The Secret Ways of Perfume

by Cristina Caboni

  “I’m not laughing at you.”

  “But you are laughing,” she said, standing with her hands on her hips.

  “Because I like what I see.”

  Elena stopped. “There! You see? You say things like that to me and I . . . I ask myself why I ever wasted my time with Matteo when I could have spent it with you. And I don’t even know why I was like that for so long. I hate it and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  Cail walked over to her and took her hand. “Come and sit back down. We can talk about it, if you want to.”

  Elena let herself be convinced, because she knew that talking to Cail always did her good. He listened properly and he helped her overcome her obstacles. Once they were sitting together on the sofa, under the coverlet, they looked at each other. Then he started to kiss her, his lips brushing hers, gentle but determined, and increasingly so, as though every time they shared a kiss the bond between them got stronger. But despite that, he never went any further.

  Elena, though, drew him to her chest. When he kissed her neck she melted into his caresses; they were more confident now, more possessive.

  Suddenly, Cail pulled away from her. Every time it was harder to stop. He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anyone. He knew that she wanted him, too. Cail could feel it in every bit of his body. But once they had been together, when their relationship changed, what would happen then? The baby would arrive, and a whole stack of problems along with it. Sure, Elena said she would never go back to her ex, but what if she changed her mind after the birth? That thought drove Cail crazy. He didn’t want to let go of her, but he couldn’t cross the boundary they’d set.

  Damn it, he cursed in his head. Cail held her again, tenderly this time, resting his forehead on hers, his heart pounding beneath the palm of her hand. Elena looked and saw that his expression had hardened, as though he regretted losing control. He probably did. Instinctively, she wriggled free. Cail immediately let her go and she took the chance to stand up.

  She kept forgetting she was a pregnant woman; pregnant by somebody else, she reminded herself with a hint of bitterness. And she knew from experience how unsettling that could be for a man. Oh, she knew! An image of Maurice flashed through her mind, but she dispelled it. Cail was nothing like Maurice. There was no chance he would behave like her stepfather. He was there, wasn’t he? With her. He could have left whenever he wanted; there was nothing between them, no promises, no obligations. Yet there he was. He was always there. Besides, he acted completely differently. Cail had never forced or persuaded her to do anything she didn’t want to do. He talked to her openly . . . when he did actually talk.

  She sighed. Then she realized that however sure she was about Cail, there was always a doubt—a subtle, intangible doubt. After all, Elena didn’t know how charming Maurice had been with her mother. She’d only seen the worst side of their relationship. Even if Cail was interested in her, what if he didn’t want the baby?

  She brushed her hair back with her fingers, feeling a sudden urgent need to talk to her mother. As strange as it sounded, Susanna was the only person who would understand. They were both in love with a man who wasn’t the father of their child. But was it love that she felt for Cail? Elena had no idea. After Matteo, she was being very careful when it came to putting her feelings on the line. And then there was the baby to think about.

  “Come back over here,” Cail said, patting the sofa beside him.

  She was tempted to refuse, or much worse, maybe even ask him to leave. But that wasn’t what she really wanted.

  “Let’s talk for a bit, OK?” he suggested again. “Or do you want me to leave?” Cail’s question broke the tense silence that had settled over them like a heavy cloak.

  “No.”

  “So, come over here, let’s sit down and talk.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t want to talk about . . .”

  “About us?” Cail asked.

  Elena nodded, her eyes glued to the floor. She wasn’t ready to define this thing between them—not yet, and not right then, not when she was so close to bursting into tears.

  “OK. We don’t have to. Let’s not argue.” Cail’s voice was more relaxed now, more amenable. He took a lilac macaron from the tray, Elena’s favorite, and held it out to her.

  “Peace offering?”

  She fought back the tears and an involuntary smile. “You’re terrible,” she told him. But she took it and bit into it, savoring the delicious black currant cream. “I’m not doing this for you,” she continued, wagging a finger at him. “We’re making up because of the cakes. Seeing as you brought them, I wouldn’t want you to take them away again.”

  He didn’t reply, but as he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, his touch was warm, gentle.

  “One question each?” she suggested.

  Cail thought for a moment. “All right, but I go first.” He paused. “You once told me you had two wishes: one was the baby . . . what’s the other?”

  Elena licked her lips. “Is there an alternative question?”

  “No, but you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” His voice was low and serious.

  With a deep sigh, Elena tried to explain herself better. “It’s not that simple. And it’s not that I don’t want to answer, but it involves you. I can’t reveal my plan. I have to play my cards right, don’t you think? Come on, ask me another question,” she said, waving her hand at him again.

  Cail seemed surprised. He held her to him again and kissed her, his hands in her hair. Then he pulled away, as though he’d been overcome by an irrepressible urge and then regretted it. He cleared his throat and a moment later he picked up the conversation. “OK, another question. Let’s see . . . Do you miss Italy? Do you want to go back?”

  Still thrown by the kiss, Elena shook her head, as though it would order her thoughts.

