The last mods Alissa evaluated pre-date the latest shake-up, so she’s come to find out where the formula is at, and to weigh in on possible adjustments to make before Sarah comes in with Nick to take the final decision.
I’ve been skin-testing Duende N°123 and getting extremely positive comments. The orange blossom accord is marvellously expansive during the first couple of hours and very long-lasting. But it slacks off a bit in the heart notes, and Bertrand has been experimenting with ways to give it even more volume.
This is where things get tricky. We both love the way N°123 smells, and that’s pretty much where we’d like to keep the scent. But there is no magic ingredient that can amplify the volume of a perfume without skewing its form. You’ve got to alter proportions in materials that are already in the formula or add something new, but whatever you do it won’t smell exactly the same.
Bertrand has come up with three new mods, all based on N°123, all beautiful, and different enough to present clear options.
N°125 is the brightest. Alissa feels it might be a good pick for a spring launch, though we all feel that Duende is rich and complex enough to be a perfume for all seasons.
N°127 has an even stronger orange blossom note, but the dose of Luisieri lavender has been reinforced to bolster the incense accord. As a result, it is the darkest, most balsamic and most sensuous of the three, but it’s also a little bit flatter in the top notes.
As for N°126, Alissa and I are both less keen on it. It isn’t so much an orange blossom because of a new material, alpha-damascone, one of the components of rose. Bertrand is nothing if not stubborn: this is the third or fourth time he tries working in a rose note.
‘I’m insisting wickedly, because rose always amplifies the volume of the heart notes.’
‘Yes, but it also changes the smell,’ I point out.
‘OK, so I’ve moved the cursor slightly, but bear in mind that you have to take in the whole of the line on which the cursor is moving. The note is a little less orange blossom in N°126, but isn’t it worth toning it down to achieve more volume?’
Bertrand insists we try 126 on skin, so as both our wrists are scented with 125 and 127, we squirt the crooks of our elbows and indulge in a session of perfume-testing yoga, six arms twisting around like a fragrant Shiva as we sniff each other out.
‘It’s girlier, younger,’ Alissa comments, but not as though these were necessarily positive attributes: she’s just stating the facts.
‘I’m fed up with young-and-girly,’ I grumble.
‘Hey, wait a minute, this isn’t girly,’ Bertrand protests. ‘It’s not an innocuous perfume.’
‘But it is sweeter,’ I insist.
‘You’re absolutely right. The damascone fruits it up, it juices it up. It makes the heart notes redder. Like red apple juice. Whether that’s necessary or not, I don’t know.’
Alissa doesn’t seem to think it is. Like me, she finds that the new note pulls the scent towards a more common, more commercial register and, again, she doesn’t mean it in a positive way.
‘That’s the problem with rose,’ I argue. ‘Because it does give more volume and appeal to a floral note, it’s a trick of the trade, which means adding it makes the perfume a little less original.’
‘You’re right,’ says Bertrand.
Alissa shakes her head.
‘I’d rather we didn’t go for something too sweet. The last two perfumes we’ve launched are both sweet and fruity…’
As I let out a sigh of relief, Bertrand nods.
‘All right. You’ll have the final choice anyway.’
* * *
Meanwhile, the darker mod N°127 is asserting itself on our skins. Alissa asks whether it wouldn’t be possible to do another mod based on it, but with more contrast in the top notes so that they’re as fresh as those of N°125.
While Bertrand tinkers with his formula, Alissa and I go on smelling the mods and chatting. This is the first real chance I get to have a proper talk about Duende with someone from L’Artisan Parfumeur. As it turns out, they started following the project quite early on, before Bertrand even mentioned to me that they were interested. In fact, Sarah, Nick and Bertrand had been discussing developing a fragrance based on a novel just about at the time I came into the picture. So when I told him my story, which I had always intended to use in a novel about my adventures in Seville (I may have even mentioned that to him at some point), it all clicked. This doesn’t make the way the stars aligned at that particular moment any less serendipitous; on the contrary: it could have been anyone but me, any story but mine.
