Pitigrilli - Cocaine

Translated by Eric Mosbacher

COCAINE

NEW VESSEL PRESS

www.newvesselpress.com

Copyright 2013 Pier Maria Furlan

Afterword Copyright 2013 Alexander Stille

First published in Italian in 1921 as Cocaina

This translation first published in 1982 by Hamlyn Paperbacks.

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At the College of the Barnabites he learned Latin, how to serve mass and how to bear false witness skills that might come in handy at any time. But as soon as he left he forgot all three.

For several years he was a medical student. When he presented himself for the pathology exam they said: We cant allow you to take it wearing a monocle. Either you dont wear the monocle or you dont take the exam.

Well, I shant take the exam, Tito replied, rising to his feet. And with that he abandoned the idea of taking a degree.

He chewed gum sent him by an uncle in America as an advance on his legacy, and he smoked cheap cigarettes. When a woman took his fancy he jotted down her name in a notebook; she took her place at the bottom of the list, which he consulted as soon as he grew tired of the current favorite. Its Luisellas turn, he would note, and he would go and see Luisella.

Its your turn, he would tell her. And dont waste time, because Mariuccias next, and shes getting impatient.

When he met Mariuccia he would say: Its not your turn yet, Luisellas first.

Not having a moustache, he was in the habit of twirling his eyebrows.

Why do you keep twirling your eyebrows? a young lady asked him one day.

We all twirl the hairs we have, depending on our age and sex, Tito replied.

The young lady thought him very witty and fell in love with him.

She lived in a flat in the same building and she was twenty. That is something that happens to young persons of both sexes when they are no longer nineteen and are not yet twenty-one. Afterwards we look back on it with regret as a fabulous age we did not sufficiently appreciate.

Her name was Maddalena, and she was a decent girl, though she went to a secretarial school. When they took their Sunday walk her highly respectable mama seemed to be shielding her daughters twenty-year-old virginity with her bosom; and every evening her father, who was one of those old-fashioned men who still count in scudi and napoleons, waited for her to come home with an extinguished cigar between his fingers and his spectacles on his brow, and if she was ten minutes late he would read her a lecture, brandishing his hundred-year-old pocket watch in the air like a sword.

He knew that when girls start by being five minutes late they end by being a fortnight late, and even more. All sexual morality is basically intended to avert the danger of girls being late.

Maddalenas parents were inflexible in their moral principles, and one day when Maddalena was seen exchanging a few kisses with Tito, her medical student neighbor, all the most picturesque insults suggested by comparative zoology burst forth from her mothers robust bosom and spread and re-echoed up and down the stairs; she then resorted to medico-legal terms such as degenerate, irresponsible and satyr; and when her repertoire and her lungs were exhausted she seized the girl by the arm and dragged her inside the flat. Next day Maddalena was sent to a reformatory for fallen girls or girls in moral danger, and she remained there for ten months, until she attained her majority, because her poor but honest mother and her poor but irreproachable father could not allow her to take the wrong turning.

At the Royal Reformatory contact with her depraved companions was supposed to be neutralized by daily visits from a number of pious and aristocratic ladies whose presence, encouragement and example would show the juvenile offenders the way to the flowery arbors of virtue. These dried up, shriveled and bearded ladies, devoid of breasts or ovaries, did have a beneficial effect; they produced consternation and alarm among the young delinquents and turned their wavering imaginations towards the blissful attractions of vice. It is a grave mistake to entrust the kaleidoscope of virtue to ugly and repulsive women. Female reformers should invite the most glittering cocottes to visit prisoners and show them in return for a reasonable fee, of course that it was by the practice of modesty and chastity that they became so beautiful, attractive and tempting; while old, pious, ugly, aristocratic and bearded ladies could be usefully employed demonstrating the disastrous consequences of dissolute and licentious living.

Her older companions taught Maddalena all the arts of gallantry, from how to procure an abortion to how to fleece a client. She took a theoretical preparatory course in prostitution; and when she was released to return to the paternal roof she forgave her beloved parents for the excessively severe punishment they had imposed on her (for her own good) the previous year.

In their turn, her parents forgave her youthful indiscretion, but explained that their reputation permitted no compromise with conventional morality.

Soon afterwards Maddalena, having become the mistress of a big industrialist and of a wealthy priest, adopted the name of Maud. Her poor but honest parents put no obstacle in the way of her career, particularly as her mother was allowed to go and see her every day to inquire after her health and take the leftovers from her kitchen.

Her father, saying No, I cannot accept them, nevertheless accepted the industrialists banknotes and smoked his cigars. He drank the priests liquor and had his discarded cloak made into a magnificent morning coat, to be worn on special occasions and when he went to see his daughter. And since she was in the habit of discarding shoes and stockings while they were still new, he made himself responsible for getting a good price for them, dividing the proceeds into two equal parts, of course: one for himself and one for his wife.

Tito, in despair at the news that Maddalena had been sent to a reformatory, flung himself into a train for France, and he arrived in Paris eighteen hours later.

He had a few hundred-lire notes in his pocket and no letters of introduction. Everyone who is destined to be a success in life leaves home without any letters of introduction. Tito went straight to a printers and ordered a hundred visiting cards, which were delivered the same day.

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi

Professor Dr Tito Arnaudi...

He read them all, one by one. By the time he reached the hundredth he was convinced that he really was both a doctor and a professor, for to convince others it is first of all necessary to convince oneself. He sent the first of them to the pedant who had prevented him from taking his degree by telling him to remove his monocle. Whats the use of a degree if a visiting card says as much as a diploma?

He succumbed to the melancholy that afflicts everyone during his first few days alone in a big city, and while strolling down a boulevard, looking up as if he were seeking the best place for a rope to hang himself with, he ran into an old school friend.