Cocaine (6 page)

“And then, if you knew how wretched it is behind the scenes of this big stage. You’ve seen the many rooms, the many carpets and many lamps; you’ve seen the bar, the
salle d’armes
, the restaurant, but you haven’t yet met the men. What a prima-donna atmosphere. How many ham actors preen themselves in these rooms, and how many megalomaniacs boast about successes they never had.

“Outsiders believe journalists to be privileged creatures because theaters give them free stalls, ministers give them precedence over prefects and senators kicking their heels in the waiting room, and great artists talk to them on familiar terms. But the public doesn’t know that in spite of their public cordiality all these people privately despise them. Everyone has a low opinion of journalists, from the hospital porter who gives a reporter information about a tram crash to the President of the Republic who grants an interview to the parliamentary correspondent. They are polite to them because they’re afraid of major acts of blackmail or minor acts of meanness; they willingly give them the information they need, and sometimes they actually give it to them already written out or dictate it to them word for word because, knowing their dreadful ignorance, they’re afraid of heaven knows what idiocy being attributed to them. A great musician or fashionable playwright or highly successful actor will be on familiar terms with newspaper critics, but they know perfectly well who and what those critics are: they’re individuals who between the age of eighteen and twenty-five became newspaper reporters just as you or I did, just as they might have gone into the cod-liver oil business or become a bookkeeper to an equestrian circus. Journalism put them in contact with writers, actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, and thus equipped them with a vocabulary extensive enough to write a defamatory column about a genius or eulogize an idiot.

“Nevertheless I do not wish to imply that journalism is a printing press put at the disposal of irresponsibility and incompetence; in every editorial office there are two or three men of intelligence, two or three decent human beings, and sometimes one or two who have both brains and conscience.

“In this caravansary in which you took refuge a quarter of an hour ago you’ll find some admirable persons: the editor, the chief sub-editor, the dramatic critic, who is very severe in his judgments and is a playwright —”

“A successful one?”

“No; the chief shorthand writer and the German specialist. But the others — they’re superficial types with nothing in their heads but a short list of books they haven’t read, who talk, talk, talk in disconnected fragments, in ready-made phrases without rhyme or reason, so that listening to them is like looking at a bundle of newspaper cuttings and picking out phrases here and there with no connecting link between them. There are others who never talk. But they create the impression of being plunged in deep thought, because they walk about with lowered head, as if hypnotized by the pavement, looking at every bit of spittle as if they were expecting to find a diamond; you’d think them absorbed in trying to solve some baffling problem, but in fact they’re not thinking at all; they’re like the cab horses waiting at the corner of the street, seemingly weighed down by tremendous problems though in reality they’ve nothing whatever in their noddles. All the same, I think you’ll be happy on this newspaper. Everyone here seems slightly infected with
à-quoi-bonisme,
with
je-m’enfichisme.
We don’t have here what happens in other places: that the successful look down on those whose success is still to come, like married women who look down on young ladies still looking for a husband.”

While Pietro Nocera was talking Tito looked round the room.

There was a big frosted window, a desk with some opened newspapers, some sheets of paper in disarray, a long pair of scissors lying wide open, an ink stand, a bottle of glue, a lamp, an ashtray with a great many wax match heads which looked like tiny skulls mingled with small bones in a dainty charnel-house (there were still some traces of cocaine in Tito’s head), a telephone, some newspaper cuttings stuck to a wall, and a thin shelf with a few books lying about on it. It looked not so much as if the shelf were there for the books but as if the books had been put there for the sake of the shelf.

“Your office is exactly the same,” Pietro Nocera explained. “They’re all exactly alike, like cabins in a liner.”

Someone knocked the door, and a messenger came in.

“Show her up,” Pietro said to the messenger. Then, turning to Tito, he added “It’s a temporary mistress of mine. Go next door and take possession of your office. I’ll fetch you in an hour’s time.”

“Do you mean you receive women in your office?”

“Where do you expect me to receive them, you provincial? In yours?”

Tito walked out. The woman walked in.

