Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  Actually, the priests proved to be good customers after Kudra decided to start manufacturing combustible cones from the raw aromatics in which she customarily dealt. Influenced by the Byzantines, the Western Church had become increasingly fond of the ritualistic burning of incense, ostensibly as an evocation of the sweet oxygens of heaven, but more likely a way of combating the concentrated funk of sweaty congregations. It appeared as if incense might become a rage in the cathedrals of Paris, so Alobar was not overly surprised when Kudra announced one morning that she wished to settle in the French capital and open a permanent shop.

  “A shop might be a smart idea,” agreed Alobar, “but when you say 'permanent,' you mean, of course, permanent compared to our usual knocking about.” They had been on the road for several centuries.

  “No,” said Kudra. “I mean permanent.”

  “I needn't remind you of the troubles in store should we hang around long enough to flaunt our perpetual freshness before the envious eyes of our steadily decaying fellow citizens. Ahem. We can realistically expect fifteen, maybe twenty years as Parisian incense merchants. But that will be a welcome change, a nice recess, and when the time comes, we shall move on.”

  “I am not moving on. I am finished with moving on. I want a shop, I want a home, and I want to stay there.”

  “Stay,” repeated Alobar. “How long, exactly, do you intend to stay?”

  “As long as . . . I don't know. As long as it damn well pleases me.”

  “Well, it better not please you beyond fifteen years or so, because when it dawns on the neighbors that we aren't aging—”

  “But maybe I will age.”

  "What?"

  Kudra gave him a look that you could spread on a bun. Her words, however, pricked him like the knife that does the spreading. “We are capable of aging, if we want to. We stopped the aging process and we can start it again. Haven't we fallen into a rut, being the same age for over five—or is it six—hundred years? I don't know about you, but I am a little fed up with it. I really wouldn't mind aging again.”

  Alobar couldn't believe how calmly, serenely even, she had spoken the unspeakable. Icy fingers tickled the harpsichord keys of his vertebrae. “You—you don't know what you're saying. Here, let me pour you some tea. You aren't awake yet, that's your problem.”

  “I am awake, darling. I have been awake most of the night. And the night before. I have thought about this through more sleepless nights than you could shake a tambourine at. And I am ready, willing, and actually eager to settle down in one place like normal people, and grow older like normal people. I am.”

  Alobar held back, refusing to speak until his vocal cords could be trusted not to quiver. Alas, he waited too long, overshot the mark, and heard his voice go well beyond evenness into petrification. The finest stone carver in France would have been proud to chisel his mark on any word in the following sentence: “Aging seems a high price to pay for normalcy.”

  “I do not care. I am willing to pay it. Besides, if I do not like getting older, I can always stop.”

  “Can you?” Simple little question chipped from solid basalt. “How do you know for sure?” Six words weighing in at a ton, not including punctuation. “We believe that we can start it and stop it at will, but the fact is, we have never tried. What if you cannot stop it, what if you just keep on growing older until, until . . .” The voice had become so rigid that it cracked. That's how molecules behave today, and that's how they behaved back then, though in those days nobody blamed molecules for brittleness any more than they credited them for plasticity.

  “Until what? Until I die? First of all, Alobar, neither you nor I is convinced that aging has to automatically lead to death. We have talked about that many times. Where is the courage of your convictions? It is not aging that leads to death, it is the belief that aging leads to death that leads to death. Do I speak rightly or wrongly?”

  “You are probably right,” squeaked Alobar, in his newly broken voice. “We do not know for certain.”

  “There is only one way to find out.”

  “But what if—”

  “What if I die? Then, by Shiva, I die! Dying does not strike me as such a horrible fate anymore.”

