30

‘You should tighten your belt. You’re flashing plumber’s cleavage.’

Bertrand’s iPhone is booming its ‘Sonar’ ringtone from someplace in the lab and he’s been frantically trying to locate it, digging into his pockets, shifting sheaves of paper. He’s just leaned down to rummage through his satchel.

‘Excuse me?’

He straightens up, phone in hand. It’s stopped booming.

‘You know … the bit plumbers bare when they’ve got their head under the sink?’

I point to the small of my back. He grins sheepishly and hoists up his jeans.

‘Not a pretty sight, is it?’

Actually, wardrobe malfunction apart, Bertrand’s quite spiffy today in a hip-geek way. He’s swapped his rimless rectangular glasses for big cherry-red Buddy Holly frames, topped off with a narrow-brimmed grey tweed trilby. His long-sleeved tee-shirt is adorned with the face of a Papuan in primary-coloured tribal paint, who stares out from where nipples should be so that I never quite know who, of Bertrand or the Papuan, to look in the eye – it’s the male version of Wonderbra’s ‘my eyes are up here.’

The iPhone bloops to indicate he’s got a message. After listening to it, Bertrand pours out a string of expletives. I’ve always suspected he had a temper … While he launches into a series of calls to settle what seems to be a delivery problem, I go on serenely sniffing my wrist. This is our last session before Christmas and, this time, he hasn’t presented me with a new version of Duende. We’ve simply been debriefing mod 28. I’m not sure it’s because I complained he never waited for my input before tweaking: he’s just been too busy to tackle number 29, I suspect. When I walked in half an hour ago, he was already grumbling ‘merde’ as he hurriedly weighed a formula that a client suddenly wanted to get before 6 p.m.

Mercifully, he’s not taking his stress out on me. As soon as he’s settled his problem, he apologizes for the interruption and we resume our conversation in tones that feel much mellower than they’ve ever been. We’ve got good reason to feel mellow: we’re both pretty happy with the direction Duende is taking, though Bertrand is wondering whether the green top notes aren’t a little too cologne-like. I start prattling on about the fact that Latinos love colognes. When I stayed with friends in Spain I used to see giant bottles of Agua de this or that sitting in the bathroom for the whole family to splash themselves with. The effect can work itself into a Spanish story, I add.

‘Still, I’ll try to mask it a bit, make it more sophisticated. But it’s important to keep the cologne effect, because at L’Artisan Parfumeur, they quite liked it.’

‘Hold on … Why should you take into account what they like?’

Bertrand puts on his poker face.

‘Well, I’ve been telling them about our project.’

‘And?’

‘They’re interested.’

Shouldn’t Bertrand be helping me off the floor at this point? Have I still got a pulse? Granted, I’m a sophisticated Parisian and squealing is beyond my moral reach, unless I’m in the general vicinity of any spider whose body is bigger than a raisin. Still, I’m taking this much too calmly. Is it because I knew all along this was bound to happen?

Duende and L’Artisan Parfumeur feel like a perfect fit. They’ve done a lot of travel-based scents, a few of which are Bertrand’s. Though he’s been taking on other clients, he’s still their star perfumer, so they were the logical people to turn to.

But we haven’t got a name yet! The earlier we find something that hasn’t been copyrighted all over the planet, the better. I’ve known from the start Duende wouldn’t be available. Before I gave Bertrand the book by Federico García Lorca, he’d called the project ‘Séville Semaine Sainte’. Would that stick? Bertrand shakes his head. Too religious. We can play neither on ‘Fleur d’oranger’ as L’Artisan Parfumeur already has one, nor on ‘Orange blossom’, which exists in its sister brand Penhaligon’s. ‘Azahar’, the Spanish word, has already been taken by the Spanish designer Adolfo Dominguez, though Bertrand quite likes the word ‘Azar’ which springs from the same root and means ‘chance’. Maybe we could play on that. I’m groping round for words related to Holy Week …

‘How about madrugada?’

‘I love it! Love it!’ Bertrand gushes.

‘What does it make you think of when you hear it?’

‘I was going to say it sounds very Spanish, but…’

‘… that’s comment degree zero!’

We burst out laughing.

‘OK, so what is it, a dance?’

I explain that, in Spanish, it can either mean ‘the wee hours’ or ‘dawn’. Pronounced with the lazy Sevillan accent, dragging the last two vowels together, la madrugá is also the period between midnight and noon on Good Friday – the very night I spent in Román’s arms – when the exhausted crowds who’ve been partying all night in the wake of the religious processions blend in with the soap-scrubbed, cologne-splashed families rising for Mass.

As Bertrand writes an email to L’Artisan Parfumeur’s main office to ask them to check up on the availability of the name, I start stuffing my notebook, phials and recorder into my handbag. When we’d set our appointment, he’d said he needed to be out by five thirty, and it’s past six already. I’m just waiting for him to click on ‘send’ to take my leave.

