Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (8 page)

‘Now pay attention!’ he said with an affectedly stern voice. ‘Pay attention! I… what is your name, anyway?’

‘Grenouille,’ said Grenouille. ‘Jean-Baptiste Grenouille.’

‘Aha,’ said Baldini. ‘All right then, now pay attention, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille! I have thought it over. You shall have the opportunity, now, this very moment, to prove your assertion. Your grandiose failure will also be an opportunity for you to learn the virtue of humility, which—although one may pardon the total lack of its development at your tender age—will be an absolute prerequisite for later advancement as a member of your guild and for your standing as a man, a man of honour, a dutiful subject and a good Christian. I am prepared to teach you this lesson at my own expense. For certain reasons, I am feeling generous this evening, and, who knows, perhaps the recollection of this scene will amuse me one day. But do not suppose that you can dupe me—Giuseppe Baldini’s nose is old, but it is still sharp, sharp enough immediately to recognize the slightest difference between your mixture and this product here.’ And at that he pulled the handkerchief drenched in ‘Amor and Psyche’ from his pocket and waved it under Grenouille’s nose. ‘Come closer, best nose in Paris! Come here to the table and show me what you can do. But be careful not to drop anything or knock anything over. Don’t touch anything yet. Let me provide some light first. We want to have lots of illumination for this little experiment, don’t we?’

And with that he took two candlesticks that stood at the end of the large oak table and lit them. He placed all three next to one another along the back, pushed the goatskins to one side, cleared the middle of the table. Then with a few composed yet rapid motions, he fetched from a small stand the utensils needed for the task—the big-bellied mixing bottle, the glass funnel, the pipette, the small and large measuring glasses—and placed them in proper order on the oaken surface.

Grenouille had meanwhile freed himself from the doorframe. Even while Baldini was making his pompous speech, the stiffness and cunning intensity had fallen away from him. He had heard only the approval, only the ‘yes’, with the inner jubilation of a child that has sulked its way to some permission granted and thumbs its nose at the limitations, conditions and moral admonitions tied to it. Standing there at his ease and letting the rest of Baldini’s oration flow by, he was for the first time more human than animal, because he knew that he had already conquered the man who had yielded to him.

While Baldini was still fussing with his candlesticks at the table, Grenouille had already slipped off into the darkness of the laboratory with its cupboards full of precious essences, oils and tinctures, and following his sure-scenting nose, grabbed each of the necessary bottles from the shelves. There were nine altogether: essence of orange blossom, lime oil, attars of rose and clove, extracts of jasmine, bergamot and rosemary, musk tincture and storax balm, all quickly plucked down and set at the ready on the edge of the table. The last item he lugged over was a demi-john full of high-proof rectified spirit. Then he placed himself behind Baldini—who was still arranging his mixing utensils with deliberate pedantry, moving this glass back a bit, that one over more to one side, so that everything would be in its old accustomed order and displayed to its best advantage in the candlelight—and waited, quivering with impatience, for the old man to get out of the way and make room for him.

‘There!’ Baldini said at last, stepping aside. ‘I’ve lined up everything you’ll require for—let us graciously call it—your “experiment”. Don’t break anything, don’t spill anything. Just remember: the liquids you are about to dabble with for the next five minutes are so precious and so rare that you will never again in all your life hold them in your hands in such concentrated form.’

‘How much of it shall I make for you, maître?’ Grenouille asked.

‘Make what…?’ said Baldini, who had not yet finished his speech.

‘How much of the perfume?’ rasped Grenouille. ‘How much of it do you want? Shall I fill this big bottle here to the brim?’ And he pointed to a mixing bottle that held a gallon at the very least.

‘No, you shall not!’ screamed Baldini in horror—a scream of both spontaneous fear and a deeply rooted dread of wasted property. Embarrassed at what his scream had revealed, he followed it up by roaring, ‘And don’t interrupt me when I am speaking, either!’ Then in a calm voice tinged with irony, he continued, ‘Why would we need a gallon of a perfume that neither of us thinks much of? Half a beakerful will do, really. But since such small quantities are difficult to measure, I’ll allow you to start with a third of a mixing bottle.’

‘Good,’ said Grenouille. ‘I’m going to fill a third of this bottle with “Amor and Psyche”. But, Maître Baldini, I will do it in my own way. I don’t know if it will be how a craftsman would do it. I don’t know how that’s done. But I will do it my own way.’

‘As you please,’ said Baldini, who knew in this business there was no ‘your way’ or ‘my way’, but one and only one way, which consisted of knowing the formula and, using the appropriate calculations for the quantity one desired, creating a precisely measured concentrate of the various essences, which then had to be volatilized into a true perfume by mixing it in a precise ratio with alcohol—usually varying between one-to-ten and one-to-twenty. There was no other way, that he knew. And therefore what he was now called upon to witness—first with derisive hauteur, then with dismay, and finally with helpless astonishment—seemed to him nothing less than a miracle. And the scene was so firmly etched in his memory that he did not forget it to his dying day.

