Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  It was encouraging that he would mention a contemporary female, for Pan had begun to live in his memories, an unhealthy symptom in anyone, suggesting as it does that life has peaked. Every daydream that involves the past sports in its hatband a ticket to the grave. Yet, what did the neglected god have to look foward to? To ambrosia, to Maria Theresa, to a monthly pension, a flock of his own? No, only the ministrations of Alobar and Kudra kept him going, and as their recent quarreling intimated, the couple had other things to worry about.

  As he warmed his horns on the sunny riverbank, watching the wind-torn chestnut blossoms drift by like melted nymph flesh on the tide, Pan dismissed Descartes and his prideful ambition to force nature under human control, and thought instead of Alobar and Kudra, how they had come to Arkadia, drunk on eternal knowledge, seeking him out and laughing. . . .

  Presumably, their “eternal knowledge” was derived from the Bandaloop, albeit indirectly. No documents, no artifacts, no graffiti were left behind by the Bandaloop, but as Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy of the Last Laugh Foundation has written, “Physical immortality is primarily a matter of vibration,” and the caves certainly were resonant with the vibrations of their former occupants.

  Alobar and Kudra lived in those caves, amidst those vibrations, for seven years, during which time they learned many of the secrets of life everlasting. Alobar believed they should have stayed longer and learned more, and this belief kept surfacing like a lungfish in the hot surf of their seventeenth-century quarrels. Way back then, however, six hundred years further back, when the cream was still thick and yellow on the magic milk and the marble egg of logic laid by the Greek philosophers had yet to hatch, Alobar was simply too happy to protest at length.

  Kudra was as thrilled as he with their Bandaloop education, yet she had been yearning since childhood, since that formative merchandising trip, to go out into the wider world, and now, tingling as she was with vitality and confidence, she was impatient to plunge into far cities and countrysides. “Take me to the lands where the sun sets,” she implored. “We can do our immortality work wherever we are.” That was basically true, for, and here we quote Wiggs Dannyboy again, “Physical immortality is not an end result, a condition to be arrived at in the future, but an ongoing discipline, an attitude, a way of life to be practiced in the present, day by day.” Nevertheless, Alobar was convinced that there were serious holes in their knowledge that could best be filled in the caves of the Bandaloop. He made a sincere effort to persuade Kudra to linger; then, having failed at that, jumped with her, lighthearted and eager, into the meandering mainstream of medieval life.

  Alobar signed on as a guard with a spice caravan, and they traveled by camel to Constantinople, humpbacking out of the sandy wings of the east onto that golden stage where Emperor Basil II was directing, under the auspices of Byzantine Christianity, a long-running drama of expansion and wealth. Suspecting that immortality might be fostered more by comfort than by asceticism, but having lived hand to mouth during all of their time together, the couple elected to settle temporarily in Constantinople and sample its luxury.

  Neither of them had ever resided in a large city before, and Constantinople, a major trading center, a cosmopolitan link between East and West, a mosaic-tiled hive of commercial and religious honey, woke them daily with an excited nudge from its gilt elbow. Aided by Kudra, whose understanding of raw materials was studiously passed on to him, Alobar rose rapidly from stevedore to manager of Basil's spice warehouses, a position whose salary afforded them a smart house overlooking the Bosporus, a silver tea service, and carpets thicker and more colorful than the ones that had disappeared from the caves with the Bandaloop. Upon those rugs (dyed in some cases with beet juice), they sipped mint tea, munched spinach pies and melons, made love in ways that emphasized the utra in Kama Sutra, and perfected the breathing techniques that apparently are indispensable to extreme longevity.

