Cocaine

11

The sea was calm.

Even before they left the estuary he met a distinguished Hungarian polyglot scientist who spat when he spoke just as grasshoppers, irritated grubs and female concierges do to defend themselves. The man was engaged in some very important research into the psychology of women of various nationalities in relation to the weight of their organs.

He had discovered that German women’s hearts weighed a kilogram, that their brain weighed 825 grams, and that their height was 1.7 meters. The figures for Austrian women were heart 950; brain 850; length of hair 65 centimeters. North American women, spleen… etc.

Tito also made the acquaintance of a Spanish woman from Granada who walked into his cabin by mistake.

The mistake cost him two hundred pesos; the lady insisted on payment in advance.

“What gall these Spanish women have,” Tito remarked to the Hungarian scientist.

“About a kilogram,” the savant replied.

Like a king in fairy stories, he had two daughters who were very much alike; there could be no doubt that they were daughters of the same mother. One was plump, pink-cheeked and florid, and the other was smaller and more delicately made. But they were both of the same type, like an orange and a tangerine.

Tito peeled both of them.

He did the usual things one does on a voyage, like guessing the height of the ship, questioning the officers about longitude and latitude and the ship’s telegraph and compass, watching the clouds being ruffled by the wind, adjusting one’s watch to the ship’s time, exchanging remedies for sea-sickness, sitting on a blanket on a long rush seat and letting one’s face be tickled by the perfumed wind, pestering the wireless operator with silly questions, listening to stories of shipwrecks that never happened, and having complicated cocktails made by the barman. When they called at a Brazilian port he looked for butterflies like those let loose in the penguin room at the villa in the Champs Elysées belonging to Kalantan, the beautiful Armenian lady, and when they crossed the line he took part in the usual celebrations and put a cork in his pocket as a souvenir. On the coast of Senegal he disembarked for a few hours to have a look at the native open air brothels.

During the first few days of the crossing he bought a monkey from a Chilean dealer who displayed in the stern his loquacious stock of polyglot parrots, masturbating monkeys, caged birds and goldfinches with fancy waistcoats. Towards the end of the voyage he gave the monkey back as a present. The Chilean dealer accepted it as a favor. Everyone who buys a monkey early in a voyage gives it back before disembarking, and some monkeys are said to have crossed the Atlantic ten times in this way.

A Dutch young lady, the daughter of a big jam manufacturer who had travelled a great deal, told him that at Port Said she had seen an Egyptian woman being subjected to what moralists call the extreme outrage — by a donkey.

“It’s certainly donkeys that are most successful with women,” Tito remarked.

“But this wasn’t a metaphorical donkey, it was a donkey with four legs,” the daughter of the Dutch jam manufacturer pointed out.

“And where did this take place? In a field?”

“No, at a stall at a fair. You paid a pound sterling to watch.”

“And who got the money?” Tito asked.

“The woman.”

“I’d have given it to the donkey.”

He was introduced to some respectable ladies with whom he engaged in the polite conversation that follows an introduction.

“But how is it, my dear lady, that you already have a son as big as that?”

“Oh, I was still a child when I got married.”

The Dutch young lady also received him by mistake in her cabin, and did not put many difficulties in the way of his crossing the line. She was such an experienced traveler that she was able to whistle in bed, which gave Tito the embarrassing feeling that he was in bed with a man, though she was all warm, smooth and glossy, just like an electric lamp.

The respectable lady who already had a boy as big as that also joined the ranks of his ex-lovers.

He had a splendid appetite, though the pain of having left Maud gave him a vague feeling of uneasiness. Some people don’t eat when they are unhappy. They feel moral pain in their intestines. When Tito had love trouble his appetite was excellent.

He often went down to the deafening din of the engine room to watch the naked, bronzed, athletic stokers, those marvelous men who make virgins’ mouths water.

