Cocaine (23 page)

That was how Maud spoke, inconsolably. But Tito had never believed in human discouragement. Basically we are all optimists. There are people who actually look for love in the advertisement columns of a newspaper. With the passing of time we develop a capacity for compensation, like the blind, who develop their senses of touch and hearing. As we grow old we adapt ourselves. Artists who believe they are finished when their first gray hair appears still feel young when they have white beards. Women who genuinely resign themselves to spinsterhood at the age of thirty discover at the age of thirty-five that their hopes of finding a husband have revived. When the first wrinkle appears they say I’m ugly and no man will ever look at me again, but ten years later they know they are still capable of kindling incendiary passions.

You can’t be a woman’s last lover because, however old or ugly she may be, she still believes she will be able to find another one.

But Cocaine went on: “I asked you to come and meet me at Dakar so that we could do the last lap of the journey home together. The letter you wrote to me about your life in Turin was so sad and so lonely that I felt terribly sorry for you. You talked about dying. I too feel ready to die.”

Cocaine spoke these words in quiet, subdued tones, with one of her arms in Tito’s heated hand. They walked without heeding where they were going; the immensity of the desert is more difficult than the most complicated labyrinth.

A patrol of soldiers emerged from the darkness and stopped.

“Be careful,” the corporal in charge said, “because very soon the Great West African Express will be coming, and you’re near the line. It’s a very treacherous train, because you don’t hear it, as there are no walls in this solitude to echo and transmit the noise.”

“Thank you,” said Tito.

“
Pas du tout, mon prince. Bonne nuit à la dame.”

And the patrol disappeared.

To Tito Cocaine had looked more beautiful and more desirable than ever before. But her renewed beauty gave him pain, not pleasure, for he felt that if he was to be her last lover there would be a long time to wait until its destruction was complete. Cocaine saw herself as ugly and felt old, but she was not yet old or ugly enough to be unable to please. Tito could not yet hope for the pleasure of being the last.

There was to be another reception for her next day at the home of the head of the custom house, she had accepted an invitation to the British consulate on Thursday, and on Saturday she was expected at the villa of a rich native merchant. In that colony of Europeans tired of odorous, wild black female flesh Maud’s Nordic perfume would still rouse some interests. Tito was sure that the renunciatory intentions she had just expressed would vanish at the first smile of some European libertine.

That was what Tito felt. But Cocaine, her will broken and in a state of nervous exhaustion, was like an inert mass that could be molded by any strong will.

“You said you’d be ready to die,” Tito murmured. “You said you felt finished, that you no longer had anything to look forward to. I too am a walking corpse. I too have nothing to look forward to but death. If I asked you to die with me tonight, would you agree?”

Cocaine stopped for a moment. A star flashed across the horizon. The woman suddenly turned as if she had been touched by something; Tito’s eyes were shining as they did when he was under the influence of the white drug that the one-legged peddler sold him in that café in Montmartre.

“Would you be willing to die?”

“Yes.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“Straight away?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I offer you the most beautiful, the most exciting death in the world. Very soon the fastest train in West Africa will be passing on this track. It has been traveling for days and days and will be traveling for many more, and it travels blindly, without seeing where it’s going or what it crushes or sweeps out of its path. The crew go to sleep over the brakes and they go on and on in a straight line day and night.”

“Do you want it to run you over?”

“Yes.”

“But Tito, don’t you see that you’re not talking like an inhabitant of this world, that you’re talking like a character in a novel? You’re beside yourself.”

“Yes. Being carried away, being beside oneself, is a hand held out to us by destiny, a shove that it gives us when our will is insufficient. The African night, your voice, your perspiration, all that carries me away; and your discouragement, your disillusionment with life encourages me to die. Think how exciting it will be to lie down on this endless track with our cheeks against the cold steel, to feel for the last time our bodies clinging to each other, trembling with fear. Every light we think we see in the distance, every noise we think we hear will give us a tremor as long as eternity. And in our last embrace, which will be the most exciting in our lives, we shall hear the clatter of the train and see its shadow approaching, we shall shrink like beaten dogs, but the black monster will be on us, crushing us and mixing our blood for ever. Remember that neither you nor I have anything more to hope for from life. We’re tired. We’re as good as dead already. Come, let me kiss you for the last time.”

