19 страница

as Supreme Emperor before kings and emperors, or even

as God come to earth-if there was such a thing as God

having Himself anointed...

He could do all that, if only he wanted to. He

possessed the power. He held it in his hand. A power

stronger than the power of money or the power of

terror or the power of death: the invincible power to

command the love of mankind. There was only one thing

that power could not do: it could not make him able to

smell himself. And though his perfume might allow him

to appear before the world as a god-if he could not

smell himself and thus never know who he was, to hell

with it, with the world, with himself, with his

perfume.

The hand that had grasped the flacon was fragrant

with a faint scent, and when he put it to his nose and

sniffed, he grew wistful and forgot to walk on and stood

there smelling. No one knows how good this perfume

really is, he thought. No one knows how well made it is.

Other people are merely conquered by its effect, don’t

even know that it’s a perfume that’s working on them,

enslaving them. The only one who has ever recognized

it for its true beauty is me, because I created it myself.

And at the same time, I’m the only one that it cannot

enslave. I am the only person for whom it is

meaningless.

And on another occasion-he was already in Burgundy:

When I was standing there at the wall below the garden

where the redheaded girl was playing and her scent

came floating down to me... or, better, the promise of

her scent, for the scent she would carry later did not

even exist yet-maybe what I felt that day is like what

the people on the parade grounds felt when I flooded

them with my perfume...? But then he cast the thought

aside: No, it was something else. Because I knew that I

desired the scent, not the girl. But those people

believed that they desired me, and what they really

desired remained a mystery to them.

Then he thought no more, for thinking was not his

strong point, and then, too, he was already in the

Orleanais.

He crossed the Loire at Sully. The next day he had

the odor of Paris in his nose. On June 25, 1766, at six in

the morning, he entered the city via the rue Saint-

Jacques.

It turned out to be a hot day, the hottest of the year

thus far. The thousands of odors and stenches oozed out

as if from thousands of festering boils. Not a breeze

stirred. The vegetables in the market stalls shriveled up.

Meat and fish rotted. Tainted air hung in the narrow

streets. Even the river seemed to have stopped

flowing, to have stagnated. It stank. It was a day like

the one on which Grenouille was born.

He walked across the Pont-Neuf to the right bank,

and then down to Les Halles and the Cimetiere des

Innocents. He sat down in the arcades of the charnel

house bordering the rue aux Fers. Before him lay the

cemetery grounds like a cratered battlefield, burrowed

and ditched and trenched with graves, sown with skulls

and bones, not a tree, bush, or blade of grass, a garbage

dump of death.

Not a soul was to be seen. The stench of corpses was

so heavy that even the gravediggers had retreated. Only

after the sun had gone down did they come out again to

scoop out holes for the dead by torchlight until late into

the night.

But then after midnight-the gravediggers had left by

then-the place came alive with all sorts of riffraff:

thieves, murderers, cutthroats, whores, deserters,

young desperadoes. A small campfire was lit for cooking

and in the hope of masking the stench.

When Grenouille came out of the arcades and mixed

in with these people, they at first took no notice of

him. He was able to walk up to the fire unchallenged, as

if he were one of them. That later helped confirm the

view that they must have been dealing with a ghost or

an angel or some other supernatural being. Because

normally they were very touchy about the approach of

any stranger.

The little man in the blue frock coat, however, had

suddenly simply been there, as if he had sprouted out of

the ground, and he had had a little bottle in his hand

that he unstoppered. That was the first thing that any of

them could recall: that he had stood there and

unstoppered a bottle. And then he had sprinkled himself

all over with the contents of the bottle and all at once

he had been bathed in beauty like blazing fire.

For a moment they fell back in awe and pure

amazement. But in the same instant they sensed their

falling back was more like preparing for a running start,

that their awe was turning to desire, their amazement

to rapture. They felt themselves drawn to this angel of a

man. A frenzied, alluring force came from him, a riptide

no human could have resisted, all the less because no

human would have wanted to resist it, for what that

tide was pulling under and dragging away was the human

will itself: straight to him.

They had formed a circle around him, twenty, thirty

people, and their circle grew smaller and smaller. Soon

the circle could not contain them all, they began to

push, to shove, and to elbow, each of them trying to be

closest to the center.

And then all at once the last inhibition collapsed

within them, and the circle collapsed with it. They

lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the

ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, wanted to

have a piece of him, a feather, a bit of plumage, a

spark from that wonderful fire. They tore away his

clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they plucked

him, they drove their claws and teeth into his flesh,

they attacked him like hyenas.

But the human body is tough and not easily

dismembered, even horses have great difficulty

accomplishing it. And so the flash of knives soon

followed, thrusting and slicing, and then the swish of

axes and cleavers aimed at the joints, hacking and

crushing the bones. In very short order, the angel was

divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack

snatched a piece for itself, and then, driven by

voluptuous lust, dropped back to devour it. A half hour

later, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared utterly

from the earth.

When the cannibals found their way back together

after disposing of their meal, no one said a word.

Someone would belch a bit, or spit out a fragment of

bone, or softly smack with his tongue, or kick a leftover

shred of blue frock coat into the flames. They were all a

little embarrassed and afraid to look at one another.

They had all, whether man or woman, committed a

murder or some other despicable crime at one time or

another. But to eat a human being? They would never,

so they thought, have been capable of anything that

horrible. And they were amazed that it had been so

very easy for them and that, embarrassed as they were,

they did not feel the tiniest bite of conscience. On the

contrary! Though the meal lay rather heavy on their

stomachs, their hearts were definitely light. All of a

sudden there were delightful, bright flutterings in their

dark souls. And on their faces was a delicate, virginal

glow of happiness. Perhaps that was why they were shy

about looking up and gazing into one another’s eyes.

When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen

glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They

were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had

done something out of love.

About the Author

PATRICK SUSKIND was born in Ambach, near Munich,

in 1949. After a problem with his hands made it

impossible for him to pursue his ambitions as a concert

pianist, Siiskind enrolled in the University of Munich,

where he studied medieval and modern history. His first

play, The Double Bass, written in 1980, became an

international success, performed in Germany,

Switzerland, at the Edinburgh Festival, in London, and

most recently at the New Theatre in Brooklyn. Mr.

Siiskind lives and writes in Munich.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14