The little man named Grenouille first uncorked the demi-john of alcohol. Heaving the heavy vessel up gave him difficulty. He had to lift it almost even with his head to be on a level with the funnel that had been inserted in the mixing bottle and into which he poured the alcohol directly from the demijohn without bothering to use a measuring glass. Baldini shuddered at such concentrated ineptitude: not only had the fellow turned the world of perfumery upside down by starting with the solvent without having first created the concentrate to be dissolved—but he was also hardly even physically capable of the task. He was shaking with exertion, and Baldini was waiting at any moment for the heavy demijohn to come crashing down and smash everything on the table to pieces. The candles, he thought, for God’s sake, the candles! There’s going to be an explosion, he’ll burn my house down…! And he was about to lunge for the demijohn and grab it out of the madman’s hands when Grenouille set it down himself, getting it back on the floor all in one piece, and stoppered it. A clear, light liquid swayed in the bottle—not a drop spilled. For a few moments Grenouille panted for breath, but with a look of contentment on his face as if the hardest part of the job were behind him. And indeed, what happened now proceeded with such speed that Baldini could hardly follow it with his eyes, let alone keep track of the order in which it occurred or make even partial sense of the procedure.

Grenouille grabbed apparently at random from the row of essences in their flacons, pulled out the glass stoppers, held the contents under his nose for an instant, splashed a bit of one bottle, dribbled a drop or two of another, poured a dash of a third into the funnel, and so on. Pipette, test tube, measuring glass, spoons and rods—all the utensils that allow the perfumer to control the complicated process of mixing—Grenouille did not so much as touch a single one of them. It was as if he were just playing, splashing and swishing like a child busy cooking up some ghastly brew of water, grass and mud, which he then asserts to be soup. Yes, like a child, thought Baldini; all at once he looks like a child, despite his ungainly hands, despite his scarred, pock-marked face and his bulbous old-man’s nose. I took him to be older than he is; but now he seems much younger to me; he looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, wilful little pre-human creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence. There was just such a fanatical child trapped inside this young man, standing at the table with eyes aglow, having forgotten everything around him, apparently no longer aware that there was anything else in the laboratory but himself and these bottles that he tipped into the funnel with nimble awkwardness to mix up an insane brew that he would confidently swear—and would truly believe!—to be the exquisite perfume ‘Amor and Psyche’. Baldini shuddered as he watched the fellow bustling about in the candlelight, so shockingly absurd and so shockingly self-confident. In the old days—so he thought, and for a moment he felt as sad and miserable and furious as he had that afternoon while gazing out on to the city glowing ruddy in the twilight—in the old days people like that simply did not exist; he was an entirely new specimen of the race, one that could arise only in exhausted, dissipated times like these… But he was about to be taught his lesson, the impertinent boy! He would give him such a tongue-lashing at the end of this ridiculous performance that he would creep away like the shrivelled pile of trash he had been on arrival! Vermin! One dared not get involved with anyone at all these days, the world was simply teeming with absurd vermin!

Baldini was so busy with his personal exasperation and disgust at the age that he did not really comprehend what was intended when Grenouille suddenly stoppered up all the flacons, pulled the funnel out of the mixing bottle, grabbed the neck of the bottle with his right hand, capped it with the palm of his left, and shook it vigorously. Only when the bottle had been spun through the air several times, its precious contents sloshing back and forth like lemonade between belly and neck, did Baldini let loose a shout of rage and horror. ‘Stop it!’ he screeched. ‘That’s enough! Stop it this moment!
Basta
! Put that bottle back on the table and don’t touch anything else, do you understand, nothing else! I must have been crazy to listen to your asinine gibberish. The way you handle these things, your crudity, your primitive lack of judgement, demonstrate to me that you are a bungler, a barbaric bungler, and a beastly, cheeky, snot-nosed brat besides. You wouldn’t make a good lemonade mixer, not even a good licorice-water vendor, let alone a perfumer! Just be glad, be grateful and content that your master lets you slop around in tanning fluids! Do not dare it ever again, do you hear me? Do not dare ever again to set a foot across the threshold of a perfumer’s shop!’

Thus spoke Baldini. And even as he spoke, the air around him was saturated with the odour of ‘Amor and Psyche’. Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.

Grenouille had set down the bottle, removing his perfume-moistened hand from its neck and wiping it on his shirt-tail. One, two steps back—and the clumsy way he hunched his body together under Baldini’s tirade sent enough waves rolling out into the room to spread the newly created scent in all directions. Nothing more was needed. True, Baldini ranted on, railed and cursed, but with every breath his outward show of rage found less and less inner nourishment. He sensed he had been proved wrong, which was why his peroration could only soar to empty pathos. And when he fell silent, had been silent for a good while, he had no need of Grenouille’s remark: ‘It’s all done.’ He knew it already.

