Aphrodite, p.6
Aphrodite, page 6
The human body, especially during sexual excitation, emits a marine odor similar to the smell of crustaceans and fish. It is so important that we sniff and smell one another that—as Diana Ackerman reports in her extraordinary book A Natural History of the Senses—in some parts of the world the word kiss means “smell.” The scent of genitals and armpits is a signal, a coded message that travels directly to another person’s brain, activating the sympathetic system, along with that series of amazing physical and emotional reactions that incite us to make love. Science has recently proved something that women, with far less study, have known for millennia: that amorous desire begins in the nose.
You approaching me
with the smell
of fresh cut
morning grass:
my nipples turn hard
—Haiku, Yuko Kawano
We have a sensor at the opening of our nasal passages that perceives not odors but pheromones, which are, they say, flags, romantic signals exuded by the skin. This may be the basis of that nonsense about the “alchemy” between lovers, that often inexplicable attraction that causes us to bond as a couple. Why is it that we like a certain human type or some individuals in particular? What do some of my women friends see in their husbands, I ask myself? It’s all the fault of pheromones. In sane and cautious people, the first impulse to know each other better is determined by signals imperceptible at a conscious level but plenty loud to the hormones. Then we listen to our mother’s warnings and everyone’s advice; next, our mind sets up cultural, aesthetic, financial, and other filters; and then finally we choose the companion who will help us in the absurd task of propagating the species. When scientists finally were able to isolate pheromones, someone got the idea of creating a perfume capable of endowing the user with a commanding physical attraction, like that given off by hogs. The pheromones on a boar’s breath can madden a sow in heat. At last the universal dream of an erotic potion that will make us irresistible is within reach of science: human pheromones synthesized in the laboratory are being touted as the one infallible aphrodisiac. One of my friends bought an extremely expensive little bottle containing that promise of instantaneous love, which turned out to be a liquid as transparent, odorless, and insipid as water. Following the instructions, she mixed a few drops with her cologne and went out for a stroll. Nothing happened; no passerby threw himself at her feet raving with love, she merely experienced a ravenous hunger for pork. The study of pheromones is still in diapers, but scientists promise that the most delicious sensations will be available in the next century—that is, when it’s too late for me.
In the Tantra there is a whole chapter devoted to different perfumes that, when applied to special parts of the body, exalt the senses and invite love. The prophet Mohammed, a sober and saintly man, nonetheless liked perfumes and recommended them to his wives. And aromatic essences are often mentioned in the Bible:
I have perfumed my bed with myrrh,
aloes, and cinnamon.
Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning;
let us solace ourselves with loves.
—Proverbs 7:17–18
In his Songs of Bilitis, the poet and novelist Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) writes:
At night, they left us on a high white terrace, swooning among the roses. Warm sweat dripped from our armpits like heavy tears, bathing our chests. An exhausting, libidinous pleasure flushed our listless heads. Four captive doves bathed in four different perfumes fluttered silently above us. Drops of scent rained from their wings upon the naked women. I was streaming with the essence of the lily. Ah, weariness! I laid my cheek upon the belly of a young girl, cooling her body with my damp hair. My half-open mouth breathed in the intoxication of the saffron scent of her skin. Slowly, her thighs closed about my neck.
What Louÿs may not have known is that lilies (Iris pseudocorus) are poisonous, not a good thing to lick from a lover’s skin.
If we did not have so many prejudices and inhibitions, the smell of a human in his or her natural state—and, why not, that of a skunk as well—would come in bottles, just as they are attempting to achieve with pheromones. I have to wonder who came up with the idea of vaginal deodorants? That’s as crazy as pretending that shrimp smell of lavender and mushrooms of incense. Certainly it wasn’t Napoleon Bonaparte, who in his letters begged Josephine not to bathe her intimate parts in the weeks prior to his return from the battlefield. Casanova says in his Memoires that there is something in his beloved’s room, voluptuous emanations so intimate and balmy that had he to choose between that scent and heaven, he would not hesitate to choose the former.
The sense of smell is more developed in women than in men. A mother, blindfolded, can pick out her child’s clothing among that of twenty other babies in the nursery. Smell is also closely linked with eroticism in women, although the male is even more vulnerable to the infallible weapon emanating from the female sex, something that holds true among nearly all mammals. A woman’s unique and personal aroma is like an unerring arrow speeding through space toward a man’s most primitive instinct. In French, that sortilege of odors each woman exudes is called her cassolette, a word borrowed by other languages. In the Song of Songs, King Solomon tells the Shulamite: “Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard, Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.” (4:13–14) Now there’s a cassolette for you!
Windows VI, egg tempera by George Tooker, 1962, (Chameleon Books).
