Cocaine

7

Tito’s Arnaudi’s article on the execution that did not take place was a sensational success. The newspaper was sold out in a few hours; newsagents in the provinces ordered more copies by telegram, and the special edition was twice reprinted. The other Paris dailies, which reported the presidential reprieve, were scooped, and The Fleeting Moment immediately acquired the reputation of being the best informed newspaper in France.

A fierce controversy arose between The Fleeting Moment and the TSF, which argued that the institution of the Republic must function in full daylight and protested vigorously against what it called the false news of the presidential reprieve communicated to the newspapers by the Ministry to prevent reporters from being sent to witness the event. It insisted, in other words, that executions must take place in full view of the citizenry and not be covered up by false news of reprieves. Other newspapers tried to excuse the demonstrable inadequacy of their news service saying that they had known about the execution, but out of a sense of humanity had refrained from reporting the terrible event.

The result was that two days later, when the Minister of Information and Keeper of the Seals informed the press that Marius Amphossy really had been reprieved, no one believed him, for the description of the execution in The Fleeting Moment had been so circumstantial, so rich in detail, that it could not possibly have been invented.

Even the executioner almost believed Tito’s story.

“You’re such a marvelous hoaxer,” the editor said to Tito, that I propose to take you off reporting and put you on home politics. Later I’ll put you on foreign politics. But in the meantime I want you to do me a favor.”

“Delighted.”

“Our Bordeaux correspondent has died, and I’d like you to go there for a few days until we find a replacement.”

“But I’ve never been to Bordeaux.”

“That doesn’t matter. All you have to do is look at the local newspapers every morning and telephone us the news you think might interest us.”

Next day Tito was in Bordeaux, furious at having had to leave his two mistresses in Paris. The first thing he did was to buy three or four newspapers, go to the telephone and have himself put through to The Fleeting Moment in Paris.

“A whole family poisoned by mushrooms,” he read on the third page, and, with his mouth to the receiver, his eyes on the newspaper and his mind on his two incomparable mistresses, Kalantan and Maud, he started dictating to the shorthand writer five hundred miles away, who dutifully and prosaically took down what he said. It was a horrifying account of how a modest bourgeois family, to celebrate the grandparents’ golden wedding, had sat down to a magnificent dish of fried mushrooms, which had unfortunately been collected by inexperienced persons. Suddenly they were all seized with terrible pains, and just when the grandparents, parents, grandchildren and a nurse maid were on the point of commending their souls to God…

But the story ended with a eulogy of certain products (the safety of which was guaranteed by experts) manufactured at a well-known Bordeaux factory. The poisoning story was just an advertising stunt.

Tito was struck dumb. He had telephoned an advertisement to his newspaper, having mistaken it for a news story.

“Well?” said the shorthand writer at the Paris end of the line. “Why have you stopped? What happened?”

Tito’s pride would not allow him to admit his mistake. “In spite of the doctor’s efforts there were no survivors,” he went on.

“How many dead were there, then?” asked the shorthand writer.

“Twenty-one,” Tito firmly announced.

That afternoon’s edition of The Fleeting Moment reported under a three-column headline a piece of news that no other newspaper could claim to have:

“GOLDEN WEDDING TRAGEDY AT BORDEAUX. POISONOUS MUSHROOMS KILL 21. OFFICIAL INQUIRIES IN PROGRESS. COLLECTIVE SUICIDE OR CRIME?”

Tito would have been happy enough in Bordeaux but for the haunting memory of those two women. Bordeaux, according to its inhabitants, has nothing to envy Paris for. The smart ladies even talk the Paris argot, the famous wines of Bordeaux are held in little esteem there, and no one uses the world-famous Bordeaux mustard; and the Atlantic provides a bracing smell of the infinite and delicious Arcachon oysters. But it did not provide Maud, or Kalantan, the Armenian widow of many vices and many oil wells.

Being a local correspondent at Bordeaux was tedious, not because of the excess of news, but because of its scarcity.

Nothing important ever happened, there were no scandals, no worthwhile crimes, no sudden deaths of famous men. The editor had sent him a telegram saying: “Your news insufficient. Send sensational news.”

