Perfume. The story of a murderer

The other children, however, sensed at once what Grenouille was about. From the first day, the new arrival gave them the creeps. They avoided the box in which he lay and edged closer together in their beds as if it had grown colder in the room. The younger ones would sometimes cry out in the night; they felt a draft sweep through the room. Others dreamed something was taking their breath away. One day the older ones conspired to suffocate him. They piled rags and blankets and straw over his face and weighed it all down with bricks. When Madame Gaillard dug him out the next morning, he was crumpled and squashed and blue, but not dead. They tried it a couple of times more, but in vain. Simple strangulation-using their bare hands or stopping up his mouth and nose— would have been a dependable method, but they did not dare try it. They didn’t want to touch him. He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can’t bring yourself to crush in your own hand disgusts you.

As he grew older, they gave up their attempted murders. They probably realized that he could not be destroyed. Instead, they stayed out of his way, ran off, or at least avoided touching him. They did not hate him. They weren’t jealous of him either, nor did they begrudge him the food he ate. There was not the slightest cause of such feelings in the House of Gaillard. It simply disturbed them that he was there. They could not stand the nonsmell of him. They were afraid of him.

Five

L

OOKED AT objectively, however, there was nothing at all about him to instill terror. As he grew older, he was not especially big, nor strong-ugly, true, but not so extremely ugly that people would necessarily have taken fright at him. He was not aggressive, nor underhanded, nor furtive, he did not provoke people. He preferred to keep out of their way. And he appeared to possess nothing even approaching a fearful intelligence. Not until age three did he finally begin to stand on two feet; he spoke his first word at four, it was the word “fishes,” which in a moment of sudden excitement burst from him like an echo when a fishmonger coming up the rue de Charonne cried out his wares in the distance. The next words he parted with were “pelargonium,” “goat stall,” “savoy cabbage,” and “Jacqueslorreur,” this last being the name of a gardener’s helper from the neighboring convent of the Filles de 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. He 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 would subdue him with a sudden attack of odor.

One day as he sat on a cord of beechwood 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 Madam Gaillard’s shed. The top logs gave off a sweet burnt smell, and up from the depths of the cord came a mossy aroma; and in the warm sun, bits of resin odor crumbled from the pinewood 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 smelled 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.”