Cocaine

1

At the College of the Barnabites he learned Latin, how to serve mass and how to bear false witness — skills that might come in handy at any time. But as soon as he left he forgot all three.

For several years he was a medical student. When he presented himself for the pathology exam they said: “We can’t allow you to take it wearing a monocle. Either you don’t wear the monocle or you don’t take the exam.”

“Well, I shan’t take the exam,” Tito replied, rising to his feet. And with that he abandoned the idea of taking a degree.

He chewed gum sent him by an uncle in America as an advance on his legacy, and he smoked cheap cigarettes. When a woman took his fancy he jotted down her name in a notebook; she took her place at the bottom of the list, which he consulted as soon as he grew tired of the current favorite. It’s Luisella’s turn, he would note, and he would go and see Luisella.

“It’s your turn,” he would tell her. “And don’t waste time, because Mariuccia’s next, and she’s getting impatient.”

When he met Mariuccia he would say: “It’s not your turn yet, Luisella’s first.”

Not having a moustache, he was in the habit of twirling his eyebrows.

“Why do you keep twirling your eyebrows?” a young lady asked him one day.

“We all twirl the hairs we have, depending on our age and sex,” Tito replied.

The young lady thought him very witty and fell in love with him.

She lived in a flat in the same building and she was twenty. That is something that happens to young persons of both sexes when they are no longer nineteen and are not yet twenty-one. Afterwards we look back on it with regret as a fabulous age we did not sufficiently appreciate.

Her name was Maddalena, and she was a decent girl, though she went to a secretarial school. When they took their Sunday walk her highly respectable mama seemed to be shielding her daughter’s twenty-year-old virginity with her bosom; and every evening her father, who was one of those old-fashioned men who still count in scudi and napoleons, waited for her to come home with an extinguished cigar between his fingers and his spectacles on his brow, and if she was ten minutes late he would read her a lecture, brandishing his hundred-year-old pocket watch in the air like a sword.

He knew that when girls start by being five minutes late they end by being a fortnight late, and even more. All sexual morality is basically intended to avert the danger of girls being late.

Maddalena’s parents were inflexible in their moral principles, and one day when Maddalena was seen exchanging a few kisses with Tito, her medical student neighbor, all the most picturesque insults suggested by comparative zoology burst forth from her mother’s robust bosom and spread and re-echoed up and down the stairs; she then resorted to medico-legal terms such as degenerate, irresponsible and satyr; and when her repertoire and her lungs were exhausted she seized the girl by the arm and dragged her inside the flat. Next day Maddalena was sent to a reformatory for fallen girls or girls in moral danger, and she remained there for ten months, until she attained her majority, because her poor but honest mother and her poor but irreproachable father could not allow her to take the wrong turning.

At the Royal Reformatory contact with her depraved companions was supposed to be neutralized by daily visits from a number of pious and aristocratic ladies whose presence, encouragement and example would show the juvenile offenders the way to the flowery arbors of virtue. These dried up, shriveled and bearded ladies, devoid of breasts or ovaries, did have a beneficial effect; they produced consternation and alarm among the young delinquents and turned their wavering imaginations towards the blissful attractions of vice. It is a grave mistake to entrust the kaleidoscope of virtue to ugly and repulsive women. Female reformers should invite the most glittering cocottes to visit prisoners and show them — in return for a reasonable fee, of course — that it was by the practice of modesty and chastity that they became so beautiful, attractive and tempting; while old, pious, ugly, aristocratic and bearded ladies could be usefully employed demonstrating the disastrous consequences of dissolute and licentious living.

Her older companions taught Maddalena all the arts of gallantry, from how to procure an abortion to how to fleece a client. She took a theoretical preparatory course in prostitution; and when she was released to return to the paternal roof she forgave her beloved parents for the excessively severe punishment they had imposed on her (for her own good) the previous year.

In their turn, her parents forgave her youthful indiscretion, but explained that their reputation permitted no compromise with conventional morality.

Soon afterwards Maddalena, having become the mistress of a big industrialist and of a wealthy priest, adopted the name of Maud. Her poor but honest parents put no obstacle in the way of her career, particularly as her mother was allowed to go and see her every day to inquire after her health and take the leftovers from her kitchen.

Her father, saying “No, I cannot accept them,” nevertheless accepted the industrialist’s banknotes and smoked his cigars. He drank the priest’s liquor and had his discarded cloak made into a magnificent morning coat, to be worn on special occasions and when he went to see his daughter. And since she was in the habit of discarding shoes and stockings while they were still new, he made himself responsible for getting a good price for them, dividing the proceeds into two equal parts, of course: one for himself and one for his wife.

