Pitigrilli -Seriously wicked. It deals playfully and brutally with provocative issues of promiscuity, prostitution and ecstasy, and remains at its heart filled with pure, romantic longing

Pitigrilli, Cocaine, Trans. by Eric Mosbacher, New Vessel, 2013. [1921.]

Paris in the 1920s – dizzy and decadent. Where a young man can make a fortune with his wits … unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine’s dandified hero Tito Arnaudi invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths, and sells these stories to the newspapers. But his own life becomes even more outrageous than his press reports when he acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty and wicked, Pitigrilli’s classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and charts the comedy and tragedy of a young man’s downfall and the lure of a bygone era. The novel’s descriptions of sex and drug use prompted church authorities to place it on a list of forbidden books, while appealing to filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder who wrote a script based on the tale. Cocaine retains its venom even today.

“Pitigrilli … deserves rehabilitation. His bleak and brilliant satire, lush and intoxicating prose, and sadistic playfulness remain as fresh and caustic as they were nine decades ago. His tragic vision of the human condition, expressed through ironic wit and eloquences, distinguishes the great literature of any era.- The Arts Fuse

“Cocaine is a brilliant black comedy that belongs on the same shelf as Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion. Pitigrilli is an acidic aphorist and a wicked observer of social folly.” - Jay McInerney 

“Pitigrilli was an enjoyable writer – spicy and rapid – like lightning.” - Umberto Eco

“Pitigrilli is a highly emblematic forgotten figure, a poète maudit of Italy of the 1920s; his cynical comic satire describes the disillusioned world that followed World War I and proved fertile for the triumph of fascism.” - From the Afterword by Alexander Stille

“Seriously wicked … It deals playfully and brutally with provocative issues of promiscuity, prostitution and ecstasy, and remains at its heart filled with pure, romantic longing.” - Die Zeit

“The name of the author Pitigrilli … is so well known in Italy as to be almost a byword for ‘naughtiness’ … The only wonder to us is that some enterprising translator did not render some of his books available in English sooner.” - The New York Times

In 1920, at the age of just twenty-seven, a young Italian named Dino Segre, writing under the pen name Pitigrilli, achieved 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.
Behind Italy’s 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. Born in Turin, Segre himself had been the illegitimate child of a Jewish father—also named Dino Segre—and a young Catholic mother. (His father did not marry his mother until their child was eight years old.) In his work he delighted in turning conventional morality on its head, along with most of the Ten Commandments:

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 neighbour’s wife, but if you do covet her, take her away freely. When in the theatre, on the tram or in a woman’s bed, if there is a free place, take it before someone else does…
Hate your neighbour 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 having resulted 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. In Paris and Turin, where he worked as a writer and journalist, Pitigrilli cavorted with society’s upper crust, which experimented with theosophy, occult séances, gambling, and narcotics as means of replacing the old certainties of church and fatherland.
In Cocaine, perhaps his most successful effort at a sustained narrative, Pitigrilli describes a world of cocaine dens, gambling parlors, orgies, lewd entertainment, and séances. His main character Tito Arnaudi is a failed medical student who has just been hired as a journalist in Paris, where 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 one “a sense not just of euphoria, but of boundless optimism and a special kind of receptivity to insults.”
The principal occupation of the characters of Cocaine is distracting themselves from the horrors of real life. 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.” 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.

At a certain point, Tito’s two principal drugs, cocaine and sex, fuse in the figure of Maud, the main female character; Pitigrilli begins to call her Cocaine, since he becomes equally addicted to both at the same time. Maud too is a kind of addict, distracting herself by having sex with a procession of men, in some cases for money and in others for pleasure. She makes no effort to hide her activities from Tito, who follows her to South America in hopes of having her entirely to himself. The affair with Maud follows the course that addiction to cocaine generally follows: leading from initial euphoria to increasing desperation and psychological collapse. When Tito finally does himself in, Maud and Tito’s best friend Pietro attend to him on his deathbed. Struck by Tito’s final despair, they vow to give up their lives of excess but soon fall into bed with one another, ending the novel on a note of Pitigrillian cynicism, in which despair is leavened by bitter laughter.
Cocaine appeared in 1921; the following year, Benito Mussolini and his fascist party came to power after the so-called March on Rome. Interestingly, Mussolini, himself a deep cynic and perhaps the shrewdest interpreter of the post-World War I mood, appears to have been a fan of Pitigrilli’s novels. When the books were attacked for their immorality, Mussolini defended them: “Pitigrilli is right…. Pitigrilli is not an immoral writer; he photographs the times. If our society is corrupt, it’s not his fault.”
But as Mussolini’s fascism evolved from a transgressive, radical opposition movement into Italy’s new political order, Pitigrilli was bound to be regarded with increasing suspicion. Much of his withering sarcasm was directed at the patriotic and nationalistic nostrums that were the sacred gospel of fascism. In The Chastity Belt, Pitigrilli would write: “Fatherland is a word that serves to send sheep to slaughter in order to serve the interests of the shepherds who stay safely at home.” In 1926, Pitigrilli was put on trial for obscenity and narrowly acquitted. Two years later, he was arrested in Turin for alleged “antifascist activities.”

