Pitigrilli

Cocaine

1

At the College of the Barnabites he learned Latin, how to serve mass and how to bear false witness — skills that might come in handy at any time. But as soon as he left he forgot all three.

For several years he was a medical student. When he presented himself for the pathology exam they said: “We can’t allow you to take it wearing a monocle. Either you don’t wear the monocle or you don’t take the exam.”

“Well, I shan’t take the exam,” Tito replied, rising to his feet. And with that he abandoned the idea of taking a degree.

He chewed gum sent him by an uncle in America as an advance on his legacy, and he smoked cheap cigarettes. When a woman took his fancy he jotted down her name in a notebook; she took her place at the bottom of the list, which he consulted as soon as he grew tired of the current favorite. It’s Luisella’s turn, he would note, and he would go and see Luisella.

“It’s your turn,” he would tell her. “And don’t waste time, because Mariuccia’s next, and she’s getting impatient.”

When he met Mariuccia he would say: “It’s not your turn yet, Luisella’s first.”

Not having a moustache, he was in the habit of twirling his eyebrows.

“Why do you keep twirling your eyebrows?” a young lady asked him one day.

“We all twirl the hairs we have, depending on our age and sex,” Tito replied.

The young lady thought him very witty and fell in love with him.

She lived in a flat in the same building and she was twenty. That is something that happens to young persons of both sexes when they are no longer nineteen and are not yet twenty-one. Afterwards we look back on it with regret as a fabulous age we did not sufficiently appreciate.

Her name was Maddalena, and she was a decent girl, though she went to a secretarial school. When they took their Sunday walk her highly respectable mama seemed to be shielding her daughter’s twenty-year-old virginity with her bosom; and every evening her father, who was one of those old-fashioned men who still count in scudi and napoleons, waited for her to come home with an extinguished cigar between his fingers and his spectacles on his brow, and if she was ten minutes late he would read her a lecture, brandishing his hundred-year-old pocket watch in the air like a sword.

He knew that when girls start by being five minutes late they end by being a fortnight late, and even more. All sexual morality is basically intended to avert the danger of girls being late.

Maddalena’s parents were inflexible in their moral principles, and one day when Maddalena was seen exchanging a few kisses with Tito, her medical student neighbor, all the most picturesque insults suggested by comparative zoology burst forth from her mother’s robust bosom and spread and re-echoed up and down the stairs; she then resorted to medico-legal terms such as degenerate, irresponsible and satyr; and when her repertoire and her lungs were exhausted she seized the girl by the arm and dragged her inside the flat. Next day Maddalena was sent to a reformatory for fallen girls or girls in moral danger, and she remained there for ten months, until she attained her majority, because her poor but honest mother and her poor but irreproachable father could not allow her to take the wrong turning.

At the Royal Reformatory contact with her depraved companions was supposed to be neutralized by daily visits from a number of pious and aristocratic ladies whose presence, encouragement and example would show the juvenile offenders the way to the flowery arbors of virtue. These dried up, shriveled and bearded ladies, devoid of breasts or ovaries, did have a beneficial effect; they produced consternation and alarm among the young delinquents and turned their wavering imaginations towards the blissful attractions of vice. It is a grave mistake to entrust the kaleidoscope of virtue to ugly and repulsive women. Female reformers should invite the most glittering cocottes to visit prisoners and show them — in return for a reasonable fee, of course — that it was by the practice of modesty and chastity that they became so beautiful, attractive and tempting; while old, pious, ugly, aristocratic and bearded ladies could be usefully employed demonstrating the disastrous consequences of dissolute and licentious living.

Her older companions taught Maddalena all the arts of gallantry, from how to procure an abortion to how to fleece a client. She took a theoretical preparatory course in prostitution; and when she was released to return to the paternal roof she forgave her beloved parents for the excessively severe punishment they had imposed on her (for her own good) the previous year.

In their turn, her parents forgave her youthful indiscretion, but explained that their reputation permitted no compromise with conventional morality.

Soon afterwards Maddalena, having become the mistress of a big industrialist and of a wealthy priest, adopted the name of Maud. Her poor but honest parents put no obstacle in the way of her career, particularly as her mother was allowed to go and see her every day to inquire after her health and take the leftovers from her kitchen.

Her father, saying “No, I cannot accept them,” nevertheless accepted the industrialist’s banknotes and smoked his cigars. He drank the priest’s liquor and had his discarded cloak made into a magnificent morning coat, to be worn on special occasions and when he went to see his daughter. And since she was in the habit of discarding shoes and stockings while they were still new, he made himself responsible for getting a good price for them, dividing the proceeds into two equal parts, of course: one for himself and one for his wife.

Tito, in despair at the news that Maddalena had been sent to a reformatory, flung himself into a train for France, and he arrived in Paris eighteen hours later.

He had a few hundred-lire notes in his pocket and no letters of introduction. Everyone who is destined to be a success in life leaves home without any letters of introduction. Tito went straight to a printer’s and ordered a hundred visiting cards, which were delivered the same day.

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi…

He read them all, one by one. By the time he reached the hundredth he was convinced that he really was both a doctor and a professor, for to convince others it is first of all necessary to convince oneself. He sent the first of them to the pedant who had prevented him from taking his degree by telling him to remove his monocle. What’s the use of a degree if a visiting card says as much as a diploma?

He succumbed to the melancholy that afflicts everyone during his first few days alone in a big city, and while strolling down a boulevard, looking up as if he were seeking the best place for a rope to hang himself with, he ran into an old school friend.

“I remember you very well. You used to quote dates in history like telephone numbers; coronation of Charlemagne, eight double zero; discovery of America, one four nine two. Have you been here long? Where do you eat?”

“At the Dîners de Paris,” his friend replied. “It’s a nice place, why not come along with me?”

“Do you go there every day?” Tito asked.

“Yes.”

“You go to the same restaurant every day? That calls for a great deal of loyalty, surely.”

“No,” was the reply, “only to be what I am.”

“And what’s that?”

“A waiter.”

So Tito Arnaudi went and ate at the Dîners de Paris.

“And what do you do to find a woman in this country?” he asked his waiter friend.

“You stop a woman in the street and offer her a drink; she accepts. You offer her lunch; she does not refuse. You offer her a place in your bed; and, unless she’s committed to someone else, she goes to bed with you.”

Next day Tito Arnaudi spoke to a young lady in the street and offered her a drink and lunch, and made an appointment to meet her at a theater next day.

“I’ll get the tickets,” he said.

“Yes, do.”

“You’ll turn up, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Really?”

“Sans blague.”

The young lady was beautiful. She said she was a mannequin at a big dressmaker’s in the Opera quarter. Smart, vivacious and decorative, she had all the characteristics of an ideal girlfriend. You can’t live abroad without a girlfriend; it’s impossible. Those who fail to find one go home after a month.

This one was the kind of woman who is capable of making you forget your country, change your address and renounce your nationality.

A man who arrives alone in a foreign country suffers from a devastating sense of loneliness. His thoughts return incessantly to the landscape, the streets, the walls he left behind. But if he meets a woman willing to give herself to him, she immediately creates a new world, a new homeland for him; her affection, whether genuine or simulated, forms a kind of protective capsule all round him. She provides a kind of neutral ground, a sanctuary. To the exile, a woman is a piece of his own country in a foreign land. The emigration authorities ought to provide relays of women at the frontiers to distribute to lonely emigrants.

Tito was exultant. He had met a woman and was to meet her again the next day. With that certainty in his heart, or rather on his lips — for he kept assuring himself of it all the time — he started walking the streets of Paris looking at the shop windows. He liked Paris. Woman is a prism through which things have to be looked at if they are to seem beautiful.

“Have you found yourself a woman?” the waiter asked Tito three days later.

“Don’t mention that subject to me,” Tito replied. “Because of a woman I met in a café I took two tickets for La Pie qui Chante. I was waiting for her outside the theater half an hour before the show began, as we arranged. At nine o’clock she still hadn’t turned up. The two tickets cost me fifty francs seventy. Was I to go in alone? Out of the question. The empty seat beside me would have ruined the performance for me. Was I to go away? Those two tickets in my pocket would have stopped my blood from circulating. So I waited at the door to unload them on someone who hadn’t already bought tickets. An old gentleman with a wife and a pair of opera glasses paid for them without arguing and offered me a five franc tip. He took me for a tout.”

“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.

They huddled together side by side like birds in a cage as if to keep themselves warm. Three of them rested their feet on the horizontal metal bar under the table; the fourth had her heels on the edge of the seat with her calves up against her thighs like a closed jack-knife, and rested her chin on her knees. There was a glassy look in their eyes, and their bloodless but cruelly rouged lips looked unreal against the pallor of their faces.

These four taciturn women (or was their taciturnity the result of the two strangers’ arrival?) seemed to be awaiting sentence by an invisible court that might appear through the curtains at any moment; in fact the least stupefied of them kept looking in that direction, though nothing whatever happened.

Under the big mirror two thin men were mechanically playing dice with the listless indifference of aging clerks working away in a dusty office and being paid a salary, not for the work they did, but for the time they spent. One of them had his coat collar turned up over the silk handkerchief he wore instead of a detachable collar and tie. All Tito could see of the other was his shoulders and the back of his neck. His neglected hair came down over the back of his neck and met in the middle as if to form an embryonic tail. When he turned to have a look at the newcomers, Tito saw his face. It was one of those ugly faces that are to be seen only on days when there’s a general strike: a long, thin face, disfigured by corrosion, and fleshless, like one of those ox-skull ornaments that architects call bucranes.

The woman who had spoken rose and went and said something to one of the two players; she leaned over his shoulder and stroked his ear with her cheek, but he went on playing, unperturbed. She lifted his jacket, took his cigarette case from his trouser pocket and, on her way back to her friends with a lit cigarette, she raised one leg to the level of her shoulders and with defiant roguishness brought it down on the table, making the glasses tinkle.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” she said to Tito, who had not yet said anything. “It’s not very cheerful here.”

“So I see,” he replied. “It’s more cheerful in the morgue.”

The woman was offended. “Why don’t you go there then?” she snarled.

One of the dice players turned and exclaimed: “Christine!”

“They probably take us for two policemen or something of the sort,” Tito’s friend suggested.

Tito laughed, and turned to the least taciturn of the women. “Your friends and the gentlemen playing dice must have formed a strange idea of us,” he said. “I have the impression that you’re all a trifle embarrassed. But we’re not what you suppose. I’m a journalist, and this is a colleague of mine. There’s nothing to be afraid of, as you can see.”

“Journalist?” one of the three silent women said. “And what are you doing here?”

“What one usually does in a café.”

“But why did you pick this place instead of a café on the grand boulevards where you can watch the grues and the trottins passing by?”

“Because this is more useful for what I’m looking for.”

“And what are you looking for, if I may ask?”

“Cocaine!”

The two men stopped their game and went over to Tito. One of them sat astride a chair with his chest against the back. He took a small silver box from his waistcoat pocket, opened it, and offered it to Tito.

The four women rushed at him.

“Ah, canaille!”

“Vilain monstre!”

“Sale bête.”

“Selfish swine!”

“And he said he had none left.”

“And he was letting us die for lack of it.”

One of the women tried to seize some of the contents of the box between her thumb and forefinger, but the man pushed her away with the flat of his hand, telling her roughly to keep her hands off.

But the four harpies didn’t calm down. Panting, with dilated nostrils and flashing eyes, they clawed at the box of white powder, like shipwrecked persons struggling for a place in the lifeboat. Those four bodies round a little metal box, all in the grip of the same addiction, looked like four independent parts of a single monster greedily writhing round a small, mysterious prize, elevating its cheap pharmaceutical crudity to the dignity of a symbol. All Tito could see was half-clenched hands that looked numbed by pain, hands with pale, bony, hooked fingers that turned into tightly clenched fists with nails sticking into palms to suffocate a shriek, or quell a craving, or give pain a different form, or localize it elsewhere.

The hands of cocaine addicts are unforgettable. They seem to live a life of their own, to be getting ready to die before the rest of the body, to be always on the point of a convulsion that is just, but only just, being held at bay.

In their eyes, now enlivened by the agony of anticipation, now dulled by the terrible depression caused by absence of the drug, there is a sinister light, a suggestion of death or dying, while their nostrils are horribly dilated as if to sniff any possible stray molecules of cocaine that might be dispersed in the air.

Before Tito had a chance to help himself the four women succeeded in dipping the fingers of one hand in the box, and then, carefully holding the other hand underneath as a plate, made off to the other end of the room, like a dog making for a distant corner with a stolen bone.

While holding the precious powder to their dilated nostrils and breathing it in, they kept looking round them mistrustfully.

Misers whose meanness borders on insanity, women whose greed for jewels verges on frenzy, do not worship their treasures as cocaine addicts worship their powder. To them there is something sacred about that white, glittering, rather bitter substance; they call it by the most loving and tender names, and talk to it as we talk to a loved one whom we have regained after thinking her lost forever. To them the drug box is like a sacred relic; they think it worthy of a monstrance, an altar, a small temple. They put it on the bedside table, look at it, talk to it, caress it, hold it to their cheek, press it to their throat or their heart.

When one of the women had sniffed her pinch of powder she dashed to the man who had offered it to her, grabbed his hand just when he was going to hold the remaining contents of the box to his own nostrils, grasped it firmly with both her hands, and held it to her face and sniffed, trembling as she did so.

He pulled his hand away, shook the woman off and voluptuously sniffed the remainder. Then she took his head between her hands (those bloodless fingers curved like claws over his black hair), applied her wet, tremulous, palpitating lips to his mouth and greedily licked his upper lip and put her tongue into his nostrils to gather the last few remnants.

“You’re stifling me,” the man moaned. His head was flung back, and he supported himself with his hands against the back of the chair. The veins of his throat were swollen, and his hyoid bone kept moving up and down as a result of his intermittent swallowing movements.

The woman was like a small wild animal savoring the odor of still undamaged flesh before sinking its teeth in it. She was like a little vampire; her lips adhered firmly to the man’s face with her forceful sucking.

When she let go, her eyes were veiled like those of a cat whose lids are carefully opened while it is asleep, and the teeth in her open mouth (her lips stayed open as if they were paralyzed) laughed like those of a skull.

She tottered away and sat on the piano stool; she dropped her head on to her forearm, and her forearm dropped on to the keyboard, which responded with a sonorous thump.

The young man who had offered cocaine to Tito got off his chair as if dismounting from a bicycle and paced up and down the room. The black jacket on his fleshless shoulders looked as if it were on a clothes-hanger, and his bow legs were like a couple of twin cherry stalks. His friend, a pallid and unhealthy-looking youth, took his place on the chair and spoke to Tito.

“So those creatures didn’t give you a chance to taste the stuff,” he said. “They’re like wild animals. I’m sorry I haven’t any to offer you, but the man with the wooden leg will be here soon.”

“The man with the wooden leg?”

“Don’t you know him?”

“Yes, you do,” Tito’s waiter friend interrupted. “He lives at your hotel.”

“He always turns up here at about this time. He never goes out before five or half-past. In some calendars, the more instructive kind, it says that the sun rises at 5:45 and 27 seconds, or sets at 6:09 and 12 seconds, and so on. Well, the man with the wooden leg seems to consult the calendar before going out. As soon as the sun has set he’s to be seen strolling through the streets of Montmartre, looking as if he has nowhere to go and nothing urgent to do, and he hugs the walls as if afraid of being run over by a bus. Sometimes he meets strange-looking people and goes into a bar or a bistro with them, or simply into a doorway, and then they leave separately and go their several ways as if they were complete strangers to one another.”

“But he was at the bar in the next room when I came in just now,” Tito said.

“Yes, I know. But he didn’t have the stuff then. He must have been with a student of pharmacy. He won’t be long now.”

“Here he is,” the man with cherry-stalk legs announced.

The four women dashed at the newcomer as if they were about to assault him.

“Get back, you jackals,” the man said threateningly. “Take it easy, or I shan’t have anything for you.”

“Five grams for me,” one of the women hissed.

“I want eight,” said another.

“It’s dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,” moaned a third in steadily rising tones. “I paid you in advance yesterday, so I come first.”

Before producing his merchandise the man with the wooden leg looked at Tito and said by way of greeting: “Oh, you’re 71.”

“Did you meet in prison?” Tito’s friend asked.

“No, that’s my room number.”

One of the four women put her hand on the shoulder of the skeleton-like individual. “T’as du pèze?” she said to him.

“Not a sou,” her boyfriend replied with conviction.

“So much the worse,” she replied. “I’ll swap my bracelet.”

“Terms strictly cash,” said the man with the wooden leg, jestingly but firmly. “Cash first, paradise later.”

The woman who had asked for five grams produced a fifty-franc note from her purse.

“Give me twenty-five francs change,” she said.

“I haven’t got any change.”

“Then keep the fifty and give me ten grams,” she said.

The man took the note, put one hand in his trouser pocket and produced a small round box. The upper part of his wooden leg, the part that accommodated the stump, also provided amply stocked and very unsuspicious storage space.

“It’s as if he had his leg cut off specially for the purpose,” Tito remarked.

“What will you give me for this gold bracelet?” the woman said, whirling it on her extended forefinger under the man’s nose.

“C’est du toc,” he replied. “It’s Naples gold.”

“You’re from Naples yourself, you crook,” the woman exclaimed angrily. “I’ll give you the cash tomorrow if you won’t take the bracelet.”

The man cut the argument short. “In advance, always. In arrears, never,” he said. Then, offering Tito a box, he said: “Four grams — twenty francs.”

Tito took the box, handed him twenty francs, and read on the box the words L’Universelle idole.

Then he turned to the woman who had wanted to sacrifice her bracelet. “Will you permit me?” he said, offering it to her.

“Is that for me?” she exclaimed.

“Yes. I’m giving it to you.”

She didn’t hesitate; with her white, fleshless hands she seized Tito’s hand and the box and, holding them firmly, greedily kissed both.

“Oh, the lovely, heavenly powder; love and light of my life,” she moaned, and raised it to the level of her brow as one raises a relic or a symbol in a sacred rite. Then she used a hairpin to tear the strip of paper round the box and carefully raised the lid.

She went to a table at the other end of the room, knelt on the ground, put the exciting packet on the marble table top, and took from her bag a small tortoise-shell box and a tiny white spatula of the kind used by chemists to put powders into packets. Then, holding her breath and with infinite care, she transferred the drug from the crude cardboard box to the more worthy tortoise-shell one. When the cardboard box was empty she held it upside down over the palm of her hand, tapped the back of it with her hard fingernails and then raised the palm of her hand to her nostrils and inhaled; and, still with the same care, she shook the tortoise-shell box horizontally to level the powder, looking round every now and again with feline suspiciousness.

Then, as if she were dealing with radium, she took a pinch of the powder and raised it to her nostrils. As she inhaled, her breast swelled and her eyes closed voluptuously. She took another pinch and put it to her nostril, forcing it in with her thumb, and she scraped the little that remained behind her fingernail into her mouth with her teeth.

Tito had boasted to the skinny man of his love of the drug. Among those with a vice, not sharing it is something to be ashamed of. In prison those who have committed only a minor offence exaggerate its gravity in order not to seem inferior to the others. Tito, who had never sniffed cocaine in his life, swore he could not do without it.

And when the woman invited him to help himself, he did so.

The white powder up his nose gave him a feeling of aromatic freshness, as if essential oils of thyme and lemon verbena were evaporating in his throat. Traces of it passing from his nostrils to his pharynx gave him a slight sensation of burning at the back of his throat and a bitter taste on his tongue.

“A little more?”

Tito took another pinch. Then he fell silent. He withdrew into a kind of meditation. Then it happened. There was a cold feeling in his nose, a paralysis in the middle of his face. He could no longer feel his nose; it no longer existed.

The man with the wooden storage leg went on taking money and producing little boxes, and the women inhaled in silence. The two men ordered drinks and emptied a whole boxful into a small glass.

“Why don’t you inhale?” Tito’s friend asked.

One of the men replied by leaning his head backwards, showing that his nasal septum was worn away by an ulcer.

“Coco?” Tito asked.

“Yes,” the young man replied. “It begins with a small scab that itches. It swells slowly and then turns into an ulcer that destroys the cartilaginous part of the septum; fortunately it never reaches the bone.”

“And what did the doctor say?”

“Rien à faire.”

“Really?”

“Yes. What the doctors say is: Give up cocaine. But I prefer giving up my nasal septum.”

Tito smiled.

The man with the ulcer laughed. He laughed immoderately, frenziedly. The four women, the other man and Tito joined in.

Tito instinctively touched his nose. He seemed no longer to have one, though it was very heavy in spite of its nonexistence.

He laughed again, and the others laughed too.

The drug peddler rose as if to take his departure. “Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.

“Don’t go yet,” said Tito, holding him by the round wooden leg. “Stay and have a drink.”

The man sat down next to him, stretched his wooden leg under the table and withdrew the other one.

“You earn more that way than by begging for alms,” the yellow, skeleton-like young man said.

“Yes,” the dealer admitted. “But don’t imagine that begging’s a bad job. It all depends on where you do it. Certainly you can do it anywhere, but some places are far better than others. You do big business outside brothels, for instance. You don’t do so well as outside churches, it’s true, but well enough to make a comfortable living. I prefer working outside churches. In the streets, on the boulevards, at the doors of cafés, there’s a crowd with the average percentage of rogues and fools, but on the steps of churches the percentage is higher; they’re nearly all fools, ninety per cent of them are fools, and you can’t go wrong. Rogues go to church too, of course; actually I’d say that most church-goers are rogues, but going into or coming out of church, which is God’s pied-à-terre, they don’t want to look wicked before or after vowing to be pious.”

The man emptied his glass, put it down, said thank you and made for the door. Just as he reached it a woman stopped him and bought another box.

“Goodbye all,” he called out.

He counted on the effect of his departure, and in fact the other women swarmed round him as if their savior were departing and gave him more money. Tito also bought another box, opened it and inhaled.

“Just look what journalism leads to,” his waiter friend said. “To investigate cocaine addiction you become an addict yourself.”

“And so what?” Tito replied. “It might be much worse. When Pythagoras travelled among the Egyptians he had to be circumcised before being admitted to their mysteries.”

“And what newspaper do you write for?” the pale man asked him confidentially.

“An American newspaper,” Tito replied. “And what’s your job?”

“I haven’t got one,” the pale man replied with great naturalness. “Christine works for me. If I could work without any great effort as Christine does, I’d work for her. But as I can’t…”

Tito’s friend failed to conceal slight surprise at the candor with which the man admitted to being an alphonse.

“Your bourgeois friend is surprised,” he said, alluding to the waiter. “But what’s strange about it? Christine and I used to work in a factory where there were five hundred women. They were all destined for TB, or anemia at the very least. The factory owner exploited them. I couldn’t take away all of them, but rescued Christine, and now I exploit her. I don’t know why I should be regarded as more contemptible than that industrialist who exploited five hundred women at the same time. Particularly as the work she does now is less tiring, more hygienic and more profitable. They say it’s bad for one’s conscience, but what does that matter so long as it doesn’t dirty one’s hands?”

“What’s the time?” asked Tito, thinking it was time to go.

“I haven’t got a watch. Man shortened the days by inventing clocks, and he shortened the years by inventing calendars. I have neither the one nor the other.”

“My calendar’s here,” said Christine, making an indecent gesture.

“And she never makes a mistake,” said her lover, laughing.

Tito turned to his friend and said in an undertone: “The first things that cocaine destroys are the will and the sense of shame.”

“But what shame remains to be destroyed among these people?” said the waiter. “They’re worse than respectable women.”

2

The article on cocaine addicts was a great success. The American newspaper editor telegraphed one hundred dollars to his nephew even before the article appeared in the centre columns of his sensational news page. A hundred dollars amounted to one thousand francs and convinced him that he was a great journalist; and with that belief in his epigastrium (for that is where arrogance, presumption and pride are situated) the first thing he did was to jump into a taxi, hurry to his shady little hotel in Montmartre, pay the bill, pack his bags, and move to one of the smartest hotels in Paris, the Hotel Napoléon in the Place Vendôme, where he installed himself in an unheated room on the fourth floor, facing the interior courtyard.

That same afternoon he called on the editor of a newspaper with a big circulation called The Fleeting Moment.

The editor was a very elegant individual. It is only aged teachers at technical schools who fail to understand that it is possible to be both intelligent and well dressed. A big ruby on his finger gleamed like a tiny lamp. Like one of those little lamps that novelists compare to big rubies.

“Yes, I know your uncle,” he said, as erect in his armchair as if had been fixed with a u-joint, for an editor’s conscience always remains perfectly upright no matter how much his ship is tossed by stormy seas. “Yes, I know your uncle, and if your flair for journalism is anything like his,” he added, stropping an ivory paper knife on his thigh, “you’ll go a long way. Where did you work in Italy?”

“On the Corriere della Sera.”

“And what were you?”

“Sub-editor.”

“Have you a degree?”

“In law and medicine.”

“And what are your political views?”

“I have none.”

“Good. If you are to argue convincingly for a point of view, it’s better to have none yourself. But the difficulty,” the editor went on, applying his scissors to an English newspaper, “is that I have no vacancies at the moment, and I have no work to offer you. But I shall bear you in mind and send for you as soon as there’s an opening. Where are you staying?”

Tito, gloating over the sensational impact of what he was about to say, replied with deliberate gravity: “The Hotel Napoléon.”

The editor, who had picked up a pen to jot down his address and had pressed a bell to have him shown out, put down the pen and the notebook and sent the commissionaire away.

“I’ll give you a month’s trial on a salary of 1500 francs,” he said.

“Tomorrow’s the first, so let us start tomorrow. Come and see me as soon as you arrive at the office and I’ll introduce you to your colleagues. Goodbye.”

He then pressed the button again.

That evening Tito dined at Poccardi’s and bought himself an orchestra stall at the Boîte à Fursy, where he picked up the latest tune. He went back to his hotel whistling it.

To the Hotel Napoléon.

Remember that you’re staying at the Hotel Napoléon, he said to himself. In an unheated, back room on the fourth floor, it’s true, but it’s also true that you’re staying at the Hotel Napoléon.

He unpacked his bags, arranged his toilet articles on the washstand, put his shirts, socks and vests in the drawers and hung his jackets on the clothes hangers in the wardrobe. There was even a telephone in the room.

What a shame I’ve no one to ring up, he said to himself. To have a telephone and no one to ring up is sad. But not having anyone to ring up is not sufficient reason for not using the thing.

He picked up the receiver and asked for a number, the first that came into his head.

He did not have long to wait. A female voice replied.

“Is that you?” Tito said. “What did you say? Madame… Good, it was you I wanted to speak to. I must warn you that your husband knows everything. That’s all I have to say, and it’s no good pressing me for details. All I have to say is that your husband knows everything. No, no, it’s no good pressing me for details. No, I’m not Giacomino… Well, since you have guessed it — yes, I am Giacomino. Goodnight.”

And he replaced the receiver.

“Who on earth is Giacomino, I wonder?” he said to himself with a smile. “And I wonder who she is.”

His face suddenly darkened.

“Poor creature, that was a dirty trick I played on her,” he murmured with genuine regret. “I’ve given her a bad night. Perhaps I’ll get her into serious trouble. I’ll ring her again and tell her… But I don’t remember the number. So much the worse, or so much the better. Perhaps I’ve done her a good turn.”

And he laughed again.

He undressed and put his watch, money and a small golden box on the table. He opened the box. It was nearly empty; during the two intervals at the theater he had inhaled a few grams to celebrate his getting a job on that great daily The Fleeting Moment, and little more than a gram was left. He poured it on to the back of his hand and inhaled voluptuously.

He took the last things from his suitcase: his pajamas, a Bible, and a revolver. He put on his pajamas and put the Bible on the commode.

They say that all good men should have a Bible at their bedside, he told himself. I’ve never read it, but I always have it by my bedside.

He got into bed, drew the bedclothes up to his mouth, and switched off the light.

The fresh, volatile odor of cocaine descended to the very bottom of his lungs. How cold one’s feet get in this hotel, he grumbled, and curled up.

With his head on the pillow he could hear the beating of his heart.

My heart has started racing, he said to himself, it’s chasing my nose that has run away. I’m going to be a huge success on that newspaper. I’ll be editor within a year. Then I’ll marry a politician’s daughter. And I’ll be a deputy. A deputy at the Palais Bourbon. And from there I shall make speeches: “And believe me, Alcibiades, it is better to associate with one of those not unwilling youths than with the hetairae of Athens…”

But why had a phrase from Plato’s Symposium that he had picked up years ago at school, heaven knows when or why, suddenly returned to his mind?

And how cold his legs were.

His heart quieted down, but his imagination still ran riot. His brain was like a carnival in a madhouse; his closed eyes saw a blue darkness in which cold sparks ignited and exploded. Each split into two, then each half again divided. One of the sparks expanded like unraveling thread and throbbed with amoeba-like movements, invading his whole field of vision and flooding out all the darkness. His closed eyes were full of light.

And in that light a mobile, elastic circle formed and grew into a square, then into a rectangle, then into a parallelepiped; a black parallelepiped with one golden side and then two and then three; it was a book, the Bible.

The Book of Genesis — what a jester, what a great humorist God is, Tito said to himself, while his heart beat loudly in the bed, which was as resonant as a resonance chamber. What a jester, what a humorist God is.

God said: “Let there be light

Let there be heavens

Let there be grass

Let there be trees

Let there be the sun

Let there be the stars for when there’s no gas

Let there be gas for when there are no stars

Let there be reptiles

Let there be birds

Let there be farmyard animals

Let there be wild animals for the menageries

Let there be male human beings

Let there be female human beings…”

And then He told them to have children, authorizing them to lord it over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air and the beasts that wander over the face of the earth. All he had to do was to say: “Let there be stars” or “let there be crocodiles,” “let there be Mediterranean monk seals” — or porcupines — and all those creatures came into existence ready-made and complete at the mere sound of their names.

If that was how it was done the Creation was not very hard work. Nevertheless on the seventh day He felt He needed a rest.

What a jester God is, Tito went on. No doubt it was He who created such blessings as water to make the grass grow, grass to fill animals’ bellies, animals to fill men’s bellies, women for men to keep, the serpent to cause trouble to both sexes, truffles to slice and serve with lobsters, the sun to dry washing, the stars to shine on poets, and the moon so that Neapolitan songs could be written about it. But it strikes me as strange that things should have emerged from nothing at the mere sound of their names. I think the Almighty likes parlor tricks and arranged the whole thing beforehand, that like a good conjurer He had His boxes with double bottoms and His glasses prepared in advance, and that His bravura in seeming to create everything out of nothing in six days was a piece of American-style ballyhoo designed pour épater les bourgeois.

But He had a trick up His sleeve.

To give life to man He breathed the breath of life into his nostrils.

I believe He did this, not to give him life, but to inject into him an artistic assortment of germs. Adam in fact lived for only 930 years, though he could have lived much longer.

God began on a lavish scale, creating the stars with their huge orbits, the sun with its eternal light, and innumerable species of plants and animals. He acted entirely regardless of expense. But to make woman He performed the niggardly act of using one of Adam’s ribs.

What a humorist the Almighty is.

He knew from experience that when you see a “no smoking” notice you have an irresistible desire to light a cigarette. He regretted the excessive favors granted to Adam and his wife and wanted to withdraw them without making a bad impression, so He applied to the serpent, suggesting to it that dirty trick with the apple that we all know about. And the serpent fell in with the idea.

The serpent acted in league with God, and the whole thing was a put-up job.

And the fruit of that fruit was the following: the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened and they saw that they were naked; so they sewed themselves suits made to measure of fig leaves. But how did they know they were naked if they had never seen themselves with clothes on?

Next morning the Lord called on Adam who, always the perfect gentleman, put all the blame on his wife.

In slightly cowardly fashion God caused the apple to be paid for dearly by inventing morning sickness and labor pains. So women with a retroflexed uterus will know whom to thank for it, since the Lord said: “Thou shalt bear thy children in pain; the earth shall bring forth thorns; thou shalt gain thy daily bread with the sweat of thy brow and that of thy baker, and thou shalt pay dearly for it, because the American exchange rate is fantastic.”

Then He drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and at the entrance He put a police guard equipped with flaming swords and He called them cherubim. In short, like all arranged marriages, the marriage of Adam and Eve was unhappy.

But what repels me most is seeing the Almighty feigning ignorance. He, who is all-seeing, all-knowing and makes all the worst arrangements, goes to Adam and with hypocritical ingenuousness says to him: “What have you done with the apple?”

And He goes to Cain and says to him? “What have you done with your brother?”

If I had been in Cain’s position I would have given Him a punch in the eye.

The eye of God. The eye of God who sees everything — and hears everything. Perhaps He’s listening to my blasphemy now. And He’s capable of striking me down.

But how cold my feet are.

All the same, if I were to die now, I should be almost glad. No, I don’t want to commit suicide, but I should like to fade away and die gently. To depart from life as one gets out of a bath. What a fine thing is death. Only decomposing corpses are happy; the more advanced the decomposition, the greater the happiness. And if I’m not going to die, I should like at least to remain here, inert, like a mineral, devoid of will, devoid of initiative, devoid of rebellion, letting everything take its course all round me, letting everything collapse, without lifting a finger, behaving like decent women in the old days who grew old and ugly and disintegrated without the use of make-up or lipstick. But what an extraordinary effect cocaine has on me. Cold feet, fireworks in my head, a torrent of stupid ideas, my heart throbbing like a sewing machine, and a calm acceptance of the idea of total inertia. All the same, I’d like to stay in bed for two or three days until the staff came and knocked; then the owner would come, and then the police, and I wouldn’t answer any of them, I’d let myself be shaken and I’d let myself be taken away, as they liked and where they liked… What a strange effect cocaine has on me.

His heart went on beating hard, and the whole of his body trembled as a result; it trembled, vibrated and shook like a stationary car with the engine left running.

But the exalting and depressing effect of the drug began to fade. Tito came back to himself.

And fell asleep.

When he awoke the sun was high. He did not notice it, because in Paris the sun is always at the same height; so high that you never see it.

He had to be at the newspaper office at ten. The editor, thrusting his fierce animal-tamer’s moustaches at him, had told him to report to him personally. So he would have to have a good shave.