Tito, in despair at the news that Maddalena had been sent to a reformatory, flung himself into a train for France, and he arrived in Paris eighteen hours later.

He had a few hundred-lire notes in his pocket and no letters of introduction. Everyone who is destined to be a success in life leaves home without any letters of introduction. Tito went straight to a printer’s and ordered a hundred visiting cards, which were delivered the same day.

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi…

He read them all, one by one. By the time he reached the hundredth he was convinced that he really was both a doctor and a professor, for to convince others it is first of all necessary to convince oneself. He sent the first of them to the pedant who had prevented him from taking his degree by telling him to remove his monocle. What’s the use of a degree if a visiting card says as much as a diploma?

He succumbed to the melancholy that afflicts everyone during his first few days alone in a big city, and while strolling down a boulevard, looking up as if he were seeking the best place for a rope to hang himself with, he ran into an old school friend.

“I remember you very well. You used to quote dates in history like telephone numbers; coronation of Charlemagne, eight double zero; discovery of America, one four nine two. Have you been here long? Where do you eat?”

“At the Dîners de Paris,” his friend replied. “It’s a nice place, why not come along with me?”

“Do you go there every day?” Tito asked.

“Yes.”

“You go to the same restaurant every day? That calls for a great deal of loyalty, surely.”

“No,” was the reply, “only to be what I am.”

“And what’s that?”

“A waiter.”

So Tito Arnaudi went and ate at the Dîners de Paris.

“And what do you do to find a woman in this country?” he asked his waiter friend.

“You stop a woman in the street and offer her a drink; she accepts. You offer her lunch; she does not refuse. You offer her a place in your bed; and, unless she’s committed to someone else, she goes to bed with you.”

Next day Tito Arnaudi spoke to a young lady in the street and offered her a drink and lunch, and made an appointment to meet her at a theater next day.

“I’ll get the tickets,” he said.

“Yes, do.”

“You’ll turn up, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Really?”

“Sans blague.”

The young lady was beautiful. She said she was a mannequin at a big dressmaker’s in the Opera quarter. Smart, vivacious and decorative, she had all the characteristics of an ideal girlfriend. You can’t live abroad without a girlfriend; it’s impossible. Those who fail to find one go home after a month.

This one was the kind of woman who is capable of making you forget your country, change your address and renounce your nationality.

A man who arrives alone in a foreign country suffers from a devastating sense of loneliness. His thoughts return incessantly to the landscape, the streets, the walls he left behind. But if he meets a woman willing to give herself to him, she immediately creates a new world, a new homeland for him; her affection, whether genuine or simulated, forms a kind of protective capsule all round him. She provides a kind of neutral ground, a sanctuary. To the exile, a woman is a piece of his own country in a foreign land. The emigration authorities ought to provide relays of women at the frontiers to distribute to lonely emigrants.

Tito was exultant. He had met a woman and was to meet her again the next day. With that certainty in his heart, or rather on his lips — for he kept assuring himself of it all the time — he started walking the streets of Paris looking at the shop windows. He liked Paris. Woman is a prism through which things have to be looked at if they are to seem beautiful.

“Have you found yourself a woman?” the waiter asked Tito three days later.

“Don’t mention that subject to me,” Tito replied. “Because of a woman I met in a café I took two tickets for La Pie qui Chante. I was waiting for her outside the theater half an hour before the show began, as we arranged. At nine o’clock she still hadn’t turned up. The two tickets cost me fifty francs seventy. Was I to go in alone? Out of the question. The empty seat beside me would have ruined the performance for me. Was I to go away? Those two tickets in my pocket would have stopped my blood from circulating. So I waited at the door to unload them on someone who hadn’t already bought tickets. An old gentleman with a wife and a pair of opera glasses paid for them without arguing and offered me a five franc tip. He took me for a tout.”

“I told him I couldn’t accept.”

“The old man thought I wasn’t satisfied with five francs and offered me ten. In my appalling broken French, but with a magnificent gesture worthy of Curius Dentatus rejecting the Samnites’ gifts, I refused them. The man then offered me twenty, grinding his false teeth and saying I was a thief.”

“And what did you do?” asked his waiter friend.

“I felt offended.”

“Did you fling the twenty francs back in his face?”

“Is that likely? Perhaps I might have if it had been five or ten. But twenty? I pocketed the money.”

“Bravo. And the woman?”

“I haven’t seen her again.”