Dino Segre, 1930

But the case against Pitigrilli turned out like an episode in one of his novels, in which all the basest human instincts took on the mask of political principle and patriotism. What appears to have happened was this: some people eager to take over the editorship of Pitigrilli’s successful magazine, Le Grandi Firme (The Big Names), convinced one of his former lovers, the writer Amalia Guglieminetti, to destroy him. Guglieminetti was a society woman with literary ambitions, who dressed like a flapper and carried a long cigarette holder; she could have come straight out of the pages of Cocaine. Guglieminetti had taken up with Pietro Brandimarte, a powerful local fascist official, after her relationship with the writer ended, and she agreed to supply Pitigrilli’s enemies with personal letters written in his hand. These letters allegedly contained insults to Mussolini and fascism. But the forgeries were so crude that Pitigrilli was able to expose them at trial, forcing Guglieminetti to break down and confess on the witness stand.
Perhaps because of his sense of extreme vulnerability, Pitigrilli appears to have begun to work at ingratiating himself with the fascist regime. In 1931, he sent a new book to Mussolini with the following dedication: “To Benito Mussolini, the man above all adjectives.” And by the mid-1930s he became an extremely active and prolific spy of the OVRA, fascist Italy’s secret political police force. What makes his contributions especially intriguing is that he informed on a very rich and interesting circle of intellectuals and writers who would go on to become important parts of Italy’s anti-fascist cultural elite: the publisher Giulio Einaudi, Leone Ginzburg and his future wife Natalia, the painter and writer Carlo Levi, and the circle of Adriano and Paola Olivetti. Pitigrilli’s sudden usefulness to the secret police was sparked by a specific event: the arrest in March of 1934 of a young Turinese Jew, Sion Segre, who happened to be Pitigrilli’s first cousin. Sion Segre had been caught trying to smuggle into Italy from Switzerland a raft of newspapers and leaflets of an organization called Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), the main non-Communist left-of-centre anti-fascist group, whose leaders were living in exile in Paris. Following Sion Segre’s capture, fascist police arrested fourteen others suspected of ties to the organization. Nine of the alleged conspirators were from Jewish families and some of the Italian newspapers reported the story by referring to a Jewish anti-fascist conspiracy, the first ominous note of an anti-Semitic campaign in Italy.
Why did Pitigrilli—or rather, Dino Segre—lend himself to such a distasteful operation, spying on his own first cousin and his friends? The answer is purely speculative, but Pitigrilli’s own writings offer some obvious clues. In an autobiographical book published after World War II, entitled Pitigrilli Parla di Pitigrilli (Pitigrilli Speaks About Pitigrilli), he reveals that he loathed his first cousin and the Jewish half of his family. His father’s well-to-do Jewish family never fully accepted Pitigrilli’s mother as a daughter-in-law and did not treat the illegitimate product of their union—the younger Dino Segre—as a true grandson. Pitigrilli’s description of his father’s family is laced with deep, anti-Semitic hatred.

I was eight years old when my father and mother married and all the Jewry descended on my house: my grandmother, aunt, the crazy uncle, my cousins. My mother opened her living room to a flock of petulant, know-it-all parrots related to my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, who tolerated my mother from a distance, and bent over me with their disdainful nostrils, asking me to name the capital of Sweden, in order to show that if one doesn’t have the benefit of circumcision one cannot know what their sons know.

