Under the Jaguar Sun (7 page)

But perhaps he, down here, has always felt that he was up above, on the throne, with the crown on his head, and with the scepter. And you? Did you not feel always a prisoner? How can a dialogue be established between the two of you if each thinks he hears, not the words of the other, but his own words, repeated by the echo?

For one of you the hour of rescue is approaching, for the other, ruin. And yet that anxiety that never abandoned you seems now to have vanished. You listen to the echoes and the rustlings with no further need to separate them and decipher them, as if they made up a piece of music. A music that brings back to your memory the voice of the unknown woman. But are you'remembering it or do you really hear it? Yes, it is she, it is her voice that forms that tune like a call under the rock vaults. She might also be lost, in this night like the world's end. Answer her, make yourself heard, send her a call, so that she can find her way in the darkness and join you. Why do you remain silent? Now, of all times, have you lost your voice?

There, another call rises from the darkness, at the point from which the prisoner's words came. It is an easily recognized call, which answers the woman, it is
your
voice, the voice you created to reply to her, drawing it from the dust of the city sounds, the voice you sent toward her from the silence of the throne room! The prisoner is singing your song, as if he had never done anything but sing it, as if it had never been sung by anyone else....

She replies, in her turn. The two voices move toward each other, become superimposed, blend, as you had already heard them joined in the night of the city, certain that it was you singing with her. Now surely she has reached him, you hear their voices, your voices, going off together. It is useless for you to try to follow them: they are becoming a murmur, a whisper; they vanish.

 

I
F
you raise your eyes, you will see a glow. Above your head the imminent morning is brightening the sky: that breath against your face is the wind stirring the leaves. You are outside again, the dogs are barking, the birds wake, the colors return on the world's surface, things reoccupy space, living beings again give signs of life. And surely you are also here, in the midst of it all, in the teeming noises that rise on all sides, in the buzz of the electric current, the throb of the pistons, the clank of gears. Somewhere, in a fold of the earth, the city is reawakening, with a slamming, a hammering, a creaking that grows louder. Now a noise, a rumble, a roar occupies all space, absorbs all sighs, calls, sobs....

August 1, 1984
Rome

E
PIGRAPHS
in an undecipherable language, half their letters rubbed away by the sand-laden wind: this is what you will be, O
parfumeries
, for the noseless man of the future. You will still open your doors to us, your carpets will still muffle our footsteps, you will receive us in your jewel-box space, with no jutting corners, the walls of lacquered wood, and shopgirls or patronnes, colorful and soft as artificial flowers, will let their plump arms, wielding atomizers, graze us, or the hem of their skirts, as they stand tip-toe on stools, reaching upwards. But the phials, the ampules, the jars with their spire-like or cut-glass stoppers will weave in vain from shelf to shelf their network of harmonies, assonances, dissonances, counterpoints, modulations, cadenzas: our deaf nostrils will no longer catch the notes of their scale. We will not distinguish musk from verbena: amber and mignonette, bergamot and bitter-almond will remain mute, sealed in the calm slumber of their bottles. When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.

 

H
OW
different were the vibrations a great
parfumerie
could once stir in the spirit of a man of the world, as in the days when my carriage would stop, with a sharp tug at the reins, at a famous sign on the Champs-Elysées, and I would hurriedly get out and enter that mirrored gallery, dropping with one movement my cloak, top hat, cane, and gloves into the hands of the girls who hastened to receive them, while Madame Odile rushed toward me as if she were flying on her frills.

“Monsieur de Saint-Caliste! What a pleasant surprise! What can we offer you? A cologne? An essence of vetivert? A pomade for curling the moustache? Or a lotion to restore the hair's natural ebony hue?”

And she would flicker her lashes, her lips forming a sly smile. “Or do you wish to make an addition to the list of presents that my delivery boys carry each week, discreetly, in your name, to addresses both illustrious and obscure, scattered throughout Paris? Is it a new conquest you are about to confide in your devoted Madame Odile?”

