Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  “Good sir, I do not attack thy philosophy. I only warn that it be a dangerous instrument in the unfeeling hands of the foolish and corrupt.”

  “Please inform me, then,” said Alobar sarcastically, holding his stuffy pose, “by what authority a cunt-of-the-woods issues warnings concerning the future. Among your more obvious talents—”

  “Alobar!” This time, Kudra's voice was prickly with disapproval.

  “—do you harbor the gift of prophecy?”

  “Alas, I cannot make that claim for myself, sir, but ere I romped in Arkadia, I lived for years at Delphi, where I was intimate with the priests and priestesses who served the Oracle, and where I was privy to much oracular prognosis. Now I can sense that the boldness of my speech hast ruffled thy feathers, nevertheless thou must hear yet another prophetic plea. Certainly thou dost recollect Pan's words to the effect that mankind hast been too puny in his mind and heart and soul to deserve immortality. Yea? And certainly, also, to have conquered age to the extent that thou hast, thou must have done good strengthening work in thine own mind and heart and soul. Someday, however, a thousand years from today, there wilt be men who seek to defeat death by intelligence alone. They wilt combat age and death with potions and the like, medical weapons that their minds have invented, and age and death will shrink back from them and their medicines. Alas, because they fight with reason only, making no advance in the area of soul and heart, true immortality wilst be denied them. However, they must not be allowed to attain even the false immortality that their mental facility doth gain for them, for huge evil will be conducted if they shouldst. Thus, thou must vow upon this day that shouldst thou be living still when these events transpire, that thou willst battle them and refuseth prosperity to any immortalist thrust that doth not rise from man's soul and heart as well as his mind. Do promise me now.”

  “I am sorry,” said Alobar, “but I cannot do that. Your intentions are good, so therefore I shall consider your request, but I do not make promises to just anyone about just anything.”

  The nymph whirled, intent upon returning to the thickets, but Kudra detained her. “Lalo,” she called. “My husband claims, with some justification, to be king over himself, yet this morning he has momentarily lost sovereignty over his masculine pride. While he struggles to regain government over that portion of his kingdom, I wish to offer you my own promise, for what it is worth. It is presumptuous to imagine myself alive a thousand years hence, but should that miracle occur, I will do what I can to satisfy your plea. I promise.”

  “Thank thee, my lady, I thank thee well. If Pan were aware of these matters, I am sure he wouldst express his gratitude at great length.” She winked at Kudra. Kudra winked back. For a second, the two women, the one statuesque and umber, the other petite and rosy, smiled at one another knowingly. Then, as quick as a rabbit (a rabbit with a touch of arthritis), Lalo shot into the bushes and was gone.

  Alobar made to speak, but Kudra hushed him. “Look up there,” she whispered. High above them, barely visible upon the very pinnacle of the mountain, illuminated in the most resplendent manner by noonday sun, heel and horn almost silver, almost holy; stance jaunty yet solemn, regal yet a bit ridiculous; bearded head held at an angle suggestive both of an affection for the variety of life 'round about it and a suffering as primeval and sharp as the peak itself, stood Pan, reeds to lips, and though they scarcely could hear his tune, they felt it in the greasy stirring of the poppies and the mute breath of the snake that sunned itself on a nearby ledge. They watched him in silence for a while, inexplicable tears in their eyes; then Alobar, assisted, it seems, by sister Echo, yelled up the slope, “Lalo! Lalo! I promise, also! I promise! You have my word word ord ord.”

  Kudra gave him a sloppy kiss. She took his hand. She clasped the teapot. Off they went, over the pastures, breathing in the circular Bandaloop way, locked in a silence finally broken by Kudra's laughter when Alobar lit up her other shoe.

  If wild animals could talk, would they talk like cartoons? Would the dismal swamp resound with shrill, befuddled, childlike voices; a cute choir of cuddly Kermits delivering gentle froggy inanities?

