The President's Hat Read online

  Pierre Aslan, who hadn’t created anything for eight years now, was not in Parc Monceau by chance. For the last five years he had been seeing a psychoanalyst, Dr Fremenberg, and had formed the habit of walking in the park for quarter of an hour or so each week before his appointments. Five years of spending six hundred francs a week for very little result. In less than ten minutes it would be time for another of these silent sessions to begin. Fremenberg practically never spoke. As a committed Freudian, he practised a form of free-floating attention, a listening technique that gave the patient the impression that his analyst was thinking about something else or was actually asleep.

  Now it was ten minutes into the session. Pierre lay on the green velvet Napoleon III couch, staring as usual at the African fetish in the alcove to the left of the window. The dark wooden statue was of a man with an elongated face, like Munch’s Scream, whose abnormally small body was enhanced by an erect penis. Reflected against the wall of the alcove by the spotlight, the statue appeared larger than it was.

  Fremenberg liked primitive art, especially statuettes, fetishes and canes. His consulting room had a good dozen of these wooden objects, sculpted by tribes who followed scary magic rituals dating back to the beginning of time. These trophies were displayed on modern plinths with brushed steel or black Plexiglas legs. Pierre had always found them abhorrent, displayed as they were totally out of context.

  It wasn’t so much the works themselves as seeing them exhibited in the bourgeois setting of a Haussmann-designed apartment that rendered them hostile. They seemed to be suffering, and as a result to be emanating curses. Éric, his son, who was only interested in the top 50 and his skateboard, would have said they were ‘freaky’. And he would be right, thought Pierre, as Fremenberg cleared his throat briefly before lapsing back into silence.

  In the beginning, when he had started coming to these inert sessions, Pierre had really made an effort to express his feelings. ‘You’re there to talk about yourself …’ his wife had said. ‘So talk, tell him what’s wrong.’ And Pierre had talked. He’d talked about the fragrances that hadn’t worked, the scents that had resisted definition, particularly the one he called ‘angel’s essence’, in reference to the angel’s share, those few drops of a vintage wine or brandy which evaporate through the cork, and even through the waxed cork covering. To Pierre, angel’s essence was what you smelt when you sniffed a perfume, although it wasn’t actually one of the ingredients. It wasn’t listed anywhere. It existed without being there.

  A sepulchral silence had greeted his confidences. Aslan was disappointed that for once his profession elicited no expression of interest. So he tried another tack. He talked about his marriage. He began by describing his wife, the famous pianist and Bach specialist Esther Kerwitcz, who travelled the world performing concert after concert and whose face often graced the pages of fashion magazines. Her beautiful green eyes could be seen in Elle, Vogue, Le Figaro Madame, Vanity Fair and even Egoïste, where Herb Ritts had immortalised her clasped hands as they rested on the keys. These revelations were also received in oppressive silence.

  In the following sessions he had spoken about his early childhood and how he had first become interested in scents while in his grandfather’s Provençal kitchen garden. Neither the peppery smell of a rubbed tomato leaf, nor the mellow, enveloping odour of mint elicited the slightest reaction from his analyst. Even when Pierre had talked about his son Éric and how he worried about what would become of him, Fremenberg still did not react.

  In three and a half months, he had not heard his analyst speak. He was greeted at the start of each session by a discreet handshake and a silent nod. No words were uttered; there was never a hello or a good evening. At the end of the session, the handing over of the 500-franc note, with its 100-franc brother, caused Fremenberg to give a severe little frown, as though the acceptance of money was a painful ritual that had to be endured.

  One day, Aslan turned up unwillingly for his session and pulled a face as he stretched out on the couch. ‘I have to warn you that I slept very badly last night,’ he began.

  The silence of the consulting room was broken by a voice saying gravely, ‘A bad dream perhaps?’

  And it seemed to Pierre as though Fremenberg spoke in the tone of a waiter offering a dessert, with that mixture of deference and authority that expects the listener to respond promptly.