But like Bertrand hearing the call of his materials, perhaps I heard his call for a story – heard it in his willingness to be carried off by my tales; in his yearning for faraway places. Heard it in Al Oudh, the first fragrance of his I understood from the inside, which meant we could talk. Heard it in Nuit de Tubéreuse, which I felt had been meant for me, though it hadn’t. Heard it in Vanille Absolument: a call from Habanita though it took me months to realize it.
So it turns out that Bertrand wasn’t the only one to hear me. Thinking back, I guess there was never another option than L’Artisan Parfumeur for Duende: they were the ones who pioneered the idea of perfume as travel sketchbook, and they’ve always based their scents on stories rather than sticking on a story after the fact … Though as I smell the three current versions of Duende on my arms, I tell myself that what started out as a narrative scent has also become an incredibly complex abstract perfume, as well as a reflection on the history of perfumery with its references to cologne, fougères, white florals and orientals …
It may also be, quite simply, one of the sexiest scents L’Artisan Parfumeur has ever put out although, oddly enough, it isn’t flamboyantly feminine. And that too is what I’d envisioned it to be: a fragrance that would reflect the story of a man and a woman; the original one I told Bertrand, but also our own creative journey.
* * *
Bertrand re-emerges from his lab shaking a 5ml phial and, from the look on his face, Alissa and I can tell he’s pretty happy with the result. In fact, as we lean in to sniff fresh blotters of 125, 127 and the new 128, he’s practically whinnying with excitement.
‘N°128 is a little less settled. But … whoo! My first impression is very good. This is going to be tops!’
‘Of course, with the parents it has, it can only be good,’ I gloat.
Bertrand throws a sly glance at Alissa.
‘I’ve added a product that will explode the budget.’
She looks up from her blotters.
‘Rose … but this time, in the form of rose oil,’ Bertrand explains.
This isn’t stubbornness; it’s sheer pig-headedness. But it works. We all find N°128 more contrasted and expansive than N°127.
‘And even more mysterious,’ Bertrand adds.
He’s sprayed his forearm with N°128. I lean forward to smell it on him. His hairs tickle my nose and I back off, stifling a sneeze.
‘I’ve put in body hair absolute!’ he jokes.
I rub my nose as the three of us burst out laughing.
‘Perfumer hair headspace? Now that would be a new concept!’
As Bertrand pops back into his lab to prepare another set of samples for Alissa to test over the weekend before they are presented to Sarah and Nick, he’s still hooting about how good he thinks Duende has become.
I’ve never seen him so exhilarated. Does he feel that way every time he reaches the end of a project? For his sake and for the sake of the art of perfumery, I hope so. But I’d rather think none of his perfumes has ever been so lovingly nurtured by its muse.
And now I’m about to present our brainchild to the lady who’ll unleash it into the world. I’m sure she’ll love it.
41
Duende has a name now, the name by which it will go out into the world.
‘Séville à l’aube’ came to me as I thought back to the first time I visited Bertrand in his lab. That day I told him about Se
ville and he gave me a sample of a tuberose scent he called Nuit de Tubéreuse, without knowing what role the criminal, carnal tuberose – that corruptress of a flower – had played in my life. Segueing from the night of the tuberose into Seville at dawn feels like a continuation of the story that began that day. The story that is ending now.
Seville was always about waiting for the beauty to happen. But it was also about cutting – cutting losses, cutting loose. ‘Seville at dawn’ is right: it sets time back into motion. Dawn was when Seville dug into my flesh like a knife and, as I run my fingers over the scars I’ve reopened so many times since, it is my story I am reading in Braille.
* * *
Román and I had made it through the night, giddy with incense and wine, bruised tender from being pressed against one another by the crowds, raw-lipped from dawn kisses rough with dark bristles, voices raspy with laughter and smoke, the pearly mist of exhaustion veiling our eyes. We’d made it through the night, pinned to the orange tree – green leaves, white flowers, golden fruit against the lavender sky – and it felt like a victory to have lived until dawn; until the crowds trailed slowly towards the looming purple Giralda swallowing the gilded floats and left us standing alone.
