Odours and Angels

Chantal Schaul, 2003

I‘m a hybrid between human and coffee bean. The first thing people notice about me is my coffee smell. It’s so strong that it makes them nauseous. Some even faint. And although I am a thoroughly handsome and well-bred young man, even if I may say so myself, it is my odour that most fellow human beings judge me for. My smell is my predicament.

There are other traces of the coffee bean in me, but they are less noticeable. My pupils are the shapes of coffee beans. My finger- and toenails are coffee beans, and so are my nipples and the tip of my penis. But only a few people know that.

The lack of human company that I have experienced throughout my existence – I am forty-two, as one coffee bean year counts for seven human years – has driven me into the one surrounding where I go unnoticed, and that is a coffee bar. The perfect gentleman I am, I would have preferred tea rooms, but coffee it had to be, and there I was, spending most of my time in the various coffee houses throughout the city, from American to Italian to Costa Rican ones.

To weaken my smell, I wrapped my limbs in cling film. To divert attention, I picked the seats nearest to the coffee maker. I rarely spoke, as my coffee breath would have been a give-away. I wore gloves at all times, not only to hide my fingerbeans, but also to avoid staining whatever I touched, money, chairs, tables and newspapers. The gloves were wadded on the inside with special pads, to soak up the sticky coffee substance that my pores produce instead of perspiration.

I never drank coffee in those places, but only the finest peppermint tea. It helped counteract my body odour to a small degree. And I never go out without an ample supply of imperial mints, which I suck at all times.

Thus equipped, I meandered from one coffee bar to the next, in quest of human company. My greatest desire was to find a female soul mate who would be able to tolerate my very own odour and perceive it not as a sickening stench, but merely as an idiosyncratic scent.

You will surely understand that every man needs a woman in his life. It was nothing more than this basic human requirement which I was trying to satisfy, and which led to an, in retrospect, often cruel dilly-dallying with the female sex.

The coffee bar I visited most often, at the time, was one that had a licence for selling alcoholic drinks. It offered an array of liqueur coffees. Irish coffee, coffee with Baileys, Cognac, Amaretto, or orange, vanilla, rum raisin or mint liqueurs, and so on. The strongest coffee mixes involved a shot of French Eau de Vie with various fruit flavours, raspberry, mirabelle, pear, or plum.

My often ungentlemanly tactic was to concentrate on a single lady in the bar and send to her table one, two, or even three coffees with a triple shot of Eau de Vie. The ladies never refused. My dazzling good looks and dashing sign language never failed to win them over from a distance, before any close contact was established.

I would wait for those ladies to fall into a drunken stupor and then approach my darling victims, as soon as their sense of smell was enveloped in an alcoholic haze and had started to malfunction. I would kindly offer them more coffee. The combination of my fetching appearance, an overdose of caffeine and a good measure of Eau de Vie proved the perfect recipe for wooing the most icy of ladies.

I then escorted the worshipping women to a hotel room where they lay at my feet, so intoxicated with love and drink that none of them ever noticed the coffee bean extremity of my member. In the morning, the bed was a battlefield of ground coffee. The sheets looked like sombre sand dunes. The ladies usually didn’t remember anything and escaped as fast as they could, before they passed out.

However much I enjoyed my bedroom antics, they never satisfied my greater need for real female affection. My growing collection of pillows, on which the ladies’ napes had nestled and left the unmistakable trace of their scent, was only a small consolation. At moments of extreme sadness, I would curl up underneath these tokens of womanly presence and dream about the enchanting creatures who had left their beautiful mark thereon.

My life moved along in this despicable fashion for quite some time, until, one day, I laid eyes on the most angelic of female creatures I had ever glimpsed. I was hit like lightning as I was sitting by the bar, sipping a cup of perfectly brewed peppermint tea and nibbling a couple of biscotti. The vision of the divine lady made me choke on an almond and ground my heart to dust.

