Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  Technically, Carnival had commenced January 6, with the ball of the Twelfth Night Revelers, and had been underway throughout the downcast days of February, but so far Carnival had been a matter of club parties and society balls, closed to the public and made all the more private, all the more small, by the unusually low temperatures. Now, on the Thursday before Mardi Gras, itself—five days before climactic Fat Tuesday—it was sewing on sequins, dusting off cowbells, and ambling into the streets. On Saturday, ninety-six hours of uninterrupted spectacle and debauchery would begin. The parade of the Knights of Momus would, that very Thursday evening, prepare the way.

  Priscilla, Marcel, and Alobar were able to watch the Momus parade from the balcony of the sublet flat, where they sipped champagne and munched Cajun popcorn. For the Friday parade, they had to fight for space on the curbs of Canal Street. Saturday evening, they were back on the balcony for a third parade, and later that night, the three of them, en costume, attended a minor but nonetheless ornate ball to which Pris had wrangled invitations. There was something just a trifle unreal about dancing with a thousand-year-old man, Priscilla thought, particularly when the man was dressed as an astronaut chipmunk.

  No less than four major parades were scheduled for Sunday. As they sat around the kitchen table Sunday morning, deciding which one they would attend, Marcel thanked Pris for her hospitality, admitting to her that the festivities in New Orleans were grander in every way than Carnival in Nice. That statement prompted from Alobar an expression of disappointment.

  “New Orleans Mardi Gras is a sham,” he said. “So is Mardi Gras in Nice. It's all a sham these days. No, I am not living in the past, but believe me, some things have changed for the worse.”

  He unbuttoned his shirt, for he was preparing to soak in a tub of hot water. “In olden times, Carnival had meaning. During the forty days of Lent, the forty days before Easter, almost the entire population would abstain from eating meat and drinking spirits. Many of them gave up sexual intercourse, as well, a most unhealthy expression of self-denial, I can attest, after my recent experience behind bars. Anyway, Carnival was a final fling, it was a last indulgence of rich foods and wine and lust before the severe austerity of Lent. When you're facing a forty-day fast, that last spree can be intense. It has physical significance as well as deep psychological penetration. The old Mardi Gras was charged with real meaning. Today . . .” He sighed. “It's entertaining, but it's empty. It's just another big party. An opportunity for some to spend money and others to make money. It isn't connected to anything larger than itself. I've been a foe of Christianity all my life, but Christianity gave meaning to the fun and the rowdiness, made it more fun and more rowdy. You can't raise hell when you don't believe in hell.”

  “Pardon, Alobar,” said Marcel, “but Carnival predates Christianity, does it not?”

  “Ha ha. I'll say. By fifty centuries. It goes back to ancient Hellas—Greece—to the shepherds who worshipped a certain god named Pan. Pan.” He sighed again. “We don't have Pan in our lives anymore, either.”

  “So you say we have kept the form of Mardi Gras but lost the content?”

  “Yes. It's a shallow experience nowadays, and inevitably unsatisfying.”

  Alobar excused himself and went to his bath.

  “He seems sad,” said Priscilla.

  “He is not used to being old.”

  “Even after a thousand years?”

  “During most of that time he was a man in the prime of life. He is amazing. He is stronger than he was a month ago. Younger, also. But, you see, Mademoiselle Pris, he needs a woman if he is to recover his youth. Perhaps every man does.” Marcel closed his eyes. Priscilla could tell that he was thinking of V'lu. “Ah, yes, but Alobar cannot get a woman because he is too old. The double bind, they call it. You are correct, he is sad.”

  Feeling even more despondent after his soak-and-cool, Alobar elected to forgo the parade, sending Priscilla and Marcel downtown alone. On Monday, he complained that the continuous beating of drums and frequent drunken whoops had kept him awake all night, and he might have remained in the flat again were it not for two unexpected events.

  “The Krewe of Pan is parading today,” said Priscilla. “I'd forgotten there was a Krewe of Pan.”

  “With so many krewes, it is only fair,” said Marcel.

  “It'll be a sham,” said Alobar. “A desecration, in fact. But I suppose I ought to go.”

