Suddenly he began slowly groaning, and stopped. The contractions ceased, his brow became smooth, his eyes lost that terrifying light, and all his muscles relaxed. His cruel arms slackened their grip, and he rose to his feet.
Cocaine was still lying in the same position. There was nothing shameless in her motionless nudity in the immensity of the night under the purity of the stars.
But her lover, her last lover, looked southward, and saw a black shadow drawing nearer on the shining rails.
He picked up the naked woman and laid her on the dry grass a few yards away from the track.
The Great West Africa Express appeared and thundered past, and the huge draft caused pieces of torn mauve lingerie decorated with small organdy pleats to rise and flutter in the air.
Cocaine opened her eyes and watched the black, puffing trail of lights speeding through the night and disappearing, leaving the endless steel railway track behind it.
The train crushed even its own sparks.
Tito, without speaking, helped Maud to dress and pin together her torn clothing, and they walked back to the town and the hotel.
They kissed once more at the door of her room.
Next afternoon, while Maud was drinking a melted banana ice at another reception in her honor, Tito embarked in a ship leaving for Genoa. Just when the propellers started to sing their melancholy and gay farewell ballad, Tito put his hand in his pocket and found a visiting card.
Who’s he? he said to himself. Where did I come across this chap?
Then he remembered.
He was the European who had sung the praises of Berber women soon after his arrival and had told him he had several available, the oldest of whom was sixteen.
Tito looked again at the visiting card and smiled.
If I’d taken advantage of his offer, my suicidal intentions would have disappeared, he said to himself. Even on this occasion my jealousy was the product of long abstinence, of accumulated desire.
He remembered that on the way back to the hotel with Cocaine on the previous night he had felt much calmer after possessing her on the railway line. It had occurred to him that she might well give herself to someone else next day, but the thought did not make him suffer.
Dakar was already receding into the distance. Tito, standing in the stern, remembered the times when he had hurried to Kalantan to stifle the jealousy caused by Maud. Even then he had known that jealousy was a physical, glandular phenomenon. He knew that when the glands were emptied jealousy disappeared.
But sometimes, only too often, he had forgotten it.
Now his senses were calm, because the night before under the breath of death and the blowing of the breeze he had got rid of all his jealousy on that endless steel rail.
But now? Now that the steamer was taking him away; now that the rhythm and the exciting perfume of the sea, the memories, the eroticism with which the corridors, saloons and cabins of transatlantic liners are filled would revive his desire and his jealousy. How was he going to live now that Maud had given him more ecstatic pleasure than ever before, now that he had seen her beauty reborn and had seen her dancing marvelously, now that he liked her more than ever.
Now that he had tried to die with her, how would he find the courage to face death alone?
He looked towards Dakar, but it was out of sight.
The ship was in the middle of the ocean and the sky was above, concave, with an exactly circular edge all round it, just as on the evening before, when it had arched over him and over Cocaine’s brow — which had been whiter than a corpse’s — and over their last embrace.
And he repeated to the sea the sweet name of Cocaine.
Cocaine, as pale as the powder that intoxicates and kills; Cocaine, passive woman, as irresponsible as a lifeless being, a pinch of poison that seeks out no one but kills when swallowed; Cocaine, the inert creature who had been willing to die when Tito suggested it, but agreed to live when he no longer wanted to die; Cocaine, who gave herself to anyone who wanted her and refused no one, because refusing is an effort; Cocaine, woman made of white, exquisite poison, the poison of our time, the poison that lures one to sweet death.
Once more Tito’s luck was in, because the sea was again so rough that he had to stay in his cabin all the way to Genoa.
And, since it’s better to leave a wretched man alone when he is ill, I ask the reader to leave his cabin for a moment, particularly as I have something to confide.
What I have to say is this.
The Great West Africa Express that I said passed Dakar doesn’t exist. But it’s not my fault. It suited me to put it there.
Also, while I’m about it I may as well confess that the Hotel Napoléon in the Place Vendôme, where Tito and Maud stayed for some months, is another invention of mine. I could have put them in the Bristol, or the snobbish and conventional Ritz, but I don’t want to give hotels any publicity, for one thing because they don’t need any publicity from me.
And now let us go back into Tito’s cabin, where he is packing his bags, because the port of Genoa is in sight.
13
As Tito had foreseen, after a few days’ separation he was overwhelmed by the memory of Cocaine. Every now and again he stopped in the street and, taking careful precautions to avoid being surprised, took the naked photograph of her from his pocket and looked at it.
“Are you back in Turin?” Nocera said to him.
“As you see.”
“And what are you going to do here?”
“I’m going to die.”
“Couldn’t you do it there?”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“You’re quite right, it’s too hot in Senegal. It’s less trouble to go on living.”
Nocera gave this jocular reply because he did not believe in Tito’s suicidal intentions. He had talked about them too much. A person who is determined on suicide keeps his mouth shut to avoid giving people a chance to prevent him. A person determined to take his own life does it without warning.
One day Tito had said: “I’ve tried everything in life: love, gambling, stimulants, narcotics, work, idleness, theft; I’ve met women of all races and men of every color. The only thing I haven’t encountered yet is death, and I want to try it.”
Pietro Nocera thought these words represented a love of rhetoric rather than an irrevocable decision.
“Don’t act the tragedian, Tito,” he replied. “Don’t talk about dying. Life is a pochade, a farce.”
“Yes, Nocera, I know, but I don’t enjoy it. I’m leaving before the end of the performance.”
“There’s literary affectation on your winding sheet,” Nocera said. “You won’t kill yourself. You talk about it too much, and even while doing so you’re looking for a hook to hold on to to show yourself how wrong you are. Your real object in talking to me like this is to get me to produce arguments that will enable you to say triumphantly: What you’re saying is quite right, you’ve convinced me, now I shan’t kill myself. But what I say to you, my dear Tito, is: You’re quite right, carry on and do it.”
“Bravo, Nocera. Encouragement was just what I wanted from you. The only thing I’m still doubtful about is how to do it. Gassing oneself is too slow. It’s not polite to keep death hanging about when it’s we who have invited him; he shouldn’t creep in through the tradesmen’s entrance, but come straight in through the front door. The ideal would be to die on the high seas. That’s the best way of dying. In a first class saloon, on a fantastic night, one of those mid-ocean parties vibrant with music, blue distances and rhythm. Surrounded by millionaire décolleté ladies, dressed only in ribbons and diamonds; beautiful, radiant women loaded with jewels and rejuvenated for the occasion. Men in tails engaged in intercontinental deals. Toasts, champagne, the orchestra playing ragtime, a dancer performing on a stage surrounded by palms and garlanded with lights. A cosmopolitan hum contributed to by Chinese, blacks, mulattos, merchants, bons viveurs, diplomatists, cocottes exchanging continents to increase their fees or recover their long-lost virginity. A crowd of people brought together on that ship by chance, by destiny, on different pretexts but for the same purpose, death.