Cocaine

10

Tito had not laughed for a long time, but this disaster made him laugh. He had lost his job, he lacked the strength to look for another, and the money he had left was barely enough to last a week.

In order to economize, he bought from an antique dealer in the Rue Saint-Honoré two spherical cinerary urns that were as iridescent as soap bubbles, and a gilt monstrance, browned by time and incense, that came from some small demolished or deconsecrated mountain church. The place of the sacred host had been taken by a pharmaceutical host, round which, however, silver-gilt rays preserved the same mystical glitter.

Tito went up to his room at the Hotel Napoléon, removed from the monstrance the pharmaceutical host that so unworthily profaned it and put in its place a photograph of Cocaine in the nude.

He opened a drawer to put the cinerary urns in it and took from it a bottle of Avatar, which was Cocaine’s perfume.

Perfume exceeds even music in evocative power.

He applied the atomizer to the bottle and filled the room with the scent, as if he were about to make a pagan sacrifice worthy of the image.

While he stood there motionless, contemplating the lines of her nudity in an attitude of silent veneration, Cocaine suddenly walked in. She said nothing, but she was so moved at the sight that she flung her umbrella on the bed, put her face to Tito’s neck and wept hot tears on his green knitted tie with its big blue diagonal stripes.

If you know how deliciously perfumed tears become when they run down a pretty woman’s cheeks, and how deliciously perfumed ties become when she weeps on them.

Tito’s tie was wet, but his heart was lighter. Cocaine’s heart too was light and as luminous as an Andalusian mantilla.

“Your article has had marvelous results,” she said.

“I know,” Tito replied with a bitter smile.

“I’ve just been talking to a big American impresario. We’re leaving for Buenos Aires in a week’s time. Will your newspaper let you come with me?”

“Yes,” Tito replied simply.

“Will it allow you six months?”

“Even twelve. And what are the terms?”

“Excellent.”

And she hurried to give the news to her lady’s maid, who answered, sometimes arrogantly, to the name of Pierina.

When Csaky, the butler, announced M. Arnaudi (whom he no longer referred to as “the gentleman”) was asking for her, Kalantan was not surprised. She was used to his longer and shorter periods of melancholy and misanthropy and knew how changeable his moods were, and she felt sure that habit, if not inevitable destiny, would bring him back to her.

But he seemed strangely different; there was something forced and artificial in his behavior, and he no longer abandoned himself so completely when he made love to her.

“Your room is as you left it,” she said to him, stroking his hair. “And my love is unchanged too.”

In fact that night Tito felt that his beautiful, vice-ridden Armenian mistress gave herself to him with the same passion for simplicity as before; and when he woke up next morning in the rosewood bed he recognized the furniture and the prints on the walls and the impressive and decorative livery of Csaky, the butler, who asked whether “the gentleman” wanted Russian tea, green tea or Ceylon tea.

“I’ll have it in the lady’s room,” he said.

He went to Kalantan’s room; she was still asleep, with her hands and knees drawn up to her chin, completely enclosed in herself, just like a magnolia asleep at night.

Later he slowly dressed, carefully tied the green knitted tie with blue diagonal stripes that had been perfumed by Cocaine’s tears, and went to the Hotel Napoléon to fetch some things.

“Don’t be long,” said Kalantan.

“I’ll be back in half an hour,” he replied.

In fact half an hour later Madame Ter-Gregorianz’s car arrived in the garden with two big yellow suitcases.

Tito’s nights were restless. In the evening he took strong doses of chloral to overcome the insomnia produced by the drug he could not give up. The result of the incurable insomnia and the useless drug was a hallucinatory state; he spent long hours in a state of wakefulness in which he felt he was dreaming and in a state of sleep in which he felt he was awake. Being in this villa as white as an ossuary as guest and lover of a woman of Asian passions, being waited on by servants who treated him as coldly and obsequiously as if he were a usurper; the whole of this quasi-oriental environment set up in the heart of Paris for the purpose of creating a legendary Caucasian atmosphere all round him, and the idea of Maud, of his Cocaine, only five minutes away by car, though his impression now was that she was far, far away, fading and getting lost in the distance — all this added up in his mind to a multi-colored musical beehive, the buzzing of which was interrupted from time to time by the sentimentally ironic, epigrammatic chirping of a bird that was in love in the garden.

