The President's Hat Read online

  The large apartment on Avenue de Villiers was shrouded in silence, as always happened when Esther left on tour, but this time Éric wasn’t there either. Not that they ever interacted much; a man of fifty-two doesn’t often have a great deal to say to a fifteen -year-old boy and vice versa. In a few years they would talk and exchange views on a variety of subjects, but, for the moment, Éric reserved for his parents that taciturn air of teenagers the world over that hinted at jollity and laughter with unknown friends.

  ‘Our housekeeper told me that I look ten years younger,’ Aslan went on in the silence. ‘Which means I look forty-two, whereas, with my beard, I looked my age … Or perhaps it means I looked sixty with my beard.’

  ‘I would have said you looked sixty,’ declared Fremenberg.

  It was so rare for his psychoanalyst to speak that each time it happened Pierre felt his heart beat faster. Once he’d got over that, he turned towards his analyst.

  ‘You thought I looked sixty?’ he asked drily.

  Fremenberg looked at him unblinkingly until Pierre looked away. And they didn’t exchange another word for the whole of the rest of the session.

  In the solitary days that followed, Pierre maintained his convalescent rhythm, rising at ten o’clock in order to shave with the greatest care. Then it was time for the television news with Yves Mourousi, followed by the lunch that Maria prepared for him. The rest of the day was happily spent reading magazines, or going out to buy various things like batteries for the remote control, spare light bulbs for the lamps, or new soles for his shoes.

  The owner of Renovex, the chemist’s on Rue de Levis, thought he was looking better and told him so. She also said that it was a good idea to get rid of the beard and that his hat was very elegant.

  These unexpected compliments made him feel as if he had a new lease of life in the eyes of others. He was no longer that palely loitering and silent figure that no one ever spoke to. The subtle transformation had begun when he had started to wear a hat again. Wearing an accessory which recalled his glory days made him feel as if the old Pierre Aslan was reaching out to the disillusioned man he had become.

  The felt hat was the only thing that he had taken possession of in a long time; it was something he had chosen, unless the hat had chosen him. Left on a bench, it could have been picked up by anyone. How long had it been there anyway? Even though he would never know who the official owner of the felt hat was, the mysterious F.M., from now on it was his hat.

  The arrival of the hat in Pierre’s life was responsible for a second change to his daily wardrobe. He discarded his old sheepskin jacket. One Sunday, after watching an episode of Magnum with an interest that surprised him, Pierre decided to go for a walk in the park. This broke his pattern of only going to the park on Friday before his appointment with Fremenberg.

  It was so cold it felt as if it was about to snow; in fact Yves Mourousi had warned that it would probably do so on Monday. He walked with his hands in his pockets and the hat on his head. The park was almost deserted. The only people he passed were a pack of flushed joggers, jaws clenched and all wearing Walkmans.

  He was passing the roller-skating rink where reckless children raced round, hanging on to the handrail to stop themselves from falling, when he noticed kérakac – the smell of burning wood. He followed the smell to a part of the park that was out of bounds to the public. He saw a column of smoke rising behind a bush.

  Pierre walked over and found a gardener burning dead leaves and dry wood, turning them over with a pitchfork. The gardener looked at Pierre.

  ‘You’re not really supposed to be here,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, it was the smell of burning wood that attracted me.’

  ‘You like it too? Well, in that case, you can stay. There’s no one here anyway, and tomorrow it’s going to snow.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The gardener nodded and put his hand on his lower back. ‘I can feel it here. It’s my personal barometer.’

  Then he used his fork to scoop up a pile of dead wood and throw it on the fire. The two men stood there lost in thought in front of the crackling fire with its white smoke rising in curling plumes.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said the gardener.

  ‘Could we burn my jacket on the fire?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘My jacket, do you think it would burn?’

  ‘Why do you want to burn your clothes?’

  ‘Because … I need to.’

  After handing over a 50-franc note and emptying his pockets, Pierre put his jacket on top of the wood. He was reminded of the Hindu ritual of burning bodies on a pyre until they were reduced to cinders.