  “I cannot believe you are saying this. You are reverting. You are regressing. You are—”

  “I am facing the truth,” Kudra interrupted, “and the truth is, there is nothing so almighty wonderful about this long life of ours.” He recoiled as if she'd spit on him. She took his hand, kissing each spear-nicked finger in turn. “Darling,” she said, “look at us. We are a couple of Gypsies, running from the dogs of authority. From town to town we go, fair to fair, sleeping in fields, eating those awful mangel-wurzels, selling pretty smells to hypocrites, and hard-ons to yeomen. Where is the value in that? What is the purpose of—”

  “We are alive!” shouted Alobar. “And there—”

  “And there is not another couple like us on this whole round planet. Well, so what? Our uniqueness doesn't make the ground softer or give the beets flavor. It doesn't improve feudal conditions or reduce violence or contribute to the welfare of the people. What important thing have we accomplished in all these past six hundred years?”

  “We have beaten death,” said Alobar, and his tone was as firm and even as it had ever been. More than that, it was proud. “We have beaten death. What everyone who has ever been born since the beginning of time has longed to do, we have done. What could be greater than that?”

  “To what end have we beaten death? We can't teach others how to beat it, or else the Church would come down on us and wipe us out, and those we taught in the bargain. We can't sell this grand knowledge, for the very same reasons. We are forced to hide our supreme accomplishment as if it were a shameful crime. Where is the glory in that? Our lives are selfish and covert and none too easy. Methinks that you had a greater life back when you were mortal. You were a kind then, Alobar, a leader of men, and every day, every hour, was charged with significance.”

  “And threatened by the Reaper. Charged, but threatened, because to the Reaper a king is no less fodder than a slave. In my clan, a king was actually an easier harvest.”

  “Threatened by death you may have been, but look what a life it was that was threatened! And look at it now, my ragged Gypsy—”

  “We are about to move to Paris!”

  “Yes. I to ply the incense maker's trade, you, noble warrior, to be my assistant.”

  She paused. Together, they watched the sun break through the morning fog, coming back to the deserted fairgrounds like a dandy returning to the boulevard, prepared, when the moment was right, to strut some stuff. With a clover stem, Kudra traced the pathway of Alobar's veins, through which such endless tides of blood had run; she kissed the forehead that had been greeted by so many rising suns.

  “For you,” she said, “longevity for longevity's sake is enough. That is no longer satisfactory to me. Is there a position in the Kama Sutra that we have not mastered, a recipe for mangel-wurzel that our cook pot hasn't memorized? Oh, darling, I know that life is good, and that it still holds surprises for me, but maybe death is good, too; certainly it offers some surprise. Relax, now, don't get upset. My destination is an incense shop, not a tomb. But if I must age to have a happier life, then I will. And should aging lead to death, then I shall explore the planet of death awhile. Certainly I have been on the terrestrial voyage a nice long while. Long enough, frankly, that despite my love for you I do grow bored.”

  “I will wager that death be a million times more boring than life.”

  “If so, I shall come back to life. If we are truly immortal, we ought to be able to travel back and forth between both sides.”

  “Ha!” scoffed Alobar. “Yes, we ought to be able to. We ought to, all right, and if we had remained in the caves long enough, we probably could. We might have been able to dematerialize and rematerialize at will. But we cannot. At least, there is no hard evidence that we can. You talk about facing truth. The truth
is, Kudra, we hardly know what we are doing. There is so much more to this immortality business, so much more we might have learned from the Bandaloop, but, no, you had to go and see the world, you could not wait, so here we are half-educated and half-assed, conducting the greatest experiment in human annals and not fully qualified to conduct it correctly, just groping in the dark like mice in a bin. Why, oh why, did I let you talk me into leaving the caves before we had all the answers? Well, I can tell you one thing, you are not going to talk me into aging. If you want to risk it, go ahead, but you are stupid.”

  Kudra released his hand. “I may be stupid,” she said, “but I am not a coward.”

  And the sun pulled a cloud down over its ears. And the wind set to whistling a distracting tune. And crows that had been breakfasting on fairgrounds crumbs glanced at some clock or other and realized that they were late for work. And the cookfire flames retreated into the soundproof cellar of ashes. And the tea in the teapot nearly broke its neck in its haste to evaporate.

  There's an old axiom: “A couple's first quarrel is Cupid's laxative.”

