The Perfume Lover

Duende. That’s what Bertrand and I have christened our perfume-in-progress, though it’ll never be called that if it ever comes out: the name has already been taken by the Spanish designer Jesus del Pozo (and to add insult to injury, for an aquatic fragrance).

To me, the word epitomizes the heart-rending spell of Seville. I taught it to Bertrand the day I gave him the book where I learned about it, the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca’s Theory and Play of the Duende. But of duende itself, I’m sure he already knew. For all his boyish sweetness and straightforwardness, there’s a dark streak running through his character, a brooding intensity always threatening to boil over as it did during our last session … El duende springs from that darkness.

In most of the Spanish-speaking world, the duende is a goblin. But in Andalusia, the word is used to speak of Flamenco singers, guitarists or dancers, or of bullfighters whose art moves you to tears. You could translate it as ‘soul’ or ‘the blues’; in a 1999 lecture on the love song, the Australian musician Nick Cave calls it ‘the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art’. Duende is the tragic awareness of death in life and, when artists are possessed by it, their work resonates in ways mere skill or artistry can never achieve. Bertrand’s got that, and he manages to express it. It’s not by chance incense is one of his favourite materials: his scents are often shot with spirituality or with intimations of death – those earthy, rooty, brackish notes he keeps gravitating to … He’s got soul.

* * *

While our sessions are suspended first by Bertrand’s trip then by his intense work schedule, I return time and again to my samples of Duende 3, 4 and 5. The third, the one we’ve deemed most promising, is whispering on my wrist in the tentative tones of a thing unborn. It is strange to encounter perfume in this state, terse, barely adorned, unsure of how to introduce itself – in Lorca’s words, ‘not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air’. The narcotic, honeyed richness of the orange blossom pulled into the mystic, mineral night of the incense; the rusty-metallic flash of blood sullying soft skin.

‘All that has dark sounds has duende,’ writes Lorca, as he explains that an artist can be inspired either by the angel or the muse: ‘the angel brings light, the muse form.’ But the duende is more than just a source of inspiration: it is a demon the artist struggles with, ‘not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive’.

Should a perfumer surrender to his duende? Probably not. Perfume is meant to charm like the muse or dazzle like the angel, not ‘burn the blood like powdered glass’. But perfume can have duende since, like music, dance and spoken poetry, ‘the living flesh is needed to interpret [it]’ with ‘forms that are born and die, perpetually’. Is perfume not a perpetually moving space of beauty borne by living flesh?

Duende is the blade that tears beauty away from you even as you experience it most fully; it is the becoming-a-memory embedded in each moment of grace; a thing that is real and yet an ungraspable wisp, just as perfume conjures both the presence and absence of a loved one, a moment of the past, a persona worn and shed. An object that consumes itself as you experience it, whose very enjoyment signifies its annihilation, except as an ever-shifting imprint on the soul …

* * *

So now is the time to reach into that hallway closet and to pull out what’s slept there for two decades. A Venetian notebook with a pattern of cream and green fern leaves. And a black glass bottle with a frieze of nymphs.

The first was given to me by a French writer. I’d go up to his flat on Sunday afternoons, hurriedly removing my knickers in the lift because the bedroom always came before the whisky and the talk and the laughs in his study. One day, handing me the notebook, he’d said: ‘Write everything that happens to you and more will happen,’ as though the very fact of writing would generate more adventures, and it had, and it has.

The second, I found within days of arriving in Paris, where I had come to live at last. Officially, it was only while I did my PhD on 18th-century French literature. But I knew that Paris would be my home; that I would define myself by my destination rather than my origins. I’d stumbled on this new perfume in a knick-knack shop called Divine near Saint-Sulpice, one of the very few baroque churches in Paris, where both the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire were christened. It became the scent of anywhere-but-Montreal, the scent of leaving home, the scent I wore when I walked into beauty …

As I open the notebook I filled out for two years and have never touched since, I breathe in the perfume I wore for much longer than that before rejecting it utterly, to the point where – shades of my father – smelling it made me queasy, though I’d kept the bottle for memory’s sake. First a squirt on a blotter. Then a tiny spritz on my wrist. And then, more generously, on my breastbone. Dusky, powdery rich tobacco-hued vanilla, run through with austere, rooty vetiver … No flashback: this was part of me for too long, throughout too many adventures, to be associated with a particular period, mood or event. What I get is … comfort. Like meeting an old friend and resuming a conversation interrupted years before. I’m surprised to catch myself thinking I could wear this again. But somehow, not surprised at all to find out that on the very first page of the notebook given to me by my lover-mentor, one of the very first words I wrote was this one: Habanita.

‘Habanita. Hasn’t my life, since I’ve encountered it, been wholly turned towards this perfume? I feel as though I’d spent my life going towards it, in the opposite movement of those women who distance themselves gradually from the perfume they’ve chosen for themselves, or of those who hang on to theirs because they’re afraid of change.

Habanita. Little by little, I have accomplished this perfume.