He also met a lady who, knowing him to be a journalist and therefore something very close to literature, asked him to suggest a motto to be inscribed on the buckle of her garters.

Women don’t keep you hanging about on board ship. Perhaps they may do so on voyages of forty days or two months, but on a fortnight’s crossing, never.

He recalled his gloomy days in Paris, his lonely wanderings past the abattoirs to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, when his depressed senses enabled him to think without suffering about Maud walking around naked in someone else’s house. But now he was full of eager virility. It was the excitement of the sea. The odor of the infinite is an insidious aphrodisiac.

He was sitting in the smoking room one evening facing a lady whose legs were enclosed in pearly-gray silk stockings. They gleamed like fish just out of the water.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m praying,” Tito replied.

“I thought you were looking at my legs,” she said with a sidelong glance.

“That’s how we atheists pray.”

That evening Tito went and prayed in the cabin where those legs came from.

The sea was calm.

Everyone knows that if a man and woman not united by marriage are found in a compromising situation on board ship, they are in for a great deal of trouble.

That, however, is merely a bright idea thought up by the steamship companies, who never grudge persons of standing their entertainment. Not only do they supply a gypsy orchestra (gypsy orchestras are the caricaturists of music), a library, religious services and a daily newspaper giving the latest news (that was received before the ship sailed), and a gym; they also had the inspiration of subjecting contraband love affairs to severe penalties in order to make the idea more exciting to passengers in the luxury class, the first class and, provided a suitable tip is offered, the second class also.

This does not apply to passengers in the third class, where it would be too immoral, and offenders are subject to immediate arrest.

“You pay court to all the women,” Tito’s neighbor at table said to him. This neighbor was a rabbi from Warsaw who was returning from South America with a chanteuse who was as delicate as a flower and with a large sum of money collected for the Zionist cause.

“Yes,” Tito replied, it’s like dueling. For army officers dueling is an offence, but refusing to fight a duel is an even greater offence. It’s the same with women. If you tell a woman you want her, she’s offended, but if you don’t want her she’s even more offended.”

“You must have had a great many women,” the rabbi said. “You must know them very well.”

“I have had mistresses,” Tito modestly confessed, “but it’s quite wrong to suppose that a man who has had many women must have a profound understanding of feminine psychology; it’s just as wrong as it would be to suppose that an art gallery attendant would make a good art critic. Besides, what do you really need to make a conquest? Nothing whatever. All you have to do is to let her make a conquest of you. Men never choose. They think they choose, but in fact they’re chosen. A man paying court to a woman doesn’t try to seize her, he simply puts himself in a position where he can be seized. If you don’t believe me, look at the animal kingdom. The male is nearly always more beautiful than the female, which means that it’s the male who is chosen. The female is not sought after, so, unlike the male, she has no need to be beautiful. Look how striking the male bird of paradise is, and what a poor thing the female is.”

“That’s true,” the rabbi admitted, pulling his moustache horizontal. “But the great difficulty is not getting women, it’s leaving them.”

“I disagree,” Tito replied. The man doesn’t leave the woman, he puts himself in a condition to be left. In exceptional cases in which he wants to break the link there’s an infallible way of withdrawing gracefully, and it’s this: say to her point-blank, in threatening tones: “I know everything.”

“Everything about what?” the rabbi asked in surprise.

“Believe me, the most innocent woman always has something in her recent or distant past that can be the everything to which you refer.”

Two English misses sitting facing them listened in silence, opening their eyes wide, like heifers at the passing of an express train.

The rabbi from Warsaw was a very likeable man. He laughed aloud at the caricature of the Bible that Tito once produced for his benefit when he was under the influence of cocaine, and told him that the money he had collected in America would serve to revive the kingdom of Israel in Palestine and enable Jews scattered all over the world to resettle there.

“And will you go to Palestine?” Tito asked.

“No, I won’t,” the rabbi replied, “I’m too well off in Warsaw.”

“But what about the persecutions, the pogroms?”

