Cocaine

12

“You can still see Genoa,” his neighbor at table said, offering him his binoculars, which magnified twelve times. “In half an hour we’ll be on the high seas. Where are you going?”

“To Dakar.”

“And I’m going to Teresina.”

“Who’s she?”

“Teresina’s a town in Brazil. I’m a manufacturer of food essences of my own invention.”

“What are they for?”

“They’re a complete novelty that I’m going to launch all over the world in six months’ time. It’s an absolutely amazing thing. You know that essential oils of flowers — rose, verbena, carnation, for instance — are used for making toilet waters, and there are also extracts of fruit — raspberry, lemon, tangerine and so on — from which syrups are made. But I don’t use fruit or flowers for my invention; my essences are chemical products, extracts of tar. They can be added to bread or flour and give them the taste of various dishes. The illusion is complete. Thus there’ll be extracts of cutlets à la milanaise with potatoes, underdone roast beef with artichokes, and roast chicken with asparagus. You only need a few drops.”

The sea was not so calm as it had been during Tito’s last trip.

He went pale and, like dying Meleager, pressed his fist to his abdomen and said humbly: “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go back to my cabin.”

The chemical manufacturer was offended. “Don’t these things interest you?” he said.

“After I’ve eaten talking about food makes me feel sick,” Tito explained, “I’m like those men who, after they’ve had a woman, look the other way.”

“What men?”

“All men.”

And without further ado he went down to his cabin and did not emerge until a week later, when he landed on the aromatic coast of Senegal.

Dakar.

On the wharf the white robes of Arabs and the white uniforms of European officials, whose sun helmets made dark shadows like a domino on their luminous faces, stood out among the crowd of black porters.

But there was no sign of Cocaine. He would immediately have recognized her white silhouette surmounted by the glittering halo of her sunshade.

As soon as the disembarkation formalities were over he took the road that opened straight in front of him. The Berber village was on the left and the European quarter on the right; at the end of the road a minaret rising from a kind of oasis stood out against the red sky.

There were Senegalese soldiers, khaki-clad Europeans, an Arab-type bazaar, non-commissioned officers overloaded with stripes, peaceful black civilians of indefinable age sitting on leaf mats in front of their tukuls and imperturbably smoking their hookahs.

Two blacks came up to Tito and in appalling French (the kind spoken by Calabrians who don’t understand it) offered him a shave and a shoeshine, which he declined. A few yards further on he saw a decently dressed man sitting in a chair and undergoing the ordeal of being shaved and having his shoes cleaned at the same time.

Berber women had thrown their long breasts over their shoulders to satisfy the hunger and impatience of their swaddled babies, who sucked behind their mothers’ backs with an absent-minded indifference that was indistinguishable from that of their fathers squatting on the mats and smoking their hookahs.

A small boy, four or five years old and as naked as he was born, clutched Tito’s trousers and said:

“Mossié, moà avoàr belle mere dormir avec vous, dis francs.”

Tito tried to shake him off.

“Mossié, moà avoàr très belle soeur sept ans, dormir avec vous vingt francs.”

A European providentially arrived and freed him from this importunate child. The man was the owner of a comfortable teahouse equipped with the additional attraction of a number of Berber girls. The oldest was sixteen. He explained that Berber women were the most exciting in the world, because they were hot-blooded, shaved every morning with a cut-throat razor and sprinkled themselves with rose water.

“Once you’ve had a Berber girl you’ll never want any other,” the man said.

“In that case, in view of the fact that there are very few Berber girls in my country, it would be a mistake,” Tito replied. “Instead will you be kind enough to tell me which is the best hotel in the town?”

“There it is, the Hotel République Française. So I can’t fix up anything for you, sir? You would have been very satisfied. At all events, here’s my card. Don’t hesitate to honor me at any time.”

Tito took the card. The brothel-keeper was so polite that Tito found it impossible to turn him down flat. He extricated himself as he had done a fortnight before when he said goodbye to his friend the monk, who was anxious to lead him back to God.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

The polyglot porter at the hotel informed him that Miss Maud Fabrège was indeed honoring it with her presence and was occupying rooms 9 and 17.

Tito did some quick mental arithmetic. Nine and seventeen made twenty-six which, divided by two, made thirteen.

A lucky number.

“My love, you’ve come at the worst possible moment. I’ve got to be at the officers’ club in an hour’s time for a reception in my honor, and it’s so hot in this country that I can’t get the rouge to stick to my lips. Pierina, there’s a lighter pair of stockings in that flat suitcase; can’t you see how heavy these are? These would do for ice skating. Never mind, give me any pair you like, but be quick.”

