enough you would think. But it wasn’t going to be my lucky day.

As I walked around central Santiago I came across a lovely stone carving high in a wall, near the corner of a leafy suburban street. It was a group of lively, gargoyle-like characters, and next to the stone figures was the name of the street: Calle Livingstone. Livingstone Street. The street of living stone.

The juxtaposition was too good to miss and in a flash of creative inspiration I whipped out my camera to take a photo. Click. Click. And another click, from another angle. As I lowered the camera I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned around and found myself facing two heavily armed carabineros.

Who were unwilling to accept my protestations regarding the building in which the living stonework was set, which just happened to be the Argentine Embassy. My passport showed I had come that morning from Argentina and I looked like Che Guevara at a time in Chile that wearing any kind of beard at all, let alone a full one, was the mark of a terrorist. Unwisely, perhaps, I tried to explain to these not especially well-educated soldiers about the creative juxtaposition, about the ‘living stone’. It didn’t help, and within two minutes I was in the back of a patrol car. I noted as I entered that here were no door handles on the inside.

They went through my shoulder bag, confiscating many things, including the carton of 200 cigarettes I had just bought at the border (“This is for me, yes?”). I remember thinking: if I ever get out of this alive I’ll give up smoking. They were particularly concerned about the diary; partly because it was written in a foreign and clearly subversive tongue (English is my first language), and partly, and even more subversively, because I had drawn in it that morning the unmistakable emblem of the ubiquitous crossed rifles used by the carabineros on all their vehicles and clothing.

The patrol car drove off with me inside, convinced I was bound for the Santiago Stadium from which I would only emerge in a bin bag. The carabineros chatted, smoking my cigarettes. They offered me one; I refused, my pledge already in force. While they conversed among themselves I reflected on Leibnitz and his theory of possible worlds –for some reason I had been reading about this on the train that morning– wishing I were in any other world than this one.

The car drew to a halt, not outside the National Football Stadium, not outside the Police Station but outside the Railway Station, and I was motioned out. They returned my backpack, returned my shoulder bag, even returned my camera and notebook (but not the cigarettes). “You take the first train to Argentina. If you leave the station any other way we will shoot you”.

In fact I took the train south, to Chilean Patagonia. Call me foolhardy, but I still had the impetuosity of youth and figured by the time my train left their shift would be over. And Patagonia is another story. But I learned to be circumspect with my creative impulses and I never smoked again.