Standing in front of the mirror and applying his safety razor to his thin, lathered cheeks, he said to himself: How boring life is. How futile. Having to get up every morning, put on your shoes, shave, see people, talk, look at the hands of your watch returning inexorably to where you have seen them millions of times before. Having to eat. Having to eat bits of dead bodies, or dead fruit, or fruit worse than dead, adulterated by cooking; having to pick fruit that is so beautiful only to spoil it and pass it through our bodies. Having to swallow dead things until we become dead things ourselves. Having to make new things in order to use and so destroy them so that other new things may result from their destruction. Everything around us is dead; here and there are some traces of life, but everything else is dead: the wool of my jacket is dead, the pearl that adorns a young woman’s neck is the coffin of a worm… Having to smile at women; having to try and be a bit different from the majority of mankind. Yet even we who try to be different and make wide detours to avoid following the main road end up exactly where ordinary people end up, that is, following the main road. Life is an arc from A to B. Except for the stillborn or congenital idiots, it’s not a straight line. For those with some intelligence the curve is gentle; for the highly intelligent the curve is greatest; for the simple-minded it’s almost a straight line. The brainy, the eccentric, the odd and out-of-the-way individuals who want novelty, flavor, something different from the normal, arrive more slowly but just as inevitably at the point that conventional people reach without question and without hesitation. The only difference is in the width of the arc. Those with a taste for liberty and adventure who scorn marriage end by envying those who marry young and have a large family; those who live a dazzling life of unpredictable changes of fortune, alternating between poverty and wealth, luxury and hunger, end by regretting not having had a career in the civil service. I believe that at heart the great actress envies the good housewife who washes and plays with her children. I believe that the great statesman who makes history regrets not having been a country schoolteacher or a stationmaster.

The height of perfection is mediocrity (Tito went on). The height of perfection is the bookkeeper who shaves every other day, travels second class, aspires to purgatory, is satisfied with a dowry of 50,000 lire, lives in a third-floor flat, was a non-commissioned officer, and wears detachable shirt cuffs and silver gilt cuff links. So let mediocrity be praised.

And in that case why do I go and get a job on a newspaper in the secret hope of being a great success? But that isn’t true. At heart I don’t hope for anything at all. I have no ideals. But I have a strong beard, and this blade is blunt. That’ll do. I’ve scratched myself enough. The editor of The Fleeting Moment won’t want to embrace and kiss me, I hope. I shall be an employee, a humble employee. I shall never aspire to be the idol of the mob. The mob loves those who amuse and serve it. But to amuse it you have to love it. I love no one, least of all the mob, because the mob, the multitude, are like women: they betray those who love them.

Tito bent over the washbasin and rinsed his face. The cold water clarified his ideas.

What a pessimistic idiot I am, he said to himself. I’m an idiot and a liar. I want to succeed. And I shall.

He walked briskly down the stairs, and at the door he sent a boy resplendent in a red uniform like an acrobat’s costume to get him a taxi.

The editor of The Fleeting Moment was in the salle d’armes fencing with the drama critic, but he would be back in his office in three quarters of an hour.

In the meantime Tito took off his overcoat and hung up his hat. That is the first act that marks taking possession of an office.

A gentleman in black came towards him with outstretched hand. His jacket and hair were black, and he was all straight lines (his parting, the crease in his trousers, the shape of his mouth, the set of his shoulders); he seemed to have been drawn with a ruler in India ink.

“Aren’t you the new man?” he said. “I’m Ménier, the secretary of the editorial department. Won’t you come this way?”

He led him through three huge, richly upholstered rooms furnished with marble busts, dainty desks and huge armchairs — those soft armchairs that caressingly adjust to all the curves and bulges of the human form. The difference in substance between the flimsy desks and the hospitable armchairs was an apt acknowledgment of the supererogatory nature of work in the face of claims of idleness and sloth. After passing through the three rooms on a long length of oriental carpet they found themselves in front of the American bar.

The barman, whose generous form looked as inappropriate in his white uniform as an ancient Egyptian priest would have done if he had absent-mindedly put on the short black jacket of a contemporary Spaniard, was absorbed in mixing some highly complicated drinks for three or four members of the staff who were seated, or rather perched like lookouts, on high, slender stools.

Tito’s companion ordered two cocktails.

The barman, with the mournful precision of a chemist engaged in a highly sophisticated laboratory experiment, poured three different liquors into a kind of big glass test tube, filled it to the top with crushed ice, poured into it some drops of heaven knows what from three different little bottles, and stirred the mixture; then he pressed the edges of two glasses into a half lemon and dipped them in sugar, which stuck to the edges like brine, and poured the mixture into the glasses.

The man with the black, geometrical features, looking as neat, austere and solemn as a millionaire’s funeral, glanced at the Italian, expecting to see on his face an expression of wonder at this catastrophic concoction. When Frenchmen, and Parisians in particular, have dealings with an Italian they believe they are revealing unsuspected marvels to him and invariably expect him to be as astonished as American natives were when Christopher Columbus showed them a cigarette lighter or a box of Valda tablets. Even Parisian cocottes, when they undress in the presence of an Italian, expect him to put his hands to his brow in utter amazement at the revelation that women are differently made to men. Cocktails are made like that in my country too, Tito said to himself. If you had drunk all the cocktails that I have, you’d have delirium tremens by now.

“Allow me to introduce Dr — who deals with German politics; Professor —, who handles the Russian section, and M. — , our medical correspondent,” he said.

Then, pointing to Tito, he said.

“M. Titò Arnodi.”

“Tito Arnaudi,” the owner of the name corrected him.

“M. Titò Arnodi, our new colleague,” the man repeated.

Tito took in only the end of their names (ein in the case of the German, ov in the case of the Russian and ier in the case of the medical correspondent). The three gentlemen concerned leapt from their stools to shake hands with their new colleague.

“And now I’ll take you to your office,” the editorial secretary said. “And on the way I’ll take the opportunity of introducing you to your fellow countryman who deals with Italian politics. C’est un charmant garçon.”

Tito put his glass on the counter and shook hands with the German, the Russian and the scientist, who climbed back on to their observation stools.

Beyond the bar there was another room with two billiard tables, and beyond that there was the restaurant for the editorial staff of The Fleeting Moment and their friends.

Tito and his companion walked down a corridor, and three or four messengers rose and sat down again as they passed. It was like a hotel corridor, with doors on either side; all that was missing was shoes outside the doors and trousers hanging on hooks on the door posts. As they passed the doors they heard the clatter of typewriters, all tuned in together, the ringing of telephone bells and the sound of feminine voices.

The secretary knocked at the door.

“Entrez,” someone answered.

A number of colored cushions lay on a lounge chair, and a man lay on the cushions. One leg slid to the ground, and Pietro Nocera rose with its aid.

“Good gracious.”

“Tito Arnaudi.”

“Good heavens, Pietro Nocera.”

“Fancy seeing you in Paris.”

“I’ve been here a month. And you?”

“I’ve been here a year. Are you passing through?”

“Goodness no.”

“Are you staying in Paris, then?”

“Not only that, I’m staying on this newspaper.”

And before Pietro Nocera recovered from his surprise the secretary said: “I’m putting you in the next office. I’ll have the communicating door opened, so that you won’t have to go out into the corridor if you want to talk.”

“And how on earth did you get here?”

“I’ll tell you. And you?”

“I’ll tell you too.”

“Are you free for lunch?”

“Completely.”

“There’s a restaurant on the premises.”

“So I’ve seen.”

“So you’ll have lunch with me.”

“Do you realize the gravity of what you are saying?”

“I do.”

“In that case I accept.”

“I’ll order you oysters still redolent of the sea.”

The secretary left the two friends together to allow all their sentimental gases to expand.

Pietro Nocera telephoned to the bar. “Two Turins,” he said.

He turned to Tito and explained that he had ordered Italian vermouth for the sake of local color. “Sit there, facing me, so that I can have a good look at you. Your complexion has changed a bit, but otherwise you’re just the same. And what brought you to Paris? And how’s that old aunt of yours?”

“Don’t let’s talk indecencies at table.”

“So you’ve taken to journalism too?”

“As you see.”

“And how did that happen?”

“It’s quite simple. I’m a journalist just as I might be a cinematograph operator or a boatswain on a sailing ship or a conjuror.”

“You’re quite right,” Pietro Nocera said. “One takes refuge in journalism, as one takes refuge on the stage after doing the most desperate and disparate jobs — as priest, dentist or insurance agent. There are some who fall in love with journalism because they have had distant glimpses of its most glamorous aspects or its most successful representatives, just as they fall in love with the actors’ trade because they’ve seen an actor who played Othello being frantically applauded. I’ll play Othello too, they say to themselves.”

“And all they ever get is a walk-on part.”

“And how many walk-on parts there are in journalism! We’re not people who live real life. We live on the margins of life. We have to defend views we don’t share and impose them on the public; deal with questions we don’t understand and vulgarize them for the gallery. We can’t have ideas of our own, we have to have those of the editor; and even the editor doesn’t have the right to think with his own head, because when he’s sent for by the board of directors he has to stifle his own views, if he has any, and support those of the shareholders.

“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.

3

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…”

While Pietro Nocera talked Tito looked through the café windows at the crowded boulevard outside. A policeman armed with a white truncheon was regulating the car and pedestrian traffic against a confused background of unintelligible voices and other noises.

He told me all this the first time we met, Tito said to himself. A man tells you the most interesting things he knows during the first half hour he talks to you; after that he either repeats himself or offers you variations on the same theme.

“What are you thinking about?” Pietro asked.

“I’m thinking that you’re a real friend,” Tito replied. “But there’s no sign of the chief sub-editor. Do you suppose he has forgotten?”

And, just as happens in plays, Tito was just saying “He won’t be coming” when the person referred to walked in.

The chief sub-editor was one of those kindly persons who offer invaluable advice when you have something in your eye (blow your nose, look up, walk backwards, find the square root — etc.).

He was forty, which is the most frightening age in life. You don’t feel sorry for the old, because they are old already; you don’t feel sorry for the dead, because they are dead already. But you do feel sorry for those approaching old age, those approaching death. Forty! At fairgrounds you see rollercoasters dashing up a steep slope followed by a steep drop and then another ascent. At the top of the slope, or rather just before the top, the vehicle has used up all the energy acquired in the descent and it slows down and hesitates as if the top were unattainable, as if it were terrified of the approaching plunge. The man approaching forty is in a similar state of hesitation and uncertainty; his pace slackens, he is paralyzed by the approaching summit and the descent he cannot see but knows lies just ahead.

The chief sub-editor was forty.

“I detest tabarins,” he said, emptying his fourth glass of cognac. “All those people who dance in basements to harrow each other’s nerve endings and think they’re enjoying themselves don’t realize in their frenzy that they are passive instruments in the hands of nature, which provides them with the excitement of the dance in the interests of the reproduction of the species.”

He emptied another glass.

“I laugh out of politeness,” he went on a little later. “I laugh to try and hide my melancholy. And, as I don’t succeed in hiding it either from myself or from others, I drink, to hide it at any rate from myself. I drink to get rid of my mental wrinkles, but they can’t be got rid of, they can only be smoothed out for a moment, like the lines that women smooth out with facial massage. For a short time they vanish, and then they come back deeper than ever.”

He drank again.

“As a result of spending a lifetime in newspaper composing rooms I’ve got used to reading upside down, to seeing things the wrong way up. It’s a sad gift. Thanks to it I lost confidence in the loyalty of a friend who was dear to me, and I discovered that the woman who pretended to love me despised and betrayed me.

“So now I drink.

“I drink, and drink will be my ruin. I know it, but it helps me to see things through rose-tinted spectacles, and that’s enough for me. And then when I look at the world I see it as the optimists paint it.”

“And when you haven’t been drinking?” Tito asked.

“When I haven’t been drinking… Permit me a slight digression. When believers, mystics, look at the world, they don’t see beautiful, provocative women or pleasure-loving men; they see skeletons, skulls with empty eye-sockets, jaws without tongues, teeth without gums, shamefully bald heads, feet that seem to be made of imperfect dice, long hands that look like the mouthpieces of pipes strung together. But when I look at mankind I see spinal columns, spinal cords and nerves branching out from them.”

“So much for men,” said Tito. “And what about women?”

“Women? Roving uteri. That’s all. I see roving uteri and men pursuing them, hypnotized, talking confusedly of glory, ideals, humanity. And so I drink.”

Through the steamed up windows two dense and continuous streams of people were to be seen. The sound of their voices, the brouhaha, the trampling of feet, the movements of the crowd, suggested a color — bitumen mixed with a uniform grayish yellow, against which the occasional cry of a hawker, the loud laughter of a street Arab or a woman’s shrill voice stood out like splashes of red, blobs of white, daubs of violet, parabolas of silver, jets of lilac, quivers of green, hieroglyphics of yellow, arrows of blue. The agile, springy legs of women contrasted with the leaden monotony, all of them long, slender, muscular, pink and wrapped in their silk stockings as if by a spiral of thread that wound round their thighs and calves like the grooves of gramophone records.

The modern Venus no longer has the soft, plump gracefulness that our grandfathers sought for (with their hands); the contemporary Venus reminds one of the androgynous girl in a troupe of British gymnasts.

“And so I drink,” said the man who smiled out of politeness. “Love might perhaps be left to me, but I’ve at last realized what love is. It’s a sweet poison that comes to me from a woman I like. After some time all the poison I’ve absorbed makes me immune, and then the poison that continues to come to me from her no longer affects me.

“Once upon a time I still had the stimulus of being faced with rivals, and I tried to fight them, but now that I’m chief sub-editor, now that I’ve ‘arrived,’ I’m also finished. I’ve lost the joy of struggle, chiefly because I have no more enemies, but also because if I had I would not take the trouble to fight them. I’ve come to see that competitors are necessary to those who want to get on in the world. Opposition is indispensable to success. We should have realized that elementary truth from the embryonic beginnings of life; spermatozoa have to swim upstream to reach the ovary.”

“That’s a paradox,” said Tito.

“I never state paradoxes, because generally they are nothing but cleverly presented absurdities,” the chief sub-editor replied. “I claim that enemies are extremely useful when you know how to handle them properly. In medicine, as you know better than I do, germs are used to fight the illnesses that they cause, are they not? The whole of serotherapy is based on the exploitation of our enemies to our own advantage. Isn’t the leech a parasite of man? Well, in a doctor’s hands it’s a very useful thing. Enmity is a force, a negative, contrary force, but it’s still a force, and all forces are exploitable by man to his own advantage. What do you think?”

Pietro Nocera replied:

“I think that with a mind like yours —”

Tito interrupted: “… it’s a pity to ruin it with alcohol.”

The chief sub-editor turned to Tito and said: “You remind me of those who say it’s stupid to believe that seventeen’s an unlucky number, because it’s a number like any other; thirteen is unlucky, of course, they admit, but seventeen isn’t. That’s exactly what you do, Arnaudi. You’re killing yourself with cocaine, and you think it’s stupid of me to be killing myself with alcohol. You don’t see that if the two of us get on well it’s because there’s an affinity of poisons between us which in turn has led to an affinity of ideas.

“You and I have the same type of mind, and basically Pietro Nocera has it too. The three of us get on well because we are all three attuned. We are simply men of our time, not three exceptional individuals who have come together to form a particular triangle. I may be wrong in saying that it’s our poisons that have made us like this. Perhaps it’s our being like this that makes us drown ourselves heroically in our sweet poisons. However that may be, I’m happy poisoning myself; and, as it give me a little joy, it would be absurd not to do it. If half a liter of alcohol is sufficient to do away with depression and transform the world in my sight, and if all I have to do to get half a liter of alcohol is to press a button, why should I deprive myself of it? If it were painful, I should understand. We could rid ourselves of all the agonies of love by having an operation, but it would be painful, and an operation is always a step in the dark. Instead I regulate my intake of alcohol myself; it’s a tool I use on myself with my own hands. I know very well that it earns me a great deal of disapproval, but I go on drinking all the same, because these five or six glasses give me a sense of well-being and result in insults seeming to be acts of courtesy, in sorrows being transformed, if not into joys, at least into indifference. Being removed from reality, I see it with the changed perspective that forms the basis of irony. What could be better than being near one’s neighbor without recognizing anyone and living in a kind of unconscious intoxication? Fools say I’m ruining myself, but what I say is that the fools are those who cling to the useless and contemptible thing that is life. Even our editor, who has such a clear mind, sometimes makes me sit down in front of him, tries to counteract the bellicosity of those ferocious moustaches of his by the gentleness of his voice and advises me to give up drink. But it’s only when I’ve been drinking that I’m fit for work, flexible, docile. When I’ve been drinking he could order me to polish the floor and I’d do it.”

A thin, pale lady, dressed completely in black, came in, looked round, and sat at a table.

“De quoi écrire et un Grand Marnier,” she said.

The waiter brought her writing materials and her drink.

That’s Madame Ter-Gregorianz,” said Pietro Nocera, indicating the attractive new arrival. “She’s an Armenian, living at the Porte Maillot, and she’s famous for her white masses.”

The lady wore a black tulle hat through which you could see the waves of her black hair; a black bird of paradise descended over one temple, caressed her neck and curved under her chin. Her face seemed to be framed in a soft, voluptuous upside-down question mark.

When she had finished her letter she summoned a small page boy, who was all green and gold, glossy and shining and covered with braid, and handed it to him. The boy raised his right hand vertically with the palm outwards to his green, cylindrical unpeaked cap, which was kept in its crooked position by a black chinstrap. Then he went out on to the boulevard, dodging between the buses.

Pietro Nocera went over to her, asked if he might introduce his friends, and invited her to join them at their table.

She looked through the question mark and smiled. Her face was pale and her mouth thin and rectilinear as if it had been cut with a scalpel. When she smiled she lengthened it, stretching it half an inch on either side without curving it.

The chief sub-editor had been to Armenia in the course of his career as a journalist, and this led to the immediate establishment of cordial relations. She reminded him of the customs of the country, the martyrdom of its people, the color of its mountains, the passionate nature of its women.

And while the two revived memories Tito murmured to Pietro Nocera in Italian: “What marvelous oblong eyes.”

“Try telling her that, and you’ll see that she’ll start working them immediately. She’s the woman I was telling you about yesterday. She’s the one with the magnificent ebony coffin in her room. It’s padded with feathers and upholstered with old damask.”

“And is it true that…”

“Ask her.”

“Ask her straight out?”

“Yes. She’s a woman who can be asked that question.”

He turned to her and said: “Is it true, madame, that you have a black wooden coffin and —”

“Yes,” she said.

“And that —” Tito went on.

“And that I use it for making love in? Certainly I do. It’s comfortable and delightful. When I die they’ll shut me up in it for ever, and all the happiest memories of my life will be in it.”

“Oh, if that’s the reason,” said Tito.

“It’s not the only one,” the lady continued. “It also offers another advantage. When it’s over I’m left alone, all alone; it’s the man who has to go away. Afterwards I find the man disgusting. Forgive me for saying so, but afterwards men are always disgusting. Either they follow the satisfied male’s impulse and get up as quickly as they do from a dentist’s chair, or they stay close to me out of politeness or delicacy of feeling; and that revolts me, because there’s something in them that is no longer male. How shall I put it? Forgive me for saying so, but there’s something wet about them.”

She turned to the chief sub-editor and resumed their interrupted conversation.

“Who’s her present lover?” Tito asked.

“A painter,” Nocera replied. “But a woman like that always has five or six replacements available.”

Tito Arnaudi and Pietro Nocera were invited next evening to Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s villa, shining white between the Étoile and the Porte Maillot, between the Champs Élysées and the Bois, in the fashionable area that is the aristocratic cocaine quarter. In the luxurious villas in which the various tout Paris gather (the political tout Paris, the fashionable tout Paris, the artistic tout Paris) meetings are regularly arranged to enjoy the ecstasy the drug produces. Young followers of the turf and devotees of dress rehearsals, fashionable young gentlemen who have barely reached the age of puberty and believe themselves obliged to have on their desk the latest poem launched on the book market and in their bed the latest female adolescent launched on a life of gallantry; young Parisians who have their pajamas designed by the artists of La Vie Parisienne and feed on preserved tropical birds mention, among the big and small subjects of conversation that pullulent autour de nos tasses de thé, as Sully Prudhomme used to say, the fashionable poisons of the moment, the wild exaltation they produce, the craze for ether and chloroform and the white Bolivian powder that produces hallucinations. And by common accord they decide to try it. Thus dens of cocaine addicts form overnight in ordinary households, and men and women invite one another to cocaine parties as they invite one another to lunch. In some families the contagion spreads from children of fifteen to grandpas of seventy, and addiction à deux, the addiction of man and wife, is frequent; if it did not produce impotence in the male and frigidity in the female, I believe that the newborn babies of such couples would need the white powder immediately, just as the children of morphine addicts have to be given an immediate injection of morphine. The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection.

4

Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s villa was completely white, as white as an ossuary and as round as an ancient Greek temple. At the side there was a small triangular evergreen garden that looked like a leaf attached to a bridal bouquet.

The villa might have been the garçonnière of a fairy who has not yet made her appearance in current fairy stories, but ought unquestionably to do so: that is, the fairy Libertine.

Tito Arnaudi and Pietro Nocera arrived there in the evening in an open taxicab. A ribbon-shaped cloud extended from the perfectly round moon, resembling an arm holding a lamp. Clusters of stars twinkled untidily here and there in the sky, looking like wind-scattered platinum filings.

Between the pergola and the euonymus hedges rectangular shirt fronts framed by evening dress stood out in the darkness of the garden under the moon. The air was full of the fragrance of night, that always young and beautiful cocotte. The two men in evening dress got out of the taxi.

The entrance hall was in Roman style. The walls were adorned with mythological frescoes against a bright red background, like those of Pompeii, which prudish and virginal English misses consider shocking. The temperature was that of a tepidarium.

The two Italians handed over their top hats and, preceded by a flunkey wearing more braid than a Turkish admiral, advanced down a corridor that was semi-circular like those in a theater and were shown into a big room.

This was the penguin room. There were big mirrors all round it, and on them were painted polar landscapes, vast expanses of snow, blocks of ice, and huge icebergs that acted as platforms for assemblies of penguins. And since only the lower part of the mirrors was painted, the higher, unpainted part provided an infinity of reflections of the landscapes facing them.

The penguins looked like gentlemen in evening dress with their hands behind their back.

A huge carpet covered with white, green and blue hieroglyphics covered the whole floor. Tiger skins and brocade cushions lay on semi-circular divans. There were no lamps and no windows, but a misty light from invisible colored lamps filtered through the light blue glass ceiling.

“We were admiring the sorceress’s cave,” Tito said, going up to Kalantan, who came in holding out one hand to him and the other to his companion.

“We’re the first. Are we too early?”

“Not at all. Someone has to be first.”

A fur as shaggy as a royal mantle acted as door curtain. No sooner had the flunkey dropped it than he had to raise it again to announce three names, preceded by three titles.

Three gentlemen came in.

One of them was tall, thin, clean-shaven and white-haired; his white sidechops gave him the austere appearance of a maître d’hôtel.

Kalantan introduced him: “Professor Cassiopea, astronomer, in charge of the world’s most powerful telescope.”

Bows. She then introduced the two Italians. “Dr Chiaro di Luna, Professor Où Fleurit l’Oranger, both journalists on a Paris newspaper.”

More bows.

Two other gentlemen had come in with the astronomer.

“The painter Triple Sec.”

He was young, blond, thin, and trebly dry. More bows.

“Dr Pancreas, of the Faculty of Medicine.”

Bows and handshakes.

On a sign from the hostess the five gentlemen moved towards a divan; the two Italians were invited to precede the three Frenchmen.

The divan was so soft and well sprung that once one had sat on it one’s knees were at the height of one’s shoulders. To avoid assuming ungraceful positions there was no alternative to either getting up again or lying flat.

The flunkey announced more guests.

A rich industrialist, an antique dealer with several deposed kings among his clientèle, a blonde of indefinable age between thirty and sixty, a cocotte of recent vintage, more men, more women.

One of the latter announced that M. — was playing in a tragedy of Corneille’s that evening and would be arriving later.

An old gentleman apologized for the absence of a colleague who had had to go to Marseilles to perform an operation. The painter realized at once what lay behind this excuse. The surgeon, who was the master of an important masonic lodge, was never free on Thursdays.

More guests arrived, and there were more introductions and more bows; and no one showed surprise at seeing anyone else there.

Four flunkeys brought in about a hundred multi-colored cushions and piled them round the ladies sitting on the divans. At one end of the big circular room a smaller circle formed: an assembly of men, women, cushions, pink female shoulders, women’s hair-dos, wisps of cigarette smoke; the overhead light tinted everything pink and blue, turning the shadows greenish and violet.

A great correctness of attitude gave a certain nobility to the promiscuousness of cushions, the huddle of limbs, the close proximity of austere elderly men in tails and women in revealing dresses.

Kalantan, the beautiful Armenian lady, was sheathed in darkness; her dark gray dress with greenish and bluish reflections clung to her form as if she were wearing tights; it was not trimmings or stitching that held the silk to the curves of her body. She was like a bronze nude or a basalt statue, but touching her would no doubt have revealed the adhesive softness of a vampire. There was not so much as a silk chemise between her dress and her skin; round her waist she had a green girdle, knotted in front, and the tassels at the two ends ended in two big emeralds. Her stockings were green, and so were her satin shoes and her fingernails.

A kind of trapdoor opened, and a pale young man with a girlish face, carrying a violin in one hand and a bow in the other, emerged from below. The hostess signed to him, he disappeared again, and the trapdoor shut.

Through the floor — and only then did its thinness become apparent — there rose the sound of soft, caressing music that seemed to come from great depths.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you,” the painter Triple Sec said to the man beside him. “At the Grand Palais yesterday morning you said that a painting of mine was full of sublime falsities. The phrase struck me.”

“Good gracious,” said the gentleman with the austere face of a maitre d’hôtel, “do you mean to say you were standing next to your picture?”

“Of course he was,” said a woman with metallic blonde hair. The painter’s always near the picture just as the deceased’s close relatives are always near the hearse. If you want to say nasty things about a picture or someone who has just died, it’s better to keep your distance.”

“And do you like the false in art?” the painter asked.

The astronomer: Of course; only the false is beautiful. Crazy distortions, maddening contrasts, are the only means by which artists can produce any reaction in me. We’ve had enough of the truth, of life and realism. What I want of an artist is that he should be able to give me the illusion of walking city streets paved with stars with a pair of galoshes on my head, enabling me to splash about with my head in the puddles of the sky while rain and light come up to me from below. Instead of admiring flowers and plants, I want to see them buried, with their roots exposed to the winds; instead of effects I want to see causes, instead of consequences I want to see origins. I’m much more interested in the roots of daisies than in their corollas.

Surgeon: For an astronomer like you that’s a bit much.

Astronomer: Astronomers are nothing but poets manqués, because instead of studying qualities and their distortion they concentrate on the exact study of quantities, which is absurd.

Kalantan, the beautiful Armenian lady: Nevertheless you’re held in high esteem…

Astronomer: Yes, because we use huge telescopes, write numbers thirty digits long, calculate in sextillions and write unintelligible formulas. But what is the actual use of measuring the distance of the stars?

Kalantan: If only you made mistakes in your measurements and forecasts. The infuriating thing about you is your accuracy.

A gentleman with the face of a chronic cuckold came in. After the usual exchange of courtesies, he sat on the floor and went to sleep with a cushion between his legs, just like an emigrant with his bundle.

Kalantan: He always goes to sleep.

Retired cocotte: Who is he?

Kalantan: A big business man.

Tito Arnaudi: But how does he manage to look after his business?

Kalantan: He has a partner.

Surgeon: How he must fleece him.

Kalantan: No, the partner’s his wife’s lover, and she keeps an eye on the business and sees he doesn’t do any dirty work, at any rate so far as the business is concerned.

This information raised a laugh, based partly on amusement and partly on malice.

A flunkey brought in a big silver tray with about twenty champagne glasses full of fruit and offered one to each guest. Another flunkey offered each guest a small golden spoon.

“Fruit salad,” Pietro Nocera explained to Tito Arnaudi, helping himself to a strawberry that sparkled with tiny crystals of ice and was soaked in champagne and ether.

By now the smell of ether had spread through the room; the condensed vapor frosted the outside of the glasses.

A third flunkey went round with a small cubical silver box, one side of which was perforated; from it he shook into each glass some white powder that dissolved in the liquid.

The invisible violinist played laments as heart-rending as those of a troubadour imprisoned in a dungeon for some crime of love. The weak, tremulous light, the velvety carpets, the soft cushions, the circular walls, the men in black, the almost silent women gave an air of solemnity to the pagan ceremony; the men sat with legs crossed in the Turkish fashion, holding their glasses and sedately and impassively sipping the subtle, alcoholized mixture of sweet and pungent fruit.

On a tripod taller than a man’s height there was a Chinese jade vase with a big bunch of violet carnations and black roses (they looked as if they had been skillfully made of wrought iron) carnally perfumed with ambergris; they let out a cry of picturesque immodesty.

The notes of the invisible violin were like drops of dew slipping along a silk spider’s web in the sun.

Tito Arnaudi: And who’s the man that looks like a convalescent cuckold?

Pietro Nocera: He’s an antique dealer. He and the other two who look like incurable sentimentalists are three ex-lovers of the lady of the house. They’re called the mummies’ gallery, because their volcanic lover has made them literally useless from the love-making point of view. It seems that in that connection the lady once said: What does it matter to me if a man is of no use to other women after he has been useful to me?

Tito Arnaudi: What rubbish. Do you believe that excess can lead to —

Surgeon: And why shouldn’t it? Look at the tortoise. It lives for a hundred years, but makes love only once a year.

Painter: I don’t envy it. So far as I’m concerned, there’s only one thing that’s worse than excess.

Surgeon: And what’s that?

Painter: Abstinence.

The man who was always asleep, waking up: I heard you talking about me; you said I was a cuckold. Cuckold, tart — they’re just words. The cuckold is ridiculous because of the existence of the word. A deceived woman would be just as ridiculous if there were a corresponding word for her. An unfaithful woman is a tart. An unfaithful man is merely an unfaithful man, only because a term for a male tart has not yet been coined. But what does it matter? I spend my time in dream or sleep. When there’s morphine in my veins I dream; when there isn’t I sleep.

And he dropped off to sleep again.

Tito Arnaudi: But why does he sleep all the time?

Surgeon: Morphine.

Two flunkeys came in and raised both parts of the curtain door to allow two dancers to appear.

“Danse polynésienne,” the male dancer announced, putting his arm round his partner’s waist.

The violinist struck up a wild tune.

But no one took any notice. The surgeon had taken a small gold box from the pocket of his white waistcoat and inhaled a big pinch of cocaine, and at Kalantan’s instigation a flunkey had filled the glasses with more ether and more champagne.

Kalantan went down on her knees in front of a glass that had been put on the floor and drank as if she were drinking the clear water of a lake.

While she drank, Tito Arnaudi put his face near her black hair, which had an exciting odor of musk, like India ink.

The dancers withdrew, and the flunkies reappeared with small white cups like those in which Arabs take coffee.

“Strawberries with chloroform,” a thin lady with a green wig explained.

“Who’s she? Tito asked.

“A recently launched hetaira. You’d have said she was born and had spent her life at an imperial court, though last year she was still a waitress at a divisional police station. These women provide the most remarkable examples of mimicry in the animal kingdom. One year they still have dirty feet, and the next they graciously offer you their hand and take offence if you don’t kiss it. One year they don’t know whether numbers are read from left to right or from right to left, and the next you find them talking about shares in the railway from Senegal to Zanzibar by way of Lake Tanganyika and discussing the latest Goncourt Prize and the paintings of Cézanne.”

The room was suddenly invaded by a swarm of butterflies. Some of the terrified creatures crashed into the mirrors in their dash for freedom, and others performed the most absurd evolutions among the guests. They glittered like pieces of cloth shot with metal, purple, gold and glass, silver and ice, air and brass. They flew desperately this way and that, landing upside down on the luminous ceiling or fluttering on the floor. One came to rest on the moiré silk lapel of an evening dress jacket, with its wings spread and its huge stupefied eyes.

Then it took off again, hovered undecidedly between a woman’s red hair and a glass, and then, asphyxiated by the fumes of ether and chloroform, fell into a glass of champagne, covering it with its spread wings like a paten on a chalice.

Others alighted on the flowers.

“They’re sent to me by a friend of mine in Brazil,” Kalantan explained. “They’re the loveliest butterflies in the world. Every steamer from Rio de Janeiro brings me a small cageful. I’d like to have an arena and the most marvelous wild beasts and give them my servants to eat for your entertainment, but unfortunately the only exotic creatures I can offer you are butterflies.”

“What a bitch she is,” Tito said to Nocera. “If they’re all like that in her country, I shall begin to think the Kurds are right and I shall approve of the Armenian massacres.”

“And so the only spectacle I can offer you is the death of the butterflies,” Kalantan went on. “They die intoxicated by subtle poisons and perfumes. Perfume affects butterflies as it does gems. Did you know that perfumes harm gems? It’s an enviable death, because butterflies preserve all the beauty they had in life. You see them in collections transfixed by pins, and they seem to be alive because of their variegated colors. When I die you must all come and make me up as if I were to appear at a dress rehearsal at the Comédie.”

“Poor creatures,” said the incurable sentimentalist.

“Stop it,” the Armenian lady said to him. “Besides, I think my house is a tomb very worthy of a butterfly. A house,” she added with a smile, “where distinguished personalities such as yourselves come to kill yourselves little by little.”

“But where’s your coffin?” asked Tito.

“You wouldn’t want me to have it carried round in procession in accordance with the Egyptian practice at banquets,” Kalantan said.

“Why not?” said Tito. “There’s no one here who has a horror of death.”

“I have a certain familiarity with coffins,” the skinny painter said. “During my worst days as a Bohemian I got permission to sleep on a pile of straw in a coffin factory near the Bercy custom house. On the first night I couldn’t sleep. I have a lively imagination, and I kept trying to assure myself that all those boxes were to be used for transporting fruit or ladies’ underwear, but the shape gave the lie to that theory. On the second night I slept by fits and starts, and on the third night I slept well. But, though I had no more nightmares, the damp got into my bones and bits of straw into my skin.

