The Scent of Neroli

The Scent of Neroli Chapter One- Serena, The Queen Her name was Serena because she came from the island from the sea near Greece. It was, unfortunately, an arranged marriage with the Caliphate of the Arab kingdom. She arrived and tried to please her King, who seemed indifferent to her after their marriage night and more when she did not bear a child for him which he understood could happen only in one night with his poor wife not knowing what to do. She was inept when it came to love. She knew she was in love with the Caliphate but for him to love her, among his other bevy of women in a harem she seemed sorely lacking in the wiles of love. And so, she was banished to the chambers to live in seclusion until she learned how it is to please a King. Frantically she searched the libraries for books on making love. The Kama Sutra was first opened to her and her eyes were disgusted by the display of erotic animations of love which she could not understand. Women from the harem were summoned to help her understand what was amiss and finally, a woman whispered to her the need for the palace alchemist to concoct a love potion for her highness to seduce the King. Wide eyed and desperate, she agreed. Chapter 2- Philtre, The Alchemist   The woman whipped up a flame of torch and led her through the dank inner passages of the palace which seemed to have been forgotten by time but soon revealed the chamber of a man working on beetles at the corner of the room. The room was almost dark but for the light of a slight lamp whose weak light revealed a man with a beard busy, busy, busy in his room full of flasks and single open flames, not unlike a laboratory of sorts. There was also a panel of books by a wall. I brought you the Queen Serena, sir Alchemist Philtre. Philtre looked up from his work and was immediately entranced by the sorrow in the woman’s mien. He had never seen a woman so beautiful and yet so sad. He wanted to vanish the creases of worry on her face which was not possible because he was only a man, an alchemist, at the mercy of the Caliphate who had taken him to live here so he could control the man from spreading his talents in the outside world and be exclusively his. The women from the harem, managed to engage his services once they knew of his existence in the palace. He was a boy when taken to work for the Caliphate but was now a full-grown man who had not fully seen the full light of day for like the Queen, he seemed banished for his services to the King. But, today as the sun and blue sky passed through the small window of his cell, he could surmise much as though the Queen appeared to him in a clear lighted dream. The odalisque whispered to him what was required all but in discretion for if the Caliphate hears of this surely all of them would be killed. The alchemist straightened up as though it were the first time he did for he had always been studying about the elements of the world and longed to be in the outside world in search of his materials but could only send someone to procure these materials from the books he read and searched for solutions to problems that plagued the Caliphate. He was an apothecary upon himself and could create magnificent salves for every ailment the Caliphate suffered. For this, he requested that he be given a library of books for him to study the inner workings of the world of nature and how they related as medicine to man. It was enough for him to know for it was the reward in itself until today. The Queen appeared to him as though he had known her a thousand dreams before, from lifetimes ago but someone he could not touch for she held the quality of water, shimmering, glassy, impossible to take hold of, impermeable water. Together they discussed her problem. She needed to lace the King’s drink with a love potion so that he would look at no one else except the way he saw her. She wanted him to fall in love with her the way there never had been anything between them for theirs had been an arranged marriage of convenience and there was no time to know each other except as a royal decree that they marry. The alchemist realized this woman knew not what love was if it stared at her in the face but wanted it so much. He himself knew not what love was until now when he wanted to be close to her so much but could only stand meters away from her due to some ridiculous decree that had nothing to do with his feelings for her. He bribed the soldiers and the gardens were opened for them to stroll in. Finally, she twined her arms around his as they walked about the gardens with the butterflies circling them and the flowers. Birds seemed to warble songs which were intimately composed for them. The alchemist, bearded and the fine Queen kissed for they knew not what else to do in the garden of immediacy. She so wanted to fall in love with him and he knew more than she that he had known her long ago and will know her more as the days, months, years and lifetimes to come. Why it never ended with them together, he had no idea. She kissed him first on the shoulder as they watched the green grass, the flowers, the blue sky that sheltered their arboreal, piece of paradise. His own lips sought her own, and