Cocaine (14 page)

But now she was no longer an uncontaminated seedpod. To Tito, now that he saw her again, she was a flower (oh, let me make a floral comparison; floral and ornithological comparisons are so soothing, so purging). To Tito, then, now that he saw her again, she was a flower that in its passage from buttonhole to alcove to
hôtel meublé
had received too many male fingerprints.

That was sufficient to rouse in him a disturbing jealousy of the past, the pain of not having been the first and only man in her life, a hatred of all the men who had had her and a hatred of her for having given herself, a hatred of the time that had brought this reality into being, a hatred of the reality that could not be changed, and an even greater hatred of the time to which he could not return.

Inability to go backwards in time is the worst of our sufferings, if our impossible desire is to experience the youth or virginity of the woman we began to love when she was already mature and had been someone else’s.

We then try to grasp fleeting time with both hands, as if it were the last carriage of an express train just moving out of the station. We devour the rest of the way and swear to travel every inch of it; being unable to recapture the past, we try at least to make sure of the future.

Nevertheless we know that a future of ten years, or the whole remainder of our lives, will be no compensation for the few months of youth that she gave to another. Old photographs show that she was not as beautiful or refined or seductive as she is today; yet it’s the girl in those old photographs, or even before that, whom we want. The lover of the most famous and most beautiful actress (the lover really in love with her) would like to go back to the time when she was an ordinary, unknown, touring character actress, moving from theater to theater with a small trunk, her sewing machine and her unnoticed virginity.

Tito fell in love with Maud on that day in late spring or early summer when she confided her little story to him, standing at a window in the Hotel Napoléon watching the cars moving between the Rue Castiglione and the Rue de la Paix with the noise made by a nail on silk.

Soon afterwards, when he left her among her open luggage to hurry to the beautiful Armenian lady’s villa, perhaps he might have realized he was in love with her if he had not had to get out in the Rue de Rivoli to have a pale gardenia that still preserved the voluptuous perfume of the Côte d’Azur among its untouchable petals put in the buttonhole of his dinner jacket.

His love was born and blossomed and grew because he did not stop to contemplate it. A Slovenian mountaineer once told me that small mushrooms that have just sprung up must be picked immediately, just as they are, because they stop growing when someone has laid eyes on them. It would be useless to come back next day hoping to find them fully grown.

Love is just like that. If it is watched at birth, it stops. Sometimes it is reabsorbed into the earth.

Tito didn’t stop to watch it, because he had to hurry to the villa as white as an ossuary and as round as a small Greek temple, where Kalantan was waiting for him, completely naked under her peplum and all atremble in her almost chaste nudity.

That evening, after a tasteful but quick meal — it was as quick as those served at railway station buffets — Kalantan curled up on the parallelepiped of carpets and listened to Tito squatting cross-legged beside her and telling her his tale of woe.

She listened quietly, lying with her knees drawn up to her face, with that tender, self-satisfied look peculiar to women and cats.

Then they went into the next room, which was her bedroom.

Next morning, on his way back to his hotel in her car,
the gentleman
was exhausted; Kalantan had given herself to him that night with a frenzied prodigality.

“You see,” she confided to him, almost blushing, “tonight, during these last few days, I wanted you more frantically because — listen, and I’ll explain. There are some days on which we women are particularly passionate, but we can’t, because those are just the days when . . . Oh, how difficult it is to explain. Forgive me. I’m talking like a fool. Do you remember Marguerite Gauthier, the Lady of the Camellias, who always wore white camellias every day, except for two or three days every month, when she appeared with a red rose on her bosom or in her hair? It meant that on those days . . . Well, I never have to wear red camellias. What has made me like that is morphine.

“Marguerite Gauthier would not have admitted you to her alcove tonight. But I can. Those are days of the truest, most terrible love.”

That was what the Armenian lady, roused by insatiable passion, told him.

He went back to his hotel exhausted, like a convalescent after his first walk out of doors; too much loving had wiped out his masculinity.