“That’s all humbug,” the rabbi replied with a laugh. “Those are rumors spread by us Polish Jews. We want it to be believed that Jews are badly off in Poland to prevent others from coming there.”

Tito’s senses were excited by the sun, the smell of the calm sea, the sensuality inherent in all transatlantic liners, the uterine quality with which the brasses, the upholstery, the decks, the big saloons and long corridors are impregnated. In the course of the twenty-two-day voyage he satisfied his senses ten times with five different women; and in doing so he almost wiped out the memory of Maud, which grew fainter with every turn of the screw. Love (erotic attraction), like the force of gravity, diminishes proportionately to the square of the distance.

When they drew close to land, Tito regretted the prospect of saying goodbye to the Dutch young lady with her perfect curves that were as sweet as her father’s jam; to the respectable lady who already had a son as big as that because she had married when she was still a child; to the professor’s two daughters, who were as alike and unlike as a tangerine and an orange; to the lady with the luminous legs who wanted a motto for her garters; and to the drily humorous Warsaw rabbi’s mistress, who was as delicate as a flower and as stupid as an ox.

He regretted all these women whom he would never see again.

But he did not regret Cocaine, his Cocaine, whom he never wanted to see again, Cocaine who at that moment was either writhing deceitfully in the arms of the multimillionaire rastaquero whose face would surely secrete castor-oil if you squeezed it, or on the hollow chest of the student Arguedos, who was looking in vain for a half-price bed in a sanatorium.

But as soon as he was in the train to Turin, all that was left of the voyage was some cigarettes given him by a generous passenger and some tropical sunburn.

And his thoughts returned to Cocaine, his little Cocaine whom he had left on the other side of the Atlantic; his Cocaine whose skin had a perfume not to be found on any other woman, his Cocaine on whose epidermis scents acted more miraculously than on any other female skin, Cocaine, Maud, the woman from whom he fled and to whom he returned, the poison-woman whom he hated and loved, for she was simultaneously his ruin and his delight, his suffering and his exaltation, his most delightful death and his most terrible life.

In Turin, cradle of the Risorgimento and guardian of the Holy Shroud, he saw the usual faces and the usual things. At dusk hundreds of swifts still tangled and untangled in disorderly patterns as they flew round the towers of the Palazzo Madama; and the usual people got on the usual trams at the usual stops at the usual times. He met a number of friends and a number of women who, when he came to think of it, had been his. Sometimes we meet women whose lovers we have been for an hour or a month, and we hardly remember having dedicated to them the solemn ceremony conducted by the industrious donkey with the Egyptian woman at Port Said, though the memory of that highly important ceremony ought automatically to spring to our mind. How insignificant it is. Nothing of her flesh, her electricity, her breath, has remained in us, nothing whatever. As soon as it was over, while she dressed, we started chatting again about other, unimportant things. So all that was left was a taste no stronger than that left in our mouths by a cigarette after we have put it in an ashtray. But if we discover that our current love has been someone else’s, if only for five minutes, we feel an intolerable pang, even after many years. The act to which she was subjected by others seems to us to be an indelible stain; we feel that her blood has been polluted, her flesh irreparably soiled, violated, adulterated by that act, by that very same act that we hardly remember carrying out with the woman we now pass in the street.

Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain.

Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion.

The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror.

But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with the woman you love.

Well, what remains in your skin, your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman.

In other words, auto-suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don’t know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you’d kill him.

But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it’s possible to look at him without horror; and, believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you’d approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you had reached my degree of perfection, you’d actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he’s a good chap.

In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy. The day will come when our beloved children (the cuckolds of the future) will be prepared to be cuckolded and will no longer suffer for it, because we shall have inoculated them with commonsense and given them anti-cuckoldry injections.

Now that he could not see the men concerned, Tito’s jealousy was greater than it had been three weeks earlier, when they were within his reach, catching the scent of the latest electric sparks invisibly given off by Maud’s body.