  While they were studying a map of the parade route, deciding exactly where they should station themselves for the most auspicious view, a United Parcel Service delivery van pulled up outside, and its driver rang their bell. Priscilla signed for the package. It was from Seattle. From Wiggs Dannyboy.

  The note inside was handwritten in red ink. It resembled something Noog the necromancer might have scratched into the lungs of a hen. Marcel and Alobar were baffled. “Let me have a peek,” said Priscilla, wondering if an addled land crab had not deposited its string of eggs upon the page.

  “Here are your . . . Mardi Gras . . . costumes,” she read.

  They unfolded the three piles of green satin, crimson velvet, and chicken wire and held them at arm's length, looking from one to the other in a manner both a- and be- mused.

  Beet suits.

  The three beets made their way through the French Quarter, seeking to root themselves at the intersection of Royal and Canal, where the Quarter met the business district. It was slow going. For blocks, they would be swept along by the throng, only to have the tide reverse itself so that they were forced to fight the current and barely moved at all.

  Through eyeholes in their stems, the beets were bombarded by garish colors and flashes of light popping from sunlit sequins, rhinestones, and glass. They passed among the swaying and bobbing fronds of a forest of feathers, overshadowed at times by towering headdresses that must, each one, have left a hundred birds shivering in their birthday suits, and at other times were caressed or tickled by wayward ostrich plumes. The muffled echo of an ocean of mythology welled up around them; a surf of Orientalism broke over them, spraying them with sultans and caliphs, prophets and potentates, gladiators and porters, harem girls and dragons, licentious Babylonians and passive Buddhas. This strange Asia shimmered in the sun, and the river of gods and monsters overflowed its banks, knocking the pinnings from under tourists and photographers.

  Countless pictures were snapped of the three beets, countless hands waved at them, countless lips smiled. Who among the thousands might have guessed that inside the ambulatory vegetables were a genius waitress, the world's finest perfumer, and a man older than the first mosquito to preen its proboscis in the fever marsh that was once New Orleans? But, then, who could guess the identity of any of the costumed or the masked? And wasn't that—and not the lust and the gluttony—the true beauty of Mardi Gras? A mask has but one expression, frozen and eternal, yet it is always and ever the essential expression, and to hide one's telltale flesh behind the external skeleton of the mask is to display the universal identity of the inner being in place of the outer identity that is transitory and corrupt. The freedom of the masked is not the vulgar political freedom of the successful revolutionary, but the magical freedom of the Divine, beyond politics and beyond success. A mask, any mask, whether horned like a beast or feathered like an angel, is the face of immortality. Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we'll have nothing to hide.

  There was a definite distance, a gulf, between those in costume and those in daily dress. In the caste system of Carnival, the unmasked were instantly relegated to a position of inferiority. They were peasants, outsiders, mere spectators no matter how energetically they attempted to participate. For example, gangs of college boys, in beer-wet T-shirts and vomit-encrusted jeans raced through the Quarter shouting “Show yer tits! Show yer tits!” and when some woman upon a balcony would oblige, pulling up her front in a gesture of mammary theater, the boys would go berserk, hooting and slobbering, scratching themselves, slapping their thighs, punching one another an
d rolling on the cement, like a band of baboons shorn of its baboon dignity, but although these raunchy gangs had become increasingly a dominant force in Mardi Gras, there was a sense in which they were not a part of it at all; for all their lewdness, they were unconnected to the true lewd heart of Carnival, which must beat behind a disguise, grand or grotesque, in order to be heard by the gods, for whom Mardi Gras, ultimately, is defiantly and lovingly staged.

  As the beets neared Canal Street, the jostle of the multitudes grew turbulent. According to the news, it was the largest attendance in the history of New Orleans Mardi Gras. City fathers had feared that the bees might keep people away, but widespread stories of the swarm had had just the opposite effect. Thousands came to New Orleans with the expressed desire of seeing the bees. And bee costumes were the most popular, by far, that holiday. Human bees, solitary or in swarms, were everywhere. Legion were the pretty girls who were “stung” by insects six feet in height.

  As for the real bees . . . well, who knew? Numerous sightings were reported throughout the city, but officials were unable to confirm a single one. Madame Theo, a fortune-teller on St. Philip Street, claimed that the swarm had returned to Jamaica, a prospect that relieved many people and disappointed still more.

