“And your fur coat?”
“Fifty grams of coco.”
“And the gold bracelets?”
“A box as big as that, full of nothing but bicarbonate of soda and phenacetin.”
And the woman laughs coldly, in order not to weep, in order not to try to weep, perhaps because she would no longer know how to. Among these creatures who are half women and half ghosts the peddler circulates with his little cardboard boxes with labels of various colors: red, green or yellow, each color secretly indicating a more or less dishonest mixture. He never sells pure cocaine, which is always only a small proportion of the mixture; all the rest is boric acid or lactose or magnesium carbonate.
The peddler knows that an addict can be satisfied with a white powder that looks only roughly like cocaine; so long as she has something to sniff she does not analyze it. In the final stages of addiction she can’t distinguish cocaine from sugar, and in the early stages she is less interested in the drug than in the ceremonial of taking it. With a gold nib? An ivory nail file? A tiny bone spoon taken from a saltcellar? The nail of a little finger grown specially long for the purpose?
So the dealer grows rich in a few months. With 100 grams of cocaine he buys 10,000 lire worth of jewelry, and when his customers offer him the empty boxes he buys them back at the rate of one sou for every ten sous’ worth.
The editor of The Fleeting Moment was quick to appreciate Tito’s talents. In fact he telephoned the manager after the first week, and when Tito presented himself to draw his salary he was handed 500 francs extra.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked the editor.
“It means you’re a bright young man.”
“You never told me so.”
“I don’t tell you, I show it.”
He showed him the greatest consideration, and excused him from all the boring jobs.
“Would you like to go and report this conference?”
“No,” said Tito.
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t amuse me. Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister.”
“You’re perfectly right,” the editor said. “I’ll send one of your colleagues.”
The chief sub-editor too realized that Tito was a decent fellow, and suggested that they should address each other in the familiar second person singular.
The chief sub-editor was not an important person on the newspaper, though his title suggested high rank in the journalistic hierarchy; actually he was an excellent fellow subordinate to everyone else. Our society creates these comforting paradoxes. The horse, after being worked and exploited like the lowest proletarian, is called the noble animal. Deformation of the spine, hypertrophy of the bones, cretinism, physical monstrosities are cheerfully called “sports” of nature; sick people are sent to health centers; places where people are sent to die are called sanatoria; and priests, after being condemned to childlessness and celibacy, are called “father.”
Pietro Nocera, his Italian friend, did everything he could to help Tito during his first months on the newspaper and guided his footsteps in all the different aspects of the job.
“But soon you’ll turn your back on me,” Tito told him. “As long as I’m junior to you in position and pay, you’ll help and protect me and tell your colleagues that I have talent; but salary’s a rough guide to one’s value, and as soon as my pay is the same as yours you’ll say I’m an idiot. That’s perfectly human and natural. Even the Almighty, after giving Adam a good position in the earthly paradise, thought better of it and promptly found a pretext to ruin him.”
“You’ve been taking cocaine again,” Pietro Nocera said in tones of mild reproach. “When you make biblical comparisons it means that you have a few grams of cocaine up your nose.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Tito replied. “I tell you, you’ll drop me.”
“No, my friend,” Pietro Nocera went on, leaning against the back of a soft divan at the Café Richelieu. “You haven’t yet realized that I don’t have the stupid little defects of other men. I envy neither you, nor the editor, nor the President of the Republic, nor Félix Potin, who is the leading pork butcher in Paris. I work because I need to have two thousand francs in my pocket every month, but I have no desire to glorify work either by enthusiasm or envy or emulation. Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void. Who would think of working in a waiting room? While awaiting our turn we chat, or look at the pictures on the walls. But work? There’s no point in it, if when our turn comes to go into the next room we shall no longer see anything. I don’t understand why all these people get excited and upset and argue. One man acts the hero, another rouses the multitude, a third brags and blusters; one man expounds ideas, another demolishes systems, a third stands values on their head. And what for? When you consider that today’s triumphant victor who holds the mob in the hollow of his hand tomorrow goes into a café, drinks from a badly washed glass, swallows two or three germs no bigger than one thousandth of a millimeter, and then goes back to his creator. But coming back to you, if one day I were to tell someone that you were an idiot, it would mean I thought others intelligent. Instead I see all round me nothing but people who pretend to be different from what they are, propound ideas they do not have, make a display of beliefs that are not theirs, engage in fine gestures and fine phrases to conceal some deficiency or inferiority. A man who doesn’t wear an overcoat in winter on the ground that he’s healthier without one would wear a fine fur coat in bed if he had one; nine times out of ten the recluse, the misanthrope, is someone whom no one wants to visit; the man who systematically practices taciturnity and tries to give the impression of profound thought and philosophic doubt is not an intellectual crucified by skepticism but a puppet with a windy void in his head. If someone tells me he’s sick of everything and is disgusted with the world and tired of life and that the only happiness lies in death, I’m prepared to believe him only after he has shot himself and been buried. But so long as there isn’t a cubic meter of earth on his belly I shall go on believing that he’s play-acting…”
While Pietro Nocera talked Tito looked through the café windows at the crowded boulevard outside. A policeman armed with a white truncheon was regulating the car and pedestrian traffic against a confused background of unintelligible voices and other noises.
He told me all this the first time we met, Tito said to himself. A man tells you the most interesting things he knows during the first half hour he talks to you; after that he either repeats himself or offers you variations on the same theme.
“What are you thinking about?” Pietro asked.
“I’m thinking that you’re a real friend,” Tito replied. “But there’s no sign of the chief sub-editor. Do you suppose he has forgotten?”
And, just as happens in plays, Tito was just saying “He won’t be coming” when the person referred to walked in.
The chief sub-editor was one of those kindly persons who offer invaluable advice when you have something in your eye (blow your nose, look up, walk backwards, find the square root — etc.).