“One evening they had made a magnificent coffin for a bishop, who was to take up permanent residence in it next day. It was a masterpiece, both decoratively and for comfort. There was a cushion for the episcopal feet and a pillow for the episcopal skull. All that was lacking was the episcopal corpse. There was even a kind of umbrella stand for the episcopal alpenstock.

“I decided it was unfair that a living artist should have to sleep on straw while a corpse was being given such a comfortable coffin to decompose in and, when I was sure that the caretaker had gone to bed, I went to sleep in it. I slept in papal splendor in that coffin.

“Next day they took it away, but there was a deluxe coffin there every evening, though not such a splendid one as the bishop’s, and none was to be expected until another bishop died. They were actually too luxurious for a proletarian like me. I admit that at first it was rather inconvenient to change beds, change coffins, every evening, but I got perfectly used to it, and I wouldn’t have exchanged my coffin for the bed of the Roi Soleil that’s kept at Versailles.

“I slept in that factory for two months. But one fine day difficulties arose. There were complaints that the coffins had been used.”

“Who complained? The dead?”

“No, the relatives.”

“What fools. When you’re dead, what does it matter if the coffin’s second-hand?” Kalantan said.

“But what about the relatives’ religious feelings? The cult of the dead?” said the astronomer.

“That did not come into it,” the painter went on. “The factory owner refused to let me go on sleeping in his store, not because his customers had religious objections, but because the relatives of the deceased took the opportunity to demand a reduction in price.”

The dancers came back and announced an Andalusian dance.

“And where did you go and sleep then?”

There was a rattle of castanets.

“I started selling a few canvases, and I rented a garret and started being successful. Do you remember,” he said, turning to the woman with yellow hair, “the parties I used to give in my boîte up on the Butte? I actually had silver cutlery.”

“Yes, I remember your silver cutlery,” said the woman with the fiery hair. “On one fork there were the words Restaurant Duval, and on a spoon there were the words Station Buffet.”

“But that was a tactful gesture on my part,” said the painter. “I wanted to give my guests the feeling of exclusiveness.”

“I was at the Lycée Voltaire then,” said a gentleman who had not yet spoken.

“No, you were at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand,” the painter pointed out.

“Nonsense, it was the Lycée Voltaire.”

“No, I tell you it was the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.”

“Triple Sec is right,” a friend of the gentleman’s said. “You were at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.”

The surgeon turned to Tito. “You see the stage he has reached,” he said. “Loss of memory.”

“Cocaine?” Tito asked.

“Morphine,” replied the surgeon.

The gentleman stayed open-mouthed, staring as if hypnotized by some detail of the pattern of the carpet.

He took a small metal container from the inside pocket of his evening dress and stuck a needle through his trousers into his thigh; and a few minutes later his face lit up and he exclaimed: “Yes, you’re perfectly right. I went right through the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and I was a class-mate of Ivan the Terrible and Scipio Africanus.”

Butterflies dazed by ether fluttered about and fell to the floor, dying.

One was crushed by the dancer’s feet, and another, bent over a rose as if to gaze at its own reflection in a dewdrop, languished and died in that coquettish posture. Another, with pure white wings, came to rest on the edge of an ashtray, seemingly intent on sprinkling itself with humility before dying. Kalantan put her little finger in a glass and dropped some liquid on the creature’s head; it was struck dead and collapsed on its back.

“Don’t, Kalantan, that’s cruel and stupid,” the blonde woman exclaimed as if her hand had been pricked with a pin. “You’re stupid and cruel, Kalantan.”

The woman’s voice was wooden and harsh as if she had water gurgling in her throat. Her eyes were glassy and her fingers contracted as if she were about to grab someone by the arm.

The violin seemed to be at death’s door.

The woman fell back in a state of nervous frenzy. Kalantan took the cocaine box from the surgeon’s hands and put some up the nostrils of the trembling woman, who with lined brow and terrified eyes went on hissing: “You’re wicked, wicked.”

Tito rose and went to the trapdoor. Neither the violinist nor his instrument were visible through the opening, though every now and then he caught a brief glimpse of the bow.

“She’s coming round,” Kalantan said, handing back the gold box to its owner.

The poison made the woman feel better for the moment. The wrinkles vanished from her brow, her fingers relaxed and an almost calm expression returned to her eyes.

“You’re very kind to me, my dear Kalantan,” she murmured. “Forgive me.” And she started to weep.

Kalantan picked her up by her bare, damp armpits, as if she were a little girl, and made her sit by her side.

“Poor darling, you’ve quite spoilt your make-up. Stop crying and, whatever you do, don’t laugh,” she said.

Kalantan knew all about these crises. She knew that weeping was followed by convulsions more dreadful than despair, by laughter that consisted of sobs. The woman would laugh or cry with the whole of her being, her livid mouth contracted into a grimace. She would be in a state of terrified gaiety, or grief-stricken hilarity, as if she were looking at a corpse dressed as a clown playing a ferocious pantomime with a lizard.

The man who always went to sleep went on sleeping.

The astronomer had taken a rose from the bunch and plunged it in ether. He inhaled it voluptuously, looking at it with ecstasy on his face. His left leg was stretched out on the floor and quivered convulsively as if as the result of some electromagnetic phenomenon. The mummies’ gallery were silent; one of them, after pricking himself with a syringe, did not have the strength to put it back, having been immediately overwhelmed by a feeling of stupefying bliss. The surgeon, who had preserved some traces of dignity, started talking about painting in order to create the impression that some remnants of clarity still remained in his head.

“I detect a Norwegian element in Van Dongen,” he said. “In my opinion he uses too many warm tones and too much white lead; and there’s a lack of stereoscopy in the position of the hands. What do you think?”

“What I think, my dear doctor,” the artist replied, “is that the latest method of treating arteriosclerosis is sound. The patient’s eye must be inoculated with horse kidneys and inhalations of hot vitriol must be put in his eyes. My own advice would be also to give him an injection of potassium chlorate and ipecacuanha between the first and second vertebrae.”

“What rubbish are you talking?” the surgeon exclaimed.

“I was only paying you back for the rubbish you talked about painting.”

The painter rose to his feet.

The male dancer announced a Bengal dance. He wore a white silk turban with a big brilliant and enormous plume. The woman, who was completely nude and depilated, wore a close-fitting golden cap that came down in two flaps over her cheeks to accentuate the oval line. Her bronzy yellow flesh gleamed and quivered with her feline movements. The spring-like, darting movements of her body alternated with brief, sinister pauses; like a young jaguar that hesitates before it pounces. In her eyes, heavily outlined with antimony, there was a veiled, drugged voluptuousness. Her skin exuded an ambiguous but strong perfume of saffron, sandalwood and benzoin. In her brownish face with its green reflections, the whiteness of her teeth looked like an ivory paperknife held between her open lips. Her arms turned and twisted and intertwined, clung to her neck, slipped down her sides, wound over her belly and writhed like two snakes whose heads were simulated by the fingers she stretched and clenched, adorned by two luminous chalcedonies that were as fascinating and as cold as two hypnotized eyes. The young jaguar’s body struggled wildly in the coils and the glazed smile twisted into a deathly grimace.

Those death throes full of a convulsive and arid eroticism were a marvelous evocation of all the fabulous mysteries of the jungle, far superior to an interminable lecture on India with slides.

Tito, carried away by the dancer’s legs, said: “Look at those slender ankle bones. Ankle bones are what excite me most in women. The breasts, the hips, the sexual organs are of interest only to seminarists, if that.”

The music came to an end and the dancers disappeared.

A rectangular opening appeared in the ceiling to let out the poisoned air, and through it the sharp breeze of early morning entered and a patch of clear blue sky became visible. In the garden a bird sang a few notes, as cheerful, sharp and ironic as an epigram.

The sleepers started. Kalantan, lying prone on a rug, mumbled: “Close it.”

It was closed.

The only persons who were awake and almost normal were Tito and the painter.

“I have a very high opinion of your art,” Tito said, “and I’m delighted that the public follows you.”

“It’s not the public that follows us, but we that unconsciously follow the public, though apparently it’s the other way about,” the painter replied. “Haven’t you ever seen a flea circus at a fair, with tame fleas pulling tiny aluminum carts? The flea seems to be pulling the cart, doesn’t it? But actually the cart is on an incline and pushes the flea ahead of it. I should never have believed that the time would come when I would paint the portraits of Asian monarchs and presidents. I thought I’d always remain a caricaturist for humorous journals or a magazine illustrator or a painter of cabaret scenery. That’s why I adopted the absurd pseudonym of Triple Sec. But adopting a pseudonym is like being tattooed; you do it lightheartedly, and then you’re stuck with it for life. I have many journalist friends, and if I’ve been a success it’s partly due to them, because of the publicity they gave me. In the absence of publicity merit isn’t enough.”

“I know,” said Tito, who was ceasing to see things straight. “Publicity’s essential. If Jesus Christ became famous, it was thanks to the apostles, his twelve great publicity agents.”

When Pietro Nocera heard Tito mention Jesus Christ he pulled himself together, went over to him and said: “When you start referring to the Bible, you have more cocaine than gray matter in your head. Sit down.”

And with a push that was more vigorous than gentle he caused him quietly to subside between two piles of cushions.

An invisible fan began to hum. The astronomer, puzzled, looked all round him as if he were wondering whether it was an auditory illusion. But the man who always went to sleep awoke at that moment and said of the steady hum:

“Those butterflies would have done better to stay at home on the Orinoco.”

The painter knelt beside Tito and said: “I’ve also been greatly aided by women. Women are a great help in getting on in the world. If you don’t know what to do in a difficult situation, ask a woman.”

“I know,” said Tito, muttering indistinctly, leaving out syllables and alternating between low tones and a high falsetto. “I know. From crimes of high treason, in which international hetairae are used to wheedle their war plans out of enemy generals, all the way back to Eve, who acted as intermediary between the serpent and man, women have always and at all times been highly successful at the dirtiest deeds. And I’m not surprised that they should have helped a pig of a painter like you.”

The painter did not react. He wouldn’t have had the strength, and besides, cocaine gave him a sense, not just of euphoria, but of boundless optimism, and a special kind of receptivity to insults, which were converted in his ears into courteous compliments.

He smiled.

Everything in the room had become phantasmagoric: human voices gave forth non-human sounds; the light coming from numerous sources and reflected again and again had the wavering liquid transparency of an aquarium; straight lines bent; a vague, flowing motion replaced solidity and seemed to breathe life into lifeless objects; and all the people, with their slow, flaccid movements, who drooped, fell and writhed on the floor among the multi-colored cushions with disheveled hair, half naked and surrounded by broken glasses, were like creatures in an aquarium whose liquid environment softened and slowed down every movement.

The greenish carpet, splashed with spilled liquor, was like a muddy ocean floor on which the cushions were shells and the women’s loosened hair the fibrous tufts of byssus or the fabulous vegetation of submarine landscapes.

Meanwhile the excited and exciting music went on. A blind violinist was playing a melancholy gypsy tune without realizing that he was performing to an audience of corpses. No one talked now. Every so often there would be some sinister noise: the impact of a knife on a statue, or a barely audible moan. Was someone dying in the room? The shaggy curtains that acted as a doorway trembled, concealing who knew what menacing mysteries. The light floor that separated the room from the basement underneath seemed to be affected by a slow, rhythmical breathing — low notes lowered it and high notes raised it. If for any reason the light had gone out at that moment, all the people in the room would have gone mad, and when the light came back the big mirrors might well have been splashed with blood.

Kalantan lay on the floor with her face, breast, stomach, thighs, knees and the instep of one foot on the carpet. The other foot rested on the ankle. Her pose was perfectly symmetrical, as if it had been designed by an artist who liked balanced composition. The thin ankles and slender calves were favored with graceful tendons and healthy muscles; squeezing them would surely have made the same sound as squeezing fresh bread.

Tito lay near her, with his face close to her legs. His eyes were flooded with green, the iridescent green of her silk stockings. The closeness of his eyes to the silk and flesh on which he was concentrating produced a fantastically distorted image; that shining, emerald green object, suffused with a warm feminine perfume, was a sweet cyclopic hill, where the atmosphere was filled with the odor of young flesh.

The woman was plunged in an almost cataleptic sleep.

Slowly, with hesitant fingers, he raised her skirt to halfway up her thigh to savor the progressive revelation. Her stockings were held up by a light chain of platinum and pearls with a buckle decorated with Armenian symbols. Gently, religiously, as if he were shelling an almond or uncovering a sacred relic, he folded the stocking back on itself, rolled it back halfway down the calf, and contemplated the charming concavity at the back of the knee — concavities in women are far more exciting than convexities; its boundaries were marked by two tendons as slender as bow strings.

It formed a magnificent goblet.

A glass of champagne, still untouched and unbroken, was waiting humbly beside him. There were traces of foam at the edges, and rare bubbles rose and disappeared when they reached the surface. With trembling hands Tito took it by the slender stem and poured the contents into that sweet cavity without spilling a drop; the woman did not move; the back of her knee was as big as an open mouth.

“Kalantan,” he moaned.

He bent over that mouth of white flesh and with closed eyes took the champagne into his own feverishly dry mouth.

“Kalantan,” he moaned.

He seemed to be drinking from a magnolia.

“Kalantan, beautiful, marvelous Kalantan.”

The woman did not even tremble when Tito collapsed on top of her with his mouth on her flesh, moaning: “Kalantan.”

Someone again opened a glass rectangle in the ceiling. It was nearly dawn; the last stragglers among the stars flickered exhaustedly in the absinthe-colored sky.

A motor-horn sounded reveille in the Avenue des Champs Elysées. Aurora’s two horses, Lightning and Phaeton, are no longer enough for her; to announce the arrival of day she needs the eighty horsepower of a long, open tourer, gliding on soft tires, which she drives herself with her “rosy fingers,” made still more rosy by the enamel of a skilful manicure.

5

“Kalantan, Kalantan, Kalantan,” the dazed and sleepy Tito kept repeating to himself in the car belonging to the Armenian lady with a villa as white as an ossuary and as round as a Greek temple as it speeded him to his hotel in the Place Vendôme by way of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Royale.

At that early hour Paris was crowded with people on the way to work: clerks employed in the suburbs and wearing shoes that were still too shiny hurried towards the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Gare d’Orléans and the Gare des Invalides; working girls with freshly washed faces, everyone was hurrying as if to forestall the course of the sun. Outside Maxim’s a dog and a beggar were non-competitively scavenging in a pile of oyster shells and lemon peel.

“Kalantan, Kalantan, Kalantan,” he kept muttering, his lips hidden by the coat collar that he had turned up to his nose, while the car turned into the Rue Saint-Honoré in the gray, cool air of morning — Kalantan, a sweet name for a serene lover, not for a poisoned and poisonous woman… Kalantan, Kalantan, a long drawn out name made to be pronounced without moving one’s lips, if one spoke it with one’s soul; a name made to be repeated slowly a thousand times over the brow of a pale and a pure woman… Kalantan, a name that shares the sounds of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s line O mano mansueta in man d’amante… Kalantan… in man d’amante… Kalantan, Kalantan.

The car drew up outside the Hotel Napoléon as gently as if it had been stopped by a puff of air, and a page boy opened the door. Tito got out and handed fifty francs to the chauffeur, who refused it.

“Take it, it’s offered to you by a sentimentalist,” Tito said. “I know, in man d’amante. I’m a sentimentalist. It’s disgusting of me, but take it all the same.”

The chauffeur pocketed it in a dignified manner and the car glided away with a mocking toot of the horn.

Tito found two letters waiting for him, one from Italy, the other from his newspaper.

He read the latter first. It was from the editor:

“Marius Amphossy, the Jamaican murderer of school mistresses, is to be guillotined at four o’clock tomorrow morning in the Boulevard Arago,” it said. “Write me a colorful article about it. Two columns. There have been no executions in France for seven years. The new President had discontinued commuting death sentences. I’m counting on you. The article must be at the printer’s at six a.m. We’re coming out with a special edition at eight a.m. Regards…

He crumpled up the letter and opened the other one.

Thank you for your postcard, it said. How nice of you. Do you still remember Maddalena? But I’m not Maddalena any longer, I’m Maud. I was released after ten months in the reformatory and met a number of men, one of whom is a café chantant manager. He said my legs could take me a long way, and he taught me dancing and got me engagements at the best variety theaters in Italy. I shall be coming to Paris next month to the Petit Casino. Would you like to see me?

Maud

He ordered lime tea and some drops of orange-flower water from the liftman who took him to the fourth floor. The waiter who brought it had to knock three times before entering, because he was in bed, fast asleep.

When he awoke the lime tea was stone cold, the orange-flower water had evaporated, and his watch had stopped.

He rang the bell and the waiter appeared.

“What’s the time?”

“Four a.m.”

“What did you say?”

“Four a.m., sir.”

“What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“And what time did I come back?”

“Seven a.m., sir.”

“What day was that?”

“Wednesday.”

“And what is it today?”

“Thursday.”

“And what’s the time?”

“Four a.m., sir.”

“So I slept —”

“From eight o’clock yesterday till four o’clock today, sir.”

“Making altogether —”

“Twenty hours, sir.”

“That’s a lot.”

“I’ve seen cases worse than yours, sir. Can I take away the tray? I see the lime has done you good, sir.”

“Why?”

“You’ve slept, sir.”

“But I haven’t even tasted it.”

“That’s not necessary, sir. It’s a spécialité de la maison.”

“Very well then. Take the specialty away.” The tray, followed a pace behind by the waiter, left the room.

He read the editor’s letter without turning a hair. At this moment, he said to himself, I ought to be at the Boulevard Arago watching Mr Marius Amphossy having his head cut off. But is it absolutely essential for me to be present? The article has to be written, that I admit. But have I got to be there? How lovely the Armenian lady was. Kalantan — the name reminds me of the sound of a distant bell, tolling for the death of Marius Amphossy, the Jamaican murderer who specialized in schoolmistresses. And if I went there, what would I see in this pitch black darkness? But I shall have to write something. For the special edition with a full report of the beheading. It has to be at the printer’s at six o’clock…

As he muttered these last few words he got out of bed and collapsed with part of his body on the chair and the rest on the desk.

Large sheets of paper of a spectral whiteness awaited his pen.

He looked like a suicide about to write down his last wishes.

I’ve never understood why death sentences are always carried out early in the morning, he said to himself. Why do the executioner, the priest, the sentenced man, who would so much like to go on sleeping, have to be disturbed so early? Wouldn’t apéritif time be far better?

He began writing:

THE EXECUTION OF MARIUS AMPHOSSY

JAMAICAN MURDERER OF SCHOOLMISTRESSES

But instead of beginning his report of the grim ceremony he soliloquized as follows: What an appalling thing it is to be a journalist in summer, when the Chamber of Deputies is on vacation, and the criminal court is closed. There’s nothing to fill the paper with, so the editor orders two columns to be written about an insignificant trifle such as this. But in Italy it would be worse. When news is scarce there, long articles are written on the death of Giovanni Orth, the intelligence of ants, the birth of triplets (a Calabrian speciality), plague in Manchuria, the tricks played by lightning, and stolen necklaces (in North America). Articles are produced about the possibility of life on Mars, on the age of the earth and on D’Annunzio’s real name (D’Annunzio or Rapagnetta?); or they describe the catching of an “enormous whale,” even if it’s only a shark or a dogfish. Newspapers believe all rather large fishes to be whales. Idiots.

His watch said a quarter past four. He re-read the title of his article.

But his ideas refused to germinate. They were inert, lifeless, compressed like sardines in a tin. After twenty hours’ sleep the gastronomic comparison made him feel queasy. His ideas were shut up as if in a box of cocaine, as if in that light, seductive little metal box that was lying there in front of his eyes near the inkstand — oh, the satanic complicity between cocaine and ink.

He knew that under the influence of cocaine ideas that had shriveled opened up, unfolded, expanded like dried tea leaves when boiling water is poured on them.

He took a sniff and began to write.

He wrote one page, two pages, three pages without stopping, hesitating, or correcting, and without his mind wandering. In his mind’s eye he visualized the dreadful scene. He interwove memories of reports of executions he had read with ironic and compassionate comments. He described the sinister blade of the guillotine gleaming in the gray light of a rainy morning; the rare passers-by who stopped to watch the executioner and his assistants making the preparations for their gruesome task; the gray prison, solemn with a funereal solemnity; the soldiers of the Garde Républicaine drawn up in a grim square round the place of execution.

When the seven gentlemen in black entered his cell Marius Amphossy was fast asleep. Until the evening before he had still believed in a reprieve, but the sight of those gentlemen in morning coats and top hats made him abandon hope.

“Marius Amphossy,” one of the gentlemen in black said, “you must be brave. The appeal for a reprieve has been rejected. The time for you to expiate your crimes has come. Be strong.”

“I shall be,” the condemned man replied with a scornful and cynical laugh.

The director of prisons and the condemned man’s defense counsel stood behind the public prosecutor. The other gentlemen could not dissimulate their emotion.

The prison clock mournfully struck four.

The gentleman who had spoken read a decree. When he had finished, the executioner’s two assistants took their place on either side of the condemned man. The others made way for them to pass.

Marius Amphossy walked with a firm and confident step. He looked with an ironic smile at us journalists who were watching the tragic scene from a dark corner of the big, cold corridor flanked with cells; terrified eyes behind the peep-hole of every door watched as if hypnotized — were they the eyes of other prisoners sentenced to death or of wretches expecting to be so sentenced?

The executioner led the procession down the long, straight corridor.

Behind him came the condemned man and the executioner’s two assistants. Then came the defense counsel, the director of prisons, the other officials, and the journalists.

He walked down some steps and through a tunnel. The sound of our footsteps echoed in the huge, sepulchral silence.

We went into a room.

There was a priest there, holding a crucifix, and bottles of champagne and other drinks were on a small table.

The priest embraced the condemned man while a warder poured him some champagne.

The condemned man asked for a cigarette. A cigarette was lit and handed to him.

The two assistants cut off the collar of his shirt and summarily cut the hair at the back of his neck; then they seized his arms and tied them behind his back.

The procession moved off again.

While going down some steps Amphossy suddenly wavered. His legs gave way, and he would have collapsed if the assistants had not promptly supported him, holding him under the armpits.

The prison yard exposed the grim procession to innumerable eyes gazing through the little windows. We crossed the yard.

In the cold morning air outside the gate a vehicle with two white horses was awaiting. This was the panier à salade, the Black Maria. Some steps were let down, and the prisoner got in with the executioner, his two assistants and the lawyer.

A hundred yards away the guillotine was awaiting its prey. The horses trotted quietly and cheerfully, with unconscious indifference, as if they were taking a bride to church.

The vehicle stopped with a jerk. The two assistants opened the door and lowered the steps. The executioner jumped out. Marius Amphossy got out, looking terror-stricken. His lawyer remained motionless as if unable to move, as if turned to stone.

The two assistants held the wretched man under the armpits and carried him bodily. As he moved round the carriage Amphossy could see the big deserted square; arms and uniforms glittered; the soldiers of the Garde Républicaine drew their sabers, and the civilians raised their hats.

The condemned man’s face was ashen. His convulsively twisted mouth seemed to be trying to make a plea for mercy to the dawning day, to the life he saw about him.

But did the poor wretch still see anything? No, his eyes no longer saw, though they were staring fixedly at the brown contraption among the foliage of the trees of the boulevard; a tall, slender contraption, three beams, two vertical and one horizontal.

Two drops of sweat flowed down his temples and cheeks. His chin was covered with beads of sweat. He opened his mouth as if to shriek, but no sound came.

He reached the foot of the scaffold. His life was now measured in seconds. Not a sound was to be heard in the big square, not the whisper of a leaf or a flutter of wings; even the fine drizzle seemed to be falling more silently, more religiously.

He mounted the scaffold without moving his legs; death seemed already to have him in its clutches and to be lifting and raising him above other men. In fact he did not walk. His legs, already dead, dragged along like tins that small boys pull along behind them on a string. The hands tied behind his back contracted spasmodically; his breast swelled as if it were about to burst; and his neck swelled too.

The blade of the guillotine gleamed; a round hole was ready to open wider to admit the man’s head and then close firmly round his neck. Beyond it was the basket ready to receive the severed head a few moments later.

The man made a convulsive effort to back away from the terrifying sight, but he could not. Then he arched his breast and thrust back his head as if to provide leverage against some support. Consternation was in the air.

But the executioner’s assistants forced his head down and tripped him, making him fall like a sack on the bascule. The executioner put his head under the lunette, which fell, holding him inexorably as with an iron hand.

This took a moment, a cruel moment that seemed an eternity. The man, who had been flung on the bascule with his hands tied behind his back and his head immobilized beneath the pincers, looked at the basket that opened like an abyss beneath his terrified eyes.

There was a thud, and the head rolled, causing a semicircular spray of blood as it fell.

Justice had been done.

We journalists were allowed to approach. The body was put in a pine coffin. The eyes in the head were still open, and the tongue was out and moved slightly, causing some greenish foam to emerge from the mouth. One of the assistants picked up the head by the hair and put it in the coffin, which was loaded on to a truck and taken away to a medical institute.

Sunlight began to illuminate the square. The Garde Républicaine moved off, and the executioner and his assistants set about dismantling the guillotine.

At the medical institute to which we went a few minutes after the execution they told us that the heart was still beating and that indubitable signs of life were to be observed in the retina. Oh pitiless human laws, oh legal experts, perhaps…

But Tito’s article was still short of two columns, so he launched into some long, Tolstoyan comments on the human right to judge and the right to kill. And as it was still too short, he preceded his account with some digressions about the guillotine.

He recorded the last words of the fat and hawk-like Louis XVI, who called out: Français, je meurs innocent de tout. He recalled Marie Antoinette, whose hair had gone gray in a single night and when she accidentally bumped into the executioner said to him politely: Pardon, monsieur. He mentioned how Elisabeth, Louis XVI’s sister, her shoulders having been bared when she was already under the blade, modestly asked that they might be covered again. And he also recalled the story about the aged Bailly, whose teeth chattered in the November rain. “You’re trembling,” someone said to him. “It’s the cold,” he replied. Tito also mentioned how Charlotte Corday blushed with shame when her shoulders were bared. He recalled Danton (“Show my head to the people; it’s worth it.”); Desmoulins, who asked the executioner to take a lock of his hair to his mother; Adam Lux, who kissed Charlotte Corday before dying; Jourdan Coupe-Tête, who mounted the scaffold with a sprig of lilac between his lips…

But Tito had still not written the two columns that were required, so he repeated the story of the crimes committed by Marius Amphossy of Jamaica, the dreadful killer of schoolmistresses. He also wrote about Jamaica and its rum, and explained why the government had not granted extradition, though international law, etc.

He lingered over the gaps in international law, described the executioner’s face, reported a brief interview with that sinister individual, who turned out after all to be a decent fellow, but times were hard, things were very expensive, and you had to do something to make a living. He explained how the guillotine worked, and added some colorful notes about the state of mind of the condemned man. By means of a clever stratagem he had been the only Paris journalist who had gained access to the condemned cell a few hours before the execution.

“But why did you kill all those schoolmistresses?” I asked the murderer.

“I disliked them,” the man replied in matter-of-fact tones and with a smile. “If it’s legal to kill a man who makes a murderous attack on you or seduces your wife or breaks into your house to rob, why shouldn’t it be legal to kill a man whom you dislike? Isn’t dislike the best of all reasons?”

Tito decided that he had not sufficiently described the unfortunate man’s behavior in the face of the scaffold, so he added his last words:

I’m innocent. I swear before God and man that I did not kill those twenty-seven schoolmistresses.”

But that struck him as too rhetorical. So he crossed it out and wrote instead:

“I killed those twenty-seven schoolmistresses and am content. If I had to live my life over again, I should do it again.”

But then he realized that such cynical behavior would have caused the crowd to yell with indignation, in which case he would have had to alter some parts of his story.

So again he crossed out the condemned man’s last words and substituted the following:

“Mother, mother, save me.”

But she could not save him, because she was in Jamaica and could not hear him; she was in a beautiful cemetery in Jamaica in which pineapples grew.

It was six o’clock by Tito’s watch, and he had filled thirty sheets with his handwriting.

He didn’t read through what he had written. He put it in an envelope, wrote on it — Urgent. Send to the composing room immediately, and rang the bell.

“Waiter, have this sent to my newspaper as quickly as possible, by taxi if necessary.”

And while the waiter was still on his way out he collapsed on to the bed, dropping first one slipper on to the carpet and then the other.

The sheets were still warm.

Six hours later the telephone rang and woke him.

“Yes, it’s me,” he said with a yawn.

“You wretch. This is your editor speaking.”

“Oh, good morning, sir.”

“You’ve ruined the paper for me. The execution did not take place.”

“Good.”

“He was reprieved at the last moment.”

“I’m delighted to hear it, sir.”

“What do you mean? Your story —”

“All you have to do is not publish it.”

“But we put it on the front page.”

“Then take it out, sir.”

“It’s been on sale in the streets of Paris for four hours.”

“Oh, has it? What’s the time?”

“Twelve o’clock.”

“Strange. But what harm has been done? He was reprieved by the President of the Republic at three o’clock this morning? Do you mean to tell me that the President of the Republic has nothing better to do at three o’clock in the morning? In any case, we can face public opinion and our own consciences with an easy mind. We carried out our journalistic duty scrupulously and to the point of self- sacrifice. A stupid little incident like a presidential reprieve is not sufficient reason to deprive our readers of such an interesting story. The purpose of the death penalty, according to modern penal theory, is not so much punishment as the setting of an example, and by describing it as if it had happened — we have done our journalistic duty in full consciousness of the social responsibility of the daily press.”

There was no reply from the other end of the line. Tito went on talking imperturbably for some time without realizing that the editor had long since rung off.

Down below in the square newspaper sellers were shouting the name of the newspaper that had printed a special edition giving full details of the execution of Marius Amphossy, from Jamaica, the mass murderer of schoolmistresses, and the sound of their voices was audible all the way up to the fourth floor of the Hotel Napoléon.

Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s husband owned some inexhaustible oil wells.

“Let me introduce Dr Tito Arnaudi.”

“Stay for lunch,” her husband said.

In spite of all his oil he was bald and, though he was rich, he was young.

He didn’t like Paris and wasn’t very fond of his wife, though at intervals he liked both. Every two or three months he interrupted his flitting between foreign cities and different women to linger over the vices of Paris and those of his wife. But she could not please him permanently, because she was too nervy and too thin. He only liked fat women. The fatter they were, the more they attracted him. In affairs of the heart he obeyed the celebrated law of physics which says that attraction is proportionate to mass.

“My wife and I are leaving for Deauville tomorrow,” he said. “Do you like the sea? We can easily put you up.”

Tito accepted the invitation.

Next day, though he had not obtained the editor’s permission to take a month’s leave, he took it all the same and left with the Ter-Gregorianz couple for the fashionable seaside resort.

The two men were in perfect agreement in saying nasty things about the Turks (in whom Tito was totally uninterested) and in singing the praises of vegetarianism (in which the Armenian was totally uninterested). They played bridge and snooker, went for long drives by the sea, listened to the waves, which talk in hexameters and pentameters; and Tito, who was sometimes more sentimental than a clown, agreed with Verlaine that la mer est plus belle que les cathédrales. In the evening they played baccarat, and they bathed.

Tito could swim. The Armenian gentleman couldn’t, but Tito taught him, not well enough to swim the channel, but at any rate well enough to save himself in a shipwreck. What Tito failed to teach him, probably because the Armenian was so thin, was to float on the water like a corpse.

He held him and told him to sink the top of his head four inches below the surface and to stay like that with his body motionless and with open arms. He explained to him the principle of Archimedes according to which a body immersed in a liquid…

But as soon as Tito let him go the Armenian sank like a stone.

“How’s it going?” Kalantan asked with a smile every morning when they came back in their beach pajamas.

“I can swim under water and I can do twelve yards in a minute, but as for floating like a corpse, I simply can’t manage it.”

One day M. Ter-Gregorianz went swimming alone in a quiet inlet. A treacherous wave overwhelmed him and swallowed him up. He tried to call out, but water got into his mouth and he couldn’t. Two legs were seen emerging from the water as if calling for help, and then nothing at all.

Tito walked back to the hotel alone, and Kalantan came strolling towards him with her hands in her pockets like a man.

“Well?” she said, “has my husband learnt to float like a corpse?”

“Yes,” Tito replied.

They buried him in Paris, in the Armenian Gregorian Cemetery. All his wife’s past lovers were to be seen at the funeral, and her future lovers as well.

Tito, in the front rank, was conspicuous among them.

The reader will find details of how Tito became the Armenian lady’s lover in any other novel. In particular I recommend those that systematically describe all the phases of falling in love and end with irreproachable modesty at the precise moment when the couple, having had three hundred chaste pages of inconclusive posturing devoted to them, exchange the first really sustained kiss.

That, I believe, is the point at which the novel ought not to end, but to begin. And since we have finished with chapter 5 and our heroine (who is the Italian and not the Armenian lady) has not yet appeared, let us now introduce her once and for all.

6

Maud, male impersonator — she danced in tails and a top hat — arrived in Paris with eight trunks and a small red dog.

She wore a light gray suit, decorated at the wrists with monkey skin, as soft and flowing as Leonardo da Vinci’s beard. She went straight to the Hotel Napoléon, because Tito not only met her at the station but booked two rooms and a bathroom for her at his hotel.

Some stuffed dogs are perfect imitations of live dogs, but Maud’s was a perfect imitation of a stuffed one; when you stroked it there was a risk that one of its hairs might stick in your finger. Its eyes, concealed beneath a fringe, were a Darwinian demonstration of the futility of using them when one is always on a lead subject to another’s will. It was a small dog, almost pocket size and attractively stupid. By careful examination it was possible to discover which end was the head and which the tail. It was a personification of la beauté de la laideur.

“What’s its name?” Tito asked.

Maud rounded her scarlet lips (they looked like half a cherry without a stone) and let forth a prolonged whistle approximating to the note of G.

“That’s its name.”

“It’s a lovely one.”

She had also brought from Italy a lady’s maid highly skilled in doing her hair and looking after her clothes and dealing with male visitors. When she felt like it she answered to the name of Pierina.

