Telegrams of the Soul

Perfume

As a child, rummaging around a drawer in the desk of my beloved, oh so beautiful Mama, the desk made of mahogany and cut glass, I found an empty perfume bottle which still retained the potent scent of a certain unidentified fragrance.

Many times I’d sneak over and sniff at it.

I associated this fragrance with all the love, tenderness, friendship, longing, sadness in the world. But for me all these feelings were bound up with my Mama. Later fate fell upon us, unsuspected, like a horde of Huns and inflicted heavy losses all around.

And one day I dashed from perfumery to perfumery hoping to possibly find in the little sample bottles the fragrance from the mahogany desk drawer of my late beloved Mama. And finally, finally I found it: Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris.

And I remembered the bygone days when Mama was the only womanly presence able to arouse pleasure and pain, ardent longing and deep despair, but who would always, always forgive whatever I’d done and who fretted over me and perhaps even before falling asleep at night prayed for my future happiness. .

Later, many young women in their guileless sweet zeal sent me their favorite perfume to thank me from the heart for a beauty tip of my devising, namely that every perfume ought to be rubbed into the skin all over the naked body right after the bath so that it wafts forth like the body’s own true natural essence! But all these perfumes were like the scents of breathtakingly beautiful but rather poisonous exotic flowers. Only the fragrance Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris, brought me a melancholic tranquility, even though Mama was no longer there and could no longer forgive me for my sins!