Free Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino Page A

smell, it’s hard to hunt in the dark but even if I saw her how can I tell it’s her when all I know is her smell, so I go on smelling the bodies lying on the floor and one guy says fuck off and punches me, this place is laid out in a funny way, like a lot of rooms with people lying on the floor in all of them, and I’ve lost my sense of direction or else I never had one, these girls have different smells, some might even be her only the smell isn’t the same any more, meanwhile Howard’s waked up and he’s already got his bass and he’s picking up Don’t tell me I’m through, I think I’ve already covered the whole place, so where has she gone, in the midst of these girls you can begin to see now the light’s coming in, but what I want to smell I can’t smell, I’m roaming around like a jerk and I can’t find her, Have mercy, have mercy on me, I go from one skin to another hunting for that lost skin that isn’t like any other skin.
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    F OR each woman a perfume exists which enhances the perfume of her own skin, the note in the scale which is at once color and flavor and aroma and tenderness, and thus the pleasure in moving from one skin to another can be endless. When the chandeliers in the Faubourg Saint-Honore’s drawing rooms illuminated my entrance intothe gala balls, I was overwhelmed by the pungent cloud of perfumes from the pearl-edged decolletes, the delicate Bulgarian-pink ground giving off jabs of camphor which amber made cling to the silk dresses, and I bowed to kiss the Duchesse du Havre-Caumartin’s hand, inhaling the jasmine that hovered over her slightly anemic skin, and I offered my arm to the Comtesse de Barbes-Rochechouart, who ensnared me in the wave of sandalwood that seemed to engulf her firm, dark complexion, and I helped the Baronne de Mouton-Duvernet free her alabaster shoulder from her otter coat as a gust of fuchsia struck me. My papillae could easily assign faces to those perfumes Madame Odile now had me review, removing the stoppers from her opalescent vials. I had devoted myself to the same process the night before at the masked ball of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre; there was no lady whose name I could not guess beneath the embroidered domino. But then she appeared, with a little satin mask over her face, a veil around her shoulders and bosom, Andalusian style; and in vain I wondered who she was, and in vain, holding her closer than was proper as we danced, I compared my memories with that perfume never imagined until then, which enclosed the perfume of her body as an oyster encloses its pearl. I knew nothing of her, but I felt I knew all in that perfume; and I would have desired a world without names, where that perfume alone would have sufficed as name and as all the words she could speak to me: that perfume I knew was lost now in Madame Odile’s liquid labyrinth, evaporated in my memory, so that I could not summon it back even by remembering her when she followed me into the conservatory with the hydrangeas. As I caressed her, she seemed at times docile, then at times violent, clawing. She allowed me to uncover hidden areas, explore the privacy of her perfume, provided I did not raise the mask from her face.
    â€œWhy this mystery, after all?” I cried, exasperated. “Tell me where and when I can see you once more. Or rather, see you for the first time!”
    â€œDo not think of such a thing, Monsieur,” she answered. “A terrible threat hangs over my life. But hush—there he is!”
    A shadow, hooded, in a violet domino, had appeared in the Empire mirror.
    â€œI must follow that person,” the woman said. “Forget me. Someone holds unspeakable power over me.”
    And before I could say to her, “My sword is at your service. Have faith in it!”, she had already gone off, preceding the violet domino, which left a wake of Oriental tobacco in the crowd of maskers. I do not