Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  If Alobar could trust his nose, K23 stopped Pan in his tracks. It seemed to throw a mantle—gossamer in places, heavily embroidered in others—over his funk, and however long and hard the goat musk might squirm beneath that cloak, it could not wriggle free. “I wonder if I am only imagining that it is so effective?” worried Alobar. “Perhaps it is wishful smelling.” There was nothing to do but submit it to objective testing.

  Into a sack, Alobar packed a gallon jug of K23, what remained of the beet pollen distillate (the jasmine and citron were used up), the empty bottle that Kudra had designed, some roasted beets to munch on on the road, and his companion's innocent-looking reeds. Then, at Pan's pace—out there in the back country the peasants still secretly honored him, a fact that put a tad of pep in his step—they set off in the direction of France. In every village through which they passed, Pan—freshly sprinkled with K23—walked ahead, Alobar following at a distance of nine or ten yards. Directed by Alobar, Pan endeavored to brush as closely as possible to people in the street. From Bohemia to Paris, the results were invariably the same.

  As the invisible Pan walked by, people's eyebrows would raise, their noses would tilt, and they would begin to turn toward the source of the scent, looks of expectation or ill-concealed delight forming on their faces. Halfway into the turn, however, that expression would be abruptly dislodged by a twitch of embarrassment, and, reddening slightly, the person would turn away, as if to look directly at the origin of such a fragrance might violate an intimacy sacred even to an unrefined yokel. Bemused smiles involuntarily parting their lips, they would continue on their way for a few yards, when, at a safe distance and no longer able to resist, they would stop and slowly look back, smiling all the while, only to find that the emanator of the aroma had—so they believed—turned a corner or disappeared through a doorway. Off they would go then, not really disappointed, some fantasy or other obviously drawing a grass blade lightly along the genitals of their minds.

  Now Alobar was hardly expert, but he realized that he had concocted a unique and genuinely amazing perfume, a fragrance whose possibilities extended far beyond its worth—praise the morning star for that worth!—as a cover-up for the Horned One's fetid ooze. Kudra had predicted it, had she not? She had said, at least, that she wished the perfume for Alobar and her as much as for Pan.

  On the outskirts of Paris, where they rested beneath a stone bridge, waiting for darkness before daring to enter the city, Alobar filled the bluish bottle to the brim with K23. He put its stopper in. He pressed it to his tear-wet cheeks.

  It was late September, there were tambourines of frost in the air. Alobar and Pan crossed the great city, their breath always one step ahead of them. Man's breath and god's breath looked identical, congealed in the urban night. Their footsteps, on the other hand, were distinctly different—the bum flap of Alobar's boots, the blacksmith chisel of Pan's hooves—but they led to the same destination over the rigid effervescence of cobblestones.

  The incense shop was just as they had left it, boarded up and blocked by a crude wooden cross. Apparently the monks were giving it a wide berth. Had Alobar stopped off at the neighboring brewery/perfumery, he would have caught the abbot discussing the sale of the business to an enterprising fragrance broker named Guy LeFever. At that very moment, LeFever was inquiring about the possibility of locating the owner of the incense shop and purchasing it as well, for he had heard that its inventory was quite valuable and in disuse, but the abbot, who was sleeping better those nights and taking no chances, wrung his lily hands and cried, “No, no, do not pursue it.”

  As deftly as possible, Alobar pried open a rear window. He and Pan crawled in. Alobar's heart was beating more loudly than Pan's hoofbeats as they climbed the stairs. The door to the sitting room was opened with a creak. Alobar did not recall that it had ever creaked before.

  It seems there should have been a harvest moon that night, but not a cuff link of moonlight was in evidence. Perhaps the moon was spending the evening at Versailles. In any case, Alobar didn't really require a moon to see that nothing in the room had changed. The pale reach of a streetlamp was sufficient to illuminate the sad tableau: his note, the single shoe, the balls of dust.