A street-walker offered herself to him for twenty lire.

“That’s not expensive, not even enough to cover the costs of production. Come along, then. But I’ll spray you all over with scent.”

The seller of sensations followed him to his room and allowed herself to be sprayed with Avatar, Maud’s perfume.

He tried a large number of these women. They were young, pretty and skillful, but they were not Cocaine. He poured her scent, the delicious Avatar, over them, but the result was not the same as that produced on Cocaine’s skin.

Every woman’s skin interprets scents in its own way, just as every musician interprets music in his own way.

He tried exhausting himself, exhausting his virility, going from one woman’s bed to another, but when his flesh seemed dead to any stimulus there was one thing that still excited him, the memory of Maud, desire for her. He had experienced this once before, in Paris, when, after the excesses of the insatiable Kalantan, he discovered new sources of pleasure in himself at the sight of Maud.

He went walking in the outlying districts of Turin, just as he had done in his days of misery in Paris. But now when he walked he started feeling the weight of his body. It was the first sign of age, the age when men start wearing dark brown suits.

One day he came across the knitted green tie with big blue diagonal stripes in a forgotten corner of a suitcase, and he wore it to go and see his monk friend who had sought refuge in the monastery that was a kind of Foreign Legion for the victims of emotional upsets. A ray of sunlight that fell on the tie revived a dead trace of Avatar scent. If you only knew how tears are perfumed when they run down a pretty woman’s face, and how ties are perfumed when a woman weeps on them.

In the monastery garden swifts were flying about at ground level and then zooming up as if to cleanse themselves in the sky.

A poor monk was throwing bits of bread to sparrows as poor as himself. Waves of silence met Tito in the porch.

His friend the monk came to meet him, holding out both sleeves, and greeted him as his brother in Christ. Then he said: “Yes, I’m happy.”

And he told him that he should enter the monastery too.

“But it’s not so easy…”

“On the contrary, it’s very easy indeed. Are you a Mason?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s just like entering a Masonic lodge.” He said that the Good Shepherd was happy to find a lost sheep.

“I know,” said Tito. “But if He doesn’t find it there’s one fewer to milk and clip.”

The monk showed Tito his cell, the library, and the workroom of an aged monk who lovingly studied beetles and butterflies. He also took him to the chapel.

“I’m sorry I can’t offer you a vermouth, as I did when I was a waiter in Paris,” he said. “But I can offer you a mass.”

“Very well,” said Tito, “I’ll settle for a mass.”

“Ordinary mass or sung mass?”

“Which is the quicker?”

“There’s no difference.”

“If you’ll sing…”

“Of course I will.”

“Then make it sung mass.”

He duly listened to it.

“Would you also like a benediction?”

“No, thanks. I’m all right as it is.”

They walked slowly along the cloister and looked at the refectory.

“What’s the food like?”

“It’s table d’hôte. Only the sick eat à la carte.”

The monk said that Christ should be loved because He had sacrificed himself for mankind, and Tito replied that the mice and rabbits that were killed in laboratories to test new medicines for the benefit of mankind were Jesus Christs too.

The monk was horrified, and begged him not to blaspheme; he said that mice saved nobody, while Jesus Christ had redeemed mankind.

“In that case a fireman who dies to save a single life is more admirable than Christ, because there’s more merit in sacrificing yourself to save a single life than in saving thousands of millions.”

The monk was not convinced, but he could find nothing better to suggest than that Tito should take minor orders, and he was so persuasive that when Tito said goodbye he did not dare call him a fool, but said: “I’ll consult my conscience.” In other words, he was just like women who, when they want to leave a shop without buying, say: “I’ll come back with my husband.”

