Pitigrilli: Cocaine

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?”