The Secret Ways of Perfume

by Cristina Caboni

  “I’m leaving Narcissus. I just came to tell you.”

  Another silence, longer this time, until he finally lifted his head and looked at her.

  “Isn’t that a little excessive? I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so touchy.”

  Jacques put on his lab coat, his expression grim. In front of him stood a row of tiny aluminum bottles containing essential oils. The rest of the ingredients were in glass containers, vials and alembics of all shapes and sizes. On the steel table sat a number of droppers and paper funnels, and in the middle of it all, a measuring cylinder emitting an intense perfume. He opened his mouth to go on, and then looked at the cylinder, as if it were only then that he remembered what he was doing.

  “Wait. I need to write down the last step, then we’ll talk.” He leaned over the table and scribbled on a pad next to the perfume the exact number of grams of essence he had just used.

  Monique watched him, then gave a sad smile. “There’s always something more important,” she said quietly. She waited a few more minutes. Jacques went over to the computer on the next table, entered a code, took his time to read something, then went back to the pad and continued to write.

  “Goodbye, Jacques.”

  The sound of the pencil snapping cut through the silence between them.

  “I can’t listen to you now. You know that full well.”

  Of course. What had she been thinking? Had she really expected anything different? Something like despair rose up in Monique.

  “You’ll find my resignation letter on your desk,” she said after a long pause, and closed the door behind her.

  As she walked away, she half-expected to hear his footsteps behind her . . . She prayed he’d hurry to catch up with her, talk to her. She stood and waited another minute in front of the exit, counting the seconds, still prepared to give him a bit more time. Then she pushed the door with both hands, walking out onto the shop floor of Narcissus, elegant, bright, brimming with customers. She greeted a few colleagues, quickly collected her things from behind one of the counters and left.

  With his eyes fixed on the security camera, Jacques watched her even after she’d left the shop. When she disappeared from the video, he swore violently, running his hands through his hair, and collapsed into an armchair.

  • • •

  Another ruined one!

  Elena wrinkled her nose, quickly pulling the bottle away. It smelled rancid. She’d cast aside around fifty essential oils that had gone bad; she’d have to throw them all away. There was no chance of saving anything.

  She couldn’t have reopened her grandmother’s shop even if she’d wanted to. She’d gone to the basement to check what state things were in down there since the shop had closed. She still hadn’t decided to go down the perfume route—she hadn’t got that far. But since she didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with her life, it was as good an option as any. It was funny, she thought, smiling at the irony. Now that there was nothing stopping her from opening the perfume shop, she couldn’t do it: no essences meant no perfumes. And no perfumes meant no profits. Anyway, what was she thinking? She couldn’t restart a perfume business just because perfumes suddenly didn’t turn her stomach anymore.

  She sighed. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t disgust that she’d felt when she worked in the shop; it was something else—something she didn’t want to think about right now.

  Her mobile phone vibrated. Elena opened it, looked at the number and smiled.

  “Did it go well?” she asked Monique.

  “Define ‘well.’ Actually, no, forget it. Anyway, I got the job. Le Notre is a real gentleman. Tell me about you. How’s the stocktaking going?”

  Elena rubbed the palm of her hand on her shirt. “All in the trash. All I’ve got left are a few bottles I made for a hotel that never collected them, and some really old stuff. Nothing that would be any good now.”

  “Like perfumes from another era?”

  Elena went up to the dark wooden cabinet, aged over time, and gave the doors a gentle tug, letting them swing on their hinges. “Yes. My grandmother kept them in the dark, and the temperature in the cellar never changes with these walls . . .”

  “You mean to say you went down there, to the secret studio?” Monique sounded incredulous and excited at the same time.

  Elena said she had. “You’ve got no idea what’s down here. I could open a museum. There are alembics and extractors that must be hundreds of years old.”

  “Did you have a look at the formulas?” Monique asked.

  “Absolutely nothing has changed since the last time we looked at them together. Beatrice Rossini’s Perfect Perfume is just a legend, Monique,” Elena said.

