Cocaine (20 page)

“Bring me some bread and butter,” Maud replied.

The waiter was on his way out when Maud called him back.

“And honey,” she said.

The sea was calm.

Even before they left the estuary he met a distinguished Hungarian polyglot scientist who spat when he spoke just as grasshoppers, irritated grubs and female concierges do to defend themselves. The man was engaged in some very important research into the psychology of women of various nationalities in relation to the weight of their organs.

He had discovered that German women’s hearts weighed a kilogram, that their brain weighed 825 grams, and that their height was 1.7 meters. The figures for Austrian women were heart 950; brain 850; length of hair 65 centimeters. North American women, spleen . . . etc.

Tito also made the acquaintance of a Spanish woman from Granada who walked into his cabin by mistake.

The mistake cost him two hundred pesos; the lady insisted on payment in advance.

“What gall these Spanish women have,” Tito remarked to the Hungarian scientist.

“About a kilogram,” the savant replied.

Like a king in fairy stories, he had two daughters who were very much alike; there could be no doubt that they were daughters of the same mother. One was plump, pink-cheeked and florid, and the other was smaller and more delicately made. But they were both of the same type, like an orange and a tangerine.

Tito peeled both of them.

He did the usual things one does on a voyage, like guessing the height of the ship, questioning the officers about longitude and latitude and the ship’s telegraph and compass, watching the clouds being ruffled by the wind, adjusting one’s watch to the ship’s time, exchanging remedies for sea-sickness, sitting on a blanket on a long rush seat and letting one’s face be tickled by the perfumed wind, pestering the wireless operator with silly questions, listening to stories of shipwrecks that never happened, and having complicated cocktails made by the barman. When they called at a Brazilian port he looked for butterflies like those let loose in the penguin room at the villa in the Champs Elysées belonging to Kalantan, the beautiful Armenian lady, and when they crossed the line he took part in the usual celebrations and put a cork in his pocket as a souvenir. On the coast of Senegal he disembarked for a few hours to have a look at the native open air brothels.

During the first few days of the crossing he bought a monkey from a Chilean dealer who displayed in the stern his loquacious stock of polyglot parrots, masturbating monkeys, caged birds and goldfinches with fancy waistcoats. Towards the end of the voyage he gave the monkey back as a present. The Chilean dealer accepted it as a favor. Everyone who buys a monkey early in a voyage gives it back before disembarking, and some monkeys are said to have crossed the Atlantic ten times in this way.

A Dutch young lady, the daughter of a big jam manufacturer who had travelled a great deal, told him that at Port Said she had seen an Egyptian woman being subjected to what moralists call the extreme outrage — by a donkey.

“It’s certainly donkeys that are most successful with women,” Tito remarked.

“But this wasn’t a metaphorical donkey, it was a donkey with four legs,” the daughter of the Dutch jam manufacturer pointed out.

“And where did this take place? In a field?”

“No, at a stall at a fair. You paid a pound sterling to watch.”

“And who got the money?” Tito asked.

“The woman.”

“I’d have given it to the donkey.”

He was introduced to some respectable ladies with whom he engaged in the polite conversation that follows an introduction.

“But how is it, my dear lady, that you already have a son as big as that?”

“Oh, I was still a child when I got married.”

The Dutch young lady also received him by mistake in her cabin, and did not put many difficulties in the way of his crossing the line. She was such an experienced traveler that she was able to whistle in bed, which gave Tito the embarrassing feeling that he was in bed with a man, though she was all warm, smooth and glossy, just like an electric lamp.

The respectable lady who already had a boy as big as that also joined the ranks of his ex-lovers.

He had a splendid appetite, though the pain of having left Maud gave him a vague feeling of uneasiness. Some people don’t eat when they are unhappy. They feel moral pain in their intestines. When Tito had love trouble his appetite was excellent.

He often went down to the deafening din of the engine room to watch the naked, bronzed, athletic stokers, those marvelous men who make virgins’ mouths water.

He also met a lady who, knowing him to be a journalist and therefore something very close to literature, asked him to suggest a motto to be inscribed on the buckle of her garters.

Women don’t keep you hanging about on board ship. Perhaps they may do so on voyages of forty days or two months, but on a fortnight’s crossing, never.

He recalled his gloomy days in Paris, his lonely wanderings past the abattoirs to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, when his depressed senses enabled him to think without suffering about Maud walking around naked in someone else’s house. But now he was full of eager virility. It was the excitement of the sea. The odor of the infinite is an insidious aphrodisiac.

He was sitting in the smoking room one evening facing a lady whose legs were enclosed in pearly-gray silk stockings. They gleamed like fish just out of the water.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m praying,” Tito replied.

“I thought you were looking at my legs,” she said with a sidelong glance.

“That’s how we atheists pray.”

That evening Tito went and prayed in the cabin where those legs came from.

The sea was calm.

Everyone knows that if a man and woman not united by marriage are found in a compromising situation on board ship, they are in for a great deal of trouble.

That, however, is merely a bright idea thought up by the steamship companies, who never grudge persons of standing their entertainment. Not only do they supply a gypsy orchestra (gypsy orchestras are the caricaturists of music), a library, religious services and a daily newspaper giving the latest news (that was received before the ship sailed), and a gym; they also had the inspiration of subjecting contraband love affairs to severe penalties in order to make the idea more exciting to passengers in the luxury class, the first class and, provided a suitable tip is offered, the second class also.

This does not apply to passengers in the third class, where it would be too immoral, and offenders are subject to immediate arrest.

“You pay court to all the women,” Tito’s neighbor at table said to him. This neighbor was a rabbi from Warsaw who was returning from South America with a
chanteuse
who was as delicate as a flower and with a large sum of money collected for the Zionist cause.

