The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

  I’m also getting … something boozy? Bertrand nods again, looking impish.

  ‘I’ve worked in an ethereal, alcoholic effect in the top notes.’

  ‘Because…?’

  ‘Because it’s a boozy night, you told me so yourself!’

  True. We were downing quite a lot of manzanilla. Its almondy, woody aromas are easily conjured by the notes in Duende; the tiny drop of blood that seeps through carries the wine’s saline sea breeze … The rum absolute he put in doesn’t read like rum, but as it whooshes upwards it gives an exhilarating jolt to the green top notes: makes them smile. That’s something he’d been looking for too.

  But as everything in Duende is falling into place, my own position is shifting. Bertrand tells me how impressed he was with my report on Duende N°55:

  ‘You really know how to smell now. I won’t touch N°63 until you tell me what you think.’

  It’s taken me a year to get there; it’s taken him a year to listen. Hasn’t anything I’ve said up to now made any difference?

  ‘You brought me the story.’

  Ah.

  ‘I had to wait until I was satisfied with what I’d done before I could listen…’

  ‘And now you’re satisfied. So what do you need me for?’

  ‘Now I need you as an evaluator.’

  That pinches a little. However useful an evaluator’s input is, it’s mostly technical and commercial: she’s not working on her story but on a client’s brief. It’s not a moment of her life that’s being bottled. Duende comes from me as much as it comes from Bertrand, and whatever I’ve been to him throughout the year, I am much more than an evaluator. Aren’t I?

  ‘OK, so you are a muse…’

  It’s the first time he’s said the word. I’d kiss him smack on the top of the head, if he weren’t saying it in such a teasing tone.

  ‘… and an evaluator.’

  OK, so now I could bang his head against the counter. But of course I’ll do it. Who knows Duende better than I do, after him? I’m pretty sure that of all the people he works with, no one follows the development of their product as closely as I do. Do they?

  ‘Never.’

  I think back to what Christian Astuguevieille told me: that much of his work with perfumers was learning to talk with them. Those long hours Bertrand and I spent together, huddled over blotters, were spent looking for a common language. Bertrand corrects me:

  ‘Looking for a common emotion, for the moment when we’d both go “ah” … A meeting of the souls.’

  And that’s happened during the last session. In a way, Duende is done. From now on he’ll focus on rebalancing proportions without adding any new materials to the formula. My mission will be to keep track of certain aspects of the development that might need polishing: whether the cat pee facet in the blackcurrant base sticks out too much; if the aldehydes are too screechy; if the new ethereal, boozy effect works well. Whether the scent evolves harmoniously rather than splitting up into two different volumes like it did in N°55. How long it lasts on skin; if it carries; if I get compliments on it … But even if the next mods are just tweaks, we’re well on for going over 70. How does that measure up to the other work he’s been doing, I wonder?

  ‘The most mods I’ve done were for a Penhaligon’s product. I was up to 78. So I’d say it’s getting to be pretty sophisticated.’

  The competitive streak in me is speaking up and I make a mental note of pushing to 80. Suddenly Bertrand looks me in the eye, scowling:

  ‘But, believe me, that’s nothing compared to the way I used to work with my colleagues in the big companies! Those people who called the shots, they didn’t have a clue about what they were doing. They kept changing their minds. We did thousands of mods, and there could have been ten masterpieces among them, but those were never the ones they picked! The perfumers work themselves sick on a chunk of the road that’s two metres wide, when there’s a whole highway of creativity that should be open to them! But no! No one ever goes past those two metres because, beyond, it’s the unknown!’

  Clearly, the memory of the years he spent slogging over commercial products still rankles. I’ve seldom seen him so worked up. But surely those days are over for him, aren’t they? He shakes his head.

  ‘No, I’m still restraining myself a lot, because I’d love to work on raw materials that are imbitable, but people wouldn’t understand. They just wouldn’t.’

  There’s that word again. I did suspect he wasn’t being entirely in good faith when he said he wanted to move away from the difficult notes.

  ‘But I’ll do it anyway. We’re going to try to impose a certain idea of perfumery. We’ll tilt against windmills. I’m Don Quixote!’

  Well, Mr D., don’t expect me to play Sancho Panza, the paunchy peasant who trails after the deluded knight errant as his squire. But though Duende is far from imbitable – it’s got the lushness of an old-time classic, like a modernist rewrite of a Guerlain – I’m more than willing to gallop alongside you as a fellow knight with a battery of atomizers tucked in my ammo belt. We’ll spray those windmills until they spread the waft.

  35

  ‘I want to make the most beautiful oriental perfume possible,’ Bertrand writes in an email, and suddenly I realize he’s right. Duende is so much its own creature to me that I’ve never thought of fitting it into a slot, but the soft, balsamic accords and resins that form its base are indeed the core of the oriental, also known as the amber fragrance family. How in the world did that happen? Orientals are not my favourite genre. My inclination runs to the more tightly corseted, sensuous yet intellectual chypres. Had I been an oligarch’s bit of arm candy commissioning a bespoke perfume, I wouldn’t even have requested the notes found in Duende. But if Duende is an oriental, it is because Seville dictated it.

  It was as one of the jewels of the Moslem world that Ishbilya, as it was then known, shone most brightly in the Middle Ages, as brilliant and refined a capital as Baghdad and Damascus. Its great cathedral, the Giralda, rose around a minaret whose twins still stand in Marrakech and Rabat; the cathedral’s patio of orange trees was once the courtyard where the faithful performed their ritual ablutions. To this day, from the jasmine-choked alleys of the old Jewish quarter to the fountains glimpsed behind the wrought-iron grilles of its traditional casas de patio, Seville still winds its way into the world of the Arabian Nights. And yet this gateway to the East became the door to the West: the gold splashed on the altars of its Renaissance and Baroque churches was ripped away from the entrails of the Spanish Americas; the treasures of the New World that passed through Seville until the late 16th century turned it briefly into one of the wealthiest cities in Europe.

  Seville’s dual nature – looking to the East as one of the westernmost outposts of the Moslem world, then to the West as the treasure chest of the Spanish colonies – is reflected in the very notes of Duende. The incense comes from Arabia. The orange tree first grew in Asia. Lavender and cistus labdanum are Mediterranean. But vanilla and tonka bean originated in the Americas. Of course, you could say that almost every perfume is a blend of essences that found their way into the perfumers’ palette after travelling the trade routes of the planet … Or, conversely, that perfume is oriental by its very essence, no matter what you put into it.

  Sophisticated extraction methods were already developed as far back as Ancient Egypt, but it was the Arabs who revolutionized perfumery with the distillation of alcohol and rose water. Their techniques were then imported into the West along with aromatic materials through the Crusades and the merchant port of Venice.

  But the modern perfume family called ‘oriental’ has little to do with the blends of Egypt, the Levant or the Middle East. Though it may be reminiscent of the sweet musky scents of the perfumers’ souks, it is a Western reinvention, in the same way that Western artists, craftsmen and poets reinvented the Orient as precious goods were imported, travellers brought back tales and literary works such as The Thousand and One Nights were transla
ted. Harems inspired fevered dreams of unfettered sexuality, as well as being a pretext for painters to depict voluptuous nudes. Writers like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, Flaubert and Gautier turned the trip to the Orient into a literary genre. Inevitably, sultanas, odalisques and slave girls wound their way from paintings, poems, plays and operas onto perfume bottle labels. The fragrances were only vaguely related to Eastern blends through the resins and balsams that had featured in perfumers’ palettes for centuries, such as benzoin, whose soft, powdery, spicy smell is partly owed to vanillin. Vanilla itself had been in use since the time of Louis XIV; after vanillin was first synthesized from clove oil in 1874, it found its way into perfume formulas because it was stronger and cheaper than vanilla tincture (the pods soaked in alcohol), though still a high-end material. Matched with cistus labdanum and bergamot, it formed what is known as ‘amber’.

