Cocaine

  The bill amounted to 180 lire, which was not expensive considering that it included the liquor necessary to wash down the lobster and the partridges seasoned with truffles.

  “How sad going home is.”

  “Suppose we go to a show?”

  “It would be sacrilege.”

  “Not to enjoy ourselves, but to take our minds off our grief.”

  “What’s on?”

  “The Pills of Hercules.”

  “Is it very dirty?”

  “Yes.”

  When the show was over, Nocera took her home in a cab and let her choose which urn she wanted.

  “It’s all the same,” she said, picking one at random. Never was a dead person’s estate shared out so amicably.

  Nocera put the other urn in his pocket and got back into the cab.

  How shabby the modest flat seemed to the woman who was used to grand hotels and smart villas.

  She had been back in Turin for several weeks, after dancing her last dance under the Senegalese sky, and she still had a little African fever in her blood. She had come back to Turin to retire from life, to shut herself up in the humble room in which she had lived as a girl.

  She found old picture postcards, empty sweet boxes, disintegrating novels with the first pages missing, yellowed shorthand notebooks, material for blouses, faded ribbons; also she found old memories: the exact spot where Tito had kissed her for the first time, the door against which she had been taken, standing, as one transfixes a butterfly, by a man whose name she didn’t even know, on an August afternoon when passion had flared up inside her.

  It would have charm, melancholy charm, she thought, to shut herself up for ever in that room to live and die of memories. She locked herself up in it, full of remorse for not having been faithful to Tito, or at least for not having given him the illusion of being faithful to him. But now she offered him eternal fidelity. He was to be her last lover, as he had wanted.

  She laid her chinchilla fur coat on the bed, prepared a soft resting place in the corner of the room for the small live dog that was a perfect imitation of a stuffed one, and was inconsolable at the departure of Pierina, her invaluable lady’s maid, whom she had sent on unlimited leave.

  The room was full of trunks, on the lids and sides of which were the names of ships and hotels. The furs and coats exuded the odor of Avatar.

  On a table by the window that served as a desk there was a photograph of Tito, and on a piece of old lace there was the urn, spherical and shiny and full of gray powder.

  The gray powder was Tito. Was it one of his legs? Or his head and an arm? Two thighs and the neck? Heaven knows what part of him had come to her as her share. And how everything had lost its shape in that yellowy gray powder that might have been a Rachel face powder.

  Surrounded by these memories, she said to herself, I shall be able to prepare myself for death.

  Nocera paid the doctors, the chemist and the undertaker, and then went to the parish church.

  “How much does it come to?” he asked.

  The bill was waiting for him, already receipted. He paid up without asking for a reduction, though one of the eight priests (at twenty-five lire each) had been lame.

  He also paid other persons involved in the funeral. Who knows why so many people have to be mobilized when someone dies? The day will come when dead bodies are simply thrown into canals like dead cats.

  He carried out the deceased’s last wishes, wrote a few letters of thanks, and collected the last things remaining in his room. A pair of shoes were still under the bed.

  Oh, the shoes of the dead, what a painful sight they are. Those black objects that preserve the shape of something that no longer exists.

  In Paris, Pietro Nocera had never had occasion to see Maud. If he had seen her among all those electrifying Parisian women, he would have noticed nothing but her wretched Italian provincialism.

  But as soon as he saw her in Turin he was swept away by the exquisite Parisian fascination of that great female globetrotter. Her devotion to his sick friend moved him; and the distance between sympathy and sensuality is as short as that which separates those two words in the dictionary.

  One morning — three days after the funeral — Maddalena was drinking her breakfast coffee on the balcony overlooking the courtyard when they brought her a letter. She read it through once only, then wrote on the first sheet of paper that came to hand:

  Dear Nocera, you don’t love me. You think you love me. Don’t write to me like that again. I shall never be yours or anyone else’s. Tito is to be my last lover.

