Cocaine

6

Maud, male impersonator — she danced in tails and a top hat — arrived in Paris with eight trunks and a small red dog.

She wore a light gray suit, decorated at the wrists with monkey skin, as soft and flowing as Leonardo da Vinci’s beard. She went straight to the Hotel Napoléon, because Tito not only met her at the station but booked two rooms and a bathroom for her at his hotel.

Some stuffed dogs are perfect imitations of live dogs, but Maud’s was a perfect imitation of a stuffed one; when you stroked it there was a risk that one of its hairs might stick in your finger. Its eyes, concealed beneath a fringe, were a Darwinian demonstration of the futility of using them when one is always on a lead subject to another’s will. It was a small dog, almost pocket size and attractively stupid. By careful examination it was possible to discover which end was the head and which the tail. It was a personification of la beauté de la laideur.

“What’s its name?” Tito asked.

Maud rounded her scarlet lips (they looked like half a cherry without a stone) and let forth a prolonged whistle approximating to the note of G.

“That’s its name.”

“It’s a lovely one.”

She had also brought from Italy a lady’s maid highly skilled in doing her hair and looking after her clothes and dealing with male visitors. When she felt like it she answered to the name of Pierina.

Never having been to Paris before, she was thrilled by everything she saw. Maud, her mistress, had also never been to Paris before, but she was not thrilled by anything.

Tito immediately saw in her an embryonic international, intercontinental, transoceanic adventuress capable of acclimatization to males of all races.

He no longer recognized her as the Maddalena he had known two years previously, the decent girl who attended a corrupt secretarial college. In this elegant and electromagnetic creature he failed to see any trace of the respectable bourgeois girl who lived in a fourth floor flat with a balcony facing the courtyard. All this was so obvious that it seems hardly necessary to mention it. All great actresses, dancers, courtesans come from a fourth floor flat, and research into their past would reveal salads for their physical nourishment, the novels of Ponson du Terrail for their intellectual nourishment and a zinc hip-bath for the cleansing of a body worthy of a Phidias or a Canova and predestined to princely love and imperial desire. Just as every alehouse scullery boy is a possible future owner of a grand hotel, so every girl who waters the flowers and looks after the canary in a fourth floor flat is a potential Otero or Cléo de Mérode.

Tito tactfully refrained from inquiring about her parents. He recalled her highly respectable mama who, fixing her intrepid gaze on her from above her formidable bosom, gave her rapid courses of lecture on morality; and her highly respectable papa, who (when he had any money) still counted it in scudi and marenghi and brandished his hundred-year-old pocket watch like a sword whenever his daughter came home a few minutes late.

He remembered the flat, poor but honest, and rich in those ornamental objects that are put into circulation by charitable lotteries and pass from household to household until they find a home like Maddalena’s and stay there. But on the day when Maddalena becomes Maud they go to another charitable lottery.

So Tito and Maud could not abandon themselves to wallowing in old memories, which is a kind of mnemonic masturbation. To Tito Maud was merely a creature in whom he noted some points of contact with a rather ugly, rather stupid girl whom he had met on a balcony two years before.

Now she wore kangaroo gloves and used difficult words like idiosyncrasy, eurhythmics and quadrilateral and spoke them with pedantic accuracy.

Maud talked and laughed about Maddalena as if she were an old friend of whom she had lost sight. Her confessable past now began with the day on which — or rather with the first time she —

“It happened like this,” she explained to Tito while the maid unpacked her luggage in the next room. “It happened like this,” she said, looking at the Vendôme column surmounted by a bronze Napoleon while Tito leaned against the window with his back to the square. “It was a summer’s day, and I was at home alone. My mother had let a room to a bank clerk, and it was hot, and I felt desires that gave me a kind of tingling in the blood. We were alone in the flat, and my mama had the key; she might have come in at any moment. The young man started kissing me, then he pushed me up against the door and took me standing like that, quite quietly, just as one might transfix a butterfly stupefied by the sun.”

“But did you like the young man? Did you love him?”

