Cocaine

by Pitigrilli

  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.

  10

  Tito had not laughed for a long time, but this disaster made him laugh. He had lost his job, he lacked the strength to look for another, and the money he had left was barely enough to last a week.

  In order to economize, he bought from an antique dealer in the Rue Saint-Honoré two spherical cinerary urns that were as iridescent as soap bubbles, and a gilt monstrance, browned by time and incense, that came from some small demolished or deconsecrated mountain church. The place of the sacred host had been taken by a pharmaceutical host, round which, however, silver-gilt rays preserved the same mystical glitter.

  Tito went up to his room at the Hotel Napoléon, removed from the monstrance the pharmaceutical host that so unworthily profaned it and put in its place a photograph of Cocaine in the nude.

  He opened a drawer to put the cinerary urns in it and took from it a bottle of Avatar, which was Cocaine’s perfume.

  Perfume exceeds even music in evocative power.

  He applied the atomizer to the bottle and filled the room with the scent, as if he were about to make a pagan sacrifice worthy of the image.

  While he stood there motionless, contemplating the lines of her nudity in an attitude of silent veneration, Cocaine suddenly walked in. She said nothing, but she was so moved at the sight that she flung her umbrella on the bed, put her face to Tito’s neck and wept hot tears on his green knitted tie with its big blue diagonal stripes.

  If you know how deliciously perfumed tears become when they run down a pretty woman’s cheeks, and how deliciously perfumed ties become when she weeps on them.

  Tito’s tie was wet, but his heart was lighter. Cocaine’s heart too was light and as luminous as an Andalusian mantilla.

  “Your article has had marvelous results,” she said.

  “I know,” Tito replied with a bitter smile.

  “I’ve just been talking to a big American impresario. We’re leaving for Buenos Aires in a week’s time. Will your newspaper let you come with me?”

  “Yes,” Tito replied simply.

  “Will it allow you six months?”

  “Even twelve. And what are the terms?”

  “Excellent.”

  And she hurried to give the news to her lady’s maid, who answered, sometimes arrogantly, to the name of Pierina.

  When Csaky, the butler, announced M. Arnaudi (whom he no longer referred to as “the gentleman”) was asking for her, Kalantan was not surprised. She was used to his longer and shorter periods of melancholy and misanthropy and knew how changeable his moods were, and she felt sure that habit, if not inevitable destiny, would bring him back to her.

  But he seemed strangely different; there was something forced and artificial in his behavior, and he no longer abandoned himself so completely when he made love to her.

  “Your room is as you left it,” she said to him, stroking his hair. “And my love is unchanged too.”

  In fact that night Tito felt that his beautiful, vice-ridden Armenian mistress gave herself to him with the same passion for simplicity as before; and when he woke up next morning in the rosewood bed he recognized the furniture and the prints on the walls and the impressive and decorative livery of Csaky, the butler, who asked whether “the gentleman” wanted Russian tea, green tea or Ceylon tea.

  “I’ll have it in the lady’s room,” he said.

  He went to Kalantan’s room; she was still asleep, with her hands and knees drawn up to her chin, completely enclosed in herself, just like a magnolia asleep at night.

  Later he slowly dressed, carefully tied the green knitted tie with blue diagonal stripes that had been perfumed by Cocaine’s tears, and went to the Hotel Napoléon to fetch some things.

  “Don’t be long,” said Kalantan.

  “I’ll be back in half an hour,” he replied.

  In fact half an hour later Madame Ter-Gregorianz’s car arrived in the garden with two big yellow suitcases.

  Tito’s nights were restless. In the evening he took strong doses of chloral to overcome the insomnia produced by the drug he could not give up. The result of the incurable insomnia and the useless drug was a hallucinatory state; he spent long hours in a state of wakefulness in which he felt he was dreaming and in a state of sleep in which he felt he was awake. Being in this villa as white as an ossuary as guest and lover of a woman of Asian passions, being waited on by servants who treated him as coldly and obsequiously as if he were a usurper; the whole of this quasi-oriental environment set up in the heart of Paris for the purpose of creating a legendary Caucasian atmosphere all round him, and the idea of Maud, of his Cocaine, only five minutes away by car, though his impression now was that she was far, far away, fading and getting lost in the distance — all this added up in his mind to a multi-colored musical beehive, the buzzing of which was interrupted from time to time by the sentimentally ironic, epigrammatic chirping of a bird that was in love in the garden.

  At the hotel they gave him a letter from his friend the novice monk, who prayed for him every evening, and he found Cocaine busy trying on a graceful garment of mauve crêpe-de-Chine adorned with fine organdy pleats.

  “Do you know, Tito, that I’m getting fat?” Cocaine said to him with a laugh.

