Cocaine

  One evening a young Japanese man appeared with a Japanese prostitute whom Tito had seen before on the boulevards.

  The couple exchanged a few introductory remarks while the man took off his jacket. The sound of the Far Eastern language reached Tito’s ears distinctly; it apparently consisted of independent syllables, detached from one another like the clicking of a telegraphic keyboard. The man spoke calmly, with a veiled smile on his enigmatic face.

  What will they say to each other? Tito wondered, and he answered himself: He will ask her if she has been working as a geisha for long, and she will answer only a few months, and she’ll say she was born in Yokohama, and that her name is Haru, meaning spring, or Umé, meaning cherry blossom . . .

  Montmartre is the breast that has the good fortune to nourish the brain of France, as Rodolphe Salis, the father of the Paris comic press, said. Or Montmartre is simply la Butte, the hill dominated by the Moulin de la Galette, highlighted by the outer boulevards and secured by the two big buttons of the Place Pigalle and the Place Clichy. Montmartre is the modern Babylon, the electrified Antioch, the little Baghdad, the Paradise of the cosmopolitan noctambulist, the blinding, deafening, stupefying spot to which the dreams of the blasés of the whole world are directed, where even those no longer able to blow their noses come to challenge the world’s most expert suppliers of love. Montmartre is the Sphinx, the Circe, the venal Medusa of the many poisons and innumerable philters that attracts the traveler with a boundless fascination. Plays, novels, newspapers spread the perfume of Montmartre through all the continents, a bookish, literary, theatrical, journalistic perfume to which every artist has contributed. Montmartre radiates afar in every direction the glitter of illustrious bald heads, grand-ducal décolletages, regal jewelry, princely shirtfronts and the sharp teeth of insatiable female predators. From a distance every one of us has imagined a fictitious Montmartre embedded in a framework of the names of a few streets, moulins, tabarins and night-clubs.

  But when we get there we suffer a disappointment that we do not always dare confess, pretending sophistication. All the same, at heart we have all said to ourselves: Is that all?

  “Is that all?” Tito Arnaudi said to his waiter friend after they had visited the most celebrated and characteristic spots together. “I must admit that to me the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse seem much more interesting. Here people pretend to be enjoying themselves; there they pretend to be thinking great thoughts. Of the two I prefer the phony thinkers, because they’re not so noisy.”

  Tito had discovered a source of funds.

  “I told you you would,” his waiter friend replied. “I told you that the way to find a job was to wander round Paris.”

  “You’re perfectly right,” Tito said. “By wandering round Paris I found a source of funds in New York.”

  “Explain the riddle.”

  “An uncle of mine in America . . .”

  “You mean to tell me that uncles in America really exist?”

  “. . . is the editor of a big morning newspaper. He has just replied by cable informing me that he will be glad to publish any articles I offer him. Thanks to my uncle’s generosity and the favorable exchange rate, I shall be able to earn a by no means despicable monthly income. My first article will be on cocaine and cocaine addicts.”

  The waiter had in fact taken him to Montmartre in search of dens where worshippers of la captivante coco gathered.

  “Here?” Tito asked at the entrance to a café.

  “Here,” his friend replied, pushing him in.

  From the outside the café looked gloomy. From the outside Paris cafés generally look gloomy; there’s too much wood and too little glass on the doors and windows, and the little light that might have been able to get in is partly obstructed by the big enamel lettering giving the names of the drinks and their prices.

  They were just about to go in when they met the man with a wooden leg, who stepped back to allow them to pass.

  “He lives in my hotel,” Tito said, “and no one knows what his job is.”

  “Job?” his friend replied. “He’s in a very lucrative business indeed, it’s all in his wooden leg.”

  “He must be a beggar,” said Tito.

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “That’s the only way of earning money with a wooden leg.”

  “Is that what you think? He does much better than that. But there’s no hurry. You’ll soon see what I mean.”

