A story told to us from a place so foreign and yet familiar to our own: we smelled the rot of dead dogs, the incomprehensible murders of our fellow citizens on our shared streets, always masked with the perfume of jasmine and magnolia. This man, this beast, was a monster for sure, and in those heated months, all of us sat spellbound by his tale, his desire, his evil. We devoured that book over those sweaty months in our sinking city, hungry for and repulsed by Grenouille, the protagonist born with no scent. And this creature demanded during our first sweat-soaked summer that all of us tongue-lolling dogs read Das Parfum. An enchantress? All of the men–and women–in our graduate school thought so. But she looked All-American with her cowboy boots and short skirts, her dizzying scent. Her maiden surname was Büege, her maternal name Weckauff. It drove me to the place in which I find myself today. That woman’s scent, though, it haunts me. And I realize now that saying “I smelled her,” sounds far too unattractive, much too gauche for how this particular story continues to unfold. My original year away from home, I was a lonely graduate student in foreign New Orleans. I first smelled her in late August of 1992.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |