Cocaine

8

At the Petit Casino Maud, male impersonator who danced in top hat and tails, was a moderate success. She was applauded, as were Ta-lan-ki, tamer of short-sighted and lazy Pekinese, Kerry, a black boxer, and the so-called Irishman Sibémol, a musical comedian who walked on his hands playing a keyboard of bells with his feet. She was called back to the footlights twice. She gave one encore, and would have given another if the audience in the cheaper seats had not tacitly excused her from doing so.

She was nevertheless kept on for a month, and was given an engagement for the following month as principal dancer in a revue at the Folies Montmartroises.

She was not dismayed by her moderate success in Paris, because she did not claim to be adding a new beam of light to the Ville Lumière. There was nothing original about her art; there had been dozens of dancers in top hat and tails before her; the music was Paris music that had been imported into Italy and had returned of its own accord to the city of its origin; and her beauty was not so exceptional as to attract special attention in that exacting metropolis.

So when she went back to her hotel after her Paris début she was neither depressed nor discouraged, having earned the anemic laurels that she expected; no more and no less.

However, Tito Arnaudi, of The Fleeting Moment, was not of the same mind. The tamer of Pekinese dogs, a Chinese who also peddled opium and cocaine, had sold him a box of powder that he hurried to open, and under its influence her dancing seemed to him to be the revelation of a new art, an expression of universal energy, a supreme synthesis of beautiful movement, a divine rhythmical experience.

From his seat in the front row of the stalls he vigorously applauded her first appearance; but as no one else joined in the only result was some cheap, rude giggles.

In his eyes Maud’s black tailcoat shone with gleams of blue as if it were shot through with phosphorus. The hallucinatory influence of cocaine made Maud’s flowing hair look like a tangle of incandescent metal threads. The music seemed to come from invisible distances and the backcloth looked like a landscape full of sun and wind.

“With your dancing you reveal unknown worlds and unexplored marvels,” he said as soon as he had a chance to talk to her. He repeated this later, when they went to her room at the Hotel Napoléon. And he repeated it several times more that night while the blue humidity that seeped down from the sky on the sleepless metropolis reached their naked, perspiring bodies through the open window.

Next day Tito had to leave for Bordeaux, where he stayed for a week before returning to Paris.

After a conversation with his editor which was as dramatic and forceful as a scene from Bernstein, he went back to the Hotel Napoléon, where he found Maud in bed with a stranger.

“That makes forty,” the stranger said, sitting up in bed and looking at Tito without showing any sign of anxiety or modestly covering his chest.

“What do you mean?” Maud asked.

“That’s the fortieth husband.”

“He’s not my husband.”

“Who is he, then?”

“My lover.”

“Then it’s seventy-six.”

Tito had recognized the man immediately. He was Kerry, the black boxer. There are some people you don’t forget when you’ve once seen them. His body was so solid and so shiny that the proverbial bullet would have bounced off it. So there would have been no point in shooting him.

In view of this circumstance Tito walked out of the room with a great deal of dignity, protesting at the inadequacy of hotel bedroom keys that never worked properly from the inside.

He changed, put on a sand-colored suit with a fresh violet tie, and walked to the beautiful Armenian lady’s villa that looked like a small Greek temple that by some historical mistake had been displaced to the Avenue des Champs Elysées.

I have no desire to sing the praises of bigamy, but I must admit that Tito lived very happily between these two women. He was in love with neither, but believed he was in love with both, and when one of them upset him he took refuge with the other.

When one of them deceived him he found purity and fidelity with the other. If Maud remained faithful to him for too long, for lack of the stimulation of jealousy he started falling out of love with her, and he went back to Kalantan. But as soon as Maud showed signs of attachment to another male his jealousy boiled up again, and he left Kalantan and became passionately devoted to Maud. And, as long as this served to keep other men away, he constructed a coat of mail of love all round her; but as soon as he saw that other men were overcoming her resistance, in order to forget her he hurried back to Kalantan and her takhta, her parallelepiped of Turkish carpets and cushions.

At the Petit Casino poor Maud earned only one-fifth of what she needed to live on. But some very rich gentlemen gave her in cash ten times more than she spent.

The reader will ask how much Maud earned, and how much she spent, and exactly how much these rich gentlemen gave her, and what sort of figure that half-kept man Tito cut in these circumstances.

Problems of that kind cannot be solved by logarithm tables, but by much simpler methods. All that is necessary is to do it as Tito did. He knocked at Maud’s door. If she answered “Not now,” he said sorry, and did not come back till three hours later.

