Perfume. The story of a murderer - Suskind Patrick - Страница 47

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He was suddenly very tired from the exertions of the day and of the night before and equally very satisfied with himself and how things had gone. Without the least thought of care, without any of the gloomy suspicions that until yesterday had plagued him and kept him awake every time he had put out his light, he instantly fell asleep and slept without a dream, without a moan, without a twitch or a nervous toss of his body back and forth. For the first time in a good while, Richis found deep, peaceful, refreshing sleep.

Around the same time, Grenouille got up from his bed in the stall. He too was satisfied with how things were going and felt completely refreshed, although he had not slept a single second. When Richis had come to the stall looking for him, he had only feigned sleep, augmenting the impression of obvious harmlessness he already exuded with his odor of inconspicuous-ness. Moreover, in contrast to the way in which Richis had perceived him, he had observed Richis with utmost accuracy, olfactory accuracy, and Richis’s relief at the sight of him had definitely not escaped him.

And so at their meeting each had convinced himself of the other’s harmlessness, both correctly and falsely, and that was how it should be, Grenouille thought, for his apparent and Richis’s true harmlessness made it much easier for him, Grenouille, to go about his work-an opinion that, to be sure, Richis would definitely have shared had the situation been reversed.

GRENOUILLE SET to work with professional circumspection. He opened his knapsack, took out the linen, pomade, and spatula, spread the cloth over the blanket on which he had lain, and began to brush on the fatty paste. This job took time, for it was important that the oil be applied in thinner or thicker layers depending on what part of the body would end up lying on a particular patch of the cloth. The mouth and armpits, breasts, genitals, and feet gave off greater amounts of scent than, for instance, shins, back, and elbows; the palms more than the backs of the hands; eyebrows more than eyelids, etc.-and therefore needed to be provided with a heavier dose of oil. Grenouille was creating a model, as it were, transferring onto the linen a scent diagram of the body to be treated, and this part of the job was actually the one that satisfied him most, for it was a matter of an artistic technique that incorporated equally one’s knowledge, imagination, and manual dexterity, while at the same time it anticipated on an ideal plane the enjoyment awaiting one from the final results. Once he had applied the whole potful of pomade, he dabbed about here and there, removing a bit of oil from the cloth here, adding another there, retouching, checking the greasy landscape he had modeled one last time-with his nose, by the way, not with his eyes, for the whole business was carried on in total darkness, which was perhaps yet another reason for Grenouille’s equably cheerful mood. There was nothing to distract him on this night of new moon. The world was nothing but odor and the soft sound of surf from the sea. He was in his element. Then he folded the cloth together like a tapestry, so that the oiled surfaces lay against one another. This was a painful procedure for him, because he knew well that despite the utmost caution certain parts of the sculpted contours would be flattened or shifted. But there was no other way to transport the cloth. After he had folded it up small enough to be carried under his arm without all too much difficulty, he tucked spatula, scissors, and the little olivewood club in his pockets and crept out into the night.

The sky was clouded over. There were no lights burning in the inn. The only glimmer on this pitch-dark night was the winking of the lighthouse at the fort on the He Sainte-Marguerite, over a mile away to the east, a tiny bright needlepoint in a raven-black cloth. A light, fishy wind was blowing from the bay. The dogs were asleep.

Grenouille walked to the back dormer of the threshing shed, where a ladder stood propped. He picked the ladder up, and balancing it vertically, three rungs clamped under his free right arm, the rest of it pressed against his right shoulder, he moved across the courtyard until he was under her window. The window stood half ajar. As he climbed the ladder, as easily as a set of stairs, he congratulated himself on the circumstances that made it possible for him to harvest the girl’s scent here in La Napoule. In Grasse, where the house had barred windows and was tightly guarded, all this would have been much more difficult. She was even sleeping by herself here. He would not have to bother with eliminating the maid.

He pushed up the casement, slipped into the room, and laid down his cloth. Then he turned to the bed. The dominant scent came from her hair, for she was lying on her stomach with her head pressed into the pillow and framed by the crook of her arm— presenting the back of her head in an almost ideal position for the blow by the club.

The sound of the blow was a dull, grinding thud. He hated it. He hated it solely because it was a sound, a sound in the midst of his otherwise soundless procedure. He could bear that gruesome sound only by clenching his teeth, and, after it was all over, standing off to one side stiff and implacable, as if he feared the sound would return from somewhere as a resounding echo. But it did not return, instead stillness returned to the room, an increased stillness in fact, for now even the shuffle of the girl’s breathing had ceased. And at once Grenouille’s tenseness dissolved (one might have interpreted it more as a posture of reverence or some sort of crabbed moment of silence) and his body fell back to a pliable ease.

He tucked the club away and from here on was all bustle and business. First he unfolded the impregnating cloth, spread it loosely on its back over the table and chairs, taking care that the greased side not be touched. Then he pulled back the bedclothes. The glorious scent of the girl, welling up so suddenly warm and massive, did not stir him. He knew that scent, of course, and would savor it, savor it to intoxication, later on, once he truly possessed it. But now the main thing was to capture as much of it as possible, let as little of it as possible evaporate; for now the watchwords were concentration and haste.

With a few quick snips of his scissors, he cut open her nightgown, pulled it off, grabbed the oiled linen, and tossed it over her naked body. Then he lifted her up, tugged the overhanging cloth under her, rolled her up in it as a baker rolls strudel, tucking in the corners, enveloping her from toes up to brow. Only her hair still stuck out from the mummy clothes. He cut it off close to her scalp and packed it inside her nightgown, which he then tied up into a bundle. Finally he took a piece of cloth still dangling free and flapped it over the shaved skull, smoothed down the overlapping ends, gently pressed it tight with a finger. He examined the whole package. Not a slit, not a hole, not one bulging pleat was left through which the girl’s scent could have escaped. She was perfectly packed. There was nothing to do but wait, for six hours, until the gray of dawn.

He took the little armchair on which her clothes lay, dragged it to the bed, and sat down. The gentle breath of her scent still clung to the ample black cloak, blending with the odor of aniseed cakes she had put in her pocket as a snack for the journey. He put his feet up on the end of the bed, near her feet, covered himself with her dress, and ate aniseed cakes. He was tired. But he did not want to fall asleep, because it was improper to sleep on the job, even if your job was merely to wait. He recalled the nights he had spent distilling in Baldini’s workshop: the soot-blackened alembic, the flickering fire, the soft spitting sound the distillate made as it dripped from the cooling tube into the Florentine flask. From time to time you had to tend the fire, pour in more distilling water, change Florentine flasks, replace the exhausted stuff you were distilling. And yet it had always seemed to him that you stayed awake not so that you could take care of these occasional tasks, but because being awake had its own unique purpose. Even here in this bedchamber, where the process of enfleurage was proceeding all on its own, where in fact premature checking, turning, or poking the fragrant package could only cause trouble-even here, it seemed to Grenouille, his waking presence was important. Sleep would have endangered the spirit of success.

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