Much has been said about the power of perfumes to awaken memories. In my case, it is not only that. Many other images are involved, metaphorical or collateral. If I see a cup shattering on asphalt in a silent film, I never hear the sound of the action. Instead, I immediately sense the smells around it—the sharp scent of broken porcelain.
The smell of the river: mud and rotting vegetation, sand overheated by the sun; a specific river along whose banks people worked and sweated; the smell of stones freshly pulled from the water, of crushed frog heads, of coarse leaves. Along the river of my childhood there were endless hemp fields—an expansive scent that slid southward toward the great river, toward the rotten wood of fishermen’s boats, toward the crests of a forest where grayling and breadflower always held supremacy. A smell of elderflower, tamed.
Something simple: a sprig of basil crushed into freshly dried soil.
Vienna smells like a kitchen where cakes are being baked. Paris carries the scent of a refined despair—perhaps because of its great variety, constantly assaulted by immigrants and passersby. Beijing smells of relentless work and everything that follows from it. Madrid has a lofty fragrance, preserved in ancient vials. Barcelona smells of youth. Moscow has an iron scent—subway tunnels and brick shattered by rain.
Rome is the hardest to describe: something optimistic and profoundly real, an essence of life itself, a delicate vapor of familiar hope. And speaking of already-lived scents—perfume taken from your bedside—I would mention Istanbul too, had it not since been covered by clouds. Sicily smells of love, of bodies embraced. Crete carries the fragrance of old parchment. In Sardinia, especially in Cagliari, the stones themselves pull at your nose, stones from which rivers once sprang. In Skopje, snowdrops bloom all year long. In Plovdiv, everything is perfumed with rock flowers. In Marseille, it feels as though the Green Knight has passed through. Along the Côte d’Azur, occasional wafts of detergent drift by. Berlin strikes you with the contrast between smells from the West and those from the East—the latter recalling cramped kitchens where food is cooked intensely. And Naples: a container that horrifies you at first contact, yet becomes unforgettable afterward.
A full history—I wouldn’t dare. But I can think of rain-soaked petunias laid accidentally atop a volume of Bacovia. I can still smell the rotten lettuce lingering after a novel by John Steinbeck. Orange blossom follows me. The steam of pebbles heated underfoot rises whenever I think of Márquez. I instinctively inhale linden blossom whenever I hear the word poem. The scent of freshly dug lowland pits comes to mind with any book by Preda. Hot asphalt in Camil’s afternoons. The shop-scented perfume of Balzac. Syringes thrown into rivers in Céline. The incomparable smell of fresh dinners in Pavese’s summers. A lily rotting in mud among Dante’s verses. The reek of molten copper and musk in Cervantes.
That would take a long time to answer. Bucharest is the city where I write; therefore, everything here is fictional. Once, I went on a summer vacation to an airy, empty place and lasted only a few hours. I was exasperated by the harsh, puritanical air. I returned to Bucharest and still remember stepping out of the North Station and being struck by the stench of sewage erupting from the city’s entrails in summer.
Yet within its subtle nuances—rotting peppers, the waste of millions—emerged the city’s true perfume for me: something alive, irreplaceable. A faint scent of an old chest where fine clothes once lay, covered in wormwood and tobacco; furs once drenched in perfumes, former collars at parties and drunken feasts; lace touched by men’s fingers, leaving in its fibers the only aspiration that truly matters in a short human life. Not to mention bedsheets, which never forget the bodies that have crumpled them; letters—old paper soaked in dreams and the aromas that once floated through rooms, from smoky summer kitchens where garlic creeps in slyly, to serving hatches through which plates passed, bowls scorched on the hearth, pheasants seared in rose sauces.
Over all of this sighs, intermittently, a breath escaped from mallow flowers, which I cannot help but see swaying beside a vaulted porch. On the windowsill waits a pan of thick fruit jelly, set out to cool, spreading the perfume of pears and the memory of quinces.
It was the summer when I was writing The Phanariot Manuscript—a long summer whose scents could not all fit into the novel.
Although I try many perfumes, there is only one that remains constant; no matter what I do, I return to it. It suits me, as they say. Between us, a poem has grown—one that will never be published. It is a scent born from a flowerbed where two fugitives once made love.
I don’t quite know what to say. I have always fought against this instinct, believing that a human being is complex and should not be judged by first impressions. And every time I was wrong—for refusing to listen to what my nose was telling me.
Beyond the wisteria in Absalom, Absalom!, there are many others, some already mentioned. I’ll stop at Sartre’s Nausea: whenever I pass by my library lately and come across that book, I feel physically ill, just as I did at first reading—even though it is not among the books that truly mattered to me. And then there are old books from secondhand shops, still holding the perfumes of former owners—smells of clothes, of objects that passed through many hands, objects with long histories. But about these, there is simply too much to say.
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 goes with the smell of fairs. And Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-ho) pairs with the scent of lobster, served with fried plums and horseradish sauce.