Oh, how often did the patient and indulgent Tito have to wait three hours before being admitted.

But he filled in the time by putting on his violet tie and his sand-colored suit and going to the house of the Armenian lady, who was always willing to console him, because she was able to adorn her musk-scented hair with white camellias every day.

When he went back to Maud’s room and hazarded a timid reproach she embraced and kissed him and, pressing her body to his, said: “Don’t talk like that, darling. I’m all yours now. Everyone else, including the man that left half an hour ago, belongs to the past now, and the past has nothing to do with us. Come along, darling, let’s make it up and be friends again.”

When two men want to make it up they go and have lunch together.

A man and woman go to bed.

To forget the immediate and distant past Tito and Maud made it up practically every day.

At Kalantan’s there was a past too.

It was in the nuptial chamber, which as a result of a bathing accident had become a widow’s chamber.

It consisted of an old tin box covered in velvet, a magnificent example of Caucasian art.

“What’s inside it?” Tito asked one evening as he undid his violet tie.

“One day I’ll tell you,” Kalantan promised, taking off a golden slipper.

“Can’t it be today?” said Tito, taking off his sand-colored jacket.

“No, not yet,” said Kalantan, undoing her belt.

“But why?” said Tito, unbuttoning his waistcoat.

“Because today I’ve much more important things to tell you,” Kalantan said playfully, snapping the green garter on her thigh.

“And what have you got to tell me?”

“That I’m in danger of getting lost in this huge bed unless you join me in it immediately. Don’t wind your watch. Put it down.”

“But supposing it stops?”

“Exactly. Wait till it stops before you wind it.”

And so Tito failed to discover what was in that tin box, that rare example of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past.

Maud, the Italian dancer, met an official of the police department of very high rank and very small stature, who stuck out his chest and held his head back and, when looked at sideways, resembled a spoon. He was attached to the vice squad.

She also met a young surgeon who aspired to a lectureship at the Sorbonne and was the author of an important book on surgery. He called on her in a strictly non-professional capacity, and assured her that she was in excellent condition and was very well-formed. In fact he predicted that, with an element of good will, or rather imprudence, on her part, she would become an excellent wife and mother. But dancing and maternity don’t go very well together.

The high official in the police department who resembled a spoon when looked at sideways was a great lover of his peace and quiet and urgently begged her not to become pregnant. She assured him that she knew a young surgeon who was the author of a treatise on surgery and was available for any eventuality.

No one would have supposed that this little blond surgeon, who looked like a troubadour in an oleograph and had the melancholy, resigned eyes of a newly-delivered mother, was capable of carrying out Caesarian sections and removing cancers and ovaries. In fact he was highly skilled at these things.

He had specialized in an operation that is performed with a certain frequency in Vienna, Berlin and Paris and is beginning to be performed in Italy. It was a little operation that the surgeon with the gentle eyes of a newly-delivered mother performed without assistance and within an hour. For this little operation, including sterilization of his instruments and of his own hands, he was satisfied with a fee of 10,000 francs. In Maud’s case he was satisfied with double that amount, knowing it would be paid by the high police official, who loved Maud and his own peace and quiet; for, in order to avoid upsetting his own children who were still slumbering in the calm blue of the future, he would actually have been willing to produce several thousand francs more.

Rarely in the lifetime of that worthy official had he been so relieved as when, having once again implored the dancer Maud not to become pregnant, she assured him that, thanks to the young surgeon’s intervention, there was now nothing to fear.

The young surgeon was satisfied with his modest fee and the personal approval and grateful patronage of this influential police official who was specially assigned to the vice squad.

But, when Tito had learned that his Maud had stoically subjected herself to the surgeon’s knife in order to be able to sell her delicate merchandise without risk of its being depreciated by an unwanted pregnancy, he turned as faint as if the young surgeon had removed his heart instead of Maud’s ovaries.

He had not totally forgotten his own relatively recently acquired knowledge of physiology. For two years he had attended a gynecological clinic and had followed with real distress the fate of women who for pathological reasons had undergone the operation that Maud had now undergone, that is at the very source of life and of their femininity, and as a consequence had never been women again.

He knew the internal secretory glands were vitally important to the functional economy of women, and the rogue had deprived her of them for the sake of a few thousand francs.

