But where are you able to find and produce these notes, if your chest remains contracted and your teeth clenched? You are convinced that the city is nothing but a physical extension of her person; and where should the king’s voice come from then if not from the very heart of his kingdom’s capital? With the same sharpness of ear that has enabled you to catch and follow until this moment the song of that unknown woman, now you collect the hundred fragments of sound that, united, compose an unmistakable voice, the voice that alone is yours.
There, dismiss every intrusion and distraction from your hearing. Concentrate: you must catch the wornan’s voice calling you and your voice calling her, together, in the same intention of listening (or would you call it the vision of your ear?). Now! No, not yet. Do not give up. Try again. In another moment her voice and yours will answer each other and merge to such a degree that you will no longer be able to tell them apart....
But too many sounds intrude, frantic, piercing, ferocious: her voice disappears, stifled by the roar of death that invades the outside, or that perhaps reechoes inside you. You have lost her, you are lost; the part of you projected into the space of sounds now runs through the streets among the curfew patrols. The life of voices was a dream, perhaps it lasted only a few seconds, as dreams last, while outside the nightmare continues.
AND yet, you are the king: if you seek a woman who lives in your capital, recognizable by her voice, you must be quite capable of finding her. Unleash your spies, give orders to search all the streets and all the houses. But who knows that voice? Only you. No one but you can carry out this search. And so, when a desire to be fulfilled presents itself to you at last, you realize that being king is of no use for anything.
Wait, you must not lose heart immediately; a king has many resources. Is it possible that you cannot devise a system to obtain what you want? You could announce a singing contest: by order of the king all female subjects of the realm who have a pleasant singing voice would present themselves at the palace. It would be, even more important, a clever political move, to soothe people’s spirits in a period of unrest, and strengthen the bonds between citizenry and crown. You can easily imagine the scene: in this hall, festively decorated, a platform, an orchestra, an audience made up of the leading figures of the court, and you, impassive, on the throne, listening to every high note, every trill with the attention suitable in an impartial judge, until suddenly you raise your scepter and declare: “She is the one!”
How could you fail to recognize her? No voice could be less like those that usually perform for the king, in the halls illuminated by crystal chandeliers, among the potted plants with broad, flat palm-like leaves. You have been present at many concerts in your honor on the dates of glorious anniversaries; every voice aware of being heard by the king takes on a cold enamel, a glassy smugness. That one, on the contrary, was a voice that came from the shadow, happy to display itself without emerging from the darkness that hid it, casting a bridge toward every presence enfolded in the same darkness.
But are you sure that, before the steps of the throne, it would be the same voice? That it would not try to imitate the intonation of the court singers? That it would not be confused with the many voices you have become accustomed to hearing, with condescending approbation, as you follow the flight of a fly?
The only way to impel her to reveal herself would be an encounter with your true voice, with that ghost of your voice that you summoned up from the city’s tempest of sounds. It would suffice for you to sing, to release that voice you have always hidden from everyone, and she would immediately recognize you for the man you really are, and she would join her voice, her real voice, to yours.
Then, ah!, an exclamation of surprise would spread through the court: “His Majesty is singing.... Listen to how His Majesty sings....” But the composure which is proper in listening to the king, whatever he says or does, would soon take over. Faces and gestures would express a complaisant and measured approval, as if to say: “His Majesty is graciously favoring us with a song....” and all would agree that a vocal display is one of the sovereign’s prerogatives (provided that they can then cover you with whispered ridicule and insults).
In short, it would be all very well for you to sing: no one would hear you, they would not hear you, your song, your voice. They would be listening to the king, in the way a king must be listened to, receiving what comes from above and has no meaning beyond the unchanging relationship between him who is above and those who are below. Even she, the sole addressee of your song, could not hear you: yours would not be the voice she hears; she would listen to the king, her body frozen in a curtsey, with the smile prescribed by protocol masking a preconceived rejection.
YOUR every attempt to get out of the cage is destined to fail: it is futile to seek yourself in a world that does not belong to you, that perhaps does not exist. For you there is only the palace, the great reechoing vaults, the sentries’ watches, the tanks that crunch the gravel, the hurried footsteps on the staircase which each time could be those announcing your end. These are the only signs through which the world speaks to you; do not let your attention stray from them even for an instant; the moment you are distracted, this space you have constructed around yourself to contain and watch over your fears will be rent, torn to pieces.
Is it impossible for you? Are your ears deafened by new, unusual sounds? Are you no longer able to tell the uproar outside from that inside the palace? Perhaps there is no longer an inside and an outside: while you were intent on listening to voices, the conspirators have exploited the lapse of vigilance in order to unleash the revolt.
Around you there is no longer a palace, there is the night filled with cries and shots. Where are you? Are you still alive? Have you eluded the assassins who have burst into the throne room? Did the secret stairway afford you an avenue of escape?
The city has exploded in flames and shouts. The night has exploded, turned inside out. Darkness and silence plunge into themselves and throw out their reverse of fire and screams. The city crumples like a burning page. Run, without crown, without scepter; no one will realize that you are the king. There is no night darker than a night of fires. There is no man more alone than one running in the midst of a howling mob.