There’s a kind of freemasonry among cocaine addicts. They recognize one another by signs perceptible only to themselves; they have their own lodges, some more democratic, others more aristocratic — but that is of no consequence, because they drift from one to the other, from the cabarets of Montmartre to the villas of the Porte Maillot, from the
boîtes à étudiants
of the Latin Quarter to the cafés of Montparnasse. In a few months Tito Arnaudi got to know all the legendary cafés, the little theaters of the Butte Sacée, the dives that re-echo to the sound of brass instruments beating out the rhythm of licentious dances from five o’clock in the evening until dawn. He went to all these semi-tolerated, semi-clandestine nightspots which are the meeting places of the cocaine addicts who form fifty per cent of their
habitués.
He got to know the small world that gathers round the university: the little women who from the age of fifteen to thirty-five practice the romantic profession of student’s girlfriend. They are very undemanding girlfriends, satisfied with half a room, half a bed and one meal a day; they attach themselves to a student because of the sentimental caprice of an hour. The hour passes, the caprice remains, is extended and transformed, and in the meantime a year passes, two years pass, and so does the bloom of youth. The girlfriend remains, almost faithful, almost in love, and then the young man takes his degree and leaves her; and she weeps, perhaps seriously, she feels desperate, perhaps genuinely, and for consolation finds another young man, younger than the one who left her and younger than she herself. She accompanies him, supervising all his actions, both sensible and crazy, throughout his university career, in all the rented rooms he lives in, rooms new to him but not to her, to all the cafés where they play snooker and backgammon, to all the numerous Bouillons Chartier, where for five francs they have the complete illusion of having lunch for two.

And one day, out of bravado, a student of pharmacy offers his friend some white powder to which he has helped himself in the university lab; and the latter accepts it, for fun, or to be in the swim, and not for pleasure, because the first pinch is always unpleasant; and then he can no longer do without it, and with a clouded mind he begins the descent through all the stages of degradation to complete destitution. And the female companion, who has followed him through the various rented rooms, bars and
bouillons
starts taking it too, smiling as she did the first time she used a powder puff, and then . . .

And then these little women draw close to one another, meet, need, recognize and understand one another. You see them in twos and threes in the bars at
apéritif
time, behaving restlessly, sniffing all round them like fox terriers, going in twos and threes to the toilet or to telephone booths and emerging a few minutes later with eyes more shining, faces more serene, movements more vivacious, looking more cheerful, more talkative, more attractive. In the toilet or telephone booth they have exchanged cocaine.

They are still at the first stage of addiction. They still have some restraint; they confess their vice only if they are sure that their confidante is a
renifleuse
too. They still take the poison secretly, shyly, shamefully. In a few months’ time they will be putting the little box on the café table as ostentatiously as if it were a cigarette case with a ducal coronet.

There is a cold, dead look in their eyes; what has died is their will.

But of what use would it be if it still existed? Could it make them give up the drug? No, because it has become a necessity. It is not being deprived of it, but the mere possibility of being deprived of it that disturbs, upsets and exasperates them. They take your hand and press it against their heart, where a tiny breast serves as a sounding box.

“Feel how hard, how quickly, it beats,” they say. “It slows down and seems to stop, and then it starts up again.”

At night, they say, they have dreadful shivering fits; they suffer from sleeplessness. Not having the drug is appalling, but the idea of not being able to get it is even more appalling.

And then they resort to the most disastrous expedients to get it, though they rarely resort to serious crime, for which energy is needed. They begin by cutting out unnecessary expenditure, and then they cut out necessary expenditure. They exchange their flat for a furnished room, and they exchange the latter for a garret. They sell their furs and jewels at ridiculous prices; and then they sell their clothes, and then their body. And they go on until they are so raddled that no more buyers are to be found. Their coquettishness goes, and so does their sense of cleanliness, though in that environment coquettishness and cleanliness are necessary for survival. And that is why it is possible to meet women, now modestly or poorly dressed, who a few months before were leaders of fashion at Auteuil and Longchamp.

“And your fur coat?”

“Fifty grams of coco.”

“And the gold bracelets?”

“A box as big as that, full of nothing but bicarbonate of soda and phenacetin.”

And the woman laughs coldly, in order not to weep, in order not to try to weep, perhaps because she would no longer know how to. Among these creatures who are half women and half ghosts the peddler circulates with his little cardboard boxes with labels of various colors: red, green or yellow, each color secretly indicating a more or less dishonest mixture. He never sells pure cocaine, which is always only a small proportion of the mixture; all the rest is boric acid or lactose or magnesium carbonate.

