I Was Her Nose — Paris, France
Dear Reader, Before you begin this piece, find a scent, a perfume, a tea, a coffee, some chocolate, a rose from your garden to smell while you read.
Imagine Paris had no smell. No whiff of hot baguette, no aroma of café crème, no hint of musk in your wine, no trace of rose. As you wandered around Paris, it would feel flat, as if it had lost a dimension. This is how my friend Mary experienced the world, and this is why she asked me to travel with her to Paris — to be her nose.
Mary never knew what she was missing, because she never had a sense of smell. The specialists at Stanford confirmed to her dismay that the issue was not in her nose but in her brain, and therefore it could not be fixed. She had congenital anosmia — she was nose blind. In contrast, I am a super smeller. I can smell a lady’s shampoo from across the street, and sometimes that power scares me — without meaning to, I literally poke my nose into other people’s business.
Mary’s unusual handicap led her to depend on a handful of dedicated friends to be her Royal Sniffers. We would sniff her sweaters to let her know if they needed washing and sniff her milk to make sure it was still fresh. When she got a cat, she bragged that she could not smell the litter box, and we had to explain to her the critical importance of cleaning the box daily. In addition to a smoke alarm, we installed a sensor to let her know if she had a gas leak. We had all sworn an intimate oath to Mary.
In Paris, my role took on greater import. For Paris is synonymous with taste and smell. Parisians value desire, the sensual, the ability to know one’s own taste and to feel pleasure. They understand that desire drives action, and joy is a skill, not an innate ability. They teach children how to feel pleasure, how to be curious, how to taste, to smell, and to be polite in public — because being polite in public means others will like you and that will give you pleasure. Savoir vivre — the knowledge of culture and how to be polite, cordial, and gracious — will lead to joie de vivre.
Sometimes Americans mistake the French focus on pleasure for gluttony, but it is quite the opposite. The French eat small portions; they eat together; and they eat slowly — lunch often lasts for two hours. They take a moment to let their nose linger in their wine glass. They talk about how one cheese smells differently than the other because it was aged in a particular cave. This is not self-centered indulgence; rather it is being mindful, paying attention. And paying attention is both how we experience love and how we give love. Paris is a romantic city because it awakens the senses, and because while there, if we try, we can learn how to pay more attention, how to love more.
I tried to pay more attention to scent while with Mary in Paris, and I tried to pay more attention to Mary. I was not only responsible for representing the scents of Paris — an enormous and impossible task — but I was under even more self-imposed pressure because Mary had recently recovered from a second round of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As an intrepid explorer who rode her bike alone across the United States, Mary was thrilled to finally be well enough to travel and enjoy sensuous pleasures again. Our friend Gerry had generously invited us to stay in his Paris apartment for two weeks. It was a chance of a lifetime, so I pulled out my credit card and never regretted going into debt for that trip.
As a writer, I took my duties very seriously. Again and again I would attempt to explain smell to Mary, for words always failed, but I had to keep trying. Dissecting an aroma into its components made it flat, exactly what I was trying to avoid.
How could I tell Mary about the enormous power the olfactory function has over the body? Some things smell so good, such as fresh baked cookies or one’s lover, you feel giddy and light headed. Some things smell so bad, such as diarrhea or a dead body, you want to vomit; your nose wrinkles, your stomach clenches, and your body pulls back violently in repulsion.
How could I describe what it feels like when an odor provokes a memory? How many millions have traveled to Paris to bite into and smell a madeleine like Marcel Proust describes in his famous passage In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past)? Mary lamented not having smell mnemonics.
How could I explain the emotional power scents have over us, such as the sadness that an ex-lover’s perfume can spark despite the beauty of the scent?
How could I tell her about the daily delight of discovery — the infinite variety of scents? Rain on the Paris sidewalk, the essence of the sea in whelks, artichoke broth with floating garlic oil, an apricot tart in Le Jardin du Luxembourg, rum baba with an espresso, or the heavenly scent of books in Shakespeare and Company? Mary was amazed to learn that even books had an aroma.
How could I demonstrate the secrets scents revealed? That gun was just fired. That neighbor is cooking fish for dinner. That neighbor who wears Old Spice aftershave was walking up the stairs just before us. And that neighbor drinks bourbon every morning.
