Cocaine (18 page)

“Madam is out,” he announced. “Your room is ready, sir.”

Late every afternoon Kalantan used to go to a physiotherapy establishment where she subjected herself to illusory treatment for an imaginary complaint, and she came back after sunset with flowers at her waist. The first thing she did was to go to Tito’s room without asking the servants, to enjoy the pleasure of surprise.

When he wasn’t there she assured herself that he would be coming next day.

Then she went back to her room to be undressed by Sonya, a lady’s maid of the old type.

One evening Csaky said to her: “The gentleman has had to leave suddenly for Italy.”

“Oh? Did he leave any letters?”

“No, madam.”

“Did you take him to the station?”

“No, madam. I took him to his hotel.”

“Did he leave his suitcases?”

“He took them, madam. But he left some clothes.”

“Very well. You may go.”

She put down her flowers, undid her belt, took off her hat, and dropped her veil on the velvet and tin box that constituted her “past.” The box that contained the memories of pleasure given to another man. The box full of coins her husband had given her to create the illusion that she was something better than a wife: a courtesan.

The box that made poor Tito suffer so much that he had broken it open to learn its secrets and emptied the contents into his two yellow suitcases, among his handkerchiefs and ties, his antelope gloves and his foulard pajamas.

Kalantan, who like all women was incapable of understanding jealousy, particularly jealousy of the past, smiled to herself indulgently as she thought of Tito’s anguish when to reassure him she had said to him: “Darling, the past has nothing to do with us.”

It no longer has anything to do with us when it has been stolen and taken in two yellow suitcases to distant South America.

No sooner had the ship left harbor than Maud started flirting with passengers of various nationalities. And, as the sea was terribly rough throughout the passage, Tito hardly ever left his cabin.

Someone told him that the best way of getting rid of seasickness was to eat nothing. So Tito ate nothing.

Others advised him to eat. So he ate.

An elderly, very religious lady gave him some anti-hysteria water from Santa Maria Novella. He drank it.

A
rastaquero,
a self-made man from the pampas on his way home, recommended anchovies. So he tried anchovies. Someone advised him to lie on his back, so he lay on his back. Someone else told him to lie on his face, so he lay on his face.

As none of these things did him any good, he sent for the ship’s doctor.

“Doctor,” he said, “what do you do when you’re seasick?”

“I throw up,” he said.

The doctor, like all traders with a continually changing clientèle, was skeptical and indifferent.

The talkative Maud shone among passengers of the oddest nationalities on the promenade deck. A Bolivian diplomat wanted to know whether her continual infidelities did not drive Tito to distraction. She replied that in the matter of infidelity men’s hearts were like patent leather shoes. Everything depended on the first time. If they didn’t crack then, there was no danger of its happening later.

She was also observed disappearing into various first class cabins but, as this was of no interest to anyone but Tito, who at the time was more concerned with his stomach than with his heart, there is no point in our lingering over such minor episodes of transatlantic travel.

When they crossed the equator Maud danced, and received a great deal of applause and many presents.

Meanwhile Tito lay prone on the bed in his cabin, eating anchovies dipped in anti-hysteria water from Santa Maria Novella.

And over the sea the moon was like a match lit behind a porcelain plate.

One stormy night a Wagnerian tenor who was as blond as a camel and had sung
en todos los grandes teatros de Europa y de America
, pressed his two hands melodramatically to his
corazon
and murmured to Maud that he would be willing to spend
toda la vida
on the ocean with her, because
jamás como en esta noche el perfume del mar me ha parecido tan dulce.

One day the
rastaquero
from the pampas, seeing that the care and attention he lavished on Tito were all in vain, for the poor fellow still had
el sueño agitado, la lengua sucia y el color pajizo
, turned his attention to Maud.

The
rastaquero
seemed to her to be a more worthwhile object for her attention than the Wagnerian tenor, who had told her frankly that the idea of giving a
mujer
a
centavo
had never passed through his
cabeza
, for
las mujeres
considered that granting him a
capricho
or, as they say in Paris, a
béguin
, was a great
honor.