  Next day they brought her another letter, in which Nocera expressed a wish to kiss her magnificent body. After consulting the mirror, which reflected the whole of her form, she sat down and replied:

  “Dear Nocera, my body is finished. I can’t love any more, and I don’t want to be loved either. My last lover was poor Tito, to whom I shall be faithful for ever.”

  Next day she expected another letter, but none came. She waited two days, three days, with increasing anxiety.

  Why didn’t he write?

  “Here’s a letter for you, Maddalena.”

  “Thank you, papa.”

  It was a last passionate letter from Nocera, who implored her to come to his house in an almost poetical street in a quiet district. He said he loved her, wanted her, needed her, her flesh and her perfume.

  Maddalena remained thoughtful for a few moments, took a card and an envelope, and with a calm, spring-like smile wrote:

  I’ll be at your place at four o’clock. Kiss me.

  She looked for a sheet of blotting paper, but there wasn’t one. She looked all round. There wasn’t even any sand. But in front of her eyes, on an old lace mat, there was a shiny, mother-of-pearl sphere full of a yellowy-gray powder that looked like Rachel face powder.

  She carefully lifted it, gently poured some powder on to the card on which the ink was still wet, carefully shook it to dry the ink, and then bent the card and poured the powder back into the urn. She put the card in an envelope, gave it to the postman, and remained thoughtful for a moment as brief as a pause in a piece of music.

  She bit her lower lip to make it swell, dried it on her upper lip, and then slowly and skillfully passed her rouge pencil over both.

  She took a small key from her key ring, the one that opened her flat cabin trunk.

  She felt as light and luminous in spirit as an Andalusian mantilla.

  She improvised a song with her mouth shut, knelt in front of the innumerable pairs of stockings and chose the thinnest, the pair that most exposed her flesh.

  AFTERWORD

  In 1920, at the age of just twenty-seven, a young Italian named Dino Segre, writing under the pen name Pitigrilli, achieved overnight success and notoriety with a book of short stories called Luxurious Breasts, followed the next year by the novel Cocaine, and a second book of stories entitled The Chastity Belt.

  Although he was branded by some as a “pornographer,” he would not be considered such by contemporary standards: rather than graphic descriptions of sex, Pitigrilli offered a deeply cynical, iconoclastic satire of contemporary European society.

  Behind the official façade of bourgeois morality, traditional family life, and patriotism, Pitigrilli saw a world driven by sex, power and greed, in which adultery, illegitimate children and hypocrisy were the order of the day and husbands and wives were little more than respectable-seeming pimps and prostitutes. Pitigrilli’s sarcastic, aphoristic style shocked and amused by turning conventional morality (and most of the Ten Commandments) on its head:

  Never tell the truth. A lie is a weapon. I speak of useful, necessary lies. A useless lie is as unpleasant and odious as a useless homicide...

  Do not covet thy neighbor’s wife, but if you do covet her, take her away freely. When in the theater, on the tram or in a woman’s bed, if there is a free place, take it before someone else does...

  Hate your neighbor as you love yourself: and don’t
forget that revenge is a great safety valve for our pain... Believe me: a good digestion is worth much more than all the ideas of humanity...

  Honesty, duty, brotherhood and altruism are like supernatural phenomena: everyone describes them but nobody has seen them; when you get closer, either they don’t happen or there’s a trick behind it... (The Chastity Belt)

  Pitigrilli’s cynical amorality captured something of the spirit of Italy in the early 1920s, a society that emerged from World War I with many of its traditional beliefs in pieces. The calls to glory and sacrifice and national renewal had proven cruel illusions, with the death and mutilation of millions resulting in but a few minor territorial changes. Meanwhile, traditional pillars of society—such as the Catholic Church and the country’s economic and political elite—had lost much of their authority. Women were pushing for greater freedom and autonomy, challenging existing standards of personal morality and family structure.

