Cigar

The Cigar is Matilda’s training object: an ordinary item taken from Mr. Wormwood’s cigar box and made the measure of her developing power to move things with her eyes. Its weight, size, position on a table, and eventual flight give her a practical sequence of challenges. Across six days of private practice, it changes from an object she can push to one she can lift and direct through the air, preparing Matilda to carry out a plan to help Juffrouw Engel.

Selection and Preparation

Matilda finds the house empty, as it often is: Mr. Wormwood is still at work, Mrs. Wormwood has not returned from bingo, and her brother may be anywhere. She goes to the sitting room, opens a cupboard drawer where she knows her father keeps a box of cigars, takes one, and carries it to her bedroom. There she locks the door. The sequence places the Cigar between the disorderly availability of an unattended household and the deliberate privacy Matilda makes for herself.

The object is chosen with practice in mind. Matilda’s plan to help Juffrouw Engel is nearly worked out in detail, but its success depends on whether she can perform a particular feat with her eyes. She does not expect to achieve it immediately; she trusts that effort and repeated exercise may get her there. The Cigar’s thickness seems a little inconvenient, but its weight is just right. That practical judgment makes it a test object rather than a keepsake: Matilda needs something substantial enough to work against, yet manageable enough to lift.

She clears a space on the dressing table, moving aside a hairbrush, a comb, and two library books before placing the Cigar in the middle. Then she sits on the edge of her bed about three metres away. The arrangement is precise: a target, an unobstructed tabletop, distance, and a fixed position from which to concentrate. The locked bedroom becomes a place where Matilda can repeat and refine an ability away from the rest of the household.

From Pushing to Lifting

At first, Matilda concentrates and feels the power gather behind her eyes. She directs it at the Cigar, and it rolls almost immediately across the tabletop before falling to the floor. The Cigar’s red-and-gold band makes the moving object visually distinct, but the important result is the change in what Matilda can do: the power she had previously used to push now produces a definite movement in a chosen target. She retrieves the Cigar and puts it back on the table, turning the first success into the start of another attempt.

Lifting proves harder. Matilda reasons that if she can push with the power, she ought also to be able to raise objects, and that learning to lift and suspend one is essential to her plan. She returns to the bed and concentrates again. The Cigar initially rolls away; only after more intense effort does one end rise about one or two centimetres above the tabletop. Matilda keeps it there for roughly ten seconds before it falls. This partial lift is a different kind of success from the first roll: she has begun to oppose the Cigar’s weight, but cannot yet sustain control.

Matilda responds to the brief result as evidence that the method is working. She continues for an hour, eventually lifting the whole Cigar from the table and keeping it suspended for about a minute. The effort leaves her so exhausted that she falls back onto her bed and goes to sleep. Later, Mrs. Wormwood finds her there and wakes her, asking whether she is ill. Matilda says she is only tired. The episode makes the cost of the exercise concrete: the Cigar has yielded to her power, but sustaining that control has temporarily overcome her body with fatigue.

Repeated Practice and Mastery

The first session is only the beginning. From then on, Matilda shuts herself in her room after school each day and practices with the Cigar. The repeated routine develops what the initial attempt could not provide: reliable command rather than a single surprising movement. The narrative marks progress through the same object and the same basic task, so the change is measurable without introducing a new test. The Cigar remains the target as Matilda’s control becomes more accomplished.

By the following Wednesday evening—exactly six days after she began—she can not only lift the Cigar but make it do whatever she wants in the air. Her power has advanced from rolling it across a surface, through a difficult and short-lived lift, to directing its movement aloft. The milestones preserve the difference between possessing an unusual ability and mastering it: Matilda must practice before the Cigar responds with the freedom her plan requires.

Function and Significance

The Cigar matters chiefly through its changing role in Matilda’s work. It begins as a cigar from her father’s box, selected for its useful weight; becomes a target for testing whether she can push; then exposes the greater difficulty of lifting; and finally becomes an object she can direct through the air. Its usefulness depends on material qualities the passage names, especially its weight and thickness. Matilda does not simply imagine success: she adjusts her technique through the Cigar’s actual movements, from rolling and falling to brief suspension and sustained flight.

The object also gives form to the gap between Matilda’s intention and her ability. Her plan to help Juffrouw Engel is already nearly complete, but it depends on an action she cannot yet perform. The Cigar lets her work on that missing capability in private, with each return to the tabletop testing what has changed. When she can send it wherever she chooses, the practice has reached the point needed for the next step: Matilda says she has only to carry out her larger plan. The Cigar’s arc thus ends not in possession or display, but in readiness for an action beyond the practice session.