Now that the first few days were over, Tito had settled down. The woman who had been his for a short time had made him forget Maddalena. And now that he had forgotten her he no longer remembered her. Stupid, but true.

Women are like posters. One is stuck on top of another and covers it completely. Perhaps just for a moment, when the paste is still soft and the paper still wet and slightly transparent, you may still catch a vague impression of the splashes of color of the first, but soon there’s no more trace of it. Then, when the second one is removed, both come away together, leaving your memory and your heart as blank as a wall.

Every evening, as soon as the waiter was free, he would show Tito the sights of Paris.

“You won’t find jobs by applying to agencies. Just wander round the city,” he explained. “If you want to be a waiter like me, I’ll find you a job. It’s not difficult work. All that’s necessary is to be polite to the customer. You can spit in his plate in the kitchen, but you must present it to him with a solicitous smile and a supple bow. Every so often every working man feels the need to demonstrate to himself that he’s not a servant, or at any rate that he’s superior in some way to the person he serves. The most junior executive in an office with a huge hierarchy above him takes it out on the senior clerk. To avoid feeling the lowest of the low, the most wretched hall porter bullies the office boy, and the office boy insults the public. The lowest tramp bullies the child that gets between his feet, and the child bullies the dog. Life is a structure of cowardices; we need to think there’s someone lower than ourselves, weaker than ourselves. The waiter spits in the customer’s plate to give himself the illusion of humiliating the man who humiliates him by talking to him in a superior manner and leaving him a tip. You’re still riddled with prejudices, and perhaps the idea of serving is repugnant to you, but we all serve. Even the President of the Court of Appeal serves; and so does the great courtesan who charges a client five thousand francs for the privilege of unlacing her corset; and the stockbroker who earns himself half a million by a single telephone call. Artists and doctors and even archbishops serve too. Won’t you join me? I’ll teach you in a day or two how to hold eight full plates with your left hand and twelve with your right, and I’ll show you how to repeat the names of twenty-five different dishes while thinking about something else.”

“No, thank you,” Tito replied. “When I want to spit, I’ll spit on the ground.”

The staircase of the little hotel in Montmartre where Tito was staying was half occupied by the compressed-air lift and was so steep and narrow that the only way of getting luggage to the upstairs rooms was to hoist it up with ropes outside the building and take it in through the window.

The place reeked of soap, tobacco, female perspiration and military leather; the ordinary smells which saturate brothels for persons of modest means.

The building was so tall and slender that rooms on the top floor quivered like the hands of a seismograph. Tito’s bed was sixty feet above ground level, but someone in the street below only had to swear with a certain amount of emphasis to make it shake.

Police visited or raided the place practically every night. The only permanent residents were himself and a mysterious one-legged man of about fifty who had replaced his missing limb by a crude and noisy wooden one. He looked like a cattle dealer, and his complexion was like that of a boatswain on a windjammer. No one knew what his job was; all the landlord knew was that the man paid him promptly and punctually every five days.

His wooden leg could be heard coming up the stairs regularly at four o’clock in the morning.

The hotel’s other clients were all strictly short-term. They arrived in couples and never stayed longer than half an hour. Tito quickly got used to hearing four or five times a night in the adjoining rooms the usual sequence of sounds that accompany the sale and purchase of sex: the opening of a door, the switching on of the light, slow footsteps, a man’s voice, a woman’s reply, kisses, rhythmical heavy breathing, the sound of running water, a man’s voice, a woman’s reply, the switching off of the light, the door closing, only to open again soon afterwards to resume the series of identical sounds.

Love, he said to himself, is always exactly the same. When it is freely given, the same words are always used; when it is sold, the same pattern is invariably followed. “Where do you come from?”

“Toulouse.”

“What’s your name?”

“Margot.”

“How long have you been on the game?”

“A year.”

“You’re not infected, are you?”

“What do you think?”

“Then get undressed.”

In the other room on the other side there was another man with another woman, but the conversation was the same.

“What’s your name?”

“Louise.”

“Do you come from Paris?”

“No, Lyons.”

“How long have you…?”

“Eight months.”

“Are you healthy?”

“I’ve never been to bed alone.”

“Take off your chemise.”

The communicating doors between his and the two neighboring rooms were locked, but unknown inquisitive persons had made holes in them at different levels for persons of all heights, and expert hands had temporarily plugged them with balls of chewed paper.

At first the voices of the couples who came together by chance to have their momentary fling, and the subsequent sound of running water, had such a morbid effect on Tito that he spent long hours of the night with his eye to the peep-hole.