  The landlord was behind the counter, serving big glasses of beer to a number of taxi drivers, who smelled of cheap tobacco and wet mackintoshes. Behind him bottles of liquor garlanded with little flags sparkled cheerfully on glass shelves, doubly reflected in the walls of bright mirrors behind them and in front of them.

  On the counter a big spherical aquarium housed some melancholy red fish. The refraction and the combination of natural and artificial light made them look as strange as Chinese dragons as they swam around gracefully.

  “There are some people,” said Tito, drinking a glass of port at the counter, “who go to bed full of aches and pains after a drop of rain, while fish, who spend their whole lives in water, don’t even know what rheumatism is.”

  A metallic, strident laugh that sounded as if someone had struck a tray full of glasses echoed through the room.

  “Go back in there, you fool,” the landlord called out.

  And the girl with the pale face and glassy eyes who had laughed fell back two or three paces as if her face had been slapped, and withdrew behind the reddish curtains that concealed the entrance to the next room.

  “Pas de pétard ici,” the man continued in slang. Then, realizing that Tito was a foreigner, he translated for him. “Pas de bruit,” he said.

  Tito took umbrage at this. “Are you referring to me?” he said

  “A la môme,” the man explained. “A la poule.”

  When the taxi drivers left, Tito’s friend whispered something to the man, whose only answer was to raise the red velvet curtains.

  “À votre service,” he said with a bow.

  Tito and his friend went into the next room as if they were entering a waxwork show restricted to men over the age of eighteen.

  Their arrival was greeted with a certain mistrust. A stagnant, yellowish light shone down on a number of small tables covered with green baize of the kind used for card tables and university exams. The room was not a big one; there was a big divan that went all round it, eight small tables, a piano, some newspapers dirtied by drink and finger marks, and a mirror that had been scratched with a diamond.

  Tito scrutinized the room before observing the people in it; natural curiosity should have made him do the opposite but, to avoid rousing unjustified suspicions and to create the impression of being already initiated into the mysteries of drugs, he took his seat on the divan next to his friend in an offhand and casual manner.

  Then he picked up a newspaper.

  Three women looked at him suspiciously and mumbled something inaudible. But the girl who had laughed noisily at his remark in the other room a short time before turned to the others and, nodding in his direction, said: “Pas bête le type.”

  Tito observed the four women one by one. He noticed that their dresses were made of good materials, but were old, worn and neglected; the white of the organdy was yellowed, the leather trimmings were cracked, the silk was split, the belt twisted, the shoes not worn out but misshapen as a result of careless walking. One of the women had not properly washed her neck and her polished fingernails offered a repulsive contrast of red enamel and black filth.

  They huddled together side by side like birds in a cage as if to keep themselves warm. Three of them rested their feet on the horizontal metal bar under the table; the fourth had her heels on the edge of the seat with her calves up against her thighs like a closed jack-knife, and rested her chin on her knees. There was a glassy look in their eyes, and their bloodless but cruelly rouged lips looked unreal against the pallor of their faces.

 
These four taciturn women (or was their taciturnity the result of the two strangers’ arrival?) seemed to be awaiting sentence by an invisible court that might appear through the curtains at any moment; in fact the least stupefied of them kept looking in that direction, though nothing whatever happened.

  Under the big mirror two thin men were mechanically playing dice with the listless indifference of aging clerks working away in a dusty office and being paid a salary, not for the work they did, but for the time they spent. One of them had his coat collar turned up over the silk handkerchief he wore instead of a detachable collar and tie. All Tito could see of the other was his shoulders and the back of his neck. His neglected hair came down over the back of his neck and met in the middle as if to form an embryonic tail. When he turned to have a look at the newcomers, Tito saw his face. It was one of those ugly faces that are to be seen only on days when there’s a general strike: a long, thin face, disfigured by corrosion, and fleshless, like one of those ox-skull ornaments that architects call bucranes.

