Read Online Cocaine by Pitigrilli - Free Book Online Page B

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    When she had finished her letter she summoned a small page boy, who was all green and gold, glossy and shining and covered with braid, and handed it to him. The boy raised his right hand vertically with the palm outwards to his green, cylindrical unpeaked cap, which was kept in its crooked position by a black chinstrap. Then he went out on to the boulevard, dodging between the buses.
    Pietro Nocera went over to her, asked if he might introduce his friends, and invited her to join them at their table.
    She looked through the question mark and smiled. Her face was pale and her mouth thin and rectilinear as if it had been cut with a scalpel. When she smiled she lengthened it, stretching it half an inch on either side without curving it.
    The chief sub-editor had been to Armenia in the course of his career as a journalist, and this led to the immediate establishment of cordial relations. She reminded him of the customs of the country, the martyrdom of its people, the color of its mountains, the passionate nature of its women.
    And while the two revived memories Tito murmured to Pietro Nocera in Italian: “What marvelous oblong eyes.”
    “Try telling her that, and you’ll see that she’ll start working them immediately. She’s the woman I was telling you about yesterday. She’s the one with the magnificent ebony coffin in her room. It’s padded with feathers and upholstered with old damask.”
    “And is it true that . . .”
    “Ask her.”
    “Ask her straight out?”
    “Yes. She’s a woman who can be asked that question.”
    He turned to her and said: “Is it true, madame, that you have a black wooden coffin and —”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “And that —” Tito went on.
    “And that I use it for making love in? Certainly I do. It’s comfortable and delightful. When I die they’ll shut me up in it for ever, and all the happiest memories of my life will be in it.”
    “Oh, if that’s the reason,” said Tito.
    “It’s not the only one,” the lady continued. “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. How shall I put it? Forgive me for saying so, but there’s something wet about them.”
    She turned to the chief sub-editor and resumed their interrupted conversation.
    “Who’s her present lover?” Tito asked.
    “A painter,” Nocera replied. “But a woman like that always has five or six replacements available.”
    Tito Arnaudi and Pietro Nocera were invited next evening to Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz’s villa, shining white between the Étoile and the Porte Maillot, between the Champs Élysées and the Bois, in the fashionable area that is the aristocratic cocaine quarter. In the luxurious villas in which the various tout Paris gather (the political tout Paris , the fashionable tout Paris , the artistic tout Paris) meetings are regularly arranged to enjoy the ecstasy the drug produces. Young followers of the turf and devotees of dress rehearsals, fashionable young gentlemen who have barely reached the age of puberty and believe themselves obliged to have on their desk the latest poem launched on the book market and in their bed the latest female adolescent launched on a life of gallantry; young Parisians who have their pajamas designed by the artists of La Vie Parisienne and feed on preserved tropical birds mention, among the big and small subjects of conversation that pullulent autour de nos tasses de thé, as Sully Prudhomme used to say, the fashionable poisons of the moment, the wild exaltation they produce, the craze for ether and chloroform and the white