Maud had long since passed the stage of indulging in
béguins
or
caprichos.

The
rastaquero
, for the benefit of those who have never come across persons such as he, was a typical parvenu, of the type that can euphemistically be described as a country gentleman. He kept his well-filled wallet in an inside pocket of his waistcoat, almost against his skin, and he wore cotton pants with a ribbon at the bottom that he wound five times round his ankles. His eyes looked different ways, so that he reminded you of one of those road signs that point to two different countries in opposite directions. If he had not been so rich he would have made an excellent supervisor in a big store, because with those eyes of his he seemed to be looking all ways at once.

As his cabin was next door to the music room, Maud was able to dance for his exclusive benefit to the sound of a slow waltz that seemed to come from a distant island, and as a token of his appreciation he allowed her to choose a small souvenir of the voyage from the contents of the wallet he kept hidden in the inside pocket of his waistcoat, almost against his skin.

As one courtesy deserves another, Maud allowed him to put his hand between her dress and her skin and help himself to what he wanted.

The notes of the slow waltz came from the music room while the ship sailed southwest at a steady speed of sixteen knots.

A few hours later when the
rastaquero
went back to bed alone, he found a hairpin in the bedclothes that preserved all Maud’s perfume, all the exquisite perfume of her violet crêpe-de-Chine lingerie decorated with fine organdy pleats.

Tito was well aware that Cocaine was paying instructive visits to various cabins. But now his jealousy was painless. Let me explain. Jealousy was at work inside him, but it was like an unthreaded pulley that went on revolving without starting up the machinery of pain and passion. When you feel ill, even if it’s only from seasickness, you no longer feel moral anguish. I should like to establish a new kind of therapy, curing illnesses of the mind by means of physical illness.

The idea would be to cure remorse by inoculation with influenza, jealousy by malaria germs, love by injections of spirochaetes. I think that is the direction in which the medicine of the future will have to move.

The ship called at Rio de Janeiro. As soon as Tito felt
terra firma
beneath his feet he wanted to go on to Buenos Aires by train, but when he heard that Cocaine was going by sea he agreed to go back into the lion’s den. He emerged, after five more days of seasickness at a speed of eighteen knots, when they arrived at Buenos Aires.

We shall not describe the landing, or the impressive sight of the Avenida de Mayo. All those who have been to Buenos Aires will remember it, and those unfortunate people who have not should be ashamed of themselves and go there immediately.

Nor shall we describe the moderate success enjoyed by Maud. Her beauty was declining, but the spotlights at the big music halls and the witchcraft of powder, rouge and eye-pencil ensured that she was still a desirable creature.

After dancing for a few months at Buenos Aires she went on to Montevideo, accompanied by Tito, Pierina and the dog.

She stayed at Montevideo for three months and at Rosario for a fortnight.

A paint manufacturer proposed to her at Bahia Blanca, and the head of a big canned meat factory fell passionately in love with her at Fray Bentos.

A year after they landed in South America she signed a profitable contract with the Casino at the smart seaside resort of Mar del Plata, one of the most luxurious spas in South America.

The half million francs extracted from Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s precious family memories were nearly exhausted. Tito’s health was declining. The everlasting peregrination from hotel to hotel and from one city to the next, noting how suitors and lovers sprang up everywhere in Cocaine’s path, took an increasing toll of his nerves and impoverished his blood.

He had come to South America hoping that good theatrical contracts and the money he had earned by cleansing Kalantan’s past would assure him of exclusive access to Maud’s body. But the
rastaquero
whose acquaintance she had made on the voyage out, the greasy face of that country gentleman with his inexhaustible wallet and robust passions, followed them to the various cities they visited.

Cocaine distributed her favors both on expensive and on gratuitous terms. Now that she was aware of her swift physical decline, she sought out pleasure without wasting a day or missing an opportunity; she gave herself to men who turned out to be unworthy of her generosity.

“You give them pleasure and they’re not grateful to you.”