  Bathing techniques also are important, and, fortunately, in Constantinople they were easy to practice. As Alobar was well aware, most of Europe's two-legged mammals thought of water as an element only slightly more suitable for external application than fire. The unpopularity of the bath was both widespread and persistent (in Louis XIV's incomparably elegant Versailles, there was not a single vessel designed for bathing, a fact that one day would lead Kudra to regard the Sun King's court a potential market for her incense; late in the twentieth century, there were still great numbers of Europeans who refused to wash their bodies lest they remove some quality—corporeal or incorporeal—deemed essential to their image of themselves). As a result of its constant intercourse with the Far East, Constantinople had acquired an appreciation of the protracted hot bath, for the purpose of which a network of stone aqueducts channeled water into the city from reservoirs in the nearby hills. So that they might bathe together, a practice forbidden in the sexually segregated public baths, Alobar and Kudra tapped into the aqueduct system and built a tile-roofed, waist-deep tub at the rear of their house, between the rosebushes and the pistachio tree. Kudra spoke fluent amphibian, but Alobar, conditioned by the European aversion, frequently had to be coaxed into the tub by a reminder that ritualistic bathing enhances longevity, or by a suggestion that a soak might add some unusual slippery dimension to the coital functioning of his or his companion's organs.

  “Nowhere under yon setting sun will you meet water meant for bathing in,” Alobar would caution Kudra whenever she grew antsy, and if that did not lull her restlessness, he would add, “No perfumes will you meet, either.”

  He was correct, there was no perfume west of the Bosporus. In the modern sense, there was no perfume anywhere, for the process by which a flower's fumes are extracted and preserved using alcohol distillation was not to be discovered for another hundred years, when Avicenna, the Arabian alchemist, hit upon it while trying to isolate for Islam the soul of its holy rose. In eleventh-century Constantinople, however, aromatics were as popular as they were in Kudra's India, and, as in India, they came mostly in the form of thick resins and gooey gums. Each morning, a servant would bring Basil II a small cedar box filled with resinous frankincense and gummy myrrh, whereupon the emperor would smash the box over his own head, allowing its contents to trickle down his neck and beard. As time passed, Basil began to act rather punchy from all the box breaking, and frequently his eyes were sealed half shut from the gum. He smelled great, though, and when he died in 1025, his successor, wishing to exude an even larger glory, took to breaking two boxes over his head every day. Perhaps it was because of their vigorous application of scent that neither of the emperors was sufficiently alert to notice that their spice manager stayed constant in appearance even as they aged—although others in Constantinople noticed well enough: in the court and in the church, gossip rustled its leathery wings.

  “The emperor, the bishop, the camels at the marketplace, the olive trees on the hillsides, the ships in the harbor, every and each grow older. This Alobar and Kudra do not.”

  “They are always in good humor and health, yet they never attend devotion.”

  “They bathe together.”

  “They smile too much.”

  “She anoints herself with sweet unguents as though a man.”

  “Nobody knows whence they came.”

  “They are often at the act of love, as their noisy demonstrations attest, but produce not a child.”

  “It is whispered that they eat their children as soon as they are born.”

  “Aye. Eating babies is what keeps them young.”

  “Dark, she is.”

  “Haughty is he.”

  “Nonbelievers.”

  “Supernatural.”

  “Agents of the Evil One.”

  “Our children are in peril.”

  Rumor by rumor, suspicion of them intensified, until—"Did you hear? A small boy disappeared yesterday at play on the Bosporus"—one night they found themselves fleeing Constantinople just ahead of a mob. Alobar bribed a Greek captain to hide them among the stacks of
ivory tusks lashed to his deck, and it was from that vantage that they witnessed their home of nearly thirty years burning to the ground.

  “Hold back your sobs,” Alobar consoled, squeezing one of Kudra's dolphin thighs. “We have learned from this experience two important things. First of all, our Bandaloop experiment is successful; we have slowed, if not turned away, the wrinkle-carving, silver-sowing herald of death. About that we can rejoice. Second, we now are aware that a display of undue longevity creates problems in a community conditioned to age and die. In the future, we must take that cautiously into account.”

  He pointed to their burning house, which by then was but a glowing ember on the horizon. “We have lost a roof over our heads, a fine teapot, an overrated bath, and some carpets stained by our love. Let them go. We have aliveness, instead. And on this entire world, which I know for fact to be as round as a beet, there is no other pair like you and me.”