While Pierina knelt in front of her, taking off and putting on her stockings, Maud looked at Tito.

“I can see you’re well,” she said. “You haven’t kissed me yet. Never mind, I’ll give you lots of kisses when I come back, but not now, I can’t get this rouge to stick. Have I got very ugly?”

“Not in the least.”

“You don’t want to tell me, but I know I have. Look, there’s a telegram on that table.”

Tito took it.

“Read it.”

Tito read: BARBAMUS FALABIOS TAGIKO RAMUNGO BOMBAY 200,000 VIAGAROS WOLFF.

“Is that Esperanto?” he asked.

“No. You don’t know the telegraphic handbook they use in business. The telegram’s from a rich carpet merchant in Bombay, and his name is Wolff. Barbamus Falabios, etc, means that if I join him immediately (Falabios means I need urgently), he’ll pay 200,000 francs for my Ramungo, that is, my precious and delicate merchandise, plus travelling expenses there and back.”

“And what did you reply?”

“I told him that the Ramungo is no longer on the market. The poor fellow will be very unhappy, because he’s in love with me, but I can’t stand either him or anyone else any longer. The only man I still love a little is you; I’m fond of you as of a brother or a son, and so far as I’m concerned all the Barbamus Falabios in the world can go to hell. He would have been willing to come and live with me in Italy, but I’ve turned him down. He said that from Bombay we’d go to Persia, Arabia, Syria, the north coast of Africa, and then cross to Italy; it’s the route the swallows take on their return journey. Because my carpet merchant is also a poet. Now it’s four o’clock. I’ll be back at half past six, and we’ll have supper together. After that I’ve got to go and dance at the French consulate. You must come too. Goodbye.”

Tito watched her crossing the sunbaked, dusty street swaying her excessively plump hips.

“Pierina, do you think you could use your influence to get me a bath?”

“I was just coming to take your orders,” an almost Parisian waiter replied. “But it will take some time, sir.”

“For the water to be heated?”

“For it to cool.”

When the block of ice had melted, Tito stretched out in the bath and stayed there for an hour.

Then he dressed very slowly, helping himself every now and then to a greenish iced drink.

Maud Fabrège, danseuse, came back smothered with heat and roses.

The roof of the concert room in the governor’s palace was the blue sky, which was as crowded with stars as if the whole firmament had been raked to gather them into that small rectangle.

When Tito walked in almost unnoticed the audience were already in their places: European officers so suntanned that but for their gold-braided khaki uniforms they could have been taken for natives; notables solemnly wrapped in their white burnouses; some wore silk turbans, leggings, and a harmless dagger under their white robes. The bare arms of the ladies, some of whom were veiled, descended on sumptuously draped and rustling silk. From all these men and women a heavy heat emanated, mounted, surged upwards, as if the earth were trying to give back to the sky the thermal energy received from it. A small orchestra of black cello players with a nearly white conductor in an almost fashionable dinner jacket was busily playing under a small stage surrounded by fans and palms. Waiters were moving about offering melting ices on tinkling trays.

Tropical heat and colonial atmosphere are much more agreeable in the imitations found in the subterranean tabarins of Paris.

Tito looked at the program and, as Maud’s turn was to be preceded by an English conjuror, an Egyptian magician and a German chanteuse, he went out into the street.

Fruit and vegetables were rotting in the dark and deserted market place. In a café where he ordered iced tea, he found a Marseilles newspaper.

Next to him a Senegalese sergeant, loaded with medals and golden badges, was waiting for his absinthe to settle. A French soldier, a typical je-m’en-fichiste from the boulevards, came in with elastic step and complete aplomb and sat down.

The Senegalese sergeant rose and rebuked him: “Pourquoi ti pas saluer moi?” he said.

The young Parisian soldier looked with contempt at the black sergeant and said: “Foutez moi la paix, vieux con.”

“Et ça? Et ça?” the Senegalese sergeant protested pointing to the stripes on his sleeve.

“Ça? Ça c’est de la merde de pigeon,” the Parisian replied, and ordered himself some beer. The much bemedaled n.c.o. was at a loss for a reply and went back to his seat, where his absinthe had now completely settled, and he drank it with tropical austerity.

Tito went out into the street again. The sound of guitars and castanets accompanying a Spanish singer came from a sort of hut:

Dónde vas con mantón de Manila?

Dónde vas con vestido chinés?

A kind of stage manager greasily pressed him to go in and see the show, which had only just begun.

A boy sold him some oranges.

Everything in Africa has a cooked, burnt taste. Flowers smell like dried specimens in a herbarium; women’s flesh smells of stew; and when you eat fruit you have the warm sweet taste of jam in your mouth.

He retraced his steps and went back into the concert room in the governor’s palace.

The German chanteuse, who was as blonde as zabaglione, was singing Alfred de Musset’s melancholy verses to the music of the Merry Widow:

… Quand je mourrai,

Plantez un saule au cimetière.

The intellectual native ladies in the audience applauded with much perspiration and enthusiasm.

Then came Maud’s turn.

To Tito she had never looked so beautiful.

She turned and twisted in a new dance, to the rhythm beaten out by wooden heels on the stage. Her whole body seemed to be free of joints and her soft, apparently boneless arms rose towards the sky, the rectangular African sky in which all the stars in the world had gathered to watch her; oh, those miraculously bare arms, how they rose and stretched towards the stars. Maud was a soft, elastic thing that curved right, left and forward with the suppleness of a lily whose flower is so heavy that it bends its perfume-dazed body right down to the ground. Pearls of sweat shone on her breast and arms and round her ankles, and roses and hairpins fell from her loose hair. She smiled, showing all her white teeth and two big, astonished eyes like those of a bird of prey. Rouge as well as perspiration dripped from her lips; it might have been drops of blood. The black stains of her armpits shone as they had never done even in nights of passion. And she went on dancing, bending this way and that like the stalk of a lily in the grip of a hurricane.

Serpentine writhings alternated with languid amorous, feline suppleness; an evil light flashed in her eyes and gave way to a smile of caressing sweetness. Passion, capriciousness, cruelty, evil succeeded each other in her eyes.

Tito remembered a dance like this long ago in distant Paris at a white mass in Kalantan’s villa on the Champs Elysées. How everything repeated itself, how everything returned.

Cocaine went down on her knees and bent backwards, forming a bridge, as if offering her sex to the pit.

She rose again and smiled.

Rage suddenly overwhelmed her; her heels beat a furious tattoo and she writhed as if transfixed by some unclean thing; then she sank to the floor, rose again, twisted and turned, smiled at the sky, then paused motionless for a moment, gazing at the stars as if transfixed by wonder; then she collapsed like a lifeless body and did not rise again except to smile and thank the audience that applauded with black hands and incomprehensible cries.

Tito could see nothing but the violet nails on hundreds of brown applauding hands.

Outside in the street there was a queue of antiquated cars.

The burnouses, the turbans, the bare arms, the khaki uniforms, the musicians, the Egyptian magician and a woman with a box of instruments under her arm all left; so did the blonde German singer, surrounded by a group of hungry officers; and last of all came Maud, alone.

The heat had gone, and a refreshing breeze came from the sea.

Tito put his arm round Cocaine’s waist, and they walked towards the white point of a mosque set in a kind of oasis where two endless caravan routes began.

They walked in the night and in solitude (after leaving the last huts behind them) with the springy steps of a couple of adolescents going for their first evening walk after declaring their love for each other. But a feeling of approaching death hung over them.

“I left Buenos Aires to go back to Italy, and tonight I’ve danced for the last time. I’m not beautiful any longer. I’ve put a little money aside, and I shall retire to that fourth floor flat facing the courtyard where the smells from rich kitchens gave me a frantic desire to be well off. Do you remember? Perhaps I may still find some man who won’t dislike me, or perhaps I’ll die alone. I’m at a point in my life when I’m faced with a parting of the ways, like these two great roads leading heaven knows where in Africa. I think that whichever I choose will lead to my dying in poverty sooner or later.”

That was how Maud spoke, inconsolably. But Tito had never believed in human discouragement. Basically we are all optimists. There are people who actually look for love in the advertisement columns of a newspaper. With the passing of time we develop a capacity for compensation, like the blind, who develop their senses of touch and hearing. As we grow old we adapt ourselves. Artists who believe they are finished when their first gray hair appears still feel young when they have white beards. Women who genuinely resign themselves to spinsterhood at the age of thirty discover at the age of thirty-five that their hopes of finding a husband have revived. When the first wrinkle appears they say I’m ugly and no man will ever look at me again, but ten years later they know they are still capable of kindling incendiary passions.

You can’t be a woman’s last lover because, however old or ugly she may be, she still believes she will be able to find another one.

But Cocaine went on: “I asked you to come and meet me at Dakar so that we could do the last lap of the journey home together. The letter you wrote to me about your life in Turin was so sad and so lonely that I felt terribly sorry for you. You talked about dying. I too feel ready to die.”

Cocaine spoke these words in quiet, subdued tones, with one of her arms in Tito’s heated hand. They walked without heeding where they were going; the immensity of the desert is more difficult than the most complicated labyrinth.