But the spectacle was always the same.

Even the most vicious and out-of-the-way and exceptional practices were always the same. Every male thought he was doing something new and extraordinary, but all he did was to repeat with another woman, or even with the same one, what someone else had done half an hour before, who also believed that he was introducing rare innovations into the animal-like rite.

One evening a young Japanese man appeared with a Japanese prostitute whom Tito had seen before on the boulevards.

The couple exchanged a few introductory remarks while the man took off his jacket. The sound of the Far Eastern language reached Tito’s ears distinctly; it apparently consisted of independent syllables, detached from one another like the clicking of a telegraphic keyboard. The man spoke calmly, with a veiled smile on his enigmatic face.

What will they say to each other? Tito wondered, and he answered himself: He will ask her if she has been working as a geisha for long, and she will answer only a few months, and she’ll say she was born in Yokohama, and that her name is Haru, meaning spring, or Umé, meaning cherry blossom…

Montmartre is the breast that has the good fortune to nourish the brain of France, as Rodolphe Salis, the father of the Paris comic press, said. Or Montmartre is simply la Butte, the hill dominated by the Moulin de la Galette, highlighted by the outer boulevards and secured by the two big buttons of the Place Pigalle and the Place Clichy. Montmartre is the modern Babylon, the electrified Antioch, the little Baghdad, the Paradise of the cosmopolitan noctambulist, the blinding, deafening, stupefying spot to which the dreams of the blasés of the whole world are directed, where even those no longer able to blow their noses come to challenge the world’s most expert suppliers of love. Montmartre is the Sphinx, the Circe, the venal Medusa of the many poisons and innumerable philters that attracts the traveler with a boundless fascination. Plays, novels, newspapers spread the perfume of Montmartre through all the continents, a bookish, literary, theatrical, journalistic perfume to which every artist has contributed. Montmartre radiates afar in every direction the glitter of illustrious bald heads, grand-ducal décolletages, regal jewelry, princely shirtfronts and the sharp teeth of insatiable female predators. From a distance every one of us has imagined a fictitious Montmartre embedded in a framework of the names of a few streets, moulins, tabarins and night-clubs.

But when we get there we suffer a disappointment that we do not always dare confess, pretending sophistication. All the same, at heart we have all said to ourselves: Is that all?

“Is that all?” Tito Arnaudi said to his waiter friend after they had visited the most celebrated and characteristic spots together. “I must admit that to me the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse seem much more interesting. Here people pretend to be enjoying themselves; there they pretend to be thinking great thoughts. Of the two I prefer the phony thinkers, because they’re not so noisy.”

Tito had discovered a source of funds.

“I told you you would,” his waiter friend replied. “I told you that the way to find a job was to wander round Paris.”

“You’re perfectly right,” Tito said. “By wandering round Paris I found a source of funds in New York.”

“Explain the riddle.”

“An uncle of mine in America…”

“You mean to tell me that uncles in America really exist?”

“… is the editor of a big morning newspaper. He has just replied by cable informing me that he will be glad to publish any articles I offer him. Thanks to my uncle’s generosity and the favorable exchange rate, I shall be able to earn a by no means despicable monthly income. My first article will be on cocaine and cocaine addicts.”

The waiter had in fact taken him to Montmartre in search of dens where worshippers of la captivante coco gathered.

“Here?” Tito asked at the entrance to a café.

“Here,” his friend replied, pushing him in.

From the outside the café looked gloomy. From the outside Paris cafés generally look gloomy; there’s too much wood and too little glass on the doors and windows, and the little light that might have been able to get in is partly obstructed by the big enamel lettering giving the names of the drinks and their prices.

They were just about to go in when they met the man with a wooden leg, who stepped back to allow them to pass.

“He lives in my hotel,” Tito said, “and no one knows what his job is.”

“Job?” his friend replied. “He’s in a very lucrative business indeed, it’s all in his wooden leg.”

“He must be a beggar,” said Tito.

“Good heavens, no.”

“That’s the only way of earning money with a wooden leg.”

“Is that what you think? He does much better than that. But there’s no hurry. You’ll soon see what I mean.”

The landlord was behind the counter, serving big glasses of beer to a number of taxi drivers, who smelled of cheap tobacco and wet mackintoshes. Behind him bottles of liquor garlanded with little flags sparkled cheerfully on glass shelves, doubly reflected in the walls of bright mirrors behind them and in front of them.

On the counter a big spherical aquarium housed some melancholy red fish. The refraction and the combination of natural and artificial light made them look as strange as Chinese dragons as they swam around gracefully.