  “I like Paris,” she said. “I think it’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world—I feel I can say that, even if I haven’t visited them all. You know, when I was little, my mother moved around all the time, before she settled in Grasse. I saw Bombay, Cairo, Tokyo, New York . . . She went anywhere they needed her skills as a perfumier. And I went with her. I’ve visited more playgrounds and zoos than you can imagine. When I went out with the nannies, I took it all in. There were places I liked, where I felt at home, and others that frightened me, even though they were beautiful. A place is like a perfume, like a dress; you have to try it on to understand whether it suits you.” She paused. “Paris, the Marais, the Île de la Cité, they’re all places I like.”

  “So you won’t go back to Florence?”

  “For a visit, every now and again, yes. To see the house. You know, that’s another thing I can’t understand. Before, I hated the place; now there are moments, especially at night, when I wish I was there. Maybe it’s because of what it represents, because of its past. Everything my grandmother taught me is there, everything that was created and left by the women in my family. You should see the laboratory: there are glazed porcelain jars taller than me. They’re amazing. Every room has antique furniture, and an old oil lamp.”

  “Like that one?” Cail asked, pointing to a glass vase with a candle burning under a little plate that was giving off a light, aromatic perfume.

  “Yes. My grandmother always used the same oils: orange for happiness, sage to combat confusion and doubt, mint to stimulate the imagination, lavender for purification. The perfumes are all over the furniture now—it all smells as if it has herbs, flowers and fruit stuck to it. When I came from Florence, I slipped that one into my suitcase, along with a few essences.”

  “I really like this perfume.”

  “Jasmine and two drops of helichrysum,” she explained.

  “It’s very stimulating,” Cail went on, half-smiling.

  Elena blushed. When she had measured out the jasmine, she’d had an in
timate atmosphere in mind. Taking a deep breath, she tried to pick up where she’d left off. “On the ground floor, there’s the old perfume store. There’s a fresco on the ceiling. When you look up, it’s as if you’re looking at a meadow full of flowers and angels, and in one corner, a little out of the way, there’s a man and a woman. They’re holding hands and walking toward an arch of roses. It’s really striking. There’s also a huge screen in the corner of the room: if you open it up, it turns into a little house—the perfect hiding place.”

  “Is that where you used to go when you were up to something?”

  She nodded. “I was a terrible disappointment to my grandmother. I used to make her really angry. Some days we got on and everything seemed to be going well. And she was happy. But there were times when I hated her. So then I mixed up perfumes, ruined compositions, refused to study, refused to speak to her.”

  “You really were a terrible child.” Cail laughed, but soon his happiness turned into bitter reflection. He understood the young Elena’s anger, how overwhelmingly powerless you feel at that age. Cail himself often used to get angry, especially when his father, Angus McLean, would disappear. His mother, Elizabeth, stayed on her own with him and his little sister to look after the business. Somewhere deep inside, he could still hear his mother’s stifled sobs. He’d even tried to ruin his own father’s work: one of their best roses was actually the result of his attempt to sabotage a seed.

  “Your roots are in that house, Elena,” he said now. “It’s normal for you to feel attached to it.”

  She shrugged. “It would be normal, if I hadn’t hated every minute I spent there.”

  Cail looked into the distance. “Hate is a very complicated emotion. We hate the things we intensely desire but can’t have. We hate what we don’t understand, things that seem too different. Hate and love are too close; their edges get blurred—they don’t have clear boundaries.”

  Elena stared at him. “I’d never thought about it like that.”

  “Why did you hate that house?”

  “My mother left me there. She told me it was for my own good, that I’d be better off with my grandmother. They were excuses—she just wanted to get rid of me. The truth was, Maurice hated me and she wanted to start a new life without another man’s kid under her feet.”

  “Your grandmother . . . she never hurt you?” His voice was low and serious, his eyes solemn.

  Elena shook her head. “My grandmother loved me very much, albeit in her own way. You know she used to come into my room at night? She’d wait for me to fall asleep, then come in and sit by my bed. After a few minutes, she’d get up, give me a kiss and go back downstairs. That’s the only affection she ever showed me. During the day, though, she talked to me as if I was an adult. She had no time for mistakes, but she respected me.”

  The feeling came back with the memories, little incidents that popped into her mind like lost objects she thought had disappeared without a trace. She’d forgotten how much her grandmother’s respect had mattered to her.

  “Whenever I said something—especially if it was something to do with perfume—she’d stop, put down whatever she was doing and listen to me. She wanted me to go beyond the concept of perfume, beyond the fragrance itself. She wanted me to look for the perfume in my mind, to find it in my heart. She said perfume was the way, the path to a deeper understanding, an understanding of the soul. She insisted that words, images, sounds and even taste could be misleading, but never smell: ‘It transcends everything else.’”

  She paused; in her mind she could still hear Lucia Rossini’s exact words. They were as vivid now as they were then, deeply engraved on her memory.