We stopped at a stall to buy floury hot chocolates and the fried strings of dough called churros, and sat on a bench under an olive tree. Román held out a burning piece of dough for me to bite. I licked the caster sugar off his fingers and drank the chocolate, thick and dark as congealed blood. A giggling cross-dresser tottered on platform shoes, followed by a gaggle of gypsy boys good-naturedly chanting ‘Guapa, guapa y guapa’ to her as they’d done to the Virgin of La Esperanza minutes before, and we laughed too.
Then it was just Román and me, his arm around my waist, our steps ever slower as our giddiness waned and our limbs grew numb, and we drew from the well of the night one last time, knowing what we had lost in defeating it. Soon the sun would tear the last shred of darkness off our skins; the sun was another world and, for a few minutes, while dawn still embraced us, we hovered at the edge of goodbye – it is at dawn that the duende murmurs its dark sounds most poignantly and we were straining to hear its song.
Román left me in the doorway of the Hotel Simon. I stumbled through the hotel patio and made my way up the staircase tiled with copper and blue azulejos to reach my tiny rooftop room … He’d promised he’d come back after Easter, so I waited.
All the orange trees burst into blossom on Easter morning and, under her bridal crown, Seville traded her black lace mantilla for a blonde one. At three in the afternoon, the voice of the city changed into a deep hum, as though thousands of nectar-maddened bees were converging towards the honeycombs of the bullring. Even the light was different: it had been waiting for the first bullfight of the year to take on its purest colours, a gold-drenched blue streaked with swallows darting over the ochre sand – white arcades, ink-black bulls, sepia blood, tiny glittering doll-men waving fuchsia and buttercup, then poppy-red capes …
I’d planned to hop onto the train the next day and spend an afternoon in the Prado before returning to Paris. I forgot to leave. Instead, I drifted into the limbo between Holy Week and the April Fair, caught in the immutable present tense of Seville’s dusty walls – blind men roaring ‘Para hoyyyyy!’ as they touted their lottery tickets, one-armed bandits wailing their electronic siren song in cafés strewn with sawdust, bits of waxed paper and gamba shells, the white alleys where every path led back to the statue of Don Juan raising a paper glass filled with rainwater to the old men who huddled on the tiled benches of the Gardens of Murillo …
I was waiting for Román. I knew nothing of him, except that I amused, excited, seduced him. He was no more to me, perhaps, than my effect on him, and the effect Seville was having on me. So I waited for him to keep the promise Seville had made me. It’s not a gift if you have to ask for it: I asked for nothing. I waited. The beauty of Seville was a gift in itself, and I wanted to lose myself in it.
I left a forwarding address at the Hotel Simon when I went back to Paris after the April fair. I got his letter in September.
* * *
You are as unpredictable and fickle as I am. You left Seville without telling me, but no matter: whatever happens, we are forever bound by our magical night.
But now, I need to see your smile, your pink lips, your honey eyes, your porcelain skin wrapped in black lace. I remember them perfectly well even though you left me no memento. Send me a poem, a picture, a dried flower, the imprint of your lips on a piece of paper …
* * *
Instead of a flower, I sent myself. But when I arrived in Seville in the first cool nights of fall, she turned her back on me with Carmen’s mocking laugh. Román was going for a week to the beach. Perhaps we’d meet up when he returned if I was still around … We’d have a drink somewhere.
I didn’t see him that time, but I came back often, not for Román but for Seville. And I did sometimes see him when he hadn’t gone to the seaside or the sierra. We spent some nights together, never more than one at a time. I never knew when we met whether he’d take me home. But I was filled with so many stories back then that I was never truly with him; besides, our nights could only be faint echoes of the Madrugada. Yet Román was always watching over me as though Seville had entrusted me to him, a stranger who never truly understood the mores of the city and wandered into his arms to rest for a few hours from her adventures …
Then I met the Tomcat and there was no more Seville. And then, after the orange blossom had beckoned in Marrakech, Seville was where I went to decide whether I’d leave my marriage. The Tomcat said he wouldn’t be there when I came back. I hoped he meant it.
