Cocaine (2 page)

“I told him I couldn’t accept.”

“The old man thought I wasn’t satisfied with five francs and offered me ten. In my appalling broken French, but with a magnificent gesture worthy of Curius Dentatus rejecting the Samnites’ gifts, I refused them. The man then offered me twenty, grinding his false teeth and saying I was a thief.”

“And what did you do?” asked his waiter friend.

“I felt offended.”

“Did you fling the twenty francs back in his face?”

“Is that likely? Perhaps I might have if it had been five or ten. But twenty? I pocketed the money.”

“Bravo. And the woman?”

“I haven’t seen her again.”

Now that the first few days were over, Tito had settled down. The woman who had been his for a short time had made him forget Maddalena. And now that he had forgotten her he no longer remembered her. Stupid, but true.

Women are like posters. One is stuck on top of another and covers it completely. Perhaps just for a moment, when the paste is still soft and the paper still wet and slightly transparent, you may still catch a vague impression of the splashes of color of the first, but soon there’s no more trace of it. Then, when the second one is removed, both come away together, leaving your memory and your heart as blank as a wall.

Every evening, as soon as the waiter was free, he would show Tito the sights of Paris.

“You won’t find jobs by applying to agencies. Just wander round the city,” he explained. “If you want to be a waiter like me, I’ll find you a job. It’s not difficult work. All that’s necessary is to be polite to the customer. You can spit in his plate in the kitchen, but you must present it to him with a solicitous smile and a supple bow. Every so often every working man feels the need to demonstrate to himself that he’s not a servant, or at any rate that he’s superior in some way to the person he serves. The most junior executive in an office with a huge hierarchy above him takes it out on the senior clerk. To avoid feeling the lowest of the low, the most wretched hall porter bullies the office boy, and the office boy insults the public. The lowest tramp bullies the child that gets between his feet, and the child bullies the dog. Life is a structure of cowardices; we need to think there’s someone lower than ourselves, weaker than ourselves. The waiter spits in the customer’s plate to give himself the illusion of humiliating the man who humiliates him by talking to him in a superior manner and leaving him a tip. You’re still riddled with prejudices, and perhaps the idea of serving is repugnant to you, but we all serve. Even the President of the Court of Appeal serves; and so does the great courtesan who charges a client five thousand francs for the privilege of unlacing her corset; and the stockbroker who earns himself half a million by a single telephone call. Artists and doctors and even archbishops serve too. Won’t you join me? I’ll teach you in a day or two how to hold eight full plates with your left hand and twelve with your right, and I’ll show you how to repeat the names of twenty-five different dishes while thinking about something else.”

“No, thank you,” Tito replied. “When I want to spit, I’ll spit on the ground.”

The staircase of the little hotel in Montmartre where Tito was staying was half occupied by the compressed-air lift and was so steep and narrow that the only way of getting luggage to the upstairs rooms was to hoist it up with ropes outside the building and take it in through the window.

The place reeked of soap, tobacco, female perspiration and military leather; the ordinary smells which saturate brothels for persons of modest means.

The building was so tall and slender that rooms on the top floor quivered like the hands of a seismograph. Tito’s bed was sixty feet above ground level, but someone in the street below only had to swear with a certain amount of emphasis to make it shake.

Police visited or raided the place practically every night. The only permanent residents were himself and a mysterious one-legged man of about fifty who had replaced his missing limb by a crude and noisy wooden one. He looked like a cattle dealer, and his complexion was like that of a boatswain on a windjammer. No one knew what his job was; all the landlord knew was that the man paid him promptly and punctually every five days.

His wooden leg could be heard coming up the stairs regularly at four o’clock in the morning.

The hotel’s other clients were all strictly short-term. They arrived in couples and never stayed longer than half an hour. Tito quickly got used to hearing four or five times a night in the adjoining rooms the usual sequence of sounds that accompany the sale and purchase of sex: the opening of a door, the switching on of the light, slow footsteps, a man’s voice, a woman’s reply, kisses, rhythmical heavy breathing, the sound of running water, a man’s voice, a woman’s reply, the switching off of the light, the door closing, only to open again soon afterwards to resume the series of identical sounds.