Clearly, his early experience as an illegitimate child—with a deep desire to avenge himself on the supposedly more respectable world that snubbed him and his mother—was highly formative. Pitigrilli reserved his most withering cynicism for those high-minded people who actually imagined that they were acting out of principle. A character in the novel L’esperimento di Pott (published in English in 1932 as The Man Who Searched for Love) remarks, “I am afraid of incorruptible people. They are the easiest to corrupt. Corruptible people have their price: it’s only a question of the amount. Sometimes, luckily, the price is so high that no one reaches it. But incorruptible people are really dangerous, because they…are corrupted not by money but by words.”
This is almost certainly how the anti-fascists of Giustizia e Libertà would have appeared to Pitigrilli: young, idealistic people who were ready to face prison for their ideas and who also tended to look down on a popular writer like Pitigrilli as not altogether serious. In fact, Vittorio Foa, one of the young men whom Pitigrilli spied on, noted that one of the older members of their group did object to Pitigrilli because of the immorality of his books. “We thought that was very funny at the time, but maybe he was right,” Foa told me fifty years after the fact. Pitigrilli’s cynical epigrams may have served as a kind of justification for his spying activities: “What could be more relative than an idea? A man is a traitor or a martyr depending on whether you look at it on one side of the border or another.” In retrospect, Foa surmised that Pitigrilli may have been motivated by a kind of perverse instinct, “the pleasure of doing harm to others.”
Pitigrilli’s career as a spy peaked in 1935, the year in which his secret reports led to the arrest of Foa and some fifty other suspected anti-fascists, many of whom, like Foa, spent the next several years in prison. Pitigrilli suspected that his great triumph might diminish his power as a spy. He actually suggested to the fascist police that he too be arrested with the others to deflect suspicion from himself and retain his utility as an informant. The police did not follow up on this suggestion and word trickled out from those in prison that Pitigrilli had been the traitor.
In 1936, the fascist regime stopped the reprinting of most of his books and in 1938 Pitigrilli himself fell victim to Mussolini’s racial laws. A note from the fascist secret police in 1939 states: “We thank you for all you’ve done up until now for us, but given the present situation we are compelled to renounce your further collaboration.” For the purposes of the fascist bureaucracy, he was thenceforth known as “the well-known Jewish writer Dino Segre, alias Pitigrilli.”
During the war, he continued to write self-pitying letters to Mussolini pleading for recognition as an Aryan so that he could work freely:

Rome, 25 March [1942]
Duce,
I understand that my little personal troubles are irrelevant to the great historical drama of the moment. But since you, with a word, can resolve my situation…I ask you to consider it: you will see at first sight that my request for recognition of belonging to the Aryan race is legitimate, since I have all the requisites required by the law.
Remove me, Duce, from this unjust, degrading and paradoxical situation, in which I am forced to work in secret, to suffer the pettiness of rivals and to continue boring you with my tedious tale….
Pitigrilli

But the letters seem to have gone nowhere and Pitigrilli fled to Switzerland at the time of the German occupation. Paradoxically, while shunned by the fascists for being a Jew, his record as an informant also put him at risk of prosecution after the war, and he emigrated to Argentina, that refuge of many fascists and Nazis fleeing possible arrest and punishment. Later in life, he drifted back to Italy, but his reputation had diminished to the point that almost no one noticed. He died in 1975 in near total obscurity. - Adapted from Alexander Stille’s afterword to Cocaine www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/sep/16/from-cocaine-to-fascism/