did not miss no matter how dim his sight already were for he had grown accustomed to the futile light of his study and laboratory. They sat on the stone bench and knew not what to do. They simply knew, they finally knew what love was all about. A remembering and a reckoning. Finally, they decided to escape the palace and live a life somewhere else like a normal couple. Philtre picked a flower from an orange tree and crushed it in his palm. He salved it unto the wrist of his beloved. He told her that if they were to be killed by the King, she should remember the scent of the Neroli so that whichever lifetime they were to be sent, they would find each other again and be happy in the next lifetime as they could not in this. Chapter 3- The Flight   The Queen smelt the whiff of Neroli and promised to remember for love is most recalled from the scent of shared secret more than anything else. He gave her a bottle of neroli which she brought with her back to her room. Each night she would place a dash of it on her delicate white wrists and visit Philtre in his chambers where they would make love and make plans to escape. He would bribe another soldier to take them out of the palace and from there they were to travel on foot towards the nearest town where they were to buy camels for their journey far, far away from the King. Philtre kissed his beloved on the forehead and told her to meet him tonight again for the flight from the palace. The Queen dressed simply and brought nothing but the bottle of neroli in her pocket. She was about to leave when the odalisque came to ask her where she was going. In haste, she made the mistake of telling her consort that she was to leave the palace with Philtre. The odalisque, who knew she was next in succession as the Queen, smiled in pretense of making the other feel as though everything would be alright. After the Queen left, she summoned presence with the King and whispered to him the Queen’s decision to leave. All sorts of emotions surged through the King who had no idea but for an instant realized who he had just lost. The loss of the Queen made him jealous and embarrassed if it were to be known she had left him for an upstart, an alchemist no less. Immediately, he summoned his soldiers and best, fastest horses to catch up on the lovers who were now, he surmised, in the desert, on foot. They found the tracks of the Queena and the alchemist for they had brought dogs to follow the scent of the Queen’s dress. There were two pairs of footprints. They seemed labored and in haste. In truth, she told Philtre that she told the odalisque that she left with him and this made Philtre acutely aware of the tenuous situation they were possibly in because he, of all people, knew the succession of the women of the harem. These women talked when with him for they flirted with him and talked beyond their drunkenness and the opium they inhaled which loosened their tongues and made them feel sensuous. He listened but never fell for any of them. He never realized that this would finally be important to know in the final moments of their life. They hastened their walk. He tried to lift her on his back and he had to tell her that the King is tailing them by now. The Queen agreed to saddle on his back. Finally, weary of awareness of their fateful end, he brought her down and looked deep into her eyes which held the stars and moon above. He kissed her forehead and pulled out the bottle of Neroli. They were about to drink the Neroli scent for its toxicity which would end them and save them the fate of being killed tortuously by the King when a strong gust of wind blew and turned them to dust. The King followed their trail and as soon as the soldiers found out that the footprints had disappeared, he was informed and he slapped the soldier for how could the footprints disappear unless there was a powerful sandstorm and there was not. The lovers simply disappeared. The King had the nearby towns ransacked and searched but the lovers were simply gone. Chapter 4- In Another Lifetime   Lucien scraped his palm over the rough wall of the University dark corridor lit by sconces of electric light. He was walking through a dark passage and at the end was light. And a rowdy classroom of high school students who quieted as soon as he stood before them with a pile of books he dropped on the table before them. He adjusted the glasses on top of his nose and gazed at the students suddenly not knowing what to do. He was about to write some equations on the whiteboard when his gaze wandered towards the window where an orange tree stood with its white flowers and stark orange fruits were in full bloom. The scent of the orange tree wafted inwards to the classroom and he felt weak all of a sudden. He wrote the equation on the whiteboard and told his students to research and solve the problem. They were welcome to stay in the classroom with their laptops or go home and do it there. He sat down and played with his pen which he twirled like a mannerism he just learnt to play from a lifetime he was just beginning to remember. It would happen to him sometimes, stop in his tracks and remember he had a life to live, this life and no other and yet he felt as though