Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (6 page)

Baldini stood at the window, an old man, and gazed malevolently at the sun angled above the river. Barges emerged beneath him and slid slowly to the west, towards the Pont-Neuf and the quay below the galleries of the Louvre. No one poled barges against the current here, for that they used the channel on the other side of the island. Here everything flowed away from you—the empty and the heavily laden ships, the rowboats, and the flat-bottomed punts of the fishermen, the dirty brown and the golden-curled water—everything flowed away, slowly, broadly and inevitably. And if Baldini looked directly below him, straight down the wall, it seemed to him as if the flowing water were sucking the foundations of the bridge with it, and he grew dizzy.

He had made a mistake buying a house on the bridge, and a second when he selected one on the western side. Because constantly before his eyes now was a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accumulated over many decades were flowing away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current. Sometimes when he had business on the left bank, in the quarter of the Sorbonne or around Saint-Sulpice, he would not walk across the island and the Pont Saint-Michel, but would take the longer way across the Pont-Neuf, for it was a bridge without buildings. And then he would stand at the eastern parapet and gaze up the river, just for once to see everything flowing towards him; and for a few moments he basked in the notion that his life had been turned around, that his business was prospering, his family thriving, that women threw themselves at him, that his own life, instead of dwindling away, was growing and growing.

But then, if he lifted his gaze the least bit, he could see his own house, tall and spindly and fragile, several hundred yards away on the Pont au Change, and he saw the window of his study on the second floor and saw himself standing there at the window, saw himself looking out at the river and watching the water flow away, just as now. And then the beautiful dream would vanish, and Baldini would turn away from where he had stood on the Pont-Neuf, more despondent than before—as despondent as he was now, turning away from the window and taking his seat at his desk.

Before him stood the flacon with Pélissier’s perfume. Glistening golden brown in the sunlight, the liquid was clear, not clouded in the least. It looked totally innocent, like a light tea—and yet contained, in addition to four-fifths alcohol, one-fifth of a mysterious mixture that could set a whole city trembling with excitement. The mixture, moreover, might consist of three or thirty different ingredients, prepared from among countless possibilities in very precise proportions to one another. It was the soul of the perfume—if one could speak of a perfume made by this ice-cold profiteer Pélissier as having a soul—and the task now was to discover its composition.

Baldini blew his nose carefully and pulled down the blind at the window, since direct sunlight was harmful to every artificial scent or refined concentration of odours. He pulled a fresh white lace handkerchief out of a desk drawer and unfolded it. Then, holding his head far back and pinching his nostrils together, he opened the flacon with a gentle turn of the stopper. He did not want, for God’s sake, to get a premature olfactory sensation directly from the bottle. Perfume must be smelled in its efflorescent, gaseous state, never as a concentrate. He sprinkled a few drops on to the handkerchief, waved it in the air to drive off the alcohol, and then held it to his nose. In three short, jerky tugs, he snatched up the scent as if it were a powder, immediately blew it out again, fanned himself, took another sniff in waltz time, and finally drew one long, deep breath, which he then exhaled slowly with several pauses, as if letting it slide down a long, gently sloping staircase. He tossed the handkerchief on to his desk and fell back into his armchair.

The perfume was disgustingly good. That miserable Pélissier was unfortunately a virtuoso. A master, to heaven’s shame, even if he had never learned one thing a thousand times over! Baldini wished he had created it himself, this ‘Amor and Psyche’. There was nothing common about it. An absolute classic—full and harmonious. And for all that, fascinatingly new. It was fresh, but not frenetic. It was floral, without being unctuous. It possessed depth, a splendid, abiding, voluptuous, rich brown depth—and yet was not in the least excessive or bombastic.

Baldini stood up almost in reverence and held the handkerchief under his nose once again. ‘Wonderful, wonderful…’ he murmured, sniffing greedily. ‘It has a cheerful character, it’s charming, it’s like a melody, puts you in a good mood at once… What nonsense, a good mood!’ And he flung the handkerchief back on to his desk in anger, turned away, and walked to the farthest corner of the room, as if ashamed of his enthusiasm.

Ridiculous! Letting himself be swept up in such eulogies—‘like a melody, cheerful, wonderful, good mood’. How idiotic. Childishly idiotic. A moment’s impression. An old weakness. A matter of temperament. Most likely his Italian blood. Judge not as long as you’re smelling! That is rule number one, Baldini, you muttonhead! Smell when you’re smelling and judge after you have smelled! ‘Amor and Psyche’ is not half bad as a perfume. A thoroughly successful product. A cleverly managed bit of concocting. If not to say conjuring. And you could expect nothing but conjuring from a man like Pélissier. Of course a fellow like Pélissier would not manufacture some hackneyed perfume. The scoundrel conjured with complete mastery of his art, confusing your sense of smell with its perfect harmony. In the classical arts of scent, the man was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In short, he was a monster with talent. And what was worse, a perverter of the true faith.