Overcome with agitation as I was, I remained silent, writhing, while the girls already began to concern themselves with me. One slipped the gardenia from my buttonhole so that its fragrance, however faint, would not disturb my perception of the scents; another girl drew my silk handkerchief from my pocket so it would be ready to receive the sample drops from which I was to choose; a third sprinkled my waistcoat with rose water, to neutralize the stench of my cigar; a fourth dabbled odorless lacquer on my moustache, so it would not become impregnated with the various essences, confusing my nostrils.

And Madame went on: “I see! A great passion! Ah! I've been expecting this for some time, Monsieur! You can hide nothing from me! Is she a lady of high degree? A reigning queen of the Comédie? Or the Variétés? Or did you make a carefree excursion into the demi-monde and fall into the trap of sentiment? But, first of all, in which category would you place her: the jasmine family, the fruit blossoms, the piercing scents, or the Oriental? Tell me,
mon chou!
”

And one of her shopgirls, Martine, was already tickling the tip of my ear with her finger wet with patchouli (pressing the sting of her breast, at the same time, beneath my armpit), and Charlotte was extending her arm, perfumed with orris, for me to sniff (in the same fashion, on other occasions, I had examined a whole sampler, arrayed over her body), and Sidonie blew on my hand, to evaporate the drop of eglantine she had put there (between her parted lips I could glimpse her little teeth, whose bites I knew so well), and another, whom I had never seen, a new girl (whom I merely grazed with an absent pinch, preoccupied as I was), aimed an atomizer at me, pressing its bulb, as if inviting me to an amorous skirmish.

“No, Madame, that's not it, that's not it at all,” I managed to say. “What I am looking for is not the perfume suited to a lady I know. It is the lady I must find! A lady of whom I know nothing—save her perfume!”

At moments like these Madame Odile's methodical genius is at its best: only the sternest mental order allows one to rule a world of impalpable effluvia. “We shall proceed by elimination,” she said, turning grave. “Is there a hint of cinnamon? Does it contain musk? Is it violet-like? Or almond?”

But how could I put into words the languid, fierce sensation I had felt the previous night, at a masked ball, when my mysterious partner for the waltz, with a lazy movement, had loosened the gauzy scarf which separated her white shoulder from my moustache, and a streaked, rippling cloud had assailed my nostrils, as if I were breathing in the soul of a tigress?

“It's a different perfume, quite different, Madame Odile, unlike any of those you mention!”

The girls were already climbing to the highest shelves, carefully handing one another fragile jars, removing the stoppers for barely a second, as if afraid the air might contaminate the essences in them.

“This heliotrope,” Madam Odile told me, “is used by only four women in all Paris: the Duchesse de Clig-nancourt, the Marquise de Menilmontant, the wife of Coulommiers the cheese-manufacturer, and his mistress.... They send me this rosewood every month especially for the wife of the Tsar's Ambassador.... Here is a potpourri I prepare for only two customers:
the Princess of Baden-Holstein and Carole, the courtesan.... This artemisia? I remember the names of all the ladies who have bought it once, but never a second time. It apparently has a depressant effect on men.”

What I required of Madame Odile's specific experience was precisely this: to give a name to an olfactory sensation I could neither forget nor hold in my memory without its slowly fading. I had to expect as much: even the perfumes of memory evaporate: each new scent I was made to sniff, as it imposed its diversity, its own powerful presence, made still vaguer the recollection of that absent perfume, reduced it to a shadow.

“No, it was sharper ... I mean fresher ... heavier....” In this seesawing of the scale of odors, I was lost, I could no longer discern the direction of the memory I should follow: I knew only that at one point of the spectrum, there was a gap, a secret fold where there lurked that perfume which, for me, was a complete woman.