  In the all-black Zulu parade, at least one float had borne a sign, REMEMBER BINGO PAJAMA.

  The beets managed to reach Royal and Canal without being pulverized or pollinated. They pushed to curbside, where the espresso brewer from the coffeehouse, with his kid brothers, had staked a narrow claim. As prearranged, the beet named Priscilla gave each of the boys ten dollars of Marcel's money, and they whooped off to buy beer and to yell, “Show yer tits!” to anyone who was suspected of legitimately possessing tits. The beets took their place at the curb.

  Since the Pan krewe's parade had not yet begun to pass, the trio waited there, gaping through their stems at the intoxicated fantasy surrounding them. All at once, two vegetable cries penetrated the jazzy din. Not thirty feet from them, also on the curb, stood a beautiful black woman, less than en costume, yet not wholly straight. Apricot and artichoke were the colors of her gown, which clung to her like a child about to be separated from its parents, and cream was her turban, fastened with a glass jewel the size of half a peach. Aside from gown and turban, and spiky, pink, rather vaginal shoes, she wore no adornment, but she appeared as much a creature of Carnival—mysterious, alluring, fanciful—as any befeathered Sheba or she-bee in the multitudes. Perhaps it was because disguise and deception were second nature to her, or it could have been simply that she was one of those persons destined to be exotic even should they never stray from home. It was V'lu.

  At the sight of her, there was an immediate and abrupt schism among the beet population of Mardi Gras. One beet peeled off to the left, heading for V'lu. A second beet whirled, if one could be said to whirl in so dense a congregation, and began to fight its way down Royal Street, in the direction of Parfumerie Devalier. The third beet, abandoned, stood its ground to await the passage of Pan.

  Parfumerie Devalier was at the opposite end of Royal Street from the Canal intersection. It took the beet more than forty minutes to wade through the baboon boys, Dixieland high-steppers, and glittering transvestites who blocked its route to the shop. When it at last arrived, it found the shop unlocked. Madame Devalier was in the rear, seated upon the lime love seat, filling the space of two lovers, fingering rosary beads and nodding dreamily from the effects of the first hurricane drops she'd ingested in fifteen years.

  The cop trial had ended on Friday with a verdict of guilty. Seizing the opportunity, the judge issued sentence on Saturday: two years, suspended. The judge was well aware that there could be no race riot during Mardi Gras. Potential participants would be too distracted, too dispersed, too happy, too drunk. The sentencing barely made news. Without fanfare, Madame and V'lu had returned on Sunday, in time to dust off their hundreds of perfume vials and attend the Bacchus parade.

  Now, both under the influence of drops, V'lu had wandered off to view Pan, while Madame rested in the eye of the hurricane, hallucinating about Jesus, Wally Lester, a Mardi Gras baby, gris-gris, zombie butter, and the way things used to be. When the giant beet burst into the shop, she crossed herself and chanted:

  "Eh, Yé Yé Conga!

  Eh! Eh! Bomba Yé Yé!"

  With deliberation, the beet bustled to the rear, snatched the ancient perfume bottle from the table where Madame had been contemplating it, off and on, and before the stout woman could revive enough to shriek in protest, rushed out of the shop and into the masquerade melee.

  "Eh! Eh! Bomba Yé!

  Hail Mary, Full of Grace!

  Help, police! Police!"

  Cradling the precious bottle, shielding it from the flailing appendages of dancers and drunks, it took the big beet the better part of an hour to navigate the treacherous human river, but when it reached the Canal Street intersection, its fellow beets were there, one on either side of V'lu.

  “Alobar! Alobar!” Priscilla cried. She held the bottle up for him to see.

  Alobar blinked inside his beet stem, scarcely comprehending what he saw. More from instinct than reason, he reached out for the bottle, trembling with excitement, fear, and desire as visions of jasmine boughs, goat hooves, and lost love swam past his brain.

  At that moment, Priscilla tripped, pitching forward on her velvet-and-wire encircled belly. The bottle slipped out of her stubby fingers and went rolling into the path of the parade.

  Later, Priscilla swore that she'd been purposefully shoved, and she clung to that story even though Marcel insisted that no one had touched her, even though V'lu testified, “Her always had butterfingers and two leff feets.”