Never having been to Paris before, she was thrilled by everything she saw. Maud, her mistress, had also never been to Paris before, but she was not thrilled by anything.

Tito immediately saw in her an embryonic international, intercontinental, transoceanic adventuress capable of acclimatization to males of all races.

He no longer recognized her as the Maddalena he had known two years previously, the decent girl who attended a corrupt secretarial college. In this elegant and electromagnetic creature he failed to see any trace of the respectable bourgeois girl who lived in a fourth floor flat with a balcony facing the courtyard. All this was so obvious that it seems hardly necessary to mention it. All great actresses, dancers, courtesans come from a fourth floor flat, and research into their past would reveal salads for their physical nourishment, the novels of Ponson du Terrail for their intellectual nourishment and a zinc hip-bath for the cleansing of a body worthy of a Phidias or a Canova and predestined to princely love and imperial desire. Just as every alehouse scullery boy is a possible future owner of a grand hotel, so every girl who waters the flowers and looks after the canary in a fourth floor flat is a potential Otero or Cléo de Mérode.

Tito tactfully refrained from inquiring about her parents. He recalled her highly respectable mama who, fixing her intrepid gaze on her from above her formidable bosom, gave her rapid courses of lecture on morality; and her highly respectable papa, who (when he had any money) still counted it in scudi and marenghi and brandished his hundred-year-old pocket watch like a sword whenever his daughter came home a few minutes late.

He remembered the flat, poor but honest, and rich in those ornamental objects that are put into circulation by charitable lotteries and pass from household to household until they find a home like Maddalena’s and stay there. But on the day when Maddalena becomes Maud they go to another charitable lottery.

So Tito and Maud could not abandon themselves to wallowing in old memories, which is a kind of mnemonic masturbation. To Tito Maud was merely a creature in whom he noted some points of contact with a rather ugly, rather stupid girl whom he had met on a balcony two years before.

Now she wore kangaroo gloves and used difficult words like idiosyncrasy, eurhythmics and quadrilateral and spoke them with pedantic accuracy.

Maud talked and laughed about Maddalena as if she were an old friend of whom she had lost sight. Her confessable past now began with the day on which — or rather with the first time she —

“It happened like this,” she explained to Tito while the maid unpacked her luggage in the next room. “It happened like this,” she said, looking at the Vendôme column surmounted by a bronze Napoleon while Tito leaned against the window with his back to the square. “It was a summer’s day, and I was at home alone. My mother had let a room to a bank clerk, and it was hot, and I felt desires that gave me a kind of tingling in the blood. We were alone in the flat, and my mama had the key; she might have come in at any moment. The young man started kissing me, then he pushed me up against the door and took me standing like that, quite quietly, just as one might transfix a butterfly stupefied by the sun.”

“But did you like the young man? Did you love him?”

“No,” Maud replied, looking at the porphyry Vendôme column vibrating in the sun like transparent liquid. “No. At that moment I just wanted someone. I didn’t even know who he was; I didn’t like him, but he was a man. I wanted someone, and he had what was necessary to satisfy me. When my parents heard about it there was a terrible row. I’ve never understood why. Just because at that moment — it was August, after all — I wanted a man. I had to put up with my mother’s screams and my father’s insults and the curses of both of them.”

“And the man?”

“I never saw him again. Before giving myself to him I had refused two or three men who were in love with me.”

“That’s what you women always do. You reject men who love you only to give yourself one day to someone who doesn’t deserve you.”

“Deserve? What has that to do with it? I’ve never given myself to anyone, we women never give ourselves to anyone as a reward, in recognition of his deserts. We give ourselves because we need to give ourselves.”

“Signorina,” the lady’s maid called out from the next room. “In the big trunk there’s a —”

“Excuse me,” said Maud, detaching herself from Tito.

He leaned on the windowsill with his face between his elbows and his fingers intertwined at the back of his neck, watching, without moving his head, the cars entering the big gray square by the Rue de la Paix and leaving it by the Rue Castiglione, making the noise on the asphalt that scissors make when cutting silk.

What an intelligent woman, he said to himself. With what purity and simplicity she described to me how it happened that first time. It was hot, there was a man available, she was excited, she wanted him, she gave herself to him without making a noise, without pretending. Other women say: The man was a coward, I was a child, I knew nothing, I understood nothing, he took advantage of me. Or: He gave me something to drink, I don’t know what, and I went to sleep. When I woke up… Or they say: My mother was dying, we had no money for medicine, for the doctor, even for a coffin; so I gave myself to a rich man… And they say: Oh, if only I’d known, oh, the revulsion, the hatred I feel for that man and the loathing I feel for myself.

Instead (Tito went on to himself) this delicious Maud talks about the first time as she would about her first communion, if that were worth talking about. She attaches no importance to that physical episode, that superficial incident, that harmless, simple, quiet event about which poets, moralists, judges at all times and in all ages have made such a fuss. That minor act of nervous release that had led to savage injustices and idiotic philosophical outpourings in the name of morality; that natural interplay of two bodies that appears so different depending on whether it happens before or after a carriage ride to the town hall, and is considered decent and honorable if it is done in one bed and wicked if it is done in another.

Maud describes with complete and honest simplicity what is called a guilty act (Tito went on), and with the simplicity of her story she emerges pure and uncontaminated from the bog of a rotten morality. The false valuation put upon that act — the contact of two bodies — has led to nothing but crime. On the day when a girl’s giving herself is no longer considered shameful, abortion and infanticide will cease, because a child will cease to be the fruit of sin and there will be no more need to hide it. The Jews would stone a girl who gave herself before marriage. The people themselves killed her. Perhaps the seducer was among those who threw the stones. Nowadays such a girl is forced to have an abortion, and if she’s found out she’s sent to prison. If she doesn’t have an abortion she has to kill the child, and if she doesn’t do that she and the child are thrown out.

If I had my way, in every case of abortion or infanticide it wouldn’t be the girl that was punished, but her father, mother, elder brothers, neighbors, and all those whose gossip, tittle-tattling, prejudices and good breeding caused her to believe it was a crime to be pregnant without giving advance notice to the town hall. Then at last we should have the satisfaction of seeing unmarried mothers in the street treated with the respect that is now reserved for archbishops and kings. And that would be more than justified. The unmarried mother is the only kind that deserves any kind of admiration. She volunteers for maternity. What is the merit of the others, the married ones? They know that having a child, or the prospect of having one, gives them a position in life, a family. They know there will be someone there to help them from the first morning sickness until forty days after everything has returned to its place. They know that midwife, surgeon, mother, mother-in-law, husband and nurse will do everything in their power to lessen the ordeal of confinement and its consequences and nursing; they know that the “happy event” will be celebrated like a beatification.

But a pregnant unmarried girl cannot count on any of that. On the contrary. The man turns his back on her, her parents despise and insult her, she has to look after the child herself, and she knows that one day the child will turn against her, reproaching her for having made him a bastard.

Nevertheless she faces all this, because of her love, because of her noble instinct. She, and only she, is the true mother. The others are the shopkeepers of maternity, and in comparison with them they have no merit. They produce children with every possible guarantee. They are like those who cheerfully face the prospect of a duel, knowing that their opponent’s pistol is loaded with chewed paper bullets.

By now it was five o’clock, and the square below started gradually filling with people. It was the best time of the day in Paris — de cinq à sept. They say Parisians are nocturnal animals. I think they’re dusk animals.

“Forgive me,” said Maud, coming back and putting a bare arm round Tito’s neck. “That Pierina is marvelous at packing but can’t unpack, but I —”

“Can’t pack or unpack. So what? When did you leave home?”

“Does that interest you? I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn’t stand priests, and a priest who didn’t have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly both of priests and of magistrates, because both were his best clients. Then I took up dancing and travelled all over Italy. In Naples I met an American who was the nephew of the owner of the Metropolitan Theater in New York.”

“In the course of my life I’ve already met twenty-five Americans of both sexes who said their uncle was the owner of the Metropolitan. That man’s brothers and sisters must be disastrously fertile. In America they must even have children by mass production.”

“But he really was the nephew of —”

“I believe you, I believe you. Having an uncle who owns a theater is a specialty of Americans abroad. The Russians you meet outside Russia always say they are friends of Maxim Gorki’s. The Spaniards are always on terms of intimacy with the Quintero brothers, and the Norwegians were always held at the baptismal font by Ibsen.”

A waiter and a porter came in obsequiously (hotel waiters are our obsequious enemies) to dismantle the bed and take away the bedstead.

“All I need is a palliasse and two mattresses,” Maud explained. “I’ll put some rugs and Turkish shawls on it and a chinchilla fur I brought from Italy.”

“Will you have dinner with me?” Tito asked, putting his watch back in his pocket.

“Thanks, but I’m tired. I’ll have something sent up to my room. Do go if you want to. When shall I see you again?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Not this evening?”

“I shall be back late.”

“Until tomorrow, then.”

“You’ll have to see your manager. When does the show begin?”

“In three day’s time.”

“I’ll show you round Paris in your spare time.”

Maud held out her hand to him and in doing so threw back her head. Tito kissed the hollow in her throat. Then he went back to his room.

While he was standing in front of the wardrobe mirror trying to decide between a black suit and a gray one, an express letter arrived for him.

That made him decide on the dinner jacket, because the letter summoned him to the house of Kalantan, the beautiful Armenian lady, who was feeling depressed and lonely. As usual, her car was waiting outside the hotel. Tito got in. A few moments later he made it stop at a florist’s in the Rue de Rivoli, where he had a gardenia put in his buttonhole before he got in again.

The delicate, untouchable petals of the gardenia preserved the voluptuous odor of the Côte d’Azur.

There are waves in the air that are not registered by laboratory apparatus but are apprehended by our nerves when we drive at dusk among the shadows of the Champs Elysées: waves of love and adultery. Here and there you see couples coming back. Where from? Perhaps from cafés, perhaps from tea rooms, perhaps from the art galleries of the Grand Palais, perhaps from the banks of the Seine. But in the way they walk, their faces, the atmosphere that surrounds them, there’s a trace of voluptuous exhaustion.

Couples…

Lovers.

Lovers. The most beautiful word in the world.

Lovers.

The car followed the rectilinear tracks made on the wet asphalt by thousands of other cars. At the end of the avenue the Arc de Triomphe stood out white in the night.

The arc lamps sizzled with blue.

The car entered the garden. Dripping leaves embraced it, leaving drops on the paint, which was as shiny as Japanese lacquer.

A servant went and informed Kalantan that the gentleman had arrived.

When a man is no longer Monsieur Arnaudi to the servants but the gentleman pure and simple, it means that he is officially recognized as the only, or at any rate the principal lover of the lady of the house.

“You may go, Csaky,” said the beautiful Armenian lady as she came in, even before offering her hands to her guest.

Csaky stood to attention and walked out majestically, with a great glittering and creaking of leggings.

Kalantan flung herself into her lover’s arms, pressing herself voluptuously against him. Before he spoke he embraced her tremulously, running his hands along her back, shoulders and ribs. Her body arched backwards like an angry snake.

She wore nothing but a Greek peplum held at the shoulder by a green cameo where the soft folds converged. Her legs and arms were bare, her feet were in light raffia sandals, her hair was loose, tied with a ribbon behind her back as simply, gracefully and modestly as that of a little girl who wants to run about and play. At the bottom of the peplum, by way of an edging, there was a Greek key pattern made with big woolen stitches and dyed with vegetable extracts and cochineal.

Having been plunged hitherto in the morbid, the artificial and the toxic, now, in her new pure love she felt the need to hark back to the remote mythological simplicity of ancient Greek dress.

Her dress had been made for her by Raymond Duncan, that half wheeler-dealer, half visionary, who has not yet lost his American accent after twenty years in Paris. He is the brother of Isadora Duncan, the great classical dancer, who every so often visits her children’s grave dressed in veils and necklaces to weep maternal tears and address her prayers and raise her legs to God.

Raymond Duncan has founded a monastic institution with a strange rule and strange rites in the Latin Quarter, near the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He and his followers grow their hair long and wear chlamyses and sandals, and in that guise, sometimes in platoons and sometimes alone, they face the ironic comments of the boulevards, on which, with a trace of irreverence, they are known as les hommes nature.

They claim that this is the uniform to be adopted by those who wish to complete the long journey in search of the ideal. No secret rites take place in this monastery, which has big windows looking on to the Rue Jacob through which healthy and flourishing girls can been seen laying out carpets and disentangling skeins of wool on their arms, which are bare up to their armpits. Painted materials, unbleached cloth, wools as brown as shepherds’ clothing hang from looms that recall the impatient hurry of a smoothing plane; and clusters of skeins of wool resembling huge fruits grown in honor of Vertumnus, Proserpine and Pomona hang on posts that support a primitive Greek style of architecture. Thick woolen cloth, woven into patterns that recall ancient mythological hair-styles, hang from the loom at which a girl working the shuttle flexes the muscles of her bare arms and legs. She looks like an Andromache en déshabillé.

At that monastery without crosses, images or altars Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz had found something that the great dressmakers of the Rue de la Paix had not been able to offer her, that is, a loose and simple dress in harmony with the pure and primitive love that after many years of questionable excitements and morbid complications, chemically induced hallucinations and fictitious exaltations, she had at last found in the arms of the young Italian with his pale face and moist blue eyes.

Until a few weeks previously she had had strange lovers with strange ideas of love. She had given herself under the influence of morphine and music; she had lain between love and death, underneath violent men in a coffin; she had experimented with the craziest complications and the most tremendous cerebral exaltations. For 5,682 years (according to the Jewish calendar) women have been taken in the old, traditional way, and Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz tried desperately to find a new one. But the further she ran after artificial and extravagant pleasure, the further did voluptuousness vanish into the distance.

And then Tito, whom she met on a night of orgy, at one of those white masses that had made her famous in Paris, had offered her his youthful simplicity as a magnificent fruit is offered with two bare hands.

Tito, the young cocaine addict, to whom the drug gave an exceptional cheerfulness.

“There’s still hope for you,” Kalantan said to him. “I know that dreadful, deadly powder. You haven’t yet got to the stage of tremendous depression, of insuperable melancholy. Now you smile when you have the powder in your blood. You’re at the early stage in which you go back to childhood.”

She spoke to him as to a child, though they were both of the same age. Cocaine achieves the cruel miracle of distorting time.

Csaky, the butler, had laid a small round table, so small that the mouths of the two diners facing each other could easily meet.

“Csaky,” was all the lady said, and Csaky brought to the table a silver dish with big slices of a pink fish alternating with slices of aquamarine-colored pineapple.

Champagne bubbled in a jug as simple as an ordinary water jug. Bringing champagne to table in a labeled bottle is like giving a present with the price still attached.

A Siamese cat came and rubbed itself voluptuously against Tito’s legs.

Kalantan stretched her bare arm across the table and lightly stroked her lover’s hair and then one of his pale cheeks. The caress was as gentle as that of a ghost.

It gave Tito not so much sweet pleasure as a sweet shudder.

Kalantan had not wanted to see any of her old friends since falling in love with Tito. Mourning her husband gave her an excellent excuse for this voluntary isolation. There were no more orgies with drugs and the music of Stravinsky and butterflies sent from the Amazon. What she now loved was love that was as pure as a ringless hand, as simple as loosened hair.

She offered herself to Tito without scent or make-up, just as she emerged from the bath, with nothing but a perfume of wild flesh that was no longer western but was not yet Asian. Her skin preserved a slightly salty odor, as if impregnated with the winds that blow past the salt mines of her remote country.

Kalantan.

A slow, deep, melodious name, like the wind that blows through the gorges of the Caucasus.

Kalantan.

He felt the warmth of her bare knees. He stretched out his hand under the table and caressed something round, smooth, soft, warm and as fresh as a child’s face.

The butler came in several times. After the coffee and liqueurs he did not come in again.

Against one wall of the little room, which was painted like the cabin of a transatlantic liner, there was a low, wide, and deep parellelepiped consisting of three or four mattresses on top of one another covered by a big rug. This was the takhta, a kind of altar to Asian female idleness on which oriental women spend their unprofitable time with their legs crossed, munching sweets and recalling antediluvian legends.

“And they’re quite right,” said Tito, joining Kalantan, who was squatting on the takhta between two cushions. “What is the point of getting excited and rushing about? We’re like children who laboriously drag a toy cart up a slope for the sake of the insipid pleasure of coasting down it. You say that I’m at the cheerful stage of self-poisoning, Kalantan. You think I laugh, but I’ve passed that stage already. I’m always sad. I no longer believe in the blue of dreams. There’s an illness called acianoblepsia that results in one color, dark blue, becoming invisible, and I’m ill with a kind of mental acianoblepsia. I no longer see the blue of life. The great harm done by cocaine is not confined to weakening the lungs and damaging the heart. The chief harm is psychological. It splits the personality; it does a tremendous job of disintegrating the mind, almost as if by electrolysis. I believe that in every intelligent person there are two persons of opposite ideas and tastes; and I believe that in the artist these two persons are so distinct that one can criticize the other, suggest remedies to him and cultivate his vices if they are attractive and his virtues if they are not boring. The effect of cocaine is to make the splitting of the personality take the form of an explosion of revulsion. The two persons inside me criticize each other, corrode each other, in a way that results in my hating myself. And then I begin to see the uselessness of everything. I feel my heart beating. What for? To send the blood to my lungs. What for? To fill it with oxygen. What for? To enable the oxygen to go and burn up the tissues and then return to the lungs to get rid of the products of combustion. And then? It goes on like that, even when I’m asleep, even when I’m waking or when I’m in your arms and even when I’m not thinking at all. Tell me, Kalantan, tell me why my heart goes on beating and for what purpose. If you knew how many times I’ve been tempted to send it a little leaden messenger telling it to stop at once, because one day it will stop naturally, of its own accord, and why should it take the trouble of going on until then?”

“Child,” said Kalantan.

And instead of using the usual words that women use to console us, instead of opening the first aid box of common sense and applying to his brow the cold compress of verbal tenderness, instead of showing him he was wrong, she comforted him with the sweetest tonic, the only one that really raises our spirits and destroys the gloomy products of the imagination.

“Child,” was the only word she used.

And while she whispered it through clenched teeth she took him by the cheeks, fell backward on to the cushions and, bringing his face to her white bosom, sealed his mouth with one of her breasts.

7

Tito’s Arnaudi’s article on the execution that did not take place was a sensational success. The newspaper was sold out in a few hours; newsagents in the provinces ordered more copies by telegram, and the special edition was twice reprinted. The other Paris dailies, which reported the presidential reprieve, were scooped, and The Fleeting Moment immediately acquired the reputation of being the best informed newspaper in France.

A fierce controversy arose between The Fleeting Moment and the TSF, which argued that the institution of the Republic must function in full daylight and protested vigorously against what it called the false news of the presidential reprieve communicated to the newspapers by the Ministry to prevent reporters from being sent to witness the event. It insisted, in other words, that executions must take place in full view of the citizenry and not be covered up by false news of reprieves. Other newspapers tried to excuse the demonstrable inadequacy of their news service saying that they had known about the execution, but out of a sense of humanity had refrained from reporting the terrible event.

The result was that two days later, when the Minister of Information and Keeper of the Seals informed the press that Marius Amphossy really had been reprieved, no one believed him, for the description of the execution in The Fleeting Moment had been so circumstantial, so rich in detail, that it could not possibly have been invented.

Even the executioner almost believed Tito’s story.

“You’re such a marvelous hoaxer,” the editor said to Tito, that I propose to take you off reporting and put you on home politics. Later I’ll put you on foreign politics. But in the meantime I want you to do me a favor.”

“Delighted.”

“Our Bordeaux correspondent has died, and I’d like you to go there for a few days until we find a replacement.”

“But I’ve never been to Bordeaux.”

“That doesn’t matter. All you have to do is look at the local newspapers every morning and telephone us the news you think might interest us.”

Next day Tito was in Bordeaux, furious at having had to leave his two mistresses in Paris. The first thing he did was to buy three or four newspapers, go to the telephone and have himself put through to The Fleeting Moment in Paris.

“A whole family poisoned by mushrooms,” he read on the third page, and, with his mouth to the receiver, his eyes on the newspaper and his mind on his two incomparable mistresses, Kalantan and Maud, he started dictating to the shorthand writer five hundred miles away, who dutifully and prosaically took down what he said. It was a horrifying account of how a modest bourgeois family, to celebrate the grandparents’ golden wedding, had sat down to a magnificent dish of fried mushrooms, which had unfortunately been collected by inexperienced persons. Suddenly they were all seized with terrible pains, and just when the grandparents, parents, grandchildren and a nurse maid were on the point of commending their souls to God…

But the story ended with a eulogy of certain products (the safety of which was guaranteed by experts) manufactured at a well-known Bordeaux factory. The poisoning story was just an advertising stunt.

Tito was struck dumb. He had telephoned an advertisement to his newspaper, having mistaken it for a news story.

“Well?” said the shorthand writer at the Paris end of the line. “Why have you stopped? What happened?”

Tito’s pride would not allow him to admit his mistake. “In spite of the doctor’s efforts there were no survivors,” he went on.

“How many dead were there, then?” asked the shorthand writer.

“Twenty-one,” Tito firmly announced.

That afternoon’s edition of The Fleeting Moment reported under a three-column headline a piece of news that no other newspaper could claim to have:

“GOLDEN WEDDING TRAGEDY AT BORDEAUX. POISONOUS MUSHROOMS KILL 21. OFFICIAL INQUIRIES IN PROGRESS. COLLECTIVE SUICIDE OR CRIME?”

Tito would have been happy enough in Bordeaux but for the haunting memory of those two women. Bordeaux, according to its inhabitants, has nothing to envy Paris for. The smart ladies even talk the Paris argot, the famous wines of Bordeaux are held in little esteem there, and no one uses the world-famous Bordeaux mustard; and the Atlantic provides a bracing smell of the infinite and delicious Arcachon oysters. But it did not provide Maud, or Kalantan, the Armenian widow of many vices and many oil wells.

Being a local correspondent at Bordeaux was tedious, not because of the excess of news, but because of its scarcity.

Nothing important ever happened, there were no scandals, no worthwhile crimes, no sudden deaths of famous men. The editor had sent him a telegram saying: “Your news insufficient. Send sensational news.”

“But if nothing sensational ever happens,” poor Tito said with his mouth to the receiver, desperately turning over the dreary pages of the local newspaper in the hope of finding something.

“The editor asked me to ask you on his behalf to send plenty of interesting news,” the shorthand writer said.

“Did he?” Tito said. “Then take this: When a big sausage manufacturer in southern France whose name we cannot yet disclose heard that two illegitimate children were born of the illicit love affair between his wife and a Vaudois shepherd, he killed the woman and her children, and to conceal the crime he minced them at night in the lonely factory and used them to fill hundreds of sausages that were distributed all over France, We shall be in a position to give more details tomorrow.”

Next day there was a catastrophic drop in the price of sausage meat all over France. No one bought sausages; retailers refused to accept them and cancelled orders and payments.

A Toulouse manufacturer who was incorrigibly honest and therefore not very successful could no longer sell anything, and with bankruptcy staring him in the face shot himself through the heart with a revolver.

The biggest shareholder in The Fleeting Moment, who was a big exporter of sausage meat, called a directors’ meeting and insisted on the editor being sacked. All the sausage eaters in France demanded to be told the trademark of the incriminated sausages. All the ruined pork butchers wanted to know the name of the killer who had put women’s and children’s flesh into sausages instead of donkey meat.

The editor of The Fleeting Moment recalled Tito to Paris, and he arrived by the next train.

“I’m ruined,” the editor lamented. “They want me to publish the manufacturer’s name.”

“Publish it, then,” said Tito.

“What name can I give?”

“There’s no need to make one up. A big sausage manufacturer has committed suicide at Toulouse. Let us say that it was he. His tragic end amounts to a confession. His name was Thomas Salmâtre.”

The editor was radiant; he glowed with his own light. That evening’s Fleeting Moment announced the honored name of the suicide Thomas Salmâtre in big headlines.

The situation was saved. As Thomas Salmâtre’s sausages had no trademark, no one knew he had eaten them, and the directors confirmed the editor in his job, though he had to commit himself to paying a pension for life to Salmâtre’s widow and to providing for the education of his nine innocent children.

Tito was not sent back to Bordeaux, so he was able to return to the arms of the beautiful Armenian lady and the no less beautiful arms of his Italian neighbor at the Hotel Napoléon.

He had begun to fall in love with Maud on the day of her arrival in Paris. But “day” is too vague a term. The beginning and end of a love affair can be established with astronomical precision in hours, minutes and seconds. He had begun to fall in love with her at the moment when, leaning on the windowsill (with the porphyry Vendôme column vibrating like transparent liquid) she told him how she had given herself to a man for the first time. “I hardly knew him,” she said. “He was just an ordinary man, but an ordinary man was what I wanted. Just imagine it, it was summer, a midsummer afternoon. He took me standing against a door, quietly, without making a fuss, just as one transfixes a butterfly.”

Because of the obscure and inexplicable reaction produced by the knowledge of how she gave herself to another, Tito felt his whole being throb with a strange excitement. We can be made jealous even by women with whom we are not yet in love.

He had known her when she was simply Maddalena, a colorless schoolgirl predestined for the cautious love-making of a meticulous neo-Malthusian bookkeeper or the incautious aggressions of a prolific, ready-fisted, qualified metal worker.

She was then the purest of the pure; the reformatory had not yet turned her into a harlot. She cleaned her gloves with petrol on the balcony and threw coins to street musicians in the courtyard to get them to play the latest song over and over again.

The smell of meat being cooked in Marsala and of caramelized sugar flavored with vanilla rose from the kitchens on the first floor. Maud was as intact as a seedpod on the branch. She ate her breakfast standing against the shutters with her cup in one hand and her grissini in the other. She ate cherries on the balcony and spat the stones at neighbors’ balconies, and when she hit a window she ran back into the house uttering shrill cries.

But now she was no longer an uncontaminated seedpod. To Tito, now that he saw her again, she was a flower (oh, let me make a floral comparison; floral and ornithological comparisons are so soothing, so purging). To Tito, then, now that he saw her again, she was a flower that in its passage from buttonhole to alcove to hôtel meublé had received too many male fingerprints.

That was sufficient to rouse in him a disturbing jealousy of the past, the pain of not having been the first and only man in her life, a hatred of all the men who had had her and a hatred of her for having given herself, a hatred of the time that had brought this reality into being, a hatred of the reality that could not be changed, and an even greater hatred of the time to which he could not return.

Inability to go backwards in time is the worst of our sufferings, if our impossible desire is to experience the youth or virginity of the woman we began to love when she was already mature and had been someone else’s.

We then try to grasp fleeting time with both hands, as if it were the last carriage of an express train just moving out of the station. We devour the rest of the way and swear to travel every inch of it; being unable to recapture the past, we try at least to make sure of the future.

Nevertheless we know that a future of ten years, or the whole remainder of our lives, will be no compensation for the few months of youth that she gave to another. Old photographs show that she was not as beautiful or refined or seductive as she is today; yet it’s the girl in those old photographs, or even before that, whom we want. The lover of the most famous and most beautiful actress (the lover really in love with her) would like to go back to the time when she was an ordinary, unknown, touring character actress, moving from theater to theater with a small trunk, her sewing machine and her unnoticed virginity.

Tito fell in love with Maud on that day in late spring or early summer when she confided her little story to him, standing at a window in the Hotel Napoléon watching the cars moving between the Rue Castiglione and the Rue de la Paix with the noise made by a nail on silk.

Soon afterwards, when he left her among her open luggage to hurry to the beautiful Armenian lady’s villa, perhaps he might have realized he was in love with her if he had not had to get out in the Rue de Rivoli to have a pale gardenia that still preserved the voluptuous perfume of the Côte d’Azur among its untouchable petals put in the buttonhole of his dinner jacket.

His love was born and blossomed and grew because he did not stop to contemplate it. A Slovenian mountaineer once told me that small mushrooms that have just sprung up must be picked immediately, just as they are, because they stop growing when someone has laid eyes on them. It would be useless to come back next day hoping to find them fully grown.

Love is just like that. If it is watched at birth, it stops. Sometimes it is reabsorbed into the earth.

Tito didn’t stop to watch it, because he had to hurry to the villa as white as an ossuary and as round as a small Greek temple, where Kalantan was waiting for him, completely naked under her peplum and all atremble in her almost chaste nudity.

That evening, after a tasteful but quick meal — it was as quick as those served at railway station buffets — Kalantan curled up on the parallelepiped of carpets and listened to Tito squatting cross-legged beside her and telling her his tale of woe.

She listened quietly, lying with her knees drawn up to her face, with that tender, self-satisfied look peculiar to women and cats.

Then they went into the next room, which was her bedroom.

Next morning, on his way back to his hotel in her car, the gentleman was exhausted; Kalantan had given herself to him that night with a frenzied prodigality.

“You see,” she confided to him, almost blushing, “tonight, during these last few days, I wanted you more frantically because — listen, and I’ll explain. There are some days on which we women are particularly passionate, but we can’t, because those are just the days when… Oh, how difficult it is to explain. Forgive me. I’m talking like a fool. Do you remember Marguerite Gauthier, the Lady of the Camellias, who always wore white camellias every day, except for two or three days every month, when she appeared with a red rose on her bosom or in her hair? It meant that on those days… Well, I never have to wear red camellias. What has made me like that is morphine.

“Marguerite Gauthier would not have admitted you to her alcove tonight. But I can. Those are days of the truest, most terrible love.”

That was what the Armenian lady, roused by insatiable passion, told him.

He went back to his hotel exhausted, like a convalescent after his first walk out of doors; too much loving had wiped out his masculinity.

In spite of that, when he got back to the hotel he went to Maud’s room. She was just buttoning her kangaroo gloves on her thin wrists, and the sight of her gave him a vague feeling of trepidation.

“How did you sleep, little one?”

“Splendidly. And you?”

“I spent the night at the club,” he replied.

Maud meant nothing to him. He was not in love with her. They were not in love with each other. There was no sign of any future bond between them. But he lacked the courage to tell her that he had been with his mistress, which would have felt like admitting an act of infidelity.

It was that stupid, useless, but instinctive and spontaneous lie that made Tito realize for the first time that he liked little Maud, that he liked her very much indeed.

8

At the Petit Casino Maud, male impersonator who danced in top hat and tails, was a moderate success. She was applauded, as were Ta-lan-ki, tamer of short-sighted and lazy Pekinese, Kerry, a black boxer, and the so-called Irishman Sibémol, a musical comedian who walked on his hands playing a keyboard of bells with his feet. She was called back to the footlights twice. She gave one encore, and would have given another if the audience in the cheaper seats had not tacitly excused her from doing so.

She was nevertheless kept on for a month, and was given an engagement for the following month as principal dancer in a revue at the Folies Montmartroises.

She was not dismayed by her moderate success in Paris, because she did not claim to be adding a new beam of light to the Ville Lumière. There was nothing original about her art; there had been dozens of dancers in top hat and tails before her; the music was Paris music that had been imported into Italy and had returned of its own accord to the city of its origin; and her beauty was not so exceptional as to attract special attention in that exacting metropolis.

So when she went back to her hotel after her Paris début she was neither depressed nor discouraged, having earned the anemic laurels that she expected; no more and no less.

However, Tito Arnaudi, of The Fleeting Moment, was not of the same mind. The tamer of Pekinese dogs, a Chinese who also peddled opium and cocaine, had sold him a box of powder that he hurried to open, and under its influence her dancing seemed to him to be the revelation of a new art, an expression of universal energy, a supreme synthesis of beautiful movement, a divine rhythmical experience.

From his seat in the front row of the stalls he vigorously applauded her first appearance; but as no one else joined in the only result was some cheap, rude giggles.

In his eyes Maud’s black tailcoat shone with gleams of blue as if it were shot through with phosphorus. The hallucinatory influence of cocaine made Maud’s flowing hair look like a tangle of incandescent metal threads. The music seemed to come from invisible distances and the backcloth looked like a landscape full of sun and wind.

“With your dancing you reveal unknown worlds and unexplored marvels,” he said as soon as he had a chance to talk to her. He repeated this later, when they went to her room at the Hotel Napoléon. And he repeated it several times more that night while the blue humidity that seeped down from the sky on the sleepless metropolis reached their naked, perspiring bodies through the open window.

Next day Tito had to leave for Bordeaux, where he stayed for a week before returning to Paris.

After a conversation with his editor which was as dramatic and forceful as a scene from Bernstein, he went back to the Hotel Napoléon, where he found Maud in bed with a stranger.

“That makes forty,” the stranger said, sitting up in bed and looking at Tito without showing any sign of anxiety or modestly covering his chest.

“What do you mean?” Maud asked.

“That’s the fortieth husband.”

“He’s not my husband.”

“Who is he, then?”

“My lover.”

“Then it’s seventy-six.”

Tito had recognized the man immediately. He was Kerry, the black boxer. There are some people you don’t forget when you’ve once seen them. His body was so solid and so shiny that the proverbial bullet would have bounced off it. So there would have been no point in shooting him.

In view of this circumstance Tito walked out of the room with a great deal of dignity, protesting at the inadequacy of hotel bedroom keys that never worked properly from the inside.

He changed, put on a sand-colored suit with a fresh violet tie, and walked to the beautiful Armenian lady’s villa that looked like a small Greek temple that by some historical mistake had been displaced to the Avenue des Champs Elysées.

I have no desire to sing the praises of bigamy, but I must admit that Tito lived very happily between these two women. He was in love with neither, but believed he was in love with both, and when one of them upset him he took refuge with the other.

When one of them deceived him he found purity and fidelity with the other. If Maud remained faithful to him for too long, for lack of the stimulation of jealousy he started falling out of love with her, and he went back to Kalantan. But as soon as Maud showed signs of attachment to another male his jealousy boiled up again, and he left Kalantan and became passionately devoted to Maud. And, as long as this served to keep other men away, he constructed a coat of mail of love all round her; but as soon as he saw that other men were overcoming her resistance, in order to forget her he hurried back to Kalantan and her takhta, her parallelepiped of Turkish carpets and cushions.

At the Petit Casino poor Maud earned only one-fifth of what she needed to live on. But some very rich gentlemen gave her in cash ten times more than she spent.