  “Yes, I do.”

  He certainly knew it, he had expected it. This was the first sign, the beginning of the decline. The cruel mutilation to which she had submitted the year before was now beginning to confirm the saying that woman is woman only because of her generative gland.

  All feminine charm, the delicacy of outline, the softness of the limbs, the development of the breasts, the flowing abundance of the hair, the musical subtlety of the voice, depend on that gland. With its removal the harmonious line changes into obesity, the voice becomes masculine, the liveliness of the mind degenerates into loss of memory, the affectionate nature gives way to hypochondria and irritability, a hairy shadow appears on the lip and an expression of su
rliness comes into the eyes; and after a few years we find ourselves with a virago in all her hybrid hatefulness.

  But Tito was so much in love with this woman that he wanted to hasten the day when she would be as ugly as that. No one else will want her, he said to himself, and then at last she’ll be mine alone. And then I shall have the only joy of which I dream: that of being her last lover.

  And when she asked him to touch her and actually feel that she was getting fat, he hugged her so fiercely that she called out: “Be careful, you’re spoiling my organdy pleats.”

  The dog started barking in her defense.

  But all that Tito could see was the beginning of plumpness, the first stage of the downward trend that would end with her coming back to him.

  It was the first gleam of hope that appeared in what was a kind of amorous irredentism.

  Csaky, the Ter-Gregorianz butler, looked at him with respectful but venomous eyes.

  “Madam is out,” he announced. “Your room is ready, sir.”

  Late every afternoon Kalantan used to go to a physiotherapy establishment where she subjected herself to illusory treatment for an imaginary complaint, and she came back after sunset with flowers at her waist. The first thing she did was to go to Tito’s room without asking the servants, to enjoy the pleasure of surprise.

  When he wasn’t there she assured herself that he would be coming next day.

  Then she went back to her room to be undressed by Sonya, a lady’s maid of the old type.

  One evening Csaky said to her: “The gentleman has had to leave suddenly for Italy.”

  “Oh? Did he leave any letters?”

  “No, madam.”

  “Did you take him to the station?”

  “No, madam. I took him to his hotel.”

  “Did he leave his suitcases?”

  “He took them, madam. But he left some clothes.”

  “Very well. You may go.”

  She put down her flowers, undid her belt, took off her hat, and dropped her veil on the velvet and tin box that constituted her “past.” The box that contained the memories of pleasure given to another man. The box full of coins her husband had given her to create the illusion that she was something better than a wife: a courtesan.

  The box that made poor Tito suffer so much that he had broken it open to learn its secrets and emptied the contents into his two yellow suitcases, among his handkerchiefs and ties, his antelope gloves and his foulard pajamas.

  Kalantan, who like all women was incapable of understanding jealousy, particularly jealousy of the past, smiled to herself indulgently as she thought of Tito’s anguish when to reassure him she had said to him: “Darling, the past has nothing to do with us.”

  It no longer has anything to do with us when it has been stolen and taken in two yellow suitcases to distant South America.

  No sooner had the ship left harbor than Maud started flirting with passengers of various nationalities. And, as the sea was terribly rough throughout the passage, Tito hardly ever left his cabin.

  Someone told him that the best way of getting rid of seasickness was to eat nothing. So Tito ate nothing.

  Others advised him to eat. So he ate.

  An elderly, very religious lady gave him some anti-hysteria water from Santa Maria Novella. He drank it.

  A rastaquero, a self-made man from the pampas on his way home, recommended anchovies. So he tried anchovies. Someone advised him to lie on his back, so he lay on his back. Someone else told him to lie on his face, so he lay on his face.

  As none of these things did him any good, he sent for the ship’s doctor.

  “Doctor,” he said, “what do you do when you’re seasick?”

  “I throw up,” he said.

  The doctor, like all traders with a continually changing clientèle, was skeptical and indifferent.

  The talkative Maud shone among passengers of the oddest nationalities on the promenade deck. A Bolivian diplomat wanted to know whether her continual infidelities did not drive Tito to distraction. She replied that in the matter of infidelity men’s hearts were like patent leather shoes. Everything depended on the first time. If they didn’t crack then, there was no danger of its happening later.

  She was also observed disappearing into various first class cabins but, as this was of no interest to anyone but Tito, who at the time was more concerned with his stomach than with his heart, there is no point in our lingering over such minor episodes of transatlantic travel.

  When they crossed the equator Maud danced, and received a great deal of applause and many presents.

  Meanwhile Tito lay prone on the bed in his cabin, eating anchovies dipped in anti-hysteria water from Santa Maria Novella.

  And over the sea the moon was like a match lit behind a porcelain plate.

