Cocaine by Pitigrilli Read Free Book Online Page B

with no connecting link between them. There are others who never talk. But they create the impression of being plunged in deep thought, because they walk about with lowered head, as if hypnotized by the pavement, looking at every bit of spittle as if they were expecting to find a diamond; you’d think them absorbed in trying to solve some baffling problem, but in fact they’re not thinking at all; they’re like the cab horses waiting at the corner of the street, seemingly weighed down by tremendous problems though in reality they’ve nothing whatever in their noddles. All the same, I think you’ll be happy on this newspaper. Everyone here seems slightly infected with à-quoi-bonisme, with je-m’enfichisme. We don’t have here what happens in other places: that the successful look down on those whose success is still to come, like married women who look down on young ladies still looking for a husband.”
    While Pietro Nocera was talking Tito looked round the room.
    There was a big frosted window, a desk with some opened newspapers, some sheets of paper in disarray, a long pair of scissors lying wide open, an ink stand, a bottle of glue, a lamp, an ashtray with a great many wax match heads which looked like tiny skulls mingled with small bones in a dainty charnel-house (there were still some traces of cocaine in Tito’s head), a telephone, some newspaper cuttings stuck to a wall, and a thin shelf with a few books lying about on it. It looked not so much as if the shelf were there for the books but as if the books had been put there for the sake of the shelf.
    “Your office is exactly the same,” Pietro Nocera explained. “They’re all exactly alike, like cabins in a liner.”
    Someone knocked the door, and a messenger came in.
    “Show her up,” Pietro said to the messenger. Then, turning to Tito, he added “It’s a temporary mistress of mine. Go next door and take possession of your office. I’ll fetch you in an hour’s time.”
    “Do you mean you receive women in your office?”
    “Where do you expect me to receive them, you provincial? In yours?”
    Tito walked out. The woman walked in.

3
    There’s a kind of freemasonry among cocaine addicts. They recognize one another by signs perceptible only to themselves; they have their own lodges, some more democratic, others more aristocratic — but that is of no consequence, because they drift from one to the other, from the cabarets of Montmartre to the villas of the Porte Maillot, from the boîtes à étudiants of the Latin Quarter to the cafés of Montparnasse. In a few months Tito Arnaudi got to know all the legendary cafés, the little theaters of the Butte Sacée, the dives that re-echo to the sound of brass instruments beating out the rhythm of licentious dances from five o’clock in the evening until dawn. He went to all these semi-tolerated, semi-clandestine nightspots which are the meeting places of the cocaine addicts who form fifty per cent of their habitués. He got to know the small world that gathers round the university: the little women who from the age of fifteen to thirty-five practice the romantic profession of student’s girlfriend. They are very undemanding girlfriends, satisfied with half a room, half a bed and one meal a day; they attach themselves to a student because of the sentimental caprice of an hour. The hour passes, the caprice remains, is extended and transformed, and in the meantime a year passes, two years pass, and so does the bloom of youth. The girlfriend remains, almost faithful, almost in love, and then the young man takes his degree and leaves her; and she weeps, perhaps seriously, she feels desperate, perhaps genuinely, and for consolation finds another young man, younger than the one who left her and younger than she herself. She accompanies him, supervising all his actions, both sensible and crazy, throughout his university career, in all the rented rooms he lives in, rooms new to him but not to her, to all the