Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
W
hen the harvest was in, I took a job at the factory, helping to make the soaps and weak perfumes and potions.
Beyond the use of lavender in perfumery, there was hardly an ailment that the plant would not cure, it seemed. Of course, I knew that Maman made lavender infusions for nervous emergencies, and that Old Marcel rubbed it on his dog’s paws if they became cut and infected. But it was news to me that it was also considered to have properties capable of healing everything from asthma to fever, fainting to stomach disorders, headaches to rheumatisms. That, and its widespread use as a cheap antiseptic in hospitals, was the reason the fields were still in production.
The factory at the foot of Manosque made a particularly potent brew that would stop an epidemic of influenza in its tracks, according to
Mme.
Musset, the wife of the owner. She was also the potions manager. That was her official title, and it suited her, this small, bony woman with a prominent nose; there was a touch of one of those elderly women in fairy tales about her, both good witch and bad witch. Certainly she turned out to be Marthe’s fairy godmother.
Due to her fondness for Marthe, and her desire to nurture my sister’s talent in every way possible, Madame was very kind to me. She gave me a personal demonstration of how the influenza cure was made. A liter of water was boiled, to which was added a whole fifty grams of flowers, left to infuse for several hours. When required, it was to be reheated, and the sufferer made to drink it all. They would sweat profusely, and have to run for the privy, but it was deemed to have an impressive effect on the system.
“They say Napoleon got through sixty bottles of lavender essence a month,” said
Mme.
Musset happily. “He even drank it before rising from his campaign bed and appearing on the battlefield! I must say I have my suspicions about the level of preserving alcohol in that consumption, though.”
More conventionally, the Musset factory followed a traditional recipe for lavender aperitif by marinating lavender flowers in white wine. After a week, we filtered it and added sugar and honey, then it was bottled. I found it a strange taste. “It needs to be served very cold,” explained Madame. “For myself I prefer the emerald.” She made an unnerving sip-sip noise through teeth yellow as pumpkin seeds.
The emerald liqueur hardly involved lavender at all, just a few flowers, as the marinade was predominantly herbal: angelica, sage, rosemary, bay, rue, absinthe, and thyme. It also called for a liter of ninety-degree-proof alcohol, which gave it a stronger kick, and, once sweetened, was quite delicious, though advisable only in extremely small doses.
Madame showed me how to make a powder to perfume the house by taking lavender flowers, thyme flowers, and mint leaves, and letting them dry, then adding several cloves and pulverizing them before leaving out in open bowls.
After the war, all these products, decanted into pretty bottles and jars, were sold from stalls at all the markets of Provence, along with biscuits studded with dried lavender buds, and rose-petal meringues. When I was there, that would have been an unspeakable indulgence.
Every evening, I would return to the room nearby where Marthe lodged (and I was sleeping on a camp bed), and relate to her the minute details of everything I’d seen.
I
tried to imagine what it would be like to see the world only in scent and sound and touch. To understand without ever being able to see the way the hills swelled up to the sky in sea-green waves, or the contrast of the time shadow on the crumbling sundial, or the geometric patchwork of the aromatic fields. To smell the pungent herds of goats blocking the narrow lanes, and the yellow banks of wild broom at the edges but not experience the myriad colors, or the cloud patterns sweeping over the empty flatness of undulating fields. To be able to combine scents but not to know the exact hue of the eau de cologne in the glass bottles.
“Have you found a project?” Dom asked one evening as I sat scribbling.
“Not so much a translation project as trying out an idea, but I think I could be onto something.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been following up a story I was told about a girl who was born here at Les Genévriers in the 1920s. It’s fascinating, quite a mystery. Her name was Marthe Lincel. She began to go blind when she was only five years old, but she developed a prodigious sense of smell.”
He was silent.
“That’s how it all began, with the flowers and the patches of lavender right here. By the time she went to the perfume factory for the first time, she could already distinguish between the different types of lavender and sometimes even the slopes where they were grown, what angle they were to the sun. She became a renowned
parfumeuse
, a creator of scents—in Manosque. I’ve been there already, but I want to go again—will you come with me?”
Disconcertingly, the question was met by an expression of bewilderment that quickly turned to blankness.
“If you’re not interested I’ll go on my own. It’s not a problem.”
No response.
“Dom?”
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, barely controlling the anger in his voice.
“What?”
“You heard. Why did you choose this?”
“Well, I—” I was about to say that Sabine had told me, to admit that I had gone to Manosque with her, but Dom had closed his eyes as if he was steeling himself for the worst. He was rigid with tension.
“Dom, it’s only a— There’s nothing to react like this about—”
He opened his mouth, then clearly changed his mind.
“What?” I persisted.
“Oh . . . forget it. You know what, I really don’t want to know.”
“Dom, what is it? What did I say?”
He turned and went out of the room. Hours later, when I had heard nothing, not a note of music, not even a movement throughout the rest of the house, I poured two glasses of red wine and followed. I found him at his piano, head in his hands, elbows on the keys. The solidity of his despair stopped me in my tracks.
On the threshold of the room, I quietly turned back.
M
arthe and I went home together at Toussaint, the first of November.
While the men were out hunting, and Maman and I plucked and butchered and stewed whatever game they had shot or caught in snares, Marthe sat by the hearth and listened. She had so many questions, wanted to know so much.
I did my best to find the words to reanimate the pictures imprinted in my memory, struggling to stitch bright patches of summer over the fallen leaves and the sound of cold against the windows.
Even the scents—especially the scents—were fleeting, hard to pin them down in words. The way the resinous fire beneath the alembic still candied the soft summer nights. The warm human odor as the audience squeezed together in front of the cloth cinema screen in the town square. The smell of a man pulling you toward the mysterious underside of his chin in darkness lit by flickering black-and-white pictures, I kept to myself.
