31

Every time I go to Ottawa to see my parents, I check the level of the two perfume bottles on the glass shelf under the bathroom mirror. They never seem to go down much: in one year, my mother has used up about ten millilitres of Maharanih, an orange and amber scent by Parfums de Nicolaï I gave her after I found out she used her Jean Patou Sublime as a room spray. It seemed sacrilegeous to blast those precious drops into the air as a cover-up for more offensive effluvia. But though my mother admits she sneaks a spritz on her bra or on a Kleenex tucked under her pillow, room spray is her only official excuse for enjoying fragrance.

I’ve given her perfumes now and then, hoping the paternal ban would be lifted eventually. The limited edition Baccarat crystal bottle of Trésor I received from Lancôme back when I was a journalist was a miscalculation though. It is described as a ‘hug-me’ perfume – perfect for a mom – but my mother finds it too cloying. Trésor is now displayed next to her collection of Swarovski crystal animals. The plainer bottle of Eau d’Arpège, which seemed fitting when I picked it up at the duty-free shop because the scent had been composed for Jeanne Lanvin as a gift to her beloved daughter, ended up in the purgatory of the guestroom closet, alongside Bal à Versailles, Max Factor Green Apple and the Chloé I bought on my first trip to Paris.

After I’ve taken stock of these, I sit on the bed and stare at the flotsam of my pre-Paris life: my books, from teething to grad school; the stern-faced Spanish doll in crisp red taffeta flounces; the teddy bear we once drove one hundred miles to retrieve from a motel where we’d forgotten it, worn noseless and armless by a decade of little-girl love; pictures of my beaming face at every age. ‘What will you do with all this when we’re gone?’ my mother keeps asking me, turning my stays into an anticipated mourning period as I survey each object I can’t bear to let go.

I haven’t been here twenty-four hours and, though I love my parents deeply, I’m already going stir-crazy. So I pull on my heavy boots, wind a scarf around my neck, slip on my fur coat and head out into the winter, trading one stifling atmosphere for another – at –10°C, breathing becomes slightly harder. There is nowhere to walk to that isn’t a neon-lit box selling the same things you can buy anywhere in North America, so I pace up and down the driveway and scare off a few squirrels, black velvet ribbons undulating from the whiteness to the grey, naked tree trunks. I take my small decant of Avignon out of my pocket, spray some on my coat and bury my nose in my collar. When my father quit smoking, he complained that my clothes carried the stench of cigarettes over from Paris cafés. Rather than laundering the contents of my suitcase before each trip to Canada, I decided to fight smoke with smoke, hoping that the incense wouldn’t register as perfume to my father’s nose. Now incense has become the signifier of my Christmas holidays, not because of its religious connotations – I must have gone to Midnight Mass three times in my entire life – but because its mineral, dry, burnt quality is the answer to the blinding scentless nothingness of snow …

I’ve also brought along a decant of Annick Menardo’s Patchouli 24. With its daisy chain of smoky, burnt, medicinal and leathery smells softened by the old-book sweetness of vanilla, Patchouli 24 epitomizes Menardo’s style at its most radical. She composed it for a man who didn’t wear perfume and asked her for something that didn’t smell of it. She figured he could always spritz his father’s old leather flight jacket with it. She had only herself and one man to please: fortunately for perfume lovers, it also pleased the New York-based Le Labo and no brand could have been more suited to it. In Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, Luca Turin compares it to the smell of a storage room in the Biology Department at Moscow State University. I concur: it reminds me of my father’s lab. I’d actually told this to Menardo when we’d spoken on the phone. She herself studied chemistry, biochemistry and medicine before perfumery and, when she learned my father was a pharmacologist, she surmised that he had used cresol (whose tarry, burnt, medicinal facets can be found in single malt whisky and smoked tea) for liquid chromatography, a laboratory technique designed to separate mixtures in order to analyse them.

As we’re sipping the Laphroaig I brought home for Christmas, I tell my father that the smell of his lab may have inspired some of my quirkier olfactory tastes; the whiff of the stables I got when coming to visit him conjures pleasant memories when I find it in a perfume. At this, he blurts out:

‘Parfums Ibérie, trois nuits à l’écurie!’

‘Ibérie perfumes, three nights in the stable.’ Excuse me? My dad has just turned eighty, but he’s nowhere near gaga: in fact, he’s still working.

The memory just popped up for the first time in decades when I associated fragrance with horses. He explains that, when he was ten years old, he sent in for perfume minis that were advertised in a magazine in order to resell them. His commercial endeavour failed miserably, he says, and what’s more, the cleaning lady kept crowing an annoying little ditty about ‘Ibérie’ perfumes smelling like the stables.

My Google queries yield no perfume or perfume house called ‘Ibérie’ or ‘Iberia’, but I do find a French house, Ybry, that developed its activities in North America in the 30s. I wonder what the horsy one smelled like. Narcissus? Leather? Was its smell what put my daddy off perfumes? Or was it the cleaning lady’s jeers? It can’t be the trauma of his failure as a door-to-door salesman: he put himself through his first year in college selling Fuller brushes …

I’d have never imagined that my father had made an early foray into fragrance before becoming perfume-averse. Now I’m doing it the other way round, lifting the curse of Ybry by dreaming of an Iberian perfume. I’ve been meaning to show Duende to my parents, but although I’ve often spoken about it, they don’t seem to be curious. It’s only once my suitcase is packed for my return trip that I ask my mother whether she wants to smell it.

‘Oh. It’s strong’ is all she’ll volunteer, with a tentative smile.

An hour later, when I join her in the kitchen, I hold out my wrist again. She agrees it’s softer now. She likes it better.

As for my father, I’ve been wondering whether perfume still bothers him as much as it used to: he’s never made a comment on the fragrances that must permeate my clothes even when I don’t apply any. I ask him whether he does smell them.

‘Yes, in fact, I do,’ he answers with a sly little smile.

Somehow I feel that if he hasn’t made a comment, it’s for the same reason he never uttered a word against my husband until I announced my intention of divorcing him: out of respect for my choices. Still, I press on. Does he want to smell Duende? My mother looks as though she’s about to catch my wrist when I raise it to my father’s nose. Her expectant, amused, slightly defiant gaze flits from my face to his.

‘It smells … like perfume,’ he finally says with a baffled chuckle.

‘But why perfume?’ my mother asks me. ‘I don’t understand. You’ve always liked it, but there were many other things you liked you could have chosen to write about.’

Why indeed?

I could answer that each tiny puff of beauty is my stand against the ever-more-standardized world of shopping malls and big-box stores where I’ve chosen not to live; the essences of flowers, spices and woods grown in warmer climes a protest against the four-month-long winters of my youth. I could say that I drench myself in sweet scents for all the times my mom dabbed on a drop of Bal à Versailles in secret or sneaked a spritz of Sublime on a Kleenex, ever the daughter rebelling against the Law of the Father. I could say that perfume is the only thing that allows me to breathe when the cold air catches in my throat and I’m smothered in childhood memories; that perfume is the language of my chosen country; that in many ways it is my chosen country, invisible and borderless: that’s why I need to learn its language.

I don’t. Instead, I slip my phial of Duende 28 into the regulation Ziploc bag next to my Ventolin, lipstick and mascara before we head for the airport. If it comes to it at the security checkpoint, I’ll dump the Ventolin.