‘What does it make you think of when you hear it?’
‘I was going to say it sounds very Spanish, but…’
‘… that’s comment degree zero!’
We burst out laughing.
‘OK, so what is it, a dance?’
I explain that, in Spanish, it can either mean ‘the wee hours’ or ‘dawn’. Pronounced with the lazy Sevillan accent, dragging the last two vowels together, la madrugá is also the period between midnight and noon on Good Friday – the very night I spent in Román’s arms – when the exhausted crowds who’ve been partying all night in the wake of the religious processions blend in with the soap-scrubbed, cologne-splashed families rising for Mass.
As Bertrand writes an email to L’Artisan Parfumeur’s main office to ask them to check up on the availability of the name, I start stuffing my notebook, phials and recorder into my handbag. When we’d set our appointment, he’d said he needed to be out by five thirty, and it’s past six already. I’m just waiting for him to click on ‘send’ to take my leave.
But as soon as he does, he starts telling me about the way he’ll tweak Duende. He wants to make it even more honeyed and nectar-sweet; he’s been thinking about adding thyme instead of the lavender he used in the first two trials: it would bridge the cologne and incense effects. The latter he can amp up, but the material he’ll be using won’t express itself in the top notes. Fine, I can live with the incense note coming in later. After all, that’s what happened in the story: waiting under the orange tree until the procession got nearer …
As we sniff my wrist to follow the development of N°28, we agree the base notes are too static and un-contrasted. We’ll work in more darkness, Bertrand says, but not the abrupt, mineral darkness we started out with in Duende 1 and 2. He wants to add tobacco to warm up the incense and play off the animalic waxy notes.
‘We need to make it more mysterious … We’re not in the chapel yet, but we’re getting close!’
I make a move for my coat. He grabs his too, puts on his little grey hat and says:
‘So … do you have time for a drink?’
I’m not due at my dinner party for another two hours. It turns out Bertrand can’t go home before picking up a parcel near Bastille, and it won’t be ready for a couple of hours either. So we head out into the night, try the nearby cocktail bar – no tables – and end up in an empty café on the rue de Rivoli in front of two steaming pots of frothy milk to pour into our hot chocolates. Neither of us is the ‘have you seen a good movie lately’ type but, as it happens, last night I saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, which shows the master at work practically in real time. At each step, you want to say, ‘Stop, this is it,’ and then he paints it over, twists it and warps it until he chucks it all and says: ‘Now that I know what I want, I’m starting all over again.’ That feeling of seeing a piece of work morphing over and over again is what I’m getting from Duende.
‘I don’t know if Picasso knew exactly what he wanted,’ Bertrand says, ‘but I know that even if a piece seems to have integrity, if it isn’t exactly what you want, you refuse it. You know exactly what you don’t want, even when you don’t know exactly what you want or where you’re going.’
That’s what’s been happening with Duende, he explains. He’s discovering it as he goes along, finding out what he can exploit from its current state, what will yield a new form. He’ll pull on that form until it takes on a perfect volume. Sometimes he can achieve an extraordinary volume after one or two mods because the project’s been well conceptualized beforehand, usually when the structure is simple and straightforward. Sometimes he has to start over countless times before finding exactly what it was he was looking for.
As Bertrand falls back on the metaphor of the labyrinth, I tell myself our conversations also follow labyrinthine paths: we often seem to pass by the same points but never quite at the same level. Of course, that must be the pattern of most conversations between people who meet regularly and are developing the kind of culture-à-deux that sometimes becomes the foundation of friendship …
So although we’ve been through this before, I bring the issue up again: isn’t he taking on too many projects? He answers that, as a freelancer, he can’t afford to turn down contracts. I shake my head. Someday, he’ll get to the point where he’ll be able to say no; where clients will say, ‘We’re hoping Duchaufour will make our new perfume, he hasn’t agreed to yet but…’ Bertrand says ‘I hope so,’ but he doesn’t look convinced. I raise another issue: his style is so distinctive he can’t help imposing it. What then of the brand identity of the various houses he works for? Not his problem, he answers. Clients ask for a product, he gives them the best he can, end of story. I shake my head again. I’m not buying his ‘I’m just a guy making a living’ line. Bertrand’s one of the few perfumers I know who’s got enough vision to art-direct himself. Even if he no longer wants to do imbitable stuff – and I’m not quite convinced he doesn’t – he cares enough about the art not to be content churning out products, no matter how good they are. At that, he looks up:
‘OK, right, so I’ve done a few juices that smell good while managing to be a bit original. But it’s still classic perfumery. I want to move on to something completely different. Work on another language. Something more modern.’