“No,” Maud replied, looking at the porphyry Vendôme column vibrating in the sun like transparent liquid. “No. At that moment I just wanted someone. I didn’t even know who he was; I didn’t like him, but he was a man. I wanted someone, and he had what was necessary to satisfy me. When my parents heard about it there was a terrible row. I’ve never understood why. Just because at that moment — it was August, after all — I wanted a man. I had to put up with my mother’s screams and my father’s insults and the curses of both of them.”

“And the man?”

“I never saw him again. Before giving myself to him I had refused two or three men who were in love with me.”

“That’s what you women always do. You reject men who love you only to give yourself one day to someone who doesn’t deserve you.”

“Deserve? What has that to do with it? I’ve never given myself to anyone, we women never give ourselves to anyone as a reward, in recognition of his deserts. We give ourselves because we need to give ourselves.”

“Signorina,” the lady’s maid called out from the next room. “In the big trunk there’s a —”

“Excuse me,” said Maud, detaching herself from Tito.

He leaned on the windowsill with his face between his elbows and his fingers intertwined at the back of his neck, watching, without moving his head, the cars entering the big gray square by the Rue de la Paix and leaving it by the Rue Castiglione, making the noise on the asphalt that scissors make when cutting silk.

What an intelligent woman, he said to himself. With what purity and simplicity she described to me how it happened that first time. It was hot, there was a man available, she was excited, she wanted him, she gave herself to him without making a noise, without pretending. Other women say: The man was a coward, I was a child, I knew nothing, I understood nothing, he took advantage of me. Or: He gave me something to drink, I don’t know what, and I went to sleep. When I woke up… Or they say: My mother was dying, we had no money for medicine, for the doctor, even for a coffin; so I gave myself to a rich man… And they say: Oh, if only I’d known, oh, the revulsion, the hatred I feel for that man and the loathing I feel for myself.

Instead (Tito went on to himself) this delicious Maud talks about the first time as she would about her first communion, if that were worth talking about. She attaches no importance to that physical episode, that superficial incident, that harmless, simple, quiet event about which poets, moralists, judges at all times and in all ages have made such a fuss. That minor act of nervous release that had led to savage injustices and idiotic philosophical outpourings in the name of morality; that natural interplay of two bodies that appears so different depending on whether it happens before or after a carriage ride to the town hall, and is considered decent and honorable if it is done in one bed and wicked if it is done in another.

Maud describes with complete and honest simplicity what is called a guilty act (Tito went on), and with the simplicity of her story she emerges pure and uncontaminated from the bog of a rotten morality. The false valuation put upon that act — the contact of two bodies — has led to nothing but crime. On the day when a girl’s giving herself is no longer considered shameful, abortion and infanticide will cease, because a child will cease to be the fruit of sin and there will be no more need to hide it. The Jews would stone a girl who gave herself before marriage. The people themselves killed her. Perhaps the seducer was among those who threw the stones. Nowadays such a girl is forced to have an abortion, and if she’s found out she’s sent to prison. If she doesn’t have an abortion she has to kill the child, and if she doesn’t do that she and the child are thrown out.

If I had my way, in every case of abortion or infanticide it wouldn’t be the girl that was punished, but her father, mother, elder brothers, neighbors, and all those whose gossip, tittle-tattling, prejudices and good breeding caused her to believe it was a crime to be pregnant without giving advance notice to the town hall. Then at last we should have the satisfaction of seeing unmarried mothers in the street treated with the respect that is now reserved for archbishops and kings. And that would be more than justified. The unmarried mother is the only kind that deserves any kind of admiration. She volunteers for maternity. What is the merit of the others, the married ones? They know that having a child, or the prospect of having one, gives them a position in life, a family. They know there will be someone there to help them from the first morning sickness until forty days after everything has returned to its place. They know that midwife, surgeon, mother, mother-in-law, husband and nurse will do everything in their power to lessen the ordeal of confinement and its consequences and nursing; they know that the “happy event” will be celebrated like a beatification.