The night of the countryside keeps watch over the throes of the city. An alarm spreads with the shrieks of the nocturnal birds, but the farther it moves from the walls, the more it is lost among the rustlings of the usual darkness: the wind in the leaves, the flowing of the streams, the croaking of the frogs. Space expands in the noisy silence of the night, where events are dots of sudden din that flare up and die away; the crack of a broken bough, the squeaking of a dormouse when a snake comes into his hole, two cats in love, fighting, a sliding of pebbles beneath your fugitive steps.
You pant, you pant and under the dark sky only your panting is heard, the crackle of leaves beneath your stumbling feet. Why are the frogs quiet now? No, there they begin again. A dog barks.... Stop. The dogs answer one another from a distance. For some time you have been walking in thick darkness, you have lost all notion of where you might be. You prick up your ears. There is someone else panting like you. Where?
The night is all breathing. A low wind has risen as if from the grass. The crickets never stop, on all sides. If you isolate one sound from another, it seems to burst forth suddenly, very distinct; but it was also there before, hidden among the other sounds.
You also were there, before. And now? You could not answer. You do not know which of these breaths is yours. You no longer know how to listen. There is no longer anyone listening to anyone else. Only the night listens to itself.
Your footsteps reecho. Above your head there is no longer the sky. The wall you touch was covered with moss, with mold; now there is rock around you, bare stone. If you call, your voice also rebounds. Where? “Ohooo ... Ohooo...” Perhaps you have ended up in a cave: an interminable cavern, an underground passage....
For years you have had such tunnels dug under
the palace, under the city, with branches leading into the open country....You wanted to assure yourself the possibility of moving everywhere without being seen; you felt you could dominate your kingdom only from the bowels of the earth. Then you let the excavations crumble in ruins. And here you are, taking refuge in your lair. Or caught in your trap. You ask yourself if you will ever find the way to go out of here. Go out: where?
Knocking. In the stone. Muffled. Cadenced. Like a signal! Where does the rapping come from? You know that cadence. It is the prisoner’s call! Answer. Rap on the wall yourself. Shout. If you remember rightly, the tunnel communicates with the cells of the political prisoners....
He does not know who you are: liberator or jailer? Or perhaps one who has become lost underground, like him, cut off from the news of the city and of the battle on which his fate depends?
If he is wandering outside his cell, this is a sign that they came to remove his chains, to throw open the bars. They said to him: “The usurper has fallen! You will return to your throne! You will regain possession of the palace!” Then something must have gone wrong. An alarm, a counterattack by the royal troops, and the liberators ran off along the tunnels, leaving him alone. Naturally he got lost. Under these stone vaults no light arrives, no echo of what is happening up above.
Now you will be able to speak to each other, to recognize your voices. Will you tell him who you are? Will you tell him that you have recognized him as the man you have kept in prison for so many years? The man you heard cursing your name, swearing to avenge himself? Now you are both lost underground, and you do not know which of you is king and which, prisoner. It almost seems to you that, however it turns out, nothing changes: in this cellar you seem to have been sealed forever, sending out signals....It seems to you that your fate has always been in suspense, like his. One of you will remain down here.... The other...
But perhaps he, down here, has always felt that he was up above, on the throne, with the crown on his head, and with the scepter. And you? Did you not feel always a prisoner? How can a dialogue be established between the two of you if each thinks he hears, not the words of the other, but his own words, repeated by the echo?
For one of you the hour of rescue is approaching, for the other, ruin. And yet that anxiety that never abandoned you seems now to have vanished. You listen to the echoes and the rustlings with no further need to separate them and decipher them, as if they made up a piece of music. A music that brings back to your memory the voice of the unknown woman. But are you'remembering it or do you really hear it? Yes, it is she, it is her voice that forms that tune like a call under the rock vaults. She might also be lost, in this night like the world’s end. Answer her, make yourself heard, send her a call, so that she can find her way in the darkness and join you. Why do you remain silent? Now, of all times, have you lost your voice?
There, another call rises from the darkness, at the point from which the prisoner’s words came. It is an easily recognized call, which answers the woman, it is your voice, the voice you created to reply to her, drawing it from the dust of the city sounds, the voice you sent toward her from the silence of the throne room! The prisoner is singing your song, as if he had never done anything but sing it, as if it had never been sung by anyone else....
She replies, in her turn. The two voices move toward each other, become superimposed, blend, as you had already heard them joined in the night of the city, certain that it was you singing with her. Now surely she has reached him, you hear their voices, your voices, going off together. It is useless for you to try to follow them: they are becoming a murmur, a whisper; they vanish.
IF you raise your eyes, you will see a glow. Above your head the imminent morning is brightening the sky: that breath against your face is the wind stirring the leaves. You are outside again, the dogs are barking, the birds wake, the colors return on the world’s surface, things reoccupy space, living beings again give signs of life. And surely you are also here, in the midst of it all, in the teeming noises that rise on all sides, in the buzz of the electric current, the throb of the pistons, the clank of gears. Somewhere, in a fold of the earth, the city is reawakening, with a slamming, a hammering, a creaking that grows louder. Now a noise, a rumble, a roar occupies all space, absorbs all sighs, calls, sobs....