A patrol of soldiers emerged from the darkness and stopped.

“Be careful,” the corporal in charge said, “because very soon the Great West African Express will be coming, and you’re near the line. It’s a very treacherous train, because you don’t hear it, as there are no walls in this solitude to echo and transmit the noise.”

“Thank you,” said Tito.

“Pas du tout, mon prince. Bonne nuit à la dame.”

And the patrol disappeared.

To Tito Cocaine had looked more beautiful and more desirable than ever before. But her renewed beauty gave him pain, not pleasure, for he felt that if he was to be her last lover there would be a long time to wait until its destruction was complete. Cocaine saw herself as ugly and felt old, but she was not yet old or ugly enough to be unable to please. Tito could not yet hope for the pleasure of being the last.

There was to be another reception for her next day at the home of the head of the custom house, she had accepted an invitation to the British consulate on Thursday, and on Saturday she was expected at the villa of a rich native merchant. In that colony of Europeans tired of odorous, wild black female flesh Maud’s Nordic perfume would still rouse some interests. Tito was sure that the renunciatory intentions she had just expressed would vanish at the first smile of some European libertine.

That was what Tito felt. But Cocaine, her will broken and in a state of nervous exhaustion, was like an inert mass that could be molded by any strong will.

“You said you’d be ready to die,” Tito murmured. “You said you felt finished, that you no longer had anything to look forward to. I too am a walking corpse. I too have nothing to look forward to but death. If I asked you to die with me tonight, would you agree?”

Cocaine stopped for a moment. A star flashed across the horizon. The woman suddenly turned as if she had been touched by something; Tito’s eyes were shining as they did when he was under the influence of the white drug that the one-legged peddler sold him in that café in Montmartre.

“Would you be willing to die?”

“Yes.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“Straight away?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I offer you the most beautiful, the most exciting death in the world. Very soon the fastest train in West Africa will be passing on this track. It has been traveling for days and days and will be traveling for many more, and it travels blindly, without seeing where it’s going or what it crushes or sweeps out of its path. The crew go to sleep over the brakes and they go on and on in a straight line day and night.”

“Do you want it to run you over?”

“Yes.”

“But Tito, don’t you see that you’re not talking like an inhabitant of this world, that you’re talking like a character in a novel? You’re beside yourself.”

“Yes. Being carried away, being beside oneself, is a hand held out to us by destiny, a shove that it gives us when our will is insufficient. The African night, your voice, your perspiration, all that carries me away; and your discouragement, your disillusionment with life encourages me to die. Think how exciting it will be to lie down on this endless track with our cheeks against the cold steel, to feel for the last time our bodies clinging to each other, trembling with fear. Every light we think we see in the distance, every noise we think we hear will give us a tremor as long as eternity. And in our last embrace, which will be the most exciting in our lives, we shall hear the clatter of the train and see its shadow approaching, we shall shrink like beaten dogs, but the black monster will be on us, crushing us and mixing our blood for ever. Remember that neither you nor I have anything more to hope for from life. We’re tired. We’re as good as dead already. Come, let me kiss you for the last time.”

And Tito, passionately uttering these words, put his arms round Maud, who had nearly fainted, and forced her to kneel, then sit, then lie on the ground. The sky was a perfect concave; you could see its completely circular edge as you can out at sea. Cocaine was pale; her brow was wet with perspiration and her eyes marvelously dilated as if she could see above her the face of death.

It was the face of Tito who was lying on top of her, frenziedly kissing her mouth, her throat, her eyes. Under her back the endless rail extended like a blade. It hurt, because all her weight was on it, as well as Tito’s weight on top of her.

“Cocaine,” Tito groaned without ceasing to kiss her cheeks and bite her lips. “Cocaine, these are the last minutes. Tell me again you love me.”

“I love you,” she moaned with the voice of one who is dying.

“I want you,” Tito hoarsely exclaimed, stifling her with the pressure of his mouth on hers and holding her in his arms as if to crush her to death, “I want you. I want to die taking you for the last time. I want to be your last lover.”

“Yes,” she cried. “Take me.”

With trembling hands Tito tore off her light clothing, and when she was completely naked he started frantically kissing her whole body, her breast, her eyes, her armpits, tearing out hairs with his teeth and sucking the perspiring flesh that bled as a result of his bites.

“Take me,” she cried again.

For a moment the two bodies were one. She saw Tito’s bloodshot, panting face on her own face, framed by stars and the blue sky; she felt herself being crushed between the hard steel rail and the weight of the panting man who was putting the ardor of a whole lifetime and the frenzy of all his passion into this last experience.

