Entering her house is like slipping inside a wooden drawer. More precisely, between the folds of linen where the jewellery is hidden.
Picture this room where she receives me. The floor is lined with Persian rugs which, taken individually, might lend the place a certain otherness, but piled one over another make it clear that appearances ceased to matter to her long ago.
To the right and left, enormous portraits with exhausted faces, their frames so opulent they seem to weigh upon their cheeks like plaster masks. If they could tighten, they would be nooses.
At the windows, pounds and pounds of the finest white curtains form a layer that shuts out the sun like a reinforced-concrete wall.
The only light comes from directly in front of me, behind her. An enormous window whose panes have been replaced by perfume bottles, fitted together so perfectly that not even a draught can slip through, arranged so that the combination of amber liquids, reddish liquids, liquids dark as well water, cannot possibly seem accidental.
In an interview once, she said that if all those essences were opened simultaneously, they would recreate exactly the scent that filled this same room in the year, on the day, at the precise hour when she was born.
Statistically speaking, if she did it, she might be born again. Hypothetically, her scientific formula for reincarnation.
Seated against the light at her desk, wrapped in a silver tulle dress so tight I cannot tell whether she refuses to move or the fabric is preventing her, she is dissecting a petal with a scalpel.
No fragment of a petal smells the same as any other fragment of that petal. If you know what you are doing, you can extract at least three rare essences worth millions of euros.
Her long ash-grey hair gets in the way of everything she does. The truth is that it is these infinitesimal quarks of hair scales, which she inevitably slices off as she works, that turn the entrails of the vivisected petal into unrepeatable essences.
I know her well enough to know when not a word may be uttered. Certainly not when she separates the margins. Heaven forbid when she divides the apex from the rest. God help you when she dissects the veins.
You have to pay close attention to her sighs. From the moment the rhythm of her long, linear sighs is interrupted by one that seems broken in two, no more than four seconds pass before she begins to speak.
First second. She freezes. As though she had suddenly dropped into the room from somewhere else.
Second second. She places the scalpel in her tin scalpel holder, and you notice involuntary microexpressions of astonishment clustered around her mouth.
Third second. Her hands accelerate. She opens a drawer and sweeps everything on the table into it, as though the tiny flower cuttings suddenly needed shelter in a nuclear bunker.
Fourth second. The bomb drops. Planting her elbows on the table, banging them down hard, inventing on the spot a telegraphic language between herself and her little refugees, she says:
This week I defeated poverty.
Leaning all the way back in her chair, she adds:
It was picturesque.
I come to see her once a year, to hear about triumphs of this sort.
I am sitting before a grandfather telling fairy tales; for one day I am entirely devoid of personal experience, waiting for other people’s experiences so I can turn them into jurisprudence.
She is my holiday, my Christmas. My Miss World waving to the crowd and dreaming of ending war.
She tells me that what she had always wanted to avoid by becoming a perfumer—her way of warding it off—was making people smell of jasmine and tonka bean. Smells, she tells me, have nothing to do with an elegant coat, with leaving a trail behind you.
Smell is the primary life-saving sense of many animals, the one with the longest memory. She says: For ten minutes, be a wolf.
Driving rain can drown out the sounds of a leveret. Darkness, tangles of brambles, can deceive a lamb’s eyes. But no smell can conceal the smell of frightened flesh, once you have smelled it before. Smell, she says, is the only sense that cannot be fooled.
With a sigh that seems to come from some hypothetical version of herself, she asks:
Have you ever found a rat in the garden? Have you ever, unfortunately, found a fox with a broken neck by the side of the ring road? Suppose you had picked it up in your hands to move it a few yards: no toy poodle would have come bounding up to make friends with you. No stray cat with days of accumulated hunger would have accepted food from your hand. That is the effect of putrescine, a gaseous chemical compound produced by the breakdown of fatty acids in corpses, which makes the synapses of imminent danger explode in animals from a mile away.
1,4-diaminobutane, or butane-1,4-diamine. To the bright little eyes of a Labrador retriever, you would have been nothing but the Grim Reaper.
The fact is, you would not have liked yourself either.
Have you ever thought about it? We know dead animals give off this smell of danger without, for reasons beyond their control, suffering any personal repercussions. But what if someone alive and kicking gave off the smell of death? What would happen to that living person’s perception of themselves?