At the hotel they gave him a letter from his friend the novice monk, who prayed for him every evening, and he found Cocaine busy trying on a graceful garment of mauve crêpe-de-Chine adorned with fine organdy pleats.

“Do you know, Tito, that I’m getting fat?” Cocaine said to him with a laugh.

“Yes, I do.”

He certainly knew it, he had expected it. This was the first sign, the beginning of the decline. The cruel mutilation to which she had submitted the year before was now beginning to confirm the saying that woman is woman only because of her generative gland.

All feminine charm, the delicacy of outline, the softness of the limbs, the development of the breasts, the flowing abundance of the hair, the musical subtlety of the voice, depend on that gland. With its removal the harmonious line changes into obesity, the voice becomes masculine, the liveliness of the mind degenerates into loss of memory, the affectionate nature gives way to hypochondria and irritability, a hairy shadow appears on the lip and an expression of surliness comes into the eyes; and after a few years we find ourselves with a virago in all her hybrid hatefulness.

But Tito was so much in love with this woman that he wanted to hasten the day when she would be as ugly as that. No one else will want her, he said to himself, and then at last she’ll be mine alone. And then I shall have the only joy of which I dream: that of being her last lover.

And when she asked him to touch her and actually feel that she was getting fat, he hugged her so fiercely that she called out: “Be careful, you’re spoiling my organdy pleats.”

The dog started barking in her defense.

But all that Tito could see was the beginning of plumpness, the first stage of the downward trend that would end with her coming back to him.

It was the first gleam of hope that appeared in what was a kind of amorous irredentism.

Csaky, the Ter-Gregorianz butler, looked at him with respectful but venomous eyes.

“Madam is out,” he announced. “Your room is ready, sir.”

Late every afternoon Kalantan used to go to a physiotherapy establishment where she subjected herself to illusory treatment for an imaginary complaint, and she came back after sunset with flowers at her waist. The first thing she did was to go to Tito’s room without asking the servants, to enjoy the pleasure of surprise.

When he wasn’t there she assured herself that he would be coming next day.

Then she went back to her room to be undressed by Sonya, a lady’s maid of the old type.

One evening Csaky said to her: “The gentleman has had to leave suddenly for Italy.”

“Oh? Did he leave any letters?”

“No, madam.”

“Did you take him to the station?”

“No, madam. I took him to his hotel.”

“Did he leave his suitcases?”

“He took them, madam. But he left some clothes.”

“Very well. You may go.”

She put down her flowers, undid her belt, took off her hat, and dropped her veil on the velvet and tin box that constituted her “past.” The box that contained the memories of pleasure given to another man. The box full of coins her husband had given her to create the illusion that she was something better than a wife: a courtesan.

The box that made poor Tito suffer so much that he had broken it open to learn its secrets and emptied the contents into his two yellow suitcases, among his handkerchiefs and ties, his antelope gloves and his foulard pajamas.

Kalantan, who like all women was incapable of understanding jealousy, particularly jealousy of the past, smiled to herself indulgently as she thought of Tito’s anguish when to reassure him she had said to him: “Darling, the past has nothing to do with us.”

It no longer has anything to do with us when it has been stolen and taken in two yellow suitcases to distant South America.

No sooner had the ship left harbor than Maud started flirting with passengers of various nationalities. And, as the sea was terribly rough throughout the passage, Tito hardly ever left his cabin.

Someone told him that the best way of getting rid of seasickness was to eat nothing. So Tito ate nothing.

Others advised him to eat. So he ate.

An elderly, very religious lady gave him some anti-hysteria water from Santa Maria Novella. He drank it.

A rastaquero, a self-made man from the pampas on his way home, recommended anchovies. So he tried anchovies. Someone advised him to lie on his back, so he lay on his back. Someone else told him to lie on his face, so he lay on his face.

As none of these things did him any good, he sent for the ship’s doctor.

“Doctor,” he said, “what do you do when you’re seasick?”

“I throw up,” he said.

The doctor, like all traders with a continually changing clientèle, was skeptical and indifferent.