  “The diary says otherwise,” her friend argued.

  “We’ve read it from cover to cover, and there’s nothing that could suggest a formula. They were just the ramblings of an obsessive woman.”

  It was true: both she and Monique had read Beatrice Rossini’s diary over and over again. Apart from references to a few ingredients commonly used in perfumery, and a series of symbols drawn on the pages, they’d never found anything relating to the production of one specific perfume. The symbols were interesting, of course, as were the drawings, poems and rhymes. But the main content of those pages was a heartbreaking tale of unrequited love that ended in tragedy. Beatrice had fallen for the wrong man. And she wanted him so much that she let herself be destroyed by what became an obsession. The Perfect Perfume was the essence of her delusion and betrayal. It was appearance; it was deception.

  The two friends had reached a conclusion: the illustrious client had paid for the perfume in cash, rather than with his heart. That was all there was for Beatrice Rossini: tears and money. Enough gold florins to ensure that she and her family would be comfortable for generations.

  “Love can have that effect,” Monique murmured.

  “I don’t know. I’m pretty confused by love. Apart from the urge to vomit whenever I think about Matteo and Alessia, I’ve just got a kind of empty feeling in my chest.” Elena paused for a moment. “You know how much I wanted a normal family, a husband, children. A stable environment. I’m nearly thirty, Monie. I can’t wait forever. And now I’m alone, I don’t have a job . . .”

  “Come on, you’ve got a long way to go before you hit thirty. Besides, you can’t just marry the first idiot who comes along,” Monique blurted out.

  Elena nodded. A shiver made her decide to leave the cold, dark room. “Matteo wasn’t that bad, if you ignored a couple of things,” she said, turning off the lights and closing the door behind her. She went back upstairs, noticing that she felt tired again.

  “Like the fact that you had to have lunch with his mother every Sunday. What a horrible woman!” Monique shuddered audibly. “She’s an ignorant, rude snob. And anyway, she gave me the creeps.”

  “Me, too. She used to give me such looks . . .”

  “I’d have done a runner. I swear, I’d have made up some kind of excuse to avoid seeing her. But my God, why were you with him anyway?” Monique was as direct as always. Elena sat on the bench by the stairs. She needed to catch her breath.

  “Kids. He wanted loads of them. He said they were the most important thing to him. And I wanted a baby. And then—I don’t know . . . I keep asking myself how I didn’t see what kind of man he was.”

  “Listen, enough about him. Let’s talk about you. Have you decided to go to Grasse?”

  Elena closed her eyes. “I can’t. Not now. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “So what about coming to Paris? My job at Narcissus is up for grabs. If Jacques knew who you were, he’d take you on straightaway.” Monique lay down on her bed, Le Notre’s business card in her hand.

  Elena frowned. “You what? You must be joking! We’re talking about Narcissus here, not just any old perfume company.”

  Her friend left a
thoughtful silence. “Supposing the job’s there, would you come? There’s my family’s old apartment in the Marais—you could stay there. Loads of Italians live in the Marais, and it’s twenty minutes from my place on the Metro. So?” Her voice had become more determined, as though a vague idea that had gradually been developing had finally taken shape.

  “I don’t know,” Elena mused. “A job like that, really, I mean . . . and I’d have to arrange everything, close up the house.”

  Monique sprang up so she was sitting on the bed. “Come on, Elena, think about it! A job in Paris, a new life. Of course, the apartment isn’t perfect—it needs a lick of paint, some new furniture—but it’ll make a nice change. Somewhere different, somewhere you can start from scratch. It shouldn’t take you more than a week or two to sort things out in Florence, should it?”

  Elena stood up. The silence of the house all around her only emphasized the loneliness she’d been feeling for days now. A sadness came over her, bringing a lump to her throat, but she swallowed it back down. She imagined Paris, the narrow streets of the Marais, the parks full of flowers, the wonderful museums. And a job. She could make some money, pick up the path she’d abandoned a couple of years ago, reestablish her contacts . . . Then, if it all went well, she could reopen the shop here in Florence. Not straightaway, no, but one day.