The reader will ask how much Maud earned, and how much she spent, and exactly how much these rich gentlemen gave her, and what sort of figure that half-kept man Tito cut in these circumstances.

Problems of that kind cannot be solved by logarithm tables, but by much simpler methods. All that is necessary is to do it as Tito did. He knocked at Maud’s door. If she answered “Not now,” he said sorry, and did not come back till three hours later.

Oh, how often did the patient and indulgent Tito have to wait three hours before being admitted.

But he filled in the time by putting on his violet tie and his sand-colored suit and going to the house of the Armenian lady, who was always willing to console him, because she was able to adorn her musk-scented hair with white camellias every day.

When he went back to Maud’s room and hazarded a timid reproach she embraced and kissed him and, pressing her body to his, said: “Don’t talk like that, darling. I’m all yours now. Everyone else, including the man that left half an hour ago, belongs to the past now, and the past has nothing to do with us. Come along, darling, let’s make it up and be friends again.”

When two men want to make it up they go and have lunch together.

A man and woman go to bed.

To forget the immediate and distant past Tito and Maud made it up practically every day.

At Kalantan’s there was a past too.

It was in the nuptial chamber, which as a result of a bathing accident had become a widow’s chamber.

It consisted of an old tin box covered in velvet, a magnificent example of Caucasian art.

“What’s inside it?” Tito asked one evening as he undid his violet tie.

“One day I’ll tell you,” Kalantan promised, taking off a golden slipper.

“Can’t it be today?” said Tito, taking off his sand-colored jacket.

“No, not yet,” said Kalantan, undoing her belt.

“But why?” said Tito, unbuttoning his waistcoat.

“Because today I’ve much more important things to tell you,” Kalantan said playfully, snapping the green garter on her thigh.

“And what have you got to tell me?”

“That I’m in danger of getting lost in this huge bed unless you join me in it immediately. Don’t wind your watch. Put it down.”

“But supposing it stops?”

“Exactly. Wait till it stops before you wind it.”

And so Tito failed to discover what was in that tin box, that rare example of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past.

Maud, the Italian dancer, met an official of the police department of very high rank and very small stature, who stuck out his chest and held his head back and, when looked at sideways, resembled a spoon. He was attached to the vice squad.

She also met a young surgeon who aspired to a lectureship at the Sorbonne and was the author of an important book on surgery. He called on her in a strictly non-professional capacity, and assured her that she was in excellent condition and was very well-formed. In fact he predicted that, with an element of good will, or rather imprudence, on her part, she would become an excellent wife and mother. But dancing and maternity don’t go very well together.

The high official in the police department who resembled a spoon when looked at sideways was a great lover of his peace and quiet and urgently begged her not to become pregnant. She assured him that she knew a young surgeon who was the author of a treatise on surgery and was available for any eventuality.

No one would have supposed that this little blond surgeon, who looked like a troubadour in an oleograph and had the melancholy, resigned eyes of a newly-delivered mother, was capable of carrying out Caesarian sections and removing cancers and ovaries. In fact he was highly skilled at these things.

He had specialized in an operation that is performed with a certain frequency in Vienna, Berlin and Paris and is beginning to be performed in Italy. It was a little operation that the surgeon with the gentle eyes of a newly-delivered mother performed without assistance and within an hour. For this little operation, including sterilization of his instruments and of his own hands, he was satisfied with a fee of 10,000 francs. In Maud’s case he was satisfied with double that amount, knowing it would be paid by the high police official, who loved Maud and his own peace and quiet; for, in order to avoid upsetting his own children who were still slumbering in the calm blue of the future, he would actually have been willing to produce several thousand francs more.

Rarely in the lifetime of that worthy official had he been so relieved as when, having once again implored the dancer Maud not to become pregnant, she assured him that, thanks to the young surgeon’s intervention, there was now nothing to fear.

The young surgeon was satisfied with his modest fee and the personal approval and grateful patronage of this influential police official who was specially assigned to the vice squad.

But, when Tito had learned that his Maud had stoically subjected herself to the surgeon’s knife in order to be able to sell her delicate merchandise without risk of its being depreciated by an unwanted pregnancy, he turned as faint as if the young surgeon had removed his heart instead of Maud’s ovaries.

He had not totally forgotten his own relatively recently acquired knowledge of physiology. For two years he had attended a gynecological clinic and had followed with real distress the fate of women who for pathological reasons had undergone the operation that Maud had now undergone, that is at the very source of life and of their femininity, and as a consequence had never been women again.

He knew the internal secretory glands were vitally important to the functional economy of women, and the rogue had deprived her of them for the sake of a few thousand francs.

He remembered young girls who, when they went home after leaving the clinic, had one by one lost all the distinguishing marks of femininity in their voice, their smile, their ways. A hoarse note crept into their voice, a severe look came into their eyes, a non-sexual, hermaphroditic, precociously old something appeared in their face, which became hairy like a man’s, and their bodies tended to fat.

Tito foresaw that all this would happen to Maud.

“Poor, poor Maud,” he said to her, with suppressed tears in his voice.

But since Maud did not understand, and since he lacked the courage to explain, all he could do was melodramatically go down on his knees, as they do in sentimental novels, and exclaim broken-heartedly: “Maud, Maud, what have you done, what have you done.”

Maud asked him to dry his tears and go away, since she was expecting the senior police official, whose visits had become much more frequent since her little operation.

But before saying goodbye she said: “Why were you weeping?”

“I was pretending,” he said.

“But you had tears in your eyes.”

“When we passionate people pretend to weep, we really do weep.” He lacked the courage to tell her the awful truth.

The young talented surgeon’s name was put forward for the Legion of Honor.

For a few days Tito rushed round Paris like a maniac. Every now and then he remembered he was on the staff of The Fleeting Moment and dropped in to see if he was needed.

He dragged himself to the reporters’ room, looking as weak as a corpse that could still walk though it was in a state of advanced putrefaction. His face was as pale as if it had been soaked in ammonia.

In the reporters’ room was the man whom nobody knew. He came forward to meet Tito with outstretched hand and a cordial smile. On every newspaper there is always a man whom nobody knows. Nobody knows who he is, what he does or why he is tolerated, but everyone from the commissionaire to the editor greets him with varying degrees of deference. He is not on the editorial staff, he is not on the payroll, he has no specific duties, but in spite of that he takes a seat at any available desk, uses the telephone, keeps his hat on, reads the newspapers, uses the newspaper’s headed paper and gives orders to the messengers.

The first thing he said was: “You’re living much too irregular a life, my dear Arnaudi. Isn’t that true, Nocera?”

Nocera: Those two women are ruining you, my dear Tito.

Chief sub-editor: You ought to get married.

Tito: Shut up, all of you.

Chief sub-editor: What you need is a loving wife to console you every now and then for all the troubles you have with your two mistresses.

Nocera: We’ll help you to find one, if you like.

Tito: Basically you’re perfectly right, of course. I ought to take refuge in marriage as if it were castration.

The man whom nobody knows: You ought to marry, if only to change your troubles.

Chief sub-editor: You ought to marry a widow. The ideal woman is a widow, in my opinion — but not your Armenian widow. A little widow whose passions have quieted down a bit. I might have one in mind for you.

Tito: It’s not easy to explain the kind of women I like. If I decided to get married, I’d want a woman with the stupid intelligence, the idiotic tameability of a seal; as for her physique —

Nocera: Do you like them plump or skinny?

Tito: I don’t want too much of an Amazon and I don’t like them too callipygian.

Chief sub-editor: I know a little widow who’s rich and very pretty. What do you say to a widow? She’s inexpensive, second hand, but as good as new. She was widowed after functioning smoothly for six months. Incidentally, I think women should be treated as Beau Brummell treated his clothes; when they were new he had them worn by his valet. This one’s very virtuous, and she’s so economical that when the year of mourning was up she put her widow’s weeds in mothballs, saying they would do for her second husband.

Nocera: I’d advise you to marry a whore. Not a streetwalker, of course, but one of those who won’t take less than two hundred lire for a session. Experience shows they make model wives. If you marry a respectable young lady of good family with some securities in the bank and an intact hymen, she’ll feel entitled to keep you at her feet in a state of adoration for the rest of her life. But if you marry a whore her dowry will be a flat already furnished and equipped with all the little luxuries suggested by long experience. Also she’ll have a well-filled jewel box and she’ll have put aside a tidy sum of money.

Chief sub-editor: Whores don’t save money.

Nocera: I tell you they’re very economical, in fact they’re almost miserly. They’ll insist on a man’s wasting a thousand francs on a useless thing like a wedding present, but if they get a letter with an unfranked stamp they carefully remove it and re-use it at the first opportunity.

Tito: Decent women do that too. Four sous, if a woman has to spend them, are four sous, but a hundred lire spent on her by a man are worth less in her eyes than a tram ticket. Women have invariably been responsible for the worst instances of stinginess I’ve come across. But go on.

Nocera: The prostitute you marry will have money that you’ll be under no obligation to distribute out of pride to the poor of the parish. Perhaps at the time you may be tempted to do so, but at the last moment the temptation will disappear. Money in small quantities soils the hands, but in large quantities it cleans them; fortunately the only signatures on banknotes are those of the director-general and the chief cashier, and those who pay a woman don’t add their signatures, so your dignity will be safe. Also the woman, having earned her money by her own sweet efforts, will realize that your money too is worthy of some respect, and that’s something not understood by young ladies of good family.

Also, if you marry the type of woman I have in mind, your wife will have enjoyed all the ephemeral pleasures of luxury and will have satisfied her wildest whims; things like a villa on the Lake of Lucerne or a yacht at Nice or a car with special coachwork will no longer tempt her. She’ll have a delightful longing for simplicity à la Cincinnatus. Instead of saying: “You know what you ought to buy me, darling?” she’ll say: “Don’t waste your money, my love.”

Whether you marry a young woman of good family or a whore, she’ll certainly be unfaithful to you, but there’s a difference. The former will deceive you in a noisy, sensational fashion; if she does not draw your attention to your unhappiness, she’ll certainly draw everyone else’s to it. Not having much experience of men, she’ll believe her idiot of a lover (because she’ll inevitably fall in love with an idiot) is an exceptional individual; and if he tells her that you’re a fool she’ll take his word for it and help him make you look a fool to your friends. A whore, on the other hand, will deceive you elegantly, methodically, economically, with style, tact and honesty. She will be able calmly and accurately to compare your merits with the other man’s, because she knows men, while a wife recruited from respectable virgins of good family knows only two, that is, you and the other man. A respectable woman who cuckolds you will laugh at the state she has put you in, because she regards it as strange, remarkable and exceptional. But the whore, knowing it to be natural, normal and usual, will not laugh. The respectable young woman will want you to help her lover, lend him large sums of money, help him over his difficulties. The whore, being used to taking money from men, not giving it to them, will not impose that burden on you.

She will not be accepted in good society, so you won’t have the displeasure of having to meet people and return visits and debase yourself with the company of the respectable. The only people you will invite to your home will be agreeable and unprejudiced persons such as ourselves, who will never cause you any embarrassment, because with a former whore there’s no need to mince words; and there’ll be no vulgarity either, because the woman will have become your wife after all. Also, she’ll never refuse you when you want her.

Tito: No wife ever refuses herself.

The man whom nobody knows: That’s what you think, but there are wives who have the courage to say to their husbands: “No, not tonight, darling.”

Nocera: But she won’t make the excuse of being tired, because you could answer: “What? You, who had twenty men a day?” And if she wanted it when you were tired, you could say: “But haven’t you had enough yet after your active and hard-working career?” You could have as many lovers as you liked, and if she objected you could silence her by mentioning the first Christian name that came into your head.

A respectable young woman will never bother to hide her fits of irritability and bad temper and will make you put up with her nervous outbursts, and when she gives herself she’ll show her indifference or disgust. But the whore, accustomed to giving herself with a smile and an appearance of pleasure, will treat you as her most highly valued client and give you the illusion of desire and pleasure, even though her father and mother have died of yellow fever that day. Also she’ll keep her beauty till an advanced age because, as it’s one of the essentials of her calling, she will have learnt all its secrets.

Just as retired actors sometimes yield to the temptation of returning to the stage, or at least of giving a special performance, she may one day be tempted to do the same. But, if so, no one will be surprised, no one will despise you for it, because it’s her former profession, after all.

You may, perhaps, have a strange feeling on the first night of your marriage. You won’t have the feeling of being in bed with a wife, but with a woman whom you’ve accosted in the street. Won’t that be a pleasure? You won’t be up against the nuisance of having to struggle with a virgin’s safety locks, and that’s a far from negligible advantage. But if you were foolish enough to want a virgin wife, believe me, my friend, a prostitute could provide that for you too, for only prostitutes — and not virgins — are able to create a complete illusion of virginity.

Tito: You’re perfectly right, my dear fellow.

Nocera: The first thing you must do is to drop those two women and never see them again.

Tito: No, I’ll never see them again.

Nocera: Do you swear that?

Tito: I swear it.

The telephone rang.

“It’s for Tito Arnaudi.”

Tito picked up the receiver. “Yes, darling, it’s me,” he said. “At your place in half an hour? Yes, even sooner.”

“Who was that?” Nocera asked.

“The Armenian,” Tito answered, and walked out.

9

He reached Kalantan’s villa a little late, having met, at the entrance to a Métro station, his old school friend, the waiter, who used to memorize dates like telephone numbers (Peace of Campoformio, one seven nine seven) and had acted as his guide to the cafés of Montmartre when he was doing his research for the cocaine article.

“I’m going back to Italy,” his friend announced, extending his baggage-laden arms. “I’m sick of Paris, I’m sick of waiting, I’m sick of earning money one franc or so at a time, I’m sick of everlasting complaints. If I stayed here much longer I’d throw myself in the Seine, though half of its water comes from the bidets of recognized or clandestine whores.”

“Do you expect to find a cleaner river in Italy? Perhaps you will, because Italian women wash less.”

“I’m going to be a monk. There’s a monastery near Turin where they take anyone who offers himself. It’s a kind of religious Foreign Legion.”

“But do you know how to be a monk?”

“I don’t think it’s very difficult.”

“And do you have faith?”

“No.”

“Do you have a vocation?”

“No.”

Then why are you doing it?”

“There’s a small garden, the cells are well laid out, there’s not much work, the rule is not oppressive, the food’s healthy, there are plenty of books, and you never go out, even after death, because there’s a cemetery on the spot. There’s every convenience.”

Tito looked at him, puzzled. Then he said: “You’ve had an unhappy love affair. Has your mistress been deceiving you with her husband?”

The future monk lowered his eyes and lifted his bags with a disconsolate gesture. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll send you my address, so that you can come and see me if you’re ever in the neighborhood. Goodbye.”

And he hurried down the Métro steps with bowed head.

The velvet and tin box, the complicated specimen of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past, was full of gold coins. It was like fabulous treasure hidden in the cellars of vanished cities. When Kalantan told him what the box contained Tito laughed as if it were a good joke.

“But that’s the sort of thing that happens only in fantastic novels and German films,” he said.

Kalantan told him the story.

“My husband was very rich,” she said. “He owned some inexhaustible oil wells and the most famous fisheries in the whole of Persia.”

“I know.”

“And he was inflicted from birth with the most appalling taedium vitae. He seemed to have been born with the whole of Asia’s ancient experience in his blood. Nothing tempted him, nothing amused him. He had no interest in his home or his family, and in his room he put up the notices you see in hotel bedrooms, giving the prices charged by the laundry, the cost of breakfast served in the dining room or the bedroom, and informing gentlemen taking trains later in the day that the room must be vacated before two p.m.

“He dreamt of travel, but travelled very little. He was a kind of paralytic with a craving for distant places. His longest journeys were Paris — Berlin, Paris — London, or Paris — Brussels. After being away for a month, he’d come back.

“He liked cocottes. I think all the most celebrated ones passed through his hands. What he would really have liked would have been to have them all permanently available in a moveable home, a kind of gypsy caravan, but run in accordance with the standards of a Paris maître d’hôtel. He liked me at infrequent intervals. At the beginning of our marriage he was very fond of me, though I had one defect — being his wife. To create the illusion that I wasn’t his wife, he used to pay me. Every time I took him into my bed he dropped some gold coins into that box. He said that a wife was ennobled by elevation to the rank of courtesan.”

“And hasn’t anyone ever tried to break into that box?”

“My servants are honest, and no one suspects there’s gold in it.”

“It must amount to several hundred thousand francs.”

“Maybe half a million.”

Tito went over and tried to lift it; the effort made the veins of his brow and neck swell.

“Poor darling,” Kalantan said, making him sit next to her on the day bed; and she kissed his face, which suddenly went pale, and started to caress his hands.

“Kalantan, that box is your past, and your past makes me suffer dreadfully, because I’m jealous of it. I should like to have been the first to have you. Every one of those coins is a sign of the pleasure you gave someone else.”

“But what does that matter?” Kalantan said in astonishment, kissing his eyes that were veiled with anger. “You’re my real master. My husband was merely a duty. My lovers? I don’t remember, because never have I had so much pleasure as in your arms. In any case, the past is the past, and has nothing to do with us.”

Tito withdrew his hands from hers.

The past has nothing to do with us.

It was the phrase Maud had used. These two women, products of two different civilizations, one from the Po valley and the other from the gorges of the Caucasus, used the same words to comfort him.

His waiter friend who was going to shut himself up in a monastery had been so right when he summed up his disgust by saying: “I’m sick of all this.”

Tito was now irritated with Kalantan, the wealthy Armenian woman who liked being treated like a whore. In their heart of hearts all women to a greater or lesser extent feel the latent attraction of the brothel.

That day Tito could not make love to the Armenian lady.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “But today it’s no use. I’m depressed, let me go.”

And he went back to Maud.

A few weeks previously he had still been able to forget Maud’s infidelities in Kalantan’s arms and Kalantan’s past in Maud’s bed, but now his intensified love of both meant that he was crushed between two equal and opposite forces.

He now knew all about Kalantan’s past: her simulated selling of herself to her husband, the orgies in the penguin room, the feverish excitement of her stimulants and the voluptuousness of her narcotics, the love-making in the coffin, the primitive nostalgia for the brothel followed by a desire for purity, which was nothing but revulsion from excessive and perverted sensuality; it was a purely cerebral disgust transformed by morphine into a chaste frenzy.

Nor was there anything he didn’t know about Maud’s past and present.

He knew how and to whom she had first given herself; he knew to whom she had sold herself in Italy and in Paris; he had seen her in bed with a black man whose pachydermatous skin shone like brilliantine; he had seen the police official emerging from the lift with his little eyes swollen and shining with lust; he knew that the young surgeon had mutilated her at the very source of life and love, anticipating her menopause and cutting short her youth. He knew the discreet hotels, the garçonnières, where she went to hire herself; every Paris arrondissement harbored a client of hers.

Maud and Kalantan were different creatures belonging to different civilizations, but they were alike in not understanding his anguished jealousy. Both had said to him, with different accents but with the same non-understanding in their eyes, that the past had nothing to do with them.

Maud and Kalantan were dissimilar women, both of whom he loved with the same frenzy, for both held him captive, one by his jealousy of the present, the other by his jealousy of the past.

Maud had on her skin the odor of the thyme of her green mountains; Kalantan had a salty flavor.

Both were young, but there was something old in each of them, though in a different way.

Maud, with her insatiable sensuality, sought new and excitingly strange and vicious forms of excitement, while Kalantan, sick of morbid eccentricities, sought purity, simplicity, primitiveness in her relations with Tito.

There were two kinds of age in these two young women. One had gone through the most complicated forms of vice, only to end up with wanting straightforwardness and simplicity; while the other had gone through the whole gamut of ordinary love-making, only to end up in search of vice.

The enthusiasm with which they pursued two opposite paths indicated two different but similarly dynamic personalities.

Between these two women, these two passions, Tito was undecided. He couldn’t make up his mind by which to let himself be carried away. He was intra due fuochi distanti e moventi, between two distant and powerful fires…

Oh, that Dante Alighieri, he has managed to get himself quoted even by me.

Just as the inventors of rubber heels and the metal toy that makes a disagreeable sound like a hysterical frog when you press it made millions and were able to lead comfortable and independent lives, so Tito as a result of his journalistic extravagance was given a permanent position on The Fleeting Moment. They increased his salary, at the same time forbidding him to write anything.

“You’re capable of announcing that the Pope has had himself circumcised to enable him to marry Sarah Bernhardt,” the editor told him. “If you want us to remain friends, take the salary, come to the office, play snooker on my billiard table, frequent the bar, fence with my foils, help yourself to my cigars and my typists, but don’t write a word, even if I tell you to.”

So all Tito had to do was to turn up at the manager’s office once a month, receive an envelope full of banknotes, and sign a receipt.

He spent his time going for solitary morning walks in the outlying districts of Paris. Sometimes he stayed for two or three days at Kalantan’s house, where a room was now kept ready for the gentleman. Then he would give up Kalantan for a week to devote himself exclusively to Maud. At other times he let days go by without seeing either. And sometimes he went back to the semi-clandestine cafés in Montmartre and Montparnasse, the doubtful haunts of professors of billiards and poker, impresarios of amorous adventures at popular prices, police informers, pimps, and hungry little tarts living on anchovy sandwiches and croissants dipped in coffee.

The one-legged peddler sold him six glass tubes full of excellent Mannheim cocaine, and he went round Paris with the tubes in his pocket like a child who sleeps with all his toys under his pillow. He sought out the most modest streets in La Villette and Belleville where the walls were adorned with sinister theatrical posters, advertising such productions as The Bastard’s Daughter and The Hanged Man’s Revenge. He walked down the avenues of the Père Lachaise cemetery, which were kept as neat and tidy as a collection of samples; and he went to see the abattoirs, and saw docile sheep and restive calves going in.

At least no one talks to them about dying for their country, he said to himself.

A wretched dog, exhausted by fatigue and thirst, was trotting along behind a light cart which, to judge from the dust, must have come a long way. The cart was nearly empty, and the peasant who was driving it could have let the dog into it instead of letting it suffer like that.

But peasants, Tito said to himself, are an inferior race; they’re worse than blacks. Their actions are guided by the grossest selfishness, the most useless cruelty and the most stubborn ignorance. I should be delighted if hail destroyed their wheat, fungus ruined their vines and disease affected their cattle every year. They deserve no better.

He was strangely moved by the sight of a long crocodile of little girls dressed in white chattering on their way to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. He started following them. He thought he could already see something definitive in each of them. He saw little faces of future comic opera soubrettes; the merry, dangerous eyes of future wreckers of nervous systems; the plump cheeks of future mothers and housewives who would find ways and means of pleasing serious-minded gentlemen between one delivery and the next. They were all dressed in the same way, all in white, they were almost identical in size, but in each of them there already slumbered in embryo the courtesan, the artist, the ordinary woman, the exceptional woman. Inside them were tiny ovules from which great men or great criminals might perhaps be born, or perhaps also cancer cells or tuberculosis bacilli. Among them might be another Maud, another Kalantan, who would cause despair to some small Tito Arnaudi who somewhere or other was now sticking his fingers up his nose.

These casual, aimless wanderings gave him the apathetic bliss of the vagabond. The vagabond’s life has its charms, such as not being the slave of the clock or of appointments, and of not going in prearranged directions. He could spend his time listening to a case in the appeal court, or attending a lecture at the university, or sitting on a bench in a public park or on the river bank; he could attend a public auction, or stop and watch a cart that was too heavy and could not get out of a rut, or go and see the bodies in the Morgue, or watch the departure of melancholy evening trains, or talk to builders, or listen to market salesmen calling their wares, or leaf through the books of the bouquinistes on the peaceful quais, or snooze on green velvet seats in museums, or throw bread to the patient and stupid bears and those enormous, childlike elephants in the Jardin des Plantes.

Sometimes an image of Maud would form in his mind’s eye on the smooth surface of a street or on the white screen of a pavement, and he would go into a café or a sweet shop to escape from it.

When I see an old lady eating pastries, they seem to me to be wasted, he said to himself.

Everything irritated him from time to time. But from one point of view there was a kind of contentment in him that had been developing for some time without his noticing it. In the early stages, taking cocaine had resulted in a sensual restlessness, an almost insatiable erotic excitement (which two mistresses had not been sufficient to satisfy), but now it had begun to lower the flame of his passions. Days passed without his wanting to see Maud’s slender calves or note the musky, India ink-like perfume of Kalantan’s hair. Sometimes his thoughts reverted to the soft carpets of the takhta, where the lovely Armenian curled up in a voluptuous act of self-adoration, and sometimes he returned in memory to Maud, with her thirst for vice and novelty, but both seemed to him to be remote from his present life, for he felt himself to be a survivor.

His sensuality was now a tiny flame on the point of extinction. But every now and then a sudden burst of jealousy had the enlivening inflammable effect of oxygen.

He would imagine Maud in the arms of another in some house or other in heaven knows which of the twenty Paris arrondissements, and jealousy would make his passion flare up again.

Then he would go back to look for her, and when he found her (if he did find her) she was always ready to give herself with the whole of her vibrant body and her divinely wet lips.

“Cocaine,” he would say to her in his passion. “Cocaine, you’re not Maud, you’re Cocaine, my necessary poison. I run away from you, swear never to see you again, but then inevitably I come back, because you’re as necessary to me as a poison that is my salvation and my death. I run away from you because I feel the imprint of other males on your skin. I feel them, they are as visible to me as finger marks on gardenias. I run away from you because you’re not all mine, because I can’t bear to share you with others. Sometimes you revolt me, but I come back to you because you’re the only woman I want, the only one I can really love.”

And she, sitting on the big, unmade bed, would listen with a calm and almost preoccupied smile to the fervent words with which Tito tried to burn her hands.

And as her hands were engaged, for Tito was pressing them to his mouth, she absent-mindedly amused herself by picking up her tortoiseshell hairpins from the floor with her toes.

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.

10

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.

“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.

“Trente et un: rouge impair et passe.”

An old woman who had lost all her money wouldn’t move. At least she wasn’t going to lose her seat.

“As selfish as a tapeworm,” Tito said aloud.

A gentleman sitting in front of him turned and exclaimed: “Arnaudi?”

It was an old friend from his boyhood days.

What a bore these childhood friends are. Just because you had the misfortune to meet them before the light of reason dawned, afterwards you have to put up with them wherever in the whole wide world you run into them.

“I’ll lose these thousand pesos,” his friend said, showing him two or three piles of chips, “and then we’ll go.”

The roulette room, with its vague noises and obscure vibrations, reminded Tito of the illustrations in books of experimental physics that show iron filings arranging themselves on magnets in accordance with different lines of force.

He felt those lines of force in the air over the green baize tables and understood why there are people who live and die for gambling.

Gambling is merely a summary of life, which is nothing but a quarter of an hour at a roulette table. The successful are those who win; and to win it’s sufficient if the gentleman on your right distracts your attention for a moment or the lady on your left prevents you from putting your stake on the number you chose. All that’s needed is that you should be seated near the low numbers when the low numbers come up, or that you should hear a voice in the air, a number whispered by an anonymous voice, and that you should put your money on it.

Gambling is not the pleasure of winning, but a feeling that you are living intensely.

It’s folly to entrust your fate to numbers that are the mere scrapheap of calculation, the rubble of mathematics. Abandoning honest work for the extravagance of gambling is like dropping science in favor of empiricism.

Those who win thanks to the empiricism of a bankruptcy or a martingale have difficulty in returning to subcutaneous injections and straightforward business transactions.

Do you generally win?” Tito’s friend asked.

“I didn’t play this evening, but I always lose,” Tito replied. “The only people who play to win are old, retired cocottes.”

The two friends parted.

Tito walked back to the hotel. It was dark. The iron benches under the palms along the seaside promenade were occupied by couples as quiet as insects in love. Every now and then a fleeting car projected beams of light and the sound of laughter.

He passed a party of perspiring young ladies, irresistible young men, officers. As in all groups that include a few intellectual young women and fashionable idiots, they were discussing spiritualism and theosophy. The young ladies inserted Portuguese words into their Spanish. In Italy they adorn their talk with French words and in France with English ones; in Horace’s Rome female intellectuals used Greek words. You find bluestockings everywhere.

The frock-coated porter, hearing the crunch of gravel, opened the door for him. In the lobby a shrieking child was struggling with a phlegmatic nurse. He entered the lift, and three floors of the hotel descended beneath him.

When he was in his own room he strode backwards and forwards on the silent carpets like a madman.

A mosquito was buzzing about, landing here or there on its long legs, which were like those of a young lady suffering from anemia. It flew round Tito’s head and then came to rest on his hand. It was the kind from which you get malaria.

Tito crushed it with his other hand. Then his face darkened. How tremendously inferior men are to insects, he said to himself. To kill a man an insect only has to sting him, while to kill an insect a man has to crush it.

Maud had not yet come back.

Tito sat on the bed, and his gaze fell on the alarm clock. He wound it and put it back. There was a notice under the bedside lamp. Tito read it, nervously cleaning his fingernails.

Le prix de la chambre sera augmenté dans le cas où ne sera pas pris au moins un des repas principaux à l’Hôtel.

The price of this room will be augmented if one of the principal meals (lunch or dinner) is not taken in the hotel.

Der Zimmerpreis erfährt Erhöhung wenn keine der beiden Hauptmahlzeiten (Lunch oder Diner) im Hotel eingenommen werden.

The sound of pulleys and counterweights came from the lift-well.

Here she is, Tito said to himself.

But the lift stopped at the floor below.

He waited for a moment, hoping that it had stopped to let someone out and that it would resume its ascent and bring his Maud up to him. Instead if gently went down again, moving its own volume of air in the well and making a noise like a tire being deflated.

He walked across the room and opened the window.

In the distance the vague luminosity peculiar to all big cities hovered in the night like phosphorus vapor, as if the sky were reflected in a convex glass.

Tito looked at the constellations of the southern hemisphere: groups of stars, stars like iron filings, stars like flotsam and jetsam, naive combinations of primitive goldsmiths’ work. He felt the blue of the night raining on his heated face. He looked for two constellations of which he had heard when he was a boy: the Southern Cross and Hydra. But he had the impression that in this part of the world the sky was just as randomly untidy as was his own sky.

A big avenue along the seafront flaunted its arc lamps at regular intervals against the dark background of water; they looked like the illuminated portholes of a big ship travelling slowly with all its lights on.

Music, now audible and now not, floated on the slight breeze from some distant villa; it seemed to be not the breeze that was carrying the music but the music that was bringing the breeze to him on that sultry night. Clusters of lights under the big black trees glittered like a paste clasp in rustling tresses. Tito put his hands out of the window as one does in a railway compartment in August in the hope of getting an illusion of coolness from the speed of the train.

He counted the floors beneath him. He was about forty meters up.

A motorboat made its way along the estuary, with guitars and lit cigarettes.

Tito raised his eyes to see whether Vesuvius were not smoking in front of him.

But his Cocaine had not come back.

He shut the window, started the fan that was on the bedside table and slowly began to undress.

“Aren’t you in bed yet?” said Maud, coming in suddenly with her hat in one hand and passing the fingers of her other hand across her brow.

“As you see,” Tito answered coldly, tying the cord of his pajamas round his waist.

“What’s the matter?” Cocaine asked, reading the reasons for his ill humor on her lover’s face.

“Where have you been all this time?”

“Here we are again. Where do you expect me to have been?”

“That’s what I was asking you.”

“I’ve been out for a drive in a car.”

“With whom?”

“Arguedos.”

“The student?”

“Yes.”

“In a car? If he had money for a car, he’d take a bed in a sanatorium.”

“What do you know about it?” the woman objected. Women’s skin reacts quickly to their lovers’ pinpricks.

“And where did that wretch get a car from?” Tito insisted.

“If you didn’t lend him the money, someone else must have done it.”

“No one would trust him with a bootlace.”

“He must have hired it.”

“With whose money?”

“With mine. You think no one trusts him? Well, I do. I lent him a thousand pesos.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Out of friendship.”

“You’ll never get it back.”

“I know.”

“Then it was a present.”

“Call it what you like.”

As she said this she opened the communicating door and disappeared into her own room, tapping the doorpost with her rings.

Tito, cold, calm and painfully hostile, went back to the window to receive comfort from the infinite. The boundless night does not deny consolation to those who ask with the eloquence of pain. And, drinking in a mouthful of blue air (a gramophone was now playing somewhere) he said to himself, laughing bitterly: She used to go to bed with men for the sake of money. Now she pays to go to bed with them. If she grew so atrociously ugly that she couldn’t get a man, she’d wait for the first poor sex-starved devil coming out of jail who made a beeline for her for want of anything better. But she’ll never be faithful to me.

The gramophone had stopped.

A nightingale kept a sleepy villa garden awake.

In another villa an invisible violin sounded as if it was at death’s door.

The violin and the nightingale could not see each other, but took turns in telling each other about their sadness.

They seemed to be the same nightingale and the same violin that were to be heard at night in Paris at Kalantan’s villa which was as white as an ossuary. How uniform the world was. But for the fact of the intervening ocean, the road between that Paris villa and this South American hotel would be scattered with nightingales and violins just like these.

The gramophone started up again. They had put on a new record. It started up again to cover those other sounds with its froglike croaking.

The gramophone is the duty frog in the great swamp that is every big city.

Tito did not sleep that night. He heard bells ringing: once for the waiter, twice for the waitress, three times for the porter.

He heard the sound of footsteps on the ribbon-shaped carpets in the corridor.

He heard the moaning of a siren of an arriving ship (how sad) or a departing one (how melancholy).

He switched on the light. He was in a hotel bedroom. There was the number of the room and a notice giving the prices. The management could not accept responsibility for valuables not handed in at the office.

He switched off the light.

He had the illusion of going to sleep, but did not sleep. He seemed to be leaning against a high balustrade that suddenly disappeared and let him fall into the void. But halfway down he awoke with extended arms.

A beetle in the Louis XV-style wardrobe ticked its monotonous complaint. Tito remembered that in his country these creatures were called deathwatch beetles, because their ticking was believed to portend death.