Love, he said to himself, is always exactly the same. When it is freely given, the same words are always used; when it is sold, the same pattern is invariably followed. “Where do you come from?”

“Toulouse.”

“What’s your name?”

“Margot.”

“How long have you been on the game?”

“A year.”

“You’re not infected, are you?”

“What do you think?”

“Then get undressed.”

In the other room on the other side there was another man with another woman, but the conversation was the same.

“What’s your name?”

“Louise.”

“Do you come from Paris?”

“No, Lyons.”

“How long have you . . .?”

“Eight months.”

“Are you healthy?”

“I’ve never been to bed alone.”

“Take off your chemise.”

The communicating doors between his and the two neighboring rooms were locked, but unknown inquisitive persons had made holes in them at different levels for persons of all heights, and expert hands had temporarily plugged them with balls of chewed paper.

At first the voices of the couples who came together by chance to have their momentary fling, and the subsequent sound of running water, had such a morbid effect on Tito that he spent long hours of the night with his eye to the peep-hole.

But the spectacle was always the same.

Even the most vicious and out-of-the-way and exceptional practices were always the same. Every male thought he was doing something new and extraordinary, but all he did was to repeat with another woman, or even with the same one, what someone else had done half an hour before, who also believed that he was introducing rare innovations into the animal-like rite.

One evening a young Japanese man appeared with a Japanese prostitute whom Tito had seen before on the boulevards.

The couple exchanged a few introductory remarks while the man took off his jacket. The sound of the Far Eastern language reached Tito’s ears distinctly; it apparently consisted of independent syllables, detached from one another like the clicking of a telegraphic keyboard. The man spoke calmly, with a veiled smile on his enigmatic face.

What will they say to each other? Tito wondered, and he answered himself: He will ask her if she has been working as a geisha for long, and she will answer only a few months, and she’ll say she was born in Yokohama, and that her name is Haru, meaning spring, or Umé, meaning cherry blossom . . .

Montmartre is the breast that has the good fortune to nourish the brain of France, as Rodolphe Salis, the father of the Paris comic press, said. Or Montmartre is simply la Butte, the hill dominated by the Moulin de la Galette, highlighted by the outer boulevards and secured by the two big buttons of the Place Pigalle and the Place Clichy. Montmartre is the modern Babylon, the electrified Antioch, the little Baghdad, the Paradise of the cosmopolitan noctambulist, the blinding, deafening, stupefying spot to which the dreams of the
blasés
of the whole world are directed, where even those no longer able to blow their noses come to challenge the world’s most expert suppliers of love. Montmartre is the Sphinx, the Circe, the venal Medusa of the many poisons and innumerable philters that attracts the traveler with a boundless fascination. Plays, novels, newspapers spread the perfume of Montmartre through all the continents, a bookish, literary, theatrical, journalistic perfume to which every artist has contributed. Montmartre radiates afar in every direction the glitter of illustrious bald heads, grand-ducal
décolletages,
regal jewelry, princely shirtfronts and the sharp teeth of insatiable female predators. From a distance every one of us has imagined a fictitious Montmartre embedded in a framework of the names of a few streets,
moulins, tabarins
and night-clubs.

But when we get there we suffer a disappointment that we do not always dare confess, pretending sophistication. All the same, at heart we have all said to ourselves: Is that all?

“Is that all?” Tito Arnaudi said to his waiter friend after they had visited the most celebrated and characteristic spots together. “I must admit that to me the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse seem much more interesting. Here people pretend to be enjoying themselves; there they pretend to be thinking great thoughts. Of the two I prefer the phony thinkers, because they’re not so noisy.”

Tito had discovered a source of funds.

“I told you you would,” his waiter friend replied. “I told you that the way to find a job was to wander round Paris.”

“You’re perfectly right,” Tito said. “By wandering round Paris I found a source of funds in New York.”