  But she knew that these were just hopes; she couldn’t truly believe in them. They were barely more than dreams.

  Then something inside her stirred. It was her own will, reasserting itself. How long had it been since she’d made a decision? She realized that lately, she’d missed the satisfaction of deciding on something and accomplishing it for herself, with no motivation other than fulfilling her own expectations. She would go to Paris! She wanted to go, she wanted a change . . . she wanted to, end of story.

  “I’ll admit, it does seem like a good idea. But there’s a problem. I don’t know anything about new perfume technology. I’m not up-to- date.”

  Monique went over to the table where the packaging from the Indian perfume was still sitting. “Book the ticket,” she said. “Email me the flight number, and leave the rest to me.”

  Monique ended the call, picked up the mouillette that still held a slight perfume, and inhaled it slowly. Then she opened her mobile phone and dialed a number.

  “I’m sending you a CV,” she told Philippe.

  Seven

  HELICHRYSUM: understanding. Sweet as honey and bitter as a sleepless dawn. An intense perfume.

  The fragrance of kindness; to be used sparingly, blended with delicate scents like rose that can take on its qualities.

  Unites heart and mind, passion and reason. Evokes compassion.

  The Marais was one of the few quarters to have retained the character of seventeenth-century Paris. Once a favorite of the aristocracy, who preferred to live next door to the royal court rather than in it, the area came through the Revolution unscathed and survived subsequent visions for town-planning, the Seine floods that deluged southern parts of the city, a succession of kings, and Napoleon.

  Elena walked through the narrow streets in search of the apartment where she was about to start her new life. In spite of the rain, dozens of tourists stubbornly continued to hunt for things, admire them and take photographs. Elena left them behind in rue des Rosiers, the ancient heart of the Jewish quarter within the Marais, and entered a maze of back streets. Here, the ambience changed, and she felt as if she was somewhere else, a tiny village suspended in time.

  She stopped under a boulangerie sign, checking the piece of paper with the address on it for the thousandth time: rue du Parc-Royal, number 12A. She carried on walking almost automatically. At one point, the wheels on her case stopped cooperating, weighed down by the rain. Muttering crossly, Elena gave the suitcase a sharp tug before realizing she’d finally arrived.

  “At last,” she said, stopping in front of a stone archway marked with the number twelve, and peering through the wrought-iron bars. In the dim glow of a few beams of light, she could make out a garden, some bicycles and a couple of parked cars.

  Monique had emailed the code for Elena to open the main gates—but the rain had smudged the numbers she’d jotted on a piece of paper. Annoyed, Elena crumpled the note into a ball. Then, weighed down by her wet clothes and wretched mood, she leaned against the wet wall. It smelled of brick, plaster and exhaustion; the same exhaustion Elena could feel in her whole body. The journey from Florence had not been easy. The plane was late, then she couldn’t find a taxi at the airport and she had had to take the bus.

  At that moment, a car drew up beside her. The driver activated the automatic catch on the gate and drove slowly into the internal courtyard. Dragging her suitcase behind her, Elena limped through the gates just before they closed. The first door on the right was marked as the entrance to apartments 12A and 12B. A wave of relief swept over her.

  Monique had sent her a text message saying that she’d stopped by that afternoon to switch on the heating and hot water, and to drop off some shopping, and that she’d left the shared entrance door ajar. Elena only had to give it a shove, Monique said, since it was inclined to stick, and she’d be in.

  Leaning both hands on the huge door, Elena followed her friend’s instructions. But it didn’t budge. A musty smell filtered through a tiny gap in the door: as though inside there were piles of old books, plants and moss.

