At the end of a meeting with a group of professionals in a discreet place, a woman with assumed red lips and ebony black hair, perched on high heels, came to introduce herself to me: “My name is Schérazade. Yes, I know, I haven’t missed my parents! ”
She spoke very quickly and a lot. I struggled to follow her in the hubbub of other conversations. But my memory was marked by its incredible vividness. We met on social networks and, subsequently, around a croissant at home. Or was it at her place? I do not remember anymore. I only know that I stretched out on her sofa from the first minute of my first visit to her house, until I left several hours later, as if we had gone to war together.
If I were a neurologist, I would do a scan of his head to see how many brains have carved out a niche in his skull. She reads books at lightning speed and people at the speed of her sprinting heart. In addition, like a clairvoyant, she puts learned words on each of the emotions with the precision of a surgeon. Or rather with the exactness of the engineer that she is.
In her young forty-something life, she crossed from the African continent to Europe before reaching North America to finally settle in Quebec thanks to love, this force which convinced the Jedi in her to be sit in a canoe in a long dress, with diamond and mascara, to let yourself be transported by your “pure wool” lover who paddles slowly on the Quebec lakes, without waves or splashes.
The richness of its vocabulary, its ability to speak five languages, its waves of crazy, philosophical, technological, funny reflections … hypnotize me, enrich me, bewitch me.
I will share some of them with you:
– Very close to genius, madness. I wonder who decided where to draw the line between the two.
– Drawing someone is flat. Drawing a state of mind is hara-kiri, straight to the heart.
– I will remain dictator of my hypertrophied mind.
– Neurolinguistic programming… undo negative mental equations; we are just computers.
– In Algeria, to speak out meant to be killed. Families slept with knives under pillows.
– The policeman: call if you find your car. Her answer: she must already be in Togo, hurtling down the savannah in the middle of giraffes, the lucky one.
And my favorite message from her: “I’ll bring you couscous.” ”
At our last coffee, she brought me a present as usual. It was a bottle of The spirit of the times by Nina Ricci, an old perfume created in France in 1948, one of the five best-selling in the world.
Sché: This perfume looks like you because it carries its charisma in flight.
Me: You know I hardly ever wear perfume.
Sché: A perfume leaves you in base notes the residue of the body memory beyond the present time. This is a bilateral relationship where you give him a personality to decode or encode. He delivers a message to us and carries our message within him. Then it goes its way. Permanence in the ephemeral only.
Before she finished her sentence, I rolled up my sleeve to let the droplets land on my wrist. In a few minutes, the scent integrated into my skin. The first aromas animated Duluth Avenue with Vietnamese merchants, children skipping rope and the smoke of charcoal BBQs.
Sché and I have the French colonization in common. So, The spirit of the times surreptitiously created another moment of complicity or even more, of reciprocity.
Her: “My father had a lot of perfumes. He said it was for our mother and a little for him. He sang when he perfumed himself. For my part, this gift reminded me of my grandmother, my aunts, Indochina. The perfume bottles of the women in my family were displayed inside the glass cabinets, locked with large locks next to their dressing tables. The drops were numbered, because no one knew when the next bottle would arrive in the country, a territory characterized by the vagaries of war and the uncertainties of fate. That’s why every bottle brought back by a flight attendant / saleswoman returning from Paris was a party. Before even feeling the contents, these stylized bottles offered us a window on peace, an imaginary portrait of this dreamed peace which was foreign to us.
All it took was a mist of flowers and spices on the skin and our hectic childhoods were revealed. I have been wearing this Air of the times at night when I sit down to read, to fold the laundry basket, to look lovingly at this dreamed peace of my past transformed into daily life, my daily life.