  The next worst thing to a quarrel is a compromise. They made one at once.

  Since Alobar had been nearly forty chronological years older than Kudra from the start, it was agreed that Kudra could permit herself to age for four decades, more or less, stopping when she had “caught up” with her mate. If she could stop, that is. As for Alobar, he would cross his bridges as he came to them.

  They did move to Paris, they did open an incense shop. It was located on the rue Quelle Blague, next door to a brewery and perfumery, across the street from a monastery and cathedral. It did all right. Their marriage (it is fair to call it a marriage, though no formal ceremony ever transpired) did all right, too, which is to say the champagne was far from flat, although there were fewer bubbles per sip than there had been before the arguing started. They argued always about the same thing. It's best that way. If lovers have to argue, they might as well specialize. And the arguments usually concluded with Alobar's complaint that they had left the academy of the Bandaloop before they had completed their course.

  (Oddly enough, he refrained from pressuring her to return to the caves for additional study, perhaps because he was of the opinion that after so long a time there were no vibrations left to “study.” If Fosco of Samye could be believed, the Bandaloop had left the caves for good. Dance craze? Argenwhat?)

  If they ever reached a point where they seriously considered separation, it would have been in the cruel winter of 1664, a season that no amount of firewood nor any variation on the Kama Sutra could quite warm. Yet right in the middle of the shivers and the shouts, something came along to bind them, a slapdash patch job by the mason of common cause.

  Darkness arrived so abruptly that day it was as if a Gypsy had swept Paris under a walnut shell, good luck, ye gamblers, on guessing which one. By four o'clock, the street lamps were lit. Despite being called to work early, the lamps flickered dutifully, as though lighting a path for the snow. The snow would be along any minute. The clouds promised it and the lamps believed them. Alobar believed them, too. He also believed that there would be no more customers through the door that day, so he bolted it against thieves (a Gypsy who would steal daylight would surely steal incense) and the gales of January. He joined Kudra in the backroom.

  Paying him little heed when he entered, Kudra remained bent over a large candle, heating some newly purchased storax resin in a metal cup. “It's cold in here,” Alobar said. “Umm,” she answered, without looking up. As it relaxed its grip on itself, the wad of storax caused the room to smell like the center of a chocolate cream. Sometimes when a stressful person relaxes, he or she will, in a similar fashion, perfume the air 'round about them. Alobar sat down and tried it.

  The candle glow that held Kudra's head like an object in a showcase allowed Alobar to count five silver hairs in her mane. He hadn't noticed them until then. It was all he could do to keep from crying out. He wondered if she knew.

  His thoughts flashed back to the afternoon that he met her, eight years old and sobbing, fleeing the funeral pyre. He thought of her in the Himalayas, dressed as a boy; the glossy black explosion her tresses had made when they tumbled from the turban. Then he thought of that fateful day when the concubines' mirror had shown him his own pale intruder. Such a chain of events that little fellow had set off!

  So still for so long was Alobar that when he finally spoke, Kudra flinched. She must have forgotten he was there. The corona of candlelight and the vanilla halo of storax ringed her concentrically, as if she were twice blessed, a double madonna.

  “Kudra,” he said, “I have a splendid idea.”

  “And what splendid idea is that?” she asked, her head still bowed to the task.

  “Let's sail to the New World.”

  “The New World?”

  “Yes, the New World, the land they stumbled upon when they finally caught on that the Earth is round, as I, ahem, was saying all along.”

  “Only fortune hunters and Christian fanatics go to the New World. We are neither of those.”

  “Fortune hunters, Christian fanatics, and misfits. That last category describes us rather accurately.”

  “You may be a misfit, Alobar. I am not. Not any longer, at any rate.”

  He leaped to his feet and with two swift yanks reduced her silver quintet to a trio. Dropping the strands into the resin cup in front of her, he said, “In the New World, you wouldn't have to sacrifice your beautiful black hair.”