The talkative Maud shone among passengers of the oddest nationalities on the promenade deck. A Bolivian diplomat wanted to know whether her continual infidelities did not drive Tito to distraction. She replied that in the matter of infidelity men’s hearts were like patent leather shoes. Everything depended on the first time. If they didn’t crack then, there was no danger of its happening later.

She was also observed disappearing into various first class cabins but, as this was of no interest to anyone but Tito, who at the time was more concerned with his stomach than with his heart, there is no point in our lingering over such minor episodes of transatlantic travel.

When they crossed the equator Maud danced, and received a great deal of applause and many presents.

Meanwhile Tito lay prone on the bed in his cabin, eating anchovies dipped in anti-hysteria water from Santa Maria Novella.

And over the sea the moon was like a match lit behind a porcelain plate.

One stormy night a Wagnerian tenor who was as blond as a camel and had sung en todos los grandes teatros de Europa y de America, pressed his two hands melodramatically to his corazon and murmured to Maud that he would be willing to spend toda la vida on the ocean with her, because jamás como en esta noche el perfume del mar me ha parecido tan dulce.

One day the rastaquero from the pampas, seeing that the care and attention he lavished on Tito were all in vain, for the poor fellow still had el sueño agitado, la lengua sucia y el color pajizo, turned his attention to Maud.

The rastaquero seemed to her to be a more worthwhile object for her attention than the Wagnerian tenor, who had told her frankly that the idea of giving a mujer a centavo had never passed through his cabeza, for las mujeres considered that granting him a capricho or, as they say in Paris, a béguin, was a great honor.

Maud had long since passed the stage of indulging in béguins or caprichos.

The rastaquero, for the benefit of those who have never come across persons such as he, was a typical parvenu, of the type that can euphemistically be described as a country gentleman. He kept his well-filled wallet in an inside pocket of his waistcoat, almost against his skin, and he wore cotton pants with a ribbon at the bottom that he wound five times round his ankles. His eyes looked different ways, so that he reminded you of one of those road signs that point to two different countries in opposite directions. If he had not been so rich he would have made an excellent supervisor in a big store, because with those eyes of his he seemed to be looking all ways at once.

As his cabin was next door to the music room, Maud was able to dance for his exclusive benefit to the sound of a slow waltz that seemed to come from a distant island, and as a token of his appreciation he allowed her to choose a small souvenir of the voyage from the contents of the wallet he kept hidden in the inside pocket of his waistcoat, almost against his skin.

As one courtesy deserves another, Maud allowed him to put his hand between her dress and her skin and help himself to what he wanted.

The notes of the slow waltz came from the music room while the ship sailed southwest at a steady speed of sixteen knots.

A few hours later when the rastaquero went back to bed alone, he found a hairpin in the bedclothes that preserved all Maud’s perfume, all the exquisite perfume of her violet crêpe-de-Chine lingerie decorated with fine organdy pleats.

Tito was well aware that Cocaine was paying instructive visits to various cabins. But now his jealousy was painless. Let me explain. Jealousy was at work inside him, but it was like an unthreaded pulley that went on revolving without starting up the machinery of pain and passion. When you feel ill, even if it’s only from seasickness, you no longer feel moral anguish. I should like to establish a new kind of therapy, curing illnesses of the mind by means of physical illness.

The idea would be to cure remorse by inoculation with influenza, jealousy by malaria germs, love by injections of spirochaetes. I think that is the direction in which the medicine of the future will have to move.

The ship called at Rio de Janeiro. As soon as Tito felt terra firma beneath his feet he wanted to go on to Buenos Aires by train, but when he heard that Cocaine was going by sea he agreed to go back into the lion’s den. He emerged, after five more days of seasickness at a speed of eighteen knots, when they arrived at Buenos Aires.

We shall not describe the landing, or the impressive sight of the Avenida de Mayo. All those who have been to Buenos Aires will remember it, and those unfortunate people who have not should be ashamed of themselves and go there immediately.

Nor shall we describe the moderate success enjoyed by Maud. Her beauty was declining, but the spotlights at the big music halls and the witchcraft of powder, rouge and eye-pencil ensured that she was still a desirable creature.

After dancing for a few months at Buenos Aires she went on to Montevideo, accompanied by Tito, Pierina and the dog.

She stayed at Montevideo for three months and at Rosario for a fortnight.