  He avoided going inside, but, rather, leaned across the threshold just far enough to set down the bottle of K23, having first removed its stopper. He shut the door briskly, as if the breeze from the door might speed a waft of perfume toward the Other Side.

  Upon the bed where he, a latecomer to kissing, had kissed so much of her, he lay the night, weeping, dozing, waking to weep once more. Throughout the morning he lay there, a pillow, which he imagined to bear some scent of her ebony hair, pasted to his face. It was past noon when he finally released himself from the twist of marriage-stained sheets. Lint in his beard, burrs of salt in the corners of his eyes, he padded barefoot to the sitting room to fetch the bottle. Pan was up and would be needing a fix.

  As bait, K23 had failed—for the time being, at any rate. Alobar had heard no sound from the sitting room during the night, and now, creaking open the door, he saw that his note still lay there, beneath the forlorn shoe. But wait! Hadn't he tucked the note inside the shoe?! And hadn't the shoe been placed in the very center of the carpet, whereas it now lay somewhat off to the right, closer to the fireplace!?!

  Shaking like a wedding announcement in a misogamist's fist, Alobar examined the shoe, unfolded and reread the note. He turned them over and over. He even sniffed them. There were no marks, no odors, nothing unusual in any way. Yet they had been moved, he was positive of that! The question was, had they been moved during the night—in which case, the perfume was a lure, after all—or sometime during the preceding five months? The light had been so dim, his emotions so swollen on the previous evening that he easily could have overlooked such a slight, though significant, displacement.

  Unable to learn anything from the slipper or paper, he scrutinized the room itself, patrolling the carpet, inch by dusty inch. Nothing. The walls, too, were a tabula rasa. When his gaze settled on the fireplace, however, his spine was straightened by a fulminous jolt. On the mantelpiece, next to Kudra's beloved silver teapot, a word had been written in the dust!

  Yes, someone, using a fingertip as implement, had plowed a grafitto on the surface of the marble, where the dust lay thick as fur. The script, while instantly familiar, was not Kudra's style, however, nor was the word in her single written language. When Kudra had finally become literate, it was French that she learned to read and write. The word on the mantelpiece was from the Slavo-Nordic tongue that his clan had used to speak of battles, bear hunts, beet harvests, and broken mirrors, and the handwriting was that of the only woman in his kingdom with the ability to write that language: Wren.

  For a long time, Alobar just stood there, grasping the mantel ledge for support. So shocked was he by the implications of language and penmanship that he didn't even consider content. When at last he turned his attention to it, his bafflement only increased. The word was a transitive verb, an exclamation, a command, of which an exact English translation is impossible. The closest equivalent probably would be the phrase:

  Lighten up!

  Lighten up, indeed. Against his better judgment and to Pan's chagrin, Alobar remained in the flat for a week, subsisting on crusts of stale bread and flakes of moldy cheese. Each night he placed the open bottle of K23 in the sitting room, each morning he rushed in and searched for messages in the dust. There were none. That is, there was but one, the one and only: Erleichda. “Lighten up!”

  Alobar watched the last grain of green cheese work its way down Pan's invisible gullet while some morbid hymn about the gore of Christ drifted over from across the street. He chewed a mouthful of dried blossoms from the shop's supply. They tasted like Grendel's underpants. He spat them out, wiped his beard with his sleeve, and asked, “What shall we cook for dinner? The drapes?” Had Guy LeFever, who was next door closing his deal with the abbot, overheard him, the businessman might have snapped, “Not d
rapes, you idiot, draperies. Drape is a verb.” LeFever did not overhear him, but Alobar knew that it was merely a matter of time before one of the monks did hear him, or spot him through a window (the upper ones were not boarded), a prospect that caused his empty stomach to rattle its chains.

  He was sitting there in the universal slouch of hopelessness, the old droop of despair, when he felt the pressure of Pan's hand on his arm. The god had never touched him before, and Alobar had to confess that his first reaction was that he must defend himself against intended buggery. Pan simply squeezed him, however, and remarked, “Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth.” Then he walked away, his hooves beating a slow rat-a-tat on the floorboards, pausing to call over his presumed shoulder, “Puny homer.”

