Cocaine

3

There’s a kind of freemasonry among cocaine addicts. They recognize one another by signs perceptible only to themselves; they have their own lodges, some more democratic, others more aristocratic — but that is of no consequence, because they drift from one to the other, from the cabarets of Montmartre to the villas of the Porte Maillot, from the boîtes à étudiants of the Latin Quarter to the cafés of Montparnasse. In a few months Tito Arnaudi got to know all the legendary cafés, the little theaters of the Butte Sacée, the dives that re-echo to the sound of brass instruments beating out the rhythm of licentious dances from five o’clock in the evening until dawn. He went to all these semi-tolerated, semi-clandestine nightspots which are the meeting places of the cocaine addicts who form fifty per cent of their habitués. He got to know the small world that gathers round the university: the little women who from the age of fifteen to thirty-five practice the romantic profession of student’s girlfriend. They are very undemanding girlfriends, satisfied with half a room, half a bed and one meal a day; they attach themselves to a student because of the sentimental caprice of an hour. The hour passes, the caprice remains, is extended and transformed, and in the meantime a year passes, two years pass, and so does the bloom of youth. The girlfriend remains, almost faithful, almost in love, and then the young man takes his degree and leaves her; and she weeps, perhaps seriously, she feels desperate, perhaps genuinely, and for consolation finds another young man, younger than the one who left her and younger than she herself. She accompanies him, supervising all his actions, both sensible and crazy, throughout his university career, in all the rented rooms he lives in, rooms new to him but not to her, to all the cafés where they play snooker and backgammon, to all the numerous Bouillons Chartier, where for five francs they have the complete illusion of having lunch for two.

And one day, out of bravado, a student of pharmacy offers his friend some white powder to which he has helped himself in the university lab; and the latter accepts it, for fun, or to be in the swim, and not for pleasure, because the first pinch is always unpleasant; and then he can no longer do without it, and with a clouded mind he begins the descent through all the stages of degradation to complete destitution. And the female companion, who has followed him through the various rented rooms, bars and bouillons starts taking it too, smiling as she did the first time she used a powder puff, and then…

And then these little women draw close to one another, meet, need, recognize and understand one another. You see them in twos and threes in the bars at apéritif time, behaving restlessly, sniffing all round them like fox terriers, going in twos and threes to the toilet or to telephone booths and emerging a few minutes later with eyes more shining, faces more serene, movements more vivacious, looking more cheerful, more talkative, more attractive. In the toilet or telephone booth they have exchanged cocaine.

They are still at the first stage of addiction. They still have some restraint; they confess their vice only if they are sure that their confidante is a renifleuse too. They still take the poison secretly, shyly, shamefully. In a few months’ time they will be putting the little box on the café table as ostentatiously as if it were a cigarette case with a ducal coronet.

There is a cold, dead look in their eyes; what has died is their will.

But of what use would it be if it still existed? Could it make them give up the drug? No, because it has become a necessity. It is not being deprived of it, but the mere possibility of being deprived of it that disturbs, upsets and exasperates them. They take your hand and press it against their heart, where a tiny breast serves as a sounding box.

“Feel how hard, how quickly, it beats,” they say. “It slows down and seems to stop, and then it starts up again.”

At night, they say, they have dreadful shivering fits; they suffer from sleeplessness. Not having the drug is appalling, but the idea of not being able to get it is even more appalling.

And then they resort to the most disastrous expedients to get it, though they rarely resort to serious crime, for which energy is needed. They begin by cutting out unnecessary expenditure, and then they cut out necessary expenditure. They exchange their flat for a furnished room, and they exchange the latter for a garret. They sell their furs and jewels at ridiculous prices; and then they sell their clothes, and then their body. And they go on until they are so raddled that no more buyers are to be found. Their coquettishness goes, and so does their sense of cleanliness, though in that environment coquettishness and cleanliness are necessary for survival. And that is why it is possible to meet women, now modestly or poorly dressed, who a few months before were leaders of fashion at Auteuil and Longchamp.

“And your fur coat?”

“Fifty grams of coco.”

“And the gold bracelets?”

“A box as big as that, full of nothing but bicarbonate of soda and phenacetin.”

