Cocaine (13 page)

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

Csaky, the butler, had laid a small round table, so small that the mouths of the two diners facing each other could easily meet.

“Csaky,” was all the lady said, and Csaky brought to the table a silver dish with big slices of a pink fish alternating with slices of aquamarine-colored pineapple.

Champagne bubbled in a jug as simple as an ordinary water jug. Bringing champagne to table in a labeled bottle is like giving a present with the price still attached.

A Siamese cat came and rubbed itself voluptuously against Tito’s legs.

Kalantan stretched her bare arm across the table and lightly stroked her lover’s hair and then one of his pale cheeks. The caress was as gentle as that of a ghost.

It gave Tito not so much sweet pleasure as a sweet shudder.

Kalantan had not wanted to see any of her old friends since falling in love with Tito. Mourning her husband gave her an excellent excuse for this voluntary isolation. There were no more orgies with drugs and the music of Stravinsky and butterflies sent from the Amazon. What she now loved was love that was as pure as a ringless hand, as simple as loosened hair.

She offered herself to Tito without scent or make-up, just as she emerged from the bath, with nothing but a perfume of wild flesh that was no longer western but was not yet Asian. Her skin preserved a slightly salty odor, as if impregnated with the winds that blow past the salt mines of her remote country.

Kalantan.

A slow, deep, melodious name, like the wind that blows through the gorges of the Caucasus.

Kalantan.

He felt the warmth of her bare knees. He stretched out his hand under the table and caressed something round, smooth, soft, warm and as fresh as a child’s face.

The butler came in several times. After the coffee and liqueurs he did not come in again.

Against one wall of the little room, which was painted like the cabin of a transatlantic liner, there was a low, wide, and deep parellelepiped consisting of three or four mattresses on top of one another covered by a big rug. This was the
takhta
, a kind of altar to Asian female idleness on which oriental women spend their unprofitable time with their legs crossed, munching sweets and recalling antediluvian legends.

“And they’re quite right,” said Tito, joining Kalantan, who was squatting on the
takhta
between two cushions. “What is the point of getting excited and rushing about? We’re like children who laboriously drag a toy cart up a slope for the sake of the insipid pleasure of coasting down it. You say that I’m at the cheerful stage of self-poisoning, Kalantan. You think I laugh, but I’ve passed that stage already. I’m always sad. I no longer believe in the blue of dreams. There’s an illness called acianoblepsia that results in one color, dark blue, becoming invisible, and I’m ill with a kind of mental acianoblepsia. I no longer see the blue of life. The great harm done by cocaine is not confined to weakening the lungs and damaging the heart. The chief harm is psychological. It splits the personality; it does a tremendous job of disintegrating the mind, almost as if by electrolysis. I believe that in every intelligent person there are two persons of opposite ideas and tastes; and I believe that in the artist these two persons are so distinct that one can criticize the other, suggest remedies to him and cultivate his vices if they are attractive and his virtues if they are not boring. The effect of cocaine is to make the splitting of the personality take the form of an explosion of revulsion. The two persons inside me criticize each other, corrode each other, in a way that results in my hating myself. And then I begin to see the uselessness of everything. I feel my heart beating. What for? To send the blood to my lungs. What for? To fill it with oxygen. What for? To enable the oxygen to go and burn up the tissues and then return to the lungs to get rid of the products of combustion. And then? It goes on like that, even when I’m asleep, even when I’m waking or when I’m in your arms and even when I’m not thinking at all. Tell me, Kalantan, tell me why my heart goes on beating and for what purpose. 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?”

“Child,” said Kalantan.

And instead of using the usual words that women use to console us, instead of opening the first aid box of common sense and applying to his brow the cold compress of verbal tenderness, instead of showing him he was wrong, she comforted him with the sweetest tonic, the only one that really raises our spirits and destroys the gloomy products of the imagination.

“Child,” was the only word she used.

And while she whispered it through clenched teeth she took him by the cheeks, fell backward on to the cushions and, bringing his face to her white bosom, sealed his mouth with one of her breasts.