In spite of that, when he got back to the hotel he went to Maud’s room. She was just buttoning her kangaroo gloves on her thin wrists, and the sight of her gave him a vague feeling of trepidation.

“How did you sleep, little one?”

“Splendidly. And you?”

“I spent the night at the club,” he replied.

Maud meant nothing to him. He was not in love with her. They were not in love with each other. There was no sign of any future bond between them. But he lacked the courage to tell her that he had been with his mistress, which would have felt like admitting an act of infidelity.

It was that stupid, useless, but instinctive and spontaneous lie that made Tito realize for the first time that he liked little Maud, that he liked her very much indeed.

At the Petit Casino Maud, male impersonator who danced in top hat and tails, was a moderate success. She was applauded, as were Ta-lan-ki, tamer of short-sighted and lazy Pekinese, Kerry, a black boxer, and the so-called Irishman Sibémol, a musical comedian who walked on his hands playing a keyboard of bells with his feet. She was called back to the footlights twice. She gave one encore, and would have given another if the audience in the cheaper seats had not tacitly excused her from doing so.

She was nevertheless kept on for a month, and was given an engagement for the following month as principal dancer in a revue at the Folies Montmartroises.

She was not dismayed by her moderate success in Paris, because she did not claim to be adding a new beam of light to the Ville Lumière. There was nothing original about her art; there had been dozens of dancers in top hat and tails before her; the music was Paris music that had been imported into Italy and had returned of its own accord to the city of its origin; and her beauty was not so exceptional as to attract special attention in that exacting metropolis.

So when she went back to her hotel after her Paris début she was neither depressed nor discouraged, having earned the anemic laurels that she expected; no more and no less.

However, Tito Arnaudi, of
The Fleeting Moment
, was not of the same mind. The tamer of Pekinese dogs, a Chinese who also peddled opium and cocaine, had sold him a box of powder that he hurried to open, and under its influence her dancing seemed to him to be the revelation of a new art, an expression of universal energy, a supreme synthesis of beautiful movement, a divine rhythmical experience.

From his seat in the front row of the stalls he vigorously applauded her first appearance; but as no one else joined in the only result was some cheap, rude giggles.

In his eyes Maud’s black tailcoat shone with gleams of blue as if it were shot through with phosphorus. The hallucinatory influence of cocaine made Maud’s flowing hair look like a tangle of incandescent metal threads. The music seemed to come from invisible distances and the backcloth looked like a landscape full of sun and wind.

“With your dancing you reveal unknown worlds and unexplored marvels,” he said as soon as he had a chance to talk to her. He repeated this later, when they went to her room at the Hotel Napoléon. And he repeated it several times more that night while the blue humidity that seeped down from the sky on the sleepless metropolis reached their naked, perspiring bodies through the open window.

Next day Tito had to leave for Bordeaux, where he stayed for a week before returning to Paris.

After a conversation with his editor which was as dramatic and forceful as a scene from Bernstein, he went back to the Hotel Napoléon, where he found Maud in bed with a stranger.

“That makes forty,” the stranger said, sitting up in bed and looking at Tito without showing any sign of anxiety or modestly covering his chest.

“What do you mean?” Maud asked.

“That’s the fortieth husband.”

“He’s not my husband.”

“Who is he, then?”

“My lover.”

“Then it’s seventy-six.”

Tito had recognized the man immediately. He was Kerry, the black boxer. There are some people you don’t forget when you’ve once seen them. His body was so solid and so shiny that the proverbial bullet would have bounced off it. So there would have been no point in shooting him.

In view of this circumstance Tito walked out of the room with a great deal of dignity, protesting at the inadequacy of hotel bedroom keys that never worked properly from the inside.

He changed, put on a sand-colored suit with a fresh violet tie, and walked to the beautiful Armenian lady’s villa that looked like a small Greek temple that by some historical mistake had been displaced to the Avenue des Champs Elysées.