I suddenly realize that, for the past year, I’ve been somehow waiting for him to say that. I was sure he would, sooner or later. As we pay up and head for the metro, he starts telling me about his new ideas. He goes on talking as we wait on the platform and shove our way onto the train. It’s the rush hour three days before Christmas and we’re jammed against each other in the crowd.
‘You sure smell good!’
‘Are you surprised?’
We’re still talking as we are spat out by the crowd onto the platform of the Bastille station and wind our way through the piss-reeking corridors to the nearest exit. On the place de la Bastille, we move aside to avoid the hordes of last-minute shoppers, but it’s too cold to stand and talk so the talk dies down. We exchange pecks on the cheeks and a hug and wish each other a happy holiday, and then he’s zipping off to his appointment and I’m on my way to my dinner party, walking towards the place de la République along the boulevard Beaumarchais with its Harley Davidson dealership, camera and art supplies stores, weaving round icy puddles in my Italian kid-glove boots, fur coat flouncing about my legs. Next year’s the year Duende may come true: I couldn’t have found a more exciting gift under the tree.
Merry Christmas, Mr D.
31
Every time I go to Ottawa to see my parents, I check the level of the two perfume bottles on the glass shelf under the bathroom mirror. They never seem to go down much: in one year, my mother has used up about ten millilitres of Maharanih, an orange and amber scent by Parfums de Nicolaï I gave her after I found out she used her Jean Patou Sublime as a room spray. It seemed sacrilegeous to blast those precious drops into the air as a cover-up for more offensive effluvia. But though my mother admits she sneaks a spritz on her bra or on a Kleenex tucked under her pillow, room spray is her only official excuse for enjoying fragrance.
I’ve given her perfumes now and then, hoping the paternal ban would be lifted eventually. The limited edition Baccarat crystal bottle of Trésor I received from Lancôme back when I was a journalist was a miscalculation though. It is described as a ‘hug-me’ perfume – perfect for a mom – but my mother finds it too cloying. Trésor is now displayed next to her collection of Swarovski crystal animals. The plainer bottle of Eau d’Arpège, which seemed fitting when I picked it up at the duty-free shop because the scent had been composed for Jeanne Lanvin as a gift to her beloved daughter, ended up in the purgatory of the guestroom closet, alongside Bal à Versailles, Max Factor Green Apple and the Chloé I bought on my first trip to Paris.
After I’ve taken stock of these, I sit on the bed and stare at the flotsam of my pre-Paris life: my books, from teething to grad school; the stern-faced Spa
nish doll in crisp red taffeta flounces; the teddy bear we once drove one hundred miles to retrieve from a motel where we’d forgotten it, worn noseless and armless by a decade of little-girl love; pictures of my beaming face at every age. ‘What will you do with all this when we’re gone?’ my mother keeps asking me, turning my stays into an anticipated mourning period as I survey each object I can’t bear to let go.