  Alobar was more sympathetic. Just as Pris fell, he imagined that he'd registered a strong goaty odor, and while he automatically attributed it to the nostalgic atmosphere of the float that was passing—a lofty wagon decorated with enormous plaster sheeps' heads and festooned with purple grapes as big as cannonballs, and on whose pinnacle there pranced in pastoral splendor, attended by nymphs in filmy tunics, the living image of old Goat Foot himself—Alobar was to consider, in retrospect, that the smell had been real and had originated at curbside. Was it an invisible arm that shoved her?

  The question was probably academic. What mattered was that the bottle rolled beneath the tractor wheel of the heavy float, and as the Great God Pan (to be sure, an insurance adjuster who'd once played linebacker for LSU) looked down upon the prone beet in the gutter with the clownish contempt that the ribald deity has forever held for the puny failures—and accomplishments—of humanity, it was crushed. There was a pop!, a gritty crunch, an earthy, mocking laugh from Pan above, and it was over.

  Two of the beets tore off their stems and leaves and ran into the street. The third beet quickly followed, pulled by V'lu. The four of them dropped to their knees in the wake of the float, surrounding a tiny pile of ground blue glass as if it were a sacred spoor that they were worshiping.

  Kudra's bottle, Pan's bottle, the K23 bottle, the bottle that three hundred years earlier had terrified an order of monks, beckoned to the Other Side, and negotiated the fishy seas, was now no more than a dust of glitter that might have sifted from a Carnival transvestite's cheeks.

  But from the sparkling blue powder there wafted a marvelous aroma, an effuvium both sweet and bitter, a fragrance as romantic as the pollen-stained teeth of the floral Earth, the sexual planet; wafted the secret fetish and daring charm that creates a new reality for men and women, transcending and transforming nature, reason, and animal destiny.

  In a matter of minutes, policemen forced the quartet back to the curb. Three of them moved reluctantly but with minimal resistance. The bottle had meant much to them, and they were in shock. The fourth, Marcel LeFever, to whom, on the other hand, the bottle had meant nothing, had to be dragged, kicking and screaming.

  “That scent, that scent!” he exclaimed, his voice inflamed by passion. “What is that scent? Le parfum suprê
me! Le parfum magnifique!”

  Several hours later, in the rear of Parfumerie Devalier, there occurred something akin to a wake. In turn, Alobar, Priscilla, Madame Devalier, and V'lu eulogized the bottle. And right when everyone was feeling its loss most keenly, Alobar, who, alone, still wore a beet costume—it was the most fulfilling garment he had worn since he was forced to abdicate his kingly ermine—lifted everyone's spirits by spilling the beans. Or, rather, the beets.

  “Beet pollen. Yes. Simply beet pollen. Beet pollen and nothing else. The pollen of the beet plant, if you please. Exactly, positively, emphatically beet pollen. Beet pollen, don't you see? The answer is beet pollen.”

  "Incroyable!" exclaimed Marcel.

  "Sacre merde!" gasped Madame.

  “Why didn't I think of that?” asked Priscilla.

  “Beets, don't fail me now,” said V'lu.

  “The theme was jasmine, of course. A deluxe jasmine, rare and costly. But the top note was merely citron—”

  “Would tangerine work as well?” inquired Madame.

  “Oh, tangerine is charmant,” put in Marcel. “It might be superior to the citron.”

  “—and the bottom was beet pollen. Good old everyday beet pollen.”

  “Hardly everyday,” said Priscilla. “I've never seen a speck of beet pollen in my life.”

  “Me never.”

  “Imagine, cher! Vegetable spore in a fine boof!”

  The little group was so amazed by the revelation, and so fascinated by Alobar's subsequent tale of the intertwined roles of beet and fragrance in his life, that it failed to notice V'lu when she slipped out the door, a conspiratorial and purposeful set to her jaw.

  That edge of the Quarter at that hour was fairly free of Carnival congestion and noise, and V'lu was detained only by the lump that rose in her throat when she passed the place where Bingo Pajama, prince of blossom and song, had fallen bleeding at her feet. She paused briefly, bit her lower lip, and then proceeded to the telephone booth. It was occupied, but she was next in line.