  Pierre described the dream that had disturbed his sleep. Carnivorous plants had climbed out of his wife’s piano and rampaged through the flat until they reached the perfume organ. Their spines and leaves had swept through the precious little bottles, knocking one of them to the floor where it smashed. But there was no odour. Pierre picked up the shards and sniffed them. Nothing. So he opened all the bottles and found they contained only water. The mutant plants began to bleed and shrivel on the floor, whereupon Pierre was seized by an irrational anguish. He had to save the plants or else the apartment would burst into flames. He had woken up just as the first flames had started licking at his study door.

  As he finished describing his dream he turned to Fremenberg, who was taking notes with a Montblanc Meisterstück. His face looked completely serene, he was practically smiling. It had been a long time since Pierre had given anyone that much pleasure and it immediately made him feel more confident. ‘You see, Fremenberg is peculiar – everyone says so – but he is an excellent therapist; he’s going to help you. You seem happier; it seems to me you’re getting better,’ Esther had said. Yes, at that moment, Pierre was feeling better.

  A few weeks later though, it was back to the long silent sessions. Pierre didn’t have a dream he could describe and he sensed this was a disappointment to his analyst. That made him feel guilty. Lying on the couch, he could feel Fremenberg’s disapproving presence behind him. The return to square one made him feel more despairing than ever.

  A ‘disappointment’ was the worst possible thing to be and Pierre was now convinced that he was the walking embodiment of the word. He who had once been the brilliant star of French perfume and who from the age of nineteen to forty-four had risen relentlessly through the firmament! He had gone from lab assistant to ‘nose’ in less than three years, astounding his peers with his audacious combinations and encyclopedic knowledge of scents. He had been capable of recognising and categorising more than ten thousand scents and had even invented a new language, a veritable personal Esperanto, to describe them – kérakac, for the odour of wet, burnt wood, varvine for limestone heated by the sun, pergaz for seaweed abandoned on the shore at dusk …

  He had created seven perfumes before his imagination had withered and he had become a disappointment. A disappointment to his backers, who no longer recognised in him the genius creator of Solstice, Alba or Sheraz. A disappointment to his wife, who found herself married to a husk of a man who hung aimlessly about the flat dragging himself from bedroom to sitting room. But crucially and above all he had become a disappointment to himself. The brands that had previously paid him a fortune to sniff little strips of paper diagnosed a creative block that would soon pass. It hadn’t. After eight years during which he had created nothing, no one mentioned that possibility any more. Pierre Aslan had been great, now he wasn’t.

  From time to time in order to keep on the right side of his analyst, Pierre would invent a dream. Despite not remembering any of his dreams from the night before his session, he would nevertheless serve up a good yarn to entertain Fremenberg. The last time he’d done it, the dream had involved a purple bat that had flown into the cellar and bumped into some hessian sacks filled with rotting rose petals. Fremenberg had liked that. Occasionally, Pierre would have a quick fantasy of punching his analyst or striking him with one of those obscene fetishes.

  This session, nothing came to mind as he stretched out on the couch. He rested the hat on his thighs and stroked it gently to pass the time. The repetitive movement of his fingers against the felt evoked an image from his childhood – Aladdin rubbing his brass lamp to summon up the geni
e to fulfil his every wish. That thought linked to a hat found in the park might interest Fremenberg. Nevertheless Pierre decided not to share it with him.

  As Pierre walked home, he passed the bench and hesitated. Should he put the hat back on it? Its owner might come back hoping to find it there. A young woman pushing a pram stopped, checked that the baby inside was sleeping soundly, then sat down and opened Télé-Poche which had a kitsch picture of Joan Collins on the front. Now it would be difficult to go over to the bench, put the hat down and leave in silence without appearing like a lunatic or a mad fetishist. And he didn’t feel able to explain to the girl – who was undoubtedly an au pair, and probably foreign – that he’d found the hat an hour earlier on the bench.

  No, it was much better just to keep the hat, at least for now. Pierre looked inside the hat again and this time the two gold letters made him think of FM radio – another curious association that might have been of interest to Fremenberg – then he put the hat on and slowly smoothed the black brim between his thumb and forefinger. It had been a long time since his fingers had made that particular gesture, which drew an imaginary line in front of his eyes.