A paint manufacturer proposed to her at Bahia Blanca, and the head of a big canned meat factory fell passionately in love with her at Fray Bentos.

A year after they landed in South America she signed a profitable contract with the Casino at the smart seaside resort of Mar del Plata, one of the most luxurious spas in South America.

The half million francs extracted from Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s precious family memories were nearly exhausted. Tito’s health was declining. The everlasting peregrination from hotel to hotel and from one city to the next, noting how suitors and lovers sprang up everywhere in Cocaine’s path, took an increasing toll of his nerves and impoverished his blood.

He had come to South America hoping that good theatrical contracts and the money he had earned by cleansing Kalantan’s past would assure him of exclusive access to Maud’s body. But the rastaquero whose acquaintance she had made on the voyage out, the greasy face of that country gentleman with his inexhaustible wallet and robust passions, followed them to the various cities they visited.

Cocaine distributed her favors both on expensive and on gratuitous terms. Now that she was aware of her swift physical decline, she sought out pleasure without wasting a day or missing an opportunity; she gave herself to men who turned out to be unworthy of her generosity.

“You give them pleasure and they’re not grateful to you.”

She laughed loudly. “What makes you think that whenever I give myself to someone I want his esteem and gratitude? Gratitude for what? I don’t do it to give him pleasure; I do it for my own pleasure, or for the money he gives me. Why should I worry about what he says if I felt pleasure during the five minutes when his body was on mine? Esteem? Gratitude? Rubbish. If you hope to catch me with those arguments, I advise you to try something else.”

Tito had already threatened to leave her, but to no avail. “Your beauty is fading,” he argued desperately. “You’re only twenty-four, but you look much older. I love you because physically I’m welded to you, because an elective affinity binds me to you independently of your beauty. You’re getting old. You may still interest someone who’s attracted to you by the animal pleasure of having you, but not by your charms; he’ll want you, not because you’re young and beautiful, but because you have female organs. I’m the only one who can still feel your fascination, because I remember your former beauty. You’re almost a corpse of a woman. You may still take in some shortsighted person thanks to your dye and your make-up, but soon you’ll find yourself rejected like a badly forged bank note. You’ve the prospect of five or six more men and a few more affairs at most.

“Well, Cocaine, you must renounce those few affairs unless you want me to leave you for ever,” he went on. “I shall remain devoted to you for the whole of your life. When no one spares you a second glance I shall still be there to love you, to tell you you’re beautiful, to give you the illusion of still being attractive. I offer you my life, but what I want from you in return while your beauty fades is the faithfulness you’ve never been able to give me. Remember the specter of loneliness that lies ahead of you. Think of the time when you’ll be reduced to spending your nights alone, cold and old, and when you wake up in your bed you’ll see the yellow flesh that nobody wants any longer. If you now reject these men who are after you I’ll love you even then.”

Cocaine looked at him dry-eyed and answered: “Renunciation is what I’m afraid of.”

“But do you realize what I’m offering you in return?”

“Yes. And I prefer being alone and abandoned for ever tomorrow to giving up my pleasure tonight. The specter of loneliness is less terrifying than the immediate prospect of renunciation.”

“But have you taken stock of what remains to you? Don’t you know that every morning you have to remove hair round your lips? Don’t you realize that the skin of your neck is as fat and flabby as that on a turkey’s neck?”

“Yes. But having an affair still tempts me.”

“Remember you’ll be old tomorrow.”

“And so will you be the day after tomorrow.”

“I shall still be able to get young, fresh, beautiful women by paying them.”

“And I shall be able to get healthy males by paying them.”

“It’s not the same,” Tito replied. “I’ve always paid. The man always pays, even when he’s twenty, even when the woman seems to be giving herself to him for love. Having always sold yourself, you’ll be faced with the sad novelty of buying. You’ll find out how sad it is to pay for love.”

“That’s something I haven’t tried yet. Perhaps it might have its pleasing side. We shall see. Now let me go, because it’s nine o’clock, and I’m on at the Casino at a quarter past ten. Goodbye.”

After the show the few free seats left round the roulette tables were noisily taken by storm while the chief croupier in his elevated headquarters called out: “Un peu de silence, s’il vous plait.”