there were other lifetimes before what he was living. After class, he left the room and walked towards the tree, picked an orange fruit from the tree, was about to peel it when he became more interested in the flowers. He garnered a few one of which he crushed in the palm of hand and smelled with a swoon, Oh, sweet Neroli. Lucien was a chemistry instructor taking a Doctoral for Chemistry and waiting to become a full professor. He loved it. He didn’t know why he loved it so much. Sometimes he thought because it allowed him to find the desired product and the process by which he did his research was all suited to his temperance. He had the patience for the elements and to know what constituted everything in matter was a kind of power in itself. “Professor Drew.” A woman’s voice brought him back to the reality that he was standing before a tree doing an irregularity of picking fruits and flowers forbidden in campus. “You seem in the mood for nature. Don’t worry, I won’t tell about the forgetful professor who has forgotten the rules of the Botanical Department. Thou shalt not pick flowers in campus.” The voice of Professor Fields was coy but warm. Lucien laughed placing his nature treasures on the stone bench and brushed his palms together as though to avoid being caught with the most intimate of scent he could place in his whole personal life. They sat together on the bench and he peeled the orange and offered it to the lady professor who bit through the juicy fruit and leaving the seeds on the rind. “Oh, are you going to the opening of that new perfume in the market. You seemed keen on attending the other day. You still have the ticket I believe. There is to be a dance show by the students of the University and word is that it is to be a very markedly sensuous yet enticing one.” “I don’t know.” Lucien replied. “I might if the company is as convivial as you Professor Fields.” Professor Fields was part of the Chemistry department as well. Some of their students would go on to be interns for perfumeries, mostly female and gay students more interested in the artistry of chemistry with an olfactory skill which were wittier than their tongue. “You flatter me Lucien. Some of the students are going there tonight. Don’t forget, Eight p.m. at the Crimson Atelier. With some nice fancy installations to go with it, it really might be a worthwhile thing to go to don’t you think? Drinks and cocktails. See you then, Lucien.” She stood up with a whiff of scent which was proving more and more that Professor Fields was more than just playing around with him. He had the nose for such things as well and it was embarrassing sometimes.                                                                                                             *** Stella remembered pounding odd plants on a stony mortar and pestle as a child and using the sap to paint flowers of different colors. She would learn to taste them as well and one time was driven to the emergency room of a hospital vomiting the flowers she ate with complete disregard to their bitterness. They were poisonous harmless looking flowers but she so wanted to taste what she smelled as though they all came without polarity between the life-filled colors and the death-grip of their taste. She almost died and through it she would recall things, a cold desert swelling below a midnight sky so blue it reminded her of heaven and hell, a twist of wind that captured her completely she was turned to sand like the granules in the hourglass of time. Stella learned to hate watches after that. Time became an annoying factor. It became almost irrelevant to her. After that encounter with what she could only term as time, she was reduced to smelling things. Differentiating the different smells from the repugnant to those that held her attention. She came to love oranges and would ask her mom to buy more from the grocery. It was as close to something she could not name and yet it wasn’t. Oranges. She learned to eat them a lot until her guts hurt. Some books she read said orange is a sign of marriage and so it was. But what of it. She learned to sprout the seeds and bury them beneath the soil. Some grew and bore fruits and flowers. Strangely, she climbed the tree one day and picked a flower, crushed it within the palm of her hand and inhaled it. The scent of Neroli never left her from that time on. She grew up learning the art of perfumery, realizing she had the nose for distinguishing the seven different types of smell. She started buying little vials of perfume and mixing them up to create a new scent and had so much fun in the process. Neroli, however, haunted her. It was like that dream of orange sands and a deep blue sky above it that never left her. These three elements became a source of mystery for her that she needed to fathom. It was as though there was something to find among that scent. Later on, when she was to decide on which scent to create a perfume with, she chose Neroli with the idea that if she created it, it would attract that which she was searching for like a scent that left a trail of elusive memories behind which she so wanted to know, to feel, to love and to be loved. Why she felt so strongly about it was beyond