When I mention this he just says, ‘Yeah, OK,’ before going back to the latest mods. He’s still trying to work out the warm blood note he associates with ‘duende, ardour, desire, so many things…’
‘And if you want, we could work spicy notes back in, a little bit,’ he concedes.
Indeed. This time I’m not letting him off the hook.
‘Speaking of spices, I’ve got N°5 with me. Would you like to smell it again?’
‘Gladly.’
I pull the phial out of my handbag and Bertrand dips in the blotters.
‘Oh yeah!’ he blurts out. ‘It’s really…’
‘… really what?’
‘Really woody. Really spicy. But you don’t smell the orange blossom.’
‘It’s the warmth of it I loved.’
Bertrand falls silent for a couple of minutes. Then:
‘It’s a good thing you brought back N°5.’
It is? I’m feeling rather smug now, but also a little bit scared. What if I’m derailing the whole process? No. I’m pretty sure I’m right about this. Still, I hedge:
‘I know it isn’t the story, but…’
‘But even so,’ he interrupts me, ‘the accord is beautiful. And it’s powerful, isn’t it? In fact, there’s a whole damn story in it!’
We do a side-by-side between numbers 15, 16 and 5: the latter’s green notes are different; they work better with the orange blossom, with slightly raw orange-tree-leaf effects.
‘You were right to bring back N°5,’ Bertrand repeats. ‘There’s a strong accord, even though it’s not one hundred per cent in the story.’
Guess I’m no longer just a human blotter, then.
Bertrand gets up suddenly to rummage through his files and flips through his sheaf of formulas. The woody note in N°5 came from a material called cedramber, which he used in his church incense, Avignon. He’d dropped it in the following mods. Now I understand better why I was so drawn to N°5 – yesterday, I even sprayed it alongside Avignon, so it seems I got the connection. The green top notes in N°5 were composed of angelica, tagetes and cassis base. Tagetes, a type of marigold, has dried banana and daisy facets. Cassis (blackcurrant) adds raspy, fruity, sulphurous tones. As for angelica (the green bits in Christmas cakes are the candied stalks of the plant), I’m mad about it and so is Bertrand. It’s got four different facets, he explains, a green dark resinous one that’s close to galbanum with almost stem-like effects, a spicy one that’s celery, a bit curry, almost hazelnut, and a musk note that is chemically identical to animal musk …
‘We’ll put angelica back in,’ he decides.
‘And it kind of works well with the religious theme because of the name.’
He raises his head from his formulas.
‘You know what? I’m going to go back to the base of N°5.’
‘That means you’ll be doing something completely different from N°16.’
‘Well, yeah. I’m completely going back to N°5 with its spicy note.’
‘You agree with me then?’
‘Yes, because N°5 has more character, more body, more accords than N°16.’
Should I be pushing my luck? I’ve scored high marks for sticking N°5 back under Bertrand’s nose – hey, Coco, could you be watching over me with your lucky number? As long as we’re shaking things up, I might as well get out exhibit number two: an 80s bottle of Habanita. Yesterday, I tried spraying on a tiny bit next to N°12 and Avignon to see how they combined, but Habanita just gobbled up my whole forearm.
Bertrand pulls a face.
‘The problem is you’re bringing this up so late in the game.’
Sheesh. I’ve been talking about Habanita for months. It’s called selective listening, darling: men are very gifted at that.
‘I don’t want Duende to smell like Habanita. It’s gorgeous but it’s not modern. What I do want is that burnished gold quality, that darkness you know how to work in so well…’
‘That Caravaggio chiaroscuro, as my friend Chandler Burr would say…’
The New York Times’ former scent critic, who considers Bertrand ‘a living Old Master of scent’, did indeed write that his Paestum Rose for Eau d’Italie was ‘rich and filled with meaning like the intimate opalescent blacks Caravaggio painted.’ Caravaggio is, along with Francis Bacon, one of Bertrand’s favourite painters …
‘Exactly. That darkness has got to be in our fragrance. The boy in the story smokes brown tobacco. It’s the smell on his fingers…’
Bertrand sniffs at his blotter of Habanita, eyebrows knitted.