  The woman who had spoken rose and went and said something to one of the two players; she leaned over his shoulder and stroked his ear with her cheek, but he went on playing, unperturbed. She lifted his jacket, took his cigarette case from his trouser pocket and, on her way back to her friends with a lit cigarette, she raised one leg to the level of her shoulders and with defiant roguishness brought it down on the table, making the glasses tinkle.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” she said to Tito, who had not yet said anything. “It’s not very cheerful here.”

  “So I see,” he replied. “It’s more cheerful in the morgue.”

  The woman was offended. “Why don’t you go there then?” she snarled.

  One of the dice players turned and exclaimed: “Christine!”

  “They probably take us for two policemen or something of the sort,” Tito’s friend suggested.

  Tito laughed, and turned to the least taciturn of the women. “Your friends and the gentlemen playing dice must have formed a strange idea of us,” he said. “I have the impression that you’re all a trifle embarrassed. But we’re not what you suppose. I’m a journalist, and this is a colleague of mine. There’s nothing to be afraid of, as you can see.”

  “Journalist?” one of the three silent women said. “And what are you doing here?”

  “What one usually does in a café.”

  “But why did you pick this place instead of a café on the grand boulevards where you can watch the grues and the trottins passing by?”

  “Because this is more useful for what I’m looking for.”

  “And what are you looking for, if I may ask?”

  “Cocaine!”

  The two men stopped their game and went over to Tito. One of them sat astride a chair with his chest against the back. He took a small silver box from his waistcoat pocket, opened it, and offered it to Tito.

  The four women rushed at him.

  “Ah, canaille!”

  “Vilain monstre!”

  “Sale bête.”

  “Selfish swine!”

  “And he said he had none left.”

  “And he was letting us die for lack of it.”

  One of the women tried to seize some of the contents of the box between her thumb and forefinger, but the man pushed her away with the flat of his hand, telling her roughly to keep her hands off.

  But the four harpies didn’t calm down. Panting, with dilated nostrils and flashing eyes, they clawed at the box of white powder, like shipwrecked persons struggling for a place in the lifeboat. Those four bodies round a little metal box, all in the grip of the same addiction, looked like four independent parts of a single monster greedily writhing round a small, mysterious prize, elevating its cheap pharmaceutical crudity to the dignity of a symbol. All Tito could see was half-clenched hands that looked numbed by pain, hands with pale, bony, hooked fingers that turned into tightly clenched fists with nails sticking into palms to suffocate a shriek, or quell a craving, or give pain a different form, or localize it elsewhere.

  The hands of cocaine addicts are unforgettable. They seem to live a life of their own, to be getting ready to die before the rest of the body, to be always on the point of a convulsion that is just, but only just, being held at bay.

  In their eyes, now enlivened by the agony of anticipation, now dulled by the terrible depression caused by absence of the drug, there is a sinister light, a suggestion of death or dying, while their nostrils are horribly dilated as if to sniff any possible stray molecules of cocaine that might be dispersed in the air.

  Before Tito had a chance to help himself the four women succeeded in dipping the fingers of one hand in the box, and then, carefully holding the other hand underneath as a plate, made off to the other end of the room, like a dog making for a distant corner with a stolen bone.

  While holding the precious powder to their dilated nostrils and breathing it in, they kept looking round them mistrustfully.

  Misers whose meanness borders on insanity, women whose greed for jewels verges on frenzy, do not worship their treasures as cocaine addicts worship their powder. To them there is something sacred about that white, glittering, rather bitter substance; they call it by the most loving and tender names, and talk to it as we talk to a loved one whom we have regained after thinking her lost forever. To them the drug box is like a sacred relic; they think it worthy of a monstrance, an altar, a small temple. They put it on the bedside table, look at it, talk to it, caress it, hold it to their cheek, press it to their throat or their heart.

  When one of the women had sniffed her pinch of powder she dashed to the man who had offered it to her, grabbed his hand just when he was going to hold the remaining contents of the box to his own nostrils, grasped it firmly with both her hands, and held it to her face and sniffed, trembling as she did so.

