Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

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! You 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.