And the woman laughs coldly, in order not to weep, in order not to try to weep, perhaps because she would no longer know how to. Among these creatures who are half women and half ghosts the peddler circulates with his little cardboard boxes with labels of various colors: red, green or yellow, each color secretly indicating a more or less dishonest mixture. He never sells pure cocaine, which is always only a small proportion of the mixture; all the rest is boric acid or lactose or magnesium carbonate.

The peddler knows that an addict can be satisfied with a white powder that looks only roughly like cocaine; so long as she has something to sniff she does not analyze it. In the final stages of addiction she can’t distinguish cocaine from sugar, and in the early stages she is less interested in the drug than in the ceremonial of taking it. With a gold nib? An ivory nail file? A tiny bone spoon taken from a saltcellar? The nail of a little finger grown specially long for the purpose?

So the dealer grows rich in a few months. With 100 grams of cocaine he buys 10,000 lire worth of jewelry, and when his customers offer him the empty boxes he buys them back at the rate of one sou for every ten sous’ worth.

The editor of The Fleeting Moment was quick to appreciate Tito’s talents. In fact he telephoned the manager after the first week, and when Tito presented himself to draw his salary he was handed 500 francs extra.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked the editor.

“It means you’re a bright young man.”

“You never told me so.”

“I don’t tell you, I show it.”

He showed him the greatest consideration, and excused him from all the boring jobs.

“Would you like to go and report this conference?”

“No,” said Tito.

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t amuse me. Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister.”

“You’re perfectly right,” the editor said. “I’ll send one of your colleagues.”

The chief sub-editor too realized that Tito was a decent fellow, and suggested that they should address each other in the familiar second person singular.

The chief sub-editor was not an important person on the newspaper, though his title suggested high rank in the journalistic hierarchy; actually he was an excellent fellow subordinate to everyone else. Our society creates these comforting paradoxes. The horse, after being worked and exploited like the lowest proletarian, is called the noble animal. Deformation of the spine, hypertrophy of the bones, cretinism, physical monstrosities are cheerfully called “sports” of nature; sick people are sent to health centers; places where people are sent to die are called sanatoria; and priests, after being condemned to childlessness and celibacy, are called “father.”

Pietro Nocera, his Italian friend, did everything he could to help Tito during his first months on the newspaper and guided his footsteps in all the different aspects of the job.

“But soon you’ll turn your back on me,” Tito told him. “As long as I’m junior to you in position and pay, you’ll help and protect me and tell your colleagues that I have talent; but salary’s a rough guide to one’s value, and as soon as my pay is the same as yours you’ll say I’m an idiot. That’s perfectly human and natural. Even the Almighty, after giving Adam a good position in the earthly paradise, thought better of it and promptly found a pretext to ruin him.”

“You’ve been taking cocaine again,” Pietro Nocera said in tones of mild reproach. “When you make biblical comparisons it means that you have a few grams of cocaine up your nose.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Tito replied. “I tell you, you’ll drop me.”

“No, my friend,” Pietro Nocera went on, leaning against the back of a soft divan at the Café Richelieu. “You haven’t yet realized that I don’t have the stupid little defects of other men. I envy neither you, nor the editor, nor the President of the Republic, nor Félix Potin, who is the leading pork butcher in Paris. I work because I need to have two thousand francs in my pocket every month, but I have no desire to glorify work either by enthusiasm or envy or emulation. Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void. Who would think of working in a waiting room? While awaiting our turn we chat, or look at the pictures on the walls. But work? There’s no point in it, if when our turn comes to go into the next room we shall no longer see anything. I don’t understand why all these people get excited and upset and argue. One man acts the hero, another rouses the multitude, a third brags and blusters; one man expounds ideas, another demolishes systems, a third stands values on their head. And what for? When you consider that today’s triumphant victor who holds the mob in the hollow of his hand tomorrow goes into a café, drinks from a badly washed glass, swallows two or three germs no bigger than one thousandth of a millimeter, and then goes back to his creator. But coming back to you, if one day I were to tell someone that you were an idiot, it would mean I thought others intelligent. Instead I see all round me nothing but people who pretend to be different from what they are, propound ideas they do not have, make a display of beliefs that are not theirs, engage in fine gestures and fine phrases to conceal some deficiency or inferiority. A man who doesn’t wear an overcoat in winter on the ground that he’s healthier without one would wear a fine fur coat in bed if he had one; nine times out of ten the recluse, the misanthrope, is someone whom no one wants to visit; the man who systematically practices taciturnity and tries to give the impression of profound thought and philosophic doubt is not an intellectual crucified by skepticism but a puppet with a windy void in his head. If someone tells me he’s sick of everything and is disgusted with the world and tired of life and that the only happiness lies in death, I’m prepared to believe him only after he has shot himself and been buried. But so long as there isn’t a cubic meter of earth on his belly I shall go on believing that he’s play-acting…”