“There are some people,” said Tito, drinking a glass of port at the counter, “who go to bed full of aches and pains after a drop of rain, while fish, who spend their whole lives in water, don’t even know what rheumatism is.”

A metallic, strident laugh that sounded as if someone had struck a tray full of glasses echoed through the room.

“Go back in there, you fool,” the landlord called out.

And the girl with the pale face and glassy eyes who had laughed fell back two or three paces as if her face had been slapped, and withdrew behind the reddish curtains that concealed the entrance to the next room.

“Pas de pétard ici,” the man continued in slang. Then, realizing that Tito was a foreigner, he translated for him. “Pas de bruit,” he said.

Tito took umbrage at this. “Are you referring to me?” he said

“A la môme,” the man explained. “A la poule.”

When the taxi drivers left, Tito’s friend whispered something to the man, whose only answer was to raise the red velvet curtains.

“À votre service,” he said with a bow.

Tito and his friend went into the next room as if they were entering a waxwork show restricted to men over the age of eighteen.

Their arrival was greeted with a certain mistrust. A stagnant, yellowish light shone down on a number of small tables covered with green baize of the kind used for card tables and university exams. The room was not a big one; there was a big divan that went all round it, eight small tables, a piano, some newspapers dirtied by drink and finger marks, and a mirror that had been scratched with a diamond.

Tito scrutinized the room before observing the people in it; natural curiosity should have made him do the opposite but, to avoid rousing unjustified suspicions and to create the impression of being already initiated into the mysteries of drugs, he took his seat on the divan next to his friend in an offhand and casual manner.

Then he picked up a newspaper.

Three women looked at him suspiciously and mumbled something inaudible. But the girl who had laughed noisily at his remark in the other room a short time before turned to the others and, nodding in his direction, said: “Pas bête le type.”

Tito observed the four women one by one. He noticed that their dresses were made of good materials, but were old, worn and neglected; the white of the organdy was yellowed, the leather trimmings were cracked, the silk was split, the belt twisted, the shoes not worn out but misshapen as a result of careless walking. One of the women had not properly washed her neck and her polished fingernails offered a repulsive contrast of red enamel and black filth.

They huddled together side by side like birds in a cage as if to keep themselves warm. Three of them rested their feet on the horizontal metal bar under the table; the fourth had her heels on the edge of the seat with her calves up against her thighs like a closed jack-knife, and rested her chin on her knees. There was a glassy look in their eyes, and their bloodless but cruelly rouged lips looked unreal against the pallor of their faces.

These four taciturn women (or was their taciturnity the result of the two strangers’ arrival?) seemed to be awaiting sentence by an invisible court that might appear through the curtains at any moment; in fact the least stupefied of them kept looking in that direction, though nothing whatever happened.

Under the big mirror two thin men were mechanically playing dice with the listless indifference of aging clerks working away in a dusty office and being paid a salary, not for the work they did, but for the time they spent. One of them had his coat collar turned up over the silk handkerchief he wore instead of a detachable collar and tie. All Tito could see of the other was his shoulders and the back of his neck. His neglected hair came down over the back of his neck and met in the middle as if to form an embryonic tail. When he turned to have a look at the newcomers, Tito saw his face. It was one of those ugly faces that are to be seen only on days when there’s a general strike: a long, thin face, disfigured by corrosion, and fleshless, like one of those ox-skull ornaments that architects call bucranes.

The woman who had spoken rose and went and said something to one of the two players; she leaned over his shoulder and stroked his ear with her cheek, but he went on playing, unperturbed. She lifted his jacket, took his cigarette case from his trouser pocket and, on her way back to her friends with a lit cigarette, she raised one leg to the level of her shoulders and with defiant roguishness brought it down on the table, making the glasses tinkle.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” she said to Tito, who had not yet said anything. “It’s not very cheerful here.”

“So I see,” he replied. “It’s more cheerful in the morgue.”

The woman was offended. “Why don’t you go there then?” she snarled.

One of the dice players turned and exclaimed: “Christine!”

“They probably take us for two policemen or something of the sort,” Tito’s friend suggested.

Tito laughed, and turned to the least taciturn of the women. “Your friends and the gentlemen playing dice must have formed a strange idea of us,” he said. “I have the impression that you’re all a trifle embarrassed. But we’re not what you suppose. I’m a journalist, and this is a colleague of mine. There’s nothing to be afraid of, as you can see.”

“Journalist?” one of the three silent women said. “And what are you doing here?”