‘I’m stunned.’
‘By what?’
‘By the natural tobacco effect. If this bottle is from the 80s they could probably still use tobacco absolute. Now to use a good tobacco that’s not banned because of the restrictions on nicotine … It’s rough going.’
Is he sold? I suspect he’s a little annoyed because, all of a sudden, Duende is going in many different directions, all of which interest him.
‘That’s a lot of information to take in all of a sudden…’ I half apologize.
‘All of a sudden … Can I associate all of it? I don’t know. It could be interesting. But I’d have to rebuild the formula completely. Rework the elements one after another, try to associate … How can I say? … the patterns of the accords, the orange blossom note as it is in 15 and 16, the lily note as it is in 5 and the Habanita note as I smell it here…’
He points to the bottle.
‘The tobacco?’
‘Oh yes, it goes with the story, completely! Tobacco, tobacco-stained fingers, and what have you!’
‘Tobacco-stained fingers in my knickers,’ I slip in, not wanting him to lose sight of the erotic aspect of the story.
‘In your knickers,’ he echoes in a get-your-mind-out-of-the-gutter tone, before adding thoughtfully: ‘This can be a beautiful challenge.’
‘So we’re going for that?’
‘We’re going for that. I’m sure we can get there. Now I have to break everything apart … We’re starting from scratch!’
‘Am I making you suffer with this?’ I say, a bit hopefully.
‘No.’
‘Good, because that’s not the point.’ (‘Yes it is,’ my demon duende whispers.)
‘I’m not afraid.’
‘Même pas peur!’ we utter simultaneously, laughing. It’s one of Bertrand’s pet expressions, something kids say in the schoolyard: ‘Not even afraid.’
‘In fact we’re not really starting from scratch,’ he says. ‘We’ll dismantle the puzzles, scatter all the pieces, take some from one puzzle, some from another, and re-assemble the perfume in a different form … bits of story that will shape another story.’
‘What a plot twist!’
‘It’s a plot twist, but that’s often how things go when you’re making a perfume.’
* * *
We take a breather by going over my write-up of the session during which we discussed incense: this has been our process ever since I started the journal. I add bits of research along with my thoughts to the transcripts, which allows Bertrand to follow the course of the development and put it into perspective. In this particular case, he’s both pleased and astonished to find out that his intuition about the equivalence between blood and incense is rooted in several myths, as well as in Catholic liturgy. He re-reads our conversation about his own obsession with the note and stares at the page for a while, nodding.
‘You’re right, you know … My creative process is a kind of therapy for all the suffering and frustrations of my childhood … I wasn’t mistreated, that would be an exaggeration, but our super-strict Catholic upbringing was quite oppressive. We’ve tried to break free from it and mostly we’ve managed to, at least the youngest siblings. Perfumery was one of the best ways to act it out.’
I am suddenly reminded of Serge Lutens’ droll, indignant tirade against bespoke perfumes – ‘I’m not a psychoanalyst!’ During lunch, I quoted it to Bertrand, who wholeheartedly
agreed: his own experience as a bespoke perfumer ended abruptly after spending a whole day with a client. ‘At the end, I knew his life story but nothing about his tastes in perfume!’
Bertrand and I are far from psychoanalysing each other, though smells have a way of triggering sudden disclosures. But somehow it seems right that reading through the incense session and going back to the painful memories it summons – reopening the wounds of the incense tree, as it were – should come just as we’re dismantling what we’ve done up to now. Not just the formula, but the way we work together. Not quite a power shift, but greater exposure. Any creative process, when it is true and sincere, is like baring yourself to the bull’s horns. This is the first time that I lower my arms to bring the cape, and thus the horns, closer to my body … Though I did it in a roundabout way, showing him the things I wanted so that they would seem obviously right to him rather than asserting my will, I’ve exposed my desire, what I wanted for the perfume, and thus taken the risk of his saying no: I still haven’t shaken the feeling he could buck at any moment. A Capricorn goat may not be able to gore you like a bull, but he can knock you out cold or throw you out of the ring.
