Cocaine

by Pitigrilli

  “You give them pleasure and they’re not grateful to you.”

  She laughed loudly. “What makes you think that whenever I give myself to someone I want his esteem and gratitude? Gratitude for what? I don’t do it to give him pleasure; I do it for my own pleasure, or for the money he gives me. Why should I worry about what he says if I felt pleasure during the five minutes when his body was on mine? Esteem? Gratitude? Rubbish. If you hope to catch me with those arguments, I advise you to try something else.”

  Tito had already threatened to leave her, but to no avail. “Your beauty is fading,” he argued desperately. “You’re only twenty-four, but you look much older. I love you because physically I’m welded to you, because an elective affinity binds me to you independently of your beauty. You’re getting old. You may still interest someone who’s attracted to you by the animal pleasure of having you, but not by your charms; he’ll want you, not because you’re young and beautiful, but because you have female organs. I’m the only one who can still feel your fascination, because I remember your former beauty. You’re almost a corpse of a woman. You may still take in some shortsighted person thanks to your dye and your make-up, but soon you’ll find yourself rejected like a badly forged bank note. You’ve the prospect of five or six more men and a few more affairs at most.

  “Well, Cocaine, you must renounce those few affairs unless you want me to leave you for ever,” he went on. “I shall remain devoted to you for the whole of your life. When no one spares you a second glance I shall still be there to love you, to tell you you’re beautiful, to give you the illusion of still being attractive. I offer you my life, but what I want from you in return while your beauty fades is the faithfulness you’ve never been able to give me. Remember the specter of loneliness that lies ahead of you. Think of the time when you’ll be reduced to spending your nights alone, cold and old, and when you wake up in your bed you’ll see the yellow flesh that nobody wants any longer. If you now reject these men who are after you I’ll love you even then.”

  Cocaine looked at him dry-eyed and answered: “Renunciation is what I’m afraid of.”

  “But do you realize what I’m offering you in return?”

  “Yes. And I prefer being alone and abandoned for ever tomorrow to giving up my pleasure tonight. The specter of loneliness is less terrifying than the immediate prospect of renunciation.”

  “But have you taken stock of what remains to you? Don’t you know that every morning you have to remove hair round your lips? Don’t you realize that the skin of your neck is as fat and flabby as that on a turkey’s neck?”

  “Yes. But having an affair still tempts me.”

  “Remember you’ll be old tomorrow.”

  “And so will you be the day after tomorrow.”

  “I shall still be able to get young, fresh, beautiful women by paying them.”

  “And I shall be able to get healthy males by paying them.”

  “It’s not the same,” Tito replied. “I’ve always paid. The man always pays, even when he’s twenty, even when the woman seems to be giving herself to him for love. Having always sold yourself, you’ll be faced with the sad novelty of buying. You’ll find out how sad it is to pay for love.”

  “That’s something I haven’t tried yet. Perhaps it might have its pleasing side. We shall see. Now let me go, because it’s nine o’clock, and I’m on at the Casino at a quarter past ten. Goodbye.”

  After the show the few free seats left round the roulette tables were noisily taken by storm while the chief croupier in his elevated headquarters called out: “Un peu de silence, s’il vous plait.”

  Tito walked round the four tables. Those sitting at them were inter-continental hetairae, men with no visible means of support, ladies of a certain age and others of an uncertain age, mères encore aimables, naked virgins only small parts of whom were covered, radioactive women who had given themselves a huge white forehead resting on knitted brows — the face of the cruel woman; the first of these were attractive, but then they became as commonplace as Alsatians or gold snake bracelets.

  They were calm, composed-looking men; attentive footmen who picked up dropped chips and swept cigarette ash from the green cloth; women who with bureaucratic diligence noted down all the winning numbers, in the belief that they recurred. Those who believe that luck repeats itself resemble those who believe in applying experience gained with earlier lovers to new ones. They invariably lose, both at play and in life.

  But Tito couldn’t find a seat.

  If only one of these persons had an epileptic fit, it would be enough. It would free three seats immediately, because his two neighbors would carry away the body. But people have more pity for the dead than for the living.

  “Trente et un: rouge impair et passe.”

  An old woman who had lost all her money wouldn’t move. At least she wasn’t going to lose her seat.

  “As selfish as a tapeworm,” Tito said aloud.

  A gentleman sitting in front of him turned and exclaimed: “Arnaudi?”

  It was an old friend from his boyhood days.

  What a bore these childhood friends are. Just because you had the misfortune to meet them before the light of reason dawned, afterwards you have to put up with them wherever in the whole wide world you run into them.

  “I’ll lose these thousand pesos,” his friend said, showing him two or three piles of chips, “and then we’ll go.”

  The roulette room, with its vague noises and obscure vibrations, reminded Tito of the illustrations in books of experimental physics that show iron filings arranging themselves on magnets in accordance with different lines of force.

  He felt those lines of force in the air over the green baize tables and understood why there are people who live and die for gambling.

