Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  They put Lalo to bed in their flat upstairs. Then they took to their own bed, where, as the snow did its sums on the windowsill, they snuggled and talked, eventually formulating a plan of action: they would get Pan out of Europe.

  The New World was vast and virgin. They would make a place for him there, beneath smokeless skies where primitive equalities prevailed. Far from any city, they would establish a new Arkadia, complete with flocks of goats; and the pagan Indians, so hounded now by Christian missionaries, could join with them in a free landscape in which the old gods and goddesses would be given their due. Why, they would teach the Indians what they knew of Bandaloop immortality, and, moreover, Kudra would throw away her pennyroyal, and she and Alobar would at last have children of their own. They would found a race of immortals, with Pan as their principal deity. Yes! Wasn't this the grand destiny that had been eluding them all along?! They grew drunk with the vision of it while the sober snow looked on.

  When weather permitted, Alobar would strike out for Greece (Lalo could help Kudra with the business) to fetch Pan to Paris. They would nurse him back to health right there in the flat, while they saved and schemed for their passage across the Atlantic.

  “How much money have we on hand?” asked Alobar. “Here, let us get up and count it. I cannot wait to get started.”

  Kudra pulled him back down into the blankets. “We can count when it is daylight,” she said. “We have a new world to populate. I cannot wait to get started.”

  Prior to his departure for Greece, Alobar filled Kudra to the brim. She was saturated. She launched squadrons of sperm every time she sneezed. They circled Paris like microscopic angels, looking for harp concerts in the snow. Wherever she went, she leaked, leaving snail trails, sticky and translucent, upon work stool, carpet, and carriage seat. Needless to say, there was Standing Room Only in her uterus. Nevertheless, she failed to conceive. That the topography of her tummy offered no challenge to his abilities as a climber was the first thing Alobar noticed when he returned from Greece to her embrace. The second thing he noticed, raising his disappointed gaze from the abdominal plane, was that there had been an exodus of gray from her hair and that the skin around her eyes, which had been cobwebbing with crinkles, was now as smooth as custard. In the eight months that he'd been away, she looked to have youthed a good eight years.

  “Kudra, you did it! You reversed it!” So pleased was he that he forgot, for the moment, the vacancy in her womb. “Was it difficult? Did you have to labor at it? Will you promise me that you will never backslide again?”

  She ignored his jabber and concentrated on Pan, if “concentrated” is the accurate verb. She could determine Pan's whereabouts in the room only by focusing her nostrils upon the epicenter of the caprine aroma that was causing her entire inventory of incense to cry “uncle” and edge toward the door.

  “Greetings, Kudra,” said a familiar voice from the epicenter. “I thank thee for thy hospitality, puny and human though it be.”

  “You are welcome, sir,” said Kudra. “I think.” She turned to Alobar. “It is rather perplexing talking to someone you cannot see.”

  “Nonsense,” said Alobar. “Thousands of Christians do it every day. At least this god will talk back to you.” He shoved a wine flask into the eye of the stink storm. The flask tipped and pink Chablis commenced to gurgle out, though not a drop hit the floor. “I know what you mean, however. Traveling with an invisible who smells up the countryside is an ordeal I would hesitate to undertake again. I did not mind the stares and the insults and the occasional stone, but I have not enjoyed a warm meal or a decent night's rest since we left Arkadia. You would think rural innkeepers would be less particular.”

  “I fear it shall present a problem in Paris, as well.”

  “Indeed. He seems to have grown less observable and more pungent the further we journeyed from Greece. By the way, where's Lalo?”

  Kudra hesitated. “Uh, Lalo. Yes, well, Lalo left. Ran off with a sailor from Brittany.”

  “How inconsiderate. She was supposed to assist you in the shop.”

  “Lalo is a nymph, not a shopkeeper,” said Pan. “She only did what she was meant to do.”

  “Yes,” agreed Kudra. “And you are a god of the woods and fields. How will you fare in this environment?”

  “Perhaps not well,” said Pan. “Art thou aware that I be the lone god who never hast had a temple built in his honor? 'Tis true, not a single one. Men have always worshiped me outdoors.”