Her skin was milky white and soft and delicate, like lily petals. Her eyes shone like amber. Her long hair stirred like wild silk as she floated through rows of books. She was the new employee of a large bookshop that accommodated an Italian-themed coffee bar, Mille Notti. Her name tag read ‘Celia.’

How could I ever approach this celestial creature? She was too precious for my usual method. I dared do nothing about my devotion, for fear of repelling her with my abominable smell but returned to that coffee bar every single day.

I was spending my days trying to come up with a solution to the matter. One afternoon a man of advanced age politely asked to sit next to me. It was the first time anyone had done that.

The man wore a brown corduroy suit which was so tattered in places that the velvet ridges had eroded into flat and flimsy patches of gauze. His mocha-coloured face was covered to a large extent by a short and shabby beard. It was yellow around the corners of his mouth and stretched from his collarbones up to the furrowed bags under his eyes. Between his plump lips the old man clasped an unlit cigar. It dangled underneath the large nose, an unshapely clot of flesh riddled with open craters.

He looked at me with his small black eyes that drowned in a landscape of bristles and lumpy ridges. He spoke with a string of deep rasps that seemed to have sprung straight from the viscous insides of a bubbling cauldron.

‘Señor Barillo is my name,’ he grated.

‘James Carver,’ I replied.

His hand felt like old leather, no doubt yellowed from the constant touch of cigars. The remnants of his teeth had the same earthen tint about them.

Barillo was Spanish. He dived into endless accounts of his many travels through the entire world. But I won’t go into that now.

What did strike me was that he never dropped a single comment about my smell. I found this both very pleasant but also perplexingly strange. After a while I began to suspect that he had not noticed the stench.

The answer to my befuddlement came when he told me one of his travelling tales. It concerned his tobacco plantations, just outside Rio de Janeiro. As a young man, Barillo had made a vast fortune by investing all his money in tobacco plants. It was, alas, to last him only a few months. But during that time he had become a compulsive smoker of the most tenacious kind of tobacco vermin. Wrapped in fresh tobacco leaves, he maintained, they tasted better than the finest cigar. It was because of the pungency and sharpness of these insects that the nerve ends of Barillo’s olfactory organ had been permanently wiped out.

Once I knew of his inability to smell, I relaxed and opened up to him. I mentioned my malodorous aura. He brushed it away light-heartedly.

‘Bah, my friend, you cannot tell me that a little coffee smell keeps the ladies at bay. A fellow of your calibre must surely exert a fantastic magnetic force on any woman.’

I tried to explain quite how strong my coffee odour was, but Barillo would not believe me. He wanted to see me approach a specimen of the fair sex to be convinced. I picked a random woman and whispered a friendly and gallant ‘what ho’ to her from a good distance. She dropped her coffee tray, flapped in two and tumbled to the floor.

Barillo was profoundly moved. He vowed to help me find a woman despite my enormous defect. It was then that I uncovered my profound but doomed idolisation for the divine Celia.

Barillo banged his fist on the table.

‘By God, you shall have her!’

He reflected for a moment.

‘What you need to do is have her at your feet before you even stand face to face,’ he said.

I nodded, listening carefully.

‘So, you shall send her little tokens of affection to win her over. I shall act as your go-between. You can watch our transactions from a safe distance.’

‘Tokens of affection?’

‘Yes, letters, poems, gifts, whatever tickles your fancy.’

I remarked that Celia might be ingenious enough to work out whom the tokens were coming from. Surely she had seen us together. Barillo decided that from that day on I should dress up as an old man. He would lend me some of his clothes. I agreed.

The next day saw me sitting at the same bar in new attire. I felt like a vagrant in Barillo’s scruffy brown suit and shapeless hat. My groomed hair was mousy grey and unkempt, my smooth skin concealed underneath a layer of greasy and dirty make-up. A large swooping moustache bounced to my chin and had me enter the ranks of Nietzsche look-alikes. Barillo thought I looked unrecognisable.