The man who was about to die suffered as he had never suffered before, because this was the last time.

She was vibrant as she had never been before, because she had never experienced this sensation more wonderful than death.

His face was a single contraction of muscles and was covered with foam, his eyes shone like enamel and his rhythm was as violent as if he were transfixing her with a knife.

Suddenly he began slowly groaning, and stopped. The contractions ceased, his brow became smooth, his eyes lost that terrifying light, and all his muscles relaxed. His cruel arms slackened their grip, and he rose to his feet.

Cocaine was still lying in the same position. There was nothing shameless in her motionless nudity in the immensity of the night under the purity of the stars.

But her lover, her last lover, looked southward, and saw a black shadow drawing nearer on the shining rails.

He picked up the naked woman and laid her on the dry grass a few yards away from the track.

The Great West Africa Express appeared and thundered past, and the huge draft caused pieces of torn mauve lingerie decorated with small organdy pleats to rise and flutter in the air.

Cocaine opened her eyes and watched the black, puffing trail of lights speeding through the night and disappearing, leaving the endless steel railway track behind it.

The train crushed even its own sparks.

Tito, without speaking, helped Maud to dress and pin together her torn clothing, and they walked back to the town and the hotel.

They kissed once more at the door of her room.

Next afternoon, while Maud was drinking a melted banana ice at another reception in her honor, Tito embarked in a ship leaving for Genoa. Just when the propellers started to sing their melancholy and gay farewell ballad, Tito put his hand in his pocket and found a visiting card.

Who’s he? he said to himself. Where did I come across this chap?

Then he remembered.

He was the European who had sung the praises of Berber women soon after his arrival and had told him he had several available, the oldest of whom was sixteen.

Tito looked again at the visiting card and smiled.

If I’d taken advantage of his offer, my suicidal intentions would have disappeared, he said to himself. Even on this occasion my jealousy was the product of long abstinence, of accumulated desire.

He remembered that on the way back to the hotel with Cocaine on the previous night he had felt much calmer after possessing her on the railway line. It had occurred to him that she might well give herself to someone else next day, but the thought did not make him suffer.

Dakar was already receding into the distance. Tito, standing in the stern, remembered the times when he had hurried to Kalantan to stifle the jealousy caused by Maud. Even then he had known that jealousy was a physical, glandular phenomenon. He knew that when the glands were emptied jealousy disappeared.

But sometimes, only too often, he had forgotten it.

Now his senses were calm, because the night before under the breath of death and the blowing of the breeze he had got rid of all his jealousy on that endless steel rail.

But now? Now that the steamer was taking him away; now that the rhythm and the exciting perfume of the sea, the memories, the eroticism with which the corridors, saloons and cabins of transatlantic liners are filled would revive his desire and his jealousy. How was he going to live now that Maud had given him more ecstatic pleasure than ever before, now that he had seen her beauty reborn and had seen her dancing marvelously, now that he liked her more than ever.

Now that he had tried to die with her, how would he find the courage to face death alone?

He looked towards Dakar, but it was out of sight.

The ship was in the middle of the ocean and the sky was above, concave, with an exactly circular edge all round it, just as on the evening before, when it had arched over him and over Cocaine’s brow — which had been whiter than a corpse’s — and over their last embrace.

And he repeated to the sea the sweet name of Cocaine.

Cocaine, as pale as the powder that intoxicates and kills; Cocaine, passive woman, as irresponsible as a lifeless being, a pinch of poison that seeks out no one but kills when swallowed; Cocaine, the inert creature who had been willing to die when Tito suggested it, but agreed to live when he no longer wanted to die; Cocaine, who gave herself to anyone who wanted her and refused no one, because refusing is an effort; Cocaine, woman made of white, exquisite poison, the poison of our time, the poison that lures one to sweet death.

Once more Tito’s luck was in, because the sea was again so rough that he had to stay in his cabin all the way to Genoa.

And, since it’s better to leave a wretched man alone when he is ill, I ask the reader to leave his cabin for a moment, particularly as I have something to confide.

What I have to say is this.

The Great West Africa Express that I said passed Dakar doesn’t exist. But it’s not my fault. It suited me to put it there.

Also, while I’m about it I may as well confess that the Hotel Napoléon in the Place Vendôme, where Tito and Maud stayed for some months, is another invention of mine. I could have put them in the Bristol, or the snobbish and conventional Ritz, but I don’t want to give hotels any publicity, for one thing because they don’t need any publicity from me.

And now let us go back into Tito’s cabin, where he is packing his bags, because the port of Genoa is in sight.