Cocaine (3 page)

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.