Tito walked round the four tables. Those sitting at them were inter-continental hetairae, men with no visible means of support, ladies of a certain age and others of an uncertain age, mères encore aimables, naked virgins only small parts of whom were covered, radioactive women who had given themselves a huge white forehead resting on knitted brows — the face of the cruel woman; the first of these were attractive, but then they became as commonplace as Alsatians or gold snake bracelets.

They were calm, composed-looking men; attentive footmen who picked up dropped chips and swept cigarette ash from the green cloth; women who with bureaucratic diligence noted down all the winning numbers, in the belief that they recurred. Those who believe that luck repeats itself resemble those who believe in applying experience gained with earlier lovers to new ones. They invariably lose, both at play and in life.

But Tito couldn’t find a seat.

If only one of these persons had an epileptic fit, it would be enough. It would free three seats immediately, because his two neighbors would carry away the body. But people have more pity for the dead than for the living.

“Trente et un: rouge impair et passe.”

An old woman who had lost all her money wouldn’t move. At least she wasn’t going to lose her seat.

“As selfish as a tapeworm,” Tito said aloud.

A gentleman sitting in front of him turned and exclaimed: “Arnaudi?”

It was an old friend from his boyhood days.

What a bore these childhood friends are. Just because you had the misfortune to meet them before the light of reason dawned, afterwards you have to put up with them wherever in the whole wide world you run into them.

“I’ll lose these thousand pesos,” his friend said, showing him two or three piles of chips, “and then we’ll go.”

The roulette room, with its vague noises and obscure vibrations, reminded Tito of the illustrations in books of experimental physics that show iron filings arranging themselves on magnets in accordance with different lines of force.

He felt those lines of force in the air over the green baize tables and understood why there are people who live and die for gambling.

Gambling is merely a summary of life, which is nothing but a quarter of an hour at a roulette table. The successful are those who win; and to win it’s sufficient if the gentleman on your right distracts your attention for a moment or the lady on your left prevents you from putting your stake on the number you chose. All that’s needed is that you should be seated near the low numbers when the low numbers come up, or that you should hear a voice in the air, a number whispered by an anonymous voice, and that you should put your money on it.

Gambling is not the pleasure of winning, but a feeling that you are living intensely.

It’s folly to entrust your fate to numbers that are the mere scrapheap of calculation, the rubble of mathematics. Abandoning honest work for the extravagance of gambling is like dropping science in favor of empiricism.

Those who win thanks to the empiricism of a bankruptcy or a martingale have difficulty in returning to subcutaneous injections and straightforward business transactions.

Do you generally win?” Tito’s friend asked.

“I didn’t play this evening, but I always lose,” Tito replied. “The only people who play to win are old, retired cocottes.”

The two friends parted.

Tito walked back to the hotel. It was dark. The iron benches under the palms along the seaside promenade were occupied by couples as quiet as insects in love. Every now and then a fleeting car projected beams of light and the sound of laughter.

He passed a party of perspiring young ladies, irresistible young men, officers. As in all groups that include a few intellectual young women and fashionable idiots, they were discussing spiritualism and theosophy. The young ladies inserted Portuguese words into their Spanish. In Italy they adorn their talk with French words and in France with English ones; in Horace’s Rome female intellectuals used Greek words. You find bluestockings everywhere.

The frock-coated porter, hearing the crunch of gravel, opened the door for him. In the lobby a shrieking child was struggling with a phlegmatic nurse. He entered the lift, and three floors of the hotel descended beneath him.

When he was in his own room he strode backwards and forwards on the silent carpets like a madman.

A mosquito was buzzing about, landing here or there on its long legs, which were like those of a young lady suffering from anemia. It flew round Tito’s head and then came to rest on his hand. It was the kind from which you get malaria.

Tito crushed it with his other hand. Then his face darkened. How tremendously inferior men are to insects, he said to himself. To kill a man an insect only has to sting him, while to kill an insect a man has to crush it.

Maud had not yet come back.

Tito sat on the bed, and his gaze fell on the alarm clock. He wound it and put it back. There was a notice under the bedside lamp. Tito read it, nervously cleaning his fingernails.

Le prix de la chambre sera augmenté dans le cas où ne sera pas pris au moins un des repas principaux à l’Hôtel.