I smoke Havana cigars now. I wear carnations in my hair. I wrap myself in dancing silk dresses that cling to my breasts and my hips. Since Andalusia, I want to feel myself thus, heavy, hot and a little damp in a dress that caresses my body.

Habanita: Spain. Seville. The place where I found my perfume. But also incense and orange blossom.’

I wrote this over twenty years ago after coming back from my second trip to Seville. It was all Immanuel Kant’s fault, really. I’d read his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement in one sitting for a philosophy seminar and been struck down with such a violent fever I became delirious – my writer-lover said that was what happened when women like me were exposed to German philosophy. My fever-dreams were so haunted by images of Seville that as soon as I managed to crawl out of bed I booked a trip there for my Easter holiday: the Catholic-pagan rites of Holy Week were the only possible antidote to the philosopher whose habits were so regular, the legend goes, that you could set clocks by his daily walks.

I’d first gone to Seville the preceding autumn with my parents, just before settling in Paris. Our car had broken down right in front of the hotel so my first day there had been spent in a garage, acting as my father’s interpreter with my high-school Spanish, watching a young mechanic, slender wrists emerging from the sleeves of his green overalls, lazily tugging at charred, greasy things under the hood. Spying the way he stared at me from under his fringe, as frankly and guilelessly as a dog. What did he see? He couldn’t possibly read all the signs I’d accumulated on my body, the signs behind which I retreated, the signs that said ‘intellectual’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘scornful of the clichés of femininity’. By then I’d ditched my New Wave garb to go post-apocalyptic Japanese – asymmetrical haircut, body drowned in geometric sack-dresses, feet shod in flat clunky shoes. But this boy was looking at me as though I were a woman. No signs, no words. Just a woman.

First I cringed. Then I craved it. And somehow, the disconcerting pleasure of being just-a-woman rather than a Parisian intellectual, a creature capable of decoding Jacques Derrida before lunch and still have appetite left over for a nibble of Jacques Lacan, carried over into my new Parisian life after my Spanish holiday. As I flitted from seminar to seminar, I started studying another, parallel curriculum. I found Habanita. And I followed its sensuous wafts all the way back to Seville.

So I returned the following spring to see the celebrations of Holy Week with my writer-lover’s cream and green notebook tucked into my bag, the phone number of a friend of a friend, the address of the elderly aristocrat who was renting me a room and a bag full of the vintage frocks that had been steadily gaining on deconstructed Japanese slipcovers in my closet at the Cité Universitaire. My lone phone number yielded a whole tribe of opera-loving, aristocratic aficionados. I was young, I was alone, I knew all the operas they talked about, from Don Giovanni to Carmen, and I could sing a few arias in smoky bars: they adopted me as their new mascot, a nubile stranger dropped into their midst to churn up a little erotic excitement. Alberto suggested I paint a beauty mark under my left eye; Jacobo planted carnations in my hair; Perico gave me my first Havana cigar to light up when the second bull came out and smoke until the sixth was dead; Pepa taught me to handle a fan, sitting on the grass under the Puente de Triana.

And Román picked me up as I was crossing it, a tall slender-hipped young man in a black suit with a green polka-dotted handkerchief tied around his neck, gypsy-style. Román who gave me the most beautiful night of Holy Week, the incense and orange blossom and beeswax candles … At the time, my elderly hostess had warned me he might be a pimp, but does a pimp tell you ‘I spoke to you because you had a delicious little 18th-century air about you’?

* * *

Paris had taught me about perfume. But it was in Seville that I learned about scent in an intimate, carnal way, experiencing with my full body rather than from bottles. The whole city was possessed by smells, its air thick and churning with them. The mere act of breathing was a constant intoxication.

Orange blossom exploding into a scented atomic mushroom in every street and square. The lilies that spilled from the altars of the churches where I sought out coolness after wandering in the streets; the pungent, sweet incense soaked up by the golden, swirling baroque altars, blending with the beeswax of the pews and candles. The cold, musty gusts exhaled by old palaces; the moist, vegetal smells seeping through the grilled gates of fountain-cooled patios … Jasmine nebulae spilling over from walled gardens, so narcotic they made my knees buckle, so beautiful they drew tears. In the evening, the gypsies would go from bar to bar, baskets filled with bunches of jasmine blossoms stuck on a pin, and the men would buy them to wear on their lapel, and you’d tuck one in your curls, and the next morning even your pillow would be fragrant. And the tall, thick-stemmed sprig of trumpet-like blossoms that Teresa brought to me one day, the one she called nardo, as heady as jasmine but with a sharper, cooler smell so strong it wafted out from my tiny hotel room onto the roof patio where the gypsy chambermaid came to hang the wash and drew her to my window: my first-ever encounter with tuberose …