It should come as no surprise—if titles mean anything at all, that is—that Pitigrilli’s Cocaine was banned shortly after its 1921 publication. The slim Italian novel is not short on the white stuff, and it doesn’t skimp on the excesses we associate with its sniffing: sex, orgies, general underworld shadiness, all glimmering with the luster that illicit substances (if only through their very illicit-ness) can provide.
To readers in 2014, the novel’s purported depravity may appear mellowed, but Cocaine shocks the system all the same. The real blow in reading this nonagenarian novel, rereleased in a new translation by Eric Mosbacher through New Vessel Press, is its stomach-turning linguistic smarts that elevate this by-turns insightful and nonsensical tale to M.C. Escher-esque levels of depth. Cocaine isn’t about the drug, after all: storming through the not-quite surreal, the book reveals the addictive authority of the words we use.
I picked up Cocaine only vaguely intrigued by its history: published in Italy in 1921 by Dino Segre (pen name: Pitigrilli), the novel was promptly, and predictably, banned by the Catholic Church, which cited its depraved and all-too-offhand depictions of drugs and sex. Perhaps similarly expected, given the controversy, was the book’s commercial success: at the time of its publication, Cocaine was translated into eighteen different languages. Since then, the work has been largely forgotten in non-Italian circles: Mosbacher’s version is the novel’s first translation since the 1980s.
Though its backstory is conventional, Cocaine is not. The novel focuses on an ex-medical student named Tito Arnaudi (who abandoned medicine because he was not allowed to sport his monocle during pathology exams). Tito relocates to the center of party-hearty high culture, Paris, and, through an uncle in America (“you mean American uncles actually exist?” Tito’s friend muses) finagles his way into a newspaper job, where he invents stories billed as reporting for a rag fittingly titled the Fleeting Moment.
Tito’s first real assignment is an in-depth exposé of Parisian cocaine dens, and Tito dives headfirst into his métier, developing two vicious dependencies in the process. Naturally, Tito becomes addicted to cocaine, but his increasingly obsessive love affairs—with Kalantan, an Armenian widow who insists on coffin love-making, and with Maud, his hometown sweetheart-turned-obsession—consume the plot and bring about Tito’s demise. Tito’s story follows the drug-story trope we all know: youngster with gumption succumbs to vice, glows with initial euphoria, suspects creeping psychological despair, concludes with a bitter and inevitable end. Of course, the story is a lot more twisty-and-turny than that, but it really isn’t the story that matters.
We’re all familiar with the words typically employed in book reviews, and I would arguably be quite justified in employing them here: at its heart, Cocaine is a biting satire, its storytelling is a lively jaunt through postwar society, the prose remains fresh, the insight lucid, the humor darkly comic and (truly, I mean this) laugh-out-loud funny.
I’d avoid relying on these clichés if not for their necessity writing this review. These words are so frequently used that they are virtually meaningless and do nothing but affirm that I am a smart literary person writing a glowing literary review. They do not mean anything and hardly reflect the truth in Cocaine: like Tito, I’m lying, inventing certainty through transparently arbitrary words, and my flagrant laziness is just another way to invent with language. Tito would agree with me here: reading the book of Genesis, he opines:
           “What a jester, what a humorist God is:
                        God said: ‘Let there be light
                        Let there be heavens
                        Let there be grass
                        Let there be trees[…]’
            If that was how Creation was done then it was not very hard work… I think the Almighty likes parlor tricks and arranged the whole thing beforehand.”       
Like God (there’s blasphemy!), Tito creates realities through the words he spills, causing disasters and suicides by lazy reporting, misinforming the masses. Cocaine muses on hallucination through words. In the beginnings of his post-euphoric slump, Tito poetically and pathetically realizes his words’ growing futility: he is nothing but body: “I’m sick of knowing that my body’s a laboratory designed to nourish and renew my protoplasm. I’m nothing but phosphorous, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.” But even in invoking the physical world’s most elemental components, Tito resorts to abstraction.
Cocaine oozes with meta-musings on writing, thinking, and meaning, and the very notion of translating Cocaine seems to undermine its fundamental linguistic absurdism. But Eric Mosbacher’s translation succeeds: the writing is bright, funny, and smart. Cocaine should be required reading for comp lit undergraduates, stand-up comedians, and seasoned linguists. Here is a novel we deeply want to take seriously, but we can’t, and we feel silly in attempting to do so. Cocaine is doublethink reminding us that every word we live by is—at its core—fiction. - Patty Nash