The price of this room will be augmented if one of the principal meals (lunch or dinner) is not taken in the hotel.

Der Zimmerpreis erfährt Erhöhung wenn keine der beiden Hauptmahlzeiten (Lunch oder Diner) im Hotel eingenommen werden.

The sound of pulleys and counterweights came from the lift-well.

Here she is, Tito said to himself.

But the lift stopped at the floor below.

He waited for a moment, hoping that it had stopped to let someone out and that it would resume its ascent and bring his Maud up to him. Instead if gently went down again, moving its own volume of air in the well and making a noise like a tire being deflated.

He walked across the room and opened the window.

In the distance the vague luminosity peculiar to all big cities hovered in the night like phosphorus vapor, as if the sky were reflected in a convex glass.

Tito looked at the constellations of the southern hemisphere: groups of stars, stars like iron filings, stars like flotsam and jetsam, naive combinations of primitive goldsmiths’ work. He felt the blue of the night raining on his heated face. He looked for two constellations of which he had heard when he was a boy: the Southern Cross and Hydra. But he had the impression that in this part of the world the sky was just as randomly untidy as was his own sky.

A big avenue along the seafront flaunted its arc lamps at regular intervals against the dark background of water; they looked like the illuminated portholes of a big ship travelling slowly with all its lights on.

Music, now audible and now not, floated on the slight breeze from some distant villa; it seemed to be not the breeze that was carrying the music but the music that was bringing the breeze to him on that sultry night. Clusters of lights under the big black trees glittered like a paste clasp in rustling tresses. Tito put his hands out of the window as one does in a railway compartment in August in the hope of getting an illusion of coolness from the speed of the train.

He counted the floors beneath him. He was about forty meters up.

A motorboat made its way along the estuary, with guitars and lit cigarettes.

Tito raised his eyes to see whether Vesuvius were not smoking in front of him.

But his Cocaine had not come back.

He shut the window, started the fan that was on the bedside table and slowly began to undress.

“Aren’t you in bed yet?” said Maud, coming in suddenly with her hat in one hand and passing the fingers of her other hand across her brow.

“As you see,” Tito answered coldly, tying the cord of his pajamas round his waist.

“What’s the matter?” Cocaine asked, reading the reasons for his ill humor on her lover’s face.

“Where have you been all this time?”

“Here we are again. Where do you expect me to have been?”

“That’s what I was asking you.”

“I’ve been out for a drive in a car.”

“With whom?”

“Arguedos.”

“The student?”

“Yes.”

“In a car? If he had money for a car, he’d take a bed in a sanatorium.”

“What do you know about it?” the woman objected. Women’s skin reacts quickly to their lovers’ pinpricks.

“And where did that wretch get a car from?” Tito insisted.

“If you didn’t lend him the money, someone else must have done it.”

“No one would trust him with a bootlace.”

“He must have hired it.”

“With whose money?”

“With mine. You think no one trusts him? Well, I do. I lent him a thousand pesos.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Out of friendship.”

“You’ll never get it back.”

“I know.”

“Then it was a present.”

“Call it what you like.”

As she said this she opened the communicating door and disappeared into her own room, tapping the doorpost with her rings.

Tito, cold, calm and painfully hostile, went back to the window to receive comfort from the infinite. The boundless night does not deny consolation to those who ask with the eloquence of pain. And, drinking in a mouthful of blue air (a gramophone was now playing somewhere) he said to himself, laughing bitterly: She used to go to bed with men for the sake of money. Now she pays to go to bed with them. If she grew so atrociously ugly that she couldn’t get a man, she’d wait for the first poor sex-starved devil coming out of jail who made a beeline for her for want of anything better. But she’ll never be faithful to me.

The gramophone had stopped.

A nightingale kept a sleepy villa garden awake.

In another villa an invisible violin sounded as if it was at death’s door.

The violin and the nightingale could not see each other, but took turns in telling each other about their sadness.

They seemed to be the same nightingale and the same violin that were to be heard at night in Paris at Kalantan’s villa which was as white as an ossuary. How uniform the world was. But for the fact of the intervening ocean, the road between that Paris villa and this South American hotel would be scattered with nightingales and violins just like these.