But a pregnant unmarried girl cannot count on any of that. On the contrary. The man turns his back on her, her parents despise and insult her, she has to look after the child herself, and she knows that one day the child will turn against her, reproaching her for having made him a bastard.

Nevertheless she faces all this, because of her love, because of her noble instinct. She, and only she, is the true mother. The others are the shopkeepers of maternity, and in comparison with them they have no merit. They produce children with every possible guarantee. They are like those who cheerfully face the prospect of a duel, knowing that their opponent’s pistol is loaded with chewed paper bullets.

By now it was five o’clock, and the square below started gradually filling with people. It was the best time of the day in Paris — de cinq à sept. They say Parisians are nocturnal animals. I think they’re dusk animals.

“Forgive me,” said Maud, coming back and putting a bare arm round Tito’s neck. “That Pierina is marvelous at packing but can’t unpack, but I —”

“Can’t pack or unpack. So what? When did you leave home?”

“Does that interest you? I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn’t stand priests, and a priest who didn’t have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly both of priests and of magistrates, because both were his best clients. Then I took up dancing and travelled all over Italy. In Naples I met an American who was the nephew of the owner of the Metropolitan Theater in New York.”

“In the course of my life I’ve already met twenty-five Americans of both sexes who said their uncle was the owner of the Metropolitan. That man’s brothers and sisters must be disastrously fertile. In America they must even have children by mass production.”

“But he really was the nephew of —”

“I believe you, I believe you. Having an uncle who owns a theater is a specialty of Americans abroad. The Russians you meet outside Russia always say they are friends of Maxim Gorki’s. The Spaniards are always on terms of intimacy with the Quintero brothers, and the Norwegians were always held at the baptismal font by Ibsen.”

A waiter and a porter came in obsequiously (hotel waiters are our obsequious enemies) to dismantle the bed and take away the bedstead.

“All I need is a palliasse and two mattresses,” Maud explained. “I’ll put some rugs and Turkish shawls on it and a chinchilla fur I brought from Italy.”

“Will you have dinner with me?” Tito asked, putting his watch back in his pocket.

“Thanks, but I’m tired. I’ll have something sent up to my room. Do go if you want to. When shall I see you again?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Not this evening?”

“I shall be back late.”

“Until tomorrow, then.”

“You’ll have to see your manager. When does the show begin?”

“In three day’s time.”

“I’ll show you round Paris in your spare time.”

Maud held out her hand to him and in doing so threw back her head. Tito kissed the hollow in her throat. Then he went back to his room.

While he was standing in front of the wardrobe mirror trying to decide between a black suit and a gray one, an express letter arrived for him.

That made him decide on the dinner jacket, because the letter summoned him to the house of Kalantan, the beautiful Armenian lady, who was feeling depressed and lonely. As usual, her car was waiting outside the hotel. Tito got in. A few moments later he made it stop at a florist’s in the Rue de Rivoli, where he had a gardenia put in his buttonhole before he got in again.

The delicate, untouchable petals of the gardenia preserved the voluptuous odor of the Côte d’Azur.

There are waves in the air that are not registered by laboratory apparatus but are apprehended by our nerves when we drive at dusk among the shadows of the Champs Elysées: waves of love and adultery. Here and there you see couples coming back. Where from? Perhaps from cafés, perhaps from tea rooms, perhaps from the art galleries of the Grand Palais, perhaps from the banks of the Seine. But in the way they walk, their faces, the atmosphere that surrounds them, there’s a trace of voluptuous exhaustion.

Couples…

Lovers.

Lovers. The most beautiful word in the world.

Lovers.

The car followed the rectilinear tracks made on the wet asphalt by thousands of other cars. At the end of the avenue the Arc de Triomphe stood out white in the night.

The arc lamps sizzled with blue.

The car entered the garden. Dripping leaves embraced it, leaving drops on the paint, which was as shiny as Japanese lacquer.

A servant went and informed Kalantan that the gentleman had arrived.

When a man is no longer Monsieur Arnaudi to the servants but the gentleman pure and simple, it means that he is officially recognized as the only, or at any rate the principal lover of the lady of the house.