You would become the very thing you yourself had to avoid. Not even those nocturnal paralyses, the ones where there is a monster sitting on your chest and you cannot scream, could be worse than the nightmare in which you become the monster sitting on your own chest.
If we all became monsters, would there be anything left to run from?
Those purple lips of hers are the kind of purple lips you would imagine displayed in a museum. And you would imagine that museum existing solely to display them.
Moving them imperceptibly so as not to crease them, she explains:
There are three stages in the decomposition of animals: autolysis, putrefaction, decay. Putrescine, the notification that alerts the kicking, primitive part of our brain, arrives during the second stage.
The finest teams of sociologists have demonstrated that, in the human world, the same alert arrives during a preliminary stage unique to us.
The true revolution of progress was the creation of a Stage Zero of decomposition: bankruptcy, an overdrawn bank account. Misfortune.
You can find its olfactory notes soaked into the wood of park benches, pissed beneath overpasses, sealed behind the zipper of a filthy sleeping bag scavenged from a rubbish bin.
I extracted them, synthesised them, and no one can tell me these smells do not create an impenetrable niche. Just like ambergris. Taif rose. Civet.
Only the way society responds to them changes.
What if being dead were worth a fortune? What if hitting rock bottom went viral?
I know her well enough to distinguish between those remarks of hers that are pebbles tossed into water and those that are drumrolls. And now her bass drum begins to throb:
I did not even give the perfume I created a name, so as to strip it of all identity and strip whoever bought it of theirs.
The first person to wear it was a sheikh. His multimillion-dollar Aston Martin carried a genuine, vividly olfactory pre-death experience into the tallest skyscrapers. The prehistoric survival instinct of his little gilded slaves sprang to life: an enormous, fetid red flag was passing close beside them.
The point is that the urge to run billions of miles away soon became an urge to imitate him. What primordial warnings could not accomplish, a wrist wrapped in a Patek Philippe Grandmaster could.
He was so delighted that he sent me a parcel stuffed with filthy Gucci clothes, exquisite food just beginning to mould, necklaces of priceless rubies crawling with bacteria.
There was no need to look at the sales figures over the following days to know it was doing spectacularly well. The city began to lose its reassuring smell of smog, its comforting everyday tang of leachate. A cloud covered everything in the most primitive perfume in history.
Imagine a fractal.
The first image you see is a dead fox lying on the tarmac.
Imagine moving a little closer and seeing that the fox is actually a city.
Move closer still and you can see every detail of the city: buildings, flower beds, squares packed with immaculately dressed people, delighted—genuinely delighted—to be the nauseating part of that fox. Delighted to have paid wagonloads of money for the privilege.
A single, gigantic warning of danger in which everyone wanted to remain involved forever.
Exactly as would normally happen among animals, anyone who was not rich enough to afford to smell of putrescine was the only one still lucid enough to sense the danger and run for their life.
You have to imagine at least thirty miles of scorched earth. An expanse entirely devoid of any life with an income below seven figures.
Even resident birds began to migrate. Even the trees curled up their leaves rather than perform photosynthesis with that filth.
The niche created a niche of its own and began boasting about it. At least until they realised there can be no niche when no other kind of society remains against which to measure yourself.
And so the swaggering rich became an isolated, forgettable, stinking organism with vicuña inserts.
Those black eyelashes of hers are the kind of black eyelashes that function more like bars across her eyes than an introduction to her gaze.
Squeezing her eyelids together, making the cage as narrow as possible, she asks me:
Do you know Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? Do you have any idea what prions are?
Prions are altered proteins in the brain. They accumulate and damage neurons. They turn into prima donnas and make you do whatever they want.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is the most common of the prion diseases. It causes a progressive deterioration of brain function: involuntary movements, sudden jerks, dominant aggression. It is transmitted through the ingestion of infected meat.
I make no secret of the fact that I am spreading it through inhalation.
From the moment a letter arrived from that same sheikh, on headed paper, written in utterly incomprehensible handwriting, the pen pressed down so hard it had punched holes through the sheet, all I had to do was sit at this table and wait.
The main sound you could hear in the streets was the slapping of arms gone out of control, Louboutin catwalks pounding the ground with astonishing force at every step, the crash of Fabergé eggs being hurled through the air.
Inevitably, there were accidents.