I have no desire to sing the praises of bigamy, but I must admit that Tito lived very happily between these two women. He was in love with neither, but believed he was in love with both, and when one of them upset him he took refuge with the other.

When one of them deceived him he found purity and fidelity with the other. If Maud remained faithful to him for too long, for lack of the stimulation of jealousy he started falling out of love with her, and he went back to Kalantan. But as soon as Maud showed signs of attachment to another male his jealousy boiled up again, and he left Kalantan and became passionately devoted to Maud. And, as long as this served to keep other men away, he constructed a coat of mail of love all round her; but as soon as he saw that other men were overcoming her resistance, in order to forget her he hurried back to Kalantan and her
takhta
, her parallelepiped of Turkish carpets and cushions.

At the Petit Casino poor Maud earned only one-fifth of what she needed to live on. But some very rich gentlemen gave her in cash ten times more than she spent.

The reader will ask how much Maud earned, and how much she spent, and exactly how much these rich gentlemen gave her, and what sort of figure that half-kept man Tito cut in these circumstances.

Problems of that kind cannot be solved by logarithm tables, but by much simpler methods. All that is necessary is to do it as Tito did. He knocked at Maud’s door. If she answered “Not now,” he said sorry, and did not come back till three hours later.

Oh, how often did the patient and indulgent Tito have to wait three hours before being admitted.

But he filled in the time by putting on his violet tie and his sand-colored suit and going to the house of the Armenian lady, who was always willing to console him, because she was able to adorn her musk-scented hair with white camellias every day.

When he went back to Maud’s room and hazarded a timid reproach she embraced and kissed him and, pressing her body to his, said: “Don’t talk like that, darling. I’m all yours now. Everyone else, including the man that left half an hour ago, belongs to the past now, and the past has nothing to do with us. Come along, darling, let’s make it up and be friends again.”

When two men want to make it up they go and have lunch together.

A man and woman go to bed.

To forget the immediate and distant past Tito and Maud made it up practically every day.

At Kalantan’s there was a past too.

It was in the nuptial chamber, which as a result of a bathing accident had become a widow’s chamber.

It consisted of an old tin box covered in velvet, a magnificent example of Caucasian art.

“What’s inside it?” Tito asked one evening as he undid his violet tie.

“One day I’ll tell you,” Kalantan promised, taking off a golden slipper.

“Can’t it be today?” said Tito, taking off his sand-colored jacket.

“No, not yet,” said Kalantan, undoing her belt.

“But why?” said Tito, unbuttoning his waistcoat.

“Because today I’ve much more important things to tell you,” Kalantan said playfully, snapping the green garter on her thigh.

“And what have you got to tell me?”

“That I’m in danger of getting lost in this huge bed unless you join me in it immediately. Don’t wind your watch. Put it down.”

“But supposing it stops?”

“Exactly. Wait till it stops before you wind it.”

And so Tito failed to discover what was in that tin box, that rare example of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past.

Maud, the Italian dancer, met an official of the police department of very high rank and very small stature, who stuck out his chest and held his head back and, when looked at sideways, resembled a spoon. He was attached to the vice squad.

She also met a young surgeon who aspired to a lectureship at the Sorbonne and was the author of an important book on surgery. He called on her in a strictly non-professional capacity, and assured her that she was in excellent condition and was very well-formed. In fact he predicted that, with an element of good will, or rather imprudence, on her part, she would become an excellent wife and mother. But dancing and maternity don’t go very well together.

The high official in the police department who resembled a spoon when looked at sideways was a great lover of his peace and quiet and urgently begged her not to become pregnant. She assured him that she knew a young surgeon who was the author of a treatise on surgery and was available for any eventuality.

No one would have supposed that this little blond surgeon, who looked like a troubadour in an oleograph and had the melancholy, resigned eyes of a newly-delivered mother, was capable of carrying out Caesarian sections and removing cancers and ovaries. In fact he was highly skilled at these things.