Actually it was a sign of love. An amorous duel was in progress, the ticking is a call to the other sex made by the insect beating its head on the wood of its bachelor quarters. And men kill them because they’re parasites, Tito said to himself. As if man were not the most dreadful example of parasitism in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

Maud, Cocaine, he went on. Cocaine, tremendous and necessary little woman; my mortal and life-giving poison; little woman to whom I’m attached like a parasite, like Diplozoon paradoxum.

Forgotten memories, distant ideas, memories of his youth returned to his mind.

Just like Diplozoon paradoxum (he went on). A tiny creature that when it finds a companion of the opposite sex attaches itself to it with a sucker as big as its whole body, and then they stay joined forever.

Forever. The expression that all lovers use. The dream that comes true only for those little creatures buried in parasitology books. Maud and I are attached by each other’s suckers.

That was how Tito rambled on while the worm in the wood went on ticking out its amorous call. Tito preferred to think of it as a deathwatch.

Everything all round us is death (he said to himself). We live at the expense of humus, that is, of death. Even modern, active advanced ideas live on the humus of dead ideas. Oh, taedium vitae. How splendid life would be without mankind. To see birds enjoying complete liberty to reproduce themselves, to see forests invading cities, grass growing on café tables, chickens laying eggs on the altars of abandoned cathedrals, fungus growing on the parchment in libraries, lightning striking empty marriage beds. Man has actually given direction to the lighting. Oh, to see horses eating the violets and running free in the public parks.

The sound of the lift gate being shut clumsily awoke him.

He put his hand to his heart.

Heart, lungs, blood (he went on). I’m sick of knowing that my body’s a laboratory designed to nourish and renew my protoplasm. I’m nothing but phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. I’m sick of looking at myself, of looking down on myself as if I had eyes outside myself. And I’m sick of being in love, that is, of using up my phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

Tito was haunted all night by these strange ideas. A church clock struck the hour, followed by a school clock and a station clock. Then a cock crowed, another replied, and a third intervened.

How cocks and clocks and nightingales and gramophone and violins repeated and imitated one another.

He turned and rolled between the sheets. He lay with his head at the foot of the bed and put one leg down on either side. He switched on the fan, looked at the time, switched off the fan, got up and dressed.

He rang twice, and a maid appeared. He rang four times and the porter came. He told the maid to pack his bags. Only his, not the lady’s. He told the porter to book him a passage on the first ship leaving for Europe.

“It’ll be rather difficult to get you a cabin today, sir,” the porter prudently suggested. “But I can telephone to Buenos Aires.”

“When all the cabins in a transatlantic liner are booked,” Tito said, “a grand hotel porter can always manage to find another one, and it’s always the best in the ship.”

Some hours later, at about midday, when Cocaine came in without knocking, she found an Englishwoman who had just arrived busily soaping the abundant fat of her oversized face.

In response to the startled lady’s protests Maud muttered an apology and summoned a waiter.

“The gentleman left the hotel half an hour ago.” he said.

Maud did not reply.

“But,” the waiter, who was a tremendous psychologist, went on, “as the ship doesn’t leave until this evening, I could get a car and bring him back in eight hours, if madam so desired.”

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

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

“And honey,” she said.

11

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.

In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy. The day will come when our beloved children (the cuckolds of the future) will be prepared to be cuckolded and will no longer suffer for it, because we shall have inoculated them with commonsense and given them anti-cuckoldry injections.

Now that he could not see the men concerned, Tito’s jealousy was greater than it had been three weeks earlier, when they were within his reach, catching the scent of the latest electric sparks invisibly given off by Maud’s body.

A street-walker offered herself to him for twenty lire.

“That’s not expensive, not even enough to cover the costs of production. Come along, then. But I’ll spray you all over with scent.”

The seller of sensations followed him to his room and allowed herself to be sprayed with Avatar, Maud’s perfume.

He tried a large number of these women. They were young, pretty and skillful, but they were not Cocaine. He poured her scent, the delicious Avatar, over them, but the result was not the same as that produced on Cocaine’s skin.

Every woman’s skin interprets scents in its own way, just as every musician interprets music in his own way.

He tried exhausting himself, exhausting his virility, going from one woman’s bed to another, but when his flesh seemed dead to any stimulus there was one thing that still excited him, the memory of Maud, desire for her. He had experienced this once before, in Paris, when, after the excesses of the insatiable Kalantan, he discovered new sources of pleasure in himself at the sight of Maud.

He went walking in the outlying districts of Turin, just as he had done in his days of misery in Paris. But now when he walked he started feeling the weight of his body. It was the first sign of age, the age when men start wearing dark brown suits.

One day he came across the knitted green tie with big blue diagonal stripes in a forgotten corner of a suitcase, and he wore it to go and see his monk friend who had sought refuge in the monastery that was a kind of Foreign Legion for the victims of emotional upsets. A ray of sunlight that fell on the tie revived a dead trace of Avatar scent. If you only knew how tears are perfumed when they run down a pretty woman’s face, and how ties are perfumed when a woman weeps on them.

In the monastery garden swifts were flying about at ground level and then zooming up as if to cleanse themselves in the sky.

A poor monk was throwing bits of bread to sparrows as poor as himself. Waves of silence met Tito in the porch.

His friend the monk came to meet him, holding out both sleeves, and greeted him as his brother in Christ. Then he said: “Yes, I’m happy.”

And he told him that he should enter the monastery too.

“But it’s not so easy…”

“On the contrary, it’s very easy indeed. Are you a Mason?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s just like entering a Masonic lodge.” He said that the Good Shepherd was happy to find a lost sheep.

“I know,” said Tito. “But if He doesn’t find it there’s one fewer to milk and clip.”

The monk showed Tito his cell, the library, and the workroom of an aged monk who lovingly studied beetles and butterflies. He also took him to the chapel.

“I’m sorry I can’t offer you a vermouth, as I did when I was a waiter in Paris,” he said. “But I can offer you a mass.”

“Very well,” said Tito, “I’ll settle for a mass.”

“Ordinary mass or sung mass?”

“Which is the quicker?”

“There’s no difference.”

“If you’ll sing…”

“Of course I will.”

“Then make it sung mass.”

He duly listened to it.

“Would you also like a benediction?”

“No, thanks. I’m all right as it is.”

They walked slowly along the cloister and looked at the refectory.

“What’s the food like?”

“It’s table d’hôte. Only the sick eat à la carte.”

The monk said that Christ should be loved because He had sacrificed himself for mankind, and Tito replied that the mice and rabbits that were killed in laboratories to test new medicines for the benefit of mankind were Jesus Christs too.

The monk was horrified, and begged him not to blaspheme; he said that mice saved nobody, while Jesus Christ had redeemed mankind.

“In that case a fireman who dies to save a single life is more admirable than Christ, because there’s more merit in sacrificing yourself to save a single life than in saving thousands of millions.”

The monk was not convinced, but he could find nothing better to suggest than that Tito should take minor orders, and he was so persuasive that when Tito said goodbye he did not dare call him a fool, but said: “I’ll consult my conscience.” In other words, he was just like women who, when they want to leave a shop without buying, say: “I’ll come back with my husband.”

He spent two or three evenings in a café in the Via Po, which he knew well from his student days. It was still frequented by the poet who wrote in dialect and drank coffee without sugar and the old painter who specialized in landscapes of Mars and the fantastic flowers of Saturn because he could not draw the flowers and countryside of our own world. Those people were artists. People are generous with labels. If someone manages to get a little bit of clay together and make a nose with it, he’s consecrated as an artist; if someone has four books and a microscope, he passes for a scientist. But fortunately reputations are demolished as easily as they are gained.

He was told that Pietro Nocera, who had been his colleague on the newspaper in Paris, was in Turin too. In fact a few days later he met him.

“Yes,” Nocera said, “I heard about that half million coup of yours. I wasn’t in the least surprised. It doesn’t surprise me when a man steals. What surprises me is when he doesn’t. Because there’s a latent, potential thief in everyone, and I make no distinction between those who have stolen and those who haven’t stolen yet.”

“It was the opportunity,” Tito said by way of excuse. “I’d always been honest before.”

“I know. My friend Marco Ramperti says that honesty is merely long-term cunning. But what are you doing now?”

“I’m living in a furnished room, and I still have a little money laid aside. When it has all gone I shall commit suicide or become a monk.”

“Are you becoming religious?”

“No. Religions remind me of the big companies that are promoted with government support to exploit mines that no one has ever seen. Other religions oppose them, but not too violently, to prevent anyone from finding out that they too are based on nonexistent mines. But, since the honorary chairman is the Almighty, everyone takes them seriously. Perhaps I too will one day take one of them seriously, particularly as I have nothing to lose if the speculation fails. And what did you do in Paris after I left? And why did you come back to Italy?”

“I fell in love with an ordinary little woman, whom I liked because of some of her shortcomings. But she had too many of them, and some of them I didn’t like. I tried to improve her with advice and tonic and corrective reading. But trying to improve a woman with words is like spreading sugar on chestnuts in the hope of producing marrons glacés.

“After that I fell in love on the rebound with a superior woman; she belonged to the old nobility, and she was also beautiful. But I’ve discovered that in every woman, whether superior or inferior, there are always four ingredients: nobility and commonness, the prostitute and the servant. The proportions vary, but the ingredients are always the same. In a superior woman you’ll find 93 per cent nobility, but the other seven per cent…

“The trouble is that they can’t hide that seven per cent. They talk grandly; all their ideas are grand and pure and lofty, like a rainbow. They turn up their noses at the minor miseries of life. When they are with a man cabs and hired cars are too vulgar for their fragile constitutions, but when they are alone they economically take the tram. If you take them out to tea, the tip you leave the waitress, even if it’s bigger than the bill, is always too little in their generous eyes. But if they are alone what they leave in the plate is less than you’d dare offer an organ grinder. If you lose your wallet, they laugh, and they’re rude if you look worried about it. But when they have to buy a pair of laces they haggle over twenty centesimi as if they were plenipotentiaries negotiating a new frontier.”

“I know,” Tito interrupted. “I could have told you all that. When you find such defects in superior women they’re pleasing, because they are the abysses that correspond to the dizzy heights. But please go on.”

“And so I left her in Paris and came back to Turin. I’m now an estate agent. Would you like to buy some land?”

“In the cemetery, perhaps. But not yet. Haven’t you got a woman here?”

“Yes, I have,” Nocera replied. “She’s an ordinary little woman, very plain from the outside, both in her ways and in her dress, but behind her modest ways she’s a treasure of sensitive simplicity, and under her quiet clothing she wears the most delicate underwear.”

Maud’s crêpe-de-Chine underwear adorned with fine organdy pleats flashed through Tito’s mind.

“She reminds me of a Muslim house,” Nocera went on. “From the outside it’s nothing but a square whitewashed block, but inside there are the most marvelous mosaics, gardens and fountains.”

“Won’t you be going back to Paris?”

“No, Tito, no more than you will. You, I, your waiter-monk friend, your Maud, your — what’s her name? — Calomelan…”

“Kalantan.”

“… are all governed by the same destiny. We’re like dying dogs that go and hide under beds or tables. We’re like stray cats that have run wild and go back home to die. We’re products of a disintegrating society. You, I, and your waiter friend for one reason or another leave Paris, the city of big streets and big appearances, because we are approaching the death of our desires. No longer wanting, no longer being curious, is equivalent to death. Your Armenian lady, if I rightly remember what you told me about her, rapidly completed the cycle of vices to take refuge in pure love, chaste delirium, as you put it. Your Maud scaled the heights of pure love in search of vice and, to obtain the maximum amorous yield that the organs can provide, killed those very organs herself. Our lives are a relentless pursuit of ideas; your waiter friend, who was an atheist, suddenly becomes a mystic.”

“Rubbish. He wears the clothes of a mystic, but laughs at them.”

“Better still. Because of his need to renounce something he takes orders without having faith, like someone who accepts a prison sentence he doesn’t deserve. Our life is a headlong succession of passions. For a long time you couldn’t make up your mind between two women, and because your feelings were so intense, you loved both at the same time. You tell me that Maud is getting old; she, too, of her own free will joined in the race to death.

“We are all killing ourselves in different ways, and we’re dying even though our heart goes on beating. Do you remember that excellent fellow, that so likeable chief sub-editor, that systematic, methodical drinker who drank out of conviction more than out of vice? You remember what he used to say? What? You don’t remember what he said in the Café Richelieu on the day we introduced you to the Armenian lady? He said: “To me women are roving uteri that men run after with words like glory and ideals on their lips. To avoid seeing that horror, I, a drinker out of conviction, drink. And I’m killing myself.” We’re all killing ourselves. We men of our time are all killing ourselves. And the spread of cocaine is symptomatic of the poisoning to which we are all succumbing. Cocaine is not hydrochloride of cocaine; it’s the sweet voluntary death that every one of us is calling for with different voices and with different words.

“This is where I live, on the second floor. Come and see me when you feel like it. Goodbye.”

Tito walked home alone. He found the shiny, spherical cinerary urns and the monstrance in his luggage. The urns were as spherical and shiny as soap bubbles, and inside the monstrance was the nude photograph of Maud.

He took it and put it in his pocket, so that he would always have it with him.

Then he went out again.

A few minutes or a few hours later he came back, his mind firmly and irrevocably made up. He would become a monk; he too would go to the monastery that accepted spiritual failures.

I shall devote myself to the study of butterflies and beetles, like that aged friar, he said to himself. An insect is more elegant than the most elegant gentleman. There’s more brilliance in a box of tiger beetles than in the windows of all the jewelers in Paris. I’ve seen clashing colors at embassy balls, but on insects’ wings, never. I shall work in the garden, watch the miracle of the seed germinating and emerging from the earth with its tender green smile. It’s as marvelous as the mystery of love, and there’s nothing mean or cowardly about it.

And I shall grow a great big beard (he went on), a long flowing beard that will be the headquarters of all my butterflies and all my beetles, and I shall never again take cocaine, even when I have a tooth out.

At this time tomorrow I’ll knock at the door. The day after that I shall have my sandals. I shan’t have everything at once, but I shall have some things; probably the girdle. The first thing they give soldiers is a spoon and a mess tin. And in a week’s time I shall feel I’ve been a monk all my life.

“Can I come in?”

It was the landlady with a radiogram.

TELEGRAPHING ON BOARD CARONIA ON WAY GENOA BUT STOPPING ONE WEEK DAKAR TO DANCE GOVERNMENT HOUSE PLEASE MEET ME DAKAR I LOVE YOU COCAINE.

Tito took a sheet of paper and wrote:

MAUD FABREGE DANCER STEAMSHIP CARONIA LINE BUENOS AIRES-GENOA TAKING FIRST SHIP DAKAR WANT YOU DESPERATELY TITO.

And he hurried to the telegraph office.

12

“You can still see Genoa,” his neighbor at table said, offering him his binoculars, which magnified twelve times. “In half an hour we’ll be on the high seas. Where are you going?”

“To Dakar.”

“And I’m going to Teresina.”

“Who’s she?”

“Teresina’s a town in Brazil. I’m a manufacturer of food essences of my own invention.”

“What are they for?”

“They’re a complete novelty that I’m going to launch all over the world in six months’ time. It’s an absolutely amazing thing. You know that essential oils of flowers — rose, verbena, carnation, for instance — are used for making toilet waters, and there are also extracts of fruit — raspberry, lemon, tangerine and so on — from which syrups are made. But I don’t use fruit or flowers for my invention; my essences are chemical products, extracts of tar. They can be added to bread or flour and give them the taste of various dishes. The illusion is complete. Thus there’ll be extracts of cutlets à la milanaise with potatoes, underdone roast beef with artichokes, and roast chicken with asparagus. You only need a few drops.”

The sea was not so calm as it had been during Tito’s last trip.

He went pale and, like dying Meleager, pressed his fist to his abdomen and said humbly: “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go back to my cabin.”

The chemical manufacturer was offended. “Don’t these things interest you?” he said.

“After I’ve eaten talking about food makes me feel sick,” Tito explained, “I’m like those men who, after they’ve had a woman, look the other way.”

“What men?”

“All men.”

And without further ado he went down to his cabin and did not emerge until a week later, when he landed on the aromatic coast of Senegal.

Dakar.

On the wharf the white robes of Arabs and the white uniforms of European officials, whose sun helmets made dark shadows like a domino on their luminous faces, stood out among the crowd of black porters.

But there was no sign of Cocaine. He would immediately have recognized her white silhouette surmounted by the glittering halo of her sunshade.

As soon as the disembarkation formalities were over he took the road that opened straight in front of him. The Berber village was on the left and the European quarter on the right; at the end of the road a minaret rising from a kind of oasis stood out against the red sky.

There were Senegalese soldiers, khaki-clad Europeans, an Arab-type bazaar, non-commissioned officers overloaded with stripes, peaceful black civilians of indefinable age sitting on leaf mats in front of their tukuls and imperturbably smoking their hookahs.

Two blacks came up to Tito and in appalling French (the kind spoken by Calabrians who don’t understand it) offered him a shave and a shoeshine, which he declined. A few yards further on he saw a decently dressed man sitting in a chair and undergoing the ordeal of being shaved and having his shoes cleaned at the same time.

Berber women had thrown their long breasts over their shoulders to satisfy the hunger and impatience of their swaddled babies, who sucked behind their mothers’ backs with an absent-minded indifference that was indistinguishable from that of their fathers squatting on the mats and smoking their hookahs.

A small boy, four or five years old and as naked as he was born, clutched Tito’s trousers and said:

“Mossié, moà avoàr belle mere dormir avec vous, dis francs.”

Tito tried to shake him off.

“Mossié, moà avoàr très belle soeur sept ans, dormir avec vous vingt francs.”

A European providentially arrived and freed him from this importunate child. The man was the owner of a comfortable teahouse equipped with the additional attraction of a number of Berber girls. The oldest was sixteen. He explained that Berber women were the most exciting in the world, because they were hot-blooded, shaved every morning with a cut-throat razor and sprinkled themselves with rose water.

“Once you’ve had a Berber girl you’ll never want any other,” the man said.

“In that case, in view of the fact that there are very few Berber girls in my country, it would be a mistake,” Tito replied. “Instead will you be kind enough to tell me which is the best hotel in the town?”

“There it is, the Hotel République Française. So I can’t fix up anything for you, sir? You would have been very satisfied. At all events, here’s my card. Don’t hesitate to honor me at any time.”

Tito took the card. The brothel-keeper was so polite that Tito found it impossible to turn him down flat. He extricated himself as he had done a fortnight before when he said goodbye to his friend the monk, who was anxious to lead him back to God.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

The polyglot porter at the hotel informed him that Miss Maud Fabrège was indeed honoring it with her presence and was occupying rooms 9 and 17.

Tito did some quick mental arithmetic. Nine and seventeen made twenty-six which, divided by two, made thirteen.

A lucky number.

“My love, you’ve come at the worst possible moment. I’ve got to be at the officers’ club in an hour’s time for a reception in my honor, and it’s so hot in this country that I can’t get the rouge to stick to my lips. Pierina, there’s a lighter pair of stockings in that flat suitcase; can’t you see how heavy these are? These would do for ice skating. Never mind, give me any pair you like, but be quick.”

While Pierina knelt in front of her, taking off and putting on her stockings, Maud looked at Tito.

“I can see you’re well,” she said. “You haven’t kissed me yet. Never mind, I’ll give you lots of kisses when I come back, but not now, I can’t get this rouge to stick. Have I got very ugly?”

“Not in the least.”

“You don’t want to tell me, but I know I have. Look, there’s a telegram on that table.”

Tito took it.

“Read it.”

Tito read: BARBAMUS FALABIOS TAGIKO RAMUNGO BOMBAY 200,000 VIAGAROS WOLFF.

“Is that Esperanto?” he asked.

“No. You don’t know the telegraphic handbook they use in business. The telegram’s from a rich carpet merchant in Bombay, and his name is Wolff. Barbamus Falabios, etc, means that if I join him immediately (Falabios means I need urgently), he’ll pay 200,000 francs for my Ramungo, that is, my precious and delicate merchandise, plus travelling expenses there and back.”

“And what did you reply?”

“I told him that the Ramungo is no longer on the market. The poor fellow will be very unhappy, because he’s in love with me, but I can’t stand either him or anyone else any longer. The only man I still love a little is you; I’m fond of you as of a brother or a son, and so far as I’m concerned all the Barbamus Falabios in the world can go to hell. He would have been willing to come and live with me in Italy, but I’ve turned him down. He said that from Bombay we’d go to Persia, Arabia, Syria, the north coast of Africa, and then cross to Italy; it’s the route the swallows take on their return journey. Because my carpet merchant is also a poet. Now it’s four o’clock. I’ll be back at half past six, and we’ll have supper together. After that I’ve got to go and dance at the French consulate. You must come too. Goodbye.”

Tito watched her crossing the sunbaked, dusty street swaying her excessively plump hips.

“Pierina, do you think you could use your influence to get me a bath?”

“I was just coming to take your orders,” an almost Parisian waiter replied. “But it will take some time, sir.”

“For the water to be heated?”

“For it to cool.”

When the block of ice had melted, Tito stretched out in the bath and stayed there for an hour.

Then he dressed very slowly, helping himself every now and then to a greenish iced drink.

Maud Fabrège, danseuse, came back smothered with heat and roses.

The roof of the concert room in the governor’s palace was the blue sky, which was as crowded with stars as if the whole firmament had been raked to gather them into that small rectangle.

When Tito walked in almost unnoticed the audience were already in their places: European officers so suntanned that but for their gold-braided khaki uniforms they could have been taken for natives; notables solemnly wrapped in their white burnouses; some wore silk turbans, leggings, and a harmless dagger under their white robes. The bare arms of the ladies, some of whom were veiled, descended on sumptuously draped and rustling silk. From all these men and women a heavy heat emanated, mounted, surged upwards, as if the earth were trying to give back to the sky the thermal energy received from it. A small orchestra of black cello players with a nearly white conductor in an almost fashionable dinner jacket was busily playing under a small stage surrounded by fans and palms. Waiters were moving about offering melting ices on tinkling trays.

Tropical heat and colonial atmosphere are much more agreeable in the imitations found in the subterranean tabarins of Paris.

Tito looked at the program and, as Maud’s turn was to be preceded by an English conjuror, an Egyptian magician and a German chanteuse, he went out into the street.

Fruit and vegetables were rotting in the dark and deserted market place. In a café where he ordered iced tea, he found a Marseilles newspaper.

Next to him a Senegalese sergeant, loaded with medals and golden badges, was waiting for his absinthe to settle. A French soldier, a typical je-m’en-fichiste from the boulevards, came in with elastic step and complete aplomb and sat down.

The Senegalese sergeant rose and rebuked him: “Pourquoi ti pas saluer moi?” he said.

The young Parisian soldier looked with contempt at the black sergeant and said: “Foutez moi la paix, vieux con.”

“Et ça? Et ça?” the Senegalese sergeant protested pointing to the stripes on his sleeve.

“Ça? Ça c’est de la merde de pigeon,” the Parisian replied, and ordered himself some beer. The much bemedaled n.c.o. was at a loss for a reply and went back to his seat, where his absinthe had now completely settled, and he drank it with tropical austerity.

Tito went out into the street again. The sound of guitars and castanets accompanying a Spanish singer came from a sort of hut:

Dónde vas con mantón de Manila?

Dónde vas con vestido chinés?

A kind of stage manager greasily pressed him to go in and see the show, which had only just begun.

A boy sold him some oranges.

Everything in Africa has a cooked, burnt taste. Flowers smell like dried specimens in a herbarium; women’s flesh smells of stew; and when you eat fruit you have the warm sweet taste of jam in your mouth.

He retraced his steps and went back into the concert room in the governor’s palace.

The German chanteuse, who was as blonde as zabaglione, was singing Alfred de Musset’s melancholy verses to the music of the Merry Widow:

… Quand je mourrai,

Plantez un saule au cimetière.

The intellectual native ladies in the audience applauded with much perspiration and enthusiasm.

Then came Maud’s turn.

To Tito she had never looked so beautiful.

She turned and twisted in a new dance, to the rhythm beaten out by wooden heels on the stage. Her whole body seemed to be free of joints and her soft, apparently boneless arms rose towards the sky, the rectangular African sky in which all the stars in the world had gathered to watch her; oh, those miraculously bare arms, how they rose and stretched towards the stars. Maud was a soft, elastic thing that curved right, left and forward with the suppleness of a lily whose flower is so heavy that it bends its perfume-dazed body right down to the ground. Pearls of sweat shone on her breast and arms and round her ankles, and roses and hairpins fell from her loose hair. She smiled, showing all her white teeth and two big, astonished eyes like those of a bird of prey. Rouge as well as perspiration dripped from her lips; it might have been drops of blood. The black stains of her armpits shone as they had never done even in nights of passion. And she went on dancing, bending this way and that like the stalk of a lily in the grip of a hurricane.

Serpentine writhings alternated with languid amorous, feline suppleness; an evil light flashed in her eyes and gave way to a smile of caressing sweetness. Passion, capriciousness, cruelty, evil succeeded each other in her eyes.

Tito remembered a dance like this long ago in distant Paris at a white mass in Kalantan’s villa on the Champs Elysées. How everything repeated itself, how everything returned.

Cocaine went down on her knees and bent backwards, forming a bridge, as if offering her sex to the pit.

She rose again and smiled.

Rage suddenly overwhelmed her; her heels beat a furious tattoo and she writhed as if transfixed by some unclean thing; then she sank to the floor, rose again, twisted and turned, smiled at the sky, then paused motionless for a moment, gazing at the stars as if transfixed by wonder; then she collapsed like a lifeless body and did not rise again except to smile and thank the audience that applauded with black hands and incomprehensible cries.

Tito could see nothing but the violet nails on hundreds of brown applauding hands.

Outside in the street there was a queue of antiquated cars.

The burnouses, the turbans, the bare arms, the khaki uniforms, the musicians, the Egyptian magician and a woman with a box of instruments under her arm all left; so did the blonde German singer, surrounded by a group of hungry officers; and last of all came Maud, alone.

The heat had gone, and a refreshing breeze came from the sea.

Tito put his arm round Cocaine’s waist, and they walked towards the white point of a mosque set in a kind of oasis where two endless caravan routes began.

They walked in the night and in solitude (after leaving the last huts behind them) with the springy steps of a couple of adolescents going for their first evening walk after declaring their love for each other. But a feeling of approaching death hung over them.

“I left Buenos Aires to go back to Italy, and tonight I’ve danced for the last time. I’m not beautiful any longer. I’ve put a little money aside, and I shall retire to that fourth floor flat facing the courtyard where the smells from rich kitchens gave me a frantic desire to be well off. Do you remember? Perhaps I may still find some man who won’t dislike me, or perhaps I’ll die alone. I’m at a point in my life when I’m faced with a parting of the ways, like these two great roads leading heaven knows where in Africa. I think that whichever I choose will lead to my dying in poverty sooner or later.”

That was how Maud spoke, inconsolably. But Tito had never believed in human discouragement. Basically we are all optimists. There are people who actually look for love in the advertisement columns of a newspaper. With the passing of time we develop a capacity for compensation, like the blind, who develop their senses of touch and hearing. As we grow old we adapt ourselves. Artists who believe they are finished when their first gray hair appears still feel young when they have white beards. Women who genuinely resign themselves to spinsterhood at the age of thirty discover at the age of thirty-five that their hopes of finding a husband have revived. When the first wrinkle appears they say I’m ugly and no man will ever look at me again, but ten years later they know they are still capable of kindling incendiary passions.

You can’t be a woman’s last lover because, however old or ugly she may be, she still believes she will be able to find another one.

But Cocaine went on: “I asked you to come and meet me at Dakar so that we could do the last lap of the journey home together. The letter you wrote to me about your life in Turin was so sad and so lonely that I felt terribly sorry for you. You talked about dying. I too feel ready to die.”

Cocaine spoke these words in quiet, subdued tones, with one of her arms in Tito’s heated hand. They walked without heeding where they were going; the immensity of the desert is more difficult than the most complicated labyrinth.

A patrol of soldiers emerged from the darkness and stopped.

“Be careful,” the corporal in charge said, “because very soon the Great West African Express will be coming, and you’re near the line. It’s a very treacherous train, because you don’t hear it, as there are no walls in this solitude to echo and transmit the noise.”

“Thank you,” said Tito.

“Pas du tout, mon prince. Bonne nuit à la dame.”

And the patrol disappeared.

To Tito Cocaine had looked more beautiful and more desirable than ever before. But her renewed beauty gave him pain, not pleasure, for he felt that if he was to be her last lover there would be a long time to wait until its destruction was complete. Cocaine saw herself as ugly and felt old, but she was not yet old or ugly enough to be unable to please. Tito could not yet hope for the pleasure of being the last.

There was to be another reception for her next day at the home of the head of the custom house, she had accepted an invitation to the British consulate on Thursday, and on Saturday she was expected at the villa of a rich native merchant. In that colony of Europeans tired of odorous, wild black female flesh Maud’s Nordic perfume would still rouse some interests. Tito was sure that the renunciatory intentions she had just expressed would vanish at the first smile of some European libertine.

That was what Tito felt. But Cocaine, her will broken and in a state of nervous exhaustion, was like an inert mass that could be molded by any strong will.

“You said you’d be ready to die,” Tito murmured. “You said you felt finished, that you no longer had anything to look forward to. I too am a walking corpse. I too have nothing to look forward to but death. If I asked you to die with me tonight, would you agree?”

Cocaine stopped for a moment. A star flashed across the horizon. The woman suddenly turned as if she had been touched by something; Tito’s eyes were shining as they did when he was under the influence of the white drug that the one-legged peddler sold him in that café in Montmartre.

“Would you be willing to die?”

“Yes.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“Straight away?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I offer you the most beautiful, the most exciting death in the world. Very soon the fastest train in West Africa will be passing on this track. It has been traveling for days and days and will be traveling for many more, and it travels blindly, without seeing where it’s going or what it crushes or sweeps out of its path. The crew go to sleep over the brakes and they go on and on in a straight line day and night.”

“Do you want it to run you over?”

“Yes.”

“But Tito, don’t you see that you’re not talking like an inhabitant of this world, that you’re talking like a character in a novel? You’re beside yourself.”

“Yes. Being carried away, being beside oneself, is a hand held out to us by destiny, a shove that it gives us when our will is insufficient. The African night, your voice, your perspiration, all that carries me away; and your discouragement, your disillusionment with life encourages me to die. Think how exciting it will be to lie down on this endless track with our cheeks against the cold steel, to feel for the last time our bodies clinging to each other, trembling with fear. Every light we think we see in the distance, every noise we think we hear will give us a tremor as long as eternity. And in our last embrace, which will be the most exciting in our lives, we shall hear the clatter of the train and see its shadow approaching, we shall shrink like beaten dogs, but the black monster will be on us, crushing us and mixing our blood for ever. Remember that neither you nor I have anything more to hope for from life. We’re tired. We’re as good as dead already. Come, let me kiss you for the last time.”

And Tito, passionately uttering these words, put his arms round Maud, who had nearly fainted, and forced her to kneel, then sit, then lie on the ground. The sky was a perfect concave; you could see its completely circular edge as you can out at sea. Cocaine was pale; her brow was wet with perspiration and her eyes marvelously dilated as if she could see above her the face of death.

It was the face of Tito who was lying on top of her, frenziedly kissing her mouth, her throat, her eyes. Under her back the endless rail extended like a blade. It hurt, because all her weight was on it, as well as Tito’s weight on top of her.

“Cocaine,” Tito groaned without ceasing to kiss her cheeks and bite her lips. “Cocaine, these are the last minutes. Tell me again you love me.”

“I love you,” she moaned with the voice of one who is dying.

“I want you,” Tito hoarsely exclaimed, stifling her with the pressure of his mouth on hers and holding her in his arms as if to crush her to death, “I want you. I want to die taking you for the last time. I want to be your last lover.”

“Yes,” she cried. “Take me.”

With trembling hands Tito tore off her light clothing, and when she was completely naked he started frantically kissing her whole body, her breast, her eyes, her armpits, tearing out hairs with his teeth and sucking the perspiring flesh that bled as a result of his bites.

“Take me,” she cried again.

For a moment the two bodies were one. She saw Tito’s bloodshot, panting face on her own face, framed by stars and the blue sky; she felt herself being crushed between the hard steel rail and the weight of the panting man who was putting the ardor of a whole lifetime and the frenzy of all his passion into this last experience.

The man who was about to die suffered as he had never suffered before, because this was the last time.

She was vibrant as she had never been before, because she had never experienced this sensation more wonderful than death.

His face was a single contraction of muscles and was covered with foam, his eyes shone like enamel and his rhythm was as violent as if he were transfixing her with a knife.

Suddenly he began slowly groaning, and stopped. The contractions ceased, his brow became smooth, his eyes lost that terrifying light, and all his muscles relaxed. His cruel arms slackened their grip, and he rose to his feet.

Cocaine was still lying in the same position. There was nothing shameless in her motionless nudity in the immensity of the night under the purity of the stars.

But her lover, her last lover, looked southward, and saw a black shadow drawing nearer on the shining rails.

He picked up the naked woman and laid her on the dry grass a few yards away from the track.

The Great West Africa Express appeared and thundered past, and the huge draft caused pieces of torn mauve lingerie decorated with small organdy pleats to rise and flutter in the air.

Cocaine opened her eyes and watched the black, puffing trail of lights speeding through the night and disappearing, leaving the endless steel railway track behind it.

The train crushed even its own sparks.

Tito, without speaking, helped Maud to dress and pin together her torn clothing, and they walked back to the town and the hotel.

They kissed once more at the door of her room.

Next afternoon, while Maud was drinking a melted banana ice at another reception in her honor, Tito embarked in a ship leaving for Genoa. Just when the propellers started to sing their melancholy and gay farewell ballad, Tito put his hand in his pocket and found a visiting card.

Who’s he? he said to himself. Where did I come across this chap?

Then he remembered.

He was the European who had sung the praises of Berber women soon after his arrival and had told him he had several available, the oldest of whom was sixteen.

Tito looked again at the visiting card and smiled.

If I’d taken advantage of his offer, my suicidal intentions would have disappeared, he said to himself. Even on this occasion my jealousy was the product of long abstinence, of accumulated desire.

He remembered that on the way back to the hotel with Cocaine on the previous night he had felt much calmer after possessing her on the railway line. It had occurred to him that she might well give herself to someone else next day, but the thought did not make him suffer.

