Next day they brought her another letter, in which Nocera expressed a wish to kiss her magnificent body. After consulting the mirror, which reflected the whole of her form, she sat down and replied:
“Dear Nocera, my body is finished. I can’t love any more, and I don’t want to be loved either. My last lover was poor Tito, to whom I shall be faithful for ever.”
Next day she expected another letter, but none came. She waited two days, three days, with increasing anxiety.
Why didn’t he write?
“Here’s a letter for you, Maddalena.”
“Thank you, papa.”
It was a last passionate letter from Nocera, who implored her to come to his house in an almost poetical street in a quiet district. He said he loved her, wanted her, needed her, her flesh and her perfume.
Maddalena remained thoughtful for a few moments, took a card and an envelope, and with a calm, spring-like smile wrote:
I’ll be at your place at four o’clock. Kiss me.
She looked for a sheet of blotting paper, but there wasn’t one. She looked all round. There wasn’t even any sand. But in front of her eyes, on an old lace mat, there was a shiny, mother-of-pearl sphere full of a yellowy-gray powder that looked like Rachel face powder.
She carefully lifted it, gently poured some powder on to the card on which the ink was still wet, carefully shook it to dry the ink, and then bent the card and poured the powder back into the urn. She put the card in an envelope, gave it to the postman, and remained thoughtful for a moment as brief as a pause in a piece of music.
She bit her lower lip to make it swell, dried it on her upper lip, and then slowly and skillfully passed her rouge pencil over both.
She took a small key from her key ring, the one that opened her flat cabin trunk.
She felt as light and luminous in spirit as an Andalusian mantilla.
She improvised a song with her mouth shut, knelt in front of the innumerable pairs of stockings and chose the thinnest, the pair that most exposed her flesh.
AFTERWORD
In 1920, at the age of just twenty-seven, a young Italian named Dino Segre, writing under the pen name Pitigrilli, achieved overnight success and notoriety with a book of short stories called Luxurious Breasts, followed the next year by the novel Cocaine, and a second book of stories entitled The Chastity Belt.
Although he was branded by some as a “pornographer,” he would not be considered such by contemporary standards: rather than graphic descriptions of sex, Pitigrilli offered a deeply cynical, iconoclastic satire of contemporary European society.
Behind the official façade of bourgeois morality, traditional family life, and patriotism, Pitigrilli saw a world driven by sex, power and greed, in which adultery, illegitimate children and hypocrisy were the order of the day and husbands and wives were little more than respectable-seeming pimps and prostitutes. Pitigrilli’s sarcastic, aphoristic style shocked and amused by turning conventional morality (and most of the Ten Commandments) on its head:
Never tell the truth. A lie is a weapon. I speak of useful, necessary lies. A useless lie is as unpleasant and odious as a useless homicide…
Do not covet thy neighbor’s wife, but if you do covet her, take her away freely. When in the theater, on the tram or in a woman’s bed, if there is a free place, take it before someone else does…
Hate your neighbor as you love yourself: and don’t forget that revenge is a great safety valve for our pain… Believe me: a good digestion is worth much more than all the ideas of humanity…
Honesty, duty, brotherhood and altruism are like supernatural phenomena: everyone describes them but nobody has seen them; when you get closer, either they don’t happen or there’s a trick behind it… (The Chastity Belt)
Pitigrilli’s cynical amorality captured something of the spirit of Italy in the early 1920s, a society that emerged from World War I with many of its traditional beliefs in pieces. The calls to glory and sacrifice and national renewal had proven cruel illusions, with the death and mutilation of millions resulting in but a few minor territorial changes. Meanwhile, traditional pillars of society — such as the Catholic Church and the country’s economic and political elite — had lost much of their authority. Women were pushing for greater freedom and autonomy, challenging existing standards of personal morality and family structure.
In this tumultuous context, Pitigrilli’s books were quickly translated into numerous languages and he became an international succès de scandale. He then became the editor of a well-known magazine Le Grandi Firme, (The Big Names) the appeal of which was partly due to its daring content and cynical, worldly tone.
In Paris and Turin, Pitigrilli cavorted with society’s upper crust, which experimented with theosophy, occult séances, gambling and narcotics as means of replacing the old certainties supplied by church and fatherland. In Cocaine, perhaps his most successful effort at a sustained narrative, Pitigrilli describes a world of cocaine dens, gambling parlors, orgies and lewd entertainment. His main character Tito Arnaudi goes to Paris and finds himself swept up in the post-war French metropolis:
Montmartre is the modern Babylon, the electrified Antioch, the little Baghdad, the Paradise of the cosmopolitan noctambulist, the blinding, deafening, stupefying spot to which the dreams of the blasés of the whole world are directed, where even those no longer able to blow their noses come to challenge the world’s most expert suppliers of love. Montmartre is the Sphinx, the Circe, the venal Medusa of the many poisons and innumerable philters that attracts the traveler with a boundless fascination.
The principal occupation of the characters of Cocaine is using narcotics, sex and alcohol to distract themselves from the horrors of real life. As Tito puts it at one point: “Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void.” In searching for any kind of thrill or stimulation, they resort to “the fashionable poisons of the moment, the wild exaltation they produce, the craze for ether and chloroform and the white Bolivian powder that produces hallucinations.”
Tito, a failed medical student who has just been hired as a journalist, begins to investigate cocaine dens in order to write an article for a Paris newspaper appropriately named The Fleeting Moment. In the course of his research, he indulges in the white powder, which for a time acts as a kind of welcome balm, giving him “a sense, not just of euphoria, but of boundless optimism, and a special kind of receptivity to insults, which were converted in his ears into courteous compliments.”
As Tito’s lover, (or one of his lovers), Kalantan, tells him:
“There’s still hope for you… You haven’t yet got to the stage of tremendous depression, of insuperable melancholy. Now you smile when you have the powder in your blood. You’re at the early stage in which you go back to childhood.”
She spoke to him as to a child, though they were both of the same age. Cocaine achieves the cruel miracle of distorting time.
Kalantan is a wealthy Armenian woman whom Tito meets on the cusp of widowhood. A drug addict as well, she keeps a black coffin in her bedroom for making love. She explains her curious habit thus:
It’s comfortable and delightful. When I die they’ll shut me up in it forever, and all the happiest memories of my life will be in it… It also offers another advantage. When it’s over I’m left alone, all alone; it’s the man who has to go away. Afterwards I find the man disgusting. Forgive me for saying so, but afterwards men are always disgusting. Either they follow the satisfied male’s impulse and get up as quickly as they do from a dentist’s chair, or they stay close to me out of politeness or delicacy of feeling; and that revolts me, because there’s something in them that is no longer male.