He spent two or three evenings in a café in the Via Po, which he knew well from his student days. It was still frequented by the poet who wrote in dialect and drank coffee without sugar and the old painter who specialized in landscapes of Mars and the fantastic flowers of Saturn because he could not draw the flowers and countryside of our own world. Those people were artists. People are generous with labels. If someone manages to get a little bit of clay together and make a nose with it, he’s consecrated as an artist; if someone has four books and a microscope, he passes for a scientist. But fortunately reputations are demolished as easily as they are gained.

He was told that Pietro Nocera, who had been his colleague on the newspaper in Paris, was in Turin too. In fact a few days later he met him.

“Yes,” Nocera said, “I heard about that half million coup of yours. I wasn’t in the least surprised. It doesn’t surprise me when a man steals. What surprises me is when he doesn’t. Because there’s a latent, potential thief in everyone, and I make no distinction between those who have stolen and those who haven’t stolen yet.”

“It was the opportunity,” Tito said by way of excuse. “I’d always been honest before.”

“I know. My friend Marco Ramperti says that honesty is merely long-term cunning. But what are you doing now?”

“I’m living in a furnished room, and I still have a little money laid aside. When it has all gone I shall commit suicide or become a monk.”

“Are you becoming religious?”

“No. Religions remind me of the big companies that are promoted with government support to exploit mines that no one has ever seen. Other religions oppose them, but not too violently, to prevent anyone from finding out that they too are based on nonexistent mines. But, since the honorary chairman is the Almighty, everyone takes them seriously. Perhaps I too will one day take one of them seriously, particularly as I have nothing to lose if the speculation fails. And what did you do in Paris after I left? And why did you come back to Italy?”

“I fell in love with an ordinary little woman, whom I liked because of some of her shortcomings. But she had too many of them, and some of them I didn’t like. I tried to improve her with advice and tonic and corrective reading. But trying to improve a woman with words is like spreading sugar on chestnuts in the hope of producing marrons glacés.

“After that I fell in love on the rebound with a superior woman; she belonged to the old nobility, and she was also beautiful. But I’ve discovered that in every woman, whether superior or inferior, there are always four ingredients: nobility and commonness, the prostitute and the servant. The proportions vary, but the ingredients are always the same. In a superior woman you’ll find 93 per cent nobility, but the other seven per cent…

“The trouble is that they can’t hide that seven per cent. They talk grandly; all their ideas are grand and pure and lofty, like a rainbow. They turn up their noses at the minor miseries of life. When they are with a man cabs and hired cars are too vulgar for their fragile constitutions, but when they are alone they economically take the tram. If you take them out to tea, the tip you leave the waitress, even if it’s bigger than the bill, is always too little in their generous eyes. But if they are alone what they leave in the plate is less than you’d dare offer an organ grinder. If you lose your wallet, they laugh, and they’re rude if you look worried about it. But when they have to buy a pair of laces they haggle over twenty centesimi as if they were plenipotentiaries negotiating a new frontier.”

“I know,” Tito interrupted. “I could have told you all that. When you find such defects in superior women they’re pleasing, because they are the abysses that correspond to the dizzy heights. But please go on.”

“And so I left her in Paris and came back to Turin. I’m now an estate agent. Would you like to buy some land?”

“In the cemetery, perhaps. But not yet. Haven’t you got a woman here?”

“Yes, I have,” Nocera replied. “She’s an ordinary little woman, very plain from the outside, both in her ways and in her dress, but behind her modest ways she’s a treasure of sensitive simplicity, and under her quiet clothing she wears the most delicate underwear.”

Maud’s crêpe-de-Chine underwear adorned with fine organdy pleats flashed through Tito’s mind.

“She reminds me of a Muslim house,” Nocera went on. “From the outside it’s nothing but a square whitewashed block, but inside there are the most marvelous mosaics, gardens and fountains.”

“Won’t you be going back to Paris?”

“No, Tito, no more than you will. You, I, your waiter-monk friend, your Maud, your — what’s her name? — Calomelan…”

“Kalantan.”