I haven’t been here twenty-four hours and, though I love my parents deeply, I’m already going stir-crazy. So I pull on my heavy boots, wind a scarf around my neck, slip on my fur coat and head out into the winter, trading one stifling atmosphere for another – at –10°C, breathing becomes slightly harder. There is nowhere to walk to that isn’t a neon-lit box selling the same things you can buy anywhere in North America, so I pace up and down the driveway and scare off a few squirrels, black velvet ribbons undulating from the whiteness to the grey, naked tree trunks. I take my small decant of Avignon out of my pocket, spray some on my coat and bury my nose in my collar. When my father quit smoking, he complained that my clothes carried the stench of cigarettes over from Paris cafés. Rather than laundering the contents of my suitcase before each trip to Canada, I decided to fight smoke with smoke, hoping that the incense wouldn’t register as perfume to my father’s nose. Now incense has become the signifier of my Christmas holidays, not because of its religious connotations – I must have gone to Midnight Mass three times in my entire life – but because its mineral, dry, burnt quality is the answer to the blinding scentless nothingness of snow …
I’ve also brought along a decant of Annick Menardo’s Patchouli 24. With its daisy chain of smoky, burnt, medicinal and leathery smells softened by the old-book sweetness of vanilla, Patchouli 24 epitomizes Menardo’s style at its most radical. She composed it for a man who didn’t wear perfume and asked her for something that didn’t smell of it. She figured he could always spritz his father’s old leather flight jacket with it. She had only herself and one man to please: fortunately for perfume lovers, it also pleased the New York-based Le Labo and no brand could have been more suited to it. In Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, Luca Turin compares it to the smell of a storage room in the Biology Department at Moscow State University. I concur: it reminds me of my father’s lab. I’d actually told this to Menardo when we’d spoken on the phone. She herself studied chemistry, biochemistry and medicine before perfumery and, when she learned my father was a pharmacologist, she surmised that he had used cresol (whose tarry, burnt, medicinal facets can be found in single malt whisky and smoked tea) for liquid chromatography, a laboratory technique designed to separate mixtures in order to analyse them.
As we’re sipping the Laphroaig I brought home for Christmas, I tell my father that the smell of his lab may have inspired some of my quirkier olfactory tastes; the whiff of the stables I got when coming to visit him conjures pleasant memories when I find it in a perfume. At this, he blurts out:
‘Parfums Ibérie, trois nuits à l’écurie!’
‘Ibérie perfumes, three nights in the stable.’ Excuse me? My dad has just turned eighty, but he’s nowhere near gaga: in fact, he’s still working.
The memory just popped up for the first time in decades when I associated fragrance with horses. He explains that, when he was ten years old, he sent in for perfume minis that were advertised in a magazine in order to resell them. His commercial endeavour failed miserably, he says, and what’s more, the cleaning lady kept crowing an annoying little ditty about ‘Ibérie’ perfumes smelling like the stables.
My Google queries yield no perfume or perfume house called ‘Ibérie’ or ‘Iberia’, but I do find a French house, Ybry, that developed its activities in North America in the 30s. I wonder what the horsy one smelled like. Narcissus? Leather? Was its smell what put my daddy off perfumes? Or was it the cleaning lady’s jeers? It can’t be the trauma of his failure as a door-to-door salesman: he put himself through his first year in college selling Fuller brushes …
I’d have never imagined that my father had made an early foray into fragrance before becoming perfume-averse. Now I’m doing it the other way round, lifting the curse of Ybry by dreaming of an Iberian perfume. I’ve been meaning to show Duende to my parents, but although I’ve often spoken about it, they don’t seem to be curious. It’s only once my suitcase is packed for my return trip that I ask my mother whether she wants to smell it.
‘Oh. It’s strong’ is all she’ll volunteer, with a tentative smile.
An hour later, when I join her in the kitchen, I hold out my wrist again. She agrees it’s softer now. She likes it better.
As for my father, I’ve been wondering whether perfume still bothers him as much as it used to: he’s never made a comment on the fragrances that must permeate my clothes even when I don’t apply any. I ask him whether he does smell them.
‘Yes, in fact, I do,’ he answers with a sly little smile.
Somehow I feel that if he hasn’t made a comment, it’s for the same reason he never uttered a word against my husband until I announced my intention of divorcing him: out of respect for my choices. Still, I press on. Does he want to smell Duende? My mother looks as though she’s about to catch my wrist when I raise it to my father’s nose. Her expectant, amused, slightly defiant gaze flits from my face to his.
‘It smells … like perfume,’ he finally says with a baffled chuckle.
‘But why perfume?’ my mother asks me. ‘I don’t understand. You’ve always liked it, but there were many other things you liked you could have chosen to write about.’
Why indeed?