  As Aslan moved off he thought back to his very first hat, a grey felt hat with a narrow brim, bought in Harrods in 1967. His purchase of that piece of headgear had been the occasion of a lively encounter with Tony Curtis.

  The actor had just put the hat down amongst the others when Aslan had picked it up to try it on. Tony Curtis had remonstrated, saying that he intended to buy it, but Aslan had stood his ground: the hat had been on the table; if the actor had wanted to buy it, he should have kept it in his hand. The head of department had watched this exchange in anguished silence, then apologised profusely to the star, not knowing how to put things right – there wasn’t a single other hat like that in the whole store.

  The run-in had turned good-natured when Curtis and Aslan had tried the hat on in front of the mirror one after the other to see who it suited best.

  ‘You, definitely,’ the actor had declared, magnanimously holding the hat out to Aslan, who, not wanting to be beholden, had hurried over to the perfume counter to buy the cologne he’d detected Curtis wearing and offered it to him.

  ‘As the saying goes in French: nous sommes quittes?’ he’d said, raising his hat in farewell.

  Many years later, he’d come across the actor at a reception in Los Angeles. ‘You’ve forgotten your hat, Mister Nose,’ a voice had said behind him and they had reminisced pleasurably about their encounter at Harrods. That was the era when Aslan still socialised, and there were photographs to prove it. He’d been wearing a dinner jacket with a rose buttonhole and Esther was in a long dress. What remained of that style and elegance? Nothing. He had grown a beard six years ago, trimming it every three months, and instead of impeccable charcoal-grey suits, he wore an old threadbare sheepskin jacket, which would not have looked out of place on the park’s gardeners. At the very lowest point of his depression, he had decided to sort out his clothes. It had been dramatic. He had taken all his suits, overcoats, jackets and hats to the Salvation Army. Some had been worn out but others were perfectly wearable. The only item Pierre would have liked to hold on to would have been ‘Tony Curtis’s hat’, but he’d left it on an aeroplane a few years earlier.

  Perhaps it doesn’t go with your beard. At three in the morning he grabbed his glasses from the bedside table and got up without waking Esther. On his return from the session with his analyst, Esther had been playing the first movement of Bach’s Toccata in C minor, practising one particular passage. Pierre had followed the sound of the Steinway until he reached the sitting room where he found her concentrating on the keys, her back to the door, her hair up in a bun. She repeated four or five notes several times. Each time they sounded the same, but to her they obviously weren’t right. It was a question of touch or duration. The timing was probably only out by a nanosecond, but she wasn’t satisfied.

  Demand for absolute perfection characterised both their professions. A tiny detail became a huge obstacle and they could only rest easy once they had surmounted it. The repetition of notes might last a few minutes or it might go on all afternoon. A perfume could be created after a few weeks, or several months and sometimes several years of research. The composition of Shalimar had been a fluke. In a trial, Jacques Guerlain had poured a few drops of synthetic vanilla into a bottle of Jicky, and he had created Shalimar. Patou’s 1000 on the other hand had taken years and years of research and no less than a thousand trials, hence its name. Esther was perfectly capable of practising the same phrase a thousand times if necessary. He had intended to withdraw without disturbing her work, but a floorboard had creaked under his foot. Esther turned round.

  ‘You frightened me! What’s that hat?’

  ‘It’s a black hat,’ Pierre had replied

  ‘I see that, but where did you get it?’

  ‘In a little second-hand designer shop on Boulevard de Courcelles.’

  ‘I thought they only sold women’s clothes.’

  ‘So did I, but it was in the window; it had just been dropped off.’ Pierre was thinking on his feet. His wife was already finding it hard to take the old sheepskin jacket and the threadbare Girbaud jeans. She certainly wouldn’t approve of him wearing a hat found on a bench. The boutique, Des marques et vous, was on his way to Fremenberg’s, so it was perfectly believable that he might have spotted the hat in the window and gone in to try it on.