A woman is more sensitive to the peculiar odor of the male body when she is ovulating and her level of estrogen is high. The odor of a man’s sweat affects the menstrual cycles of his bed companion; from that I deduce that separate beds are not a good idea. Nothing is as delectable as the smell of a child, or as exciting as that of a young man! Well, sometimes the age isn’t important. Soon after we were introduced, Willie asked me to dance. I was in my high heels, and my nose came about midway to his sternum. I had no difficulty identifying his scent as the reason for the drumbeats I sensed pounding in my temples. The music ended, and I could not tear myself away from his shirt, sniffing at it like a bird dog. And this innocent maintains that ours was a meeting of souls. . . . A man’s scent is stronger and more direct than a woman’s, maybe because it is usually not camouflaged by colognes but merely mitigated by soap and water. In some Arab tales, the audacious adventurers who, risking a slow death, climb the walls of the palace to seduce the odalisques of another man’s harem are wont to smell of camel milk or dates. And the Shulamite replies to Solomon: “His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers; his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.” (5:13)
That reminds me of how my grandchildren smell.
Just as bodily aromas are exciting, so too are those of fresh, well-prepared foods. The perfumes of good cooking not only make us salivate, they also cause us to throb with a desire that is, if not erotic, closely related to it. Close your eyes and try to remember the exact bouquet of a skillet in which delicate onions, noble garlic cloves, stoic red peppers, and tender tomatoes are sizzling in olive oil. Now imagine how that fragrance changes when we add three threads of saffron followed by a fresh fish marinated in herbs, then, finally, a spurt of wine and juice of a lemon. The result is as exciting as the most sensual of exhalations and a thousand times more than any bottled perfume.
Sometimes, when I evoke the aroma of a mouthwatering dish, nostalgia and pleasure move me to tears. In my memory I see again the blazing sun of Seville and sitting on a rustic wall of white adobe a blue ceramic platter spilling over with ripe plums, some burst open, languorously offering themselves to the appetite of a yellowjacket that had nose-dived into that indecent flesh. Seville for me is the sweet, sweet fragrance of those plums and the jasmine that at dusk filled the air with desire.
From that time
earth, sun, snow,
sudden gusts
of rain in October,
along the roads,
everything,
light, rain,
left
in my memory
the smell
and transparency
of the plum;
Life ovaled
a goblet to contain
its clarity, its darkness,
its coolness.
O kiss
of the lips
on the fruit,
teeth
and lips
dripping
a fragrant amber,
the liquid
light of the plum!
—Pablo Neruda, from “Ode to the Plum”
“Death by Perfume”
At the end of the tenth century, a period in which Japan’s most refined literature flourished, outstanding women’s voices were heard in extraordinary stories, profound novels, immortal poetry, and erotica. This story was written in the Court of Heian by Lady Onogoro:
Once there was a faithless courtier who deceived his mistress with three different women in one night. One of the women, being the lady’s maidservant, tearfully confessed to her, and the lady, who had quite enough of her lover’s nonsense, conceived a plot to dispose of him.
On the courtier’s next visit she affected a sweet and trusting demeanor, and begged him to accompany her to the perfume-mixing chamber, on the pretext of concocting a new scent which would be theirs alone. The courtier, who fancied himself a connoisseur of the perfumer’s art, eagerly followed his mistress to the marble chamber where mixing vats steamed, and angelica leaves hung drying in long strings, and evening-primrose petals yielded their oils to the pressure of great iron mangles.
Never had the courtier smelled such a confluence of scents, and his nostrils thrilled to the harmony of peaflower and violet, of honeysuckle and lemon balm and wild hyacinth. Passing the grinding slab he pinched powder of nutmeg and cloves between his finger and thumb, and crushed the white crystal which comes from the bark of the camphor tree, quoting, as he did so, snippets of poems he thought relevant, for snippets, it must be said, were all he could remember.
Hiding her scorn at such self-satisfaction, the lady embraced her lover passionately and promised him an entirely novel sensation. Intrigued, the courtier was easily persuaded to remove his garments and lie down on the robe which his mistress had spread on the floor.
The lady began with dabs of iris and cloves on her lover’s temples and proceeded to the soft hollow at the base of the throat, which received the potent essence of marigold. Under each armpit she dabbed yarrow and gentian, and continued with her tender ministrations until she had distributed the scents across the lover’s entire enraptured body.
But what the lady knew was that, just as an excess of yin transforms itself into the opposite yang principle, so, in certain dosages, the otherwise healing and stimulating flower essences can be induced to take on a negative aspect.
Once again she plied her vials above the courtier’s body, and the mustard plunged her lover into that deep gloom which has no origin, and the mimulus filled him with the fear of illness and its consequences, and the larch convinced him of failure, and the holly pricked his heart with envious vexation, and the honeysuckle brought tears of homesickness to his eyes.
The heather, added in a certain secret proportion, made mountains out of molehills, and the gorse discouraged him, and the clematis bemused him, and the elm overwhelmed him with inadequacies, and the crab apple convinced him that he was unclean. The chestnut bud caused him to replay compulsively the memory of his many mistakes, and the willow made him begrudge the good fortune of his fellow men, and the aspen made him sweat and tremble with vague apprehensions, and the cherry plum convinced him that his mind would give way, and the wild rose resigned him to apathy, so that he did not care whether he lived or died but would have preferred, on balance, the latter.
