Cocaine by Pitigrilli

Author:Pitigrilli
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2013-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

9

He reached Kalantan’s villa a little late, having met, at the entrance to a Métro station, his old school friend, the waiter, who used to memorize dates like telephone numbers (Peace of Campoformio, one seven nine seven) and had acted as his guide to the cafés of Montmartre when he was doing his research for the cocaine article.

“I’m going back to Italy,” his friend announced, extending his baggage-laden arms. “I’m sick of Paris, I’m sick of waiting, I’m sick of earning money one franc or so at a time, I’m sick of everlasting complaints. If I stayed here much longer I’d throw myself in the Seine, though half of its water comes from the bidets of recognized or clandestine whores.”

“Do you expect to find a cleaner river in Italy? Perhaps you will, because Italian women wash less.”

“I’m going to be a monk. There’s a monastery near Turin where they take anyone who offers himself. It’s a kind of religious Foreign Legion.”

“But do you know how to be a monk?”

“I don’t think it’s very difficult.”

“And do you have faith?”

“No.”

“Do you have a vocation?”

“No.”

Then why are you doing it?”

“There’s a small garden, the cells are well laid out, there’s not much work, the rule is not oppressive, the food’s healthy, there are plenty of books, and you never go out, even after death, because there’s a cemetery on the spot. There’s every convenience.”

Tito looked at him, puzzled. Then he said: “You’ve had an unhappy love affair. Has your mistress been deceiving you with her husband?”

The future monk lowered his eyes and lifted his bags with a disconsolate gesture. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll send you my address, so that you can come and see me if you’re ever in the neighborhood. Goodbye.”

And he hurried down the Métro steps with bowed head.

The velvet and tin box, the complicated specimen of Caucasian art that constituted Kalantan’s past, was full of gold coins. It was like fabulous treasure hidden in the cellars of vanished cities. When Kalantan told him what the box contained Tito laughed as if it were a good joke.

“But that’s the sort of thing that happens only in fantastic novels and German films,” he said.

Kalantan told him the story.

“My husband was very rich,” she said. “He owned some inexhaustible oil wells and the most famous fisheries in the whole of Persia.”

“I know.”

“And he was inflicted from birth with the most appalling taedium vitae. He seemed to have been born with the whole of Asia’s ancient experience in his blood. Nothing tempted him, nothing amused him. He had no interest in his home or his family, and in his room he put up the notices you see in hotel bedrooms, giving the prices charged by the laundry, the cost of breakfast served in the dining room or the bedroom, and informing gentlemen taking trains later in the day that the room must be vacated before two p.m.

“He dreamt of travel, but travelled very little. He was a kind of paralytic with a craving for distant places.

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