I was not Marthe, with her extraordinary concentration and attention to detail, but through her, I was becoming ever more alert to the sensuous power of smell. They say that the loss of one of the senses makes the others more acute. I’d go further: it makes the senses of the people around them grow more intense, too. Not only was I smelling in the way she taught me, but I was seeing, really seeing, details on her behalf that I might never have noticed otherwise.
Like an atmosphere, like a taste, it is felt and experienced, and then it is gone. You can’t record it like music or conversation or a picture. You have to smell it again, and remember.
M
arthe’s masterwork, the perfume that made her name, was based on heliotrope and lavender.
I often wondered, later, whether the perfume she created was the tangible form of her memories of the farm, an idealized version of her childhood, or perhaps even a hymn of praise and thanks for what we once had. The times we’d immersed ourselves in the flowers on the bank by the barn where the walnut wine was made, and watched, or seemed to watch, the purple blooms turning to the hours of the day.
When I smelled that perfume, I was drawn back helplessly into a sunlit world of Maman’s flaky almond biscuits with their hint of bitter apricot kernel, earth like cocoa powder clinging to our bare legs, light, warm winds sifting sugared scents from the kitchen where the orange mirabelles were being bottled; and on, far beyond the aromatic, to the distant sound of the goat bells, and the whispering of the trees, the butterflies on meadow flowers and the scrubby spikiness of the land underfoot as we chased them, the taste of dried cherries sucked from their pits and of the honeyed nut wine; the soft, guttered candles waiting on the table in the courtyard where we dined at night, cool at last, a floury embrace before bedtime: all the fragrances in one, of the four months of the year when we all lived outside in the immense wide-open valley, a season of warmth and enchantment, safe from all horrors, or so we thought.
I
gave it until around seven o’clock. Then, aware that I should not leave him to his private mood too long, I ran noisily down the steps into the courtyard and into the music room to ask if he wanted a drink and what he’d like for supper.
Dom was not there.
Setting off into the garden, I called his name. There was no response, but I assumed that meant that he was up in the woods, or wandering in the orchard.
I turned back toward the main house. The sky above was a tumbled bed of dark clouds; lights blazed on the top floor. I went back inside and called his name as I climbed the stairs to the bathroom. But he was not there, nor in the library.
Still unconcerned, I opened a good bottle of wine to let it breathe, studied the contents of the fridge, and began to cook, expecting him to push the back door open at any moment.
An hour later, it was completely dark. He wouldn’t still have been wandering the land. Not knowing what else to do, I called his cell. It went straight to voicemail. I tried again, once in the house and once down in the music room, but there was no corresponding ringtone in either place.
He was not there. Neither was his phone. And neither, when I ran to the garage with my heart beating wildly, was the car. How could that be? I had not heard it go. I was sure I hadn’t.
I spun around, perplexed. My flesh puckered into goose bumps as I wondered who had switched on the lights in the upper rooms.
T
he hands on the clock slowly ground out the night hours. Familiar night noises, the ticking of tiles as the temperature changed and small animals scurried took on a new menace. Every sound was a threat.
Where was he? Had something happened to him—an accident? Why had he gone out without saying a word? I sat in the kitchen, then went upstairs and lay awake asking the same questions over and over until they gave way to others I had long avoided: What was I doing here? How well did I really know him?
Then, at about two o’clock, I thought I heard the sound of a car. I rushed up to the open window, heard nothing more, and so went out onto the terrace.
A faint light flared.
“Dom?”
Silence.
I leaned over the terrace wall. Vines scratched my bare legs as I pushed myself as far out as I dared. The light was there all right: it was quite a way down the path. I squinted, trying to make it out. Was it moving? Could it be Dom holding a flashlight? Then I started to tremble.
It was moving closer. It seemed to be—it was—the glow of a lantern. The same pattern, the same yellow dance of a guttering flame inside the metalwork frame as it moved up the path. Who was holding it? I blinked, wondering if this could be some kind of a dream.
I couldn’t make out anything else, but the lamp was still there. I watched it until the light vanished, just as before. Now I was spooked.
All was dark again. I went back into the bedroom, still shivering. Minutes later, I thought I saw him, or someone, behind me reflected in the mirror over the dressing table. The shudder down my back was like a convulsion. It seemed to push me with a cold, cold hand.
I shut my eyes. When I summoned the courage to look again, there was nothing. It must have been a trick of the light.
“Dom?” I called out again, heart hammering.
No answer.
I
n the empty bed, with no comforting arms, no warm breath, the night was an expanse of space, an absence.
A faint breeze puffed through the window, bringing a delicate vaporization of the mysterious scent whose source I had still not located.
Had I relied on him too much, and fallen into the trap of thinking that my happiness depended on him? In my determination to convince myself otherwise, had I failed to understand what was really going on, that the relationship had reached the point where it could not be saved? That he was even now in the arms of some other woman, grown tired of me and my inexperience, my failure to give him what he was searching for?
It was impossible not to feel the hollowness of loss. For the first time in a long while, I had to admit it. I was lonely; I missed my family and friends.
I thought back to previous relationships, one in particular. How, when love had soured in a morass of lies and betrayals, I’d stayed for too long, believing nothing he said. No more of that, I’d promised myself. No more suspicions; no more questions and examining the answers for deceitful chinks; no more loss of trust and stomach-churning paranoia in the long reaches of the night. And now what was I doing but repeating the same pattern?
Perhaps this time, though, it was a different story. It was, as everywhere around us, a matter of perception. Like the zoetrope, each picture slightly alters the previous image to create the illusion of movement. But that’s a hopeless analogy, because it’s the same movement repeated endlessly, or until the spinning motion stops. Each act has an effect, a ripple that cascades into another.