The heat of the afternoon seemed unbearable; I stumbled down the street with my suitcases, unable to look back towards the hotel. I collapsed, shaking, into the shaded alcove. Perhaps it was a few moments or a few minutes that passed. When I looked up, a man was standing over me: the old kitchen hand. He reached to the floor, picking up a discarded cigarette, half smoked. He gestured for a light.
I composed myself, and handed him my lighter. He didn’t need to smoke the cigarette from the floor, I insisted—I pulled one from the packet in my pocket. He put the cigarette I had offered in his own pocket, and lit the one he had picked up from the ground.
‘I’m not paid enough to walk past good tobacco,’ he said. He drew heavily on the half-cigarette. ‘When I find a cigarette on the floor, it reminds me of a story from my childhood: the fable of the tramp who collected cigarette butts. The townsfolk let this slide: the streets were cleaner for it, and the tramp would not try and bum cigarettes from others. For every six butts he has, you see, he can make his own cigarette—he takes a little of the unsmoked tobacco from each, rolls it in his own paper and, by piecing these fragments together, has a smoke of his own.
‘Here’s the riddle of the fable, though: one day, he finds more cigarette butts than he ever has—he picks up thirty-six cigarette butts from the ground. The question is: how many cigarettes is he able to roll and smoke that day?’
I took a cigarette for myself from the packet in my pocket, and lit it. Before I could answer, the kitchen hand stubbed out his own cigarette, and wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Think it over. And the answer’s not six, Giovanotto.’
Published in a book of short stories which I read as a child, but cannot find nor trace
A Personal Anthology 