  Alobar retrieved the flask, now half empty. “Our shop shall be your temple for a time. As soon as we are able, we shall transport you to greener pastures and wilder company. Meanwhile, you'll have to make do. There are parks nearby where you may roam. We must, of course, contrive a disguise for your odor. Kudra and I shall attend to that right away. Now that she has come to her senses and stopped aging, I am confident she can provide a scent for you and a baby for me with equal ease. Eh, Kudra?”

  Kudra nodded in tentative accord. Alas, the tasks assigned her proved about as easy as skinning a rhinoceros with a set of false teeth.

  She knew from experience that patchouli wouldn't cut Pan's mustard. Frankincense and myrrh might have reodorized the diapers of sweet Baby Jesus, but they disappeared in the goat god's gulf of funk like rowboats in the Bermuda Triangle; and sandalwood, clean, gentle sandalwood, lasted as long, to the minute, as a snowball in hell. A resinoid of storax, fixed with tincture of labdanum (pressed from the fatty arteries of the rockrose), proved a sufficient camouflage for a walk around the block, but it had no more staying power than patchouli. As for civet, it only compounded Pan's indigenous musk, making his presence felt all the more strongly.

  Within a fortnight, Kudra had exhausted her arsenal of aromatics. There was nothing to do but dip into their savings (the New World fund was growing very slowly) and purchase some perfumes from the monks next door. They would be unable to sail anyhow if they couldn't conceal from curious and repulsed noses their phantasmal friend.

  What was required was a perfume penetrating enough to obscure the bouquet of rutting goat, yet not so overpowering that it called undue attention to itself: there was little to be gained by moving from one extreme to another on the olfactory scale. Ideally, moreover, the scent should have the capacity to linger, because a free spirit such as Pan could not be expected to go around dabbing at his wrists and neckbones every hour, as if he were a husband-hungry marquise at a Versailles ball.

  There were critics who complained that at 23, rue Quelle Blague the beer tasted like lilac water and the perfumes smelled of hops. As to the quality of the beer we cannot testify—perhaps a taste of it today would leave us sadder Budweiser—but when it came to perfumery, the monks were not inexpert. They, in fact, laid the foundation for the French fragrance industry. The fragrance house of LeFever descended directly from their early operations. The Quelle Blague monks were among the principal suppliers to the court of Louis XIV, where enormous amounts of perfumes were consumed. At the height of Versailles, twenty to thirty perfume fountains were gushing rosewater night and day, and the men wore squirt rings loaded with patchouli—when their mistresses approached, they fumigated themselves and the air about them with a fine spray. Louis himself changed his scent every thousand miles. But all this excess failed to compensate for the fact that the royal sewage was disposed of inadequately and that there was not one bath in the court. A visiting English writer wrote of Louis that “all the odoriferous perfumes his courtiers could get him would not ease his nose and still he smelled a filthy stinke.” This was a century and a half before the emergence of the great master blenders, but despite the monks' inability to put the Sun King's unwashed nose at rest, the fragrances they distilled were far from Primitive. Could they lay the wreath on Pan?

  Hardly. Their famous rosewater was no match for his glandular output, and, one by one, he sent lily, lilac, lavender, and linden whimpering off with their l's between their legs. It was a dark day for heliotrope when it was sprinkled upo
n the transparent god, and hyacinth was reduced to lowacinth in practically a flash. The monks' most expensive product was a recipe that mixed rose oil with cloves, cinnamon, mace, musk, ambergris, citron, and cedar. With some experimenting, Kudra probably could have duplicated it, but Pan was impatient and Alobar was worried, so they further fractured their finances and bought a vial. Expectantly, Kudra rubbed it into Pan's thigh wool, including in one of her passes the smooth underside of his scrotum, a swipe that gave him some pleasure and her some trepidation, for there is nothing quite like the intrusion of an invisible erection to thoroughly unnerve a woman. The old goat might have seized the moment—indeed, he reached for his pipes—had not Alobar threatened to address his private parts with a gesture appropriate to the preparation of eunuchs. So, Pan, richly anointed, departed for the grounds of the Louvre instead, only to return in a couple of hours, smelling all too familiar, and relating how his kibitzing, imperceptible to any eye, had disrupted a fashionable fête champêtre.