“You may go, Csaky,” said the beautiful Armenian lady as she came in, even before offering her hands to her guest.

Csaky stood to attention and walked out majestically, with a great glittering and creaking of leggings.

Kalantan flung herself into her lover’s arms, pressing herself voluptuously against him. Before he spoke he embraced her tremulously, running his hands along her back, shoulders and ribs. Her body arched backwards like an angry snake.

She wore nothing but a Greek peplum held at the shoulder by a green cameo where the soft folds converged. Her legs and arms were bare, her feet were in light raffia sandals, her hair was loose, tied with a ribbon behind her back as simply, gracefully and modestly as that of a little girl who wants to run about and play. At the bottom of the peplum, by way of an edging, there was a Greek key pattern made with big woolen stitches and dyed with vegetable extracts and cochineal.

Having been plunged hitherto in the morbid, the artificial and the toxic, now, in her new pure love she felt the need to hark back to the remote mythological simplicity of ancient Greek dress.

Her dress had been made for her by Raymond Duncan, that half wheeler-dealer, half visionary, who has not yet lost his American accent after twenty years in Paris. He is the brother of Isadora Duncan, the great classical dancer, who every so often visits her children’s grave dressed in veils and necklaces to weep maternal tears and address her prayers and raise her legs to God.

Raymond Duncan has founded a monastic institution with a strange rule and strange rites in the Latin Quarter, near the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He and his followers grow their hair long and wear chlamyses and sandals, and in that guise, sometimes in platoons and sometimes alone, they face the ironic comments of the boulevards, on which, with a trace of irreverence, they are known as les hommes nature.

They claim that this is the uniform to be adopted by those who wish to complete the long journey in search of the ideal. No secret rites take place in this monastery, which has big windows looking on to the Rue Jacob through which healthy and flourishing girls can been seen laying out carpets and disentangling skeins of wool on their arms, which are bare up to their armpits. Painted materials, unbleached cloth, wools as brown as shepherds’ clothing hang from looms that recall the impatient hurry of a smoothing plane; and clusters of skeins of wool resembling huge fruits grown in honor of Vertumnus, Proserpine and Pomona hang on posts that support a primitive Greek style of architecture. Thick woolen cloth, woven into patterns that recall ancient mythological hair-styles, hang from the loom at which a girl working the shuttle flexes the muscles of her bare arms and legs. She looks like an Andromache en déshabillé.

At that monastery without crosses, images or altars Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz had found something that the great dressmakers of the Rue de la Paix had not been able to offer her, that is, a loose and simple dress in harmony with the pure and primitive love that after many years of questionable excitements and morbid complications, chemically induced hallucinations and fictitious exaltations, she had at last found in the arms of the young Italian with his pale face and moist blue eyes.

Until a few weeks previously she had had strange lovers with strange ideas of love. She had given herself under the influence of morphine and music; she had lain between love and death, underneath violent men in a coffin; she had experimented with the craziest complications and the most tremendous cerebral exaltations. For 5,682 years (according to the Jewish calendar) women have been taken in the old, traditional way, and Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz tried desperately to find a new one. But the further she ran after artificial and extravagant pleasure, the further did voluptuousness vanish into the distance.

And then Tito, whom she met on a night of orgy, at one of those white masses that had made her famous in Paris, had offered her his youthful simplicity as a magnificent fruit is offered with two bare hands.

Tito, the young cocaine addict, to whom the drug gave an exceptional cheerfulness.

“There’s still hope for you,” Kalantan said to him. “I know that dreadful, deadly powder. You haven’t yet got to the stage of tremendous depression, of insuperable melancholy. Now you smile when you have the powder in your blood. You’re at the early stage in which you go back to childhood.”

She spoke to him as to a child, though they were both of the same age. Cocaine achieves the cruel miracle of distorting time.

Csaky, the butler, had laid a small round table, so small that the mouths of the two diners facing each other could easily meet.

