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People always say that those who love the dead are stricken with anosmia. For me, there’s nothing to that, and my nose perceives the most diverse odours vividly, even if, like everyone, I am accustomed to those of my surroundings to the point of no longer being able to smell them. It could, in fact, be possible that the odour of bombyx impregnates my whole apartment without my even noticing.

The ladies show no signs of having any special trouble cleaning the antique store I inherited from my father. At the very most, once in a while, there’s a vague grumbling over the old objects, the nests of dust, the fragile things that are so ugly even though new ones could be purchased for much less. It’s only in my private apartment, on the fifth floor, that their behavior causes me to reflect. They stare into the corners with a look of prudent suspicion. They observe me slyly, and, most of all, they sniff the apartment’s odour, shifting their eyes. They sniff and sniff, searching their memory, finding nothing that’s right; sniff again, until a strange worry spreads over them. Then they become hunted beasts and escape. When I try to get them back to work, they give me the most vague answers with a frightened look, shaking their heads if I offer to increase their wages. I put a new ad into the papers and the same story begins again. One day, however, one of the cleaning ladies had the courage to ask me why I always wore black clothes, even though I wasn’t in mourning. Another, very young, already fat, and whose name I’ve forgotten, declared in a local store that I smelled like a vampire. Always this old and aberrant confusion between two beings so fundamentally opposed as the vampire and the necrophiliac, between the dead that feed off the living and the living who love the dead. I don’t deny, nevertheless, that after several days, the perfume of the bombyx transforms itself into an odour like that of heated metal that, more and more acrid, thickens finally into a stench of entrails. Each of these stages has its charm — even if the last announces separation — but never would I have the idea to eat the flesh of one of my friends, the dead, nor to drink the blood.

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