  “The smell, the perfume, enters you, because you invite it in with your breath, then it follows its own path. You can’t decide whether you’re going to like it or not, because it travels in another dimension. It’s not a matter of logic or reason. It will take you over, demanding the absolute truth. You’ll love it, or it will disgust you. But nothing in your life will be as genuine as that first emotion. Because that response comes from your soul.”

  Cail stroked her hand. “What else?”

  Elena turned to him. “In the shop she followed rituals that were generations old. She wouldn’t even hear of changing our techniques or instruments. For her, there was only what she’d learned; nothing else. She was obsessed. Like my mother, like Beatrice. Like all those women.”

  “Your mother . . . is that why she left? Your grandmother wouldn’t let her run the business?”

  Elena sighed. She didn’t like talking about the past. Yet, as she told all this to Cail, the bitter taste of her lonely childhood began to fade. She welcomed that sensation with a hint of surprise. She could bear it now. It was as though by drawing it out, showing it to someone, it had lost its intensity.

  Elena focused. She wanted to be clear, to get it right.

  “No. My mother wasn’t interested in that kind of perfumery; she didn’t believe in it. She wanted to travel, see the world. My mother loved anything modern. According to her, the future of perfumery was chemistry, synthesis. She said Beatrice’s perfume would be good for nothing nowadays. Too antiquated, too different. My grandmother, on the other hand, thought the exact opposite. For her, Beatrice’s Perfect Perfume was special: it was the concentration of ideas, sensations and emotions from previous generations, the things that reside in our family memory and are passed down together with genetic heritage. A sort of olfactory code. Beatrice’s perfume would always be relevant, she believed, because it was the human soul. It was love, hope, generosity, value, trust—all the good the human race knew and had produced.”

  “Utopia?”

  Elena shook her head again. “It’s not impossible, you know. It’s true that perfume is subjective, but a fire smells of heat, comfort, danger, action, and it’s the same for everyone. Just like rain means hope and the future. For some people, it can also represent anguish, but it’s always synonymous with abundance. Then there’s the smell of the sea, wheat, wood . . . I could go on for hours. Smells, whether good or bad, are processed by the brain instinctively, before the conscious mind is aware. And smells trigger a reaction that comes from the most ancient part of our soul.”

  “And what do you think?”

  Elena shrugged. “I just know it was perfume that took them away from me. Both of them.”

  Cail hugged her, hoping he could banish the grief her whispered words revealed. He wanted to ask her about Susanna—he had a feeling she was the key to the worst of Elena’s pain. But he sensed she was too upset to talk about that right now. So he searched deep inside himself for the right words, and he found them in what they shared, that mixture of love and hate that he’d felt toward his father when he was a boy, and had grown out of in later life.

  “Maybe it’s even more complicated than that,” he said gently. “From what you’ve told me, from what you’ve become and from what you’re doing, perfume could be the thing that brings you together.”

  The thing that brings you together. Instinctively, Elena flinched at those words. Then, while Cail told her about how crossbreeding roses was the only thing he had in common with his father, she considered what he had said from all angles, the way you approach a potentially dangerous stretch of water, one you have to cross at any cost to reach the other side. Eventually, she realized it was true. However determined she was to believe otherwise, perfume was probably the one thing she had in common with her mother and grandmother.

  At that moment, she thought of something Monique had once said—that it was Susanna and Lucia’s obsession, the influence perfume had over their lives, that led Elena to reject perfume. That was why she’d pushed it out of her own life. But perfume was a part of her. Slowly, patiently, and in spite of her efforts, it had found its way back to her and drawn her in.

  “What if I neglect my baby, too?” she said in anguish. “What if I abandon it
for this foolish obsession? What if I don’t have time?”

  There, he’d finally got her to say it, Cail thought. At last Elena had revealed what was really tormenting her.

  “You could deal with it head-on, without stalling.” Like you do with everything else, Cail thought.

  Elena scowled. “What do you mean?”

  “Open your own shop, make your own perfumes, look for the lost formula. But make sure you’re in control. It’s all right there in front of you. Choose. Make it your own choice.”

  Elena heaved another sigh. “One day, maybe. Now, I need to think about the baby.”

  “What’s stopping you doing both?” Cail wanted to know.

  Well, what was stopping her? “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “Have faith in yourself.”

  “It’s not just that. It costs a lot to open a shop. And you need a sponsor, someone to introduce you to the right people, to get you into distribution channels, and that’s not even the biggest obstacle.”

  Secretly amused, Cail asked, “And what would that be?”

  Elena looked him in the eye. “Do you know how it works? How you go about making a perfume?”

  Cail shook his head. “Only when it comes to roses, but I don’t think that counts.”

  Elena snuggled into his arms and rested her chin on his chest. “It starts with an idea. It could be an event, a dream, a walk . . . You see, a perfume is like a story; it’s a way of communicating—although it’s more subtle, more immediate. Once you’ve established the brief—that’s what it’s called—you can choose the essences. I feel them all: they turn into colors, emotions; they overwhelm me, possess me. I can’t stop thinking about the perfume until it’s finished.”