I composed the first letter. Barillo would deliver it to my angel that same day. It ran thus:

‘What ho, Celia, most divine of all creatures,

The first time I laid eyes on you, as you were flitting like an angel through rows of towering bookshelves, my heart convulsed in delightful pain as one of love’s arrows pierced through my sculpted chest.

My love, will you accept my ill-conceived words of devotion, for I have no other means of conveying to you my deepest and most hopeless of loves! I pray you, please don’t rebuke the helpless slave that I am.

Your very own James xxx

P.S. One single word from you would lighten my day and unburden my soul from feverish and torturous anticipation.’

When I watched Celia’s celestial face submerged in the reading of my note, I knew she would not dismiss me on the spot. Her divine forehead was furrowed in thought and she asked Barillo a whole sequence of questions, but she did not fling the letter aside with anger, and that was all that mattered.

Barillo reported back to me after Celia’s shift.

‘You’re in there, my friend.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She wants to see what you look like.’

‘Oh God, that’s not good. I’d have to stand in front of her.’

‘Don’t be foolish. A photo will do.’

I had no photos of myself. But Barillo said he was an accomplished landscape photographer and he would take a picture of me. He had me pose against a gnarled oak tree on the verge of the city park, gazing into space. I signed the photo with ‘Your very own Jim.’

I also composed a little poem. It ran thus:

Oh my darling milky white maiden,
With thy exquisite polished pearl hair
Hast my aching heart truly love-laden
And my twitching soul in a lace-lined snare.

Barillo assured me that both poem and photo had made a positive impression on Celia. But from now on I had to be even more careful that she would not recognise me, even in my disguise. If she were to approach me at this point, my smell would make her recoil in horror.

My next step was to send Celia a gift. Watching her every step in the bookshop and observing her preference for certain subjects, I knew she was interested in unicorns and corporate tax accountancy. Many times she had been perusing books on both subjects. She must have been an expert in both fields.

To combine those two hobbies of hers in one single gift, I picked a small porcelain unicorn and clothed it in a miniature tax accountant’s suit. My note read:

‘My darling angel, I hope this gift meets with your satisfaction and delight. Your loving admirer James.’

Then, on a spontaneous impulse, I added my mobile phone number and added: ‘Use it wisely, my angel.’

That evening, I received a text message from her:

‘Thank you, dear admirer. You intrigue me. Should we meet in real life?’

I was flabbergasted. She wanted to meet. Already! She was not yet ready to accept my smell. I replied:

‘In due time, my celestial gem. Would you not prefer to get to know me a little better first?’

To this, she sent no reply. I despaired. I poured out torrents of words into the greatest love letter ever written. Its rhetoric was so enmeshed with metaphors and its words so laden with meaning, it simply had to trap my beloved reader into its web of heart-ravishing phrases. I would recite it right here and now, if it weren’t for its excessive length. What I can tell you is that the letter proved fruitful. Celia wrote back:

‘My dear admirer,

I have to say I am absolutely amazed by the flow of your words. Such flourishing language can only stem from an immensely beautiful mind. This, in combination with your attractive exterior, seems very appealing altogether. I can only repeat my suggestion to meet in real life and hope to find your approval this time.

Yours in eager anticipation,

Celia’

I was delirious with joy and decided to give in to her request this time. But the place of our get together would have to be a breezy one. I chose the park. Another idea struck me. I would warn her of my odour! A clean slate, an open book, it is always the best way to start the day. Another one of my rose-tinted letters went her way.

‘My dearest angelic darling,

It is with more excitement than one can shake a stick at that I agree to your most sacred wishes and await our rendezvous. One confession, however, I must make before we meet.