  The most effective scent purchased from the monks proved to be an essence of jasmine. The raw flowers had come from the South of France, where to this day are grown the finest jasmine blossoms in the world (unless one counts the Bingo Pajama Jamaican variety, about which virtually nothing is known). Ah, yes, leave it to jasmine to soothe the savage beast, for jasmine in its delightful way performs an olfactory pantomime of glad animal movements from times gone by. A few other flowers may be as sweet, but jasmine is sweet without sentiment, sweet without effeteness, sweet without compromise; it is aggressively sweet, outrageously sweet: “I am sweet,” says the jasmine, “and if you don't like it, you can kiss my sweet ass.” Expansive, yet never cloying; romantic, yet seldom melancholy, jasmine has the poise of a wild creature, some elusive self-sufficient thing that croons like an organic saxophone in the tropical night. Pan's glands heard jasmine's sugary howl and were hypnotized into partially suspending secretion.

  “Jasmine may stand us in good stead,” said Kudra. “Alone, however, it falls short of perfection. Like a grand orator, it requires a somewhat lesser voice to introduce it. I am positive that a qualified master of ceremonies can be recruited, and failing at that, it would not be ruinous should it be forced to introduce itself. But what is a great orator without a strong platform to stand upon, without an enveloping auditorium to hold his words? Do you follow me? Jasmine is longer-lasting by far than any floral we have tried, but we must find a theater to contain it, an anchor, if you will, to keep it in place, because to be efficient it needs to endure at least thrice as long as it does now.”

  In other words, they could use a top note and absolutely required a fixative and a base.

  Since they couldn't afford to commission such a blend from the monks, Kudra must develop it. She had worked with aromatics much of her long life—we are talking seniority here—but having had no experience with distillation, she was not in the true sense a perfumer. Fortunately, jasmine oil is obtained by extraction rather than distillation, and that she could manage. After a period of trial and error, she found lemony citron an acceptable top note; it gave the featured jasmine a brief but flattering introduction. As for fixative, ambergris was already in wide use, and while its detractors might deride it as “behemoth barf,” a finer fixative has yet to be discovered. In this case, however, ambergris failed to deliver total satisfaction. It nailed the bouquet to the perfume, all right, but it didn't nail the perfume to Pan—at least not for very long. Since ambergris couldn't be improved upon, what this meant was that the base note, in addition to its usual function as an accommodating and complementing “platform,” must also assist the fixative in prolonging the life of the aroma. A very special base note was called for. Kudra didn't find it right away. Months, in fact, dragged by as she experimented and researched.

  In the meantime, a sardonic cuckoo was scrambling Alobar and Kudra's nest eggs, replacing them with obnoxious layings of its own.

  At the appointed hour when courtiers of Louis XIV were finally to call at the shop to test its wares, Pan returned prematurely from a stroll in the park, his malodor at high mast due to exercise and the sappy influences of spring. The courtiers, three in number, arrived on his heels. “My goodness,” said the first courtier; “Snit,” said the second; “Phew,” said the third. Whatever credibility incense may have held for them was immediately lost. Lost, too, was the most profitable market to which Kudra had ever aspired.

  Pan's lasting impression also cost her several smaller sales, and this at a time when expenses were on the rise. As the hunt for an effective base note went on, money was continually being invested in raw materials that were of no use in incense making. And, now, of course, there was another mouth on the premises, a mouth that, though it could not be seen, watered at mealtime nonetheless. They had a cash flow problem, and unless it was solved, they would never ankle up that gangplank in Marseilles.

  In the midst of worrying about finances and Kudra's failure to conceive—none of his deposits seemed to earn interest—Alobar was stopped in the street one day by a neighborhood monk who inquired in the rude manner of children, policemen, and journalists if he and his wife employed heathen practices. The monk was no more specific than that, but Alobar instantly assumed the reference was to longevity. “You mean like that old Bandaloop, Methuselah?” he shot back, and as the Christian brother gargled the froth of his bewilderment, he hurried away in a chilly sweat to warn Kudra, rightly or wrongly, that they'd been found out once again.