her comprehension. She knew it had to do with time and her repugnant attitude towards it. And yet she wanted so much of it, she was almost desperate to find it and what it had to do with the scent of Neroli. Chapter 5- Meeting Each Other Again             Lucien decided to attend after all. The atelier was situated in downtown and looked like a rundown church with old beams running up the ceiling made of old planks of wood. The whole atelier smelled of ageing wood and fresh paint. There were good pieces of modern art upon the walls. It was a bit dim and yet the lights were placed to bring good angles of view for the art. In the middle of it all was the perfume basked in warm, limpid light and he could see that it was expensively encased in shapely flasks like those used by alchemists. He was attracted to the design of the bottle because it reminded him of something he could not put a finger to. He knew of the alchemists. They were the original chemists of old. They had been thrown out in Roman times and were salvaged by Arabs for they must have still given something important to the Arab kingdoms. There was a time he became fascinated with alchemy, as a child but relegated it to New Age mania rather than a form of practicality he could teach his students. Still, they belonged to the books of history. They were the pre-cursors to the chemists of modern times. There was something to be owed to them despite what modern times had turned them out to be, an esoteric concept relegated to the dusty shelves of libraries. He was definitely cynical about it. Professor Fields approached him from the corner of the room, slid her arm about his and led him to the flasks. “Here, take a sniff. It’s definitely different and I believe would do quite well in the market. It is made from the effusion of Neroli, I believe.” Upon the mention of his favorite scent, he picked a piece of paper and sprayed a slight amount on the paper. He held it below his nostrils and was assailed by a strange feeling. He could not define it but it lifted his spirits for the rest of the evening. They sat on chairs and were presented with a dance by the university students. It was a rendition of an Arab music which played from somewhere behind them. Garbed in Moorish costumes they danced an exotic rendition of Sarah Brightman’s Harem that sent his heart pounding with the scent of the perfume exploding in his head like a rush of blood to his skull. Then he found her, on the other side of the dais, was a woman dressed in sheer dress with her fair hair up in a bun but with some loosened down to frame a face that was at once entrancing and youthful. He braced himself as though everything scintillated at that precise moment. The woman smiled at him, her eyes, green, kohled and penetrating.  Her smile was warm and reassuring, he warmed towards her and enjoyed the rest of the dance. It was a wondrous dance. It reminded him of the desert, when he had traveled to the Middle East for a business consultation which he occasionally gave for firms in need of advice. After the dance, lights flooded the whole hall and Professor Fields led him to be introduced to the perfumer who made The Elixir, as it was named. He was led to the woman who smiled at him during the dance and held him into grips of reality for otherwise he would have swooned. “Stella darling, I would like to introduce you to a colleague of mine at the University, Professor Lucien Drew.” “Hello, Professor Drew.” Stella replied then remarked, “I must say you look familiar. Have we met before?” “I’m afraid not but you may call me Lucien. Your perfume though, is a familiar scent, Neroli, yes?” “Yes, my brand.” He could not help himself but he found himself very attracted to this woman and he had never fallen for anyone before as much as this was turning out. “Here, take another whiff.” Stella held out her wrist. She pulled up the sleeve of her sheer dress and he bowed to scent her skin, so near now and yet he felt so far for she was only offering him her creation. The Elixir smelled so familiar, he looked at her wondering if she felt it too. She looked at him when he raised his head and looked confused. She quickly rearranged her sleeve and he could see alarm in her face. There was a pulse in her neck where scents were sprayed to send a message from the perfume of choice. She smelt of Neroli, of a hidden desire towards hedonism, a slight need to let out some delight past borders of containment towards desire. He adjusted his glassed and mustered the courage to ask her… “Would you like to go out of here? There’s a nice pizza place nearby. I think they’re still open. That is if you’re free?” “Yes, please, I mean. Thank you. I would like that very much.” He smiled warmly at her through his glasses. They walked slowly out of the atelier and realized she was very slight and small wearing heels that made movement a bit stilted. She looked wonderful, like a glass doll. Her eyes were blue like the night sky bereft of stars and he felt he would drown in them. They walked side by side. He helped her walk past a puddle and they ate at a pizzeria, each relating pieces of themselves. He agreed that the olfactory sense was the most complex of senses to define. That one would have to smell it and not one word about it could give it justice. She talked as though she were older than her age, so mature and yet her youthful mien made her seem like a child playing grown up. She was interested in his course, chemistry and how it related to the promise of enhancing perfumes. He asked her what she placed in her perfume that made it seem so simple and yet complex as though it were organic. “…and familiar?” she asked her eyes now transfixed to his. She removed his glasses and reached out to kiss him on the lips. “…familiar?”