  That must have done it. Alobar slumped there for another quarter-hour, then rose, bathed, shaved off his tear-encrusted beard, donned his finest clothes, polished his spare boots, pulled on and powdered the frazzled wig that Pan had dragged home from Descartes's funeral, and beckoning to the god, who may or may not have been smiling, slipped recklessly out of the shop while the sun's seal was still affixed to the scroll of the horizon.

  Packing the perfume, beet distillate, and little else, the pair made its way to Marseilles, where the last ship of the season was preparing to sail for New France.

  For more than a decade, the French had dominated the Great Lakes region of what would eventually be called North America, but unlike the English and Spanish, the French tended to view the New World in terms of its spoils—furs, fish, Christian converts, and a possible westward route to the Indies—rather than as a place to build homes, towns, and a new life. Disease, attacks from hostile Iroquois, and a major earthquake in Quebec in 1663 had brought its fur-trading company to the brink of ruin and set weary settlers to crying “Back to France!” before Louis XIV stopped waltzing long enough to rectify matters. Rumors of a mighty and mysterious river flowing southward from the Great Lakes, perhaps as far as the Pacific, had reached King Louis, and, murmuring “Mississippi, Mississippi” into his scented hankie, he raised New France to the status of a royal province, secured it with a regiment of highly trained soldiers, and appointed a capable executive to oversee its internal affairs. Henceforth, Louis decreed, qualified settlers (those with skills) would take precedence over missionaries and trappers on the ships to Montreal.

  When Alobar approached the captain of the Mississippi Poodle, he found that it had space for several more single male passengers—most families were waiting for spring before emigrating, not wishing to begin colonial life at the onset of a harsh northern winter—and were he deemed fit, he could not only travel free of charge, he would be paid a small bonus for his commitment. Alobar contended that he was an aristocrat who'd recently lost his fortune, and since he had a gentlemanly manner, and since there was another fellow aboard in an identical situation ("Sieur de La Salle by name, is he a friend of yours?") the captain believed him.

  There was some worry about Alobar's age, however. “Just how old are you, sir?” inquired the chief immigration officer. Alobar didn't know what to say. He had no idea anymore what age he looked to be, and God knows he couldn't tell the truth. He stammered a bit, finally blurting out, “Forty-six,” a figure arrived at by doubling K23. “A hale and hardy forty-six, accustomed to leading men.”

  Up the gangplank he went, aromatic liquids gurgling in his sack, suppressed laughter gurgling in his throat. Pan followed.

  The Mississippi Poodle slid across the Mediterranean as slickly as an asparagus spear gliding through a serving of hollandaise sauce, but once past Gibraltar and into the open Atlantic, she ran headlong into a mass of cold air and choppy water. With each dark day, the waves grew more pugilistic. Passengers could imagine her hull turning blue from the chilling and the pounding.

  It was routine sailing for that time of year, of course, and the seamen not only took it in stride, they seemed as content a crew as the captain had ever commanded. There was a curious sweet aroma aboard that, while it could neither be identified nor pinpointed, lifted everyone's spirits in a shy, private way, fostering the secret hope that some wonderful encounter waited just below deck (if one was above) or on deck (if one was below). Like habitual snuff users, the men sniffed as they went about their work. “This tub smells like a Bombay whore,” grumbled one old salt, but the younger men, who'd never seen Bombay, only grinned and, being sailors, lost little sleep over the pornographic nightmares that with increasing frequency invaded their hammocks. Homosexual impulses, which normally didn't surface until the men had been parted from their wives for several months, began to flicker a few days past Gibraltar, more to the amusement than disturbance of those so visited.

  Alobar spent much of the voyage seated alone behind the bowsprit, enjoying the energy of the waves, refreshed by the salty sprays that needled him. For him, the blustery days provided calm introspection, a time for putting his long, strange life into some sort of perspective.

