“You give them pleasure and they’re not grateful to you.”
She laughed loudly. “What makes you think that whenever I give myself to someone I want his esteem and gratitude? Gratitude for what? I don’t do it to give him pleasure; I do it for my own pleasure, or for the money he gives me. Why should I worry about what he says if I felt pleasure during the five minutes when his body was on mine? Esteem? Gratitude? Rubbish. If you hope to catch me with those arguments, I advise you to try something else.”
Tito had already threatened to leave her, but to no avail. “Your beauty is fading,” he argued desperately. “You’re only twenty-four, but you look much older. I love you because physically I’m welded to you, because an elective affinity binds me to you independently of your beauty. You’re getting old. You may still interest someone who’s attracted to you by the animal pleasure of having you, but not by your charms; he’ll want you, not because you’re young and beautiful, but because you have female organs. I’m the only one who can still feel your fascination, because I remember your former beauty. You’re almost a corpse of a woman. You may still take in some shortsighted person thanks to your dye and your make-up, but soon you’ll find yourself rejected like a badly forged bank note. You’ve the prospect of five or six more men and a few more affairs at most.
“Well, Cocaine, you must renounce those few affairs unless you want me to leave you for ever,” he went on. “I shall remain devoted to you for the whole of your life. When no one spares you a second glance I shall still be there to love you, to tell you you’re beautiful, to give you the illusion of still being attractive. I offer you my life, but what I want from you in return while your beauty fades is the faithfulness you’ve never been able to give me. Remember the specter of loneliness that lies ahead of you. Think of the time when you’ll be reduced to spending your nights alone, cold and old, and when you wake up in your bed you’ll see the yellow flesh that nobody wants any longer. If you now reject these men who are after you I’ll love you even then.”
Cocaine looked at him dry-eyed and answered: “Renunciation is what I’m afraid of.”
“But do you realize what I’m offering you in return?”
“Yes. And I prefer being alone and abandoned for ever tomorrow to giving up my pleasure tonight. The specter of loneliness is less terrifying than the immediate prospect of renunciation.”
“But have you taken stock of what remains to you? Don’t you know that every morning you have to remove hair round your lips? Don’t you realize that the skin of your neck is as fat and flabby as that on a turkey’s neck?”
“Yes. But having an affair still tempts me.”
“Remember you’ll be old tomorrow.”
“And so will you be the day after tomorrow.”
“I shall still be able to get young, fresh, beautiful women by paying them.”
“And I shall be able to get healthy males by paying them.”
“It’s not the same,” Tito replied. “I’ve always paid. The man always pays, even when he’s twenty, even when the woman seems to be giving herself to him for love. Having always sold yourself, you’ll be faced with the sad novelty of buying. You’ll find out how sad it is to pay for love.”
“That’s something I haven’t tried yet. Perhaps it might have its pleasing side. We shall see. Now let me go, because it’s nine o’clock, and I’m on at the Casino at a quarter past ten. Goodbye.”
After the show the few free seats left round the roulette tables were noisily taken by storm while the chief croupier in his elevated headquarters called out: “Un peu de silence, s’il vous plait.”
Tito walked round the four tables. Those sitting at them were inter-continental hetairae, men with no visible means of support, ladies of a certain age and others of an uncertain age, mères encore aimables, naked virgins only small parts of whom were covered, radioactive women who had given themselves a huge white forehead resting on knitted brows — the face of the cruel woman; the first of these were attractive, but then they became as commonplace as Alsatians or gold snake bracelets.
They were calm, composed-looking men; attentive footmen who picked up dropped chips and swept cigarette ash from the green cloth; women who with bureaucratic diligence noted down all the winning numbers, in the belief that they recurred. Those who believe that luck repeats itself resemble those who believe in applying experience gained with earlier lovers to new ones. They invariably lose, both at play and in life.
But Tito couldn’t find a seat.
If only one of these persons had an epileptic fit, it would be enough. It would free three seats immediately, because his two neighbors would carry away the body. But people have more pity for the dead than for the living.
“Trente et un: rouge impair et passe.”
An old woman who had lost all her money wouldn’t move. At least she wasn’t going to lose her seat.
“As selfish as a tapeworm,” Tito said aloud.
A gentleman sitting in front of him turned and exclaimed: “Arnaudi?”
It was an old friend from his boyhood days.
What a bore these childhood friends are. Just because you had the misfortune to meet them before the light of reason dawned, afterwards you have to put up with them wherever in the whole wide world you run into them.
“I’ll lose these thousand pesos,” his friend said, showing him two or three piles of chips, “and then we’ll go.”
The roulette room, with its vague noises and obscure vibrations, reminded Tito of the illustrations in books of experimental physics that show iron filings arranging themselves on magnets in accordance with different lines of force.
He felt those lines of force in the air over the green baize tables and understood why there are people who live and die for gambling.
Gambling is merely a summary of life, which is nothing but a quarter of an hour at a roulette table. The successful are those who win; and to win it’s sufficient if the gentleman on your right distracts your attention for a moment or the lady on your left prevents you from putting your stake on the number you chose. All that’s needed is that you should be seated near the low numbers when the low numbers come up, or that you should hear a voice in the air, a number whispered by an anonymous voice, and that you should put your money on it.
Gambling is not the pleasure of winning, but a feeling that you are living intensely.
It’s folly to entrust your fate to numbers that are the mere scrapheap of calculation, the rubble of mathematics. Abandoning honest work for the extravagance of gambling is like dropping science in favor of empiricism.
Those who win thanks to the empiricism of a bankruptcy or a martingale have difficulty in returning to subcutaneous injections and straightforward business transactions.
Do you generally win?” Tito’s friend asked.
“I didn’t play this evening, but I always lose,” Tito replied. “The only people who play to win are old, retired cocottes.”
The two friends parted.
Tito walked back to the hotel. It was dark. The iron benches under the palms along the seaside promenade were occupied by couples as quiet as insects in love. Every now and then a fleeting car projected beams of light and the sound of laughter.
He passed a party of perspiring young ladies, irresistible young men, officers. As in all groups that include a few intellectual young women and fashionable idiots, they were discussing spiritualism and theosophy. The young ladies inserted Portuguese words into their Spanish. In Italy they adorn their talk with French words and in France with English ones; in Horace’s Rome female intellectuals used Greek words. You find bluestockings everywhere.