Cocaine (21 page)

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.

“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.”