“But if nothing sensational ever happens,” poor Tito said with his mouth to the receiver, desperately turning over the dreary pages of the local newspaper in the hope of finding something.

“The editor asked me to ask you on his behalf to send plenty of interesting news,” the shorthand writer said.

“Did he?” Tito said. “Then take this: When a big sausage manufacturer in southern France whose name we cannot yet disclose heard that two illegitimate children were born of the illicit love affair between his wife and a Vaudois shepherd, he killed the woman and her children, and to conceal the crime he minced them at night in the lonely factory and used them to fill hundreds of sausages that were distributed all over France, We shall be in a position to give more details tomorrow.”

Next day there was a catastrophic drop in the price of sausage meat all over France. No one bought sausages; retailers refused to accept them and cancelled orders and payments.

A Toulouse manufacturer who was incorrigibly honest and therefore not very successful could no longer sell anything, and with bankruptcy staring him in the face shot himself through the heart with a revolver.

The biggest shareholder in The Fleeting Moment, who was a big exporter of sausage meat, called a directors’ meeting and insisted on the editor being sacked. All the sausage eaters in France demanded to be told the trademark of the incriminated sausages. All the ruined pork butchers wanted to know the name of the killer who had put women’s and children’s flesh into sausages instead of donkey meat.

The editor of The Fleeting Moment recalled Tito to Paris, and he arrived by the next train.

“I’m ruined,” the editor lamented. “They want me to publish the manufacturer’s name.”

“Publish it, then,” said Tito.

“What name can I give?”

“There’s no need to make one up. A big sausage manufacturer has committed suicide at Toulouse. Let us say that it was he. His tragic end amounts to a confession. His name was Thomas Salmâtre.”

The editor was radiant; he glowed with his own light. That evening’s Fleeting Moment announced the honored name of the suicide Thomas Salmâtre in big headlines.

The situation was saved. As Thomas Salmâtre’s sausages had no trademark, no one knew he had eaten them, and the directors confirmed the editor in his job, though he had to commit himself to paying a pension for life to Salmâtre’s widow and to providing for the education of his nine innocent children.

Tito was not sent back to Bordeaux, so he was able to return to the arms of the beautiful Armenian lady and the no less beautiful arms of his Italian neighbor at the Hotel Napoléon.

He had begun to fall in love with Maud on the day of her arrival in Paris. But “day” is too vague a term. The beginning and end of a love affair can be established with astronomical precision in hours, minutes and seconds. He had begun to fall in love with her at the moment when, leaning on the windowsill (with the porphyry Vendôme column vibrating like transparent liquid) she told him how she had given herself to a man for the first time. “I hardly knew him,” she said. “He was just an ordinary man, but an ordinary man was what I wanted. Just imagine it, it was summer, a midsummer afternoon. He took me standing against a door, quietly, without making a fuss, just as one transfixes a butterfly.”

Because of the obscure and inexplicable reaction produced by the knowledge of how she gave herself to another, Tito felt his whole being throb with a strange excitement. We can be made jealous even by women with whom we are not yet in love.

He had known her when she was simply Maddalena, a colorless schoolgirl predestined for the cautious love-making of a meticulous neo-Malthusian bookkeeper or the incautious aggressions of a prolific, ready-fisted, qualified metal worker.

She was then the purest of the pure; the reformatory had not yet turned her into a harlot. She cleaned her gloves with petrol on the balcony and threw coins to street musicians in the courtyard to get them to play the latest song over and over again.

The smell of meat being cooked in Marsala and of caramelized sugar flavored with vanilla rose from the kitchens on the first floor. Maud was as intact as a seedpod on the branch. She ate her breakfast standing against the shutters with her cup in one hand and her grissini in the other. She ate cherries on the balcony and spat the stones at neighbors’ balconies, and when she hit a window she ran back into the house uttering shrill cries.

But now she was no longer an uncontaminated seedpod. To Tito, now that he saw her again, she was a flower (oh, let me make a floral comparison; floral and ornithological comparisons are so soothing, so purging). To Tito, then, now that he saw her again, she was a flower that in its passage from buttonhole to alcove to hôtel meublé had received too many male fingerprints.