  He pulled his hand away, shook the woman off and voluptuously sniffed the remainder. Then she took his head between her hands (those bloodless fingers curved like claws over his black hair), applied her wet, tremulous, palpitating lips to his mouth and greedily licked his upper lip and put her tongue into his nostrils to gather the last few remnants.

  “You’re stifling me,” the man moaned. His head was flung back, and he supported himself with his hands against the back of the chair. The veins of his throat were swollen, and his hyoid bone kept moving up and down as a result of his intermittent swallowing movements.

  The woman was like a small wild animal savoring the odor of still undamaged flesh before sinking its teeth in it. She was like a little vampire; her lips adhered firmly to the man’s face with her forceful sucking.

  When she let go, her eyes were veiled like those of a cat whose lids are carefully opened while it is asleep, and the teeth in her open mouth (her lips stayed open as if they were paralyzed) laughed like those of a skull.

  She tottered away and sat on the piano stool; she dropped her head on to her forearm, and her forearm dropped on to the keyboard, which responded with a sonorous thump.

  The young man who had offered cocaine to Tito got off his chair as if dismounting from a bicycle and paced up and down the room. The black jacket on his fleshless shoulders looked as if it were on a clothes-hanger, and his bow legs were like a couple of twin cherry stalks. His friend, a pallid and unhealthy-looking youth, took his place on the chair and spoke to Tito.

  “So those creatures didn’t give you a chance to taste the stuff,” he said. “They’re like wild animals. I’m sorry I haven’t any to offer you, but the man with the wooden leg will be here soon.”

  “The man with the wooden leg?”

  “Don’t you know him?”

  “Yes, you do,” Tito’s waiter friend interrupted. “He lives at your hotel.”

  “He always turns up here at about this time. He never goes out before five or half-past. In some calendars, the more instructive kind, it says that the sun rises at 5:45 and 27 seconds, or sets at 6:09 and 12 seconds, and so on. Well, the man with the woode
n leg seems to consult the calendar before going out. As soon as the sun has set he’s to be seen strolling through the streets of Montmartre, looking as if he has nowhere to go and nothing urgent to do, and he hugs the walls as if afraid of being run over by a bus. Sometimes he meets strange-looking people and goes into a bar or a bistro with them, or simply into a doorway, and then they leave separately and go their several ways as if they were complete strangers to one another.”

  “But he was at the bar in the next room when I came in just now,” Tito said.

  “Yes, I know. But he didn’t have the stuff then. He must have been with a student of pharmacy. He won’t be long now.”

  “Here he is,” the man with cherry-stalk legs announced.

  The four women dashed at the newcomer as if they were about to assault him.

  “Get back, you jackals,” the man said threateningly. “Take it easy, or I shan’t have anything for you.”

  “Five grams for me,” one of the women hissed.

  “I want eight,” said another.

  “It’s dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,” moaned a third in steadily rising tones. “I paid you in advance yesterday, so I come first.”

  Before producing his merchandise the man with the wooden leg looked at Tito and said by way of greeting: “Oh, you’re 71.”

  “Did you meet in prison?” Tito’s friend asked.

  “No, that’s my room number.”

  One of the four women put her hand on the shoulder of the skeleton-like individual. “T’as du pèze?” she said to him.

  “Not a sou,” her boyfriend replied with conviction.

  “So much the worse,” she replied. “I’ll swap my bracelet.”

  “Terms strictly cash,” said the man with the wooden leg, jestingly but firmly. “Cash first, paradise later.”

  The woman who had asked for five grams produced a fifty-franc note from her purse.

  “Give me twenty-five francs change,” she said.

  “I haven’t got any change.”

  “Then keep the fifty and give me ten grams,” she said.

  The man took the note, put one hand in his trouser pocket and produced a small round box. The upper part of his wooden leg, the part that accommodated the stump, also provided amply stocked and very unsuspicious storage space.