Cocaine

9

He reached Kalantan’s villa a little late, having met, at the entrance to a Métro station, his old school friend, the waiter, who used to memorize dates like telephone numbers (Peace of Campoformio, one seven nine seven) and had acted as his guide to the cafés of Montmartre when he was doing his research for the cocaine article.

“I’m going back to Italy,” his friend announced, extending his baggage-laden arms. “I’m sick of Paris, I’m sick of waiting, I’m sick of earning money one franc or so at a time, I’m sick of everlasting complaints. If I stayed here much longer I’d throw myself in the Seine, though half of its water comes from the bidets of recognized or clandestine whores.”

“Do you expect to find a cleaner river in Italy? Perhaps you will, because Italian women wash less.”

“I’m going to be a monk. There’s a monastery near Turin where they take anyone who offers himself. It’s a kind of religious Foreign Legion.”

“But do you know how to be a monk?”

“I don’t think it’s very difficult.”

“And do you have faith?”

“No.”

“Do you have a vocation?”

“No.”

Then why are you doing it?”

“There’s a small garden, the cells are well laid out, there’s not much work, the rule is not oppressive, the food’s healthy, there are plenty of books, and you never go out, even after death, because there’s a cemetery on the spot. There’s every convenience.”

Tito looked at him, puzzled. Then he said: “You’ve had an unhappy love affair. Has your mistress been deceiving you with her husband?”

The future monk lowered his eyes and lifted his bags with a disconsolate gesture. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll send you my address, so that you can come and see me if you’re ever in the neighborhood. Goodbye.”

And he hurried down the Métro steps with bowed head.

The velvet and tin box, the complicated specimen of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past, was full of gold coins. It was like fabulous treasure hidden in the cellars of vanished cities. When Kalantan told him what the box contained Tito laughed as if it were a good joke.

“But that’s the sort of thing that happens only in fantastic novels and German films,” he said.

Kalantan told him the story.

“My husband was very rich,” she said. “He owned some inexhaustible oil wells and the most famous fisheries in the whole of Persia.”

“I know.”

“And he was inflicted from birth with the most appalling taedium vitae. He seemed to have been born with the whole of Asia’s ancient experience in his blood. Nothing tempted him, nothing amused him. He had no interest in his home or his family, and in his room he put up the notices you see in hotel bedrooms, giving the prices charged by the laundry, the cost of breakfast served in the dining room or the bedroom, and informing gentlemen taking trains later in the day that the room must be vacated before two p.m.

“He dreamt of travel, but travelled very little. He was a kind of paralytic with a craving for distant places. His longest journeys were Paris — Berlin, Paris — London, or Paris — Brussels. After being away for a month, he’d come back.

“He liked cocottes. I think all the most celebrated ones passed through his hands. What he would really have liked would have been to have them all permanently available in a moveable home, a kind of gypsy caravan, but run in accordance with the standards of a Paris maître d’hôtel. He liked me at infrequent intervals. At the beginning of our marriage he was very fond of me, though I had one defect — being his wife. To create the illusion that I wasn’t his wife, he used to pay me. Every time I took him into my bed he dropped some gold coins into that box. He said that a wife was ennobled by elevation to the rank of courtesan.”

“And hasn’t anyone ever tried to break into that box?”

“My servants are honest, and no one suspects there’s gold in it.”

“It must amount to several hundred thousand francs.”

“Maybe half a million.”

Tito went over and tried to lift it; the effort made the veins of his brow and neck swell.

“Poor darling,” Kalantan said, making him sit next to her on the day bed; and she kissed his face, which suddenly went pale, and started to caress his hands.

“Kalantan, that box is your past, and your past makes me suffer dreadfully, because I’m jealous of it. I should like to have been the first to have you. Every one of those coins is a sign of the pleasure you gave someone else.”

“But what does that matter?” Kalantan said in astonishment, kissing his eyes that were veiled with anger. “You’re my real master. My husband was merely a duty. My lovers? I don’t remember, because never have I had so much pleasure as in your arms. In any case, the past is the past, and has nothing to do with us.”

Tito withdrew his hands from hers.

The past has nothing to do with us.

It was the phrase Maud had used. These two women, products of two different civilizations, one from the Po valley and the other from the gorges of the Caucasus, used the same words to comfort him.

His waiter friend who was going to shut himself up in a monastery had been so right when he summed up his disgust by saying: “I’m sick of all this.”

Tito was now irritated with Kalantan, the wealthy Armenian woman who liked being treated like a whore. In their heart of hearts all women to a greater or lesser extent feel the latent attraction of the brothel.

That day Tito could not make love to the Armenian lady.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “But today it’s no use. I’m depressed, let me go.”

And he went back to Maud.

A few weeks previously he had still been able to forget Maud’s infidelities in Kalantan’s arms and Kalantan’s past in Maud’s bed, but now his intensified love of both meant that he was crushed between two equal and opposite forces.