In nature, various species of insects take orderly turns around a corpse to clean the bones. Here, the complete autonomy of the process soon became apparent.
They were sufficient unto themselves; they became their own food. Corpses and coprophages at once. Bluebottles and flesh.
Squads of world-famous models had begun to bite. Everywhere, bruises mottled with Yves Saint Laurent lipstick.
Teeth whitened to perfection and knocked out during organised brawls between brand ambassadors were collected and displayed in luxurious solid-gold vases. Ancient tapestries were accused of Retrogressiveness and sentenced to burn at the stake in public squares, amid thunderous applause.
Some began to suspect that things were getting out of hand, but they hastened to label every new act the latest form of etiquette.
Another stage of modern decomposition is the changing of the narrative. Everyone felt entitled to glorify their symptoms, to encourage them.
Striking and destroying anything within reach, behaving like savage beasts, had become a status symbol on a par with a Rolls-Royce Droptail.
The most envied among them, the influencers of this madness, began squandering money on possessions they would destroy immediately afterwards at specially organised elite events.
To an outside observer, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease had by then reached its acute and terminal stage.
The lower-middle classes, the poor devils who had fled at the first warning signs, who struggled to make it to the end of the month, hoped with all their hearts that they never would.
The narrative changed definitively for them as well.
Those hollow cheeks of hers are the kind of hollow cheeks that, even when smiling, could remind you of nothing but a canyon.
Pressing her back into the chair as though she wanted it to leave marks on her, she tells me:
An ancient tribe in the New Guinea archipelago built its existence around the observation of natural processes. From early childhood, each child was assigned a dying animal and instructed to follow it and observe every single aspect of what happened. Without any scientific foundation, they had noticed that the brain was the first organ to want nothing more to do with life, while the heart was always the last to cease all vital activity.
In dying dogs, the last visible movement to stop was the pulsing of the veins in their forelegs. The best position from which to see them was to rest your cheek against the shoulder of the dog lying down, so that its wrists almost became your horizon.
Lying there, you became part of the process. You felt the final heartbeats absorbing you. You were inside the last organic experience of someone’s life.
My unlimited historical archive of anthropological information, the physical embodiment of every millennia-old oral tradition, spreads her hands across the desk and bends forward until her right ear rests against it. Her hair fans out with perfect order, as though it knows every groove in the wood by heart.
Automatically, I place myself in the same position, looking in the same direction.
The pounding I hear is tremendous from the start. The enchanted bubble is kicked apart by crocodile-clad feet. Gold Louis Vuitton axes tear gashes through the walls, through the final layer of connective tissue.
The hundred foremost representatives of the irreversible stages burst in all at once. The room fills with heiresses and celebrity surgeons at the head of a nauseating cloud of skin infections bred from filth, corroded underpasses, food poisoning.
The olfactory luxury she had created surrounds us now, at the very peak of the fragrances’ maturation. Diptera and beetles embellished with French collars beat the arrogant portraits to pieces; extensions made from genuine Indian hair set fire to the carpets.
A mortally bulimic organism hurled against its creator. The final attack on their heart. Flesh-eating larvae of advanced technologies, bred specifically to smash into the wall behind her and bring it crashing down.
The pericardium collapses. The only slow-motion scene in the entire affair.
Every perfume bottle falls over us in meticulous, calculated order. At last the sun’s rays stream in, swift as bullets.
It was exactly like being born.
Under a bombardment of shards, while musks and jasmines busied themselves staging the supreme act of nativity, these cutting-edge Rickys and Barabbases began attacking one another, each accusing the others of having shattered that particular note of lily of the valley which had forever ruined their ruinously expensive essence of degradation.
You must imagine that, by then, the only things neither burning nor rotting, excluded from the process of decomposition by the new, supremely fragrant and fertile stratosphere, were Madame Mémoire and me.
Stroking the table, she confirms that the final squad of decomposition parasites, once they have exhausted the matter available for ingestion, begin eating one another, each mistaking the next for yet more putrefying matter, until they have wiped themselves out.
What we were witnessing, these rich people thrashing about in the grip of their whims, was cannibalism’s moment of hype. And we were an integral part of the process.
You can be dead even before you are dead-dead.
The truth is, all she did was make it explicit, and they liked it.
Autolysis at the top of the trending charts.
