Part I. Une passion Chinoise
Dr. Reigan walks down the corridor that smells of antiseptics.The odour of death. He prefers it more to the bottles of scents Alice lined up this morning on the breakfast table.“We are taking this into production. I need your opinion,” she said pushing the unscrewed flasks over in front of his rice porridge. Little spheres of white porcelain. Curved zeros, lonely. Alice pushed them one by one with her long fingers, trimmed, deep scarlet nail polish.“What was the name of this one again?” he asked while taking a guarded sniff from the bottled fragrance concocted by his wife.“Lamémoire,” the scent composer answered in dreamy tones.“Shush!” she added quickly in thrilled undertone, her cheeks rosy. She looked like a doll.“Perfume is like happiness. As soon as you try to explain the magic it’s gone,” said the doll with beautiful long fingers and scarlet nail polish.
True, you can’t argue with the science of scent just as one cannot cancel out the question of life, Dr. Reigan ponders. In fact with this whole bolded capitalised Q, the quiz still kills him every single day, and there are nights that it really gets to him. Him, a human male in his early thirties, already a veteran in this work, walking down the passage that smells of death in his bouncy, quiet paces right at this moment. Like in real life, the journey through the hospital can be tragic, painful or sometimes just plain funny, although the professional protocols do not allow virus-related humour like computers; as a medical doctor you aren’t supposed to be bored with your patients. The distance of no more than a hundred metres which he walks daily– he knows every inch of it, every detail is as he imagines it could be– but which would transport him beyond these grey walls to alight on an eternal path paved with childhood dreams and flying machines! Hefeels happy. Perhaps this was why he opted to study medicine many years ago, although his father rather saw him becoming an architect, Reigan recalls. As a child he showed a gift in drawing, and his father had a fascination for ancient Roman concrete buildings.
“They hold the spirits of people who once lived in them. Buildings don’t rot away like human flesh. Concrete lasts; love does not. Love is a star in dark sky: in the end all stars DIE.”
His father&rsq