  With her eyes closed and her hands on the wooden door, Elena found herself suddenly transported into another world: the world of scents. Smoke rose from the charcoal fires of restaurants nearby: she could smell grilled fish and mixed vegetables—zucchini and peppers—then the icing on a chocolate cake. Semolina and freshly baked bread. In addition, the breeze brought with it the perfume of cedar trees, their leaves heavy with rain, and flowers: gardenias, Michaelmas daisies, then the seductive, delicious scent of roses. And finally, the smell of a hard day traveling without a break. Impatience, fatigue—and doubt. Then a riot of color: red, green, purple. She opened her eyes wide. The emotions took her breath away and spiraled inside her . . . and she felt them brush against her, then swirl, concentrate, and explode. It was too much. She had to stop them—she had to stop feeling.

  She pushed with all her might—and the door suddenly burst open, catapulting her forward into darkness. A strong arm caught her waist, breaking her fall, and a voice said “What the hell . . . ? Are you all right?”

  It took Elena a couple of seconds to realize what had happened. Thank God this man had caught her before she ended up on the floor. That would have been the final straw, she thought.

  “Yes, thank you,” she murmured, stunned.

  When he didn’t respond, Elena fidgeted nervously—the man was still holding her tight.

  “You can let go of me now,” she told him awkwardly.

  Suddenly he let go, stepping away from her. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said sharply.

  Elena was struck by something in the stranger’s voice, a hint of sadness. The emotions that had overwhelmed her a moment ago dissolved, and new ones took their place.

  There was pain in the man’s words—old and unjust suffering. Elena wondered why and wanted to get to know him; she wanted to hear his story. This wasn’t something she could explain; it was instinct.

  “I can’t see you—it’s too dark,” she told him, taking his hand. Her fingers grasping his, she turned around to see his face. The lamplight coming through the open door outlined the strong figure of a man but left his face in shadow. Elena couldn’t make out anything more than a tall, broad silhouette. His voice was slightly harsh, but still polite, and deep.

  “I’m not scared of you,” she said, and gave him a smile.

  He didn’t reply, just held on to her fingers. Elena knew it was irrational—absurd even, not to want to let him go. But lately she’d stopped acting rationally.

  “You smell nice.” I
t was an impulse, this confession; the words simply tripped off her tongue.

  She immediately blushed. God, it sounded as if she was trying to pick him up. Monique would have been proud of her.

  “Sorry, you must think I’m crazy,” she babbled, “but I’ve had a horrible day and the first good thing that’s happened to me was you rescuing me. If you hadn’t caught me, I’d have ended up in a heap on the floor. A perfect end to a terrible day. I was just taken by surprise because the door opened all of a sudden.”

  “What of?”

  Elena was confused. “What of . . . what?”

  “You said I smelled nice. What of?”

  “Oh, yes.” She laughed, a light, velvety sound. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

  But he didn’t laugh, just kept on staring at her intensely. Elena felt his gaze on her, sensed the importance of her reply and the words that this man, whoever he was, was waiting for. So she closed her eyes and let his perfume speak to her, telling her things only she knew how to hear.

  “You smell like the rain, and the cold, but sunshine, too. Like words you’ve thought, long silences and reflection. You smell like earth and roses . . . You have a dog, and you’re a good person who stops to help and who’s grieving for something in his heart.”

  A long silence. Then, without warning, the man snatched back his hand.

  “I have to go,” he said. “Leave the main door open, as the light in the entrance doesn’t work. Take care.”

  He backed away, slowly, without taking his eyes off her. Only when he reached the door did he turn around and leave.

  Elena stifled a sudden urge to call him back. Then, with her eyes still on the door, she started to laugh. What on earth had got into her? She might as well have asked the guy for his phone number. She just grabbed hold of a strange man and . . . well, really it was he who grabbed hold of her. She was half-amused, half-shocked by her own behavior. But these thoughts were soon swept away as she lifted her head, trying to breathe in that perfume again. It was a promise kept, it was the sweetness of trust, and the weight and responsibility that go with it. It was action and need. She searched for it again, breathing in the night air, trying to retrace the thread as it disappeared. But it was gone, leaving her with a sense of something close to longing.