The peddler knows that an addict can be satisfied with a white powder that looks only roughly like cocaine; so long as she has something to sniff she does not analyze it. In the final stages of addiction she can’t distinguish cocaine from sugar, and in the early stages she is less interested in the drug than in the ceremonial of taking it. With a gold nib? An ivory nail file? A tiny bone spoon taken from a saltcellar? The nail of a little finger grown specially long for the purpose?

So the dealer grows rich in a few months. With 100 grams of cocaine he buys 10,000 lire worth of jewelry, and when his customers offer him the empty boxes he buys them back at the rate of one sou for every ten sous’ worth.

The editor of
The Fleeting Moment
was quick to appreciate Tito’s talents. In fact he telephoned the manager after the first week, and when Tito presented himself to draw his salary he was handed 500 francs extra.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked the editor.

“It means you’re a bright young man.”

“You never told me so.”

“I don’t tell you, I show it.”

He showed him the greatest consideration, and excused him from all the boring jobs.

“Would you like to go and report this conference?”

“No,” said Tito.

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t amuse me. Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister.”

“You’re perfectly right,” the editor said. “I’ll send one of your colleagues.”

The chief sub-editor too realized that Tito was a decent fellow, and suggested that they should address each other in the familiar second person singular.

The chief sub-editor was not an important person on the newspaper, though his title suggested high rank in the journalistic hierarchy; actually he was an excellent fellow subordinate to everyone else. Our society creates these comforting paradoxes. The horse, after being worked and exploited like the lowest proletarian, is called the noble animal. Deformation of the spine, hypertrophy of the bones, cretinism, physical monstrosities are cheerfully called “sports” of nature; sick people are sent to health centers; places where people are sent to die are called sanatoria; and priests, after being condemned to childlessness and celibacy, are called “father.”

Pietro Nocera, his Italian friend, did everything he could to help Tito during his first months on the newspaper and guided his footsteps in all the different aspects of the job.

“But soon you’ll turn your back on me,” Tito told him. “As long as I’m junior to you in position and pay, you’ll help and protect me and tell your colleagues that I have talent; but salary’s a rough guide to one’s value, and as soon as my pay is the same as yours you’ll say I’m an idiot. That’s perfectly human and natural. Even the Almighty, after giving Adam a good position in the earthly paradise, thought better of it and promptly found a pretext to ruin him.”

“You’ve been taking cocaine again,” Pietro Nocera said in tones of mild reproach. “When you make biblical comparisons it means that you have a few grams of cocaine up your nose.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Tito replied. “I tell you, you’ll drop me.”

“No, my friend,” Pietro Nocera went on, leaning against the back of a soft divan at the Café Richelieu. “You haven’t yet realized that I don’t have the stupid little defects of other men. I envy neither you, nor the editor, nor the President of the Republic, nor Félix Potin, who is the leading pork butcher in Paris. I work because I need to have two thousand francs in my pocket every month, but I have no desire to glorify work either by enthusiasm or envy or emulation. Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void. Who would think of working in a waiting room? While awaiting our turn we chat, or look at the pictures on the walls. But work? There’s no point in it, if when our turn comes to go into the next room we shall no longer see anything. I don’t understand why all these people get excited and upset and argue. One man acts the hero, another rouses the multitude, a third brags and blusters; one man expounds ideas, another demolishes systems, a third stands values on their head. And what for? When you consider that today’s triumphant victor who holds the mob in the hollow of his hand tomorrow goes into a café, drinks from a badly washed glass, swallows two or three germs no bigger than one thousandth of a millimeter, and then goes back to his creator. But coming back to you, if one day I were to tell someone that you were an idiot, it would mean I thought others intelligent. Instead I see all round me nothing but people who pretend to be different from what they are, propound ideas they do not have, make a display of beliefs that are not theirs, engage in fine gestures and fine phrases to conceal some deficiency or inferiority. A man who doesn’t wear an overcoat in winter on the ground that he’s healthier without one would wear a fine fur coat in bed if he had one; nine times out of ten the recluse, the misanthrope, is someone whom no one wants to visit; the man who systematically practices taciturnity and tries to give the impression of profound thought and philosophic doubt is not an intellectual crucified by skepticism but a puppet with a windy void in his head. If someone tells me he’s sick of everything and is disgusted with the world and tired of life and that the only happiness lies in death, I’m prepared to believe him only after he has shot himself and been buried. But so long as there isn’t a cubic meter of earth on his belly I shall go on believing that he’s play-acting . . .”