The 1920s saw the triumph of the great modernists: Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Hemingway, and … Pitigrilli, a.k.a. Dino Segre.
In 1921, the year that Luigi Pirandello first staged Six Characters in Search of an Author, when the publishers of The Little Review were convicted of obscenity by the New York District Court for publishing the “Nausicaa” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Proust had published Cities of the Plain and The Guermantes Way, the 28-year-old Italian’s novel Cocaine scandalized and delighted readers across Europe. Like many other modernist texts, Cocaine defied traditional literary conventions, employing techniques of self-reflexivity, stream of consciousness, and allusions to masterpieces of Western and other civilizations to relate the adventures of a picaresque anti-hero lost in the vacuum of a world morally devastated by World War I. Like the drug of the title, the novel stimulated unwholesome exhilaration, deranged epiphanies, and seductive despair.
Okay, so it wasn’t as revolutionary as some other works in the modernist canon, and has since sunk into obscurity (this New Vessel Press edition, translated by Eric Mosbacher, is the first in English since 1982). But in its day it was a big deal. It was translated into 18 languages. The Church added it to its “forbidden books list.” One of its fans, Benito Mussolini, himself the author of a popular anti-clerical novel and about to march on Rome and take over Italy, defended the book and its author against detractors. “Pitigrilli is not an immoral writer,” Il Duce opined. “He photographs the times.” Later, in the 30s, Pitigrilli would work with the fascist secret police OVRA (Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism). These credentials would both help and hurt him as the “cunning passages and contrived corridors” of history, as T.S. Eliot puts it in his 1920 poem “Gerontion,” eventually proved to be a trap.
More on that later. In 1921, though, such looming catastrophes didn’t mean much to those enjoying the ongoing carnival of nihilism, hedonism, and ennui. Cocaine dabbles in those themes with sardonic wit and with the abiding, gleeful sadness of debauched romanticism. It recalls authors as diverse as Nathanael West and the Marquis de Sade in its chronicle of 20-year-old Tito Arnaudi, a cynical, charming, precociously world-weary anti-Candide introduced in a paragraph that sounds like a flippant take-off of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

At the college of the Baranabites 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.

So much for religion. Tito next moves on to medicine. After three years of medical school, he refuses to take a pathology exam because he is not allowed to wear a monocle. So he drops out. He settles into being a dandy along Wildean lines, filling his idle hours mulling over aphorisms such as “Women are like posters. One is stuck on top of another and covers it completely.” Or, “Life is an arc from A to B.” Or, “Love … is always exactly the same.” And so on.
As might be expected, this callow cynicism in fact conceals a romantic soul, and one of his bon mots (“We all twirl the hairs we have, depending on our age and sex”) wins the heart of Maddalena, “a decent girl, though she went to secretarial school.” He, in turn, falls in love with her.
As Pitigrilli explains, “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 treasure.” But Maddalena’s bourgeois, rigidly Catholic parents disapprove, and shuffle her off to a reformatory. Tito, bitter and heartbroken, seeks solace in the decadent demimonde of Paris.
And what profession is more decadent than journalism? An uncle in America (“You mean to tell me that uncles in America really exist?” an incredulous acquaintance asks), a newspaper editor, offers Tito a job as a reporter, assigning him to write a story about cocaine addicts. For research, Tito visits a local cocaine den, and his description of the addicted female habitués resembles Reefer Madness by way of Ken Russell’s The Devils:

[T]he four harpies didn’t calm down. Panting, with dilated nostrils and flashing eyes, they clawed at the box of white powder, like shipwrecked persons struggling for a place in the lifeboat. Those four bodies round a little metal box, all in the grip of the same addiction, looked like four independent parts of a single monster greedily writhing round a small, mysterious prize, elevating its cheap pharmaceutical crudity to the dignity of a symbol. All Tito could see was half-clenched hands that looked numbed with pain, hands with pale, bony, hooked fingers that turned into tightly clenched fists with nails sticking into palms to suffocate a shriek, or quell a craving, or give pain a different form, or localize it elsewhere.

What a turn-on. Fortunately, the writing gets a little less hysterical as the story goes on. Naturally, and also in the interests of research, Tito tries some coke himself. He, too, becomes addicted, but not to the drug. As is evident from his description of the four female addicts, and from repeated misogynistic asides and comments made by him and others throughout the text, Tito does not think much of women. Or rather, he thinks about them all the time – two in particular, one of whom he finally refers to as “Cocaine.” In short, like the harpies above, he has elevated what he considers cheap crudities – women (dismissed by one of his cronies as “roving uteri”) – to the dignity of symbols – symbols of unfulfillable desire.
But the women Tito obsesses over exist in a more rarefied realm than the hell holes of the coke fiends he disdains. The success of his article earns him a sinecure on a popular newspaper, aptly named The Fleeting Moment, giving him entree to fashionable pleasure domes such as the villa of Madame Kalantan Ter-Gregorianz, where the rich and famous and the parasites thereof indulge in orgies that recall scenes from Fellini’s Satyricon and Dante’s Inferno. There, the insouciant Tito watches, snorts cocaine, and swaps barbed badinage with the other voyeuristic revelers. They include painters, scientists, physicians, and other journalists – sycophants and vanity cases with names like Triple Sec, Professor Cassiopeia, Dr. Pancreas, and Professor Où Fleurit l’Oranger.
Diverted by their own snide put-downs and backstabbing, these decadents ignore the “completely nude and depilated woman” engaged in a “Bengal dance,” lament the deaths of the hundreds of exotic Brazilian butterflies released by their hostess for their amusement, and sample such toxic treats as strawberries soaked in ether, straight chloroform, or good old-fashioned morphine. The night ends in a kind of primal soup of spent or impotent lust, inebriated oblivion, puddled booze, and dead brain cells:

Everything in the room had become phantasmagoric: human voices gave forth non-human sounds; the light coming from numerous sources and reflected again and again had the wavering liquid transparency of an aquarium; straight lines bent; a vague, flowing motion replaced solidity and seemed to breathe life into lifeless objects; and all the people, with their slow, flaccid movements, who drooped, fell and writhed on the floor among the multi-colored cushions with disheveled hair, half naked and surrounded by broken glasses, were like creatures in an aquarium whose liquid environment softened and slowed down every movement.
“The greenish carpet, splashed with spilled liquor, was like a muddy ocean floor on which the cushions were shells and the women’s loosened hair the fibrous tufts of byssus or the fabulous vegetation of submarine landscapes.”

Next stop, Pasolini’s Salò.
In this infernal (or perhaps paradisal) setting, Tito at last beholds his Beatrice, or at least the woman who will play that role for the time being, when he is smitten by a vision of the hostess, Kalantan. Or not so much by the hostess herself, per se, but by the little cup formed by the back of her knee as she lies passed out and face down on the floor. He pours champagne into the fleshy receptacle, drinks it, murmurs her name, and passes out himself.
Two things, or perhaps three, prevent Tito from finding in Kalantan the ideal beloved whom he will never attain but whose elusiveness will serve as a guiding star for all his subsequent delusions.

Cover of an early edition of COCAINE

First of all, Kalantan herself, who until she met Tito had been a belle dame sans merci, a fearsome dominatrix who made love in a coffin and took on and discarded lovers like a man does. But now she has become even more obsessed with Tito than he is with her. Renouncing her endless quest for the ultimate in refined and forbidden sensation, she has dedicated herself solely to him, offering herself up as his paramour, patroness, and acolyte.
Secondly, his relatively innocent first love, Maddalena, has returned from the reformatory transformed into “Maud,” now a dancer “in tails and a top hat” of mediocre talent but far different from the “rather ugly, rather stupid girl whom he had met on a balcony two years before.” She has become a vivacious, lascivious ingénue who “wore kangaroo gloves and used difficult words like idiosyncrasy, eurhythmics and quadrilateral and spoke them with pedantic accuracy.” These qualities entice him, but it is her unapologetic and incorrigible promiscuity that wins him over. As Pitigrilli explains:

He had begun to fall in love with her at the moment when … she told him how she had given herself to a man for the first time […]
That was sufficient to arouse in him a disturbing jealousy of the past, the pain of not having been the first and only man in her life, a hatred of all the men who had had her and a hatred of her for having given herself, a hatred of the time that had brought this reality into being, a hatred of the reality that could not be changed, and an even greater hatred of the time to which he could not return.

So Tito finds himself in a diabolical dilemma. Kalantan may be his, but she torments him because of her past of endless lovers and debauchery when she belonged to somebody else (primarily herself, as a matter of fact). Maud, no longer his, now has become like the Kalantan of old, an inexhaustible seeker of new pleasures and new lovers who torments him because of her infidelities – past, present, and to come.
As he helplessly recognizes,

Between these two women, these two passions. Tito was undecided. He couldn’t make up his mind by which to let himself be carried away. He was intra due fuochi distanti e moventi, between two distant and powerful fires …
Oh, that Dante Alighieri, he has managed to get himself quoted even by me.