  In this tumultuous context, Pitigrilli’s books were quickly translated into numerous languages and he became an international succès de scandale. He then became the editor of a well-known magazine Le Grandi Firme, (The Big Names) the appeal of which was partly due to its daring content and cynical, worldly tone.

  In Paris and Turin, Pitigrilli cavorted with society’s upper crust, which experimented with theosophy, occult séances, gambling and narcotics as means of replacing the old certainties supplied by church and fatherland. In Cocaine, perhaps his most successful effort at a sustained narrative, Pitigrilli describes a world of cocaine dens, gambling parlors, orgies and lewd entertainment. His main character Tito Arnaudi goes to Paris and finds himself swept up in the post-war French metropolis:

  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.

  The principal occupation of the characters of Cocaine is using narcotics, sex and alcohol to distract themselves from the horrors of real life. As Tito puts it at one point: “Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void.” In searching for any kind of thrill or stimulation, they resort to “the fashionable poisons of the moment, the wild exaltation they produce, the craze for ether and chloroform and the white Bolivian powder that produces hallucinations.”

  Tito, a failed medical student who has just been hired as a journalist, begins to investigate cocaine dens in order to write an article for a Paris newspaper appropriately named The Fleeting Moment. In the course of his research, he indulges in the white powder, which for a time acts as a kind of welcome balm, giving him “a sense, not just of euphoria, but of boundless optimism, and a special kind of receptivity to insults, which were converted in his ears into courteous compliments.”

  As Tito’s lover, (or one of his lovers), Kalantan, tells him:

  “There’s still hope for you... You haven’t yet got to the stage of tremendous depression, of insuperable melancholy. Now you smile when you have the powder in your blood. You’re at the early stage in which you go back to childhood.”

  She spoke to him as to a child, though they were both of the same age. Cocaine achieves the cruel miracle of distorting time.

  Kalantan is a wealthy Armenian woman whom Tito meets on the cusp of widowhood. A drug addict as well, she keeps a black coffin in her bedroom for making love. She explains her curious habit thus:

  It’s comfortable and delightful. When I die they’ll shut me up in it forever, and all the happiest memories of my life will be in it... It also offers another advantage. When it’s over I’m left alone, all alone; it’s the man who has to go away. Afterwards I find the man disgusting. Forgive me for saying so, but afterwards men are always disgusting. Either they follow the satisfied male’s impulse and get up as quickly as they do from a dentist’s chair, or they stay close to me out of politeness or delicacy of feeling; and that revolts me, because there’s something in them that is no longer male.

  Sex, like cocaine, provides only a brief distraction from life’s horrors, followed by disgust.

  In the world of Cocaine and its main characters, life is a decorative mask with despair always just under the surface:

  “Tell me why my heart goes on beating and for what purpose,” Tito asks Kalantan. “If you knew how many times I’ve been tempted to send it a little leaden messenger telling it to stop at once, because one day it will stop naturally, of its own accord, and why should it take the trouble of going on until then?”

  The outside world of work and industry is nothing more than another sham and a cheat. Another of Tito’s journalistic assignments, in addition to his cocaine reporting, is to cover the execution of a serial killer. Tito, exhausted after a night of debauchery, decides to write a purely fictional account of the event, including an “exclusive” final interview with the killer and a gripping account of his death. When it turns out that his life was spared in a last-minute stay of execution Tito’s editor phones him in a rage over the embarrassment of publishing a false account. But the phony account is so wildly successful that the journalists for all the other papers are berated for having been scooped on such a dramatic story.

  Like sex, like drugs, Tito’s journalism is just another fantasy or hallucination meant to distract people from the horror of the world as it is.

  At a certain point, Tito’s two principal drugs, cocaine and sex, fuse in the figure of Maud, the main female character; Pitigrilli begins to call her Cocaine, since he becomes equally addicted to both at the same time. Maud too is a kind of addict, distracting herself by having sex with a procession of men, in some cases for money and in others for pleasure. She makes no effort to hide her activities from Tito, who follows her to South America in hopes of having her entirely to himself. The affair with Maud follows the course that addiction to cocaine generally follows: leading from initial euphoria to increasing desperation and psychological collapse.