  Through her tears Kudra grinned. “I'm certain that we shall find other rugs to stain,” said she. “But even you will miss our bath, wait and see. As for the teapot . . .” With a flourish, she produced it from beneath her cloak.

  Gathering her to him, teapot and all, Alobar pretended to search under her wraps. “For what I know, you may have hid our bath in there, as well. Ah, I thought so! I feel something hot and wet.”

  “You may well wish it were a bath, before too long. Oh, what is my poor large nose going to think of a people who neither bathe nor wear perfumes?”

  “Well,” said Alobar, “my scheme is to condition you straightaway by introducing you to Pan. Of all who stink in the western lands, none stinks in such grand capacity as he. Pan is a god and is my friend.”

  “Only you, Alobar. Only you among men could claim a god for a friend. And naturally it would be a god unwashed and smelly.”

  She embraced him, swabbing his beard with kisses at the same moment that the ship plunged its black, wooden tongue into the murmuring mouth of the outer waters, knocking salt teeth loose in every direction; and as the lash lines shuddered from the recoil of that ancient kiss, as the mast pole tilted its neck like a voyeur for a better view, and the mainsail, with a raucous, swift gesture, shook a skyful of stars out of its folds and creases, Kudra and Alobar were carried off to Greece—uncertain, intrepid, possibly immortal, decidedly in love. . . .

  Pan remembered the breezy way they had crossed his pasture, fairly skipping as they walked, although that pasture, like all pastures in Arkadia, was weighted down with toe-stubbing rocks; and she had said, “It is so quiet out here I can hear my ears,” and he had shot back, “If your nose were your ears, the noise would be deafening.” Vaudeville was not dead. It wasn't born yet.

  Spying on them from a bushy crag, Pan had to admit that they were as agreeable a pair of homers as he'd ever laid eyes upon ("homers” was what the surviving Greek gods secretly called mortals, a disparaging term taken from the name of the so-called bard who had spread so many lies about them). Pan admired the bounce in their step, the fun in their voice, the way they paused every fifty yards or so to fondle one another; Pan was curious about the silver pot that the female homer cradled against her round mooey breasts as if it were a babe, and Pan was amused when the male homer, when invited to inspect one of the woman's silk slippers (meant for padding about upon carpets and now ripped and frazzled by stones), had rolled it up and smoked it.

  Oh, there was an air about them, all right, but it wasn't until they were directly beneath his perch that Pan, whose gaze had become fixed upon the prosperous sweep of the woman's hips—if ever a twat were a cornucopia, spilling forth meat puddings, hot wines, and sweets of every description: unending (shellfish) inexhaustible (peaches) infinite (mushrooms) feta feta feta forever, surely it was hers—it wasn't until her companion suddenly pinched his nostrils together and cried, “He's close by! I have got a whiff!", than Pan made the identification. Why, it was ex-King Whatsizname, that brash upstart from the north, the mad fellow who had gone off—was it fifty, sixty homer years ago?—to spike a petition on death's door. From the looks of him, death had considered his complaint. Well, well . . .

  Alobar was then one hundred and two, yet looked half his age, and the vigorous half at that. White hairs continued to populate his noble head, as if they were the familiars, the pale shadows of the chestnut filaments, which continued to dwell there, as well; but the phantoms, impotent, infertile in their ghost sheets, had failed to multiply and seemed content to just hang on, haunting the original inhabitants, who though they once might have quaked, had ceased to be afraid. Alobar had put on a few pounds and no longer carried himself like a warrior—Samye meditations had massaged the tension from his spine, Bandaloop transmissions had turned his spear-arm into a gaily waving thing—but pity the foolish young bully who noticed not the muscles turning and polishing themselves inside the lapidary of his tunic. His beard was trimmed after the Byzantine fashion, his various flashes of scar tissue had taken on a plum's brilliance, his sleet blue eyes looked out upon the world with a cub's curiosity and a papa bear's cunning. He blew playful puffs of slipper smoke through his nose.