  “Pan is right,” he thought. “Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing.” The sea hissed at him, but he didn't flinch. “If Kudra is dead, dead as all the others who have died, then I must refrain from driving myself mad by wishing her alive. I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case. If Kudra is dead like all the others, then it does me well to curtail my grief, lest my life become a deathly imitation through depression and sorrow.” He wiped a piece of foam from his eye and, without malice, flicked it back into the waves.

  “Ah, but suppose she is dead in the manner of the Bandaloop, able to pass back and forth freely between This Side and the Other Side. Although six months have gone, that still is a reasonable speculation due to her unusual abilities and to the very significant fact that she did not leave behind a body to molder in the sod: she took it with her. Hopeful I am, yet to ride that hope each day from dawn to sleep the way this vessel rides the bucking ocean is also a kind of death. Certainly I sail to New France, with my lure of K23, intent upon meeting her there, but I should be prepared to thrive even if she fails to appear.”

  On every side of him, the cold viridian waters stretched as far as he could see, and for every wave that reared and whinnied upon those waters, there was a question to rear and whinny in his mind. Did the Bandaloop really come and go as they pleased, with no regard to normal distinctions between “life” and “death"? Where was the proof? Who were the Bandaloop? Where were they now? Was Kudra with them? A swell of jealousy pitched him, as if he were a ship upon an autumn sea.

  He had placed a lot of emphasis on the perfume, but what if its scent could never reach Kudra? Or, if it could, what if she was powerless to react, or, worse, what if perfume no longer mattered to her?

  And, yes, what was the connection, if any, linking Kudra and Wren? Now there was a mystery. If Wren had written in the dust of the sitting room, wouldn't that mean that she, too, was alive behind that curtain that separates us from the Other Side? And since Wren knew nothing about dematerialization, since she regarded the notion of immortality as unnatural and vain, wouldn't her message on the mantelpiece mean that a person need not harbor immortalist ambitions in order to survive after death? Did the so-called Bandaloop practices merely provide a different brand of life—longer, healthier, more flexible—and have little or nothing to do with death per se? Suppose Kudra, not Wren, had written that word ("Erleichda!") employing Wren's language and handwriting, which she had somehow appropriated in the afterworld? Did a man's wives all blend into a single entity after their deaths? Would he blend with Navin the Ropemaker if and when he died? Was it wife soup and husband soup on the Other Side? Or was it simply soup?

  At that moment, La Salle, the penniless young nobleman, approached the bow, intending to engage Alobar in genteel conversation, but Alobar's gaze was sweeping
the Atlantic, and so absorbed was he in trying to imagine a soup as vast as that ocean that he heard not a word of the fellow's greeting. Miffed, La Salle walked away, his stride, despite the heaving of the deck, revealing the stubborn pride that a few years later would prevent him from admitting that he was lost in Texas when he was supposed to be exploring Louisiana (his frustrated men finally assassinated him, depriving him of the opportunity to found New Orleans, America's perfumed metropolis).

  Alobar continued to survey the sea. Was that wave over there Kudra and this one Wren? Or was there a drop of Kudra, a drop of Wren in each and every wave that rose and fell? Wren. He had loved Kudra so long and so well that he'd almost forgotten how he'd once loved Wren. It had been Wren who comforted him when that first white hair slithered like a viper into his happy garden, Wren who had aided and abetted his subsequent subterfuge even though she'd been shocked by his crazy notions of personal identity and survival, Wren who had plucked him from the burial mound—and that very night spread her legs for his successor. Ah, women: the mystery of them sometimes seemed greater than the mystery of death.

  One thing was certain, had it not been for Wren he wouldn't be here, seven hundred—yes, seven hundred!—years later, embarked upon the strangest adventure of his strange life. And now, after all that time, Wren had contacted him. To tell him what? Lighten up!

  Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play—more than piety, more than charity or vigilance—was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.