  ‘It’s been a long time since you last wore a hat,’ said Esther, looking at him closely. ‘It does suit you, but …’ she was frowning, her head on one side, ‘perhaps it doesn’t go with your beard; it makes you look …’

  ‘What does it make me look?’

  ‘A bit strange.’

  Pierre had walked over to the mirror above the mantelpiece and didn’t think he looked strange. Esther had repeated the notes from Bach then asked him how the session with Fremenberg had gone. ‘Well,’ said Pierre without elaborating. At that moment he felt as if he could spend the rest of his life leaning on the mantelpiece, the hat on his head, contemplating his wife’s reflection as she played Bach. The repetition of the notes helped create a reassuring impression of eternity.

  Perhaps it doesn’t go with your beard. The moonlight was filtering through the net curtains into the sitting room. Pierre nearly knocked into the coffee table but soon oriented himself by the dark mass of the sofa. Once out of the door, he crossed the corridor, passed his son’s bedroom and reached the bathroom, locking himself in.

  The fluorescent light blinked as it warmed up. He closed his eyes painfully then flicked the switch off. Candles. There were candles in the broom cupboard. Blinded by the harsh light which was still imprinted on his retina, he went out of the bathroom and felt his way to the cupboard. The candles were stored in a cardboard box along with a Bic lighter in case of a power cut.

  There, that’s much better, he thought, lighting the first candle which he put on the side of the basin. He lit another, then a third. He opened a drawer, took out a small pair of golden scissors, leant towards the mirror and took hold of his cheek between thumb and forefinger. Grey and black hairs fell in a fine rain into the basin.

  A good twenty minutes later, he had no more than five days’ worth of beard. He ran the tap and bathed his face in hot water. He wetted his shaving brush under the scalding stream of water and began to rub the shaving soap in little circular movements. The white foam thickened into a cream which he spread in wide bands across his cheeks, chin, mouth and neck, before freeing his lips with a wipe of his thumb.

  He put the razor just under his ear, held his breath and drew the blade down to the bottom of his neck. His skin was revealed, soft and smooth. The foam, dotted with black and grey, whirled down the plughole. Pierre wiped the steamed-up mirror, attacked his left cheek, his right cheek, his neck, moustache and chin, puffing out his lower lip for the finishing touches. All that was left now on his face was a few traces of white soap.

&nbs
p; He grabbed a towel, put it under the hot tap, and buried his face in its softness. He stayed like that for a good minute with his eyes closed, then slowly lowered the towel to look in the mirror. It was like bumping into an old friend he hadn’t seen for a long time. The mirror reflected back a well-known face, a man who looked like Pierre Aslan.

  The sun was shining into the consulting room, making the sheen on the old masks glow against the white wall.

  ‘I shaved my beard off,’ said Pierre. ‘I shaved my beard off and I have a hat,’ he added.

  As usual his declaration was met with silence.

  ‘If I hadn’t put in a drop of sweet myrrh, Solstice would have been different. If I hadn’t found the hat, I wouldn’t have shaved,’ he said more loudly.

  He found his reasoning very compelling. It was as simple and brilliant as a mathematical proof which could explain an entire aspect of the universe in a few phrases. At the sight of his clean-shaven face, Esther had nodded then smiled, and tears had come into her eyes.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Pierre had asked, taking her into his arms.

  ‘I’m not,’ she’d sniffed. ‘I’m happy … I’m getting you back.’

  A few days later she had left to play a series of concerts in New York, and then his son had also departed for Les Arcs to go skiing with his friends. Pierre found himself alone for the days leading up to New Year. His wife had left him instructions as if he were a child. ‘Make sure you get up in the morning.’ Until relatively recently he had been known to sleep until one o’clock and drink his coffee in his dressing gown in front of Yves Mourousi and Marie-Laure Augry’s lunchtime news programme.

  ‘Don’t be shy about asking Maria to make one of your favourite dishes, a pot-au-feu for example – that would be seasonal.’ And she had especially reminded him not to forget his Friday session with Dr Fremenberg.