He now knew all about Kalantan’s past: her simulated selling of herself to her husband, the orgies in the penguin room, the feverish excitement of her stimulants and the voluptuousness of her narcotics, the love-making in the coffin, the primitive nostalgia for the brothel followed by a desire for purity, which was nothing but revulsion from excessive and perverted sensuality; it was a purely cerebral disgust transformed by morphine into a chaste frenzy.

Nor was there anything he didn’t know about Maud’s past and present.

He knew how and to whom she had first given herself; he knew to whom she had sold herself in Italy and in Paris; he had seen her in bed with a black man whose pachydermatous skin shone like brilliantine; he had seen the police official emerging from the lift with his little eyes swollen and shining with lust; he knew that the young surgeon had mutilated her at the very source of life and love, anticipating her menopause and cutting short her youth. He knew the discreet hotels, the garçonnières, where she went to hire herself; every Paris arrondissement harbored a client of hers.

Maud and Kalantan were different creatures belonging to different civilizations, but they were alike in not understanding his anguished jealousy. Both had said to him, with different accents but with the same non-understanding in their eyes, that the past had nothing to do with them.

Maud and Kalantan were dissimilar women, both of whom he loved with the same frenzy, for both held him captive, one by his jealousy of the present, the other by his jealousy of the past.

Maud had on her skin the odor of the thyme of her green mountains; Kalantan had a salty flavor.

Both were young, but there was something old in each of them, though in a different way.

Maud, with her insatiable sensuality, sought new and excitingly strange and vicious forms of excitement, while Kalantan, sick of morbid eccentricities, sought purity, simplicity, primitiveness in her relations with Tito.

There were two kinds of age in these two young women. One had gone through the most complicated forms of vice, only to end up with wanting straightforwardness and simplicity; while the other had gone through the whole gamut of ordinary love-making, only to end up in search of vice.

The enthusiasm with which they pursued two opposite paths indicated two different but similarly dynamic personalities.

Between these two women, these two passions, Tito was undecided. He couldn’t make up his mind by which to let himself be carried away. He was intra due fuochi distanti e moventi, between two distant and powerful fires…

Oh, that Dante Alighieri, he has managed to get himself quoted even by me.

Just as the inventors of rubber heels and the metal toy that makes a disagreeable sound like a hysterical frog when you press it made millions and were able to lead comfortable and independent lives, so Tito as a result of his journalistic extravagance was given a permanent position on The Fleeting Moment. They increased his salary, at the same time forbidding him to write anything.

“You’re capable of announcing that the Pope has had himself circumcised to enable him to marry Sarah Bernhardt,” the editor told him. “If you want us to remain friends, take the salary, come to the office, play snooker on my billiard table, frequent the bar, fence with my foils, help yourself to my cigars and my typists, but don’t write a word, even if I tell you to.”

So all Tito had to do was to turn up at the manager’s office once a month, receive an envelope full of banknotes, and sign a receipt.

He spent his time going for solitary morning walks in the outlying districts of Paris. Sometimes he stayed for two or three days at Kalantan’s house, where a room was now kept ready for the gentleman. Then he would give up Kalantan for a week to devote himself exclusively to Maud. At other times he let days go by without seeing either. And sometimes he went back to the semi-clandestine cafés in Montmartre and Montparnasse, the doubtful haunts of professors of billiards and poker, impresarios of amorous adventures at popular prices, police informers, pimps, and hungry little tarts living on anchovy sandwiches and croissants dipped in coffee.

The one-legged peddler sold him six glass tubes full of excellent Mannheim cocaine, and he went round Paris with the tubes in his pocket like a child who sleeps with all his toys under his pillow. He sought out the most modest streets in La Villette and Belleville where the walls were adorned with sinister theatrical posters, advertising such productions as The Bastard’s Daughter and The Hanged Man’s Revenge. He walked down the avenues of the Père Lachaise cemetery, which were kept as neat and tidy as a collection of samples; and he went to see the abattoirs, and saw docile sheep and restive calves going in.

At least no one talks to them about dying for their country, he said to himself.

A wretched dog, exhausted by fatigue and thirst, was trotting along behind a light cart which, to judge from the dust, must have come a long way. The cart was nearly empty, and the peasant who was driving it could have let the dog into it instead of letting it suffer like that.

But peasants, Tito said to himself, are an inferior race; they’re worse than blacks. Their actions are guided by the grossest selfishness, the most useless cruelty and the most stubborn ignorance. I should be delighted if hail destroyed their wheat, fungus ruined their vines and disease affected their cattle every year. They deserve no better.