Still reading through my write-up, Bertrand gets to the point where he suggested adding an ash note.
‘Why don’t we put it in? The ashes of Christ, cigarette ashes … It’s all part of Holy Week, after all.’
Well, no, actually. Perhaps he’s willed his Catholic education out of his memory; still, he must have known at some point that Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, a full forty days before Easter and therefore, not part of Holy Week at all. The ashes are obtained by burning the palms of the preceding year’s Palm Sunday. They are a multi-secular symbol of penance used as far back as Ancient Egypt, as well as a reminder that we are dust and will return to dust. What they are definitely not are the ashes of Jesus: that he resurrects is kind of the whole point of Easter, not to mention Christianity.
But I’m not about to dive into a theological debate with Bertrand because, right now, he’s doing something I’ve never seen him do, drafting some kind of flowchart. As I peer into it, I realize he’s laying flat the structure of Duende.
‘Do you often do this?’ I ask him.
‘Yes,’ he mumbles, still scribbling and drawing arrows.
I let him finish the chart before speaking again:
‘It’s as though something had clicked all of a sudden. As though you’d rethought the whole thing out.’
‘What’s crazy is that I’ve also rethought the whole formula.’
‘Well, that’s exactly what I wanted to do with you today. Shake things up.’
‘This isn’t about destroying what we’ve done. Absolutely not … it’s just…’
‘… clarifying our ideas…’
‘You know, creating a perfume is a labyrinthine process. At one point you say, “Shit, I’ve taken the wrong turn,” and you have to turn back a bit to take the right direction.’
‘At least the fact that there are two of us helps us get some perspective.’
‘That’s essential.’
Six months and eight sessions into the development of Duende, it seems I’ve finally taken on my role as a creative partner. I’ve been wandering in the labyrinth, but now I’ve found the red thread. No longer a muse but Ariadne leading Theseus towards the Minotaur …
The bull. The blood. The wounds of the incense tree. ‘The aid of the duende is required to drive home the nail of artistic truth,’ writes Lorca.
‘I’ll write down the formula right away before I forget anything,’ says Bertrand.
‘You won’t.’
‘I won’t.’
27
Three bottles of Habanita are now sitting on the shelf above Bertrand’s desk. The first contains the umber dregs of an extrait I bought in the 80s. The second is a black glass bottle of eau de toilette with a Lalique frieze of nymphs, the one with the tobacco note Bertrand loved so much. The third was sent by an American friend who stumbled on a stash of vintage perfumes in a second-hand shop near Austin, Texas. Miraculously, this particular bottle of Habanita came with its date of purchase: a page of the 2 July 1948 issue of Le Monde had been wrapped around it so that it wouldn’t be jostled in its box. Now yellowed and brittle, it announces the adjournment of the Frankfurt conference convened to give West Germany its constitution and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Communist bloc: news of a bygone world in the throes of post-Yalta reconstruction, on the day the tiny bottle started on its journey from Grasse to Austin. And now, over half a century later, the crystal time capsule has made its way back to France. I brought it to Bertrand two weeks ago, a couple of days after our momentous ‘coup de théâtre’ session.
He has drawn his inspiration from all three bottles to compose different ‘Habanita bases’ on an accord of tobacco, oak moss and cistus, a resin with amber and aromatic facets. He’s also put in vanilla and coumarin, which has almond, hay and tobacco effects: they are two of the main notes of Habanita.
I lean towards the blotter dipped in base 2 and find myself on the verge of the Moan for the first time since I smelled Duende 5. It is a balsamic caress: sweet, powdery wafts wrapping the richest tobacco. In this concentrated form, one you’d practically want to lick off the blotter, it smells like Bertrand’s Vanille on steroids, unsurprisingly, since the two formulas have several materials in common.
