Perfume

What would love inspire me to do? This question keeps circulating in my mind as I consider the actions of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and the reactions to him by everyone he meets in the story of a murderer, Perfume. How, when presented with grace and beauty and purity of a rare and pungent variety, does one – do I – respond?

To get there I’ll describe some of how I viewed the scentless Grenouille long before the fierce and troubling climax, pieces of which had been given away when I saw movie previews years ago, arrived. I viewed him with the same suspicion as his wet nurse. I’ve lived in France; I know how it can smell and how each person, although now habitually washed, has an identifiable scent. In the states it’s not nearly so easy to know one’s neighbor’s scent. There is compulsive washing followed by deodorizing and even, at times, perfuming. Mainly people smell like nothing, but it still remains pretty easy to smell their dog.

Now, if everything stank would I know myself distinguished from it? Certainly, I would. I would also know my family members, and a couple other special people whose fragrance has captured my imagination. (I’ve been told it has to do with pheromones.) Although, I will admit that perfume throws me off enormously. I still remember a strange time when I ate my mom’s hand lotion, thinking it should taste as good as it smelled. It didn’t.

Grenouille’s elevated view of his powers was another fascination for me. Of course he should be given extreme approbation for the ability to smell his way around in the dark, to have a perfect memory of each scent he’d ever smelled and the ability to recall it at will, to smell each stage of a daffodil’s demise, to ascertain the color of a child’s hair by her smell, and most of all to combine the essence of each item he admired into perfumes of great persuasion.

But Grenouille’s ignorance of his hate, utter lack of any fine feeling for humanity, and overall incapacity to relate to other humans except in condescension, masked as it may be through his complete understanding of character, was baffling. Over and over I wondered how a human can survive with absolutely no support except the nearly magical abilities of his own nose. And what’s more phenomenal was his rather strange decision that he did not wish to survive any longer.

Leading me to ask myself, how would I respond to the wearer of the perfume of life, or, should that be too strong, the perfume of love. Eros, agape, philia, storge, are honest possibilities, or would I respond to the fullest of good emanating from a person with deep selfishness and destruction, the desire to consume such a one? I would desire to answer love with humility and grace. But there’s that niggling doubt that I might, as I did once with my mom’s lotion, seize it and devour my share.