He remembered young girls who, when they went home after leaving the clinic, had one by one lost all the distinguishing marks of femininity in their voice, their smile, their ways. A hoarse note crept into their voice, a severe look came into their eyes, a non-sexual, hermaphroditic, precociously old something appeared in their face, which became hairy like a man’s, and their bodies tended to fat.

Tito foresaw that all this would happen to Maud.

“Poor, poor Maud,” he said to her, with suppressed tears in his voice.

But since Maud did not understand, and since he lacked the courage to explain, all he could do was melodramatically go down on his knees, as they do in sentimental novels, and exclaim broken-heartedly: “Maud, Maud, what have you done, what have you done.”

Maud asked him to dry his tears and go away, since she was expecting the senior police official, whose visits had become much more frequent since her little operation.

But before saying goodbye she said: “Why were you weeping?”

“I was pretending,” he said.

“But you had tears in your eyes.”

“When we passionate people pretend to weep, we really do weep.” He lacked the courage to tell her the awful truth.

The young talented surgeon’s name was put forward for the Legion of Honor.

For a few days Tito rushed round Paris like a maniac. Every now and then he remembered he was on the staff of The Fleeting Moment and dropped in to see if he was needed.

He dragged himself to the reporters’ room, looking as weak as a corpse that could still walk though it was in a state of advanced putrefaction. His face was as pale as if it had been soaked in ammonia.

In the reporters’ room was the man whom nobody knew. He came forward to meet Tito with outstretched hand and a cordial smile. On every newspaper there is always a man whom nobody knows. Nobody knows who he is, what he does or why he is tolerated, but everyone from the commissionaire to the editor greets him with varying degrees of deference. He is not on the editorial staff, he is not on the payroll, he has no specific duties, but in spite of that he takes a seat at any available desk, uses the telephone, keeps his hat on, reads the newspapers, uses the newspaper’s headed paper and gives orders to the messengers.

The first thing he said was: “You’re living much too irregular a life, my dear Arnaudi. Isn’t that true, Nocera?”

Nocera: Those two women are ruining you, my dear Tito.

Chief sub-editor: You ought to get married.

Tito: Shut up, all of you.

Chief sub-editor: What you need is a loving wife to console you every now and then for all the troubles you have with your two mistresses.

Nocera: We’ll help you to find one, if you like.

Tito: Basically you’re perfectly right, of course. I ought to take refuge in marriage as if it were castration.

The man whom nobody knows: You ought to marry, if only to change your troubles.

Chief sub-editor: You ought to marry a widow. The ideal woman is a widow, in my opinion — but not your Armenian widow. A little widow whose passions have quieted down a bit. I might have one in mind for you.

Tito: It’s not easy to explain the kind of women I like. If I decided to get married, I’d want a woman with the stupid intelligence, the idiotic tameability of a seal; as for her physique —

Nocera: Do you like them plump or skinny?

Tito: I don’t want too much of an Amazon and I don’t like them too callipygian.

Chief sub-editor: I know a little widow who’s rich and very pretty. What do you say to a widow? She’s inexpensive, second hand, but as good as new. She was widowed after functioning smoothly for six months. Incidentally, I think women should be treated as Beau Brummell treated his clothes; when they were new he had them worn by his valet. This one’s very virtuous, and she’s so economical that when the year of mourning was up she put her widow’s weeds in mothballs, saying they would do for her second husband.

Nocera: I’d advise you to marry a whore. Not a streetwalker, of course, but one of those who won’t take less than two hundred lire for a session. Experience shows they make model wives. If you marry a respectable young lady of good family with some securities in the bank and an intact hymen, she’ll feel entitled to keep you at her feet in a state of adoration for the rest of her life. But if you marry a whore her dowry will be a flat already furnished and equipped with all the little luxuries suggested by long experience. Also she’ll have a well-filled jewel box and she’ll have put aside a tidy sum of money.

Chief sub-editor: Whores don’t save money.

Nocera: I tell you they’re very economical, in fact they’re almost miserly. They’ll insist on a man’s wasting a thousand francs on a useless thing like a wedding present, but if they get a letter with an unfranked stamp they carefully remove it and re-use it at the first opportunity.

Tito: Decent women do that too. Four sous, if a woman has to spend them, are four sous, but a hundred lire spent on her by a man are worth less in her eyes than a tram ticket. Women have invariably been responsible for the worst instances of stinginess I’ve come across. But go on.