And Tito, passionately uttering these words, put his arms round Maud, who had nearly fainted, and forced her to kneel, then sit, then lie on the ground. The sky was a perfect concave; you could see its completely circular edge as you can out at sea. Cocaine was pale; her brow was wet with perspiration and her eyes marvelously dilated as if she could see above her the face of death.

It was the face of Tito who was lying on top of her, frenziedly kissing her mouth, her throat, her eyes. Under her back the endless rail extended like a blade. It hurt, because all her weight was on it, as well as Tito’s weight on top of her.

“Cocaine,” Tito groaned without ceasing to kiss her cheeks and bite her lips. “Cocaine, these are the last minutes. Tell me again you love me.”

“I love you,” she moaned with the voice of one who is dying.

“I want you,” Tito hoarsely exclaimed, stifling her with the pressure of his mouth on hers and holding her in his arms as if to crush her to death, “I want you. I want to die taking you for the last time. I want to be your last lover.”

“Yes,” she cried. “Take me.”

With trembling hands Tito tore off her light clothing, and when she was completely naked he started frantically kissing her whole body, her breast, her eyes, her armpits, tearing out hairs with his teeth and sucking the perspiring flesh that bled as a result of his bites.

“Take me,” she cried again.

For a moment the two bodies were one. She saw Tito’s bloodshot, panting face on her own face, framed by stars and the blue sky; she felt herself being crushed between the hard steel rail and the weight of the panting man who was putting the ardor of a whole lifetime and the frenzy of all his passion into this last experience.

The man who was about to die suffered as he had never suffered before, because this was the last time.

She was vibrant as she had never been before, because she had never experienced this sensation more wonderful than death.

His face was a single contraction of muscles and was covered with foam, his eyes shone like enamel and his rhythm was as violent as if he were transfixing her with a knife.

Suddenly he began slowly groaning, and stopped. The contractions ceased, his brow became smooth, his eyes lost that terrifying light, and all his muscles relaxed. His cruel arms slackened their grip, and he rose to his feet.

Cocaine was still lying in the same position. There was nothing shameless in her motionless nudity in the immensity of the night under the purity of the stars.

But her lover, her last lover, looked southward, and saw a black shadow drawing nearer on the shining rails.

He picked up the naked woman and laid her on the dry grass a few yards away from the track.

The Great West Africa Express appeared and thundered past, and the huge draft caused pieces of torn mauve lingerie decorated with small organdy pleats to rise and flutter in the air.

Cocaine opened her eyes and watched the black, puffing trail of lights speeding through the night and disappearing, leaving the endless steel railway track behind it.

The train crushed even its own sparks.

Tito, without speaking, helped Maud to dress and pin together her torn clothing, and they walked back to the town and the hotel.

They kissed once more at the door of her room.

Next afternoon, while Maud was drinking a melted banana ice at another reception in her honor, Tito embarked in a ship leaving for Genoa. Just when the propellers started to sing their melancholy and gay farewell ballad, Tito put his hand in his pocket and found a visiting card.

Who’s he? he said to himself. Where did I come across this chap?

Then he remembered.

He was the European who had sung the praises of Berber women soon after his arrival and had told him he had several available, the oldest of whom was sixteen.

Tito looked again at the visiting card and smiled.

If I’d taken advantage of his offer, my suicidal intentions would have disappeared, he said to himself. Even on this occasion my jealousy was the product of long abstinence, of accumulated desire.

He remembered that on the way back to the hotel with Cocaine on the previous night he had felt much calmer after possessing her on the railway line. It had occurred to him that she might well give herself to someone else next day, but the thought did not make him suffer.

