To the Wedding

28

I hear a glass object being polished. Standa, the large department store in Ferrara, has just opened.

The signalman in his black leathers and motorbike boots is making his way down an aisle and, silhouetted against the barrage of pearly and frosted lights, he looks like a black frog, straight out of Aristophanes. The floors are marble, the counters are black and the objects are gold. All the flasks — some of them giant ones — contain golden liquids.

The perfume fabricant’s counters are arranged like dolls’ houses in toy streets. In each house sits a woman with every hair on her head in place, and fingernails lacquered with the shades of perfect seashells. Some of these women wear glasses, some are young, some are mothers, one has come from Cairo and another from a village in the Trentino. Each day they have to spend an hour before they start work, preparing their faces. They must all show that they have taken a potion which will spare them from ever ageing. And the strange consequence of this is that the young seem old.

The signalman is looking at a chart with fifty different skin colours on it. Each colour is round like a small coin. He peers and then, his head thrust forward, he approaches closer and closer, searching among the fifty for his daughter’s coin: the colour, as he remembers it, of Ninon’s body when he scrubbed her back under the shower when she was a child.

Are you looking, Signore, for a makeup kit? Perhaps I can help?

Behind her ageless mask the ragazza dei cosmetici has protruding eyes and the thick lips of somebody wild.

I was thinking about a perfume, says the signalman.

For a man or a woman? she asks.

A young woman … my daughter.

Would it be for the day or night?

For a wedding.

Una festa di nozze!

She opens her wide eyes a fraction wider. They are perfectly lined in pale blue and, at this moment, are empty and sad.

Then maybe an aroma with a certain weight, something ceremonial, yes?

I suppose so.

Do you have one of our perfumes in mind?

No.

We could begin with Hazard?

I’m looking, he says, for a scent that goes fast.

She puts down the flask she has just picked up and examines him: this black frog in leather who speaks like a foreigner and uses such odd phrases.

To lift her, he explains.

Then let’s begin with Bakhavis.

To give her a lift.

She chooses a flask from many on a table, sprays the back of her left wrist, rubs the skin with her other palm, and holds her hand under Jean Ferrero’s chin. He inhales.

I don’t know, he says, it’s hard to choose.

What is she like, your daughter, is she like me?

No. She’s your height, that’s all.

What colour hair does she have?

She changes it. When she was small, she was fair.

What about her voice, is it high or low?

It depends on what she’s saying … I want her to feel like a queen.

The ragazza dei cosmetici takes another golden flask and sprays her left arm well above the wrist. The signalman seizes her hand abruptly and raises it to his lips. One might suppose he was about to kiss it. Unfamiliar with the ritual gestures which accompany the sampling and choosing of perfumes in well-appointed stores, his actions are almost violent, but she is now amused.

More so, he says,

More what?

More mad! he says, still holding her hand.

Okay. Let me get our latest. It’s new this year and it’s called Saba.

Saba?

It’s fruity. With a lot of ambergris. It might suit her.

This time she sprays near the crook of her left arm. He lowers his face. And like this, her flexed arm almost surrounds his head.

Say you had a daughter and you loved her and you wanted her to have everything immediately, would you give her Saba?

She keeps her arm where it is and doesn’t answer. He shuts his eyes. The mystery of the exchange between perfume and skin exists even in a department store. For a moment, the two of them, ragazza dei cosmetici and signalman, dream their different dreams behind a screen which keeps out the world.

At last she says: Most girls would be very happy.

Only then does she disengage her arm.

I’ll take a small bottle of Saba.

Of perfume or eau de toilette?

I don’t know.

The perfume lasts longer when she puts it on …

Then both.

As she wraps the little boxes in golden paper and ties a bow in the ribbon with her seashell fingernails, she looks at the foreigner in his leathers and boots and says: You know something? My father doesn’t love me much. She’s lucky, your daughter … really lucky.