While Pietro Nocera talked Tito looked through the café windows at the crowded boulevard outside. A policeman armed with a white truncheon was regulating the car and pedestrian traffic against a confused background of unintelligible voices and other noises.

He told me all this the first time we met, Tito said to himself. A man tells you the most interesting things he knows during the first half hour he talks to you; after that he either repeats himself or offers you variations on the same theme.

“What are you thinking about?” Pietro asked.

“I’m thinking that you’re a real friend,” Tito replied. “But there’s no sign of the chief sub-editor. Do you suppose he has forgotten?”

And, just as happens in plays, Tito was just saying “He won’t be coming” when the person referred to walked in.

The chief sub-editor was one of those kindly persons who offer invaluable advice when you have something in your eye (blow your nose, look up, walk backwards, find the square root — etc.).

He was forty, which is the most frightening age in life. You don’t feel sorry for the old, because they are old already; you don’t feel sorry for the dead, because they are dead already. But you do feel sorry for those approaching old age, those approaching death. Forty! At fairgrounds you see rollercoasters dashing up a steep slope followed by a steep drop and then another ascent. At the top of the slope, or rather just before the top, the vehicle has used up all the energy acquired in the descent and it slows down and hesitates as if the top were unattainable, as if it were terrified of the approaching plunge. The man approaching forty is in a similar state of hesitation and uncertainty; his pace slackens, he is paralyzed by the approaching summit and the descent he cannot see but knows lies just ahead.

The chief sub-editor was forty.

“I detest tabarins,” he said, emptying his fourth glass of cognac. “All those people who dance in basements to harrow each other’s nerve endings and think they’re enjoying themselves don’t realize in their frenzy that they are passive instruments in the hands of nature, which provides them with the excitement of the dance in the interests of the reproduction of the species.”

He emptied another glass.

“I laugh out of politeness,” he went on a little later. “I laugh to try and hide my melancholy. And, as I don’t succeed in hiding it either from myself or from others, I drink, to hide it at any rate from myself. I drink to get rid of my mental wrinkles, but they can’t be got rid of, they can only be smoothed out for a moment, like the lines that women smooth out with facial massage. For a short time they vanish, and then they come back deeper than ever.”

He drank again.

“As a result of spending a lifetime in newspaper composing rooms I’ve got used to reading upside down, to seeing things the wrong way up. It’s a sad gift. Thanks to it I lost confidence in the loyalty of a friend who was dear to me, and I discovered that the woman who pretended to love me despised and betrayed me.

“So now I drink.

“I drink, and drink will be my ruin. I know it, but it helps me to see things through rose-tinted spectacles, and that’s enough for me. And then when I look at the world I see it as the optimists paint it.”

“And when you haven’t been drinking?” Tito asked.

“When I haven’t been drinking… Permit me a slight digression. When believers, mystics, look at the world, they don’t see beautiful, provocative women or pleasure-loving men; they see skeletons, skulls with empty eye-sockets, jaws without tongues, teeth without gums, shamefully bald heads, feet that seem to be made of imperfect dice, long hands that look like the mouthpieces of pipes strung together. But when I look at mankind I see spinal columns, spinal cords and nerves branching out from them.”

“So much for men,” said Tito. “And what about women?”

“Women? Roving uteri. That’s all. I see roving uteri and men pursuing them, hypnotized, talking confusedly of glory, ideals, humanity. And so I drink.”

