Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer Read Online Free PDF Page A

la Croix, who occasionally did rough, indeed very rough work for Madame Gaillard and was most conspicuous for never once having washed in all his life. Grenouille was less concerned with verbs, adjectives and expletives. Except for ‘yes’ and ‘no’—which, by the way, he used for the first time quite late—he used only nouns, and essentially only nouns for concrete objects, plants, animals, human beings—and only then if the objects, plants, animals or human beings suddenly overcame him with their odour.
    One day as he sat on a cord of beech-wood logs snapping and cracking in the March sun, he first uttered the word ‘wood’. He had seen wood a hundred times before, had heard the word a hundred times before. He understood it, too, for he had often been sent to fetch wood in winter. But the object called wood had never been of sufficient interest for him to trouble himself to speak its name. It happened first on that March day as he sat on the cord of wood. The cord was stacked beneath overhanging eaves and formed a kind of bench along the south side of Madame Gaillard’s shed. The top logs gave off a sweet burnt smell, and up from the depths of the cord came a mossy aroma; in the warm sun, aromatic flakes of resin odour crumbled from the pine-wood planking of the shed.
    Grenouille sat on the logs, his legs outstretched and his back leaned against the wall of the shed. He had closed his eyes and did not stir. He saw nothing, he heard nothing, he felt nothing. He only smelt the aroma of the wood rising up around him to be captured under the bonnet of the eaves. He drank in the aroma, he drowned in it, impregnating himself through his innermost pores, until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet, like Pinocchio, as if dead, until after a long while, perhaps a half-hour or more, he gagged up the word ‘wood’. He vomited the word up, as if he were filled with wood to his ears, as if buried in wood to his neck, as if his stomach, his gorge, his nose were spilling over with wood. And that brought him to himself, rescued him only moments before the overpowering presence of the wood, its aroma, was about to suffocate him. He shook himself, slid down off the logs, and tottered away as if on wooden legs. Days later he was still completely fuddled by the intense olfactory experience, and whenever the memory of it rose up too powerfully within him he would mutter imploringly, over and over, ‘Wood, wood.’
    And so he learned to speak. With words designating non-smelling objects, with abstract ideas and the like, especially those of an ethical or moral nature, he had the greatest difficulty. He could not retain them, confused them with one another, and even as an adult used them unwillingly and often incorrectly: justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, humility, gratitude, etc.—what these were meant to express remained a mystery to him.
    On the other hand, everyday language would soon prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple-wood, oak-wood, pine-wood, elm-wood, pear-wood, old, young, rotting, mouldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips and splinters—and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight. It was the same with other things. For instance, the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards each day, why should it be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouille’s senses it smelled and tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which cow it had come from, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been left in it and so on… Or why should smoke possess only the name ‘smoke’, when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odours mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire… or