  The jacket was enveloped in smoke, which became denser and, as the first burning branches caught the material, the fire took hold. The gardener watched his strange visitor in between his spadefuls of dead leaves. Pierre removed his hat and held it in both hands at knee-height while he watched the flames do their work on the coat he’d worn for six winters.

  When he returned to his flat, he opened the bedroom wardrobe looking for his black Yves Saint Laurent suit, but he couldn’t find it. He had probably given it away with the others to the Salvation Army. But he found another suit, a charcoal-grey Lanvin, that seemed to have survived the great purge. Perhaps Esther had kept it, without telling him.

  On one of the high shelves he discovered a white shirt he hadn’t worn for years. And in his chest of drawers he found gold and mother-of-pearl cuff links. Pierre undressed, throwing his jeans onto the velvet armchair in a ball, and put on the suit trousers, the shirt and then the jacket. It took him a minute to wrestle the cuff links in. He looked at himself in the mirror on the inside door of the wardrobe, beardless in a suit and white shirt. The suit was a little tight at the waist but it didn’t matter.

  He closed the wardrobe door, walked through the apartment, put on his hat and went out.

  Could he do it? It was so many years since he had undertaken this exercise. The last time, in spring 1982, he had tried it during a walk from the entrance of the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, all the way through the gardens from west to east until he arrived in front of the Louvre.

  He had then sat on a bench in the little square where several years later they would erect a glass and steel pyramid and thought, I’m finished. I couldn’t identify at least a quarter of the perfumes I passed.

  The challenge he now set himself had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. But he felt up to it. He was going to identify the perfumes of all the people he walked past in the street. Pierre breathed deeply then closed his eyes.

  He counted backwards like a hypnotist bringing his subject back to reality: five, four, three, two … one, then he clicked his fingers and opened his eyes, stroked the brim of his hat and began to walk in a straight line. The rule of the exercise was that he mustn’t stop or turn his head. A dark-haired woman with a bob was coming towards him in a black suit and Emmanuelle Khanh glasses. She was level with him and now she’d passed him. One second, two: the little gust of air that accompanied all movement swept over Pierre; ‘Fidji,’ he murmured.

  Without slowing down at all, he waited for the man with the briefcase to pass him. The man wore a grey-checked suit and his hair was tied back in a ponytail. The two regulation seconds preceded the olfactory waft; Paco Rabanne pour Homme.

  Now there was a group of three women in their thirties coming towards him. According to his self-imposed rules, although he wasn’t allowed to stop or turn to look at anyone, he could cut across them.

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ he said as he forced them to separate to get past him.

  He brushed lightly against the one with mid-length brown hair (First by Van Cleef & Arpels), her friend’s long blonde ponytail skimmed his jacket (L’Air du Temps) and as he passed the third, a petite blonde with short hair (Eau de Rochas), he heard her murmur, ‘He’s crazy, that man.’

  Hat-trick, thought Pierre just as a y
oung woman in jeans and a red beret hurried towards him; Poison.

  A man in velvet trousers and a suede jacket walked diagonally in front of him cleaning his glasses; he wasn’t wearing any cologne. There was just an adour of aftershave containing honeysuckle and mint mixed with cigarettes.

  As he waited at the red light, Pierre found himself next to a runner who was jogging on the spot; sweat of course, but also Eau Sauvage. On the other side of the boulevard, he passed a couple in their fifties – probably tourists – who were trying to find where they were on a map; the woman wore Shalimar and the man smelt of Elnett hairspray. He steals his wife’s hairspray, was Pierre’s conclusion but he didn’t have time to dwell on that before he detected Arpège on a woman with plaits wearing a grey trouser suit, then Habanita on a young blonde woman with blue eyes.

  After that he had several Poison, another L’Air du Temps, two Solstice, then Lacoste for men, Montana by Montana, Quartz by Molineux, Anaïs Anaïs, Caron’s Poivre, Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, Sikkim by Lancôme, Joy, and a surprising Épilogue by Coryse Salomé.