August 1, 1984
Rome
The Name, The Nose
EPIGRAPHS in an undecipherable language, half their letters rubbed away by the sand-laden wind: this is what you will be, O parfumeries, for the noseless man of the future. You will still open your doors to us, your carpets will still muffle our footsteps, you will receive us in your jewel-box space, with no jutting corners, the walls of lacquered wood, and shopgirls or patronnes, colorful and soft as artificial flowers, will let their plump arms, wielding atomizers, graze us, or the hem of their skirts, as they stand tip-toe on stools, reaching upwards. But the phials, the ampules, the jars with their spire-like or cut-glass stoppers will weave in vain from shelf to shelf their network of harmonies, assonances, dissonances, counterpoints, modulations, cadenzas: our deaf nostrils will no longer catch the notes of their scale. We will not distinguish musk from verbena: amber and mignonette, bergamot and bitter-almond will remain mute, sealed in the calm slumber of their bottles. When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.
HOW different were the vibrations a great parfumerie could once stir in the spirit of a man of the world, as in the days when my carriage would stop, with a sharp tug at the reins, at a famous sign on the Champs-Elysées, and I would hurriedly get out and enter that mirrored gallery, dropping with one movement my cloak, top hat, cane, and gloves into the hands of the girls who hastened to receive them, while Madame Odile rushed toward me as if she were flying on her frills.
“Monsieur de Saint-Caliste! What a pleasant surprise! What can we offer you? A cologne? An essence of vetivert? A pomade for curling the moustache? Or a lotion to restore the hair’s natural ebony hue?”
And she would flicker her lashes, her lips forming a sly smile. “Or do you wish to make an addition to the list of presents that my delivery boys carry each week, discreetly, in your name, to addresses both illustrious and obscure, scattered throughout Paris? Is it a new conquest you are about to confide in your devoted Madame Odile?”
Overcome with agitation as I was, I remained silent, writhing, while the girls already began to concern themselves with me. One slipped the gardenia from my buttonhole so that its fragrance, however faint, would not disturb my perception of the scents; another girl drew my silk handkerchief from my pocket so it would be ready to receive the sample drops from which I was to choose; a third sprinkled my waistcoat with rose water, to neutralize the stench of my cigar; a fourth dabbled odorless lacquer on my moustache, so it would not become impregnated with the various essences, confusing my nostrils.
And Madame went on: “I see! A great passion! Ah! I’ve been expecting this for some time, Monsieur! You can hide nothing from me! Is she a lady of high degree? A reigning queen of the Comédie? Or the Variétés? Or did you make a carefree excursion into the demi-monde and fall into the trap of sentiment? But, first of all, in which category would you place her: the jasmine family, the fruit blossoms, the piercing scents, or the Oriental? Tell me, mon chou!”
And one of her shopgirls, Martine, was already tickling the tip of my ear with her finger wet with patchouli (pressing the sting of her breast, at the same time, beneath my armpit), and Charlotte was extending her arm, perfumed with orris, for me to sniff (in the same fashion, on other occasions, I had examined a whole sampler, arrayed over her body), and Sidonie blew on my hand, to evaporate the drop of eglantine she had put there (between her parted lips I could glimpse her little teeth, whose bites I knew so well), and another, whom I had never seen, a new girl (whom I merely grazed with an absent pinch, preoccupied as I was), aimed an atomizer at me, pressing its bulb, as if inviting me to
an amorous skirmish.
“No, Madame, that’s not it, that’s not it at all,” I managed to say. “What I am looking for is not the perfume suited to a lady I know. It is the lady I must find! A lady of whom I know nothing—save her perfume!”
At moments like these Madame Odile’s methodical genius is at its best: only the sternest mental order allows one to rule a world of impalpable effluvia. “We shall proceed by elimination,” she said, turning grave. “Is there a hint of cinnamon? Does it contain musk? Is it violet-like? Or almond?”
But how could I put into words the languid, fierce sensation I had felt the previous night, at a masked ball, when my mysterious partner for the waltz, with a lazy movement, had loosened the gauzy scarf which separated her white shoulder from my moustache, and a streaked, rippling cloud had assailed my nostrils, as if I were breathing in the soul of a tigress?
“It’s a different perfume, quite different, Madame Odile, unlike any of those you mention!”
The girls were already climbing to the highest shelves, carefully handing one another fragile jars, removing the stoppers for barely a second, as if afraid the air might contaminate the essences in them.
“This heliotrope,” Madam Odile told me, “is used by only four women in all Paris: the Duchesse de Clig-nancourt, the Marquise de Menilmontant, the wife of Coulommiers the cheese-manufacturer, and his mistress.... They send me this rosewood every month especially for the wife of the Tsar’s Ambassador.... Here is a potpourri I prepare for only two customers: the Princess of Baden-Holstein and Carole, the courtesan.... This artemisia? I remember the names of all the ladies who have bought it once, but never a second time. It apparently has a depressant effect on men.”