A thin, pale lady, dressed completely in black, came in, looked round, and sat at a table.
“De quoi écrire et un Grand Marnier,” she said.
The waiter brought her writing materials and her drink.
That’s Madame Ter-Gregorianz,” said Pietro Nocera, indicating the attractive new arrival. “She’s an Armenian, living at the Porte Maillot, and she’s famous for her white masses.”
The lady wore a black tulle hat through which you could see the waves of her black hair; a black bird of paradise descended over one temple, caressed her neck and curved under her chin. Her face seemed to be framed in a soft, voluptuous upside-down question mark.
When she had finished her letter she summoned a small page boy, who was all green and gold, glossy and shining and covered with braid, and handed it to him. The boy raised his right hand vertically with the palm outwards to his green, cylindrical unpeaked cap, which was kept in its crooked position by a black chinstrap. Then he went out on to the boulevard, dodging between the buses.
Pietro Nocera went over to her, asked if he might introduce his friends, and invited her to join them at their table.
She looked through the question mark and smiled. Her face was pale and her mouth thin and rectilinear as if it had been cut with a scalpel. When she smiled she lengthened it, stretching it half an inch on either side without curving it.
The chief sub-editor had been to Armenia in the course of his career as a journalist, and this led to the immediate establishment of cordial relations. She reminded him of the customs of the country, the martyrdom of its people, the color of its mountains, the passionate nature of its women.
And while the two revived memories Tito murmured to Pietro Nocera in Italian: “What marvelous oblong eyes.”
“Try telling her that, and you’ll see that she’ll start working them immediately. She’s the woman I was telling you about yesterday. She’s the one with the magnificent ebony coffin in her room. It’s padded with feathers and upholstered with old damask.”
“And is it true that…”
“Ask her.”
“Ask her straight out?”
“Yes. She’s a woman who can be asked that question.”
He turned to her and said: “Is it true, madame, that you have a black wooden coffin and —”
“Yes,” she said.
“And that —” Tito went on.
“And that I use it for making love in? Certainly I do. It’s comfortable and delightful. When I die they’ll shut me up in it for ever, and all the happiest memories of my life will be in it.”
“Oh, if that’s the reason,” said Tito.
“It’s not the only one,” the lady continued. “It also offers another advantage. When it’s over I’m left alone, all alone; it’s the man who has to go away. Afterwards I find the man disgusting. Forgive me for saying so, but afterwards men are always disgusting. Either they follow the satisfied male’s impulse and get up as quickly as they do from a dentist’s chair, or they stay close to me out of politeness or delicacy of feeling; and that revolts me, because there’s something in them that is no longer male. How shall I put it? Forgive me for saying so, but there’s something wet about them.”
She turned to the chief sub-editor and resumed their interrupted conversation.
“Who’s her present lover?” Tito asked.
“A painter,” Nocera replied. “But a woman like that always has five or six replacements available.”
Tito Arnaudi and Pietro Nocera were invited next evening to Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s villa, shining white between the Étoile and the Porte Maillot, between the Champs Élysées and the Bois, in the fashionable area that is the aristocratic cocaine quarter. In the luxurious villas in which the various tout Paris gather (the political tout Paris, the fashionable tout Paris, the artistic tout Paris) meetings are regularly arranged to enjoy the ecstasy the drug produces. Young followers of the turf and devotees of dress rehearsals, fashionable young gentlemen who have barely reached the age of puberty and believe themselves obliged to have on their desk the latest poem launched on the book market and in their bed the latest female adolescent launched on a life of gallantry; young Parisians who have their pajamas designed by the artists of La Vie Parisienne and feed on preserved tropical birds mention, among the big and small subjects of conversation that pullulent autour de nos tasses de thé, as Sully Prudhomme used to say, the fashionable poisons of the moment, the wild exaltation they produce, the craze for ether and chloroform and the white Bolivian powder that produces hallucinations. And by common accord they decide to try it. Thus dens of cocaine addicts form overnight in ordinary households, and men and women invite one another to cocaine parties as they invite one another to lunch. In some families the contagion spreads from children of fifteen to grandpas of seventy, and addiction à deux, the addiction of man and wife, is frequent; if it did not produce impotence in the male and frigidity in the female, I believe that the newborn babies of such couples would need the white powder immediately, just as the children of morphine addicts have to be given an immediate injection of morphine. The alcoholic retains the ability to condemn his addiction and advise those not subject to it to avoid succumbing to the liquid poison. But the cocaine addict likes proselytizing; thus, instead of constituting a tangible warning, every victim of the drug acts as a source of infection.
4
Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s villa was completely white, as white as an ossuary and as round as an ancient Greek temple. At the side there was a small triangular evergreen garden that looked like a leaf attached to a bridal bouquet.
The villa might have been the garçonnière of a fairy who has not yet made her appearance in current fairy stories, but ought unquestionably to do so: that is, the fairy Libertine.
Tito Arnaudi and Pietro Nocera arrived there in the evening in an open taxicab. A ribbon-shaped cloud extended from the perfectly round moon, resembling an arm holding a lamp. Clusters of stars twinkled untidily here and there in the sky, looking like wind-scattered platinum filings.
Between the pergola and the euonymus hedges rectangular shirt fronts framed by evening dress stood out in the darkness of the garden under the moon. The air was full of the fragrance of night, that always young and beautiful cocotte. The two men in evening dress got out of the taxi.
The entrance hall was in Roman style. The walls were adorned with mythological frescoes against a bright red background, like those of Pompeii, which prudish and virginal English misses consider shocking. The temperature was that of a tepidarium.
The two Italians handed over their top hats and, preceded by a flunkey wearing more braid than a Turkish admiral, advanced down a corridor that was semi-circular like those in a theater and were shown into a big room.
This was the penguin room. There were big mirrors all round it, and on them were painted polar landscapes, vast expanses of snow, blocks of ice, and huge icebergs that acted as platforms for assemblies of penguins. And since only the lower part of the mirrors was painted, the higher, unpainted part provided an infinity of reflections of the landscapes facing them.