. She repeated and he could scent the Neroli so near now he was actually breathing it. “Yes.” He could only reply. Why? Lucien asked himself. They kissed and when their lips clasped it was as though they were back to that night when they stood on the lap of sands undulating forever past the ministrations of time. There could not be any place in the world where they stood to withstand the pressure of time on their selves and yet they could not, would not be touched by it. It was beautiful. The night sky was the deepest blue and the stars rained on them like tears of glass in an hourglass of time. He kissed her on the forehead and forever knew that he would never love anyone else. She was now not a Queen but someone familiar and very real. He could smell the Neroli on her that she salved like a child following his every decision for them both. And yet in this final moment he was failing them both, now when she was his more than ever. He loved her knowing her as though he knew her like a friend and a lover. Not with all the pretensions of a Queen. He held her now as if there were time. He drew the bottle of Neroli which he knew she also had in her pocket and told her to drink from it because, otherwise, they would die in the hands of the King in the most unspeakable of ways. They were about to drink the contents of the bottle when a large menacing wind took their breath away and they were engulfed into a tunnel where they were shaken from each other’s grip. The final thought that she believed in was that she had the Neroli in his pocket and wherever the wind would land them, apart, she would remember him, because she had that scent to remember him by. When they unclasped from their kiss, they knew that they had waited another lifetime to reach this point in time to realize that they were meant to meet again and recall that moment when they were taken by the winds of time towards this age to complete what has been denied them in another lifetime. From that time on, they would know what the other felt, what the other thought and what the other desired which was nevertheless to say, one. It was like a clap of lightning, a glimpse into the crack of time in one complete moment that they were meant to be together. They both were taken aback, blushing, they felt shy and yet it was a moment to be strong because neither wanted to be apart from then on. He embraced her and kissed her hair as though he knew her all along more than anyone in this life he had been sent to by the winds of time. “I think, no, I know I must have loved you in another lifetime.” And he felt her shake a little as she looked up and with her deep blue eyes now brimming with tears. “I know. Why?” She asked. “Why?” He asked himself. “Because someone wanted us apart.” She concluded. They spent the night watching each other, feeling the others’ heartbeat, knowing each other again with a renewal that both felt was owed them. Not as an entitlement, but as a regret by the forces of the universe and brought them together they make amends. They were together again and that was what mattered. The pizzeria shut the lights and left a lone light on for them. They leaned on the brick wall and slept with the woman within his embrace and with the scent of Neroli about them like a halo of defense from the vulnerability they could still feel, even now when they were both free. They soaked themselves in the comfort of recognition and the deep sleep of knowing, arriving at knowing where the other came from. That sky, so blue above them, the love they felt for each other was what drew them so close to each other. The sand beneath them was alive after all and would take them towards itself like an embrace that would save them from death but towards life, another life where they would know each other again. He must have woven his fingers through hers and she felt it quivering. She was afraid too, this commitment which went through time because every corridor of her dreams tonight, he was there and she was afraid, of losing him again.  Light seeped through the glass pane of the pizzeria and together they watched dawn slip towards them and touch them. It was warm like a familiar light of dawn they met in another life when they would sleep together, so happy and awake in each other’s arms, skin, scent of Neroli without thought as to time that went by for they would meet again that night and the next until they could not be without each other anymore and move on to flee the palace and be together forever. Yes, they dared to dream, they recall now. And now here they were, together again.                                                             ***