Satisfied that she had thus brought him to a point of preparedness, the lady administered two more dabs of crab apple to his temples, to exacerbate the self-hatred. In a swoon of self-disgust her lover begged her to deal him a fatal dose, so that he might pay the price for all his crimes against her. The lady, seeing the courtier powerless in her arms, took pity on his torment and delivered a drop of aconite to his waiting tongue. And so died the faithless lover, all naked and relieved, and not since the death of the Shining Prince himself was there ever a corpse so fragrant at its funeral.
—The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro
Untitled #7 (collage for Blood Wedding), painting by Juan Gonzalez, 1988, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, photograph: Christopher Watson.
At First Sight
Lola Montez (1821–1861), the celebrated courtesan at whose feet crowned kings and bankers threw themselves and their fortunes, created a spider dance she called the tarantula, which inflamed her spectators with mad desire. She passed herself off as an aristocratic Spanish dancer, although she knew nothing about dance and nothing about her was Spanish, but what she lacked in talent and Castilian blood, she made up for in self-assurance. With the fury of her castanets, the blur of her tapping heels, and the witchery of her lies, she created her own legend. (Why do I identify with this woman?) In private, Lola Montez used the raptures of the tarantula as a pretext for removing her veils; she never, however, committed the error of disrobing completely. She preferred to display her charms amidst clouds of lace that enhanced a glimmer of skin and disguised the imperfections of her body. In the erotic art of Japan, the subjects always appear in splendid raiment, regally robed for making love. In the symbolic language of those paintings, the voluptuous folds of the tunics indicate passion, as flowers and fruit represent the sexual organs and curled toes the orgasm.
In India, women never remove their jewels or wipe the kohl from their eyelids, because the tinkle of their bracelets and dusky call of their gaze entangle men in the ineffable attraction of mystery. My grandfather, who was born before there were electric lights in the streets of Santiago and public transportation consisted of horse-drawn trolleys—they called them blood cars—steered serenely through the fashion of the miniskirt but when it came to hippies, as an old man, wheeled nimbly to glance a female ankle peeking from beneath a long, swirling skirt. Temptation does not lie in nakedness, he maintained, but in the transparent or slinky. Hence the success of provocative lingerie, which will never go out of style. Beneath the brutal synthetic garb of some modern girls, you still find traces of silk. There are people who collect catalogues of intimate apparel, and there is a flourishing market for used undergarments to satisfy the needs of certain fetishists. Recently, through an error on the part of the mailman, I received a pair of Madonna’s panties in discreet brown-paper wrapping. I didn’t know that Madonna wore such things.
The mother of one of my friends, an eighty-one-year-old widow, was married for the third time to a similarly octogenarian gallant. Shortly before the wedding, we accompanied this admirable lady to buy the most essential articles of her trousseau: lace pajamas, bras with swansdown in the nipples, underpants covered with signs of the Zodiac, and an amusing garter belt that had lights activated by a tiny battery. “At my age,” the bride commented, “I need all the help I can get.”
Among humans, attraction begins from a distance, through the eyes. The remaining senses, such as smell, come into play with closer contact. That’s why we resort to makeup, hairstyling, jewels, tattoos, and even decorative scars. The theories of soul mates, intellectual affinity, and having been hypothetical lovers in previous incarnations come after the fact, with honorable exceptions such as the case of my poet friend, the one who went running from the erotic swing, who is capable of falling in love via the letter of a woman he’s never set eyes on but whose poems touch his heart.
Usually, women are more given to adorning themselves, but men are no less vain. No woman would dare flaunt the imperial capes, panaches, and medallions sported by military men. In Niger, in the Wodaabe tribe, a male beauty pageant is held every year. Young men ornament themselves and dance before the women, who choose the most attractive one among them. Warriors make themselves cross-eyed and invent fearsome grimaces that reveal their last molar, because the white of the eyes and the teeth is the greatest attribute of beauty. On this side of the world, we have an equivalent, but here it’s girls in bathing suits parading before a jury of men, flashing a lot of breast and thigh instead of teeth and eye. The winner carries off a crown of fake diamonds and the title of the most beautiful woman in the universe.
Food, too, appeals to the eye. The freshness of natural ingredients should be enough, but indefatigable human inventiveness cooks, blends, transforms, and decorates our fare with the same passion we devote to our personal appearance. The association between the shapes and colors of food and those of the body is inevitable. At the beginning of the century, a French poster that often hung in men’s rooms showed girls sucking asparagus with such pleasure that only an innocent could have missed the direct allusion. Panchita, who primps over her table as much as her own attire, maintains that the color of the meal is important: pea soup should never be served if the course that follows is also green—unless one is seeking a specific effect. For example, in Milan I was once invited to dine in the home of a famous designer. The dark mirrors lining her dining room reflected inky black chairs and tablecloth. Yellow flowers and napkins stood out with regal radiance against that lugubrious background. The buffet featured rice and various curries in tones of saffron; even the dessert, a delicious mango flambé, belonged to the same color family.