Dakar was already receding into the distance. Tito, standing in the stern, remembered the times when he had hurried to Kalantan to stifle the jealousy caused by Maud. Even then he had known that jealousy was a physical, glandular phenomenon. He knew that when the glands were emptied jealousy disappeared.

But sometimes, only too often, he had forgotten it.

Now his senses were calm, because the night before under the breath of death and the blowing of the breeze he had got rid of all his jealousy on that endless steel rail.

But now? Now that the steamer was taking him away; now that the rhythm and the exciting perfume of the sea, the memories, the eroticism with which the corridors, saloons and cabins of transatlantic liners are filled would revive his desire and his jealousy. How was he going to live now that Maud had given him more ecstatic pleasure than ever before, now that he had seen her beauty reborn and had seen her dancing marvelously, now that he liked her more than ever.

Now that he had tried to die with her, how would he find the courage to face death alone?

He looked towards Dakar, but it was out of sight.

The ship was in the middle of the ocean and the sky was above, concave, with an exactly circular edge all round it, just as on the evening before, when it had arched over him and over Cocaine’s brow — which had been whiter than a corpse’s — and over their last embrace.

And he repeated to the sea the sweet name of Cocaine.

Cocaine, as pale as the powder that intoxicates and kills; Cocaine, passive woman, as irresponsible as a lifeless being, a pinch of poison that seeks out no one but kills when swallowed; Cocaine, the inert creature who had been willing to die when Tito suggested it, but agreed to live when he no longer wanted to die; Cocaine, who gave herself to anyone who wanted her and refused no one, because refusing is an effort; Cocaine, woman made of white, exquisite poison, the poison of our time, the poison that lures one to sweet death.

Once more Tito’s luck was in, because the sea was again so rough that he had to stay in his cabin all the way to Genoa.

And, since it’s better to leave a wretched man alone when he is ill, I ask the reader to leave his cabin for a moment, particularly as I have something to confide.

What I have to say is this.

The Great West Africa Express that I said passed Dakar doesn’t exist. But it’s not my fault. It suited me to put it there.

Also, while I’m about it I may as well confess that the Hotel Napoléon in the Place Vendôme, where Tito and Maud stayed for some months, is another invention of mine. I could have put them in the Bristol, or the snobbish and conventional Ritz, but I don’t want to give hotels any publicity, for one thing because they don’t need any publicity from me.

And now let us go back into Tito’s cabin, where he is packing his bags, because the port of Genoa is in sight.

As Tito had foreseen, after a few days’ separation he was overwhelmed by the memory of Cocaine. Every now and again he stopped in the street and, taking careful precautions to avoid being surprised, took the naked photograph of her from his pocket and looked at it.

“Are you back in Turin?” Nocera said to him.

“As you see.”

“And what are you going to do here?”

“I’m going to die.”

“Couldn’t you do it there?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You’re quite right, it’s too hot in Senegal. It’s less trouble to go on living.”

Nocera gave this jocular reply because he did not believe in Tito’s suicidal intentions. He had talked about them too much. A person who is determined on suicide keeps his mouth shut to avoid giving people a chance to prevent him. A person determined to take his own life does it without warning.

One day Tito had said: “I’ve tried everything in life: love, gambling, stimulants, narcotics, work, idleness, theft; I’ve met women of all races and men of every color. The only thing I haven’t encountered yet is death, and I want to try it.”

Pietro Nocera thought these words represented a love of rhetoric rather than an irrevocable decision.

“Don’t act the tragedian, Tito,” he replied. “Don’t talk about dying. Life is a
pochade
, a farce.”

“Yes, Nocera, I know, but I don’t enjoy it. I’m leaving before the end of the performance.”

“There’s literary affectation on your winding sheet,” Nocera said. “You won’t kill yourself. You talk about it too much, and even while doing so you’re looking for a hook to hold on to to show yourself how wrong you are. Your real object in talking to me like this is to get me to produce arguments that will enable you to say triumphantly: What you’re saying is quite right, you’ve convinced me, now I shan’t kill myself. But what I say to you, my dear Tito, is: You’re quite right, carry on and do it.”