I could answer that each tiny puff of beauty is my stand against the ever-more-standardized world of shopping malls and big-box stores where I’ve chosen not to live; the essences of flowers, spices and woods grown in warmer climes a protest against the four-month-long winters of my youth. I could say that I drench myself in sweet scents for all the times my mom dabbed on a drop of Bal à Versailles in secret or sneaked a spritz of Sublime on a Kleenex, ever the daughter rebelling against the Law of the Father. I could say that perfume is the only thing that allows me to breathe when the cold air catches in my throat and I’m smothered in childhood memories; that perfume is the language of my chosen country; that in many ways it is my chosen country, invisible and borderless: that’s why I need to learn its language.
I don’t. Instead, I slip my phial of Duende 28 into the regulation Ziploc bag next to my Ventolin, lipstick and mascara before we head for the airport. If it comes to it at the security checkpoint, I’ll dump the Ventolin.
32
When Bertrand and I came to this café before Christmas, we’d had the whole banquette to ourselves. Now we’re stuck between the window and the railing of the staircase leading down to the cellar, an icy draft rides up my skirt each time the door opens and a dozen people are howling over the screeching coffee machine. But Bertrand’s got a new trainee and there’s no space for the three of us in the lab, so we’ll have to make do with this set-up.
Nine phials are lined up on our tiny round table. Guess the new trainee is helping. It’s been a month since we last met. I came back from Canada with a bad case of flu and stayed curled up in a foetal position in a puddle of sweat for a week. When I emerged, as I had had no news from Bertrand, I figured he was swamped with work and gave him a breather; I’d wait and see if he contacted me of his own accord. I broke down first – there was no earthly reason why I should be following the wait-for-the-guy-to-call rule with him – and found out he thought I’d been giving him the silent treatment. So he’d gone ahead and showed the latest mods to the team from L’Artisan Parfumeur. He only told me about the meeting after the fact. They loved it and they’re considering launching it next year.
Well, Mr D., I’m not popping the cork off the bottle of Moët yet. I’m delighted the team loved it. But, for the time being, the only thing that matters to me is what we want Duende to become, I tell Bertrand once we’ve settled in front of our hot chocolates. I don’t want anyone else inte
rfering with the process. Not even the client.
Bertrand seems a little taken aback by my reaction. I’m surprised myself at how territorial I’m feeling, though to be perfectly honest I’m probably just irked at having been kept out of the loop – but where’s my place in that loop? ‘Muse’ isn’t a position on organizational charts. He explains that it was just a quick meeting and that he only showed them two mods, the one I’d left with before Christmas and the latest one, but none of the intermediary versions. There are things he’ll want to go back to.
‘You’ll see. You tell me.’
Now that was a deft bit of defusing … So while Bertrand finishes numbering the blotters, I tell him how I made my parents smell Duende on the day I left Canada. He asks me if I’ve ever figured out why my father was so intolerant of perfume.
‘Maybe he’s really hyperosmic, who knows? Or maybe he’s just a control freak.’
‘I guess a lot of old-school scientists were like that,’ Bertrand muses. ‘Like my dad. Everything had to be controlled; everything had to be rational. Now that I think of it, I’d never realized this before but my father never wore fragrance either.’
Bertrand’s father was a pedologist. At first I think it’s got to do with feet, but no, that’s podology. Pedology is a branch of geology, the science of soils. The late Dr Duchaufour was one of the leading authorities in the field.
Swapping childhood memories always does the trick, doesn’t it? Once Bertrand and I have performed our bonding ritual, we can resume plotting the progress of Duende. There aren’t nine mods but seven: N°29 is just a base and N°34 has gone AWOL. All are tweaks on N°28 and running through them is like watching the scent morph as the different materials twist, blow up or tamp down its accords.
In mods 30 and 31, the incense note is produced by new materials (incense absolute instead of the essential oil, and the synthetic molecule cedramber); mods 32 and 33 have an added tobacco note produced by cistus. Bertrand hasn’t smelled them for three weeks and he’s pleasantly surprised by the way they’ve evolved after macerating. Like all resinous materials, cistus has the effect of a lacquer, smoothing out and polishing the other notes. This is where we wanted to go: darker, deeper inside the chapel.
The Perfume Lover Page 23