To resort to a more contemporary comparison, Tito has succumbed to the same fate as the two morbidly jealous cuckolds in Proust’s “Swann in Love” and The Captive. Like them, he does not suffer simply from insatiable jealousy. The real punishment is lost time itself, the impossibility of capturing any moment, and especially the moments experienced by others. Failing that, all that remains is solitude and loss.
Unless … and this brings up the third obstacle to Tito finding satisfaction in love, or at least by way of the morbid delectation of obsessively pursuing someone who will never return or satisfy his passion. Whether he acknowledges it or not, he has already moved beyond such amatory wild goose chases, and found a substitute in his casually adopted profession, journalism, or to be more accurate – as his reporting becomes more and more the product of his imagination – the act of writing itself.
Here’s how that happens: Having distinguished himself with his cocaine story, Tito gets another assignment – covering the death by guillotine of a convicted serial killer. However, the execution takes place the day after the orgy at the villa of his new soul mate Kalantan. Besotted and hung over, he decides that he doesn’t really need to attend the execution in order to write about it. He can make it up from his room, padding a purplish account with the kinds of recalled or invented factoids that someone in a similar position these days would obtain via Google.

Pitigrilli at the time he was writing COCAINE.

The account, plastered on the front page of The Fleeting Moment, is a sensation. The paper sells out, especially when the announcement comes later in the day that the execution did not take place and the sentence had been commuted. Tito’s editor is furious, until he realizes that the public has rejected the official story and embraced the fabrication, believing that something so eloquently written and exquisitely detailed must be the truth.
Tito is bemused at this new success, finding it somewhat trivial compared to the torments and ecstasies of his two new loves. But things don’t go so well when he tries to play the same game again. In his review of one of Maud’s performances, his fixation distorts his judgment. He elevates her pedestrian act to celestial heights. It costs him his job.
Why would this review, far less elaborate and flagrant a fabrication than his guillotine story, finally force his editor to give him he axe? Not because the story invented the facts, as had the one before, but because it told the truth. Like all good fiction, it revealed the naked truth of his own yearning and emptiness and need for fulfillment. And if there’s anything a publication is leery of, it’s the truth.
So Tito is cut loose, free to follow his Cocaine, now not the drug but a lover whom he’s named for it, across the world, yearning for an end to his farcical suffering, seeking a form of suicide that is dependable, but not completely so.
As for Pitigrilli himself, he lasted longer than his hero, but he suffered a less enviable fate. As discussed in Alexander Stille’s illuminating afterword to this edition, Pitigrilli enthusiastically pursued his self-serving and (probably) perversely satisfying second career as a spy for the Fascists. He reported on his friends in the Paris avant garde and was instrumental in the imprisonment of many of them. But this well-paying avocation ended when his cover was blown, and by 1938, no longer protected by his powerful friends in the regime, Pitigrilli – who was both half-Jewish and anti-Semitic – became subject to the newly enacted Italian racial laws. Efforts to change his status to “Aryan” did not succeed, and in 1940 he was briefly interned. When Mussolini was overthrown in 1943 and the Germans occupied the country, he fled to Switzerland.
After the war, though he did not face prosecution for his shady dealings with the Fascists, he nonetheless sought safety in Argentina (a favored refuge for many absconded Nazi war criminals, such as Adolf Eichmann), and then Paris. He finally returned to Italy, where – forgotten, poor, and a fervent Roman Catholic – he died in 1975.
Though not of the same stature as other modernist literary collaborators such as Celine, Ezra Pound, or Knut Hamsun, Pitigrilli nonetheless deserves rehabilitation. His bleak and brilliant satire, lush and intoxicating prose, and sadistic playfulness remain as fresh and caustic as they were nine decades ago. His tragic vision of the human condition, expressed through ironic wit and eloquence, distinguishes the great literature of any era. No less than German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was working on a movie adaptation of Cocaine when he died – of a cocaine overdose – in 1982
Plus, despite the snooty, sometimes forced snark Pitigrilli indulges in, he can write, with seeming ingenuousness, the following:

“Couples…
“Lovers.
“Lovers. The most beautiful word in the world.” - Peter Keough

 

Excerpt from Cocaine:

Through the steamed up windows two dense and continuous streams of people were to be seen. The sound of their voices, the brouhaha, the trampling of feet, the movements of the crowd, suggested a color — bitumen mixed with a uniform grayish yellow, against which the occasional cry of a hawker, the loud laughter of a street Arab or a woman’s shrill voice stood out like splashes of red, blobs of white, daubs of violet, parabolas of silver, jets of lilac, quivers of green, hieroglyphics of yellow, arrows of blue. The agile, springy legs of women contrasted with the leaden monotony, all of them long, slender, muscular, pink and wrapped in their silk stockings as if by a spiral of thread that wound round their thighs and calves like the grooves of gramophone records.
The modern Venus no longer has the soft, plump gracefulness that our grandfathers sought (with their hands); the contemporary Venus reminds one of the androgynous girl in a troupe of British gymnasts.
“And so I drink,” said the man who smiled out of politeness. “Love might perhaps be left to me, but I’ve at last realized what love is. It’s a sweet poison that comes to me from a woman I like. After some time all the poison I’ve absorbed makes me immune, and then the poison that continues to come to me from her no longer affects me.
“Once upon a time I still had the stimulus of being faced with rivals, and I tried to fight them, but now that I’m chief sub-editor, now that I’ve ‘arrived,’ I’m also finished. I’ve lost the joy of struggle, chiefly because I have no more enemies, but also because if I had I would not take the trouble to fight them. I’ve come to see that competitors are necessary to those who want to get on in the world. Opposition is indispensable to success. We should have realized that elementary truth from the embryonic beginnings of life; spermatozoa have to swim upstream to reach the ovary.”
“That’s a paradox,” said Tito.
“I never state paradoxes, because generally they are nothing but cleverly presented absurdities,” the chief sub-editor replied. “I claim that enemies are extremely useful when you know how to handle them properly. In medicine, as you know better than I do, germs are used to fight the illnesses that they cause, are they not? The whole of serotherapy is based on the exploitation of our enemies to our own advantage. Isn’t the leech a parasite of man? Well, in a doctor’s hands it’s a very useful thing. Enmity is a force, a negative, contrary force, but it’s still a force, and all forces are exploitable by man to his own advantage. What do you think?”
Pietro Nocera replied:
“I think that with a mind like yours —”
Tito interrupted: “ . . . it’s a pity to ruin it with alcohol.”
The chief sub-editor turned to Tito and said: “You remind me of those who say it’s stupid to believe that seventeen’s an unlucky number, because it’s a number like any other; thirteen is unlucky, of course, they admit, but seventeen isn’t. That’s exactly what you do, Arnaudi. You’re killing yourself with cocaine, and you think it’s stupid of me to be killing myself with alcohol. You don’t see that if the two of us get on well it’s because there’s an affinity of poisons between us which in turn has led to an affinity of ideas.
“You and I have the same type of mind, and basically Pietro Nocera has it too. The three of us get on well because we are all three attuned. We are simply men of our time, not three exceptional individuals who have come together to form a particular triangle. I may be wrong in saying that it’s our poisons that have made us like this. Perhaps it’s our being like this that makes us drown ourselves heroically in our sweet poisons. However that may be, I’m happy poisoning myself; and, as it give me a little joy, it would be absurd not to do it. If half a liter of alcohol is sufficient to do away with depression and transform the world in my sight, and if all I have to do to get half a liter of alcohol is to press a button, why should I deprive myself of it? If it were painful, I should understand. We could rid ourselves of all the agonies of love by having an operation, but it would be painful, and an operation is always a step in the dark. Instead I regulate my intake of alcohol myself; it’s a tool I use on myself with my own hands. I know very well that it earns me a great deal of disapproval, but I go on drinking all the same, because these five or six glasses give me a sense of well-being and result in insults seeming to be acts of courtesy, in sorrows being transformed, if not into joys, at least into indifference. Being removed from reality, I see it with the changed perspective that forms the basis of irony. What could be better than being near one’s neighbor without recognizing anyone and living in a kind of unconscious intoxication? Fools say I’m ruining myself, but what I say is that the fools are those who cling to the useless and contemptible thing that is life. Even our editor, who has such a clear mind, sometimes makes me sit down in front of him, tries to counteract the bellicosity of those ferocious moustaches of his by the gentleness of his voice and advises me to give up drink. But it’s only when I’ve been drinking that I’m fit for work, flexible, docile. When I’ve been drinking he could order me to polish the floor and I’d do it.”
A thin, pale lady, dressed completely in black, came in, looked round, and sat at a table.
“De quoi écrire et un Grand Marnier,” she said.
The waiter brought her writing materials and her drink.
That’s Madame Ter-Gregorianz,” said Pietro Nocera, indicating the attractive new arrival. “She’s an Armenian, living at the Porte Maillot, and she’s famous for her white masses.”
The lady wore a black tulle hat through which you could see the waves of her black hair; a black bird of paradise descended over one temple, caressed her neck and curved under her chin. Her face seemed to be framed in a soft, voluptuous upside-down question mark.
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.”