“What one usually does in a café.”

“But why did you pick this place instead of a café on the grand boulevards where you can watch the grues and the trottins passing by?”

“Because this is more useful for what I’m looking for.”

“And what are you looking for, if I may ask?”

“Cocaine!”

The two men stopped their game and went over to Tito. One of them sat astride a chair with his chest against the back. He took a small silver box from his waistcoat pocket, opened it, and offered it to Tito.

The four women rushed at him.

“Ah, canaille!”

“Vilain monstre!”

“Sale bête.”

“Selfish swine!”

“And he said he had none left.”

“And he was letting us die for lack of it.”

One of the women tried to seize some of the contents of the box between her thumb and forefinger, but the man pushed her away with the flat of his hand, telling her roughly to keep her hands off.

But the four harpies didn’t calm down. Panting, with dilated nostrils and flashing eyes, they clawed at the box of white powder, like shipwrecked persons struggling for a place in the lifeboat. Those four bodies round a little metal box, all in the grip of the same addiction, looked like four independent parts of a single monster greedily writhing round a small, mysterious prize, elevating its cheap pharmaceutical crudity to the dignity of a symbol. All Tito could see was half-clenched hands that looked numbed by pain, hands with pale, bony, hooked fingers that turned into tightly clenched fists with nails sticking into palms to suffocate a shriek, or quell a craving, or give pain a different form, or localize it elsewhere.

The hands of cocaine addicts are unforgettable. They seem to live a life of their own, to be getting ready to die before the rest of the body, to be always on the point of a convulsion that is just, but only just, being held at bay.

In their eyes, now enlivened by the agony of anticipation, now dulled by the terrible depression caused by absence of the drug, there is a sinister light, a suggestion of death or dying, while their nostrils are horribly dilated as if to sniff any possible stray molecules of cocaine that might be dispersed in the air.

Before Tito had a chance to help himself the four women succeeded in dipping the fingers of one hand in the box, and then, carefully holding the other hand underneath as a plate, made off to the other end of the room, like a dog making for a distant corner with a stolen bone.

While holding the precious powder to their dilated nostrils and breathing it in, they kept looking round them mistrustfully.

Misers whose meanness borders on insanity, women whose greed for jewels verges on frenzy, do not worship their treasures as cocaine addicts worship their powder. To them there is something sacred about that white, glittering, rather bitter substance; they call it by the most loving and tender names, and talk to it as we talk to a loved one whom we have regained after thinking her lost forever. To them the drug box is like a sacred relic; they think it worthy of a monstrance, an altar, a small temple. They put it on the bedside table, look at it, talk to it, caress it, hold it to their cheek, press it to their throat or their heart.

When one of the women had sniffed her pinch of powder she dashed to the man who had offered it to her, grabbed his hand just when he was going to hold the remaining contents of the box to his own nostrils, grasped it firmly with both her hands, and held it to her face and sniffed, trembling as she did so.

He pulled his hand away, shook the woman off and voluptuously sniffed the remainder. Then she took his head between her hands (those bloodless fingers curved like claws over his black hair), applied her wet, tremulous, palpitating lips to his mouth and greedily licked his upper lip and put her tongue into his nostrils to gather the last few remnants.

“You’re stifling me,” the man moaned. His head was flung back, and he supported himself with his hands against the back of the chair. The veins of his throat were swollen, and his hyoid bone kept moving up and down as a result of his intermittent swallowing movements.

The woman was like a small wild animal savoring the odor of still undamaged flesh before sinking its teeth in it. She was like a little vampire; her lips adhered firmly to the man’s face with her forceful sucking.

When she let go, her eyes were veiled like those of a cat whose lids are carefully opened while it is asleep, and the teeth in her open mouth (her lips stayed open as if they were paralyzed) laughed like those of a skull.

She tottered away and sat on the piano stool; she dropped her head on to her forearm, and her forearm dropped on to the keyboard, which responded with a sonorous thump.

The young man who had offered cocaine to Tito got off his chair as if dismounting from a bicycle and paced up and down the room. The black jacket on his fleshless shoulders looked as if it were on a clothes-hanger, and his bow legs were like a couple of twin cherry stalks. His friend, a pallid and unhealthy-looking youth, took his place on the chair and spoke to Tito.

“So those creatures didn’t give you a chance to taste the stuff,” he said. “They’re like wild animals. I’m sorry I haven’t any to offer you, but the man with the wooden leg will be here soon.”

“The man with the wooden leg?”

“Don’t you know him?”