But as soon as I have a whiff of base 3, I do let out a little gasp. I know this. Of course, I know rationally that Bertrand has based the formula on Habanita, but this grabs me at another level: I’ve lived here, inside those notes. The sense of familiarity is even more vivid than when I smelled my old bottles after pulling them out of the closet where they’d been banished. It’s as though by paring the structure down to its load-bearing walls, Bertrand had managed to display Habanita’s quintessential beauty, to make it more legible.
Base 3 is a perfume in and of itself, though Bertrand says he’s only added three materials to the formula of base 2: musk ketone, methyl-ionone (a molecule that smells of iris, violet, wood and tobacco, with a powdery effect) and aldehyde C11, which smells of snuffed candle. Because these materials became ubiquitous after the success of Chanel N°5, base 3 conjures half of my vintage perfume collection: it is the backbone of classic-era perfumery.
As Bertrand had said he would the last time we saw each other, he’s concentrated on building up the tobacco and orange blossom accords separately. In the latter, he’s added beeswax, I’m happy to note. We’d discussed it last spring and then it got lost in the fray, though it is a major element of the story: the candles carried by the penitents and illuminating the floats bearing the statues of the Virgin and Christ. The beeswax is also logical in purely olfactory terms: it acts as a bridge between the orange blossom and the tobacco because it has tobacco facets, while tobacco, though it’s more acidic, has slightly waxy effects.
On the other hand, he’s scrapped the banana by eliminating the ylang-ylang and cutting down on the jasmine absolute. That’s good, since it didn’t belong in the story, but he had his reasons for including it in the first place: the fruitiness was meant to cover up the blood and raw meat facets of the incense, so that he could work a higher dose of it back in. I can detect the incense, but not as much as I’d like. Bertrand says that, when he adds the wood base, plus the resins and tobacco of Habanita, that little bit of incense will be boosted.
The new orange blossom comes off as quite metallic since Bertrand has kept the rose oxide from mods 15 and 16 to conjure the blood accord, but there’s also something that makes me wonder whether he’s skipped a shower. I’m about to drop my pen to the floor so I can lean towards him and have a surreptitious sniff when he informs me he’s upped the costus.
‘Oh, and here I was thinking it was you!’
Now I’m getting a pretty animalic note from the Habanita base 3 as well … Bertrand’s mouth curls into a sly little smile.
‘I put in African Stone.’
&
nbsp; I let out a delighted hoot. When I’d given the African Stone to Bertrand, I’d asked him whether it would suit Duende and he’d agreed to try it out. Next thing I knew, he’d used it in another project. I was happy to have fed his inspiration, but slightly cross that someone else would reap the benefits of my little gift. As it turns out, Olivier Maure from Art et Parfum, with whom I’d discussed the possibility of using such a material when I’d gone to visit him, sent Bertrand a sample from a different source. He retrieves it from his refrigerator, unscrews the lid and hands it to me gingerly.
‘It’s phenomenally powerful … don’t spill any on yourself!’
‘Or I’ll be followed by all sorts of animals, including the human kind…’
The late-afternoon November gloom is falling over Paris: time to move on to mods 17, 18 and 19, which combine different proportions of the new orange blossom base and the Habanita base 3. I’m squirming with anticipation on my swivel stool.
My smile fades when I smell mod 17. The aldehydes in the two bases have ganged up on the other notes and taken over in a huge blast of hot iron steam. Bertrand shakes his head.
‘OK, forget 17. It’s too old-fashioned, too Habanita.’
I guess he had to rebuild it to understand it from the inside.
‘Of course,’ Bertrand says, ‘but it’s really interesting to integrate this base into our story. It’s part of it. That’s why I went back to it last time.’
Aren’t we rewriting history a bit here? I brought it back. But never mind.
‘And what about N°5?’ I ask him. ‘I’m really hooked on it.’
The Perfume Lover Page 20