  Speaking of noses, his consort sported a grandiose banana that was almost musical in the way it curved. Upon a more angular woman it might have been ridiculous, but this dark creature was such a walking barrage of burpy bulges and bending lines that her nose blended perfectly into her contours. From the thick parabolas of her eyelids to the pronounced balls of her now bare feet, she was nonstop curve, three nymphs' worth of curve, a foreign contradiction to Greek geometry. The drool that rained from Pan's lips as he spied on her would have frozen in mid-drip had a reliable source informed him that she was as old as the grandmothers who milked the goats in nearby valleys, toothless skeletons (this one had a mouthful of pearly brights) whose only curves were in backs bent double over walking sticks. Kudra was sixty-six, Pan, and as you were to learn, as much as match for you as any homer girl you had ever piped into a pasture. Of course, you, yourself, Mr. Horny, were long past your prime. . . .

  Yes, Mr. Goat Foot, despite the angry split between Rome and Constantinople, the tide of Christianity had not receded, but rather continued its slow, soupy flow into every nook and cranny of the land, until there was scarcely a pagan left whose heart and brain had not been lapped by it, lapped so long in many cases that old beliefs had been eroded, if not washed away, and you, Mr. Charmer, Mr. Irrational, Mr. Instinct, Mr. Gypsy Hoof, Mr. Clown; you, Mr. Body Odor, Mr. Animal Mystery, Mr. Nightmare, Mr. Lie in Wait, Mr. Panic, Mr. Bark at the Moon; yes, you, Mr. Rape, Mr. Masturbate, Mr. Ewe-bangi, Mr. Internal Wilderness, Mr. Startle Reaction, Mr. Wayward Force, Mr. Insolence, Mr. Nature Knows Best, you had been steadily losing your hold on the peasants and were now even weaker in flesh and spirit than when Alobar had seen you last. You were fading, and it was not a pretty sight, for you were a god, after all, with a god's strength; born, laughing and prancing, in the high golden circle where great and terrifying decisions are made. It hurt you to experience your popularity waning, it might have driven you to the wineskin were not the wineskin already, Mr. Sensual License, your lifelong friend; and it added to your misery to observe the effects of estrangement upon your former followers. In losing you, they were losing their body wisdom, their moon wisdom, their mountain wisdom, they were trading the live wood of the maypole for the dead carpentry of the cross. They weren't as much fun, anymore, the poor homers; they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address. That's why you were attracted to this unlikely couple that came skipping into your meadow, the woman in clear communion with the booming bells of her meat, the man unafraid of appearing frivolous in the eyes of Christ as he caressed a poppy while puffing on a shoe. You would have admired them even had they not been sniffing you out, which, of course, they were.

  Pan suspected, and rightly so, that the couple's gaiety, their cockiness and élan, was somehow the result of Alobar's successful petition against d
eath, and, more than anyone else, the beleaguered god probably could have imagined the anguished expression minted into the other side of the immortalist coin.

  To witness Kudra then, giggling and barefoot among the poppies, it would have been hard for anyone to picture her on her knees in a Constantinople pantry, weeping and wailing, shaking like the shuttle in an overachiever's loom, begging Shakti, Shiva, Kali, and Krishna to forgive her for rebelling against divine authority. (And it is divine authority, is it not, that insists that we must die? That grants us consciousness for a few decades, then, no matter how gloriously we have used it, snatches it away? Surely, the human race committed some heinous atavistic crime for the gods to inflict it with mortality, as they have; and isn't it a worsening of our crime, a compounding of our guilt, to try to escape our just punishment?) Even after absorbing the Bandaloop legacy (or part of it, at least), Kudra could never quite overcome the feeling that, in defying death, she was doing something wrong and would be made to pay for it in some prolonged and unspeakably excruciating way. When in Alobar's company, when meditating or bathing, she could exult in a body that remained firm and juicy while thousands about her withered away, but alone in the frottage of twilight, awaiting Alobar's return from the spice docks, fear would ooze out of the brown pit of her chin dimple, and, whimpering, she would turn from one deity to another, even bizarre Ganesh, with his elephant head, pleading for mercy for not having submitted to a widow's death in the rope yard.