Tito’s Arnaudi’s article on the execution that did not take place was a sensational success. The newspaper was sold out in a few hours; newsagents in the provinces ordered more copies by telegram, and the special edition was twice reprinted. The other Paris dailies, which reported the presidential reprieve, were scooped, and
The Fleeting Moment
immediately acquired the reputation of being the best informed newspaper in France.

A fierce controversy arose between
The Fleeting Moment
and the
TSF,
which argued that the institution of the Republic must function in full daylight and protested vigorously against what it called the false news of the presidential reprieve communicated to the newspapers by the Ministry to prevent reporters from being sent to witness the event. It insisted, in other words, that executions must take place in full view of the citizenry and not be covered up by false news of reprieves. Other newspapers tried to excuse the demonstrable inadequacy of their news service saying that they had known about the execution, but out of a sense of humanity had refrained from reporting the terrible event.

The result was that two days later, when the Minister of Information and Keeper of the Seals informed the press that Marius Amphossy really had been reprieved, no one believed him, for the description of the execution in
The Fleeting Moment
had been so circumstantial, so rich in detail, that it could not possibly have been invented.

Even the executioner almost believed Tito’s story.

“You’re such a marvelous hoaxer,” the editor said to Tito, that I propose to take you off reporting and put you on home politics. Later I’ll put you on foreign politics. But in the meantime I want you to do me a favor.”

“Delighted.”

“Our Bordeaux correspondent has died, and I’d like you to go there for a few days until we find a replacement.”

“But I’ve never been to Bordeaux.”

“That doesn’t matter. All you have to do is look at the local newspapers every morning and telephone us the news you think might interest us.”

Next day Tito was in Bordeaux, furious at having had to leave his two mistresses in Paris. The first thing he did was to buy three or four newspapers, go to the telephone and have himself put through to
The Fleeting Moment
in Paris.

“A whole family poisoned by mushrooms,” he read on the third page, and, with his mouth to the receiver, his eyes on the newspaper and his mind on his two incomparable mistresses, Kalantan and Maud, he started dictating to the shorthand writer five hundred miles away, who dutifully and prosaically took down what he said. It was a horrifying account of how a modest bourgeois family, to celebrate the grandparents’ golden wedding, had sat down to a magnificent dish of fried mushrooms, which had unfortunately been collected by inexperienced persons. Suddenly they were all seized with terrible pains, and just when the grandparents, parents, grandchildren and a nurse maid were on the point of commending their souls to God . . .

 But the story ended with a eulogy of certain products (the safety of which was guaranteed by experts) manufactured at a well-known Bordeaux factory. The poisoning story was just an advertising stunt.

Tito was struck dumb. He had telephoned an advertisement to his newspaper, having mistaken it for a news story.

“Well?” said the shorthand writer at the Paris end of the line. “Why have you stopped? What happened?”

Tito’s pride would not allow him to admit his mistake. “In spite of the doctor’s efforts there were no survivors,” he went on.

“How many dead were there, then?” asked the shorthand writer.

“Twenty-one,” Tito firmly announced.

That afternoon’s edition of
The Fleeting Moment
reported under a three-column headline a piece of news that no other newspaper could claim to have:

“GOLDEN WEDDING TRAGEDY AT BORDEAUX. POISONOUS MUSHROOMS KILL 21. OFFICIAL INQUIRIES IN PROGRESS. COLLECTIVE SUICIDE OR CRIME?”

Tito would have been happy enough in Bordeaux but for the haunting memory of those two women. Bordeaux, according to its inhabitants, has nothing to envy Paris for. The smart ladies even talk the Paris argot, the famous wines of Bordeaux are held in little esteem there, and no one uses the world-famous Bordeaux mustard; and the Atlantic provides a bracing smell of the infinite and delicious Arcachon oysters. But it did not provide Maud, or Kalantan, the Armenian widow of many vices and many oil wells.

Being a local correspondent at Bordeaux was tedious, not because of the excess of news, but because of its scarcity.