God has willed it that I suffer from a small but hugely disadvantageous genetic defect. It manifests itself mostly in my idiosyncratic coffee smell. No surgery in the world will ever be able to remove this fault of mine. Therefore, to maximise your well being and comfort during our impeding encounter, I see myself compelled to suggest a temporary nose-numbing injection to your divine olfactory organ, prior to out meeting. (Señor Barillo will kindly assist with the procedure.)

Please do not laugh at my modest proposal; it is no small concern to me and I would be immensely relieved if you could comply with my wishes, my godly girl.

My life rests in your marvellous hands.

Your James’

Barillo brought back good news. Celia was indeed willing to subject herself to the nose injection. This could only be a proof of her fantastic affection towards me.

The date was arranged for the following Sunday afternoon. I awaited her under the same oak tree as the one that had appeared in my picture. My heart was feverishly stomping with anticipation.

She floated towards me on her impeccable legs, not a fraction of a second too early or late. As if to celebrate her beauty, the heavens opened up and the sun, in all its glory, illuminated her seraphic complexion.

I hastened forward to softly kiss her on either cheek and whisk her into my arms for a warm-hearted embrace. She was so light and so soft, she felt like a delicate feather on my strong shoulder.

When she spoke, her voice floated like a harmony of harp tunes, gently evaporating in the crisp fresh air of the spring day.

‘You are for real, then,’ she said.

‘Of course I am, my dear, did you expect an impostor?’

She smiled. ‘Oh no, it’s just that you didn’t come across as an average kind of guy. Your choice of words is unusual.’

She was amazing.

‘I am a gentleman of the old school,’ I said.

She looked at me, still smiling. I was wearing my most dashing suit.

‘Yes, that certainly is true.’

‘I am glad you didn’t mind the nose injection.’

‘It did strike me as odd, I have to admit. What exactly is this coffee smell problem all about?’

As we were talking, I held both her fine hands in mine. I squeezed them ever so slightly as I explained to her my coffee bean roots. I still expected her to run away or laugh in my face. But she did nothing of the sort.

‘Well, I guess everybody has their little troubles. But are you quite sure I wouldn’t be able to endure the smell without this injection?’

‘Quite sure, my dear. Trust me.’

She nodded. And then the most magical moment approached, when I leaned forward and kissed her marvellous mouth. She gave her full co-operation in this mind-blowing embrace. My heart was on fire. Even my most extravagant fantasies had not prepared me for this phenomenal experience.

We spent the day together, chatting, chatting, chatting. When she left, I ached for her with my whole being. I then realised that I could not escape her!

I met my Celia a few more times in the same spot, when, one day, she suggested retiring somewhere more private. I took her to my room in this house and left her to rest on my bed, while I quickly bundled up in some cling film and popped out to buy wine and nibbles.

But when I returned, disaster had struck.

My siblings, one half-crucifix, the other half-beanstalk, had found Celia in my bedroom, as they went in to fetch my DVD collection of ‘Jeeves and Wooster.’ Celia must have screamed when she saw them, and covered her face with both hands. Her fear and repulsion made my siblings escape in shock and horror.

Poor Mama knew nothing about my love affair with Celia. I had been foolish enough to conceal the whole thing from her. She assumed that darling Celia was an insulting intruder. And she had a particular way of dealing with intruders. She was exceedingly protective of us, and would not let anyone back into the world who’d had an insight into the true nature of our unfortunate make-up.

I found my poor Celia lying on this very kitchen table. Mama had cut off her hands and feet. I was horrified. I told my poor Mama off and said things to her I will never forgive myself for. I swept Celia into my arms and swept her off to my bedroom. She was weak and frail. She had lost a lot of blood.

‘My darling,’ I whispered tenderly, ‘I’m so sorry. I should never have brought you here.’

She was under shock, feeble and delirious at the same time. She murmured ugly words.

‘Fuck you all. Fuck Barillo too.’

‘Why Barillo, my dearest? What has he done?’

She looked at me with pinhead pupils. I saw hatred in her eyes.

‘Barillo paid me. So I would date you. Freak!’

Then she passed out.