But as soon as he does, he starts telling me about the way he’ll tweak Duende. He wants to make it even more honeyed and nectar-sweet; he’s been thinking about adding thyme instead of the lavender he used in the first two trials: it would bridge the cologne and incense effects. The latter he can amp up, but the material he’ll be using won’t express itself in the top notes. Fine, I can live with the incense note coming in later. After all, that’s what happened in the story: waiting under the orange tree until the procession got nearer …

As we sniff my wrist to follow the development of N°28, we agree the base notes are too static and un-contrasted. We’ll work in more darkness, Bertrand says, but not the abrupt, mineral darkness we started out with in Duende 1 and 2. He wants to add tobacco to warm up the incense and play off the animalic waxy notes.

‘We need to make it more mysterious … We’re not in the chapel yet, but we’re getting close!’

I make a move for my coat. He grabs his too, puts on his little grey hat and says:

‘So … do you have time for a drink?’

I’m not due at my dinner party for another two hours. It turns out Bertrand can’t go home before picking up a parcel near Bastille, and it won’t be ready for a couple of hours either. So we head out into the night, try the nearby cocktail bar – no tables – and end up in an empty café on the rue de Rivoli in front of two steaming pots of frothy milk to pour into our hot chocolates. Neither of us is the ‘have you seen a good movie lately’ type but, as it happens, last night I saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, which shows the master at work practically in real time. At each step, you want to say, ‘Stop, this is it,’ and then he paints it over, twists it and warps it until he chucks it all and says: ‘Now that I know what I want, I’m starting all over again.’ That feeling of seeing a piece of work morphing over and over again is what I’m getting from Duende.

‘I don’t know if Picasso knew exactly what he wanted,’ Bertrand says, ‘but I know that even if a piece seems to have integrity, if it isn’t exactly what you want, you refuse it. You know exactly what you don’t want, even when you don’t know exactly what you want or where you’re going.’

That’s what’s been happening with Duende, he explains. He’s discovering it as he goes along, finding out what he can exploit from its current state, what will yield a new form. He’ll pull on that form until it takes on a perfect volume. Sometimes he can achieve an extraordinary volume after one or two mods because the project’s been well conceptualized beforehand, usually when the structure is simple and straightforward. Sometimes he has to start over countless times before finding exactly what it was he was looking for.

As Bertrand falls back on the metaphor of the labyrinth, I tell myself our conversations also follow labyrinthine paths: we often seem to pass by the same points but never quite at the same level. Of course, that must be the pattern of most conversations between people who meet regularly and are developing the kind of culture-à-deux that sometimes becomes the foundation of friendship …

So although we’ve been through this before, I bring the issue up again: isn’t he taking on too many projects? He answers that, as a freelancer, he can’t afford to turn down contracts. I shake my head. Someday, he’ll get to the point where he’ll be able to say no; where clients will say, ‘We’re hoping Duchaufour will make our new perfume, he hasn’t agreed to yet but…’ Bertrand says ‘I hope so,’ but he doesn’t look convinced. I raise another issue: his style is so distinctive he can’t help imposing it. What then of the brand identity of the various houses he works for? Not his problem, he answers. Clients ask for a product, he gives them the best he can, end of story. I shake my head again. I’m not buying his ‘I’m just a guy making a living’ line. Bertrand’s one of the few perfumers I know who’s got enough vision to art-direct himself. Even if he no longer wants to do imbitable stuff – and I’m not quite convinced he doesn’t – he cares enough about the art not to be content churning out products, no matter how good they are. At that, he looks up:

‘OK, right, so I’ve done a few juices that smell good while managing to be a bit original. But it’s still classic perfumery. I want to move on to something completely different. Work on another language. Something more modern.’

I suddenly realize that, for the past year, I’ve been somehow waiting for him to say that. I was sure he would, sooner or later. As we pay up and head for the metro, he starts telling me about his new ideas. He goes on talking as we wait on the platform and shove our way onto the train. It’s the rush hour three days before Christmas and we’re jammed against each other in the crowd.

‘You sure smell good!’

‘Are you surprised?’

We’re still talking as we are spat out by the crowd onto the platform of the Bastille station and wind our way through the piss-reeking corridors to the nearest exit. On the place de la Bastille, we move aside to avoid the hordes of last-minute shoppers, but it’s too cold to stand and talk so the talk dies down. We exchange pecks on the cheeks and a hug and wish each other a happy holiday, and then he’s zipping off to his appointment and I’m on my way to my dinner party, walking towards the place de la République along the boulevard Beaumarchais with its Harley Davidson dealership, camera and art supplies stores, weaving round icy puddles in my Italian kid-glove boots, fur coat flouncing about my legs. Next year’s the year Duende may come true: I couldn’t have found a more exciting gift under the tree.

Merry Christmas, Mr D.