In Turin, cradle of the Risorgimento and guardian of the Holy Shroud, he saw the usual faces and the usual things. At dusk hundreds of swifts still tangled and untangled in disorderly patterns as they flew round the towers of the Palazzo Madama; and the usual people got on the usual trams at the usual stops at the usual times. He met a number of friends and a number of women who, when he came to think of it, had been his. Sometimes we meet women whose lovers we have been for an hour or a month, and we hardly remember having dedicated to them the solemn ceremony conducted by the industrious donkey with the Egyptian woman at Port Said, though the memory of that highly important ceremony ought automatically to spring to our mind. How insignificant it is. Nothing of her flesh, her electricity, her breath, has remained in us, nothing whatever. As soon as it was over, while she dressed, we started chatting again about other, unimportant things. So all that was left was a taste no stronger than that left in our mouths by a cigarette after we have put it in an ashtray. But if we discover that our current love has been someone else’s, if only for five minutes, we feel an intolerable pang, even after many years. The act to which she was subjected by others seems to us to be an indelible stain; we feel that her blood has been polluted, her flesh irreparably soiled, violated, adulterated by that act, by that very same act that we hardly remember carrying out with the woman we now pass in the street.
Jealousy is a fever that arises from a stupid, baseless excitement in our unthinking brain.
Jealousy is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion.
The woman you love has gone to bed with X. You hate X, you hate her, and you have perpetually before your eyes the vision of your loved one and X embracing in an act that fills you with horror.
But you too in your time have deceived the woman you love and have done with Y what X did in bed with the woman you love.
Well, what remains in your skin, your mind of Mrs Y? Nothing whatever. No more than X left with your woman.
In other words, auto-suggestion. Do you want evidence of that? Well, then, if you don’t know the man, you imagine him to be hateful, offensive, repulsive, and you feel that if you met him you’d kill him.
But, if you happen to see his photograph, you begin to realize that it’s possible to look at him without horror; and, believe me, if you were actually introduced to him you’d approach him with a cordial smile on your lips, look him in the eye without trembling and, if you had reached my degree of perfection, you’d actually be capable of cheerfully patting him on the back and telling him he’s a good chap.
In a not too distant future, reason and education will have driven home the lesson of the futility of jealousy. The day will come when our beloved children (the cuckolds of the future) will be prepared to be cuckolded and will no longer suffer for it, because we shall have inoculated them with commonsense and given them anti-cuckoldry injections.
Now that he could not see the men concerned, Tito’s jealousy was greater than it had been three weeks earlier, when they were within his reach, catching the scent of the latest electric sparks invisibly given off by Maud’s body.
A street-walker offered herself to him for twenty lire.
“That’s not expensive, not even enough to cover the costs of production. Come along, then. But I’ll spray you all over with scent.”
The seller of sensations followed him to his room and allowed herself to be sprayed with Avatar, Maud’s perfume.
He tried a large number of these women. They were young, pretty and skillful, but they were not Cocaine. He poured her scent, the delicious Avatar, over them, but the result was not the same as that produced on Cocaine’s skin.
Every woman’s skin interprets scents in its own way, just as every musician interprets music in his own way.
He tried exhausting himself, exhausting his virility, going from one woman’s bed to another, but when his flesh seemed dead to any stimulus there was one thing that still excited him, the memory of Maud, desire for her. He had experienced this once before, in Paris, when, after the excesses of the insatiable Kalantan, he discovered new sources of pleasure in himself at the sight of Maud.
He went walking in the outlying districts of Turin, just as he had done in his days of misery in Paris. But now when he walked he started feeling the weight of his body. It was the first sign of age, the age when men start wearing dark brown suits.
One day he came across the knitted green tie with big blue diagonal stripes in a forgotten corner of a suitcase, and he wore it to go and see his monk friend who had sought refuge in the monastery that was a kind of Foreign Legion for the victims of emotional upsets. A ray of sunlight that fell on the tie revived a dead trace of Avatar scent. If you only knew how tears are perfumed when they run down a pretty woman’s face, and how ties are perfumed when a woman weeps on them.
In the monastery garden swifts were flying about at ground level and then zooming up as if to cleanse themselves in the sky.
A poor monk was throwing bits of bread to sparrows as poor as himself. Waves of silence met Tito in the porch.
His friend the monk came to meet him, holding out both sleeves, and greeted him as his brother in Christ. Then he said: “Yes, I’m happy.”
And he told him that he should enter the monastery too.
“But it’s not so easy…”
“On the contrary, it’s very easy indeed. Are you a Mason?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s just like entering a Masonic lodge.” He said that the Good Shepherd was happy to find a lost sheep.
“I know,” said Tito. “But if He doesn’t find it there’s one fewer to milk and clip.”
The monk showed Tito his cell, the library, and the workroom of an aged monk who lovingly studied beetles and butterflies. He also took him to the chapel.
“I’m sorry I can’t offer you a vermouth, as I did when I was a waiter in Paris,” he said. “But I can offer you a mass.”
“Very well,” said Tito, “I’ll settle for a mass.”
“Ordinary mass or sung mass?”
“Which is the quicker?”
“There’s no difference.”
“If you’ll sing…”
“Of course I will.”
“Then make it sung mass.”
He duly listened to it.
“Would you also like a benediction?”
“No, thanks. I’m all right as it is.”
They walked slowly along the cloister and looked at the refectory.
“What’s the food like?”
“It’s table d’hôte. Only the sick eat à la carte.”
The monk said that Christ should be loved because He had sacrificed himself for mankind, and Tito replied that the mice and rabbits that were killed in laboratories to test new medicines for the benefit of mankind were Jesus Christs too.
The monk was horrified, and begged him not to blaspheme; he said that mice saved nobody, while Jesus Christ had redeemed mankind.
“In that case a fireman who dies to save a single life is more admirable than Christ, because there’s more merit in sacrificing yourself to save a single life than in saving thousands of millions.”
The monk was not convinced, but he could find nothing better to suggest than that Tito should take minor orders, and he was so persuasive that when Tito said goodbye he did not dare call him a fool, but said: “I’ll consult my conscience.” In other words, he was just like women who, when they want to leave a shop without buying, say: “I’ll come back with my husband.”
He spent two or three evenings in a café in the Via Po, which he knew well from his student days. It was still frequented by the poet who wrote in dialect and drank coffee without sugar and the old painter who specialized in landscapes of Mars and the fantastic flowers of Saturn because he could not draw the flowers and countryside of our own world. Those people were artists. People are generous with labels. If someone manages to get a little bit of clay together and make a nose with it, he’s consecrated as an artist; if someone has four books and a microscope, he passes for a scientist. But fortunately reputations are demolished as easily as they are gained.