“Yes,” Tito replied, it’s like dueling. For army officers dueling is an offence, but refusing to fight a duel is an even greater offence. It’s the same with women. If you tell a woman you want her, she’s offended, but if you don’t want her she’s even more offended.”

“You must have had a great many women,” the rabbi said. “You must know them very well.”

“I have had mistresses,” Tito modestly confessed, “but it’s quite wrong to suppose that a man who has had many women must have a profound understanding of feminine psychology; it’s just as wrong as it would be to suppose that an art gallery attendant would make a good art critic. Besides, what do you really need to make a conquest? Nothing whatever. All you have to do is to let her make a conquest of you. Men never choose. They think they choose, but in fact they’re chosen. A man paying court to a woman doesn’t try to seize her, he simply puts himself in a position where he can be seized. If you don’t believe me, look at the animal kingdom. The male is nearly always more beautiful than the female, which means that it’s the male who is chosen. The female is not sought after, so, unlike the male, she has no need to be beautiful. Look how striking the male bird of paradise is, and what a poor thing the female is.”

“That’s true,” the rabbi admitted, pulling his moustache horizontal. “But the great difficulty is not getting women, it’s leaving them.”

“I disagree,” Tito replied. The man doesn’t leave the woman, he puts himself in a condition to be left. In exceptional cases in which he wants to break the link there’s an infallible way of withdrawing gracefully, and it’s this: say to her point-blank, in threatening tones: “I know everything.”

“Everything about what?” the rabbi asked in surprise.

“Believe me, the most innocent woman always has something in her recent or distant past that can be the
everything
to which you refer.”

Two English misses sitting facing them listened in silence, opening their eyes wide, like heifers at the passing of an express train.

The rabbi from Warsaw was a very likeable man. He laughed aloud at the caricature of the Bible that Tito once produced for his benefit when he was under the influence of cocaine, and told him that the money he had collected in America would serve to revive the kingdom of Israel in Palestine and enable Jews scattered all over the world to resettle there.

“And will you go to Palestine?” Tito asked.

“No, I won’t,” the rabbi replied, “I’m too well off in Warsaw.”

“But what about the persecutions, the pogroms?”

“That’s all humbug,” the rabbi replied with a laugh. “Those are rumors spread by us Polish Jews. We want it to be believed that Jews are badly off in Poland to prevent others from coming there.”

Tito’s senses were excited by the sun, the smell of the calm sea, the sensuality inherent in all transatlantic liners, the uterine quality with which the brasses, the upholstery, the decks, the big saloons and long corridors are impregnated. In the course of the twenty-two-day voyage he satisfied his senses ten times with five different women; and in doing so he almost wiped out the memory of Maud, which grew fainter with every turn of the screw. Love (erotic attraction), like the force of gravity, diminishes proportionately to the square of the distance.

When they drew close to land, Tito regretted the prospect of saying goodbye to the Dutch young lady with her perfect curves that were as sweet as her father’s jam; to the respectable lady who already had a son as big as that because she had married when she was still a child; to the professor’s two daughters, who were as alike and unlike as a tangerine and an orange; to the lady with the luminous legs who wanted a motto for her garters; and to the drily humorous Warsaw rabbi’s mistress, who was as delicate as a flower and as stupid as an ox.

He regretted all these women whom he would never see again.

But he did not regret Cocaine, his Cocaine, whom he never wanted to see again, Cocaine who at that moment was either writhing deceitfully in the arms of the multimillionaire
rastaquero
whose face would surely secrete castor-oil if you squeezed it, or on the hollow chest of the student Arguedos, who was looking in vain for a half-price bed in a sanatorium.

But as soon as he was in the train to Turin, all that was left of the voyage was some cigarettes given him by a generous passenger and some tropical sunburn.

And his thoughts returned to Cocaine, his little Cocaine whom he had left on the other side of the Atlantic; his Cocaine whose skin had a perfume not to be found on any other woman, his Cocaine on whose epidermis scents acted more miraculously than on any other female skin, Cocaine, Maud, the woman from whom he fled and to whom he returned, the poison-woman whom he hated and loved, for she was simultaneously his ruin and his delight, his suffering and his exaltation, his most delightful death and his most terrible life.

In Turin, cradle of the Risorgimento and guardian of the Holy Shroud, he saw the usual faces and the usual things. At dusk hundreds of swifts still tangled and untangled in disorderly patterns as they flew round the towers of the Palazzo Madama; and the usual people got on the usual trams at the usual stops at the usual times. He met a number of friends and a number of women who, when he came to think of it, had been his. Sometimes we meet women whose lovers we have been for an hour or a month, and we hardly remember having dedicated to them the solemn ceremony conducted by the industrious donkey with the Egyptian woman at Port Said, though the memory of that highly important ceremony ought automatically to spring to our mind. How insignificant it is. Nothing of her flesh, her electricity, her breath, has remained in us, nothing whatever. As soon as it was over, while she dressed, we started chatting again about other, unimportant things. So all that was left was a taste no stronger than that left in our mouths by a cigarette after we have put it in an ashtray. But if we discover that our current love has been someone else’s, if only for five minutes, we feel an intolerable pang, even after many years. The act to which she was subjected by others seems to us to be an indelible stain; we feel that her blood has been polluted, her flesh irreparably soiled, violated, adulterated by that act, by that very same act that we hardly remember carrying out with the woman we now pass in the street.

Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain.

Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion.

The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror.

But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with the woman you love.

Well, what remains in your skin, your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman.

In other words, auto-suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don’t know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you’d kill him.

But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it’s possible to look at him without horror; and, believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you’d approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you had reached my degree of perfection, you’d actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he’s a good chap.