But you, Baldini, are not going to be fooled. You were surprised for a moment by your first impression of this concoction. But do you know how it will smell an hour from now when its volatile ingredients have fled and the central structure emerges? Or how it will smell this evening when all that is still perceptible are the heavy, dark components that now lie in odorous twilight beneath a veil of flowers? Wait and see, Baldini!

The second rule is: perfume lives in time; it has its youth, its maturity and its old age. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life can it be called successful. How often have we not discovered that a mixture that smelled delightfully fresh when first tested, after a brief interval was more like rotten fruit, and finally reeked of nothing but the pure civet we had used too much of. Utmost caution with the civet! One drop too much brings catastrophe. An old source of error. Who knows—perhaps Pélissier got carried away with the civet. Perhaps by this evening all that’s left of his ambitious ‘Amor and Psyche’ will be just a whiff of cat’s piss. We shall see.

We shall smell it. Just as a sharp axe can split a log into tiny splinters, our nose will fragment every detail of this perfume. And then it will be only too apparent that this ostensibly magical scent was created by the most ordinary, familiar methods. We, Baldini, perfumer, shall catch Pélissier, the vinegar man, at his tricks. We shall rip the mask from his ugly face and show the innovator just what the old craft is capable of. We’ll scrupulously imitate his mixture, his fashionable perfume. It will be born anew in our hands, so perfectly copied that the humbug himself won’t be able to tell it from his own. No! That’s not enough! We shall improve it! We’ll show up his mistakes and rinse them away, and then rub his nose in it. You’re a bungler, Pélissier! An old stinker is what you are! An upstart in the craft of perfumery, and nothing more.

And now to work, Baldini! Sharpen your nose and smell without sentimentality! Dissect the scent by the rules of the art! You must have the formula by this evening!

And he made a dive for his desk, grabbing paper, ink and a fresh handkerchief, laid it all out properly, and began his analysis. The procedure was this: to dip the handkerchief in perfume, pass it rapidly under his nose, and extract from the fleeting cloud of scent one or another of its ingredients without being significantly distracted by the complex blending of its other parts; then, holding the handkerchief at the end of his outstretched arm, to jot down the name of the ingredient he had discovered, and repeat the process at once, letting the handkerchief flit by his nose, snatching at the next fragment of scent, and so on…

He worked without pause for two hours—with increasingly hectic movements, increasingly slipshod scribblings of his pen on the paper, and increasingly large doses of perfume sprinkled on to his handkerchief and held to his nose.

He could hardly smell anything now, the volatile substances he was inhaling had long since drugged him; he could no longer recognize what he thought had been established beyond doubt at the start of his analysis. He knew that it was pointless to continue smelling. He would never ascertain the ingredients of this newfangled perfume, certainly not today, nor tomorrow either, when his nose would have recovered, God willing. He had never learned fractionary smelling. Dissecting scents, fragmenting a unity, whether well or not-so-well blended, into its simple components, was a wretched, loathsome business. It did not interest him. He did not want to continue.

But his hand automatically kept on making the dainty motion, practised a thousand times over, of dunking the handkerchief, shaking it out, and whisking it rapidly past his face, and with each whisk he automatically snapped up a portion of scent-drenched air, only to let it out again with the proper exhalations and pauses. Until finally his own nose liberated him from the torture, swelling in allergic reaction till it was stopped up as tight as if plugged with wax. He could not smell a thing now, could hardly breathe. It was as if a bad cold had soldered his nose shut; little tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. Thank God in heaven! Now he could quit in good conscience. He had done his duty, to the best of his abilities, according to all the rules of the art, and was, as so often before, defeated.
Ultra posse nemo obligatur
. Closing time. Tomorrow morning he would send off to Pélissier’s for a large bottle of ‘Amor and Psyche’ and use it to scent the Spanish hide for Count Verhamont, as per order. And after that he would take his valise, full of old-fashioned soaps, scent bags, pomades and sachets, and make his rounds among the salons of doddering countesses. And one day the last doddering countess would be dead, and with her his last customer. By then he would himself be doddering and would have to sell his business, to Pélissier or another one of these upstart merchants—perhaps he would get a few thousand livres for it. And he would pack one or two bags and go off to Italy with his old wife, if she were not dead herself by then. And if he survived the trip, he would buy a little house in the country near Messina where things were cheap. And there in bitterest poverty he, Giuseppe Baldini, once the greatest perfumer of Paris, would die—whenever God willed it. And that was well and good.

