Pitigrilli: Cocaine

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.