It consisted of an old tin box covered in velvet, a magnificent example of Caucasian art.
“What’s inside it?” Tito asked one evening as he undid his violet tie.
“One day I’ll tell you,” Kalantan promised, taking off a golden slipper.
“Can’t it be today?” said Tito, taking off his sand-colored jacket.
“No, not yet,” said Kalantan, undoing her belt.
“But why?” said Tito, unbuttoning his waistcoat.
“Because today I’ve much more important things to tell you,” Kalantan said playfully, snapping the green garter on her thigh.
“And what have you got to tell me?”
“That I’m in danger of getting lost in this huge bed unless you join me in it immediately. Don’t wind your watch. Put it down.”
“But supposing it stops?”
“Exactly. Wait till it stops before you wind it.”
And so Tito failed to discover what was in that tin box, that rare example of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past.
Maud, the Italian dancer, met an official of the police department of very high rank and very small stature, who stuck out his chest and held his head back and, when looked at sideways, resembled a spoon. He was attached to the vice squad.
She also met a young surgeon who aspired to a lectureship at the Sorbonne and was the author of an important book on surgery. He called on her in a strictly non-professional capacity, and assured her that she was in excellent condition and was very well-formed. In fact he predicted that, with an element of good will, or rather imprudence, on her part, she would become an excellent wife and mother. But dancing and maternity don’t go very well together.
The high official in the police department who resembled a spoon when looked at sideways was a great lover of his peace and quiet and urgently begged her not to become pregnant. She assured him that she knew a young surgeon who was the author of a treatise on surgery and was available for any eventuality.
No one would have supposed that this little blond surgeon, who looked like a troubadour in an oleograph and had the melancholy, resigned eyes of a newly-delivered mother, was capable of carrying out Caesarian sections and removing cancers and ovaries. In fact he was highly skilled at these things.
He had specialized in an operation that is performed with a certain frequency in Vienna, Berlin and Paris and is beginning to be performed in Italy. It was a little operation that the surgeon with the gentle eyes of a newly-delivered mother performed without assistance and within an hour. For this little operation, including sterilization of his instruments and of his own hands, he was satisfied with a fee of 10,000 francs. In Maud’s case he was satisfied with double that amount, knowing it would be paid by the high police official, who loved Maud and his own peace and quiet; for, in order to avoid upsetting his own children who were still slumbering in the calm blue of the future, he would actually have been willing to produce several thousand francs more.
Rarely in the lifetime of that worthy official had he been so relieved as when, having once again implored the dancer Maud not to become pregnant, she assured him that, thanks to the young surgeon’s intervention, there was now nothing to fear.
The young surgeon was satisfied with his modest fee and the personal approval and grateful patronage of this influential police official who was specially assigned to the vice squad.
But, when Tito had learned that his Maud had stoically subjected herself to the surgeon’s knife in order to be able to sell her delicate merchandise without risk of its being depreciated by an unwanted pregnancy, he turned as faint as if the young surgeon had removed his heart instead of Maud’s ovaries.
He had not totally forgotten his own relatively recently acquired knowledge of physiology. For two years he had attended a gynecological clinic and had followed with real distress the fate of women who for pathological reasons had undergone the operation that Maud had now undergone, that is at the very source of life and of their femininity, and as a consequence had never been women again.
He knew the internal secretory glands were vitally important to the functional economy of women, and the rogue had deprived her of them for the sake of a few thousand francs.
He remembered young girls who, when they went home after leaving the clinic, had one by one lost all the distinguishing marks of femininity in their voice, their smile, their ways. A hoarse note crept into their voice, a severe look came into their eyes, a non-sexual, hermaphroditic, precociously old something appeared in their face, which became hairy like a man’s, and their bodies tended to fat.
Tito foresaw that all this would happen to Maud.
“Poor, poor Maud,” he said to her, with suppressed tears in his voice.
But since Maud did not understand, and since he lacked the courage to explain, all he could do was melodramatically go down on his knees, as they do in sentimental novels, and exclaim broken-heartedly: “Maud, Maud, what have you done, what have you done.”
Maud asked him to dry his tears and go away, since she was expecting the senior police official, whose visits had become much more frequent since her little operation.
But before saying goodbye she said: “Why were you weeping?”
“I was pretending,” he said.
“But you had tears in your eyes.”
“When we passionate people pretend to weep, we really do weep.” He lacked the courage to tell her the awful truth.
The young talented surgeon’s name was put forward for the Legion of Honor.
For a few days Tito rushed round Paris like a maniac. Every now and then he remembered he was on the staff of The Fleeting Moment and dropped in to see if he was needed.
He dragged himself to the reporters’ room, looking as weak as a corpse that could still walk though it was in a state of advanced putrefaction. His face was as pale as if it had been soaked in ammonia.
In the reporters’ room was the man whom nobody knew. He came forward to meet Tito with outstretched hand and a cordial smile. On every newspaper there is always a man whom nobody knows. Nobody knows who he is, what he does or why he is tolerated, but everyone from the commissionaire to the editor greets him with varying degrees of deference. He is not on the editorial staff, he is not on the payroll, he has no specific duties, but in spite of that he takes a seat at any available desk, uses the telephone, keeps his hat on, reads the newspapers, uses the newspaper’s headed paper and gives orders to the messengers.
The first thing he said was: “You’re living much too irregular a life, my dear Arnaudi. Isn’t that true, Nocera?”
Nocera: Those two women are ruining you, my dear Tito.
Chief sub-editor: You ought to get married.
Tito: Shut up, all of you.
Chief sub-editor: What you need is a loving wife to console you every now and then for all the troubles you have with your two mistresses.
Nocera: We’ll help you to find one, if you like.
Tito: Basically you’re perfectly right, of course. I ought to take refuge in marriage as if it were castration.
The man whom nobody knows: You ought to marry, if only to change your troubles.
Chief sub-editor: You ought to marry a widow. The ideal woman is a widow, in my opinion — but not your Armenian widow. A little widow whose passions have quieted down a bit. I might have one in mind for you.
Tito: It’s not easy to explain the kind of women I like. If I decided to get married, I’d want a woman with the stupid intelligence, the idiotic tameability of a seal; as for her physique —
Nocera: Do you like them plump or skinny?
Tito: I don’t want too much of an Amazon and I don’t like them too callipygian.