Dakar was already receding into the distance. Tito, standing in the stern, remembered the times when he had hurried to Kalantan to stifle the jealousy caused by Maud. Even then he had known that jealousy was a physical, glandular phenomenon. He knew that when the glands were emptied jealousy disappeared.

But sometimes, only too often, he had forgotten it.

Now his senses were calm, because the night before under the breath of death and the blowing of the breeze he had got rid of all his jealousy on that endless steel rail.

But now? Now that the steamer was taking him away; now that the rhythm and the exciting perfume of the sea, the memories, the eroticism with which the corridors, saloons and cabins of transatlantic liners are filled would revive his desire and his jealousy. How was he going to live now that Maud had given him more ecstatic pleasure than ever before, now that he had seen her beauty reborn and had seen her dancing marvelously, now that he liked her more than ever.

Now that he had tried to die with her, how would he find the courage to face death alone?

He looked towards Dakar, but it was out of sight.

The ship was in the middle of the ocean and the sky was above, concave, with an exactly circular edge all round it, just as on the evening before, when it had arched over him and over Cocaine’s brow — which had been whiter than a corpse’s — and over their last embrace.

And he repeated to the sea the sweet name of Cocaine.

Cocaine, as pale as the powder that intoxicates and kills; Cocaine, passive woman, as irresponsible as a lifeless being, a pinch of poison that seeks out no one but kills when swallowed; Cocaine, the inert creature who had been willing to die when Tito suggested it, but agreed to live when he no longer wanted to die; Cocaine, who gave herself to anyone who wanted her and refused no one, because refusing is an effort; Cocaine, woman made of white, exquisite poison, the poison of our time, the poison that lures one to sweet death.

Once more Tito’s luck was in, because the sea was again so rough that he had to stay in his cabin all the way to Genoa.

And, since it’s better to leave a wretched man alone when he is ill, I ask the reader to leave his cabin for a moment, particularly as I have something to confide.

What I have to say is this.

The Great West Africa Express that I said passed Dakar doesn’t exist. But it’s not my fault. It suited me to put it there.

Also, while I’m about it I may as well confess that the Hotel Napoléon in the Place Vendôme, where Tito and Maud stayed for some months, is another invention of mine. I could have put them in the Bristol, or the snobbish and conventional Ritz, but I don’t want to give hotels any publicity, for one thing because they don’t need any publicity from me.

And now let us go back into Tito’s cabin, where he is packing his bags, because the port of Genoa is in sight.

13

As Tito had foreseen, after a few days’ separation he was overwhelmed by the memory of Cocaine. Every now and again he stopped in the street and, taking careful precautions to avoid being surprised, took the naked photograph of her from his pocket and looked at it.

“Are you back in Turin?” Nocera said to him.

“As you see.”

“And what are you going to do here?”

“I’m going to die.”

“Couldn’t you do it there?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You’re quite right, it’s too hot in Senegal. It’s less trouble to go on living.”

Nocera gave this jocular reply because he did not believe in Tito’s suicidal intentions. He had talked about them too much. A person who is determined on suicide keeps his mouth shut to avoid giving people a chance to prevent him. A person determined to take his own life does it without warning.

One day Tito had said: “I’ve tried everything in life: love, gambling, stimulants, narcotics, work, idleness, theft; I’ve met women of all races and men of every color. The only thing I haven’t encountered yet is death, and I want to try it.”

Pietro Nocera thought these words represented a love of rhetoric rather than an irrevocable decision.

“Don’t act the tragedian, Tito,” he replied. “Don’t talk about dying. Life is a pochade, a farce.”

“Yes, Nocera, I know, but I don’t enjoy it. I’m leaving before the end of the performance.”

“There’s literary affectation on your winding sheet,” Nocera said. “You won’t kill yourself. You talk about it too much, and even while doing so you’re looking for a hook to hold on to to show yourself how wrong you are. Your real object in talking to me like this is to get me to produce arguments that will enable you to say triumphantly: What you’re saying is quite right, you’ve convinced me, now I shan’t kill myself. But what I say to you, my dear Tito, is: You’re quite right, carry on and do it.”

“Bravo, Nocera. Encouragement was just what I wanted from you. The only thing I’m still doubtful about is how to do it. Gassing oneself is too slow. It’s not polite to keep death hanging about when it’s we who have invited him; he shouldn’t creep in through the tradesmen’s entrance, but come straight in through the front door. The ideal would be to die on the high seas. That’s the best way of dying. In a first class saloon, on a fantastic night, one of those mid-ocean parties vibrant with music, blue distances and rhythm. Surrounded by millionaire décolleté ladies, dressed only in ribbons and diamonds; beautiful, radiant women loaded with jewels and rejuvenated for the occasion. Men in tails engaged in intercontinental deals. Toasts, champagne, the orchestra playing ragtime, a dancer performing on a stage surrounded by palms and garlanded with lights. A cosmopolitan hum contributed to by Chinese, blacks, mulattos, merchants, bons viveurs, diplomatists, cocottes exchanging continents to increase their fees or recover their long-lost virginity. A crowd of people brought together on that ship by chance, by destiny, on different pretexts but for the same purpose, death.

“Suddenly there’s a crash, and thousands of people exclaim. There are a few revolver shots, water pours in, submerges everyone, stifles voices, makes tables float and carpets swell; the lights go out, the ship sinks rapidly and you’re beneath a veil, beneath a charmeuse of blue water with the rhythm of ragtime still in your ears making a delightful funeral march. I think I could die almost without resisting; while the others struggled frantically in the water I should still be capable, if not of lighting a cigarette, certainly of calmly chewing a piece of gum. But alas, my dear Nocera, as I suffer from seasickness that kind of death is not for me. So I shall have to think of something else but, believe me, it would be splendid to be buried at sea, without the humiliation of being put in a coffin and buried in the filthy muck that’s called humus. As you, Nocera, will be responsible for the disposal of my body, I want you to have me cremated.”

“How stupid.”

“Yes, I know. Jean Moréas said he wanted to be cremated just because it was idiotic.”

“So far as I’m concerned,” Nocera said, “I don’t care whether they dump me in a swamp or bury me in Westminster Abbey.”

“But I like the idea of fooling the eight kinds of underground insect that are already counting on feasting on my dead body,” Tito replied. “To be eaten after death is revolting, but to be eaten while still alive is not. Think of that noble creature the oyster, which is eaten alive. So you, Nocera, will be responsible for my cremation; it’s an interesting thing to see. Haven’t you ever seen it? The body seems still alive, it rises, twists and turns, kneels, contracts its arms, assumes comically obscene attitudes.”

“It isn’t true.”

“You’ll see for yourself when I’m cremated, and you’ll admit that I’m right. But let us keep to the point. Recommend me a good way of dying.”

“Throw yourself from the fifth story.”

“There’s a risk of landing on someone else’s balcony.”

“Throw yourself under a train.”

“I’ve already tried that, and I don’t like it. Besides, nowadays trains are always late.”

Pietro Nocera lost patience. “I don’t know what to advise you,” he said. “If you’re as choosy as that, you don’t ask for advice and you don’t kill yourself. You go on living.”

So Tito started thinking things over by himself, and after long reflection came to the following conclusion: If I take a strong poison or fire five rounds into my head with a revolver, I’m only too sure of dying. Instead I want some thing that leaves me a possible way out or, to put it more precisely, a form of violence against myself that will allow destiny (if it exists) to save me if it doesn’t want me to die. If I swallow some corrosive sublimate tablets I shall die for certain, and destiny won’t be able to interfere, and if I throw myself from the top of a bell-tower I’ll smash my skull on the pavement, and destiny, fate, the Almighty won’t stop me in mid-air. I want to let chance save me if it wants to.

He said these things to himself on the way to the hospital.

He read some notices, went through a door, asked a porter for directions, smelled an odor of cleanliness and carbolic acid, walked up a few steps and down a corridor.

The woman doctor he was looking for came towards him with masculine-looking hands and wearing a white coat that preserved her feminine gracefulness.

They had been to university together, had worked at anatomy together, and had followed the same route from one clinic to another. For a short time Tito had been slightly in love with her, and at another time she had been in love with him, but only mildly, more in play than in real emotion. But there had never been a favorable occasion for revealing their feelings. When Tito left the university he promised to see her again. He sent her a picture postcard of the Eiffel Tower, and she replied with one of the Palazzo Carignano (the work of Juvara) and the question: “What are you up to nowadays?” to which he did not reply.

“Yes, Arnaudi, our lives might have taken a different course,” she said to him. “I remember one winter morning when we went together to the skin and venereal diseases department. You had said some very nice things to me, with a rather touching shyness. It was cold; the trees in the avenue were bare and the ramifications of the branches were like the bronchi in anatomical textbooks. You went into a tobacconist’s, and I waited outside. I decided that when you came out I’d tell you that I liked you. But you came out swearing at the state, or the tobacco, or the tobacconist, and the conversation went off at a tangent. The skin and venereal diseases department was close; we went in, and the subject never arose again.”

“I should have been happier,” Tito sadly confessed. “Our whole life can depend on our jumping into one tram instead of another, on going into a tobacconist’s, on leaving home a minute earlier or a minute later.”

Tito added that those who had had to change their job or the subject of their studies unconsciously regretted the books or the tools of the trade they had given up. It was like one’s first love; one never forgot it, because it seemed the only one worthwhile. He spoke as if his whole life had been embittered by regret for the microscope, the test tubes, the auscultations, the analyses, and the reactions; and he asked whether he might have a look at the laboratories, the operating theaters, the wards.

“I’ll be delighted to show you round,” she said. “Shall we begin with the wards?”

They left the laboratory and walked through a big ward with big frosted glass windows. There were several silent nuns and a smell of cooking and disinfectant. They passed between two long rows of white beds, all exactly alike but distinguished from one another by labels, and they stopped at the most typical cases and also at the strangest. How many different illnesses there were in all those identical beds; how many different destinies in those uniform and symmetrical wards. The young woman doctor took Tito to this bed and that, lingering over the most interesting cases and telling him about the latest methods of diagnosis and treatment.

In the surgical department, which smelt of iodoform, a sister was consoling a frantic patient. “Remember that you already have one leg in paradise,” she was saying, “and that you’ll soon be going to join it.”

They went into another ward.

More beds and more passages between them. Silent nuns, white coats, high windows with frosted glass.

The body of a colonel, with his medals and sword, lay on a low pallet. His cap was on the pillow beside his head.

“A hat on a bed is unlucky,” Tito said with a smile.

“What misfortune could happen to him now that he’s dead?”

“That of resuscitation.”

They went into the amphitheater. Tito had sat on those semicircular benches not so many years before.

“This is where we always sat,” the young woman said. “Do you remember? I sat here and you sat on my right.”

They went up to the next floor, walked through some more wards, tried different equipment, and went back to the laboratory.

In a glass case there were some big glass jars full of yellow alcohol, each of which contained a human fetus. There were fetuses of three, four, five, six, seven and eight months, some with the umbilical cord wound round them like a curl, others with an ironical smile, and others again with a derisive expression. But all their faces were cheerful, and there was a mocking quality in the attitude of their hands, as if they were cocking a snook at the life that had not succeeded in laying hold of them.

The next room contained big glass cases, full of vertical tubes with cotton wool stoppers reminiscent of eighteenth-century powdered wigs.

“Are they bacteria cultures?”

“Yes,” his attractive companion replied. “Diphtheria, pneumonia, malaria, typhoid,” she continued, pointing to the various tubes, on each of which was a label. While she was telling him how bacteria were stained for examination under the microscope, a man with huge feet emerging from under his white coat went by.

“Doctor,” the young woman said, leaving Tito alone in front of the tubes containing the bacteria cultures, “they telephoned from the anatomy institute; they want a woman’s body, if possible a young one.”

“I haven’t anything at the moment,” the doctor replied after a moment’s thought, “but I hope something will be available at latest by this evening. A woman’s body did you say? Yes, I’ll get one. Tell the professor I hope to let him have it this evening.”

And he went into the next room.

Tito took advantage of the woman doctor’s momentary absence to help himself to one of the glass tubes and hide it in an inside pocket.

He stayed a little longer, listening distractedly and impatiently to what his guide told him, and as soon as he could he hurried home, lovingly stroking the tube of bacteria culture through the outside of his jacket. Typhoid, typhoid bacteria, he said to himself. I’ll drink the lot and I shall die. It’s the kind of death I want. If fate wants to save me, it will send me a doctor able to cure me.

He shook the viscous liquid, poured it into a glass, and drank it. It tasted sour, and brackish.

A bacteria culture doesn’t make at all a bad drink, he said to himself.

He washed it down with a liqueur glassful of chartreuse.

He took from his wallet the naked photograph of Cocaine, looked at it, and put it back.

He sat at his desk, took a blank sheet of paper and wrote: “I’m committing suicide because I’m tired of life. Every intelligent man when he reaches the age of twenty-eight should do the same.

“I want no priests at my funeral. But, since priests are not for the dead but for the living, if any priests attend I want a rabbi and a Waldensian pastor to be present also. I have a great deal of liking for priests of all religions, because either they are in good faith, in which case I consider them worthy of admiration, or they are in bad faith, in which case they are to be admired, as are all skillful mystifiers.

“I wish to be put in my coffin wearing green pajamas and with my hands in my pockets.

“I wish to be cremated.

“I wish my ashes to be put in my two multi-colored cinerary urns, one to be kept in my memory by Pietro Nocera, the other by my Maud Fabrège.

“I leave all my books and my clothes to Pietro Nocera. I leave my gilt monstrance to my friend the monk. I leave my few articles of jewelry to Maud Fabrège (Maddalena Panardi).

“I leave my money to the Society for the Protection of Animals.”

He added his signature and the date, put the document in an envelope so large that it needed a double dose of saliva, and wrote on it: My last Will and Testament, to be opened immediately after my death.

And to dispel melancholy he went out, carefully looking left and right to avoid being run over and killed by a tram.

He put one or two pinches of the white drug up his nose and went into a cinema. But he didn’t see anything.

When I told my mother I had a toothache she sent me to the dentist to have it out (he said to himself). When I had a boil, she squeezed it for me. When I told her I was suffering because of a girl she told me not to be silly. Soon after I was born my father sent for a priest. Since he sent for one priest rather than another I worshipped one God rather than another. When I changed my religion they called me a renegade because I no longer wanted to use the priest my father used. When I was a boy they taught me manners; but manners are nothing but lying, pretending not to know something that someone doesn’t want us to know, smiling at persons whom we should like to spit at, saying, “Thank you” when we should like to say, “Go to hell.” A few years later I rebelled against manners and made a display of the pleasures of sincerity, but later I realized that sincerity did me nothing but harm, so I reverted to lying. So I might just as well have followed the original teaching from the outset. First they told me that vox populi, public opinion, was right. In certain circumstances that closely concerned me I made enquiries for myself and discovered that public opinion was wrong. But since then I have gone into the matter more deeply and have been forced to admit that public opinion was right, after all. When everyone says that X is a thief and Y is a tart, you don’t believe it. For a year or two you swear that both are the soul of honor and purity, but when you’ve known them for three years you realize that there’s a great deal of dishonesty in him and a great deal of whorishness in her, so you might just as well have accepted vox populi at the outset. When I was twenty they told me to swear loyalty to the King, a person who acts in that capacity because his father and grandfather did the same before him. I took the oath because they forced me to, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. Then they sent me to kill people I didn’t know who were dressed rather like I was. One day they said to me: “Look, there’s one of your enemies, fire at him,” and I fired, but missed. But he fired and wounded me. I don’t know why they said it was a glorious wound.

Meanwhile the cinema program continued. The various items were followed by intervals, and Tito stayed in his seat, letting his mind wander. He had used up all the cocaine in the box. An attendant came and told him he had seen the whole program three times and asked him to leave.

In the street his mind went on wandering in a very disconnected fashion. He told himself that he had now reached the age of twenty-eight, which is the tragic age for male lovers; you no longer have the vigor of a young lover and don’t yet have the money of an old one. If a woman loves you, he said to himself, she’s willing to make any sacrifice for you; when she has fallen out of love with you, she’s capable of anything to give vent to her malice, slandering and plotting and setting traps for you. He ridiculed ideals; behind the noblest aspirations lay the metallic clink of money. Old feelings that had disappeared revived in him. There was no such thing as love without jealousy; only women and pimps maintained the opposite. He considered original ways of committing suicide, such as plunging headlong from the gallery into the stalls at a theater. Women willing to give themselves to anyone refused the man who loved them on the day when they fell out of love with him. On the day they gave themselves to you they were making a great concession; but when you reproached them for giving themselves to another they insisted it was a trifle of no importance.

He went to cafés frequented by businessmen.

I’ve never understood how one can live by trade, that is, by selling for a hundred something that cost you ten (he said to himself). Whenever I’ve tried to sell anything, I sold for ten what cost me a hundred and fifty.

He decided that if he were born again he would be a vagrant or a beggar. Money was valuable only in so far as you could spend it. If you had to work, you had no time to spend what you earned. The thing to do was to be born rich or to rob. What did killing a man amount to? Five minutes was enough to plan, carry out, repent and forget the deed. Since it did not take more than thirty seconds, what did a painful deed (painful for the other party) amount to in comparison with the happiness of a lifetime?

Every now and then he remembered that he was close to death. The bacteria had begun their charitable work. He felt he was leaving life as tired and bored as if he were leaving a courtesan’s bed, and he congratulated himself on always having been bored; blessed are the bored, because they leave without complaint.

And since the leaven of his whole life had been women, his disconnected thoughts invariably returned to them. You wrack your brains about the psychological, physiological, pathological reasons why the woman you love deceives you, he said to himself. But more often than not a woman will give herself just because she has a beautiful pair of garters that she wants to have admired.

He recalled, but painlessly, some incidents from his love life. Cocaine, his distant Cocaine, gave him the exaltation of an hour; after possessing her he felt exultation, an enthusiasm for life, but an hour later dejection, taedium vitae, jealousy, fear of losing her, incurable depression set in. The woman and the drug produced the same toxic phenomena that were now leading to his death. If he had not met her, he would now be a doctor and would be looking into a microscope without seeing anything, or, perhaps, seeing everything. The blind eyes of a poet like Homer or Milton saw more than any arrogant precision instrument.

In his mind’s eye he formed a picture of Cocaine in old age; she had grown ugly, but was cleverly made up. My unhappiness, he said to himself, comes from a tube of scarlet for the lips, a blue pencil and a packet of face powder.

He vaguely regretted not having accepted the suggestion of his friend the monk. Asceticism, whether you had no desire, like a eunuch, or had it no longer, like St Francis of Assisi, was a sign of little vitality. I could be a mystic now (he said to himself). Mysticism was merely virility in a state of liquidation; sperm that had gone bad.

But why am I having these fantastic ideas? I must be a bit feverish, he said to himself, feeling his pulse on his way home. He found a thermometer in a drawer and put it under his armpit; his temperature was 102.

He put back the thermometer, took off one shoe, then the other, undressed, and got into bed.

He had all the symptoms of tonsillitis: fever, general debility… But how could it be tonsillitis? He had swallowed typhoid bacteria, so it must be an anomalous form of typhoid.

He recapitulated his death program. I want to leave fate the widest possible choice in the matter. I shall act like an ordinary patient, send for the doctor, tell him the symptoms, follow his advice (he said to himself). If fate wants me to live, I shall live and put no obstacles in its way. If it wants me to die, I shall do no more to stand in its way than any ordinary patient. I shall tell no one I made myself ill. If fate wants the doctor to find out, he’ll find out by himself.

He slept a feverish, agitated sleep for a few hours. When he woke up, Pietro Nocera, his landlady and Maud were by his bedside.

Maud had arrived from Senegal a few hours before and had sought him out immediately.

At the sight of her he felt a vague desire to live. He remembered that in typhoid cases bladders of ice are placed on the patient’s belly, so he asked for some, pending the arrival of the doctor.

“Shall I make him a zabaglione, Signor Nocera?” the landlady asked.

“Yes,” said Nocera.

“No,” said Tito, remembering that food is forbidden to typhoid patients. The régime consists of fasting and ice on the belly. Ice on the belly and fasting.

Maud, who had gone to answer the door, announced the doctor.

The celebrated Professor Libani, a very up-to-date young scientist with golden hair, golden spectacles and a great deal of goldsmith’s work on his hands and his belly, walked in.

He sat down, directed a clinical eye at the patient, felt his pulse, pulled the sheet down and the patient’s pajama jacket up, palpated, auscultated, observed, and sat down again to translate his scientific findings into ordinary speech.

When he opened his mouth the word that Tito expected to hear was “typhoid.” What the doctor actually said was: “You drink goat’s milk.”

“No, doctor.”

“Yes, you do. You drink goat’s milk.”

“Out of the question, doctor.”

“How do you know? You drink what the milkman gives you.”

“The milkman gives me nothing because I can’t stand that disgusting glandular excretion, milk. I drank it when I was a child up to the age of ten months, because that was all I was given. But as soon as the light of reason dawned —”

“Never mind,” the doctor gravely admitted. “You have…”

Again Tito expected to hear the ominous word “typhoid.”

“You have septicemia, that is, a blood infection.”

“Is it serious?” Maud asked, growing pale.

“No,” said the doctor. “The first thing to do is throw away that ice bladder; then you must have some high-pressure enemas to cleanse the bowels.”

“Enemas of what?” the landlady asked.

“Several pints of physiological serum, that is, salt and water. When the temperature has gone, or gone down, you can eat whatever you like.”

Tito opened his eyes wide. Good heavens, he said to himself, typhoid results in intestinal perforations, and to avoid irritating and enlarging them fasting is prescribed. But this doctor tells me to eat, and prescribes high-pressure enemas that will swell my intestine like a tire. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to interfere with the working of chance. Chance has put me in the hands of a doctor who has diagnosed the wrong illness and prescribed treatment which is the opposite of what perhaps might save me. I shall eat, have the enemas and burst.

All the same he made a suggestion. “Excuse me, doctor,” he said, “might it not be typhoid?”

“Absolutely out of the question,” the doctor replied. “The general symptoms of typhoid are absent; that is, the violent headache, the torpor, the diffuse pains in the bones. The spleen is hardly palpable, there’s no rash on the belly, and the pulse is too high in relation to the temperature. You know that in typhoid the pulse rate is inversely proportional to the temperature, but your temperature is 102 and your pulse 100. But if you want to be certain you’d better have a blood test. I’ll come back and do it later today.”

He rinsed his hands, gravely dried them, and obsequiously walked out of the room.

Nocera, Maud and the landlady talked to him quietly in the next room, and then they came back to the bedside to ask the patient which he wanted first, the meal or…

“I don’t mind which,” said Tito who, knowing the true nature of his illness, was very well aware that either would be fatal to him.

“So we’ll give you the enema first while this lady cooks you a beefsteak à la milanaise as big as that,” Nocera said.

“All right,” the patient said stoically.

And he lay face downwards, determinedly submissive, while five pints of water were noisily injected into his sensitive inside. The rubber tube hanging from the wall reminded him of the hookahs he had seen being smoked by rich blacks squatting on mats outside their huts at Dakar.

“Now turn over and sit up, because you’re going to eat,” said Nocera.

The condemned man turned over, sat up and took the steak, like Socrates taking the hemlock from the hands of the servant of the Eleven. When he had finished it he lay on his side, closed his eyes and imagined what was happening to it. Now it has gone through the esophagus, it’s making its way through the cardia and into the stomach, it’s welcomed by the gastric juices, it gets some rather rough treatment from peristalsis, it emerges from the pylorus, enters the duodenum and then the jejunum and turns over and over in the ileum. If mine is an iliac typhoid, heaven knows how many bacteria there are. Oh, here we are at the ascending colon. First of all, the caecum, the caecum with the vermiform appendix; take care at the level crossing, there’s a risk of appendicitis; but let’s go on; the transverse colon, and the descending colon. I noticed a theater called the Colon at Buenos Aires… But can my steak have got as far as that? On its journey it has met some distinguished characters with noble names that have changed its appearances, bile, trypsin, steapsin and amylopsin. Heaven knows what sort of reception they’ve given all those delightful bacteria that were floating about in that tube. By this time I ought to be dead. Why aren’t I dead?

“Calm yourself, calm yourself, darling,” Maud said to him, seeing how agitated he was.

His slight fever clouded his mind, just as cocaine had done the first time he took it at the hotel in the Place Vendôme, and he raved in the same way.

No, he said to himself, God isn’t a great humorist, He’s a small, wretched one. He has the mentality of a surveyor. To kill off multitudes He makes us wars and epidemics. He hasn’t even a sense of unfairness. The only odd thing I’ve ever caught Him at is allowing pockets to be picked in church while the victim is praying, but He has never had a really grandiose idea. In His position I’d eliminate the force of gravity. When you tried to throw away a cigarette end, it would stay in your hand. When you tried going downstairs, you’d have to go down on your knees, put your head down and pull yourself down by your hands, which would be a bigger effort than going upstairs. Or I’d increase the earth’s centrifugal force; instead of making it go round in twenty-four hours, I’d make it go round in one, hurling everything for vast distances and causing catastrophic disorder. Japanese pagodas would end up on the glaciers of Mont Blanc, Muslim minarets would be dipped like biscuits into the crater of Vesuvius, and the Pyramid of Cheops would end up in the Place de la Concorde. No, God is not an artist. For slaughtering people He uses killers so minute that you can’t even tell whether they are vegetable or animal. What a limited mentality the Almighty has, and how deficient He is in dignity.

“Calm down, calm down, my love,” Maud said to him again. “He’s feverish. Should we give him a morphine injection, doctor?”

“It’s not necessary,” the doctor replied. “We shall now give him the blood test. As a result,” the physician explained while he tied two cords round the patient’s arm to make his veins swell, “we shall know for certain that he’s not suffering from typhoid. I’m more than convinced of it already. There’s no swelling of the spleen, and there’s no rash.”

In spite of the fever Tito still understood something of what was said and had brief flashes of lucidity. When he heard the word rash he said: “There’s no rash, but there are the bacteria. Who knows how many thousands of millions I’ve swallowed.”

When the vein had swollen the doctor pricked it with a syringe, extracted some blood, put it into a sterile tube, and took it away.

The doctor came back next day (Tito had slept excellently) and announced that the result was negative. None of the various kinds of typhoid or paratyphoid A or paratyphoid B were present.

“So we can be satisfied on that point,” he said. “It’s not typhoid. To make still more certain we can, if we like, apply the urine test, Ehrlich’s so-called diazo reagent.”

“Let us do so, then.”

“Certainly. In the meantime go on eating and persist with the enemas.”

Tito still believed himself to be under the hallucinatory influence of cocaine. He knew that the treatment for the disease from which he was suffering was to leave the organism alone as much as possible but, though they tormented him with those jets of water and forced him to eat, he did not die. In fact he felt better. He was undergoing exactly the opposite of what was scientifically prescribed for typhoid, but his condition did not deteriorate.

“The diazo reagent has been negative too,” the doctor announced triumphantly on his fourth visit. “In any case, we excluded typhoid from the outset. And I note with pleasure that there has been a distinct improvement.”

“Yes,” said Maud. “He’s very agitated in the morning and the evening, but he’s calm in the afternoon.”

“It’s as if the bacteria took an afternoon rest,” Tito remarked.

“But he still has a temperature.”

“It’ll go down,” the doctor promised, as he put on his overcoat.

After he left, Nocera said to Maud: “I don’t see any improvement. To me he seems to be just the same as on the first day.”

“Shall we get another opinion?”

“That’s what I should do.”

Tito had no objection. He would have agreed if they had suggested sending for an electrician or giving him vitriol to drink.

Another doctor came. He was a typical physician of the old school. He remained standing by the bed with his arms crossed over his belly as if he were leaning on a windowsill. He felt the patient’s pulse, looked at his tongue, consulted his watch and a thermometer, and went through the usual exorcistic routine.

“Who’s your doctor?” he asked.

Nocera mentioned a name. The doctor made a grimace that betrayed what he thought.

“And what did he say?”

“A blood infection. Septicemia.”

“Rubbish,” said the doctor. “This gentleman has…”

The patient thought he saw the word “typhoid” forming on the doctor’s lips. But what he said was: “Mediterranean fever.”

“What did you say?”

“Malta fever.”

“Is it serious?”

“No. Serotherapy works wonders in these cases. What we need is Wright’s vaccine. We must act speedily. The first thing to do is to stop the previous treatment. I’ll go and get the vaccine and I’ll be back in an hour.”

This serious-minded doctor read the medical press and fell in love with the latest methods. A patient of his had died of Mediterranean fever six months before, and since then he had seen nothing but Mediterranean fever in all his patients.

“It’s perfectly simple,” he explained to Tito. “I shall inject several thousand million attenuated bacteria into your blood. Do you see this test tube? It contains three thousand million.”

The patient behaved like a martyr. He allowed himself to be injected without betraying the slightest feeling, either on his face or in the place where the needle went in. He simply said: “You’ve injected me with the bacteria of Malta fever, doctor, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Now, assuming for the sake of argument that I did not have that disease, that would have given it to me, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“So if your diagnosis is mistaken and I have typhoid, for instance, I should now have two diseases.”

“Certainly. But you haven’t got typhoid.”

“I know, I know,” the patient hastily added. It was just a hypothesis, an amusing hypothesis.”

So Tito now knew he had two diseases, typhoid and Malta fever. If I don’t die of the one I’ll die of the other, he said to himself.

His temperature, which had dropped, rose again, and he had bad pains all over his body.

“It’s nothing,” said the serious doctor. Those are the reactions invariably produced by Wright’s vaccine in these cases. It’s all perfectly normal and shows that my diagnosis was correct. It’s a very good omen.”

Maud and Nocera were not very satisfied with either of these doctors.

“As the first doctor was wrong, the second may be wrong too. The first one diagnosed a disease and made tests which satisfied him he was right. The second one diagnosed another disease and made tests which satisfied him that he was right too. I’d have a third opinion, and I’d call in the most famous doctor in the city.”

Before evening fell the famous, infallible medical luminary, that high priest of science, the greatest doctor in Turin appeared in Tito’s room.

He shook hands in a dignified manner with the other two doctors and said: “It’s typhoid. Even a dentist could see that.”

“Impossible,” exclaimed the first doctor.

“Have you tried Vidal’s test?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“Once.”

“That’s not enough,” the luminary exclaimed. “Do it again.”

At last Tito was being treated by a doctor, obviously sent by destiny, who would cure him. Again he had blood extracted from a vein. This time the result was positive: one per cent.

“So it is typhoid?” he said.

“Yes,” all three doctors agreed.

And Tito said to himself: So far they haven’t cured me because they did not diagnose my disease. Now that they have recognized it they’ll prescribe the correct treatment, and I shall get better.

“You mustn’t have anything to eat,” the famous doctor said.

And Tito said to himself: I knew very well that if you have typhoid you mustn’t eat.

“And no more enemas.”

Tito was secretly delighted. He knew very well that the bowels must be left alone.

In fact the famous doctor turned to the other two and said: “If you give him an enema you’ll kill him. Even a midwife would know that.”

All the same Tito said to himself, they gave me twenty-four and I’m still alive. And they were just like the Niagara Falls.

“He must have cold baths to bring down his temperature. Do you understand?”

“Yes, doctor,” Maud, Nocera and the landlady replied.

“Afterwards he must be put back to bed immediately. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

And they left.

The patient felt he was coming back to life. It was not surprising that treatment for the wrong disease should be ineffective. But when the diagnosis was correct… And in this case there was no doubt that it was correct, for he was very well aware of having drunk a whole tube of bacteria culture on which the word “typhoid” was written.

But what baffled him was why those steaks and enemas had not killed him out of hand.

In the hands of these three doctors he felt as if he were being held by the feet by three acrobats hanging from the ceiling at a circus and being thrown from one to the other over long distances, turning giddy somersaults on the way, and his impression was that it was pure chance that they always caught him.

He was awakened from his meditation by Nocera and Maud, who gently ushered him into the cold bath.

“It’s awful,” Tito groaned, struggling and with his teeth chattering.

“Be patient, old man.”

“Be patient, my love.”

“Just another minute,” said the landlady with a watch in her hand.

“It’ll bring down your temperature,” Nocera said.

“It’ll make you better,” Maud said.

They quickly dried him and put him back to bed; he was as livid as a drowned man.

“You’ll soon get warm again, darling,” said Maud.

But instead of getting warm he felt colder in bed than in the bath, and he had a stabbing pain in the region of his right rib.

And he coughed.

Then he coughed again.

Then he spat blood.

The first doctor, who arrived soon after he was taken out of the bath, said that the stabbing pain in the ribs was merely an intercostal pain.

The famous doctor, the luminary of science, reassured everybody by saying: “It’s nothing. It’s a bone abscess characteristic of typhoid. Even an army medical officer would know that.”

But Tito knew that he had caught acute pneumonia in the bath.

When he started spitting blood the doctors silently withdrew, and Maud hurried out to fetch them back.

And Tito saw a priest in front of him, black and solemn, talking to him with a more than human voice.

“Who sent for you?” the patient said.

“No one,” the landlady lied.

“Priests can smell when someone’s dying,” Tito said in a little trickle of a voice. “They’re like the flies that lay their eggs in the nostrils of the dying. But, as he’s here, let him stay.”

The priest showed him a crucifix and made him say a prayer under his guidance.

“Listen, father,” Tito said. “There’s a box in that drawer with a photograph in it. Please bring it to me.”

The priest brought him the box, and Tito took from it the photograph of Cocaine in the nude.

“You’re going to tear it up, I hope,” the priest said, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

“No,” Tito said with a laugh. “I want to look at it for the last time.”

“But in this last hour God is near your bed,” His minister said warningly.

“Good. Then He can look at it too.”

“And now you will confess,” said the priest, seizing the obscene photograph and putting it between the pages of his breviary.

“Confess? Is that laxative lemonade for the soul really necessary?”

“Don’t blaspheme, wretched man.”

“Go away, you fool.”

And he turned over on to his side, turning to the priest that part of his body into which three thousand million bacteria (Wright’s vaccine) had been injected.

The priest left. Halfway down he opened his breviary and blushed.