He stoppered the flacon, laid down his pen, and wiped the drenched handkerchief across his forehead one last time. He could sense the cooling effect of the evaporating alcohol, but nothing else. Then the sun went down.

Baldini stood up. He opened the jalousie and his body was bathed to the knees in the sunset, caught fire like a burnt-out torch glimmering low. He saw the deep red rim of the sun behind the Louvre and the softer fire across the slate roofs of the city. On the river shining like gold below him, the ships had disappeared. And a wind must have come up, for gusts were serrating the surface, and it glittered now here, now there, moving ever closer, as if a giant hand were scattering millions of louis-d’or over the water. For a moment it seemed the direction of the river had changed: it was flowing toward Baldini, a shimmering flood of pure gold.

Baldini’s eyes were moist and sad. He stood there motionless for a long time gazing at the splendid scene. Then, suddenly, he flung both window casements wide and pitched the flacon with Pélissier’s perfume away in a high arc. He saw it splash and rend the glittering carpet of water for an instant.

Fresh air streamed into the room. Baldini gulped for breath and noticed that the swelling in his nose was subsiding. Then he closed the window. At almost the same moment, night fell, very suddenly. The view of a glistening golden city and river turned into a rigid, ashen-grey silhouette. Inside the room, all at once it was dark. Baldini resumed the same position as before and stared out of the window. ‘I shall not send anyone to Pélissier’s in the morning,’ he said, grasping the back of his armchair with both hands. ‘I shall not do it. And I shall not make my tour of the salons either. Instead, I shall go to the notary tomorrow morning and sell my house and my business. That is what I shall do.
E basta
!’

The expression on his face was that of a cheeky young boy, and he suddenly felt very happy. He was once again the old, the young Baldini, as bold and determined as ever to contend with fate—even if contending meant a retreat in this case. And what if it did! There was nothing else to do. These were stupid times, and they left him no choice. God gives good times and bad times, but He does not wish us to bemoan and bewail the bad times, but to prove ourselves men. And He had given His sign. That golden, blood-red mirage of the city had been a warning: act now, Baldini, before it is too late! Your house still stands firm, your storage rooms are still full, you will still be able to get a good price for your slumping business. The decisions are still in your hands. To grow old living modestly in Messina had not been his goal in life, true—but it was more honourable and pleasing to God than to perish in splendour in Paris. Let the Brouets, Calteaus and Pélissiers have their triumph. Giuseppe Baldini was clearing out. But he did it unbent and of his own free will!

He was quite proud of himself now. And his mind was finally at peace. For the first time in years, there was an easing in his back of the subordinate’s cramp that had tensed his neck and given an increasingly obsequious hunch to his shoulders. And he stood up straight without strain, relaxed and free and pleased with himself. His breath passed lightly through his nose. He could clearly smell the scent of ‘Amor and Psyche’ that reigned in the room, but he did not let it affect him any more. Baldini had changed his life and felt wonderful. He would go up to his wife now and inform her of his decision, and then he would make a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame and light a candle thanking God for His gracious prompting and for having endowed him, Giuseppe Baldini, with such unbelievable strength of character.

With almost youthful elan, he plopped his wig on to his bald head, slipped into his blue coat, grabbed the candle-stick from the desk, and left his study. He had just lit the tallow candle in the stairwell to light his way up to his living quarters, when he heard a doorbell ring on the ground floor. It was not the Persian chimes at the shop door, but the shrill ring of the servants’ entrance, a repulsive sound that had always annoyed him. He had often made up his mind to have the thing removed and replaced with a more pleasant bell, but then the cost had always seemed excessive. The thought suddenly occurred to him—and he giggled as it did—that it made no difference now, he would be selling the obtrusive doorbell along with the house. Let his successor deal with the vexation!

The bell rang shrilly again. He cocked his ear for sounds below. Apparently Chénier had already left the shop. And the servant girl seemed not about to answer it either. So Baldini went downstairs to open the door himself.

He pulled back the bolt, swung the heavy door open—and saw nothing. The darkness completely swallowed the light of his candle. Then, very gradually, he began to make out a figure, a child or a half-grown boy carrying something over his arm.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m from Maître Grimal, I’m delivering the goatskins,’ said the figure and stepped closer and held out to him a stack of hides hanging from his cocked arm. By the light of his candles, Baldini could now see the boy’s face and his nervous, searching eyes. He carried himself hunched over. He looked as if he were hiding behind his own outstretched arm, waiting to be struck a blow. It was Grenouille.