  When Tito finally does himself in, Maud and Tito’s best friend, Pietro, attend to him on his deathbed. Struck by Tito’s final despair, they vow to give up their lives of excess but all their intentions of turning over a new leaf fall away in just a few days when Maud and Pietro fall into bed with one another, ending the novel on a note of Pitigrillian cynicism, in which despair is leavened by bitter laughter. For all their apparent darkness, Pitigrilli’s books have a light tone and a quick and breezy air.

  Cocaine appeared in 1921; the following year, Benito Mussolini and his fascist party came to power after the so-called “March on Rome.” Interestingly, Mussolini, himself a deep cynic and perhaps the shrewdest interpreter of the post-World War I mood, appears to have been a fan of Pitigrilli’s novels. When the books were attacked for their immorality, Mussolini defended them: “Pitigrilli is right... Pitigrilli is not an immoral writer; he photographs the times. If our society is corrupt, it’s not his fault.”

  But as Mussolini’s fascism evolved from a transgressive, radical opposition movement into Italy’s new political order, Pitigrilli was bound to be regarded with increasing suspicion. Much of his withering sarcasm was directed at the patriotic and nationalistic nostrums that were the sacred gospel of fascism. In his novel The Chastity Belt, Pitigrilli would write: “Fatherland is a word that serves to send sheep to slaughter in order to serve the interests of the shepherds who stay safely at home.”

  Tito Arnaudi’s thoughts about patriotic duty, at least when viewed through fascist spectacles, are similarly blasphemous:

  When I was twenty they told me to swear loyalty to the King... I took the oath because they forced me to, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. Then they sent me to kill people I didn’t know who were dressed rather like
I was. One day they said to me: “Look, there’s one of your enemies, fire at him,” and I fired, but missed. But he fired and wounded me. I don’t know why they said it was a glorious wound.

  In 1926, Pitigrilli was put on trial for obscenity and narrowly acquitted. Perhaps sensing the need for political protection, Dino Segre applied—and was rejected—for membership in the fascist party in 1927 and 1928. Then one day in 1928, Pitigrilli descended from a train in his native Turin and was stopped by Pietro Brandimarte, a powerful local fascist official, who slapped him in the face and arrested him for alleged antifascist activities. Brandimarte had been the instigator of an infamous episode in the fascist seizure of power, the “Turin massacre,” in which he and his squads murdered twenty-one antifascists just two months after Mussolini took over the government in 1922.

  But the case involving Pitigrilli’s alleged antifascist activities turned out like a bizarre episode in one of his novels, in which all the basest human instincts—greed, lust, anger, the desire for revenge—took on the mask of political principle and patriotism. What appears to have happened was this: some people eager to take over the editorship of Pitigrilli’s successful magazine, Le Grandi Firme, convinced one of his former lovers, the writer Amalia Guglieminetti, to destroy him. Guglieminetti was a society woman with literary ambitions, who dressed like a flapper and carried a long cigarette holder; she could have come straight off the pages of Cocaine. Guglieminetti had taken up with the fascist leader Brandimarte after her relationship with the writer ended, and she agreed to supply Pitigrilli’s enemies with personal letters written in his hand. These letters allegedly contained insults to Mussolini and fascism. But the forgeries were so crude that Pitigrilli was able to expose them at trial, forcing Guglieminetti to break down and confess on the witness stand.

  Pitigrilli’s novel-like prosecution was the fulfillment of one of his deeply cynical injunctions: “To your friends and your lovers never leave in their hands any weapons they can one day use against you... The woman you love or who leaves you is your enemy; since all women are whores, including those who don’t get paid, she will tell her new lover, between one coitus and another, the things you told her, in great secret, between one coitus and another.”