  Kudra stared at the hairs in the cup. She may have denied that there were tears in her eyes, but the reflection of candlelight upon tearwater proved otherwise.

  “See those,” said Alobar. “Those are worms from the rot of the grave.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. A single teardrop broke through the barricades and made a run for it, only to lose its footing and topple into the cup with the resin and the hairs. Was that a finer place than it had been?

  Alobar lay his hands on her shoulders and massaged them gently. “You don't have to go through this,” he said softly. “We can sail to the New World.”

  Kudra shook her head. “We made our own new world,” she said, “but something has gone wrong with it. I guess new worlds grow old. Pan was right. Immortality has its limitations.”

  “If only we had learned more in the caves!”

  “Oh, shit,” said Kudra. “Not that again.”

  “But, darling—”

  “Alobar, I'd like to be alone for a while.”

  “But—”

  “Please, Alobar!” She picked the hairs from the storax and flicked them to the floor. The teardrop had vanished, whether absorbed by resin, evaporated by candle heat, or welcomed into some mystery dimension, we cannot determine. No reward was ever offered for its return. “Please. Let me be.”

  So Alobar exchanged his slippers for boots that reached all the way to the hems of his knee breeches, pulled a woolen knee-length coat over his brocade waistcoat, tightened his lace collar until it pinched his Adam's apple, and went out into the night, where, by lamplight, the frosted cobblestone streets resembled marshmallow plantations at harvest time. Although he hadn't a destination in mind, he walked rapidly, soon finding himself in an obscene quarter of Paris, a squalid area without cobblestone or torch, an unpaved district whose frozen mud puddles reflected the shine of red lanterns. From every doorway, the lewd breath of prostitutes rose like hooks of smoke. Huddled against the cold, groups of them called to him as he passed, and he began to get ideas. A misunderstood husband usually is armed with a blunt instrument, its knob painted red like the face of a judge.

  The prostitute he eventually approached was tall and blonde. As they discussed rates, her companion, a dumpy, aged woman whom Alobar had not even considered, moved ever closer until she had wormed her way between him and the blonde. She had a rude, animal odor and so many wrinkles she could screw her hat on. Alobar was about to nudge her aside when the blond slapped her with her mu
ff, saying, “Get along, Lalo. This one's not desperate enough to want you.”

  “Lalo?”

  “Alobar! I thought that it be thee!”

  They shared a tearful embrace, then and there, while the blonde jeered and the first flakes of snow began to sift through the scarlet lanternshine. Then, he escorted her to the incense shop, walking slowly now for Lalo was a nymph no longer, but an old tart who had quit the brothels of Athens when the demand for her services waned. It was said that in Paris no whore was too old or too ugly to survive.

  Kudra was both saddened and delighted by the sight of her. She brought out their best cheese and served tea from the battered but cherished silver pot. Once Lalo was fed and warmed, they questioned her about Pan. The news was enough to sour the cheese.

  Pan was a ghost, now, Lalo said; you could look straight through him. His heartbeat was no stronger than a sparrow's. His pipes could still cause the flocks to shuffle their feet, could still raise the fuzz on a peasant's neck, but he lacked the vigor or the will to play them very often. Pan continued to visit men, according to Lalo, perhaps he always would, but in the modern world he came to them not in person, in sunlight, direct and immediate, but in dreams—erotic nightmares—or in flashes of terror, the kind that cause crowds to stampede for no reason, that they could neither explain nor understand. Lacking a direct relationship with Pan, modern Europeans were estranged from their flocks and their crops, from the natural world and, indeed, from their own natural impulses. “Grieve not just for Pan,” said Lalo, in a voice as scratched as the teapot, “but for thyselves, as well.”

  “And what of the nymphs?” asked Kudra.

  “It has been more than a century since Pan last chased a nymph. Without him in pursuit, the nymphs lost their identity, grew thin and mad. Many took their own lives. Others, like me, became whores to homers, seeking in each sexual coupling to re-create the old seduction, the old magic, the old feeling of unity.” She sighed forlornly. “I don't know why I hold on, but I do.”