“Yes, you do,” Tito’s waiter friend interrupted. “He lives at your hotel.”

“He always turns up here at about this time. He never goes out before five or half-past. In some calendars, the more instructive kind, it says that the sun rises at 5:45 and 27 seconds, or sets at 6:09 and 12 seconds, and so on. Well, the man with the wooden leg seems to consult the calendar before going out. As soon as the sun has set he’s to be seen strolling through the streets of Montmartre, looking as if he has nowhere to go and nothing urgent to do, and he hugs the walls as if afraid of being run over by a bus. Sometimes he meets strange-looking people and goes into a bar or a bistro with them, or simply into a doorway, and then they leave separately and go their several ways as if they were complete strangers to one another.”

“But he was at the bar in the next room when I came in just now,” Tito said.

“Yes, I know. But he didn’t have the stuff then. He must have been with a student of pharmacy. He won’t be long now.”

“Here he is,” the man with cherry-stalk legs announced.

The four women dashed at the newcomer as if they were about to assault him.

“Get back, you jackals,” the man said threateningly. “Take it easy, or I shan’t have anything for you.”

“Five grams for me,” one of the women hissed.

“I want eight,” said another.

“It’s dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,” moaned a third in steadily rising tones. “I paid you in advance yesterday, so I come first.”

Before producing his merchandise the man with the wooden leg looked at Tito and said by way of greeting: “Oh, you’re 71.”

“Did you meet in prison?” Tito’s friend asked.

“No, that’s my room number.”

One of the four women put her hand on the shoulder of the skeleton-like individual. “T’as du pèze?” she said to him.

“Not a sou,” her boyfriend replied with conviction.

“So much the worse,” she replied. “I’ll swap my bracelet.”

“Terms strictly cash,” said the man with the wooden leg, jestingly but firmly. “Cash first, paradise later.”

The woman who had asked for five grams produced a fifty-franc note from her purse.

“Give me twenty-five francs change,” she said.

“I haven’t got any change.”

“Then keep the fifty and give me ten grams,” she said.

The man took the note, put one hand in his trouser pocket and produced a small round box. The upper part of his wooden leg, the part that accommodated the stump, also provided amply stocked and very unsuspicious storage space.

“It’s as if he had his leg cut off specially for the purpose,” Tito remarked.

“What will you give me for this gold bracelet?” the woman said, whirling it on her extended forefinger under the man’s nose.

“C’est du toc,” he replied. “It’s Naples gold.”

“You’re from Naples yourself, you crook,” the woman exclaimed angrily. “I’ll give you the cash tomorrow if you won’t take the bracelet.”

The man cut the argument short. “In advance, always. In arrears, never,” he said. Then, offering Tito a box, he said: “Four grams — twenty francs.”

Tito took the box, handed him twenty francs, and read on the box the words L’Universelle idole.

Then he turned to the woman who had wanted to sacrifice her bracelet. “Will you permit me?” he said, offering it to her.

“Is that for me?” she exclaimed.

“Yes. I’m giving it to you.”

She didn’t hesitate; with her white, fleshless hands she seized Tito’s hand and the box and, holding them firmly, greedily kissed both.

“Oh, the lovely, heavenly powder; love and light of my life,” she moaned, and raised it to the level of her brow as one raises a relic or a symbol in a sacred rite. Then she used a hairpin to tear the strip of paper round the box and carefully raised the lid.

She went to a table at the other end of the room, knelt on the ground, put the exciting packet on the marble table top, and took from her bag a small tortoise-shell box and a tiny white spatula of the kind used by chemists to put powders into packets. Then, holding her breath and with infinite care, she transferred the drug from the crude cardboard box to the more worthy tortoise-shell one. When the cardboard box was empty she held it upside down over the palm of her hand, tapped the back of it with her hard fingernails and then raised the palm of her hand to her nostrils and inhaled; and, still with the same care, she shook the tortoise-shell box horizontally to level the powder, looking round every now and again with feline suspiciousness.

Then, as if she were dealing with radium, she took a pinch of the powder and raised it to her nostrils. As she inhaled, her breast swelled and her eyes closed voluptuously. She took another pinch and put it to her nostril, forcing it in with her thumb, and she scraped the little that remained behind her fingernail into her mouth with her teeth.

Tito had boasted to the skinny man of his love of the drug. Among those with a vice, not sharing it is something to be ashamed of. In prison those who have committed only a minor offence exaggerate its gravity in order not to seem inferior to the others. Tito, who had never sniffed cocaine in his life, swore he could not do without it.