  For all the reaction he got from Kudra, he might as well have told her that the poodle gods were pooping on the paths of the Louvre. She was up to her elbows in a basket of bark, the leprous but fragrant epidermis of some African tree; unraveling its history, reading its fortune, learning its language, its vocabulary of botanical suffering; coaxing from its ancient sores an iridescent pus that smelled of rains and nests and yellow fruits squashed beneath the feet of heavy animals. “This could be it,” she confided, milking. A single bead of resin rolled out of an ulcer and was caught in a vial. Somewhere in Africa a tree stood naked. “This could be the one to support the jasmine.”

  “Little good it will do if the monks set opinion against us.”

  When she neglected to respond, he said, “Kudra, what is to be our next move?”

  “Express the bouquet from the resin.”

  “No, no, haven't you been listening? There may be trouble over—”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Well, Alobar, I have been thinking. . . .” She held another anguished crust of bark over the candle flame, squeezing and pulling until its black boil popped and out bubbled the feverish exudation, hard pearls of honey glistening as if in a prolonged delirium brought on by the pestilence of time. “I have been thinking that the altogether smartest thing would be to dematerialize—and then rematerialize in the New World.”

  Alobar looked stunned.

  “Don't you see, that would save us money and time. We would not require a sou for passage nor would we be forced to bob about in the oceans with a horde of vomiting missionaries. Why, if Pan could dematerialize along with us—he is all but dematerialized already—we would not even need to complete his perfume. Locating the perfect base note may yet prove impossible.” She sniffed unconfidently at the wooden warts in her fingers.

  “Kudra, we do not know how to de- and rematerialize!”

  “Then it is time we learned! Have we lived seven hundred years for naught? Except for our longevity, we are no closer to the divine than ordinary folk. Our practices have kept us alive, but they have not revealed to us one divine secret nor one speck of the magic of the gods.” She laid down the ugly chips and faced him. He commenced to wring his hands.

  “Kudra . . .” he whined.

  “But for his age, Alobar the great individualist is just like any common man.”

  “Kudra! We don't know—”

  “What happened to the bold adventurer who seduced me in more ways than one up on the roof of the world?”

  “Kudra! Yo
u are talking death, I sense that you are.”

  “There is no death. There are only different levels of life. You must know that by now.”

  “You who ran away from the funeral pyre! How can you speak with such authority?”

  Dealing the bark basket a blow, much as she'd once kicked a wicker of rope, Kudra sent it spinning, setting into motion a brief blizzard of scabious crumbs.

  “Damn you, Alobar! By the blue piss of Kali, how you frustrate me! How could any man venture as far as you have and then be unwilling to go further? Is it a failure of imagination that has snipped off your curiosity, or a failure of nerve that leaves you so eager to settle for the one concession you have won from the fates?”

  “One concession, eh? You make it sound so trivial. Let me tell you something, Kudra. Each and every morning when I awake, my eyes brim with tears at the realization that I am still here breathing when all who shared my natal day have for half a millennium been dust; each and every morning when first I see the dawn ray take your sleeping face tenderly in its tongs, I tremble in a kind of ecstasy that you and I continue to lie in love together, century after juicy century, while every other pair of lovers who have lived has had to helplessly watch their passion suffocate in the sags of their sickly flesh. Now that may strike you as some small, unworthy thing . . .”

  Kudra took his cheeks in her hands (he was clean shaven then, in the seventeenth-century style) and kissed him. She shook her head from side to side, blinking back a few tears of her own. “No, my darling, it strikes me as magnificent beyond description.” Again she kissed him. “But it happens not to be the end-and-all. If a person have a glass, does that mean he should refuse a bottle; if he have a bottle does it mean he should not want wine? Come now, darling, do not pull away, but hear me out. We have crossed the threshold of the house of divine knowledge, yet we linger in the anteroom admiring its wallpaper and shun the main chambers of the house. Why is it we resist exploring the mansion to which it has been our unique privilege to gain admission?”