Nothing important ever happened, there were no scandals, no worthwhile crimes, no sudden deaths of famous men. The editor had sent him a telegram saying: “Your news insufficient. Send sensational news.”

“But if nothing sensational ever happens,” poor Tito said with his mouth to the receiver, desperately turning over the dreary pages of the local newspaper in the hope of finding something.

“The editor asked me to ask you on his behalf to send plenty of interesting news,” the shorthand writer said.

“Did he?” Tito said. “Then take this: When a big sausage manufacturer in southern France whose name we cannot yet disclose heard that two illegitimate children were born of the illicit love affair between his wife and a Vaudois shepherd, he killed the woman and her children, and to conceal the crime he minced them at night in the lonely factory and used them to fill hundreds of sausages that were distributed all over France, We shall be in a position to give more details tomorrow.”

Next day there was a catastrophic drop in the price of sausage meat all over France. No one bought sausages; retailers refused to accept them and cancelled orders and payments.

A Toulouse manufacturer who was incorrigibly honest and therefore not very successful could no longer sell anything, and with bankruptcy staring him in the face shot himself through the heart with a revolver.

The biggest shareholder in
The Fleeting Moment
, who was a big exporter of sausage meat, called a directors’ meeting and insisted on the editor being sacked. All the sausage eaters in France demanded to be told the trademark of the incriminated sausages. All the ruined pork butchers wanted to know the name of the killer who had put women’s and children’s flesh into sausages instead of donkey meat.

The editor of
The Fleeting Moment
recalled Tito to Paris, and he arrived by the next train.

“I’m ruined,” the editor lamented. “They want me to publish the manufacturer’s name.”

“Publish it, then,” said Tito.

“What name can I give?”

“There’s no need to make one up. A big sausage manufacturer has committed suicide at Toulouse. Let us say that it was he. His tragic end amounts to a confession. His name was Thomas Salmâtre.”

The editor was radiant; he glowed with his own light. That evening’s
Fleeting Moment
announced the honored name of the suicide Thomas Salmâtre in big headlines.

The situation was saved. As Thomas Salmâtre’s sausages had no trademark, no one knew he had eaten them, and the directors confirmed the editor in his job, though he had to commit himself to paying a pension for life to Salmâtre’s widow and to providing for the education of his nine innocent children.

Tito was not sent back to Bordeaux, so he was able to return to the arms of the beautiful Armenian lady and the no less beautiful arms of his Italian neighbor at the Hotel Napoléon.

He had begun to fall in love with Maud on the day of her arrival in Paris. But “day” is too vague a term. The beginning and end of a love affair can be established with astronomical precision in hours, minutes and seconds. He had begun to fall in love with her at the moment when, leaning on the windowsill (with the porphyry Vendôme column vibrating like transparent liquid) she told him how she had given herself to a man for the first time. “I hardly knew him,” she said. “He was just an ordinary man, but an ordinary man was what I wanted. Just imagine it, it was summer, a midsummer afternoon. He took me standing against a door, quietly, without making a fuss, just as one transfixes a butterfly.”

Because of the obscure and inexplicable reaction produced by the knowledge of how she gave herself to another, Tito felt his whole being throb with a strange excitement. We can be made jealous even by women with whom we are not yet in love.

He had known her when she was simply Maddalena, a colorless schoolgirl predestined for the cautious love-making of a meticulous neo-Malthusian bookkeeper or the incautious aggressions of a prolific, ready-fisted, qualified metal worker.

She was then the purest of the pure; the reformatory had not yet turned her into a harlot. She cleaned her gloves with petrol on the balcony and threw coins to street musicians in the courtyard to get them to play the latest song over and over again.

The smell of meat being cooked in Marsala and of caramelized sugar flavored with vanilla rose from the kitchens on the first floor. Maud was as intact as a seedpod on the branch. She ate her breakfast standing against the shutters with her cup in one hand and her
grissini
in the other. She ate cherries on the balcony and spat the stones at neighbors’ balconies, and when she hit a window she ran back into the house uttering shrill cries.