  Or would beasts converse in the style of Hemingway, in sentences short, brave, and clear; each word a smooth pebble damp with blood; aboriginal speech, he-man speech, an economy of language borrowed by Gary Cooper from frontiersmen who borrowed it from Apache and Ute?

  We ask, “Did you see two people pass this way, a man and a woman, walking north?”

  The stag shakes its antlers. “Nope,” he says.

  “The woman was dark with a ripe body, the man had white in his hair. Sure you didn't spot them?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, how about you?” we ask a fox. “Have you seen a couple in Byzantine garb heading in the direction of Bohemia?”

  The fox is slow to speak. “Tonight I dined on loon at the pond,” he says. “It was a good meal. Food has an excellent place in my values. Quiet has an excellent place in my values. The forest has been quiet tonight. It is a good thing being a fox when the forest is quiet.”

  “We apologize for disturbing your peace, but we're searching for a husband and wife, racially mixed, who may be in sort of a daze because they recently had an audience with Pan—you know what that means—and are either wandering aimlessly through the woodlands trying to figure out what to do next, or else are making their way by the stars to Bohemia, where the man at one time—longer ago than you might imagine—had an important job and a large family. They may have passed this way.” We pause hopefully.

  “The hunt was good,” says the fox. “The moon was right. There was a fresh breeze. A man and a woman would have spooked the loon. What a good thing the forest is when it is left to the fox and the loon.”

  Is that the way animals would talk?

  As it turned out, Alobar and Kudra did pass through that forest, before or after the fox's dinner; did hike, guided by constellations, northward across Serbia, Croatia, and the Kingdom of Hungary, arriving in the summer of 1032 (or thereabouts) in that area where the feudal state of Bohemia bordered the Slavic territories. There was no trace of Alobar's former citadel. It had burned, like much of the ancient world, in the medieval furnace, its ashes swept under the rolling carpet of civilization. Compared to Western Europe, Bohemia and the Slavic territories were still wild and thinly populated, offering many a fox a place to linger over a bit of loon, like some remote animal ancestor of Ernest Hemingway, but even there in the Eastern backwash, the gold-dust twins, Christianity and Commerce, had set up their crooked wheel of fortune.

  Kudra had the odd feeling that she had been there before. Alobar stared into the lacquered grapes of her eyes and asked if the name “Wren” meant anything to her. “Nothing,” she insisted. They didn't speak of it again, but the déjà kept right on vuing. Once, Alobar saw a huge hound at a distance. “Mik!” he cried, running after it. The dog turned on him and might have chewed off some of his best parts had not its owner intervened. Ghosts are good for short-term thrills, in the long run they're boring. Alobar and Kudra departed for Aelfric, but not before purchasing a sack of beets.

  Aelfric was four or five times its previous size. It had a wall around it. “Why do you wish to enter here?” asked a soldier at the gate where orchards used to stand. Alobar peeked in at the narrow, crooked streets, deep in garbage, flowing with sewage; dark shadows enlivened by the chirping of rats. If this is what people must resort to in order to operate their shops and worship their Jesus, perhaps they should return to the hunt and the morning star, thought Alobar. “State your business,” demanded the guard. By then, Alobar had lost considerable interest in searching for his progeny. “Bandaloop business,” he said brightly. The guard scowled, but his feet executed an abrupt and completely involuntary dance step, leaving the soldier staring at his own boots, as if he might arrest them for lewd conduct, or, at least, insubordination. Alobar and Kudra hurried away only to pause a short while later near the place where the shaman had lived.
r />   “Why are we stopping in this field?” asked Kudra.

  “I have to replace a door,” replied Alobar, but what he did was build a fire and roast beets.

  “I take it we are not to explore Aelfric,” said Kudra.

  “Wasn't a glimpse enough? If your grandchildren were citizens of Aelfric, would you be anxious to meet them?”

  “Maybe. Out of curiosity.”

  “My curiosity does not extend to dung beetles, even if they crawled out of my family tree. Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others.”