Nocera: The prostitute you marry will have money that you’ll be under no obligation to distribute out of pride to the poor of the parish. Perhaps at the time you may be tempted to do so, but at the last moment the temptation will disappear. Money in small quantities soils the hands, but in large quantities it cleans them; fortunately the only signatures on banknotes are those of the director-general and the chief cashier, and those who pay a woman don’t add their signatures, so your dignity will be safe. Also the woman, having earned her money by her own sweet efforts, will realize that your money too is worthy of some respect, and that’s something not understood by young ladies of good family.

Also, if you marry the type of woman I have in mind, your wife will have enjoyed all the ephemeral pleasures of luxury and will have satisfied her wildest whims; things like a villa on the Lake of Lucerne or a yacht at Nice or a car with special coachwork will no longer tempt her. She’ll have a delightful longing for simplicity à la Cincinnatus. Instead of saying: “You know what you ought to buy me, darling?” she’ll say: “Don’t waste your money, my love.”

Whether you marry a young woman of good family or a whore, she’ll certainly be unfaithful to you, but there’s a difference. The former will deceive you in a noisy, sensational fashion; if she does not draw your attention to your unhappiness, she’ll certainly draw everyone else’s to it. Not having much experience of men, she’ll believe her idiot of a lover (because she’ll inevitably fall in love with an idiot) is an exceptional individual; and if he tells her that you’re a fool she’ll take his word for it and help him make you look a fool to your friends. A whore, on the other hand, will deceive you elegantly, methodically, economically, with style, tact and honesty. She will be able calmly and accurately to compare your merits with the other man’s, because she knows men, while a wife recruited from respectable virgins of good family knows only two, that is, you and the other man. A respectable woman who cuckolds you will laugh at the state she has put you in, because she regards it as strange, remarkable and exceptional. But the whore, knowing it to be natural, normal and usual, will not laugh. The respectable young woman will want you to help her lover, lend him large sums of money, help him over his difficulties. The whore, being used to taking money from men, not giving it to them, will not impose that burden on you.

She will not be accepted in good society, so you won’t have the displeasure of having to meet people and return visits and debase yourself with the company of the respectable. The only people you will invite to your home will be agreeable and unprejudiced persons such as ourselves, who will never cause you any embarrassment, because with a former whore there’s no need to mince words; and there’ll be no vulgarity either, because the woman will have become your wife after all. Also, she’ll never refuse you when you want her.

Tito: No wife ever refuses herself.

The man whom nobody knows: That’s what you think, but there are wives who have the courage to say to their husbands: “No, not tonight, darling.”

Nocera: But she won’t make the excuse of being tired, because you could answer: “What? You, who had twenty men a day?” And if she wanted it when you were tired, you could say: “But haven’t you had enough yet after your active and hard-working career?” You could have as many lovers as you liked, and if she objected you could silence her by mentioning the first Christian name that came into your head.

A respectable young woman will never bother to hide her fits of irritability and bad temper and will make you put up with her nervous outbursts, and when she gives herself she’ll show her indifference or disgust. But the whore, accustomed to giving herself with a smile and an appearance of pleasure, will treat you as her most highly valued client and give you the illusion of desire and pleasure, even though her father and mother have died of yellow fever that day. Also she’ll keep her beauty till an advanced age because, as it’s one of the essentials of her calling, she will have learnt all its secrets.

Just as retired actors sometimes yield to the temptation of returning to the stage, or at least of giving a special performance, she may one day be tempted to do the same. But, if so, no one will be surprised, no one will despise you for it, because it’s her former profession, after all.

You may, perhaps, have a strange feeling on the first night of your marriage. You won’t have the feeling of being in bed with a wife, but with a woman whom you’ve accosted in the street. Won’t that be a pleasure? You won’t be up against the nuisance of having to struggle with a virgin’s safety locks, and that’s a far from negligible advantage. But if you were foolish enough to want a virgin wife, believe me, my friend, a prostitute could provide that for you too, for only prostitutes — and not virgins — are able to create a complete illusion of virginity.

Tito: You’re perfectly right, my dear fellow.

Nocera: The first thing you must do is to drop those two women and never see them again.

Tito: No, I’ll never see them again.

Nocera: Do you swear that?

Tito: I swear it.

The telephone rang.

“It’s for Tito Arnaudi.”

Tito picked up the receiver. “Yes, darling, it’s me,” he said. “At your place in half an hour? Yes, even sooner.”

“Who was that?” Nocera asked.

“The Armenian,” Tito answered, and walked out.