  Gambling is merely a summary of life, which is nothing but a quarter of an hour at a roulette table. The successful are those who win; and to win it’s sufficient if the gentleman on your right distracts your attention for a moment or the lady on your left prevents you from putting your stake on the number you chose. All that’s needed is that you should be seated near the low numbers when the low numbers come up, or that you should hear a voice in the air, a number whispered by an anonymous voice, and that you should put your money on it.

  Gambling is not the pleasure of winning, but a feeling that you are living intensely.

  It’s folly to entrust your fate to numbers that are the mere scrapheap of calculation, the rubble of mathematics. Abandoning honest work for the extravagance of gambling is like dropping science in favor of empiricism.

  Those who win thanks to the empiricism of a bankruptcy or a martingale have difficulty in returning to subcutaneous injections and straightforward business transactions.

  Do you generally win?” Tito’s friend asked.

  “I didn’t play this evening, but I always lose,” Tito replied. “The only people who play to win are old, retired cocottes.”

  The two friends parted.

  Tito walked back to the hotel. It was dark. The iron benches under the palms along the seaside promenade were occupied by couples as quiet as insects in love. Every now and then a fleeting car projected beams of light and the sound of laughter.

  He passed a party of perspiring young ladies, irresistible young men, officers. As in all groups that include a few intellectual young women and fashionable idiots, they were discussing spiritualism and theosophy. The young ladies inserted Portuguese words into their Spanish. In Italy they adorn their talk with French words and in France with English ones; in Horace’s Rome female intellectuals used Greek words. You find bluestockings everywhere.

  The frock-coated porter, hearing the crunch of gravel, opened the door for him. In the lobby a shrieking child was struggling with a phlegmatic nurse. He entered the lift, and three floors of the hotel descended beneath him.

  When he was in his own room he strode backwards and forwards on the silent carpets like a madman.

  A mosquito w
as buzzing about, landing here or there on its long legs, which were like those of a young lady suffering from anemia. It flew round Tito’s head and then came to rest on his hand. It was the kind from which you get malaria.

  Tito crushed it with his other hand. Then his face darkened. How tremendously inferior men are to insects, he said to himself. To kill a man an insect only has to sting him, while to kill an insect a man has to crush it.

  Maud had not yet come back.

  Tito sat on the bed, and his gaze fell on the alarm clock. He wound it and put it back. There was a notice under the bedside lamp. Tito read it, nervously cleaning his fingernails.

  Le prix de la chambre sera augmenté dans le cas où ne sera pas pris au moins un des repas principaux à l’Hôtel.

  The price of this room will be augmented if one of the principal meals (lunch or dinner) is not taken in the hotel.

  Der Zimmerpreis erfährt Erhöhung wenn keine der beiden Hauptmahlzeiten (Lunch oder Diner) im Hotel eingenommen werden.

  The sound of pulleys and counterweights came from the lift-well.

  Here she is, Tito said to himself.

  But the lift stopped at the floor below.

  He waited for a moment, hoping that it had stopped to let someone out and that it would resume its ascent and bring his Maud up to him. Instead if gently went down again, moving its own volume of air in the well and making a noise like a tire being deflated.

  He walked across the room and opened the window.

  In the distance the vague luminosity peculiar to all big cities hovered in the night like phosphorus vapor, as if the sky were reflected in a convex glass.

  Tito looked at the constellations of the southern hemisphere: groups of stars, stars like iron filings, stars like flotsam and jetsam, naive combinations of primitive goldsmiths’ work. He felt the blue of the night raining on his heated face. He looked for two constellations of which he had heard when he was a boy: the Southern Cross and Hydra. But he had the impression that in this part of the world the sky was just as randomly untidy as was his own sky.

  A big avenue along the seafront flaunted its arc lamps at regular intervals against the dark background of water; they looked like the illuminated portholes of a big ship travelling slowly with all its lights on.

  Music, now audible and now not, floated on the slight breeze from some distant villa; it seemed to be not the breeze that was carrying the music but the music that was bringing the breeze to him on that sultry night. Clusters of lights under the big black trees glittered like a paste clasp in rustling tresses. Tito put his hands out of the window as one does in a railway compartment in August in the hope of getting an illusion of coolness from the speed of the train.

  He counted the floors beneath him. He was about forty meters up.

  A motorboat made its way along the estuary, with guitars and lit cigarettes.

  Tito raised his eyes to see whether Vesuvius were not smoking in front of him.

  But his Cocaine had not come back.

  He shut the window, started the fan that was on the bedside table and slowly began to undress.

  “Aren’t you in bed yet?” said Maud, coming in suddenly with her hat in one hand and passing the fingers of her other hand across her brow.

  “As you see,” Tito answered coldly, tying the cord of his pajamas round his waist.

  “What’s the matter?” Cocaine asked, reading the reasons for his ill humor on her lover’s face.

  “Where have you been all this time?”

  “Here we are again. Where do you expect me to have been?”

  “That’s what I was asking you.”

  “I’ve been out for a drive in a car.”

  “With whom?”

  “Arguedos.”

  “The student?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a car? If he had money for a car, he’d take a bed in a sanatorium.”

  “What do you know about it?” the woman objected. Women’s skin reacts quickly to their lovers’ pinpricks.