  “Then pass me a beet,” said Kudra. And he did.

  The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

  In the pit of that vast stomach—sloshing with dark and vinegary juices, kindled by a thousand-year heartburn—major figures stimulated acute contractions, only to be eventually digested, adding to the bloat. Clovis, Charlemagne, Otto I, William the Conqueror, Rurik the Viking, Pope Leo, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gutenberg, and a platter of other renowned generals, kings, philosophers, and popes fermented and dissolved in that mammoth maw. Our little couple, however, our Alobar and Kudra, remained intact and indigestible, like the hard octopus beaks that sicken the stomachs of whales, causing them to vomit the ambergris that bonds the bouquet in great perfumes. Like octopus beaks, our couple. Or maraschino cherries.

  More than a decade after his death, Nikolai Lenin's body was removed from its sepulcher in the Kremlin and a belated autopsy performed. Four maraschino cherries were found in Lenin's colon. Perfectly preserved, as whole and candy red as the day (or days) that he swallowed them, the cherries were in better shape than Lenin himself. It is rumored that maraschino cherries are prepared with a chemical resembling formaldehyde, thus can neither be assimilated nor eliminated but must ride in the baggage rack of the bowels for a lifetime, like the seabags of the Flying Dutchman. If that is the case, and one is prepared to believe the worst of maraschino cherries, looking, as they do, as if they were picked in the orchards of Pluto; as if they were carved out of spoiled neon; as if they were vegetable visitors from the twenty-third century, beamed here to make us appreciate our old-fashioned beets; if it is true, then we could say that Alobar and Kudra were maraschino cherries lodged in the tubes of history's paunch.

  On the other hand, octopus beaks, pointing to the birth of future fragrances, might be a more accurate and lyrical analogy.

  At any rate, Alobar and Kudra survived wars, robbers, fires, pillages, plagues (including the Black Death of 1347–1350) and the intolerances of the Church; survived freezing winters, famines, Gothic art, and uncomfortable furniture; survived, most importantly, the “natural” process of aging, which, according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it—neither nature nor God would stoop so low.

  Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats, and the couple's victory over aging created as many problems for them as did witch-hunts and feudal strife. Nowhere could they remain for more than a decade or two. In those rough times, people aged even faster than we do today, making it all the more noticeable when Kudra's and Alobar's gums remained a-bristle with teeth. They did their best to maintain a low profile, but, let's face it, they weren't the most inconspicuous pair to mosey down the medieval pike. For one thing, they were obviously frying with love and lust for one another in an age when romance simply did not exist within the bounds of matrimony. Virtually all marriages in the Middle Ages were arranged between strangers, and the Church disallowed divorce. Therefore, romantic love was almost exclusively a function of adultery. It was for adulterers that troubadours sang their courtly ballads, it was for the attention of another fellow's wife that the jouster risked the lance. When Alobar and Kudra refused to participate in the continental pastime (in their centuries together, Alobar was cuckolded only by Pan, and that was not precisely cuckoldry, that was . . . something else), it escalated the suspicions already aroused by her exotic coloration and his regal manner, by their funny way of breathing and their tendency to wash. So they were obliged to keep moving. A few years in Heidelberg, a few near Rome; green seasons in Flanders, dry seasons on Crete. Fortunately, they subscribed to no magazines. The post office would have gone nuts.

  Early in the 1300s, attending the fair at Beaucaire in the south of France, they encountered a group of people whose proclivity for travel made Kudra and Alobar seem as though they were chained to a stump. These nomads rumbled from town to town, fair to fair, in brightly colored wagons. Variously called Logipciens, Bohemians, or Gypsies, they were ostensibly itinerant metalworkers, but music and magic were their true vocations. Although the Gypsies were new to Europe, Kudra had known them in India and could converse in their dialect. Moreover, her pigmentation was the same shade as theirs. Their chief invited her to join them. Reluctantly, he agreed to include Alobar.