It had been ten years since my last trip. I learned through one of Román’s friends that he’d sold his loft in the city and gone to live in a village in the Sierra Norte. The friend gave me his phone number. I called. He said to come. I thought, if he asked me to stay, I’d never go back to Paris.
I got up at dawn to take the coach and fought sleep throughout the three-hour ride so I wouldn’t miss my stop. When I came out of the coach I caught my foot on a step and tumbled into Román’s arms as he staggered back laughing, engulfing me in his warm man-smell. As we bumped along country roads in his dusty Jeep, he told me about the rare flamenco songs he was recording for the state archives. We stopped and got out to walk. He told me the Spanish names of birds and herbs, and we sat on a worn stone bench, and I wondered at my blindness: I’d never seen this beautiful man for what he was. When I told him, he laughed: he’d always seen me for what I was, he said, but he didn’t say what.
His house in the Sierra was almost empty. A cold-water shower in the courtyard. A white bed under a mosquito net. A threadbare faded velvet couch. Books. That afternoon I read Lorca in Spanish lying on the couch, my feet in Román’s lap. Then as we prepared dinner in his tiny tiled kitchen which opened onto a courtyard where chickens were pecking, I sang Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ and Román stopped chopping tomatoes and tapped the beat on the counter with his knife and his fingertips until the jazz was tinged with flamenco and we were almost dancing.
It was too hot to eat much, so mostly I drank the wine, and then he said:
‘You know, we won’t sleep together tonight, guapa.’
I rose from the couch unsteadily, bumped my head on a beam and burst into tears at the sudden sharp pain. He laughed and hugged me, kissing my forehead, and rocked me until I started laughing too.
‘Why not?’
‘We had our magic night, guapa. It won’t get any better.’
‘It could be different.’
‘Can you see yourself living here in the Sierra? You belong in Paris. We’re not in the same book, Carmen, la del Canada…’
* * *
Oh, but yes we are … You can noli me tangere me all you want, my love, but you can’t make love to a writer without her stealing your story to turn it into hers, just as I’ve stolen Seville so that it could be turned into the air
I breathe.
‘Román’ was the name we agreed on back then if I should ever write our story. But the real Román, the one who has another name that doesn’t mean ‘novel’ in French, might read me with his lips moving a bit as he makes out the words in a language not his, and it will be as though he were kissing my ghost. Perhaps he’ll reach out to me, not to take me away from my life but to wrap me again in his arms for a moment, because there will always be the love that burned itself out in a night and vanished at dawn to become another kind of love tempered in the crucible of the magic night. And there will always be the night in the Sierra when I trusted him with the knife to cut me free, so that Seville could become the capital of memory from which I drew the gold of words; as immaterial as perfume, and as sweet.
Perhaps the woman who shares Román’s life will wear my Séville à l’aube, and it will be as though our magic night were wafting back into his dreams. That’s all right: Séville à l’aube will no longer then be mine. If I catch a whiff of it as I’m walking past a stranger, I’ll smile at her, but she won’t know why. By then, I may be trailing in the wake of another love, the better to lose myself again in Seville when I come back to it …
But, for now, Séville à l’aube is still my Duende: an exquisitely meandering journey with the best of all possible companions – the intense, endearing, infuriating, headstrong, brave, generous and brilliantly gifted perfumer who invited me into his invisible world and opened himself up to mine. That the result of that journey would be a thing of beauty I’ve never doubted. Duende was already beautiful when it was barely a sketch, and each of the hundred shapes it took on as it grew and shifted was striking. It was heart-rending to let go of them: they suggested new alleys in the labyrinth, leading to other landscapes. But we had to listen to what Duende was asking us to become.
One single perfume cannot express all that perfume can say, all that a perfumer can say, all that a perfume lover can hope for. It can only be the most beautiful expression of the spirit that inspired it at a given time and place: as singular, flawed and moving as the people who brought it into the world, and as the ephemeral world they created together. Duende is all the choices that were made and all the choices that weren’t. Séville à l’aube is the result of those choices; not a conclusion but a story to be reinvented by all those it touches.
The Perfume Lover Page 29