He was strangely moved by the sight of a long crocodile of little girls dressed in white chattering on their way to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. He started following them. He thought he could already see something definitive in each of them. He saw little faces of future comic opera soubrettes; the merry, dangerous eyes of future wreckers of nervous systems; the plump cheeks of future mothers and housewives who would find ways and means of pleasing serious-minded gentlemen between one delivery and the next. They were all dressed in the same way, all in white, they were almost identical in size, but in each of them there already slumbered in embryo the courtesan, the artist, the ordinary woman, the exceptional woman. Inside them were tiny ovules from which great men or great criminals might perhaps be born, or perhaps also cancer cells or tuberculosis bacilli. Among them might be another Maud, another Kalantan, who would cause despair to some small Tito Arnaudi who somewhere or other was now sticking his fingers up his nose.

These casual, aimless wanderings gave him the apathetic bliss of the vagabond. The vagabond’s life has its charms, such as not being the slave of the clock or of appointments, and of not going in prearranged directions. He could spend his time listening to a case in the appeal court, or attending a lecture at the university, or sitting on a bench in a public park or on the river bank; he could attend a public auction, or stop and watch a cart that was too heavy and could not get out of a rut, or go and see the bodies in the Morgue, or watch the departure of melancholy evening trains, or talk to builders, or listen to market salesmen calling their wares, or leaf through the books of the bouquinistes on the peaceful quais, or snooze on green velvet seats in museums, or throw bread to the patient and stupid bears and those enormous, childlike elephants in the Jardin des Plantes.

Sometimes an image of Maud would form in his mind’s eye on the smooth surface of a street or on the white screen of a pavement, and he would go into a café or a sweet shop to escape from it.

When I see an old lady eating pastries, they seem to me to be wasted, he said to himself.

Everything irritated him from time to time. But from one point of view there was a kind of contentment in him that had been developing for some time without his noticing it. In the early stages, taking cocaine had resulted in a sensual restlessness, an almost insatiable erotic excitement (which two mistresses had not been sufficient to satisfy), but now it had begun to lower the flame of his passions. Days passed without his wanting to see Maud’s slender calves or note the musky, India ink-like perfume of Kalantan’s hair. Sometimes his thoughts reverted to the soft carpets of the takhta, where the lovely Armenian curled up in a voluptuous act of self-adoration, and sometimes he returned in memory to Maud, with her thirst for vice and novelty, but both seemed to him to be remote from his present life, for he felt himself to be a survivor.

His sensuality was now a tiny flame on the point of extinction. But every now and then a sudden burst of jealousy had the enlivening inflammable effect of oxygen.

He would imagine Maud in the arms of another in some house or other in heaven knows which of the twenty Paris arrondissements, and jealousy would make his passion flare up again.

Then he would go back to look for her, and when he found her (if he did find her) she was always ready to give herself with the whole of her vibrant body and her divinely wet lips.

“Cocaine,” he would say to her in his passion. “Cocaine, you’re not Maud, you’re Cocaine, my necessary poison. I run away from you, swear never to see you again, but then inevitably I come back, because you’re as necessary to me as a poison that is my salvation and my death. I run away from you because I feel the imprint of other males on your skin. I feel them, they are as visible to me as finger marks on gardenias. I run away from you because you’re not all mine, because I can’t bear to share you with others. Sometimes you revolt me, but I come back to you because you’re the only woman I want, the only one I can really love.”

And she, sitting on the big, unmade bed, would listen with a calm and almost preoccupied smile to the fervent words with which Tito tried to burn her hands.

And as her hands were engaged, for Tito was pressing them to his mouth, she absent-mindedly amused herself by picking up her tortoiseshell hairpins from the floor with her toes.

For her feet were as prehensile as those of monkeys, Annamites and twenty per cent of criminals.

Jealousy is the emotion that causes a man to feel that, having been admitted to a woman’s bed, only he has a right to return to it.

No man is willing to admit that this is a gross absurdity.

Every woman, however, sees and knows this intuitively, and the idea seems so grotesque to her that she sees the uselessness of arguing about it. So an intelligent woman lets the man wallow in his jealousy, because she knows instinctively that it’s a malady for which there’s no cure.

Nevertheless Cocaine said to Tito one day: “I’m not rich. I’m not much good as a dancer, and I can’t start a business or set up an industry. So I have to accept the money they offer me and the conditions they impose on me.”

Tito, faced with this frank confession, broke down and cried like a wet, folded umbrella.

To console him, in other circumstances she would have told him to undress and get into bed; but, as they were in bed already, she said: “Get dressed and we’ll go out.”

Half an hour later they were at the Invalides station, on the Versailles line.

Paris was beginning to weigh intolerably heavily on Tito’s heart. He felt that every street had seen Maud going by in a car to some unknown destination, that every restaurant had provided her and some man with a reserved table or a private room. Heaven knew how many clients she had received in her room at the Hotel Napoléon. She had granted semi-gratuitous samples of her love even in the dressing-room at the Petit Casino.

