Marthe and I went home together at Toussaint, the first of November.
While the men were out hunting, and Maman and I plucked and butchered and stewed whatever game they had shot or caught in snares, Marthe sat by the hearth and listened. She had so many questions, wanted to know so much.
I did my best to find the words to reanimate the pictures imprinted in my memory, struggling to stitch bright patches of summer over the fallen leaves and the sound of cold against the windows.
Even the scents—especially the scents—were fleeting, hard to pin them down in words. The way the resinous fire beneath the alembic still candied the soft summer nights. The warm human odor as the audience squeezed together in front of the cloth cinema screen in the town square. The smell of a man pulling you toward the mysterious underside of his chin in darkness lit by flickering black-and-white pictures, I kept to myself.
I was not Marthe, with her extraordinary concentration and attention to detail, but through her, I was becoming ever more alert to the sensuous power of smell. They say that the loss of one of the senses makes the others more acute. I’d go further: it makes the senses of the people around them grow more intense, too. Not only was I smelling in the way she taught me, but I was seeing, really seeing, details on her behalf that I might never have noticed otherwise.
Like an atmosphere, like a taste, it is felt and experienced, and then it is gone. You can’t record it like music or conversation or a picture. You have to smell it again, and remember.
Marthe’s masterwork, the perfume that made her name, was based on heliotrope and lavender.
I often wondered, later, whether the perfume she created was the tangible form of her memories of the farm, an idealized version of her childhood, or perhaps even a hymn of praise and thanks for what we once had. The times we’d immersed ourselves in the flowers on the bank by the barn where the walnut wine was made, and watched, or seemed to watch, the purple blooms turning to the hours of the day.
When I smelled that perfume, I was drawn back helplessly into a sunlit world of Maman’s flaky almond biscuits with their hint of bitter apricot kernel, earth like cocoa powder clinging to our bare legs, light, warm winds sifting sugared scents from the kitchen where the orange mirabelles were being bottled; and on, far beyond the aromatic, to the distant sound of the goat bells, and the whispering of the trees, the butterflies on meadow flowers and the scrubby spikiness of the land underfoot as we chased them, the taste of dried cherries sucked from their pits and of the honeyed nut wine; the soft, guttered candles waiting on the table in the courtyard where we dined at night, cool at last, a floury embrace before bedtime: all the fragrances in one, of the four months of the year when we all lived outside in the immense wide-open valley, a season of warmth and enchantment, safe from all horrors, or so we thought.