“Csaky,” was all the lady said, and Csaky brought to the table a silver dish with big slices of a pink fish alternating with slices of aquamarine-colored pineapple.

Champagne bubbled in a jug as simple as an ordinary water jug. Bringing champagne to table in a labeled bottle is like giving a present with the price still attached.

A Siamese cat came and rubbed itself voluptuously against Tito’s legs.

Kalantan stretched her bare arm across the table and lightly stroked her lover’s hair and then one of his pale cheeks. The caress was as gentle as that of a ghost.

It gave Tito not so much sweet pleasure as a sweet shudder.

Kalantan had not wanted to see any of her old friends since falling in love with Tito. Mourning her husband gave her an excellent excuse for this voluntary isolation. There were no more orgies with drugs and the music of Stravinsky and butterflies sent from the Amazon. What she now loved was love that was as pure as a ringless hand, as simple as loosened hair.

She offered herself to Tito without scent or make-up, just as she emerged from the bath, with nothing but a perfume of wild flesh that was no longer western but was not yet Asian. Her skin preserved a slightly salty odor, as if impregnated with the winds that blow past the salt mines of her remote country.

Kalantan.

A slow, deep, melodious name, like the wind that blows through the gorges of the Caucasus.

Kalantan.

He felt the warmth of her bare knees. He stretched out his hand under the table and caressed something round, smooth, soft, warm and as fresh as a child’s face.

The butler came in several times. After the coffee and liqueurs he did not come in again.

Against one wall of the little room, which was painted like the cabin of a transatlantic liner, there was a low, wide, and deep parellelepiped consisting of three or four mattresses on top of one another covered by a big rug. This was the takhta, a kind of altar to Asian female idleness on which oriental women spend their unprofitable time with their legs crossed, munching sweets and recalling antediluvian legends.

“And they’re quite right,” said Tito, joining Kalantan, who was squatting on the takhta between two cushions. “What is the point of getting excited and rushing about? We’re like children who laboriously drag a toy cart up a slope for the sake of the insipid pleasure of coasting down it. You say that I’m at the cheerful stage of self-poisoning, Kalantan. You think I laugh, but I’ve passed that stage already. I’m always sad. I no longer believe in the blue of dreams. There’s an illness called acianoblepsia that results in one color, dark blue, becoming invisible, and I’m ill with a kind of mental acianoblepsia. I no longer see the blue of life. The great harm done by cocaine is not confined to weakening the lungs and damaging the heart. The chief harm is psychological. It splits the personality; it does a tremendous job of disintegrating the mind, almost as if by electrolysis. I believe that in every intelligent person there are two persons of opposite ideas and tastes; and I believe that in the artist these two persons are so distinct that one can criticize the other, suggest remedies to him and cultivate his vices if they are attractive and his virtues if they are not boring. The effect of cocaine is to make the splitting of the personality take the form of an explosion of revulsion. The two persons inside me criticize each other, corrode each other, in a way that results in my hating myself. And then I begin to see the uselessness of everything. I feel my heart beating. What for? To send the blood to my lungs. What for? To fill it with oxygen. What for? To enable the oxygen to go and burn up the tissues and then return to the lungs to get rid of the products of combustion. And then? It goes on like that, even when I’m asleep, even when I’m waking or when I’m in your arms and even when I’m not thinking at all. Tell me, Kalantan, tell me why my heart goes on beating and for what purpose. If you knew how many times I’ve been tempted to send it a little leaden messenger telling it to stop at once, because one day it will stop naturally, of its own accord, and why should it take the trouble of going on until then?”

“Child,” said Kalantan.

And instead of using the usual words that women use to console us, instead of opening the first aid box of common sense and applying to his brow the cold compress of verbal tenderness, instead of showing him he was wrong, she comforted him with the sweetest tonic, the only one that really raises our spirits and destroys the gloomy products of the imagination.

“Child,” was the only word she used.

And while she whispered it through clenched teeth she took him by the cheeks, fell backward on to the cushions and, bringing his face to her white bosom, sealed his mouth with one of her breasts.