  When he reached Place Saint-Augustin, he sat down on a bench and took off his glasses and hat. His head was spinning. He had done it. A waiter from one of the cafés came over from his terrace to ask if he was all right.

  ‘Drakkar Noir, Guy Laroche,’ replied Pierre.

  The snow was beginning to come down, in sparse flakes at first, then in flurries. He returned home soaked through, his hat covered in white powder. He tapped it so that the crystals fell off, and put it on the sitting-room radiator to dry.

  On 18 April 1982, he had put down his smelling strips, stopped up the last five perfume bottles he’d opened and put them back in their places in the perfume organ. Then he’d left the room, locked the door and flung the key into the top drawer of the chest before getting drunk on ‘67 Bowmore. It was finished. His symbolic locking of the room was intended to put an end to twenty years of creativity.

  No one dared touch the key; the orders were clear: the door must not be opened, the ‘study’ had been condemned. Not to be opened under any circumstances, not even for hoovering. The room became the tomb of his creative genius, a Bluebeard’s chamber in which his perfume organ slept.

  Aslan had designed the organ himself, a semicircular case with adjustable shelves on which almost three hundred bottles of essential oils were stored. It had taken the master carpenter in Faubourg Saint-Antoine nearly a year and a half to build it, using the best-quality wood. It was decorated with a mermaid created by a sculptor. The mythical fish-tailed creature had her left hand on her heart and in her other hand she held – over her head like a crown – a representation of his three-branched smelling-strip-holder.

  She was Aslan’s crest, his emblem, the muse that appeared on his letterhead and on the seal he used on his envelopes.

  He planned to spend New Year’s Eve on his own. Esther and Éric had phoned earlier, and in the evening Pierre settled down to while away the last hours of the year in front of the television, watching the highlights of the most important events of the last twelve months.

  January – Thierry Sabine and Daniel Balavoine had been killed in the Paris–Dakar race, and the space shuttle Challenger exploded live on air a few minutes after it took off.

  March – Jacques Chirac became prime minister, inaugurating the first ever cohabitation in French political history, and a bomb exploded in Galerie Point Show on the Champs-Élysées, killing two and injuring twenty-nine.

  April – a reactor exploded at the nuclear plant in Chernobyl, but, thanks to an anticyclone, the radioactive cloud avoided France.

  June – stand-up star Coluche died in a motorcycle accident on a minor road in the South of France.

  September – terrorist attacks devastated the capital, targeting the main post office at Hôtel de Ville, a pub owned by Renault, the police headquarters on Île de la Cité, and Rue de Rennes.

  November – Action Directe assassinated the head of state-owned Renault, Georges Besse, at point-blank range outside his house. That same month, TV impressionist Thierry Le Luron also died.

  And this evening, 31 December, the French taken hostage in Lebanon, Marcel Carton, Marcel Fontaine, Jean-Paul Kaufmann and Jean-Louis Normandin, had still not been freed.

  Aslan fetched some champagne, a dry Canard-Duchêne, the official supplier to the higher echelons of the army, popped the cork and poured himself a glass. He saluted the television with it and, as was his habit – one which caused Esther to roll her eyes – declaimed the motto of the French cavalry: ‘To our wives! Our horses! And those who ride them!’

  As he swallowed the first fizzy mouthful, the television showed the illuminated courtyard of the Élysée Palace at night. Classical music played and ‘Best wishes from François Mitterrand, President of the Republic’ appeared on the screen in yellow letters.

  The image then faded gracefully away and the head of state appeared, sitting at his desk in front of the gilt of the Élysée Palace, the French flag in the background and a very beautiful golden inkwell in the foreground.