“… are all governed by the same destiny. We’re like dying dogs that go and hide under beds or tables. We’re like stray cats that have run wild and go back home to die. We’re products of a disintegrating society. You, I, and your waiter friend for one reason or another leave Paris, the city of big streets and big appearances, because we are approaching the death of our desires. No longer wanting, no longer being curious, is equivalent to death. Your Armenian lady, if I rightly remember what you told me about her, rapidly completed the cycle of vices to take refuge in pure love, chaste delirium, as you put it. Your Maud scaled the heights of pure love in search of vice and, to obtain the maximum amorous yield that the organs can provide, killed those very organs herself. Our lives are a relentless pursuit of ideas; your waiter friend, who was an atheist, suddenly becomes a mystic.”

“Rubbish. He wears the clothes of a mystic, but laughs at them.”

“Better still. Because of his need to renounce something he takes orders without having faith, like someone who accepts a prison sentence he doesn’t deserve. Our life is a headlong succession of passions. For a long time you couldn’t make up your mind between two women, and because your feelings were so intense, you loved both at the same time. You tell me that Maud is getting old; she, too, of her own free will joined in the race to death.

“We are all killing ourselves in different ways, and we’re dying even though our heart goes on beating. Do you remember that excellent fellow, that so likeable chief sub-editor, that systematic, methodical drinker who drank out of conviction more than out of vice? You remember what he used to say? What? You don’t remember what he said in the Café Richelieu on the day we introduced you to the Armenian lady? He said: “To me women are roving uteri that men run after with words like glory and ideals on their lips. To avoid seeing that horror, I, a drinker out of conviction, drink. And I’m killing myself.” We’re all killing ourselves. We men of our time are all killing ourselves. And the spread of cocaine is symptomatic of the poisoning to which we are all succumbing. Cocaine is not hydrochloride of cocaine; it’s the sweet voluntary death that every one of us is calling for with different voices and with different words.

“This is where I live, on the second floor. Come and see me when you feel like it. Goodbye.”

Tito walked home alone. He found the shiny, spherical cinerary urns and the monstrance in his luggage. The urns were as spherical and shiny as soap bubbles, and inside the monstrance was the nude photograph of Maud.

He took it and put it in his pocket, so that he would always have it with him.

Then he went out again.

A few minutes or a few hours later he came back, his mind firmly and irrevocably made up. He would become a monk; he too would go to the monastery that accepted spiritual failures.

I shall devote myself to the study of butterflies and beetles, like that aged friar, he said to himself. An insect is more elegant than the most elegant gentleman. There’s more brilliance in a box of tiger beetles than in the windows of all the jewelers in Paris. I’ve seen clashing colors at embassy balls, but on insects’ wings, never. I shall work in the garden, watch the miracle of the seed germinating and emerging from the earth with its tender green smile. It’s as marvelous as the mystery of love, and there’s nothing mean or cowardly about it.

And I shall grow a great big beard (he went on), a long flowing beard that will be the headquarters of all my butterflies and all my beetles, and I shall never again take cocaine, even when I have a tooth out.

At this time tomorrow I’ll knock at the door. The day after that I shall have my sandals. I shan’t have everything at once, but I shall have some things; probably the girdle. The first thing they give soldiers is a spoon and a mess tin. And in a week’s time I shall feel I’ve been a monk all my life.

“Can I come in?”

It was the landlady with a radiogram.

TELEGRAPHING ON BOARD CARONIA ON WAY GENOA BUT STOPPING ONE WEEK DAKAR TO DANCE GOVERNMENT HOUSE PLEASE MEET ME DAKAR I LOVE YOU COCAINE.

Tito took a sheet of paper and wrote:

MAUD FABREGE DANCER STEAMSHIP CARONIA LINE BUENOS AIRES-GENOA TAKING FIRST SHIP DAKAR WANT YOU DESPERATELY TITO.

And he hurried to the telegraph office.