Through the steamed up windows two dense and continuous streams of people were to be seen. The sound of their voices, the brouhaha, the trampling of feet, the movements of the crowd, suggested a color — bitumen mixed with a uniform grayish yellow, against which the occasional cry of a hawker, the loud laughter of a street Arab or a woman’s shrill voice stood out like splashes of red, blobs of white, daubs of violet, parabolas of silver, jets of lilac, quivers of green, hieroglyphics of yellow, arrows of blue. The agile, springy legs of women contrasted with the leaden monotony, all of them long, slender, muscular, pink and wrapped in their silk stockings as if by a spiral of thread that wound round their thighs and calves like the grooves of gramophone records.

The modern Venus no longer has the soft, plump gracefulness that our grandfathers sought for (with their hands); the contemporary Venus reminds one of the androgynous girl in a troupe of British gymnasts.

“And so I drink,” said the man who smiled out of politeness. “Love might perhaps be left to me, but I’ve at last realized what love is. It’s a sweet poison that comes to me from a woman I like. After some time all the poison I’ve absorbed makes me immune, and then the poison that continues to come to me from her no longer affects me.

“Once upon a time I still had the stimulus of being faced with rivals, and I tried to fight them, but now that I’m chief sub-editor, now that I’ve ‘arrived,’ I’m also finished. I’ve lost the joy of struggle, chiefly because I have no more enemies, but also because if I had I would not take the trouble to fight them. I’ve come to see that competitors are necessary to those who want to get on in the world. Opposition is indispensable to success. We should have realized that elementary truth from the embryonic beginnings of life; spermatozoa have to swim upstream to reach the ovary.”

“That’s a paradox,” said Tito.

“I never state paradoxes, because generally they are nothing but cleverly presented absurdities,” the chief sub-editor replied. “I claim that enemies are extremely useful when you know how to handle them properly. In medicine, as you know better than I do, germs are used to fight the illnesses that they cause, are they not? The whole of serotherapy is based on the exploitation of our enemies to our own advantage. Isn’t the leech a parasite of man? Well, in a doctor’s hands it’s a very useful thing. Enmity is a force, a negative, contrary force, but it’s still a force, and all forces are exploitable by man to his own advantage. What do you think?”

Pietro Nocera replied:

“I think that with a mind like yours —”

Tito interrupted: “… it’s a pity to ruin it with alcohol.”

The chief sub-editor turned to Tito and said: “You remind me of those who say it’s stupid to believe that seventeen’s an unlucky number, because it’s a number like any other; thirteen is unlucky, of course, they admit, but seventeen isn’t. That’s exactly what you do, Arnaudi. You’re killing yourself with cocaine, and you think it’s stupid of me to be killing myself with alcohol. You don’t see that if the two of us get on well it’s because there’s an affinity of poisons between us which in turn has led to an affinity of ideas.

“You and I have the same type of mind, and basically Pietro Nocera has it too. The three of us get on well because we are all three attuned. We are simply men of our time, not three exceptional individuals who have come together to form a particular triangle. I may be wrong in saying that it’s our poisons that have made us like this. Perhaps it’s our being like this that makes us drown ourselves heroically in our sweet poisons. However that may be, I’m happy poisoning myself; and, as it give me a little joy, it would be absurd not to do it. If half a liter of alcohol is sufficient to do away with depression and transform the world in my sight, and if all I have to do to get half a liter of alcohol is to press a button, why should I deprive myself of it? If it were painful, I should understand. We could rid ourselves of all the agonies of love by having an operation, but it would be painful, and an operation is always a step in the dark. Instead I regulate my intake of alcohol myself; it’s a tool I use on myself with my own hands. I know very well that it earns me a great deal of disapproval, but I go on drinking all the same, because these five or six glasses give me a sense of well-being and result in insults seeming to be acts of courtesy, in sorrows being transformed, if not into joys, at least into indifference. Being removed from reality, I see it with the changed perspective that forms the basis of irony. What could be better than being near one’s neighbor without recognizing anyone and living in a kind of unconscious intoxication? Fools say I’m ruining myself, but what I say is that the fools are those who cling to the useless and contemptible thing that is life. Even our editor, who has such a clear mind, sometimes makes me sit down in front of him, tries to counteract the bellicosity of those ferocious moustaches of his by the gentleness of his voice and advises me to give up drink. But it’s only when I’ve been drinking that I’m fit for work, flexible, docile. When I’ve been drinking he could order me to polish the floor and I’d do it.”

A thin, pale lady, dressed completely in black, came in, looked round, and sat at a table.