  One stormy night a Wagnerian tenor who was as blond as a camel and had sung en todos los grandes teatros de Europa y de America, pressed his two hands melodramatically to his corazon and murmured to Maud that he would be willing to spend toda la vida on the ocean with her, because jamás como en esta noche el perfume del mar me ha parecido tan dulce.

  One day the rastaquero from the pampas, seeing that the care and attention he lavished on Tito were all in vain, for the poor fellow still had el sueño agitado, la lengua sucia y el color pajizo, turned his attention to Maud.

  The rastaquero seemed to her to be a more worthwhile object for her attention than the Wagnerian tenor, who had told her frankly that the idea of giving a mujer a centavo had never passed through his cabeza, for las mujeres considered that granting him a capricho or, as they say in Paris, a béguin, was a great honor.

  Maud had long since passed the stage of indulging in béguins or caprichos.

  The rastaquero, for the benefit of those who have never come across persons such as he, was a typical parvenu, of the type that can euphemistically be described as a country gentleman. He kept his well-filled wallet in an inside pocket of his waistcoat, almost against his skin, and he wore cotton pants with a ribbon at the bottom that he wound five times round his ankles. His eyes looked different ways, so that he reminded you of one of those road signs that point to two different countries in opposite directions. If he had not been so rich he would have made an excellent supervisor in a big store, because with those eyes of his he seemed to be looking all ways at once.

  As his cabin was next door to the music room, Maud was able to dance for his exclusive benefit to the sound of a slow waltz that seemed to come from a distant island, and as a token of his appreciation he allowed her to choose a small souvenir of the voyage from the contents of the wallet he kept hidden in the inside pocket of his waistcoat, almost against his skin.

  As one courtesy deserves another, Maud allowed him to put his hand between her dress and her skin and help himself to what he wanted.

  The notes of the slow waltz came from the music room while the ship sailed southwest at a steady speed of sixteen knots.

  A few hours later when the rastaquero went back to bed alone, he found a hairpin in the bedclothes that preserved all Maud’s perfume, all the exquisite perfume of her violet crêpe-de-Chine lingerie decorated with fine organdy pleats.

  Tito was well aware that Cocaine was paying instructive visits to various cabins. But now his jealousy was painless. Let me explain. Jealousy was at work inside him, but it was like an unthreaded pulley that went on revolving without starting up the machinery of pain and passion. When you feel ill, even if it’s only from seasickness, you no longer feel moral anguish. I should like to establish a new kind of therapy, curing illnesses of the mind by means of physical illness.

  The idea would be to cure remorse by inoculation with influenza, jealousy by malaria germs, love by injections of spirochaetes. I think that is the direction in which the medicine of the future will have to move.

  The ship called at Rio de Janeiro. As soon as Tito felt terra firma beneath his feet he wanted to go on to Buenos Aires by train, but when he heard that Cocaine was going by
sea he agreed to go back into the lion’s den. He emerged, after five more days of seasickness at a speed of eighteen knots, when they arrived at Buenos Aires.

  We shall not describe the landing, or the impressive sight of the Avenida de Mayo. All those who have been to Buenos Aires will remember it, and those unfortunate people who have not should be ashamed of themselves and go there immediately.

  Nor shall we describe the moderate success enjoyed by Maud. Her beauty was declining, but the spotlights at the big music halls and the witchcraft of powder, rouge and eye-pencil ensured that she was still a desirable creature.

  After dancing for a few months at Buenos Aires she went on to Montevideo, accompanied by Tito, Pierina and the dog.

  She stayed at Montevideo for three months and at Rosario for a fortnight.

  A paint manufacturer proposed to her at Bahia Blanca, and the head of a big canned meat factory fell passionately in love with her at Fray Bentos.

  A year after they landed in South America she signed a profitable contract with the Casino at the smart seaside resort of Mar del Plata, one of the most luxurious spas in South America.

  The half million francs extracted from Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s precious family memories were nearly exhausted. Tito’s health was declining. The everlasting peregrination from hotel to hotel and from one city to the next, noting how suitors and lovers sprang up everywhere in Cocaine’s path, took an increasing toll of his nerves and impoverished his blood.

  He had come to South America hoping that good theatrical contracts and the money he had earned by cleansing Kalantan’s past would assure him of exclusive access to Maud’s body. But the rastaquero whose acquaintance she had made on the voyage out, the greasy face of that country gentleman with his inexhaustible wallet and robust passions, followed them to the various cities they visited.

  Cocaine distributed her favors both on expensive and on gratuitous terms. Now that she was aware of her swift physical decline, she sought out pleasure without wasting a day or missing an opportunity; she gave herself to men who turned out to be unworthy of her generosity.