“Do you expect to find a cleaner river in Italy? Perhaps you will, because Italian women wash less.”
“I’m going to be a monk. There’s a monastery near Turin where they take anyone who offers himself. It’s a kind of religious Foreign Legion.”
“But do you know how to be a monk?”
“I don’t think it’s very difficult.”
“And do you have faith?”
“No.”
“Do you have a vocation?”
“No.”
Then why are you doing it?”
“There’s a small garden, the cells are well laid out, there’s not much work, the rule is not oppressive, the food’s healthy, there are plenty of books, and you never go out, even after death, because there’s a cemetery on the spot. There’s every convenience.”
Tito looked at him, puzzled. Then he said: “You’ve had an unhappy love affair. Has your mistress been deceiving you with her husband?”
The future monk lowered his eyes and lifted his bags with a disconsolate gesture. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll send you my address, so that you can come and see me if you’re ever in the neighborhood. Goodbye.”
And he hurried down the Métro steps with bowed head.
The velvet and tin box, the complicated specimen of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past, was full of gold coins. It was like fabulous treasure hidden in the cellars of vanished cities. When Kalantan told him what the box contained Tito laughed as if it were a good joke.
“But that’s the sort of thing that happens only in fantastic novels and German films,” he said.
Kalantan told him the story.
“My husband was very rich,” she said. “He owned some inexhaustible oil wells and the most famous fisheries in the whole of Persia.”
“I know.”
“And he was inflicted from birth with the most appalling taedium vitae. He seemed to have been born with the whole of Asia’s ancient experience in his blood. Nothing tempted him, nothing amused him. He had no interest in his home or his family, and in his room he put up the notices you see in hotel bedrooms, giving the prices charged by the laundry, the cost of breakfast served in the dining room or the bedroom, and informing gentlemen taking trains later in the day that the room must be vacated before two p.m.
“He dreamt of travel, but travelled very little. He was a kind of paralytic with a craving for distant places. His longest journeys were Paris — Berlin, Paris — London, or Paris — Brussels. After being away for a month, he’d come back.
“He liked cocottes. I think all the most celebrated ones passed through his hands. What he would really have liked would have been to have them all permanently available in a moveable home, a kind of gypsy caravan, but run in accordance with the standards of a Paris maître d’hôtel. He liked me at infrequent intervals. At the beginning of our marriage he was very fond of me, though I had one defect — being his wife. To create the illusion that I wasn’t his wife, he used to pay me. Every time I took him into my bed he dropped some gold coins into that box. He said that a wife was ennobled by elevation to the rank of courtesan.”
“And hasn’t anyone ever tried to break into that box?”
“My servants are honest, and no one suspects there’s gold in it.”
“It must amount to several hundred thousand francs.”
“Maybe half a million.”
Tito went over and tried to lift it; the effort made the veins of his brow and neck swell.
“Poor darling,” Kalantan said, making him sit next to her on the day bed; and she kissed his face, which suddenly went pale, and started to caress his hands.
“Kalantan, that box is your past, and your past makes me suffer dreadfully, because I’m jealous of it. I should like to have been the first to have you. Every one of those coins is a sign of the pleasure you gave someone else.”
“But what does that matter?” Kalantan said in astonishment, kissing his eyes that were veiled with anger. “You’re my real master. My husband was merely a duty. My lovers? I don’t remember, because never have I had so much pleasure as in your arms. In any case, the past is the past, and has nothing to do with us.”
Tito withdrew his hands from hers.
The past has nothing to do with us.
It was the phrase Maud had used. These two women, products of two different civilizations, one from the Po valley and the other from the gorges of the Caucasus, used the same words to comfort him.
His waiter friend who was going to shut himself up in a monastery had been so right when he summed up his disgust by saying: “I’m sick of all this.”
Tito was now irritated with Kalantan, the wealthy Armenian woman who liked being treated like a whore. In their heart of hearts all women to a greater or lesser extent feel the latent attraction of the brothel.
That day Tito could not make love to the Armenian lady.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “But today it’s no use. I’m depressed, let me go.”
And he went back to Maud.
A few weeks previously he had still been able to forget Maud’s infidelities in Kalantan’s arms and Kalantan’s past in Maud’s bed, but now his intensified love of both meant that he was crushed between two equal and opposite forces.
He now knew all about Kalantan’s past: her simulated selling of herself to her husband, the orgies in the penguin room, the feverish excitement of her stimulants and the voluptuousness of her narcotics, the love-making in the coffin, the primitive nostalgia for the brothel followed by a desire for purity, which was nothing but revulsion from excessive and perverted sensuality; it was a purely cerebral disgust transformed by morphine into a chaste frenzy.
Nor was there anything he didn’t know about Maud’s past and present.
He knew how and to whom she had first given herself; he knew to whom she had sold herself in Italy and in Paris; he had seen her in bed with a black man whose pachydermatous skin shone like brilliantine; he had seen the police official emerging from the lift with his little eyes swollen and shining with lust; he knew that the young surgeon had mutilated her at the very source of life and love, anticipating her menopause and cutting short her youth. He knew the discreet hotels, the garçonnières, where she went to hire herself; every Paris arrondissement harbored a client of hers.
Maud and Kalantan were different creatures belonging to different civilizations, but they were alike in not understanding his anguished jealousy. Both had said to him, with different accents but with the same non-understanding in their eyes, that the past had nothing to do with them.
Maud and Kalantan were dissimilar women, both of whom he loved with the same frenzy, for both held him captive, one by his jealousy of the present, the other by his jealousy of the past.
Maud had on her skin the odor of the thyme of her green mountains; Kalantan had a salty flavor.
Both were young, but there was something old in each of them, though in a different way.
Maud, with her insatiable sensuality, sought new and excitingly strange and vicious forms of excitement, while Kalantan, sick of morbid eccentricities, sought purity, simplicity, primitiveness in her relations with Tito.
There were two kinds of age in these two young women. One had gone through the most complicated forms of vice, only to end up with wanting straightforwardness and simplicity; while the other had gone through the whole gamut of ordinary love-making, only to end up in search of vice.
The enthusiasm with which they pursued two opposite paths indicated two different but similarly dynamic personalities.
Between these two women, these two passions, Tito was undecided. He couldn’t make up his mind by which to let himself be carried away. He was intra due fuochi distanti e moventi, between two distant and powerful fires…