And when the woman invited him to help himself, he did so.

The white powder up his nose gave him a feeling of aromatic freshness, as if essential oils of thyme and lemon verbena were evaporating in his throat. Traces of it passing from his nostrils to his pharynx gave him a slight sensation of burning at the back of his throat and a bitter taste on his tongue.

“A little more?”

Tito took another pinch. Then he fell silent. He withdrew into a kind of meditation. Then it happened. There was a cold feeling in his nose, a paralysis in the middle of his face. He could no longer feel his nose; it no longer existed.

The man with the wooden storage leg went on taking money and producing little boxes, and the women inhaled in silence. The two men ordered drinks and emptied a whole boxful into a small glass.

“Why don’t you inhale?” Tito’s friend asked.

One of the men replied by leaning his head backwards, showing that his nasal septum was worn away by an ulcer.

“Coco?” Tito asked.

“Yes,” the young man replied. “It begins with a small scab that itches. It swells slowly and then turns into an ulcer that destroys the cartilaginous part of the septum; fortunately it never reaches the bone.”

“And what did the doctor say?”

“Rien à faire.”

“Really?”

“Yes. What the doctors say is: Give up cocaine. But I prefer giving up my nasal septum.”

Tito smiled.

The man with the ulcer laughed. He laughed immoderately, frenziedly. The four women, the other man and Tito joined in.

Tito instinctively touched his nose. He seemed no longer to have one, though it was very heavy in spite of its nonexistence.

He laughed again, and the others laughed too.

The drug peddler rose as if to take his departure. “Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

“Don’t go yet,” said Tito, holding him by the round wooden leg. “Stay and have a drink.”

The man sat down next to him, stretched his wooden leg under the table and withdrew the other one.

“You earn more that way than by begging for alms,” the yellow, skeleton-like young man said.

“Yes,” the dealer admitted. “But don’t imagine that begging’s a bad job. It all depends on where you do it. Certainly you can do it anywhere, but some places are far better than others. You do big business outside brothels, for instance. You don’t do so well as outside churches, it’s true, but well enough to make a comfortable living. I prefer working outside churches. In the streets, on the boulevards, at the doors of cafés, there’s a crowd with the average percentage of rogues and fools, but on the steps of churches the percentage is higher; they’re nearly all fools, ninety per cent of them are fools, and you can’t go wrong. Rogues go to church too, of course; actually I’d say that most church-goers are rogues, but going into or coming out of church, which is God’s pied-à-terre, they don’t want to look wicked before or after vowing to be pious.”

The man emptied his glass, put it down, said thank you and made for the door. Just as he reached it a woman stopped him and bought another box.

“Goodbye all,” he called out.

He counted on the effect of his departure, and in fact the other women swarmed round him as if their savior were departing and gave him more money. Tito also bought another box, opened it and inhaled.

“Just look what journalism leads to,” his waiter friend said. “To investigate cocaine addiction you become an addict yourself.”

“And so what?” Tito replied. “It might be much worse. When Pythagoras travelled among the Egyptians he had to be circumcised before being admitted to their mysteries.”

“And what newspaper do you write for?” the pale man asked him confidentially.

“An American newspaper,” Tito replied. “And what’s your job?”

“I haven’t got one,” the pale man replied with great naturalness. “Christine works for me. If I could work without any great effort as Christine does, I’d work for her. But as I can’t…”

Tito’s friend failed to conceal slight surprise at the candor with which the man admitted to being an alphonse.

“Your bourgeois friend is surprised,” he said, alluding to the waiter. “But what’s strange about it? Christine and I used to work in a factory where there were five hundred women. They were all destined for TB, or anemia at the very least. The factory owner exploited them. I couldn’t take away all of them, but rescued Christine, and now I exploit her. I don’t know why I should be regarded as more contemptible than that industrialist who exploited five hundred women at the same time. Particularly as the work she does now is less tiring, more hygienic and more profitable. They say it’s bad for one’s conscience, but what does that matter so long as it doesn’t dirty one’s hands?”

“What’s the time?” asked Tito, thinking it was time to go.

“I haven’t got a watch. Man shortened the days by inventing clocks, and he shortened the years by inventing calendars. I have neither the one nor the other.”

“My calendar’s here,” said Christine, making an indecent gesture.

“And she never makes a mistake,” said her lover, laughing.

Tito turned to his friend and said in an undertone: “The first things that cocaine destroys are the will and the sense of shame.”

“But what shame remains to be destroyed among these people?” said the waiter. “They’re worse than respectable women.”