How could I explain that scent-ghosts comprise an entire olfactory dimension? Within one Paris block there was dog poop, car exhaust, a bucket of cleaning water on the pavement, laundry steam, sweet and hot crepes, coffee, a man’s cologne, a garbage truck, cigarette smoke, and a butcher shop.
And then something significant would arise. “Right here, stand here. There is a ghost here made up of dark chocolate, almonds, and rum. A ghost of my mother’s version of Julia Child’s Queen of Sheba cake. A ghost of my mother’s love.”
Mary nodded her head pensively. She was not a reactionary person. She always took time to quietly contemplate issues from many angles before stating any opinions.
In Paris we slept foot to head in a double-size bed in Gerry’s garret apartment which was up five flights of a winding staircase. We ate at least two pastries every morning, drank a lot of wine every evening, and ate blocks of cheese. I told Mary that some of the Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc wines made me feel as if we were walking by candlelight at night through a forest with decaying leaves under foot, and we found and enjoyed the last sun-dried blackberries of the season.
Like an exceptional actor, Mary could say a million words with one look. And when you received one of her looks of approval, you felt not only loved but successful.
Sometimes I was grateful that Mary had no sense of smell — she had no idea how much gas I was passing one night due to a violently mean piece of Roquefort cheese I had eaten. When I told her later, she thought that was hilarious, and for years she would remind me of how lucky I was that she couldn’t smell.
Walking along the Seine one day, I caught my breath and started to run fast.
Mary yelled, “Why are you running!?”
I yelled back, “Just run!”
She ran and kept yelling, “Why are we running!?”
Finally, we stopped, and as I gasped for breath, I explained that back under that bridge the stench of old piss was so vicious it felt like a punch to the face and the gut at the same time.
She said, “You mean, I inhaled piss!?!”
I explained, “Well, eau de toilette de piss, oui.”
She gave me an annoyed look, and then she replied, “I’m glad I can’t smell my own poo. For that, I’m glad.”
It was spring, so we decided to take the train and then bike to Claude Monet’s home and garden in Giverny. I was hesitant at first because Monet provoked memories of cheap hotel rooms with 1980s posters of Monet’s water lilies over the bed. Also, the high tourist factor was not appealing. However, seeing Monet’s creative space — the Asian woodcut prints, his pond, and the swaths of colorful blossoms that influenced his paintings — gave me such pleasure, all my negative associations were erased. Standing on Monet’s bridge and looking out over the water lilies on the pond in real life — it was a magic trick. It was as if the paintings had brought the water lilies to life and not the other way around.
Monet’s garden was obscenely in bloom, the colors of his paintings laid bare — violet irises, red poppies, yellow daffodils. I explained to Mary that unlike colors, scents were not as distinct but would easily blend together into new variations. In the garden there was a symphony of scents — each blossom had an aroma made up of various scent-notes. The floral perfumes of jasmine, freesia, lavender, and rose wafted by on a warm breeze. Different notes would float by at different times and at various strengths, as if musical instruments were playing all around us, and as we walked among the musician-flowers the notes would change. Mary nodded pensively again.
By the side of the house, a particularly vibrant patch of roses raised their daring heads to the sun. In that dappling impressionistic light, a particular rose attracted me. Mary asked me to smell it.
I let my nose fill with its gift and said, “It is sweet and tangy — the top notes are citrus; the heart is black tea with vanilla; and the base is honey, but there is also the slightest touch of cinnamon, not enough to identify it, just enough to add the bite of spice.” I felt my heart sink. I had failed.
I looked into Mary’s curious, twinkling hazel eyes. Her look back said, keep going, I am listening. I wanted so badly to find a way for her to know that scent. “The scent of this rose is like a long-lost lover smiling at me from across a crowded and noisy room.”
Mary gave me her signature mischievous smirk, that seemed to say, we share a secret now. She asked me to smell the rose again. In that moment, she snapped my photo using black and white film. The lack of color represented a general lack and a lack of scent. Also, she didn’t want color to detract from the action. She explained that she wanted a photograph that would capture the essence of the act of enjoying a scented rose.
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” wrote Gertrude Stein, the famous Oakland, California, expat who lived in Paris.
The smell of rose has come to represent so much for me, the ghost of Mary, Monet, Paris, true friendship, love. To this day, when I smell something truly breathtaking, I think of Mary and how I would describe it to her. Let me be your nose my dear sweet friend, let me continue always to be your nose.
In memory of Mary Brown, aka Mz. Bad.