“De quoi écrire et un Grand Marnier,” she said.

The waiter brought her writing materials and her drink.

That’s Madame Ter-Gregorianz,” said Pietro Nocera, indicating the attractive new arrival. “She’s an Armenian, living at the Porte Maillot, and she’s famous for her white masses.”

The lady wore a black tulle hat through which you could see the waves of her black hair; a black bird of paradise descended over one temple, caressed her neck and curved under her chin. Her face seemed to be framed in a soft, voluptuous upside-down question mark.

When she had finished her letter she summoned a small page boy, who was all green and gold, glossy and shining and covered with braid, and handed it to him. The boy raised his right hand vertically with the palm outwards to his green, cylindrical unpeaked cap, which was kept in its crooked position by a black chinstrap. Then he went out on to the boulevard, dodging between the buses.

Pietro Nocera went over to her, asked if he might introduce his friends, and invited her to join them at their table.

She looked through the question mark and smiled. Her face was pale and her mouth thin and rectilinear as if it had been cut with a scalpel. When she smiled she lengthened it, stretching it half an inch on either side without curving it.

The chief sub-editor had been to Armenia in the course of his career as a journalist, and this led to the immediate establishment of cordial relations. She reminded him of the customs of the country, the martyrdom of its people, the color of its mountains, the passionate nature of its women.

And while the two revived memories Tito murmured to Pietro Nocera in Italian: “What marvelous oblong eyes.”

“Try telling her that, and you’ll see that she’ll start working them immediately. She’s the woman I was telling you about yesterday. She’s the one with the magnificent ebony coffin in her room. It’s padded with feathers and upholstered with old damask.”

“And is it true that…”

“Ask her.”

“Ask her straight out?”

“Yes. She’s a woman who can be asked that question.”

He turned to her and said: “Is it true, madame, that you have a black wooden coffin and —”

“Yes,” she said.

“And that —” Tito went on.

“And that I use it for making love in? Certainly I do. It’s comfortable and delightful. When I die they’ll shut me up in it for ever, and all the happiest memories of my life will be in it.”

“Oh, if that’s the reason,” said Tito.

“It’s not the only one,” the lady continued. “It also offers another advantage. When it’s over I’m left alone, all alone; it’s the man who has to go away. Afterwards I find the man disgusting. Forgive me for saying so, but afterwards men are always disgusting. Either they follow the satisfied male’s impulse and get up as quickly as they do from a dentist’s chair, or they stay close to me out of politeness or delicacy of feeling; and that revolts me, because there’s something in them that is no longer male. How shall I put it? Forgive me for saying so, but there’s something wet about them.”

She turned to the chief sub-editor and resumed their interrupted conversation.

“Who’s her present lover?” Tito asked.

“A painter,” Nocera replied. “But a woman like that always has five or six replacements available.”

Tito Arnaudi and Pietro Nocera were invited next evening to Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s villa, shining white between the Étoile and the Porte Maillot, between the Champs Élysées and the Bois, in the fashionable area that is the aristocratic cocaine quarter. In the luxurious villas in which the various tout Paris gather (the political tout Paris, the fashionable tout Paris, the artistic tout Paris) meetings are regularly arranged to enjoy the ecstasy the drug produces. Young followers of the turf and devotees of dress rehearsals, fashionable young gentlemen who have barely reached the age of puberty and believe themselves obliged to have on their desk the latest poem launched on the book market and in their bed the latest female adolescent launched on a life of gallantry; young Parisians who have their pajamas designed by the artists of La Vie Parisienne and feed on preserved tropical birds mention, among the big and small subjects of conversation that pullulent autour de nos tasses de thé, as Sully Prudhomme used to say, the fashionable poisons of the moment, the wild exaltation they produce, the craze for ether and chloroform and the white Bolivian powder that produces hallucinations. And by common accord they decide to try it. Thus dens of cocaine addicts form overnight in ordinary households, and men and women invite one another to cocaine parties as they invite one another to lunch. In some families the contagion spreads from children of fifteen to grandpas of seventy, and addiction à deux, the addiction of man and wife, is frequent; if it did not produce impotence in the male and frigidity in the female, I believe that the newborn babies of such couples would need the white powder immediately, just as the children of morphine addicts have to be given an immediate injection of morphine. The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection.