Cocaine (17 page)

For her feet were as prehensile as those of monkeys, Annamites and twenty per cent of criminals.

Jealousy is the emotion that causes a man to feel that, having been admitted to a woman’s bed, only he has a right to return to it.

No man is willing to admit that this is a gross absurdity.

Every woman, however, sees and knows this intuitively, and the idea seems so grotesque to her that she sees the uselessness of arguing about it. So an intelligent woman lets the man wallow in his jealousy, because she knows instinctively that it’s a malady for which there’s no cure.

Nevertheless Cocaine said to Tito one day: “I’m not rich. I’m not much good as a dancer, and I can’t start a business or set up an industry. So I have to accept the money they offer me and the conditions they impose on me.”

Tito, faced with this frank confession, broke down and cried like a wet, folded umbrella.

To console him, in other circumstances she would have told him to undress and get into bed; but, as they were in bed already, she said: “Get dressed and we’ll go out.”

Half an hour later they were at the Invalides station, on the Versailles line.

Paris was beginning to weigh intolerably heavily on Tito’s heart. He felt that every street had seen Maud going by in a car to some unknown destination, that every restaurant had provided her and some man with a reserved table or a private room. Heaven knew how many clients she had received in her room at the Hotel Napoléon. She had granted semi-gratuitous samples of her love even in the dressing-room at the Petit Casino.

For some time Tito had been desperately wanting to find new places as a background for their relationships, places where she had not been with other men, and to try new kinds of pleasure she had not yet tried with anyone else. What he wanted was something she had not yet given to anyone else, even if it were a little thing, something she had not said to anyone, a blouse that no one else had seen, a restaurant to which he could take her for the first time.

One day he took her for a ride on the big wheel that has since been dismantled but was once to be seen on all Paris postcards; and when they were at the top he took her on a seat at that giddy height.

Here at any rate no one else will have had her, he said to himself with satisfaction.

But as soon as they were down on the ground again she said with childish candor: “The last time I was here I didn’t think it went round so fast.”

Tito discovered a little restaurant consisting of four or five tables, frequented by painters, students and midinettes, and he took her there to provide her with surroundings that didn’t summon up the specters he wanted to avoid. But as soon as they were inside she looked round as if she recognized the place, and said: “Don’t let’s go over there, Tito. That’s where the kitchen is, and there’s a honeysuckle in the street that smells so strongly that it gives you a headache.”

Where had the woman not been? Where had nobody yet taken her?

And when they got to Versailles, in the gardens resplendent in their autumn tints, in the gay and melancholy splendor celebrated by de Musset and Verlaine, the simple, ingenuous, childish Cocaine, who at heart was still Maud, who at heart was still Maddalena, said: “Do you see that lilac over there? That’s where I found my first white hair two or three months ago.”

After that Tito did not repeat the experiment. Once upon a time he would have been able to hurry to Kalantan’s house to kill the jealousy on the soft, hospitable Asian
takhta
, but now he could do so no longer. There could be no more fugues or wanderings: Cocaine was now necessary to him to prevent him from going out of his mind.

“If you earned a thousand francs an evening,” he said to her on the way back to Paris, “if you earned a thousand francs an evening, but by your dancing, you could give up all the men who —”

“Who pay me? Of course. And I wouldn’t be anyone’s but yours. But do you think it’s possible? It’s just a dream. Don’t you realize, Tito, that I dance like a flat-iron?”

“I’ve a marvelous idea,” Tito said. “Just wait and see.”

The editor of
The Fleeting Moment
went to the Auvergne, where an election was in progress, and the chief sub-editor had to have a minor operation on his thumb, so there was no one to stop Tito from sending to the composing room a long manuscript that appeared under an enormous headline on page two.

That evening five thousand francs was taken at the Alhambre box office and Maud,
la grande beauté italienne
who danced in top hat and tails, was greeted on her appearance as the divine creature whom
The Fleeting Moment,
one of the most respected Paris newspapers, hailed as the electrifying reincarnation of Terpsichore herself. Maud’s legs, according to this very long article, elevated her to the giddiest philosophical heights, only to plunge the spectator into the abyss of the absolute. Metaphysically her dancing was a manifestation of the eternal and the infinite.

The disappointed audience did not protest at the end of the performance. It was used to impudent publicity stunts, so it contented itself with exclaiming: “What cheek!”

Less polite persons used a more forcible expression.

Everyone laughed. Even the manager laughed; all the other newspapers laughed, and so did Maud herself.

The only person who did not laugh was the editor of
The Fleeting Moment
, who had come back to Paris the day previously and immediately sent for Tito, the writer of the article.

Tito was in the waiting room outside the editor’s office when three rings of the bell awakened him. There was no need to be a philosopher of music to detect the anger contained in those three rings.

Tito walked into the office and was confronted by a huge pair of moustaches overhanging a big desk.

The editor was downcast. He spoke calmly, composedly, like someone who has suffered a terrible blow, but has now got rid of all the anger contained in his gall bladder. To illustrate what I mean, think of a poor father whose only daughter has run away with a mountebank, had a baby, throttled it, come out of prison, and returned to the paternal roof after six months of immoral living. The poor man has had plenty of time to curse, despise and execrate her, and when she comes back his stock of desperation and rancor has been exhausted and he is able to talk to her calmly, almost gently.

That was how the unfortunate editor talked to Tito, with tears on his spectacles. “You’ve ruined the newspaper,” he said slowly, in a low voice. “You’ve made me a laughing stock in the eyes of the whole Paris press.”

Tito stood with lowered eyes and his hands crossed on his belly, like a seduced and dishonored girl in the presence of her white-haired papa.

“It has been too great a blow,” the editor, a broken man, continued, talking Italian in order to seem more gentle. I’m too pained, too shattered, to be able to curse you or swear at you. I forgive you. But never let me set eyes on you again, either alive or dead. Give me your hand if you like. If you like, you may even embrace me. Here are tickets for two stalls at the Opéra Comique. Take them with all my heart. I can do no more for you.”

And he fell back in his armchair, gasping for breath.

When he came round Tito Arnaudi was no longer there.

He was outside on the pavement.

Tito had not laughed for a long time, but this disaster made him laugh. He had lost his job, he lacked the strength to look for another, and the money he had left was barely enough to last a week.

In order to economize, he bought from an antique dealer in the Rue Saint-Honoré two spherical cinerary urns that were as iridescent as soap bubbles, and a gilt monstrance, browned by time and incense, that came from some small demolished or deconsecrated mountain church. The place of the sacred host had been taken by a pharmaceutical host, round which, however, silver-gilt rays preserved the same mystical glitter.

Tito went up to his room at the Hotel Napoléon, removed from the monstrance the pharmaceutical host that so unworthily profaned it and put in its place a photograph of Cocaine in the nude.

He opened a drawer to put the cinerary urns in it and took from it a bottle of Avatar, which was Cocaine’s perfume.

Perfume exceeds even music in evocative power.

He applied the atomizer to the bottle and filled the room with the scent, as if he were about to make a pagan sacrifice worthy of the image.

While he stood there motionless, contemplating the lines of her nudity in an attitude of silent veneration, Cocaine suddenly walked in. She said nothing, but she was so moved at the sight that she flung her umbrella on the bed, put her face to Tito’s neck and wept hot tears on his green knitted tie with its big blue diagonal stripes.

If you know how deliciously perfumed tears become when they run down a pretty woman’s cheeks, and how deliciously perfumed ties become when she weeps on them.

Tito’s tie was wet, but his heart was lighter. Cocaine’s heart too was light and as luminous as an Andalusian mantilla.

“Your article has had marvelous results,” she said.

“I know,” Tito replied with a bitter smile.

“I’ve just been talking to a big American impresario. We’re leaving for Buenos Aires in a week’s time. Will your newspaper let you come with me?”

“Yes,” Tito replied simply.

“Will it allow you six months?”

“Even twelve. And what are the terms?”

“Excellent.”

And she hurried to give the news to her lady’s maid, who answered, sometimes arrogantly, to the name of Pierina.

When Csaky, the butler, announced M. Arnaudi (whom he no longer referred to as “the gentleman”) was asking for her, Kalantan was not surprised. She was used to his longer and shorter periods of melancholy and misanthropy and knew how changeable his moods were, and she felt sure that habit, if not inevitable destiny, would bring him back to her.

But he seemed strangely different; there was something forced and artificial in his behavior, and he no longer abandoned himself so completely when he made love to her.

“Your room is as you left it,” she said to him, stroking his hair. “And my love is unchanged too.”

In fact that night Tito felt that his beautiful, vice-ridden Armenian mistress gave herself to him with the same passion for simplicity as before; and when he woke up next morning in the rosewood bed he recognized the furniture and the prints on the walls and the impressive and decorative livery of Csaky, the butler, who asked whether “the gentleman” wanted Russian tea, green tea or Ceylon tea.

“I’ll have it in the lady’s room,” he said.

He went to Kalantan’s room; she was still asleep, with her hands and knees drawn up to her chin, completely enclosed in herself, just like a magnolia asleep at night.

Later he slowly dressed, carefully tied the green knitted tie with blue diagonal stripes that had been perfumed by Cocaine’s tears, and went to the Hotel Napoléon to fetch some things.

“Don’t be long,” said Kalantan.

“I’ll be back in half an hour,” he replied.

In fact half an hour later Madame Ter-Gregorianz’s car arrived in the garden with two big yellow suitcases.

Tito’s nights were restless. In the evening he took strong doses of chloral to overcome the insomnia produced by the drug he could not give up. The result of the incurable insomnia and the useless drug was a hallucinatory state; he spent long hours in a state of wakefulness in which he felt he was dreaming and in a state of sleep in which he felt he was awake. Being in this villa as white as an ossuary as guest and lover of a woman of Asian passions, being waited on by servants who treated him as coldly and obsequiously as if he were a usurper; the whole of this quasi-oriental environment set up in the heart of Paris for the purpose of creating a legendary Caucasian atmosphere all round him, and the idea of Maud, of his Cocaine, only five minutes away by car, though his impression now was that she was far, far away, fading and getting lost in the distance — all this added up in his mind to a multi-colored musical beehive, the buzzing of which was interrupted from time to time by the sentimentally ironic, epigrammatic chirping of a bird that was in love in the garden.

At the hotel they gave him a letter from his friend the novice monk, who prayed for him every evening, and he found Cocaine busy trying on a graceful garment of mauve crêpe-de-Chine adorned with fine organdy pleats.

“Do you know, Tito, that I’m getting fat?” Cocaine said to him with a laugh.

“Yes, I do.”

He certainly knew it, he had expected it. This was the first sign, the beginning of the decline. The cruel mutilation to which she had submitted the year before was now beginning to confirm the saying that woman is woman only because of her generative gland.

All feminine charm, the delicacy of outline, the softness of the limbs, the development of the breasts, the flowing abundance of the hair, the musical subtlety of the voice, depend on that gland. With its removal the harmonious line changes into obesity, the voice becomes masculine, the liveliness of the mind degenerates into loss of memory, the affectionate nature gives way to hypochondria and irritability, a hairy shadow appears on the lip and an expression of surliness comes into the eyes; and after a few years we find ourselves with a virago in all her hybrid hatefulness.

But Tito was so much in love with this woman that he wanted to hasten the day when she would be as ugly as that. No one else will want her, he said to himself, and then at last she’ll be mine alone. And then I shall have the only joy of which I dream: that of being her last lover.

And when she asked him to touch her and actually feel that she was getting fat, he hugged her so fiercely that she called out: “Be careful, you’re spoiling my organdy pleats.”

The dog started barking in her defense.

But all that Tito could see was the beginning of plumpness, the first stage of the downward trend that would end with her coming back to him.

It was the first gleam of hope that appeared in what was a kind of amorous irredentism.

Csaky, the Ter-Gregorianz butler, looked at him with respectful but venomous eyes.