Cocaine (16 page)

The future monk lowered his eyes and lifted his bags with a disconsolate gesture. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll send you my address, so that you can come and see me if you’re ever in the neighborhood. Goodbye.”

And he hurried down the Métro steps with bowed head.

The velvet and tin box, the complicated specimen of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past, was full of gold coins. It was like fabulous treasure hidden in the cellars of vanished cities. When Kalantan told him what the box contained Tito laughed as if it were a good joke.

“But that’s the sort of thing that happens only in fantastic novels and German films,” he said.

Kalantan told him the story.

“My husband was very rich,” she said. “He owned some inexhaustible oil wells and the most famous fisheries in the whole of Persia.”

“I know.”

“And he was inflicted from birth with the most appalling
taedium vitae.
He seemed to have been born with the whole of Asia’s ancient experience in his blood. Nothing tempted him, nothing amused him. He had no interest in his home or his family, and in his room he put up the notices you see in hotel bedrooms, giving the prices charged by the laundry, the cost of breakfast served in the dining room or the bedroom, and informing gentlemen taking trains later in the day that the room must be vacated before two p.m.

“He dreamt of travel, but travelled very little. He was a kind of paralytic with a craving for distant places. His longest journeys were Paris — Berlin, Paris — London, or Paris — Brussels. After being away for a month, he’d come back.

“He liked cocottes. I think all the most celebrated ones passed through his hands. What he would really have liked would have been to have them all permanently available in a moveable home, a kind of gypsy caravan, but run in accordance with the standards of a Paris
maître d’hôtel.
He liked me at infrequent intervals. At the beginning of our marriage he was very fond of me, though I had one defect — being his wife. To create the illusion that I wasn’t his wife, he used to pay me. Every time I took him into my bed he dropped some gold coins into that box. He said that a wife was ennobled by elevation to the rank of courtesan.”

“And hasn’t anyone ever tried to break into that box?”

“My servants are honest, and no one suspects there’s gold in it.”

“It must amount to several hundred thousand francs.”

“Maybe half a million.”

Tito went over and tried to lift it; the effort made the veins of his brow and neck swell.

“Poor darling,” Kalantan said, making him sit next to her on the day bed; and she kissed his face, which suddenly went pale, and started to caress his hands.

“Kalantan, that box is your past, and your past makes me suffer dreadfully, because I’m jealous of it. I should like to have been the first to have you. Every one of those coins is a sign of the pleasure you gave someone else.”

“But what does that matter?” Kalantan said in astonishment, kissing his eyes that were veiled with anger. “You’re my real master. My husband was merely a duty. My lovers? I don’t remember, because never have I had so much pleasure as in your arms. In any case, the past is the past, and has nothing to do with us.”

Tito withdrew his hands from hers.

The past has nothing to do with us.

It was the phrase Maud had used. These two women, products of two different civilizations, one from the Po valley and the other from the gorges of the Caucasus, used the same words to comfort him.

His waiter friend who was going to shut himself up in a monastery had been so right when he summed up his disgust by saying: “I’m sick of all this.”

Tito was now irritated with Kalantan, the wealthy Armenian woman who liked being treated like a whore. In their heart of hearts all women to a greater or lesser extent feel the latent attraction of the brothel.

That day Tito could not make love to the Armenian lady.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “But today it’s no use. I’m depressed, let me go.”

And he went back to Maud.

A few weeks previously he had still been able to forget Maud’s infidelities in Kalantan’s arms and Kalantan’s past in Maud’s bed, but now his intensified love of both meant that he was crushed between two equal and opposite forces.

He now knew all about Kalantan’s past: her simulated selling of herself to her husband, the orgies in the penguin room, the feverish excitement of her stimulants and the voluptuousness of her narcotics, the love-making in the coffin, the primitive nostalgia for the brothel followed by a desire for purity, which was nothing but revulsion from excessive and perverted sensuality; it was a purely cerebral disgust transformed by morphine into a chaste frenzy.

Nor was there anything he didn’t know about Maud’s past and present.

He knew how and to whom she had first given herself; he knew to whom she had sold herself in Italy and in Paris; he had seen her in bed with a black man whose pachydermatous skin shone like brilliantine; he had seen the police official emerging from the lift with his little eyes swollen and shining with lust; he knew that the young surgeon had mutilated her at the very source of life and love, anticipating her menopause and cutting short her youth. He knew the discreet hotels, the
garçonnières
, where she went to hire herself; every Paris arrondissement harbored a client of hers.

Maud and Kalantan were different creatures belonging to different civilizations, but they were alike in not understanding his anguished jealousy. Both had said to him, with different accents but with the same non-understanding in their eyes, that the past had nothing to do with them.

Maud and Kalantan were dissimilar women, both of whom he loved with the same frenzy, for both held him captive, one by his jealousy of the present, the other by his jealousy of the past.

Maud had on her skin the odor of the thyme of her green mountains; Kalantan had a salty flavor.

Both were young, but there was something old in each of them, though in a different way.

Maud, with her insatiable sensuality, sought new and excitingly strange and vicious forms of excitement, while Kalantan, sick of morbid eccentricities, sought purity, simplicity, primitiveness in her relations with Tito.

There were two kinds of age in these two young women. One had gone through the most complicated forms of vice, only to end up with wanting straightforwardness and simplicity; while the other had gone through the whole gamut of ordinary love-making, only to end up in search of vice.

The enthusiasm with which they pursued two opposite paths indicated two different but similarly dynamic personalities.

Between these two women, these two passions, Tito was undecided. He couldn’t make up his mind by which to let himself be carried away. He was
intra due fuochi distanti e moventi,
between two distant and powerful fires . . .

Oh, that Dante Alighieri, he has managed to get himself quoted even by me.

Just as the inventors of rubber heels and the metal toy that makes a disagreeable sound like a hysterical frog when you press it made millions and were able to lead comfortable and independent lives, so Tito as a result of his journalistic extravagance was given a permanent position on
The Fleeting Moment.
They increased his salary, at the same time forbidding him to write anything.

“You’re capable of announcing that the Pope has had himself circumcised to enable him to marry Sarah Bernhardt,” the editor told him. “If you want us to remain friends, take the salary, come to the office, play snooker on my billiard table, frequent the bar, fence with my foils, help yourself to my cigars and my typists, but don’t write a word, even if I tell you to.”

So all Tito had to do was to turn up at the manager’s office once a month, receive an envelope full of banknotes, and sign a receipt.

He spent his time going for solitary morning walks in the outlying districts of Paris. Sometimes he stayed for two or three days at Kalantan’s house, where a room was now kept ready for
the gentleman.
Then he would give up Kalantan for a week to devote himself exclusively to Maud. At other times he let days go by without seeing either. And sometimes he went back to the semi-clandestine cafés in Montmartre and Montparnasse, the doubtful haunts of professors of billiards and poker, impresarios of amorous adventures at popular prices, police informers, pimps, and hungry little tarts living on anchovy sandwiches and croissants dipped in coffee.

The one-legged peddler sold him six glass tubes full of excellent Mannheim cocaine, and he went round Paris with the tubes in his pocket like a child who sleeps with all his toys under his pillow. He sought out the most modest streets in La Villette and Belleville where the walls were adorned with sinister theatrical posters, advertising such productions as
The Bastard’s Daughter
and
The Hanged Man’s Revenge.
He walked down the avenues of the Père Lachaise cemetery, which were kept as neat and tidy as a collection of samples; and he went to see the abattoirs, and saw docile sheep and restive calves going in.

At least no one talks to them about dying for their country, he said to himself.

A wretched dog, exhausted by fatigue and thirst, was trotting along behind a light cart which, to judge from the dust, must have come a long way. The cart was nearly empty, and the peasant who was driving it could have let the dog into it instead of letting it suffer like that.

But peasants, Tito said to himself, are an inferior race; they’re worse than blacks. Their actions are guided by the grossest selfishness, the most useless cruelty and the most stubborn ignorance. I should be delighted if hail destroyed their wheat, fungus ruined their vines and disease affected their cattle every year. They deserve no better.

He was strangely moved by the sight of a long crocodile of little girls dressed in white chattering on their way to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. He started following them. He thought he could already see something definitive in each of them. He saw little faces of future comic opera soubrettes; the merry, dangerous eyes of future wreckers of nervous systems; the plump cheeks of future mothers and housewives who would find ways and means of pleasing serious-minded gentlemen between one delivery and the next. They were all dressed in the same way, all in white, they were almost identical in size, but in each of them there already slumbered in embryo the courtesan, the artist, the ordinary woman, the exceptional woman. Inside them were tiny ovules from which great men or great criminals might perhaps be born, or perhaps also cancer cells or tuberculosis bacilli. Among them might be another Maud, another Kalantan, who would cause despair to some small Tito Arnaudi who somewhere or other was now sticking his fingers up his nose.

These casual, aimless wanderings gave him the apathetic bliss of the vagabond. The vagabond’s life has its charms, such as not being the slave of the clock or of appointments, and of not going in prearranged directions. He could spend his time listening to a case in the appeal court, or attending a lecture at the university, or sitting on a bench in a public park or on the river bank; he could attend a public auction, or stop and watch a cart that was too heavy and could not get out of a rut, or go and see the bodies in the Morgue, or watch the departure of melancholy evening trains, or talk to builders, or listen to market salesmen calling their wares, or leaf through the books of the
bouquinistes
on the peaceful
quais,
or snooze on green velvet seats in museums, or throw bread to the patient and stupid bears and those enormous, childlike elephants in the Jardin des Plantes.

Sometimes an image of Maud would form in his mind’s eye on the smooth surface of a street or on the white screen of a pavement, and he would go into a café or a sweet shop to escape from it.

When I see an old lady eating pastries, they seem to me to be wasted, he said to himself.

Everything irritated him from time to time. But from one point of view there was a kind of contentment in him that had been developing for some time without his noticing it. In the early stages, taking cocaine had resulted in a sensual restlessness, an almost insatiable erotic excitement (which two mistresses had not been sufficient to satisfy), but now it had begun to lower the flame of his passions. Days passed without his wanting to see Maud’s slender calves or note the musky, India ink-like perfume of Kalantan’s hair. Sometimes his thoughts reverted to the soft carpets of the
takhta
, where the lovely Armenian curled up in a voluptuous act of self-adoration, and sometimes he returned in memory to Maud, with her thirst for vice and novelty, but both seemed to him to be remote from his present life, for he felt himself to be a survivor.

His sensuality was now a tiny flame on the point of extinction. But every now and then a sudden burst of jealousy had the enlivening inflammable effect of oxygen.

He would imagine Maud in the arms of another in some house or other in heaven knows which of the twenty Paris arrondissements, and jealousy would make his passion flare up again.

Then he would go back to look for her, and when he found her (if he did find her) she was always ready to give herself with the whole of her vibrant body and her divinely wet lips.

“Cocaine,” he would say to her in his passion. “Cocaine, you’re not Maud, you’re Cocaine, my necessary poison. I run away from you, swear never to see you again, but then inevitably I come back, because you’re as necessary to me as a poison that is my salvation and my death. I run away from you because I feel the imprint of other males on your skin. I feel them, they are as visible to me as finger marks on gardenias. I run away from you because you’re not all mine, because I can’t bear to share you with others. Sometimes you revolt me, but I come back to you because you’re the only woman I want, the only one I can really love.”

And she, sitting on the big, unmade bed, would listen with a calm and almost preoccupied smile to the fervent words with which Tito tried to burn her hands.

And as her hands were engaged, for Tito was pressing them to his mouth, she absent-mindedly amused herself by picking up her tortoiseshell hairpins from the floor with her toes.