  The oriental note as we know it seems to have originated in the mid-19th century in a perfume called Opoponax, by the British perfumer Septimus Piesse. But it was Aimé Guerlain who perfected it after the discovery of vanillin allowed him to overdose the note in Jicky, which hovers between the oriental and the fougère. The amber accord was later ‘extracted’ and sold as a base by raw material suppliers. François Coty mined this rich olfactory seam with his 1905 Ambre Antique, whose bottle referenced antiquity and whose fragrance, built around a base called Ambréine Samuelson, echoed the blends of Ancient Rome with their rich amber, resins and cinnamon. Coty would go on to invent two templates of the oriental family with the 1905 L’Origan, the ancestor of the spicy floral orientals later epitomized by Opium (the first product actually to be called ‘oriental’, according to the historian Elisabeth de Feydeau), and the 1921 L’Émeraude, which also featured a sweet oriental accord but with stronger aromatic and hay-like effects reminiscent of the fougère family. But though their early boxes displayed Persian-style motifs, none of the Cotys played overtly on oriental connotations.

  It was not the Napoleon of Perfume but the Pasha of Paris, Paul Poiret, who capitalized on the Orientalist wave that washed over pre-World War I Paris in the wake of the Ballets Russes (Rimski-Korsakov’s Scheherazade debuted in Paris in 1910) and of a new, unexpurgated and therefore vividly erotic translation of The Thousand and One Nights by the Egyptian-born Dr Jean-Charles Mardrus. Poiret had turned chic Parisiennes into sultanas with his harem pants and turbans; in 1912, he hosted an extravagant One Thousand and Second Night costume party staged with the help of Dr Mardrus. Unlike Coty’s, Poiret’s fragrances did explicitly refer to the Orient, with names like Minaret, Aladin or Nuit de Chine. And, according to Octavian Coifan, it was Poiret’s Orientalist vision rather than his use of the traditional materials of oriental perfumery that led us to associate certain fragrance types with the Orient, most notably the carnation, violet and sweet notes already found in Coty’s 1905 L’Origan, which Poiret reprised in the 1912 Chez Poiret.

  But it is Shalimar, launched by Guerlain at the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels, which would give its name to Art Deco, that is identified as the first oriental in modern perfume history. The reason is simple. Like Chanel N°5, it is one of the few continuously produced fragrances of the pioneering years. Like N°5, it is still widely sold and supported by lavish advertising campaigns. So in the same way that N°5 is claimed to be the first abstract perfume or the first perfume to use aldehydes, because the other contenders to the title are all but forgotten except by a handful of experts, Shalimar can claim to be the first oriental. But just as Chanel N°5 was, if not the first abstract fragrance, the first to display a consistent identity as such (the name, the bottle, the box, the notes), Shalimar was the first perfectly accomplished example of the oriental style. It had the notes. It had the name, inspired by the 17th-century Shalimar (‘abode of love’) gardens in Lahore. It had the romantic back-story: Shah Jahan, the son of Shah Jahangir, who laid out the gardens, was none other than the builder of the Taj Mahal, erected in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It had a correspondingly exotic ad featuring a veiled Indian woman, though other ads designed for the Anglo-Saxon market played both the oriental and Parisian cards by showing the Champs-Élysées: ‘The chic, the verve that is Paris … The mysterious, compelling allure that is the Orient … The inspired admixture of both … That is Shalimar.’

  * * *

  Though the Shalimar talcum powder I bought as a teenager is still tucked away in the closet of my bedroom in my parents’ flat, I was never a Shalimar girl. Perhaps because, unlike its elder sister Mitsouko, it is almost too easy to love with its powdery notes that are a molecule away from veering into the edible. The boudoir where Shalimar flaunts her cleavage is clearly built over a patisserie: trust the French to segue from one kind of carnal appetite to another, turn them both into an art form, and bottle the result. As far as orientals go, Duende is actually a little nearer to the pastry platters of the Islamic world with its orange blossom, almondy tonka bean and honeyed beeswax.