And wasn't it, after all, the same thing in the savannah, the forest, the swamp, when they were a network of smells, and we ran along, heads down, never losing contact with the ground, using hands and noses to help us find the trail? We understood whatever there was to understand through our noses rather than through our eyes: the mammoth, the porcupine, onion, drought, rain are first smells which become distinct from other smells; food, non-food; our cave, the enemy's cave; danger—everything is first perceived by the nose, everything is within the nose, the world is the nose. In our herd, our nose tells us who belongs to the herd and who doesn't; the herd's females have a smell that is the herd's smell, but each female also has an odor that distinguishes her from the other females. Between us and them, at first sight, there isn't much difference: we're all made the same way, and besides, what's the point of standing there staring? Odor, that's what each of us has that's different from the others. The odor tells you immediately and certainly what you need to know. There are no words, there is no information more precise than what the nose receives. With my nose I learned that in the herd there is a female not like the others, not like the others for me, for my nose; and I ran, following her trail in the grass, my nose exploring all the females running in front of me, of my nose, in the herd; and there I found her, it was she who had summoned me with her odor in the midst of all those odors; there, I breathed through my nose all of her and her love-summons. The herd moves, keeps running, trotting, and if you stop, in the herd's stampede, they are all on top of you, trampling you, confusing your nose with their smells; and now I'm on top of her, and they are pushing us, overturning us; they all climb on her, on me; all the females sniff me; all the males and females become tangled with us, and all their smells, which have nothing to do with that smell I smelled before and now smell no longer. It is waiting for me to hunt for it. I hunt for her spoor in the dusty, trampled grass. I sniff. I sniff all the females. I no longer recognize her. I force my way desperately through the herd, hunting for her with my nose.

 

F
OR
that matter, now that I wake up in the smell of grass and turn my hand to make a
zlwan zlwan zlwan
with the brush on the drum, echoing Patrick's
tlann tlann
on his four strings, because I think I'm still playing She knows and I know, but actually there was just Lenny knocking himself out, sweating like a horse, with his twelve strings, and one of those birds from Hampstead kneeling there and doing some things to him, while I was playing
ding bong dang yang,
and all the others including me were off. I was lying flat, the drums had fallen and I hadn't even noticed, I reach out to pull the drums to safety or else they'll kick them in, those round things I see, white in the darkness, I reach out and I touch flesh, by its smell it seems warm girl's flesh, I hunt for the drums which have rolled on the floor in the darkness with the beer cans, with all the others who have rolled on the floor naked, in the upset ashtrays, a nice warm ass in the air, and saying it's not so hot you can sleep naked on the floor, of course there are a lot of us shut up in here for God knows how long, but somebody has to put more shillings in the gas stove that's gone out and is making nothing but a stink, and, out as I was, I woke up in a cold sweat all the fault of the lousy shit they gave us to smoke, the ones who brought us to this stinking place down by the docks with the excuse that here we could make all the racket we liked all night long without having the fuzz on our tails like always, and we had to go someplace anyway after they threw us out of that dump in Portobello Road, but it was because they wanted to make these new birds that came after us from Hampstead and we didn't even have time to see who they were or what they looked like, because we always have a whole swarm of groupies after us when we play somewhere, and specially when Robin breaks into Have mercy, have mercy on me, those birds turn on and want to do things right away, and so all the others begin while we're still up there sweating and playing and I'm hitting those drums
ba-zoom ba-zoom ba-zoom
, and they're at it, Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, ma'am, and so tonight, just like the other times, we didn't do anything with these groupies even if they do follow our bunch so logically we ought to make it with them, not those others.

So now I get up to hunt for this lousy gas stove to put some shillings in it and make it go, I walk with the soles of my feet on hair asses butts beer cans tits glasses of whisky spilled on the carpet, somebody must have thrown up on it too, I better go on all fours, at least I can see where I'm going, and besides I can't stand up straight, so I recognize people by the smell, our bunch with all that sweat sticking to us is easy to recognize, I can tell us from the others who stink only of their lousy grass and their dirty hair, and the girls too who don't take many baths, but their smells mix with the others a little and are a little different from the others as well, and every now and then you run into some special smells on these girls and it's worth lingering a minute and sniffing, their hair for example, when it doesn't absorb too much smoke, and in other places too, logically, and so I am crossing the room, smelling some of these smells of sleeping girls until at one point I stop.