  ‘My dear compatriots, I am grateful to the tradition that allows me for the sixth time to wish you a Happy New Year’ – at that moment the camera zoomed slowly in on the President – ‘and to send, in your name, expressions of friendship to those living in hardship from poverty, unemployment, illness, solitude or from the long anguishing wait for the return of a loved one. The good wishes I send you are the same as always,’ he went on with easy charm: ‘that France unites when it is important, that France protects and develops its democracy, that she survives the challenges of the modern world.

  ‘The events of 1986 have shown how crucial it is to stand together without faltering against terrorist threats; they have shown that more than ever we must work to reduce unemployment; they have shown we must …’

  The President’s voice was gradually lost to Pierre as a thought took shape. He was no longer listening. As he remained immobile on the sofa, his eyes were running slowly round the room. Vanilla and kérakac … but also jasmine. He looked up and closed his eyes … sweet myrrh … but also the subtlety of leather … a new perfume hung in the air. A combination of scents that corresponded to nothing known. It was incredibly subtle for a smell found in an apartment, an unusual coming together of notes which were balancing and adjusting themselves with each passing second.

  Pierre opened his eyes. The perfume wasn’t in his head, it was here in the room. He turned towards the radiator. The hat was drying on the heat of the metal. That was what it was.

  He rose slowly and carefully so as not to disturb a single molecule of air and approached softly. The Eau d’Hadrien and Solstice had mingled in the moisture of the snow and drawn in a hint of burning wood from Parc Monceau.

  ‘My dear compatriots, when I see what so many French men and women are capable of, in so many spheres, leaders in the fields of science, the arts, industry and sport, when I see the quality of our workers, our managers, our farmers, when I look at the role that France has played in international affairs, I am sure that we have everything it takes to succeed. All we need to add is the determination to succeed, and to do it together. Happy New Year, long live the Republic, long live France!’

  The three smells were mingling and complementing each other in the heat. The perfect fusion, the ideal marriage. Pierre held his breath, then brought his face close to the hat. Time stood still. When it happened he thought he would faint. Sublime, divine, the perfect equilibrium between Solstice, Eau d’Hadrien and burning wood. A new fragrance of pure perfection. Angel’s essence.

  Aslan’s hands began to tremble. He had not felt this for eight years. His secret muse was smiling on him again in the last few moments of the year. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply so that the intangible mixture entered his body, reached his blood, filled his veins, combined with his blood cells, then revived his whole being and reactivated the sleeping circuits of the Library of Alexandria that existed within him, the one
that had burnt down one evening in the late seventies, taking with it the creative genius of Pierre Aslan.

  The walls of the apartment seemed to disappear, then the paintings, the carpet, the television, the floorboards, the building, the block of houses, the quartier, the cars, the people, the pavements, the city and even the snow. Everything gone. There was nothing any more. No 1986, no hours, no minutes.

  With staring eyes, Pierre saw nothing more than lists of thousands of names scrolling past: doses and flowers, roots and powders, alcohols and distillations, then a formula, pure, clear and as powerful as the one that describes a nuclear reaction. It was the formula for a perfume, two lines that would come to define the age, fashion and women.

  His hands were trembling as he put the key in the lock. Pierre placed the hat on top of the perfume organ as though it were an ancient relic from the beginning of time. He sat down in his wide black leather armchair, raised haggard eyes to the mermaid, then reached out his hand to his sampling-strip-holder, and blew on it to clear the dust.

  When they received the package, the men in grey seated in the large room with bay windows said nothing. It had been such a long time since they had seen that mermaid seal with the crown above her head. Aslan had given no sign of life for a good while. Three years? Six years? One man shrugged his shoulders, indicating that he couldn’t remember either …

  ‘He doesn’t even ring us now, he uses the post,’ said another man, visibly annoyed.

  A man with grey hair opened the wax seal, and little splinters of wax fell on the glass of the conference table. Then he opened the box. It contained a bottle, also sealed and displayed on a little velvet cushion. There was no note, no letter of explanation, no formula. The man with grey hair picked up a steel paper knife bearing the logo of the famous brand and tapped the top of the bottle. New little flakes joined the others. Everyone gathered round as he opened the bottle.