She laughed loudly. “What makes you think that whenever I give myself to someone I want his esteem and gratitude? Gratitude for what? I don’t do it to give him pleasure; I do it for my own pleasure, or for the money he gives me. Why should I worry about what he says if I felt pleasure during the five minutes when his body was on mine? Esteem? Gratitude? Rubbish. If you hope to catch me with those arguments, I advise you to try something else.”

Tito had already threatened to leave her, but to no avail. “Your beauty is fading,” he argued desperately. “You’re only twenty-four, but you look much older. I love you because physically I’m welded to you, because an elective affinity binds me to you independently of your beauty. You’re getting old. You may still interest someone who’s attracted to you by the animal pleasure of having you, but not by your charms; he’ll want you, not because you’re young and beautiful, but because you have female organs. I’m the only one who can still feel your fascination, because I remember your former beauty. You’re almost a corpse of a woman. You may still take in some shortsighted person thanks to your dye and your make-up, but soon you’ll find yourself rejected like a badly forged bank note. You’ve the prospect of five or six more men and a few more affairs at most.

“Well, Cocaine, you must renounce those few affairs unless you want me to leave you for ever,” he went on. “I shall remain devoted to you for the whole of your life. When no one spares you a second glance I shall still be there to love you, to tell you you’re beautiful, to give you the illusion of still being attractive. I offer you my life, but what I want from you in return while your beauty fades is the faithfulness you’ve never been able to give me. Remember the specter of loneliness that lies ahead of you. Think of the time when you’ll be reduced to spending your nights alone, cold and old, and when you wake up in your bed you’ll see the yellow flesh that nobody wants any longer. If you now reject these men who are after you I’ll love you even then.”

Cocaine looked at him dry-eyed and answered: “Renunciation is what I’m afraid of.”

“But do you realize what I’m offering you in return?”

“Yes. And I prefer being alone and abandoned for ever tomorrow to giving up my pleasure tonight. The specter of loneliness is less terrifying than the immediate prospect of renunciation.”

“But have you taken stock of what remains to you? Don’t you know that every morning you have to remove hair round your lips? Don’t you realize that the skin of your neck is as fat and flabby as that on a turkey’s neck?”

“Yes. But having an affair still tempts me.”

“Remember you’ll be old tomorrow.”

“And so will you be the day after tomorrow.”

“I shall still be able to get young, fresh, beautiful women by paying them.”

“And I shall be able to get healthy males by paying them.”

“It’s not the same,” Tito replied. “I’ve always paid. The man always pays, even when he’s twenty, even when the woman seems to be giving herself to him for love. Having always sold yourself, you’ll be faced with the sad novelty of buying. You’ll find out how sad it is to pay for love.”

“That’s something I haven’t tried yet. Perhaps it might have its pleasing side. We shall see. Now let me go, because it’s nine o’clock, and I’m on at the Casino at a quarter past ten. Goodbye.”

After the show the few free seats left round the roulette tables were noisily taken by storm while the chief croupier in his elevated headquarters called out: “
Un peu de silence, s’il vous plait.”

Tito walked round the four tables. Those sitting at them were inter-continental hetairae, men with no visible means of support, ladies of a certain age and others of an uncertain age,
mères encore aimables
, naked virgins only small parts of whom were covered, radioactive women who had given themselves a huge white forehead resting on knitted brows — the face of the cruel woman; the first of these were attractive, but then they became as commonplace as Alsatians or gold snake bracelets.

They were calm, composed-looking men; attentive footmen who picked up dropped chips and swept cigarette ash from the green cloth; women who with bureaucratic diligence noted down all the winning numbers, in the belief that they recurred. Those who believe that luck repeats itself resemble those who believe in applying experience gained with earlier lovers to new ones. They invariably lose, both at play and in life.

But Tito couldn’t find a seat.

If only one of these persons had an epileptic fit, it would be enough. It would free three seats immediately, because his two neighbors would carry away the body. But people have more pity for the dead than for the living.