  For the next half-century (time flies when you're having fun), they lived as Gypsies, bumping over the quasi-roads of the continent in a red and orange donkey cart, sleeping in a tent of woven fabrics kept precariously in place by stones, warming themselves with tezek, that charming fuel made of cow dung and straw. They indulged in some serious horseshoeing and harness making, but more frequently their band earned its living amusing, and sometimes fleecing, visitors to holy sites, festivals, and fairs. The Gypsies danced, they sang and strummed, they navigated a pea beneath a walnut shell so slickly you'd wager your last sou that it was beneath the one next door. When they shook their tambourines and sistrums, in voluptuous poses, feudal barons found them irresistible, but that made them all the more hateful in the eyes of the pious and grave, a reaction that was for Alobar a source of endless delight. Kudra chided him for it mildly, but he was rarely happier than when savoring the fear and disgust that welled up in proper Christians at the sight of their rattling, tinkling troupe.

  The opinion that “all good things must come to an end” is a confession of fatalism that the immortalist hand of Alobar would never sign. Nonetheless, he realized his days as a Gypsy were numbered when he surprised several of the chief's sons ransacking his and Kudra's belongings, searching for their presumed “elixir of youth.” As a matter of fact, their tent and wagon had been broken into thrice before, but Alobar had written it off to routine Gypsy thievery and to the Gypsies' insistence on treating them as second-class citizens. Claiming to be the direct descendants of the biblical Cain, the Gypsies considered themselves a race elite. It was obvious that their ethnocentricity would never allow complete acceptance of outsiders, no matter how compatible. They not only stole from Kudra and Alobar, but they also served them last at communal meals and required them to perform occasional menial chores. For example, on Saturdays Kudra was expected to clean the chief's wagon and launder his many brilliant scarves.

  It was while she was sweeping out the executive cart one day that she noticed that the chief's wife's famous crystal ball had been left uncovered. For a while Kudra managed to ignore the naked sphere, but at last curiosity got the best of her and she peered into it, shyly at first, then so piercingly that the chief's laundry could have been hung out to dry on her gaze. She saw nothing in the ball. There was nothing to see. It was, after all, a mere lump of polished glass. As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seashell, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed. There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey, and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness. When Kudra shut her eyes to rest them after their intense probing of the crystal innards, a vivid scene unfolded
in her mind. She saw Alobar and herself, bound with rope, in the process of being tortured by the Gypsies, who were demanding a map to the fountain of youth.

  When she returned to their tent, Kudra told Alobar of her vision. “That settles it,” he said. That night, when the moon had set, they stole away. As they disappeared into the woods, they glanced back to see shadowy figures advancing on their tent.

  In the excitement of their escape, Kudra had neglected to inform Alobar that she had consulted the crystal ball a second time ere she left the chief's wagon that Saturday. A finely detailed scene had again flashed before her mind's eye as she rested after examining the crystal. This second vision seemed far less urgent, which is why she put it aside, but it was stranger, more difficult to interpret. In it, a tall black man, blacker by several shades than she, was beckoning to her, laughing all the while. The black man wore the oddest clothes she had ever seen, and the oddest item in his wardrobe was his cap. It turned out to be not a cap at all, but a swarm of bees.

  Although finished with Gypsies, per se, Alobar and Kudra retained their vagabond life-style, working the European fair circuit on their own. Alongside booths overflowing with cotton, furs, metals, wine, tea, Venetian glass, meat, produce, and livestock, they sold or traded aromatics to a populace that was beginning to appreciate pretty fragrances, despite—or because of—the fact that it had yet to accept the concept of the bath. When business was poor, Kudra slipped into her Gypsy skirt and danced the dodole, Alobar accompanying her on tambourine. Less than approving of the leers his wife's dancing elicited from fairgoers of masculine gender, it nonetheless amused Alobar to meditate upon her real birthdate as she undulated those secretly ancient hips and loins; and, of course, it invariably elevated his mood when the priests came by to consign them to hell for their detestable display.