Nocera came in with an aunt of Tito’s, a horrible woman whom he rarely saw. In every family there’s at least one horrible aunt. There’s one in mine too.

She was glad that Tito was dying, but wept hot tears all the same.

“If you’re weeping it means I shall get better,” Tito said to her. “If I were going, you’d be laughing for joy.”

A man came in with three oxygen cylinders.

“Three? Why three?” the aunt who was one of those horrible aunts that they have in every family, including mine, wanted to know. “Why did you order three? Supposing he only uses two? Will the chemist take the other one back?”

“Yes, he will.”

“And will he give you the money back?”

“Listen, Nocera,” Tito exclaimed with his last remaining breath. “Get rid of this dreadful woman for me, otherwise I’ll get my own back on her. I’ll pay her the dirty trick of not dying.”

The high priest of medical science walked in.

“How are we, are we feeling better?” the illustrious doctor said, taking Tito’s pulse. “Are we feeling better?”

“Yes, we are, we’re going.”

And he died.

Nocera, Maud and the landlady went down on their knees round the bed, with their heads on the bedclothes, just as in the prints showing the death of Anita Garibaldi or Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.

And that’s how one can get better after swallowing typhoid bacteria and being treated for septicemia and then for Malta fever. And that’s also how one can die of pneumonia after undergoing the classical treatment for typhoid.

14

When Pietro Nocera opened the will the only other person present was Maud. Her eyes were red from weeping.

Tito had stated clearly that he was going to kill himself, and he had killed himself for her.

This was the first time that Maud had ever felt remorse.

“If I had been more faithful to him, or had made him think I was faithful, he would now…”

“Forget it,” Nocera said to her. “Remorse is the most useless thing. You’d do better to go home and sleep. I’ll see to all the funeral arrangements.”

Maud once more kissed Tito’s brow, put a little rouge on her lips and went home to the room facing the courtyard that had been hers when she was a girl, the room to which an appetizing smell of good upper-class cooking floated up from the floors below.

Her father, with the respect due to her grief, asked whether there wasn’t a mid-season overcoat among the deceased’s belongings.

The official physician whose duty it was to ascertain the cause of death called at the deceased’s address and left again immediately, and a priest called and stayed for half an hour.

“My poor friend was an atheist,” Nocera pointed out.

“The deceased does not have to have been a believer,” the priest said, “It’s sufficient if the survivors are believers.”

“I really —”

“Not you, but…”

“Well, how much does it cost?”

“Twenty-five lire for each priest.”

“How many priests are necessary to make a satisfactory show?”

“At least eight.”

“That makes two hundred lire.”

“Then there are the nuns.”

“How much are they?”

“Two lire each with used candles, three lire with new candles.”

“And how many are needed?”

“About a hundred.”

“That makes two hundred lire.”

“But not with new candles.”

“As they have to be lit, it seems to me not to matter very much if they have been lit before.”

“You must add fifty lire for the carpets to lay at the church door.”

“Is that necessary?”

“It’s essential. Then there’s the mass and the benediction.”

“Can’t you give me an all-in price? What’s the least for which you can do it?”

“Mass, benediction and carpets, a hundred lire, not including the priests and nuns.”

“Very well, then.”

“Will you give me something on account of expenses?”

“Will two hundred be enough?”

“Yes.”

“Will you see to everything?”

“Yes. Will four o’clock tomorrow afternoon be all right?”

“Yes, Father. But how can mass be celebrated at four o’clock in the afternoon if it has to be said on an empty stomach?”

“We take it in turn to fast.”

Next the undertaker’s representative arrived to make arrangements for the hearse and the trappings for the horses. Nocera telephoned the cremation society, who sent a representative, and a musician also called.

“I’m the first clarinet in the prize-winning Musica in Testa band, and I can offer you very favorable terms,” the man said. “We have a select repertoire of funeral marches: Gounod, Donizetti, Wagner, Petrella, Grieg and Chopin. We have a worn banner, it’s so worn that you can’t read what’s written on it; it looks like the banner of a charity of which the deceased was a patron and benefactor. Every player has his own special headgear, and for a small supplement he will also wear a sword.”

“What does it come to with the sword?”

“Two hundred lire.”

“Very well, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“What about the pieces?”

“What pieces?”

“The pieces of music.”

“You choose them. The best you have in stock.”

Some men arrived with the coffin.

Nocera took out Tito’s green silk pajamas, and the men helped him to put them on the dead man.

Then they put him in the coffin.

“Shall we close it straight away?”

“Yes, unless there’s anything else to put in.”

The hearse was waiting outside the door. The undertaker’s assistants carried down the coffin and put it in the hearse with neatness and precision, and the procession set off. The balconies were full of curious onlookers, and women shopkeepers came to the shop doors and gossiped.

The procession was led by an undertaker’s assistant with moustaches trimmed in the American style.

He was followed by the band, which consisted of

A piccolo,

eight flutes,

two cornets,

two trombones,

percussion group and triangle,

two baritone saxhorns,

and one bass.

Next came the nuns dressed in green.

They looked like a walking salad.

Then came the priests, singing psalms. There were eight of them, but one was lame.

The hearse was very solemn and was adorned with chrysanthemums as soft as ostrich feathers. The horses were in full canonicals.

Then came Maud, in a black veil.

Nocera.

Maud’s father, wearing an overcoat belonging to the dead man. It was a perfect fit.

Then came many women and many men. People Nocera had never seen before.

A number of old women made the sign of the cross when the hearse went by.

A boy on a bicycle rode beside the band with one thigh on the saddle and both legs on the same side, pedaling with one foot only.

Two dogs who were closely examining each other went on doing so.

“It’s the dead man’s sister,” one of the mourners said, referring to Maud.

“His wife.”

“His mistress.”

“Quite good to look at.”

“She has a lovely…”

“And two lovely…”

“She’s old.”

“I don’t think so. About thirty-five.”

“She’s older than that.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a…”

“Yes, she always has been.”

“And he?”

“He shut one eye.”

“And opened his purse.”

“But he did it with style.”

“Everyone knew about it.”

“Also he’d been in prison.”

“Forged promissory notes.”

“And what did he die of?”

“TB.”

“Syphilis.”

“Really?”

“And a pretty good dose too.”

“The American kind.”

“No doubt he gave it to her.”

“It was she who gave it to him.”

“Really?”

“Everyone knows it.”

“I know the doctor who treated both of them.”

“A fine state of affairs.”

The band, the nuns, the priests, the hearse, the whole procession had stopped. The undertaker’s assistants took the coffin and carried it into the church; then they brought it out again and then took it in again.

The procession set off once more.

Slowly, slowly.

Too slowly.

Funerals ought to be motorized. The deceased should be in a car and the procession on motorcycles. The nuns should be on motorcycles, the band should be on motorcycles, and the relatives, inconsolable at the premature loss, should be on motorcycles too.

Nocera looked back. There were fewer people now, but there were still a great many.

Poor devils who never had a loan of two lire or a word of comfort in the whole of their lives are escorted to the cemetery by a crowd of solicitous people. The most ignorant elementary school teacher is given a funeral oration by the director of education; the lawyer at the local magistrates’ court is given his last farewell by the president of the high court; and the poorest village doctor is mourned as if he were a real loss to science; the solitary individual always to be seen sitting by himself and reading the newspaper on a park bench is accompanied to his “last resting place” by several hundred intimate friends “in sad and orderly procession.”

A living man may still spring surprises on you. He may round on you, harm you, let you down, change his mind and alter his will. But when he’s dead, it’s final, and you know where you are.

A coffin is always followed by the dead man’s close enemies: the husband by his wife’s lover, the man killed in a duel by his opponent, the debtor by his creditors.

The passers-by raised their hats and the procession went on.

“It’s her I’m sorry for.”

“She’ll get over it.”

“Not immediately.”

“As soon as she finds someone else.”

“She’ll already have someone lined up.”

“More than one.”

“Men will go after anything.”

“Women of that sort.”

“With that painted face.”

“And those false teeth.”

“And that wig.”

“And her profession.”

“What’s that?”

“She works for men.”

They were near the cemetery. The white chimney of the crematorium came into view.

They went through various gates and made towards it.

Stop.

Out with the coffin. Silence. Speech by a gentleman whom no one had ever seen before.

Did anyone else wish to speak?

No one did.

Two attendants took the coffin into a white room and put it on a trolley, which moved away.

An official of the cremation society announced that the next of kin could watch. Maud stayed in the chapel to pray, and Nocera took up a position behind the big lens, through which he would be able to see his friend’s body devoured by the flames.

“It’ll take an hour,” the official said.

Nocera gave him twenty lire. “See that’s he’s well done.”

“Leave it to me.”

Nocera could see nothing. Suddenly the body came in, naked. No flames surrounded it, but it moved, contracted, writhed.

So it’s true, Nocera said to himself with his face to the lens, so it’s true that it rises, kneels, contracts, curls up, assumes obscene attitudes. Tito was right. A pity he’s not here to see, because he’d be amused. He puts his hand to his brow as in a military salute. He presses his fists to his eyes, like a fetus. Is it a return to the womb?

The body changed color, shriveled, blackened, was consumed, carbonized, turned to ashes.

When it was over, they withdrew the trolley and gathered the ashes with a silver trowel.

Nocera had brought the two shining spherical urns, and he filled both. Some fragments of bone were put in a regulation red clay urn and put in a wall in which there were many small memorial tablets.

He put one urn in one pocket and one in the other and offered his arm to Maud. Everyone else had slipped away.

“And where shall we go now?” Nocera asked her as he helped her into a cab that was waiting outside the cemetery.

“I’ve got to go to the dressmaker’s to order my mourning.”

“Black will suit you very well.”

“I hope so. But not dull black. Shiny black suits me. I’ll order shiny black, so it won’t look so much like mourning.” No one had told the cabman where to go, but he was driving back towards the city.

“I’m not hungry,” Nocera said.

“I couldn’t touch a thing,” said Maud.

Nocera sighed. Maud sighed.

“Oh, well.”

“All the same, we can’t fast for a month. Shall we go to a restaurant?”

“I couldn’t eat a thing.”

“Neither could I.”

“Perhaps a little soup.”

“Or an egg.”

Nocera gave the cabman the name of a restaurant, and Maud thought it right to weep a little.

And she wept a little while the taciturn Nocera recalled the Dantesque spectacle of the body in the furnace.

And so they arrived at the restaurant without noticing it. A whole hierarchy of waiters hurried to offer them seats and take their coats. Maud was not hungry. She couldn’t touch a thing, and nor could Nocera, but they ate all the same.

The bill amounted to 180 lire, which was not expensive considering that it included the liquor necessary to wash down the lobster and the partridges seasoned with truffles.

“How sad going home is.”

“Suppose we go to a show?”

“It would be sacrilege.”

“Not to enjoy ourselves, but to take our minds off our grief.”

“What’s on?”

“The Pills of Hercules.”

“Is it very dirty?”

“Yes.”

When the show was over, Nocera took her home in a cab and let her choose which urn she wanted.

“It’s all the same,” she said, picking one at random. Never was a dead person’s estate shared out so amicably.

Nocera put the other urn in his pocket and got back into the cab.

How shabby the modest flat seemed to the woman who was used to grand hotels and smart villas.

She had been back in Turin for several weeks, after dancing her last dance under the Senegalese sky, and she still had a little African fever in her blood. She had come back to Turin to retire from life, to shut herself up in the humble room in which she had lived as a girl.

She found old picture postcards, empty sweet boxes, disintegrating novels with the first pages missing, yellowed shorthand notebooks, material for blouses, faded ribbons; also she found old memories: the exact spot where Tito had kissed her for the first time, the door against which she had been taken, standing, as one transfixes a butterfly, by a man whose name she didn’t even know, on an August afternoon when passion had flared up inside her.

It would have charm, melancholy charm, she thought, to shut herself up for ever in that room to live and die of memories. She locked herself up in it, full of remorse for not having been faithful to Tito, or at least for not having given him the illusion of being faithful to him. But now she offered him eternal fidelity. He was to be her last lover, as he had wanted.

She laid her chinchilla fur coat on the bed, prepared a soft resting place in the corner of the room for the small live dog that was a perfect imitation of a stuffed one, and was inconsolable at the departure of Pierina, her invaluable lady’s maid, whom she had sent on unlimited leave.

The room was full of trunks, on the lids and sides of which were the names of ships and hotels. The furs and coats exuded the odor of Avatar.

On a table by the window that served as a desk there was a photograph of Tito, and on a piece of old lace there was the urn, spherical and shiny and full of gray powder.

The gray powder was Tito. Was it one of his legs? Or his head and an arm? Two thighs and the neck? Heaven knows what part of him had come to her as her share. And how everything had lost its shape in that yellowy gray powder that might have been a Rachel face powder.

Surrounded by these memories, she said to herself, I shall be able to prepare myself for death.

Nocera paid the doctors, the chemist and the undertaker, and then went to the parish church.

“How much does it come to?” he asked.

The bill was waiting for him, already receipted. He paid up without asking for a reduction, though one of the eight priests (at twenty-five lire each) had been lame.

He also paid other persons involved in the funeral. Who knows why so many people have to be mobilized when someone dies? The day will come when dead bodies are simply thrown into canals like dead cats.

He carried out the deceased’s last wishes, wrote a few letters of thanks, and collected the last things remaining in his room. A pair of shoes were still under the bed.

Oh, the shoes of the dead, what a painful sight they are. Those black objects that preserve the shape of something that no longer exists.

In Paris, Pietro Nocera had never had occasion to see Maud. If he had seen her among all those electrifying Parisian women, he would have noticed nothing but her wretched Italian provincialism.

But as soon as he saw her in Turin he was swept away by the exquisite Parisian fascination of that great female globetrotter. Her devotion to his sick friend moved him; and the distance between sympathy and sensuality is as short as that which separates those two words in the dictionary.

One morning — three days after the funeral — Maddalena was drinking her breakfast coffee on the balcony overlooking the courtyard when they brought her a letter. She read it through once only, then wrote on the first sheet of paper that came to hand:

Dear Nocera, you don’t love me. You think you love me. Don’t write to me like that again. I shall never be yours or anyone else’s. Tito is to be my last lover.

Next day they brought her another letter, in which Nocera expressed a wish to kiss her magnificent body. After consulting the mirror, which reflected the whole of her form, she sat down and replied:

“Dear Nocera, my body is finished. I can’t love any more, and I don’t want to be loved either. My last lover was poor Tito, to whom I shall be faithful for ever.”

Next day she expected another letter, but none came. She waited two days, three days, with increasing anxiety.

Why didn’t he write?

“Here’s a letter for you, Maddalena.”

“Thank you, papa.”

It was a last passionate letter from Nocera, who implored her to come to his house in an almost poetical street in a quiet district. He said he loved her, wanted her, needed her, her flesh and her perfume.

Maddalena remained thoughtful for a few moments, took a card and an envelope, and with a calm, spring-like smile wrote:

I’ll be at your place at four o’clock. Kiss me.

She looked for a sheet of blotting paper, but there wasn’t one. She looked all round. There wasn’t even any sand. But in front of her eyes, on an old lace mat, there was a shiny, mother-of-pearl sphere full of a yellowy-gray powder that looked like Rachel face powder.

She carefully lifted it, gently poured some powder on to the card on which the ink was still wet, carefully shook it to dry the ink, and then bent the card and poured the powder back into the urn. She put the card in an envelope, gave it to the postman, and remained thoughtful for a moment as brief as a pause in a piece of music.

She bit her lower lip to make it swell, dried it on her upper lip, and then slowly and skillfully passed her rouge pencil over both.

She took a small key from her key ring, the one that opened her flat cabin trunk.

She felt as light and luminous in spirit as an Andalusian mantilla.

She improvised a song with her mouth shut, knelt in front of the innumerable pairs of stockings and chose the thinnest, the pair that most exposed her flesh.

AFTERWORD

In 1920, at the age of just twenty-seven, a young Italian named Dino Segre, writing under the pen name Pitigrilli, achieved overnight success and notoriety with a book of short stories called Luxurious Breasts, followed the next year by the novel Cocaine, and a second book of stories entitled The Chastity Belt.

Although he was branded by some as a “pornographer,” he would not be considered such by contemporary standards: rather than graphic descriptions of sex, Pitigrilli offered a deeply cynical, iconoclastic satire of contemporary European society.

Behind the official façade of bourgeois morality, traditional family life, and patriotism, Pitigrilli saw a world driven by sex, power and greed, in which adultery, illegitimate children and hypocrisy were the order of the day and husbands and wives were little more than respectable-seeming pimps and prostitutes. Pitigrilli’s sarcastic, aphoristic style shocked and amused by turning conventional morality (and most of the Ten Commandments) on its head:

Never tell the truth. A lie is a weapon. I speak of useful, necessary lies. A useless lie is as unpleasant and odious as a useless homicide…

Do not covet thy neighbor’s wife, but if you do covet her, take her away freely. When in the theater, on the tram or in a woman’s bed, if there is a free place, take it before someone else does…

Hate your neighbor as you love yourself: and don’t forget that revenge is a great safety valve for our pain… Believe me: a good digestion is worth much more than all the ideas of humanity…

Honesty, duty, brotherhood and altruism are like supernatural phenomena: everyone describes them but nobody has seen them; when you get closer, either they don’t happen or there’s a trick behind it… (The Chastity Belt)

Pitigrilli’s cynical amorality captured something of the spirit of Italy in the early 1920s, a society that emerged from World War I with many of its traditional beliefs in pieces. The calls to glory and sacrifice and national renewal had proven cruel illusions, with the death and mutilation of millions resulting in but a few minor territorial changes. Meanwhile, traditional pillars of society — such as the Catholic Church and the country’s economic and political elite — had lost much of their authority. Women were pushing for greater freedom and autonomy, challenging existing standards of personal morality and family structure.

In this tumultuous context, Pitigrilli’s books were quickly translated into numerous languages and he became an international succès de scandale. He then became the editor of a well-known magazine Le Grandi Firme, (The Big Names) the appeal of which was partly due to its daring content and cynical, worldly tone.

In Paris and Turin, Pitigrilli cavorted with society’s upper crust, which experimented with theosophy, occult séances, gambling and narcotics as means of replacing the old certainties supplied by church and fatherland. In Cocaine, perhaps his most successful effort at a sustained narrative, Pitigrilli describes a world of cocaine dens, gambling parlors, orgies and lewd entertainment. His main character Tito Arnaudi goes to Paris and finds himself swept up in the post-war French metropolis:

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.

The principal occupation of the characters of Cocaine is using narcotics, sex and alcohol to distract themselves from the horrors of real life. As Tito puts it at one point: “Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void.” In searching for any kind of thrill or stimulation, they resort to “the fashionable poisons of the moment, the wild exaltation they produce, the craze for ether and chloroform and the white Bolivian powder that produces hallucinations.”

Tito, a failed medical student who has just been hired as a journalist, begins to investigate cocaine dens in order to write an article for a Paris newspaper appropriately named The Fleeting Moment. In the course of his research, he indulges in the white powder, which for a time acts as a kind of welcome balm, giving him “a sense, not just of euphoria, but of boundless optimism, and a special kind of receptivity to insults, which were converted in his ears into courteous compliments.”

As Tito’s lover, (or one of his lovers), Kalantan, tells him:

“There’s still hope for you… You haven’t yet got to the stage of tremendous depression, of insuperable melancholy. Now you smile when you have the powder in your blood. You’re at the early stage in which you go back to childhood.”

She spoke to him as to a child, though they were both of the same age. Cocaine achieves the cruel miracle of distorting time.

Kalantan is a wealthy Armenian woman whom Tito meets on the cusp of widowhood. A drug addict as well, she keeps a black coffin in her bedroom for making love. She explains her curious habit thus:

It’s comfortable and delightful. When I die they’ll shut me up in it forever, and all the happiest memories of my life will be in it… It also offers another advantage. When it’s over I’m left alone, all alone; it’s the man who has to go away. Afterwards I find the man disgusting. Forgive me for saying so, but afterwards men are always disgusting. Either they follow the satisfied male’s impulse and get up as quickly as they do from a dentist’s chair, or they stay close to me out of politeness or delicacy of feeling; and that revolts me, because there’s something in them that is no longer male.

Sex, like cocaine, provides only a brief distraction from life’s horrors, followed by disgust.

In the world of Cocaine and its main characters, life is a decorative mask with despair always just under the surface:

“Tell me why my heart goes on beating and for what purpose,” Tito asks Kalantan. “If you knew how many times I’ve been tempted to send it a little leaden messenger telling it to stop at once, because one day it will stop naturally, of its own accord, and why should it take the trouble of going on until then?”

The outside world of work and industry is nothing more than another sham and a cheat. Another of Tito’s journalistic assignments, in addition to his cocaine reporting, is to cover the execution of a serial killer. Tito, exhausted after a night of debauchery, decides to write a purely fictional account of the event, including an “exclusive” final interview with the killer and a gripping account of his death. When it turns out that his life was spared in a last-minute stay of execution Tito’s editor phones him in a rage over the embarrassment of publishing a false account. But the phony account is so wildly successful that the journalists for all the other papers are berated for having been scooped on such a dramatic story.

Like sex, like drugs, Tito’s journalism is just another fantasy or hallucination meant to distract people from the horror of the world as it is.

At a certain point, Tito’s two principal drugs, cocaine and sex, fuse in the figure of Maud, the main female character; Pitigrilli begins to call her Cocaine, since he becomes equally addicted to both at the same time. Maud too is a kind of addict, distracting herself by having sex with a procession of men, in some cases for money and in others for pleasure. She makes no effort to hide her activities from Tito, who follows her to South America in hopes of having her entirely to himself. The affair with Maud follows the course that addiction to cocaine generally follows: leading from initial euphoria to increasing desperation and psychological collapse.

When Tito finally does himself in, Maud and Tito’s best friend, Pietro, attend to him on his deathbed. Struck by Tito’s final despair, they vow to give up their lives of excess but all their intentions of turning over a new leaf fall away in just a few days when Maud and Pietro fall into bed with one another, ending the novel on a note of Pitigrillian cynicism, in which despair is leavened by bitter laughter. For all their apparent darkness, Pitigrilli’s books have a light tone and a quick and breezy air.

Cocaine appeared in 1921; the following year, Benito Mussolini and his fascist party came to power after the so-called “March on Rome.” Interestingly, Mussolini, himself a deep cynic and perhaps the shrewdest interpreter of the post-World War I mood, appears to have been a fan of Pitigrilli’s novels. When the books were attacked for their immorality, Mussolini defended them: “Pitigrilli is right… Pitigrilli is not an immoral writer; he photographs the times. If our society is corrupt, it’s not his fault.”

But as Mussolini’s fascism evolved from a transgressive, radical opposition movement into Italy’s new political order, Pitigrilli was bound to be regarded with increasing suspicion. Much of his withering sarcasm was directed at the patriotic and nationalistic nostrums that were the sacred gospel of fascism. In his novel The Chastity Belt, Pitigrilli would write: “Fatherland is a word that serves to send sheep to slaughter in order to serve the interests of the shepherds who stay safely at home.”

Tito Arnaudi’s thoughts about patriotic duty, at least when viewed through fascist spectacles, are similarly blasphemous:

When I was twenty they told me to swear loyalty to the King… I took the oath because they forced me to, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. Then they sent me to kill people I didn’t know who were dressed rather like I was. One day they said to me: “Look, there’s one of your enemies, fire at him,” and I fired, but missed. But he fired and wounded me. I don’t know why they said it was a glorious wound.

In 1926, Pitigrilli was put on trial for obscenity and narrowly acquitted. Perhaps sensing the need for political protection, Dino Segre applied — and was rejected — for membership in the fascist party in 1927 and 1928. Then one day in 1928, Pitigrilli descended from a train in his native Turin and was stopped by Pietro Brandimarte, a powerful local fascist official, who slapped him in the face and arrested him for alleged antifascist activities. Brandimarte had been the instigator of an infamous episode in the fascist seizure of power, the “Turin massacre,” in which he and his squads murdered twenty-one antifascists just two months after Mussolini took over the government in 1922.

But the case involving Pitigrilli’s alleged antifascist activities turned out like a bizarre episode in one of his novels, in which all the basest human instincts — greed, lust, anger, the desire for revenge — took on the mask of political principle and patriotism. What appears to have happened was this: some people eager to take over the editorship of Pitigrilli’s successful magazine, Le Grandi Firme, convinced one of his former lovers, the writer Amalia Guglieminetti, to destroy him. Guglieminetti was a society woman with literary ambitions, who dressed like a flapper and carried a long cigarette holder; she could have come straight off the pages of Cocaine. Guglieminetti had taken up with the fascist leader Brandimarte after her relationship with the writer ended, and she agreed to supply Pitigrilli’s enemies with personal letters written in his hand. These letters allegedly contained insults to Mussolini and fascism. But the forgeries were so crude that Pitigrilli was able to expose them at trial, forcing Guglieminetti to break down and confess on the witness stand.

Pitigrilli’s novel-like prosecution was the fulfillment of one of his deeply cynical injunctions: “To your friends and your lovers never leave in their hands any weapons they can one day use against you… The woman you love or who leaves you is your enemy; since all women are whores, including those who don’t get paid, she will tell her new lover, between one coitus and another, the things you told her, in great secret, between one coitus and another.”

Perhaps because of his sense of extreme vulnerability — or because his brand of cynical satire was less suited to the totalitarian thirties than the roaring twenties — Pitigrilli appears to have begun to work at ingratiating himself with the fascist regime. There is a document in the Italian state archives from 1930 that indicates he agreed to act as a police informant. In 1931, he sent a new book to Mussolini with the following dedication: “To Benito Mussolini, the man above all adjectives.”

What is quite certain and well-documented is that in the mid-1930s he became an extremely active and prolific spy of the OVRA, fascist Italy’s secret political police force. What makes his contributions especially intriguing is that he informed on a very rich and interesting circle of intellectuals and writers who would go on to become important parts of Italy’s antifascist cultural elite: the publisher Giulio Einaudi, Leone Ginzburg and his future wife Natalia Ginzburg, the painter and writer Carlo Levi, and the circle of Adriano and Paola Olivetti. Pitigrilli’s sudden usefulness to the secret police was sparked by a specific event: the arrest in March of 1934 of a young Turinese Jew, Sion Segre, who happened to be Pitigrilli’s first cousin. Sion Segre had been caught trying to smuggle into Italy from Switzerland a raft of newspapers and leaflets of an organization called Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), the main non-Communist left-of-center antifascist group, whose leaders were living in exile in Paris. Following Sion Segre’s capture, fascist police arrested fourteen others suspected of ties to the organization. Nine of the alleged conspirators were from Jewish families and some of the Italian newspapers reported the story by referring to a Jewish anti-fascist conspiracy, the first ominous note of an anti-Semitic campaign in Italy.

Why did Pitigrilli — or rather, Dino Segre — lend himself to such a distasteful operation, spying on his own first cousin and his friends? The answer is purely speculative, since Pitigrilli denied the charge till the end of his life — and, since Pitigrilli was never placed on trial, it was never proven in a court of law. (His son remains unconvinced to this day.) There is plenty of evidence of his spying activity, however; the official OVRA records list him as Agent Number 373 and spy reports refer to events that make his identity clear. The victims of his spying confirmed that Pitigrilli was in fact the person with whom they had the various contacts described in the reports. As to motive, Pitigrilli’s own writings offer some obvious clues.

In an autobiographical book published after World War II, entitled Pitigrilli Parla di Pitigrilli (Pitigrilli Speaks About Pitigrilli), he reveals that he loathed his first cousin and the Jewish half of his family. Dino Segre was the illegitimate child of a Jewish father (also named Dino Segre) and a young Catholic mother. His father did not marry his mother until their child was eight years old. His father’s well-to-do Jewish family never fully accepted Pitigrilli’s mother as a daughter-in-law and did not treat the illegitimate product of their union — the younger Dino Segre — as a true grandson. Pitigrilli’s description of his father’s family in this autobiography is laced with deep, anti-Semitic hatred.

I was eight years old when my father and mother married and all the Jewry descended on my house: my grandmother, aunt, the crazy uncle, my cousins. My mother opened her living room to a flock of petulant, know-it-all parrots related to my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, who tolerated my mother from a distance, and bent over me with their disdainful nostrils, asking me to name the capital of Sweden, in order to show that if one doesn’t have the benefit of circumcision one cannot know what their sons know.

In The Chastity Belt, Pitigrilli would make the following claim:

Bastards should be considered as an elect, privileged caste… like the Japanese samurai… All men should be bastards so that they care for no one and are attached to nothing. The bastard! What could be more beautiful in the world than to be a bastard so that one can despise everything without making an exception for one’s own father and mother?!

Clearly, his early experience as an illegitimate child — with a deep desire to avenge himself on the supposedly more respectable world that snubbed him and his mother — was highly formative. The idea repeatedly appears in his writing that illegitimacy is proof that life itself is fundamentally a mistake, and proof too that “respectable” society is nothing but a hypocritical lie: “One is born almost always by mistake.”

In some sense, Pitigrilli almost certainly regarded his spying activity as strangely consistent with the nihilistic cynicism that he articulated in his books — hating your neighbor as you love yourself, revenge as a safety valve, the celebration of lying. Pitigrilli reserved his most withering cynicism for those high-minded people who actually imagined that they were acting out of principle. A character in the novel L’esperimento di Pott (published in English in 1932 as The Man Who Searched for Love) remarks, “I am afraid of incorruptible people. They are the easiest to corrupt. Corruptible people have their price: it’s only a question of the amount. Sometimes, luckily, the price is so high that no one reaches it. But incorruptible people are really dangerous, because they… are corrupted not by money but by words.”

This is almost certainly how the antifascists of Giustizia e Libertà would have appeared to Pitigrilli: young, idealistic people who were ready to face prison for their ideas and who also tended to look down on a popular writer like Pitigrilli as not altogether serious.

After Sion Segre’s arrest, Pitigrilli approached some of his cousin’s friends and offered to help them. As an internationally acclaimed author he travelled frequently to Paris, where the leaders of Giustizia e Libertà were based. Pitigrilli was thus in a perfect position to act as a kind of courier between the base in Paris and its membership in Turin without attracting suspicion. The Italian customs officials frequently asked him for autographs rather than closely inspecting his bags when he re-entered Italy. Interestingly, there was some debate among the GL people about whether they could trust Pitigrilli. Some of them suspected him because of his “immorality.”

In fact, Vittorio Foa, one of the young men on whom Pitigrilli spied on, noted that one of the older members of their group did object to Pitigrilli because of the immorality of his books. “We thought that was very funny at the time, but maybe he was right,” Foa told me fifty years after the fact. Pitigrilli’s cynical epigrams may have served as a kind of justification for his spying activities: “What could be more relative than an idea? A man is a traitor or a martyr depending on whether you look at it on one side of the border or another.” In retrospect, Foa surmised that Pitigrilli may have been motivated by a kind of perverse instinct, “the pleasure of doing harm to others.”

Pitigrilli was also handsomely paid for informing, six thousand lire a month, several times the value of a typical salary. But for one who regarded all activities as a camouflaged form of prostitution, this would not have represented a problem of conscience.

Pitigrilli’s career as a spy peaked in 1935, the year in which his secret reports led to the arrest of Foa and some fifty other suspected antifascists, many of whom, like Foa, spent the next several years in prison. Pitigrilli suspected that his great triumph might diminish his power as a spy. He actually suggested to the fascist police that he too be arrested with the others to deflect suspicion from himself and retain his utility as an informant. The police did not follow up on this suggestion and word trickled out from those in prison that Pitigrilli had been the traitor.

In 1936, the fascist regime began to prevent the reprinting of most of his books and in 1938 Pitigrilli, who had informed on his cousin, possibly motivated by powerful anti-Jewish resentment, himself fell victim to the racial laws passed by Mussolini in 1938. A note from the fascist secret police in 1939 states: “We thank you for all you’ve done up until now for us, but given the present situation we are compelled to renounce your further collaboration.” For the purposes of the fascist bureaucracy, he was thenceforth known as “the well-known Jewish writer Dino Segre, alias Pitigrilli.”

Even though Dino Segre was only half Jewish, his situation was made worse by the fact that, as a young man, he had married a Jewish woman, with whom he had had a child. Because divorce was not legal at that time, they were still technically married, even though Pitigrilli had long abandoned both mother and child. In order to improve his circumstances, Pitigrilli/Dino Segre consulted a female Catholic lawyer named Lina Furlan, who succeeded in having his marriage annulled. As Furlan explained many years later, the Church’s position was that since the marriage had occurred outside of the Church, it had never actually existed as a marriage. Among those whom Furlan consulted was the Vatican’s deputy Secretary of State, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. “Montini told me that as far we’re concerned there has never been a marriage, it was only a ‘concubinaggio’ (living in sin).” After obtaining the annulment, Pitigrilli then married his lawyer, Lina Furlan, in a church in Genoa on July 26, 1940.

This did not change his status with the fascist government and he continued to write self-pitying letters to Mussolini pleading for recognition as an “Aryan” so that he could work freely.

Rome, March 25 XX [1942.]

Duce,

I understand that my little personal troubles are irrelevant to the great historical drama of the moment. But since you, with a word, can resolve my situation… I ask you to consider it: you will see at first sight that my request for recognition of belonging to the Aryan race is legitimate, since I have all the requisites required by the law. Remove me, Duce, from this unjust, degrading and paradoxical situation, in which I am forced to work in secret, to suffer the pettiness of rivals and to continue boring you with my tedious tale…

Pitigrilli

Pitigrilli and Lina Furlan fled to Switzerland at the time of the German occupation and after the war he emigrated to Argentina, that refuge of many fascists and Nazis fleeing possible arrest and punishment. Later in life, he drifted back to Italy, but his reputation had diminished to the point that almost no one noticed. He died in 1975 in near total obscurity.

There was no place for Pitigrilli in a post World War II culture that was dominated by antifascism and by some of the very men and women — the Ginzburgs, Levis, Olivettis and Foas — on whom he had spied. And yet in retrospect, Pitigrilli is a highly emblematic forgotten figure, a poète maudit of Italy of the 1920s; his cynical comic satire describes the disillusioned world that followed World War I and proved fertile for the triumph of fascism.

— Alexander Stille

Content

Pitigrilli
Cocaine

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AFTERWORD