  An Iranian friend who once asked me to help her find a new perfume added: ‘But not too oriental. With my type, that would be overkill.’ There is nothing particularly exotic about my own physique but I am inclined towards Mediterranean plushness and I sometimes wonder whether that wasn’t what drove me eastwards, where whatever charms I possessed would be appreciated. Going from Montreal to Paris was a logical, cultural leap over the ocean. But I had to come to Seville to start appreciating a body that had never consented to conform to contemporary Western norms. It is in Seville that my sensuous world pivoted on its own axis, just like the world itself had pivoted from East to West in Andalusia in 1492, when the last Moorish stronghold, Granada, fell into the hands of the Catholic kings the very year Christopher Columbus was claiming the Western Indies for them. Duende is an echo of my journey. The alchemical blending of the East and West, of oriental ancestry and French art, of materials from the Old and the New World … The quintessence of my quest for the place where my body and soul belong. Southwards. Eastwards.

  * * *

  ‘Would you be willing to fly to Beirut tomorrow?’

  The call came five years ago. I’d been warned by the business consultant who’d introduced us in Paris that Habibi wanted to use my services as a ghost-writer. When he phoned a few days later, I was invited – nay, summoned – to Beirut, rather like a scriptural call-girl. The details were arranged by a male secretary: I was to be flown business class, picked up by a chauffeur and accommodated in a boutique hotel on the Corniche. I accepted because I was, as often in my freelancing life, pressed for money, but also because it seemed very Graham Greene to be flown in on such a secret mission.

  Habibi picked me up in the lobby at eight, a tall man in his late forties with the lazy, imperious manner of a first-born son and garter-belt-snapping eyes. In my standard-issue Parisian black I felt like a sparrow caught in a flight of birds of paradise among the designer-garbed Middle Eastern female clientele, but Habibi claimed he was glad to be seen with a woman who still had the nose God had designed her with: he was bored with what Beirut had to offer. In fact, I came to understand as we chatted over dinner, Habibi was bored, period, since he’d sold off his business. I waited for him to tell me what job he’d asked me over for, but clearly this was a matter that would be dealt with later on.

  ‘Do you have a lover at the moment?’ he suddenly asked me.

  Oh. So it was that kind of bored. I didn’t make much of a fuss, answering that there had been someone, but that our affair had petered out because Monsieur was so much busier than when we’d met that he couldn’t properly attend to me.

  ‘So it stopped by suspension of payments,’ Habibi purred.

  I chuckled. He wasn’t wrong, though his interpretation was, perhaps typically for a Lebanese businessman, couched in the terms of a financial transaction.

  It was past midnight when we drove off into the April drizzle, and the car wandered in the eerily new city centre rebuilt on the model of French colo
nial-era architecture, pastel buildings encrusted with the glittering windows of Gucci, Prada and Burberry shops, a Disneyworld for label-shoppers edged with gutted buildings and the ruins of apartment blocks abandoned before they were completed at the outset of the civilian war. Beirut’s lopsided smile, with its pristine implants alongside decayed stumps, was oddly compelling.

  We did eventually broach the purpose of my trip over whiskies in the bar of my hotel. There would be a couple of people to meet who might be interested in writing their memoirs. I took an option on a vanity book for a lady friend of Habibi’s, and then Habibi took an option on me.

  As he never got up before noon, he let me have the chauffeur for the morning. But the chauffeur spoke neither English nor French and I struggled with what I thought was the Arabic for perfume, attar. The chauffeur’s eyes in the rear-view mirror were puzzled until I resorted to miming dabbing my wrist and sniffing it, until he nodded ‘itr’, then ‘aywa’, yes.

  I had envisioned some funky little shop where an elderly gentleman speaking French with the soft-rolling Lebanese ‘r’s would show me rare blends. But when the chauffeur triumphantly opened the door, it was to usher me into the black marble mausoleum of a Saudi perfume company that had a Paris branch I’d never set foot in. I was swiftly attended to by a slender young man who looked as me as tenderly as if he’d wanted to slide a spoonful of mastic ice cream between my lips, and who proceeded to display what seemed to be half the contents of the shop. I’d never had experience with oil-based perfumery, which this was: when they’re not airborne by the evaporation of alcohol, the aromatic materials develop in a very different way. The face I was making clearly demonstrated I had not partaken of Botox. Then the piastre dropped: most of these fragrances seemed to be directly inspired by Western blockbusters.