For some time Tito had been desperately wanting to find new places as a background for their relationships, places where she had not been with other men, and to try new kinds of pleasure she had not yet tried with anyone else. What he wanted was something she had not yet given to anyone else, even if it were a little thing, something she had not said to anyone, a blouse that no one else had seen, a restaurant to which he could take her for the first time.

One day he took her for a ride on the big wheel that has since been dismantled but was once to be seen on all Paris postcards; and when they were at the top he took her on a seat at that giddy height.

Here at any rate no one else will have had her, he said to himself with satisfaction.

But as soon as they were down on the ground again she said with childish candor: “The last time I was here I didn’t think it went round so fast.”

Tito discovered a little restaurant consisting of four or five tables, frequented by painters, students and midinettes, and he took her there to provide her with surroundings that didn’t summon up the specters he wanted to avoid. But as soon as they were inside she looked round as if she recognized the place, and said: “Don’t let’s go over there, Tito. That’s where the kitchen is, and there’s a honeysuckle in the street that smells so strongly that it gives you a headache.”

Where had the woman not been? Where had nobody yet taken her?

And when they got to Versailles, in the gardens resplendent in their autumn tints, in the gay and melancholy splendor celebrated by de Musset and Verlaine, the simple, ingenuous, childish Cocaine, who at heart was still Maud, who at heart was still Maddalena, said: “Do you see that lilac over there? That’s where I found my first white hair two or three months ago.”

After that Tito did not repeat the experiment. Once upon a time he would have been able to hurry to Kalantan’s house to kill the jealousy on the soft, hospitable Asian takhta, but now he could do so no longer. There could be no more fugues or wanderings: Cocaine was now necessary to him to prevent him from going out of his mind.

“If you earned a thousand francs an evening,” he said to her on the way back to Paris, “if you earned a thousand francs an evening, but by your dancing, you could give up all the men who —”

“Who pay me? Of course. And I wouldn’t be anyone’s but yours. But do you think it’s possible? It’s just a dream. Don’t you realize, Tito, that I dance like a flat-iron?”

“I’ve a marvelous idea,” Tito said. “Just wait and see.”

The editor of The Fleeting Moment went to the Auvergne, where an election was in progress, and the chief sub-editor had to have a minor operation on his thumb, so there was no one to stop Tito from sending to the composing room a long manuscript that appeared under an enormous headline on page two.

That evening five thousand francs was taken at the Alhambre box office and Maud, la grande beauté italienne who danced in top hat and tails, was greeted on her appearance as the divine creature whom The Fleeting Moment, one of the most respected Paris newspapers, hailed as the electrifying reincarnation of Terpsichore herself. Maud’s legs, according to this very long article, elevated her to the giddiest philosophical heights, only to plunge the spectator into the abyss of the absolute. Metaphysically her dancing was a manifestation of the eternal and the infinite.

The disappointed audience did not protest at the end of the performance. It was used to impudent publicity stunts, so it contented itself with exclaiming: “What cheek!”

Less polite persons used a more forcible expression.

Everyone laughed. Even the manager laughed; all the other newspapers laughed, and so did Maud herself.

The only person who did not laugh was the editor of The Fleeting Moment, who had come back to Paris the day previously and immediately sent for Tito, the writer of the article.

Tito was in the waiting room outside the editor’s office when three rings of the bell awakened him. There was no need to be a philosopher of music to detect the anger contained in those three rings.

Tito walked into the office and was confronted by a huge pair of moustaches overhanging a big desk.

The editor was downcast. He spoke calmly, composedly, like someone who has suffered a terrible blow, but has now got rid of all the anger contained in his gall bladder. To illustrate what I mean, think of a poor father whose only daughter has run away with a mountebank, had a baby, throttled it, come out of prison, and returned to the paternal roof after six months of immoral living. The poor man has had plenty of time to curse, despise and execrate her, and when she comes back his stock of desperation and rancor has been exhausted and he is able to talk to her calmly, almost gently.

That was how the unfortunate editor talked to Tito, with tears on his spectacles. “You’ve ruined the newspaper,” he said slowly, in a low voice. “You’ve made me a laughing stock in the eyes of the whole Paris press.”

Tito stood with lowered eyes and his hands crossed on his belly, like a seduced and dishonored girl in the presence of her white-haired papa.

“It has been too great a blow,” the editor, a broken man, continued, talking Italian in order to seem more gentle. I’m too pained, too shattered, to be able to curse you or swear at you. I forgive you. But never let me set eyes on you again, either alive or dead. Give me your hand if you like. If you like, you may even embrace me. Here are tickets for two stalls at the Opéra Comique. Take them with all my heart. I can do no more for you.”

And he fell back in his armchair, gasping for breath.

When he came round Tito Arnaudi was no longer there.

He was outside on the pavement.