The food too was fragrant. The bitter leathery saffron of paellas, the sweet fatty batter for fish, the honeyed smoky ham made from pigs fed on acorns, the pungent mutton broth spiked with fresh mint, the sticky cakes soaked in orange blossom water and sprinkled with cinnamon inherited from the Arab tradition. And the manzanilla wine that came from Sanlucar de Barrameda where the Guadalquivir threw itself into the Atlantic ocean, which carried in each drop the memory of the saline winds blowing from the marshes on the other bank … And the very streets, heated asphalt rubbed slick with the drippings of thousands of beeswax candles which could never entirely be blasted off by the municipal workers with their hoses, melting in the heat to make the streets slippery and honeyed. The stale-water stench rising from the arm of the Guadalquivir which ran through Seville – at the time, it was cut off to stem floods, and it festered in the heat. And the hay-spiked dung in the trail of the horse-drawn carriages that stood waiting for tourists around the cathedral, warm and homely. And the carnations gypsy fortune-tellers would hold out to you before grabbing your hand to predict love with a dark-eyed stranger. How could that prediction not come true? The city was teeming with dark-eyed men and I hadn’t spent three days there before one of them found his way to me …

It was in Seville, as I wandered the streets from church to café, that I started weaving the threads that bound me to Habanita.

* * *

Habanita: Little Havana. Havana: cigars. Cigars: Carmen the cigarera. The very archetype of the fiery Spanish woman, except that she isn’t Spanish at all since she was invented by a Frenchman, the writer Prosper Mérimée, and turned into a myth by another, the composer Georges Bizet. Sevillian girls called Maria del Carmen often added, when introducing themselves to foreigners: ‘But I am Carmen, la de España, she of Spain, not la de Bizet.’ Fake Andalusian that I was with my cigar, fan and carnations, I was frequently photographed by tourists, perhaps the most authentic Carmen in town. I knew how to sing the ‘Habanera’ and the ‘Seguidilla’ – I’d never known until then I had a good singing voice, but I did, and I used it. And I was nicknamed Carmen, la del Canada.

And then there were the 20s, the decade I was most drawn to, not least because Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was set in the 20s. I identified with his Lady Brett Ashley, the expatriate, bob-haired, hard-drinking femme fatale who’d gone off with a bullfighter in Spain. And because the man who gave me my nickname ‘Carmen, la del Canada’ was an old bullfighter who’d actually been a friend of Don Ernesto’s: in fact, the very son of the bullfighter depicted in The Sun Also Rises. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Seville was dotted with buildings from the 20s, left over from the 1929 Ibero-American fair. That junction between the Old and the New World was one I was living in the flesh. So choosing a perfume from the 20s, one that was named after a former Spanish colony, couldn’t be a coincidence either.

Habanita was launched in 1921 by Molinard, first as a fragrance added to cigarettes (Carmen again) – women had just taken up smoking but they didn’t want to reek of stale smoke – and that too, that sign of feminine emancipation, became part of my story as I dived alone into an unknown city. I would’ve told myself any story to turn my attraction for Seville, Carmen and the années folles – the ‘wild years’, as the French call the Jazz Age – into some sort of destiny. I blamed Habanita. ‘The most tenacious perfume in the world’, as it was advertised in 1924, had wound its way into my blood and transsubstantiated my very flesh. Habanita was five years of my life, years that found me drawn time and again to Seville, where I would spend months on end, waiting for adventures to happen – and often they did.

* * *

As I breathe it in from my wrist, this scent I had pushed back to the furthest recesses of my memory just as I had tucked the bottle in my darkest closet, I suddenly realize what made it possible for me to re-open that door; to love a type of scent I’d rejected along with Habanita when I had to give up being Habanita. That small atomizer has been sitting on my dresser all along. It was the first scent Bertrand and I discussed at length, the one he used to explain to me how he worked. The first vanilla I could wear after two decades of vanilla avoidance conjured my long-lost Habanita through its notes and original name (it has since been renamed Vanille Absolument). Who knows whether it wasn’t that subconscious connection that inspired me to tell Bertrand about Seville? Though I’m not quite sure I believe in fate, I do believe that if you’re alert to signs, able to connect them and willing to follow their call, strange patterns emerge that do look a lot like fate. It’s called a story. And in this story, I’m letting my nose lead me: in French, flair means both ‘sense of smell’ and ‘intuition’.

Is the ghost of Habanita, with its orange blossom, amber, vanilla and musk, the reason why I am still so drawn to the dark, velvety Duende N°5? Though we ultimately rejected it because the lily veers too far off my story, I keep going back to it. But despite their common notes and a similar sensuousness in their textures, Habanita and Duende N°5 clearly come from different universes: the latter doesn’t have a retro molecule in its body whereas the former is powdery and spilling out of its décolletage as only perfumes composed before the 60s could be.

Duende N°5 is only a sketch, of course, which explains in part why it feels so much more modern. Yet as the orange blossom top note gives way, it also feels much more ancient than Habanita. Perfumes in the 20s did look back to the faraway origins of the art, to the balsams and resins of Oriental perfumery, as though the sleek lines of the flapper’s shift dresses, their cropped bobs and naked limbs, called for more elaborate ornamentation to compensate – hence the stylized embroideries, heavy makeup and heady, come-hither fragrances of the period. But they didn’t take that final step into the most archaic of all scents … Incense.