That was sufficient to rouse in him a disturbing jealousy of the past, the pain of not having been the first and only man in her life, a hatred of all the men who had had her and a hatred of her for having given herself, a hatred of the time that had brought this reality into being, a hatred of the reality that could not be changed, and an even greater hatred of the time to which he could not return.

Inability to go backwards in time is the worst of our sufferings, if our impossible desire is to experience the youth or virginity of the woman we began to love when she was already mature and had been someone else’s.

We then try to grasp fleeting time with both hands, as if it were the last carriage of an express train just moving out of the station. We devour the rest of the way and swear to travel every inch of it; being unable to recapture the past, we try at least to make sure of the future.

Nevertheless we know that a future of ten years, or the whole remainder of our lives, will be no compensation for the few months of youth that she gave to another. Old photographs show that she was not as beautiful or refined or seductive as she is today; yet it’s the girl in those old photographs, or even before that, whom we want. The lover of the most famous and most beautiful actress (the lover really in love with her) would like to go back to the time when she was an ordinary, unknown, touring character actress, moving from theater to theater with a small trunk, her sewing machine and her unnoticed virginity.

Tito fell in love with Maud on that day in late spring or early summer when she confided her little story to him, standing at a window in the Hotel Napoléon watching the cars moving between the Rue Castiglione and the Rue de la Paix with the noise made by a nail on silk.

Soon afterwards, when he left her among her open luggage to hurry to the beautiful Armenian lady’s villa, perhaps he might have realized he was in love with her if he had not had to get out in the Rue de Rivoli to have a pale gardenia that still preserved the voluptuous perfume of the Côte d’Azur among its untouchable petals put in the buttonhole of his dinner jacket.

His love was born and blossomed and grew because he did not stop to contemplate it. A Slovenian mountaineer once told me that small mushrooms that have just sprung up must be picked immediately, just as they are, because they stop growing when someone has laid eyes on them. It would be useless to come back next day hoping to find them fully grown.

Love is just like that. If it is watched at birth, it stops. Sometimes it is reabsorbed into the earth.

Tito didn’t stop to watch it, because he had to hurry to the villa as white as an ossuary and as round as a small Greek temple, where Kalantan was waiting for him, completely naked under her peplum and all atremble in her almost chaste nudity.

That evening, after a tasteful but quick meal — it was as quick as those served at railway station buffets — Kalantan curled up on the parallelepiped of carpets and listened to Tito squatting cross-legged beside her and telling her his tale of woe.

She listened quietly, lying with her knees drawn up to her face, with that tender, self-satisfied look peculiar to women and cats.

Then they went into the next room, which was her bedroom.

Next morning, on his way back to his hotel in her car, the gentleman was exhausted; Kalantan had given herself to him that night with a frenzied prodigality.

“You see,” she confided to him, almost blushing, “tonight, during these last few days, I wanted you more frantically because — listen, and I’ll explain. There are some days on which we women are particularly passionate, but we can’t, because those are just the days when… Oh, how difficult it is to explain. Forgive me. I’m talking like a fool. Do you remember Marguerite Gauthier, the Lady of the Camellias, who always wore white camellias every day, except for two or three days every month, when she appeared with a red rose on her bosom or in her hair? It meant that on those days… Well, I never have to wear red camellias. What has made me like that is morphine.

“Marguerite Gauthier would not have admitted you to her alcove tonight. But I can. Those are days of the truest, most terrible love.”

That was what the Armenian lady, roused by insatiable passion, told him.

He went back to his hotel exhausted, like a convalescent after his first walk out of doors; too much loving had wiped out his masculinity.

In spite of that, when he got back to the hotel he went to Maud’s room. She was just buttoning her kangaroo gloves on her thin wrists, and the sight of her gave him a vague feeling of trepidation.

“How did you sleep, little one?”

“Splendidly. And you?”

“I spent the night at the club,” he replied.

Maud meant nothing to him. He was not in love with her. They were not in love with each other. There was no sign of any future bond between them. But he lacked the courage to tell her that he had been with his mistress, which would have felt like admitting an act of infidelity.

It was that stupid, useless, but instinctive and spontaneous lie that made Tito realize for the first time that he liked little Maud, that he liked her very much indeed.