  “And where did that wretch get a car from?” Tito insisted.

  “If you didn’t lend him the money, someone else must have done it.”

  “No one would trust him with a bootlace.”

  “He must have hired it.”

  “With whose money?”

  “With mine. You think no one trusts him? Well, I do. I lent him a thousand pesos.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Out of friendship.”

  “You’ll never get it back.”

  “I know.”

  “Then it was a present.”

  “Call it what you like.”

  As she said this she opened the communicating door and disappeared into her own room, tapping the doorpost with her rings.

  Tito, cold, calm and painfully hostile, went back to the window to receive comfort from the infinite. The boundless night does not deny consolation to those who ask with the eloquence of pain. And, drinking in a mouthful of blue air (a gramophone was now playing somewhere) he said to himself, laughing bitterly: She used to go to bed with men for the sake of money. Now she pays to go to bed with them. If she grew so atrociously ugly that she couldn’t get a man, she’d wait for the first poor sex-starved devil coming out of jail who made a beeline for her for want of anything better. But she’ll never be faithful to me.

  The gramophone had stopped.

  A nightingale kept a sleepy villa garden awake.

  In another villa an invisible violin sounded as if it was at death’s door.

  The violin and the nightingale could not see each other, but took turns in telling each other about their sadness.

  They seemed to be the same nightingale and the same violin that were to be heard at night in Paris at Kalantan’s villa which was as white as an ossuary. How uniform the world was. But for the fact of the intervening ocean, the road between that Paris villa and this South American hotel would be scattered with nightingales and violins just like these.

  The gramophone started up again. They had put on a new record. It started up again to cover those other sounds with its froglike croaking.

  The gramophone is the duty frog in the great swamp that is every big city.

  Tito did not sleep that night. He heard bells ringing: once for the waiter, twice for the waitress, three times for the porter.

  He heard the sound of footsteps on the ribbon-shaped carpets in the corridor.

  He heard the moaning of a siren of an arriving ship (how sad) or a departing one (how melancholy).

  He switched on the light. He was in a hotel bedroom. There was the number of the room and a notice giving the prices. The management could not accept responsibility for valuables not handed in at the office.

  He switched off the light.

  He had the illusion of going to sleep, but did not sleep. He seemed to be leaning against a high balustrade that suddenly disappeared and let him fall into the void. But halfway down he awoke with extended arms.

  A beetle in the Louis XV-style wardrobe ticked its monotonous complaint. Tito remembered that in his country these creatures were called deathwatch beetles, because their ticking was believed to portend death.

  Actually it was a sign of love. An amorous duel was in progress, the ticking is a call to the other sex made by the insect beating its head on the wood of its bachelor quarters. And men kill them because they’re parasites, Tito said to himself. As if man were not the most dreadful example of parasitism in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

  Maud, Cocaine, he went on. Cocaine, tremendous and necessary little woman; my mortal and life-giving poison; little woman to whom I’m attached like a parasite, like Diplozoon paradoxum.

  Forgotten memories, distant ideas, memories of his youth returned to his mind.

  Just like Diplozoon paradoxum (he went on). A tiny creature that when it finds a companion of the opposite sex attaches itself to it with a sucker as big as its whole body, and then they stay joined forever.

  For
ever. The expression that all lovers use. The dream that comes true only for those little creatures buried in parasitology books. Maud and I are attached by each other’s suckers.

  That was how Tito rambled on while the worm in the wood went on ticking out its amorous call. Tito preferred to think of it as a deathwatch.

  Everything all round us is death (he said to himself). We live at the expense of humus, that is, of death. Even modern, active advanced ideas live on the humus of dead ideas. Oh, taedium vitae. How splendid life would be without mankind. To see birds enjoying complete liberty to reproduce themselves, to see forests invading cities, grass growing on café tables, chickens laying eggs on the altars of abandoned cathedrals, fungus growing on the parchment in libraries, lightning striking empty marriage beds. Man has actually given direction to the lighting. Oh, to see horses eating the violets and running free in the public parks.

  The sound of the lift gate being shut clumsily awoke him.

  He put his hand to his heart.

  Heart, lungs, blood (he went on). I’m sick of knowing that my body’s a laboratory designed to nourish and renew my protoplasm. I’m nothing but phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. I’m sick of looking at myself, of looking down on myself as if I had eyes outside myself. And I’m sick of being in love, that is, of using up my phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

  Tito was haunted all night by these strange ideas. A church clock struck the hour, followed by a school clock and a station clock. Then a cock crowed, another replied, and a third intervened.

  How cocks and clocks and nightingales and gramophone and violins repeated and imitated one another.

  He turned and rolled between the sheets. He lay with his head at the foot of the bed and put one leg down on either side. He switched on the fan, looked at the time, switched off the fan, got up and dressed.

  He rang twice, and a maid appeared. He rang four times and the porter came. He told the maid to pack his bags. Only his, not the lady’s. He told the porter to book him a passage on the first ship leaving for Europe.

  “It’ll be rather difficult to get you a cabin today, sir,” the porter prudently suggested. “But I can telephone to Buenos Aires.”