Cocaine (9 page)

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.