The gramophone started up again. They had put on a new record. It started up again to cover those other sounds with its froglike croaking.

The gramophone is the duty frog in the great swamp that is every big city.

Tito did not sleep that night. He heard bells ringing: once for the waiter, twice for the waitress, three times for the porter.

He heard the sound of footsteps on the ribbon-shaped carpets in the corridor.

He heard the moaning of a siren of an arriving ship (how sad) or a departing one (how melancholy).

He switched on the light. He was in a hotel bedroom. There was the number of the room and a notice giving the prices. The management could not accept responsibility for valuables not handed in at the office.

He switched off the light.

He had the illusion of going to sleep, but did not sleep. He seemed to be leaning against a high balustrade that suddenly disappeared and let him fall into the void. But halfway down he awoke with extended arms.

A beetle in the Louis XV-style wardrobe ticked its monotonous complaint. Tito remembered that in his country these creatures were called deathwatch beetles, because their ticking was believed to portend death.

Actually it was a sign of love. An amorous duel was in progress, the ticking is a call to the other sex made by the insect beating its head on the wood of its bachelor quarters. And men kill them because they’re parasites, Tito said to himself. As if man were not the most dreadful example of parasitism in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

Maud, Cocaine, he went on. Cocaine, tremendous and necessary little woman; my mortal and life-giving poison; little woman to whom I’m attached like a parasite, like Diplozoon paradoxum.

Forgotten memories, distant ideas, memories of his youth returned to his mind.

Just like Diplozoon paradoxum (he went on). A tiny creature that when it finds a companion of the opposite sex attaches itself to it with a sucker as big as its whole body, and then they stay joined forever.

Forever. The expression that all lovers use. The dream that comes true only for those little creatures buried in parasitology books. Maud and I are attached by each other’s suckers.

That was how Tito rambled on while the worm in the wood went on ticking out its amorous call. Tito preferred to think of it as a deathwatch.

Everything all round us is death (he said to himself). We live at the expense of humus, that is, of death. Even modern, active advanced ideas live on the humus of dead ideas. Oh, taedium vitae. How splendid life would be without mankind. To see birds enjoying complete liberty to reproduce themselves, to see forests invading cities, grass growing on café tables, chickens laying eggs on the altars of abandoned cathedrals, fungus growing on the parchment in libraries, lightning striking empty marriage beds. Man has actually given direction to the lighting. Oh, to see horses eating the violets and running free in the public parks.

The sound of the lift gate being shut clumsily awoke him.

He put his hand to his heart.

Heart, lungs, blood (he went on). I’m sick of knowing that my body’s a laboratory designed to nourish and renew my protoplasm. I’m nothing but phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. I’m sick of looking at myself, of looking down on myself as if I had eyes outside myself. And I’m sick of being in love, that is, of using up my phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

Tito was haunted all night by these strange ideas. A church clock struck the hour, followed by a school clock and a station clock. Then a cock crowed, another replied, and a third intervened.

How cocks and clocks and nightingales and gramophone and violins repeated and imitated one another.

He turned and rolled between the sheets. He lay with his head at the foot of the bed and put one leg down on either side. He switched on the fan, looked at the time, switched off the fan, got up and dressed.

He rang twice, and a maid appeared. He rang four times and the porter came. He told the maid to pack his bags. Only his, not the lady’s. He told the porter to book him a passage on the first ship leaving for Europe.

“It’ll be rather difficult to get you a cabin today, sir,” the porter prudently suggested. “But I can telephone to Buenos Aires.”

“When all the cabins in a transatlantic liner are booked,” Tito said, “a grand hotel porter can always manage to find another one, and it’s always the best in the ship.”

Some hours later, at about midday, when Cocaine came in without knocking, she found an Englishwoman who had just arrived busily soaping the abundant fat of her oversized face.

In response to the startled lady’s protests Maud muttered an apology and summoned a waiter.

“The gentleman left the hotel half an hour ago.” he said.

Maud did not reply.

“But,” the waiter, who was a tremendous psychologist, went on, “as the ship doesn’t leave until this evening, I could get a car and bring him back in eight hours, if madam so desired.”

“Bring me some bread and butter,” Maud replied.

The waiter was on his way out when Maud called him back.

“And honey,” she said.