But nevertheless, although in the meantime air heavy with ‘Amor and Psyche’ was undulating all about him, he stepped up to the old oak table to make his test. He pulled a fresh snowy-white lace handkerchief from his coat pocket, the left one, unfolded it and sprinkled it with a few drops that he extracted from the mixing bottle with the long pipette. He waved the handkerchief with outstretched arm to aerate it and then pulled it past his nose with the delicate, well-practised motion, soaking up its scent. Letting it out again in little puffs, he sat down on a stool. Where before his face had been bright red with erupting anger, all at once he had grown pale. ‘Incredible,’ he murmured softly to himself, ‘by God—incredible.’ And he pressed the handkerchief to his nose again and again and sniffed and shook his head and muttered ‘incredible’. It was ‘Amor and Psyche’, beyond the shadow of a doubt ‘Amor and Psyche’, that despicable, ingenious blend of scents, so exactly copied that not even Pélissier himself would have been able to distinguish it from his own product. ‘Incredible…’

Small and ashen, the great Baldini sat on his stool, looking ridiculous with handkerchief in hand, pressing it to his nose like an old maid with the sniffles. By now he was totally speechless. He didn’t even say ‘incredible’ any more, but, nodding gently and staring at the contents of the mixing bottle, could only let out a monotone, ‘Hmm, hmm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm… hmm, hmm, hmm.’ After a while, Grenouille approached, stepping up to the table soundlessly as a shadow.

‘It’s not a good perfume,’ he said. ‘It’s been put together very bad, this perfume has.’

‘Hmm, hmm, hmm,’ said Baldini, and Grenouille continued, ‘If you’ll let me, maître, I’ll make it better. Give me a minute and I’ll make a proper perfume out of it!’

‘Hmm, hmm, hmm,’ said Baldini and nodded. Not in consent, but because he was in such a helplessly apathetic condition that he would have said, ‘Hmm, hmm, hmm,’ and nodded to anything. And he went on nodding and murmuring, ‘Hmm, hmm, hmm,’ and made no effort to interfere as Grenouille began to mix away a second time, pouring the alcohol from the demijohn into the mixing bottle a second time (right on top of the perfume already in it), tipping the contents of flacons a second time in apparently random order and quantity into the funnel. Only at the end of the procedure—Grenouille did not shake the bottle this time, but swirled it about gently like a brandy glass, perhaps in deference to Baldini’s delicacy, perhaps because the contents seemed more precious to him this time—only then, as the liquid whirled about in the bottle, did Baldini awaken from his numbed state and stand up, the handkerchief still pressed to his nose, of course, as if he were arming himself against yet another attack upon his most private self.

‘It’s all done, maître,’ Grenouille said. ‘Now it’s a really good scent.’

‘Yes, yes, fine, fine,’ Baldini replied and waved him off with his free hand.

‘Don’t you want to test it?’ Grenouille gurgled on. ‘Don’t you want to, maître? Aren’t you going to test it?’

‘Later. I’m not in the mood to test it at the moment… I have other things on my mind. Go now! Come on!’

And he picked up one of the candlesticks and passed through the door into the shop. Grenouille followed him. They entered the narrow hallway that led to the servant’s entrance. The old man shuffled up to the doorway, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door. He stepped aside to let the lad out.

‘Can’t I come to work for you, maître, can’t I?’ Grenouille asked, standing on the threshold, hunched over again, the lurking look returning to his eye.

‘I don’t know,’ said Baldini, ‘I shall think about it. Go.’

And then Grenouille had vanished, gone in a split second, swallowed up by the darkness. Baldini stood there and stared into the night. In his right hand he held the candlestick, in his left the handkerchief, like someone with a nose-bleed, but in fact he was simply frightened. He quickly bolted the door. Then he took the protective handkerchief from his face, shoved it into his pocket, and walked back through the shop to his laboratory.

The scent was so heavenly fine that tears welled into Baldini’s eyes. He did not have to test it, he simply stood at the table in front of the mixing bottle and breathed. The perfume was glorious. It was to ‘Amor and Psyche’ as a symphony is to the scratchings of a lonely violin. And it was more. Baldini closed his eyes and watched as the most sublime memories were awakened within him. He saw himself as a young man walking through the evening gardens of Naples; he saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the silhouette of a bouquet of roses on the window-sill as the night wind passed by; he heard the random song of birds and the distant music from a harbour tavern; he heard whisperings at his ear, he heard I-love-you and felt his hair ruffle with bliss, now! now at this very moment! He forced open his eyes and groaned with pleasure. This perfume was not like any perfume known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, some toiletry. It was something completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical, rich world, and in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free, so fine…

The hairs that had ruffled up on Baldini’s arm fell back again, and a befuddling peace took possession of his soul. He picked up the leather, the goat leather lying at the table’s edge, and a knife, and trimmed away. Then he laid the pieces in the glass basin and poured the new perfume over them. He fixed a pane of glass over the basin, divided the rest of the perfume between two small bottles, applied labels to them and wrote the words ‘Nuit Napolitaine’ on them. Then he extinguished the candles and left.

Once upstairs, he said nothing to his wife while they ate. Above all, he said nothing about the solemn decision he had arrived at that afternoon. And his wife said nothing either, for she noticed that he was in good spirits, and that was enough for her. Nor did he walk over to Notre-Dame to thank God for his strength of character. Indeed, that night he forgot, for the first time ever, to say his evening prayers.