“Explain the riddle.”

“An uncle of mine in America . . .”

“You mean to tell me that uncles in America really exist?”

“. . . is the editor of a big morning newspaper. He has just replied by cable informing me that he will be glad to publish any articles I offer him. Thanks to my uncle’s generosity and the favorable exchange rate, I shall be able to earn a by no means despicable monthly income. My first article will be on cocaine and cocaine addicts.”

The waiter had in fact taken him to Montmartre in search of dens where worshippers of
la captivante coco
gathered.

“Here?” Tito asked at the entrance to a café.

“Here,” his friend replied, pushing him in.

From the outside the café looked gloomy. From the outside Paris cafés generally look gloomy; there’s too much wood and too little glass on the doors and windows, and the little light that might have been able to get in is partly obstructed by the big enamel lettering giving the names of the drinks and their prices.

They were just about to go in when they met the man with a wooden leg, who stepped back to allow them to pass.

“He lives in my hotel,” Tito said, “and no one knows what his job is.”

“Job?” his friend replied. “He’s in a very lucrative business indeed, it’s all in his wooden leg.”

“He must be a beggar,” said Tito.

“Good heavens, no.”

“That’s the only way of earning money with a wooden leg.”

“Is that what you think? He does much better than that. But there’s no hurry. You’ll soon see what I mean.”

The landlord was behind the counter, serving big glasses of beer to a number of taxi drivers, who smelled of cheap tobacco and wet mackintoshes. Behind him bottles of liquor garlanded with little flags sparkled cheerfully on glass shelves, doubly reflected in the walls of bright mirrors behind them and in front of them.

On the counter a big spherical aquarium housed some melancholy red fish. The refraction and the combination of natural and artificial light made them look as strange as Chinese dragons as they swam around gracefully.

“There are some people,” said Tito, drinking a glass of port at the counter, “who go to bed full of aches and pains after a drop of rain, while fish, who spend their whole lives in water, don’t even know what rheumatism is.”

A metallic, strident laugh that sounded as if someone had struck a tray full of glasses echoed through the room.

“Go back in there, you fool,” the landlord called out.

And the girl with the pale face and glassy eyes who had laughed fell back two or three paces as if her face had been slapped, and withdrew behind the reddish curtains that concealed the entrance to the next room.

“
Pas de pétard ici
,” the man continued in slang. Then, realizing that Tito was a foreigner, he translated for him. “
Pas de bruit,”
he said.

Tito took umbrage at this. “Are you referring to me?” he said

“
A la môme,”
the man explained. “
A la poule
.”

When the taxi drivers left, Tito’s friend whispered something to the man, whose only answer was to raise the red velvet curtains.

“
À votre service
,” he said with a bow.

Tito and his friend went into the next room as if they were entering a waxwork show restricted to men over the age of eighteen.

Their arrival was greeted with a certain mistrust. A stagnant, yellowish light shone down on a number of small tables covered with green baize of the kind used for card tables and university exams. The room was not a big one; there was a big divan that went all round it, eight small tables, a piano, some newspapers dirtied by drink and finger marks, and a mirror that had been scratched with a diamond.

Tito scrutinized the room before observing the people in it; natural curiosity should have made him do the opposite but, to avoid rousing unjustified suspicions and to create the impression of being already initiated into the mysteries of drugs, he took his seat on the divan next to his friend in an offhand and casual manner.

Then he picked up a newspaper.

Three women looked at him suspiciously and mumbled something inaudible. But the girl who had laughed noisily at his remark in the other room a short time before turned to the others and, nodding in his direction, said
: “Pas bête le type.”

Tito observed the four women one by one. He noticed that their dresses were made of good materials, but were old, worn and neglected; the white of the organdy was yellowed, the leather trimmings were cracked, the silk was split, the belt twisted, the shoes not worn out but misshapen as a result of careless walking. One of the women had not properly washed her neck and her polished fingernails offered a repulsive contrast of red enamel and black filth.