“Nevertheless I do not wish to imply that journalism is a printing press put at the disposal of irresponsibility and incompetence; in every editorial office there are two or three men of intelligence, two or three decent human beings, and sometimes one or two who have both brains and conscience.
“In this caravansary in which you took refuge a quarter of an hour ago you’ll find some admirable persons: the editor, the chief sub-editor, the dramatic critic, who is very severe in his judgments and is a playwright —”
“A successful one?”
“No; the chief shorthand writer and the German specialist. But the others — they’re superficial types with nothing in their heads but a short list of books they haven’t read, who talk, talk, talk in disconnected fragments, in ready-made phrases without rhyme or reason, so that listening to them is like looking at a bundle of newspaper cuttings and picking out phrases here and there 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 cafés where they play snooker and backgammon, to all the numerous Bouillons Chartier, where for five francs they have the complete illusion of having lunch for two.
And one day, out of bravado, a student of pharmacy offers his friend some white powder to which he has helped himself in the university lab; and the latter accepts it, for fun, or to be in the swim, and not for pleasure, because the first pinch is always unpleasant; and then he can no longer do without it, and with a clouded mind he begins the descent through all the stages of degradation to complete destitution. And the female companion, who has followed him through the various rented rooms, bars and bouillons starts taking it too, smiling as she did the first time she used a powder puff, and then…
And then these little women draw close to one another, meet, need, recognize and understand one another. You see them in twos and threes in the bars at apéritif time, behaving restlessly, sniffing all round them like fox terriers, going in twos and threes to the toilet or to telephone booths and emerging a few minutes later with eyes more shining, faces more serene, movements more vivacious, looking more cheerful, more talkative, more attractive. In the toilet or telephone booth they have exchanged cocaine.
They are still at the first stage of addiction. They still have some restraint; they confess their vice only if they are sure that their confidante is a renifleuse too. They still take the poison secretly, shyly, shamefully. In a few months’ time they will be putting the little box on the café table as ostentatiously as if it were a cigarette case with a ducal coronet.
There is a cold, dead look in their eyes; what has died is their will.
But of what use would it be if it still existed? Could it make them give up the drug? No, because it has become a necessity. It is not being deprived of it, but the mere possibility of being deprived of it that disturbs, upsets and exasperates them. They take your hand and press it against their heart, where a tiny breast serves as a sounding box.
“Feel how hard, how quickly, it beats,” they say. “It slows down and seems to stop, and then it starts up again.”
At night, they say, they have dreadful shivering fits; they suffer from sleeplessness. Not having the drug is appalling, but the idea of not being able to get it is even more appalling.
And then they resort to the most disastrous expedients to get it, though they rarely resort to serious crime, for which energy is needed. They begin by cutting out unnecessary expenditure, and then they cut out necessary expenditure. They exchange their flat for a furnished room, and they exchange the latter for a garret. They sell their furs and jewels at ridiculous prices; and then they sell their clothes, and then their body. And they go on until they are so raddled that no more buyers are to be found. Their coquettishness goes, and so does their sense of cleanliness, though in that environment coquettishness and cleanliness are necessary for survival. And that is why it is possible to meet women, now modestly or poorly dressed, who a few months before were leaders of fashion at Auteuil and Longchamp.