altamura

or, perfume for reckless driving

The first time I smelled this was with my niece in Paris. We went into the L’Entropiste boutique in Le Marais. The attendant took us through their fragrances, beginning with Semence Douce, “which opens with the smell of a tulip, identical to the smell of men’s semen.” Ah, yes. (I watched my teenage niece smell it and was thinking, “okay, well… we’re definitely in France now.”)

We moved through Dawn Whispers (metallic, musky, like blood and the Metro on a Friday night), Dorian’s Spleen (amber, liquor, spice, a pervasive sense of darkness), Jodhpur 6am (ginger, cardamom, black tea so real you can taste it), Blanc Sada (intoxicating, I have more to say in the future about that one).

And then we came to Altamura. It took my breath away.

stare at this for awhile and try not to drown in sadness

Bertrand Duchaufour, the creative force behind L’Entropiste’s fragrances, apparently drew inspiration from the Altamura man, whose fossilized remains were found in a sinkhole near Altamura in Italy in the nineties. They’re still there to this day, covered in calcite, as they have been for some 130,000 years. The buildup of calcite in the eye sockets of his skull looks like oranges, inspiring the sweet orange top note of the fragrance.

We were told this perfume is also meant to echo the cosmos, the bright orange nebulae within vast galaxies spinning, forming, colliding. Alongside the fresh citrus note you’re met with warm spices, an effervescent liquor, and a hint of smoke.

Some people roll their eyes at heady fragrance backstories, but I eat this stuff up. I spritzed a little on my wrist and kept coming back to it as we continued on with our day. I later picked up a juicy little decant from Scent Split to give it another try.

Tonight felt like the night to wear this one, for some reason. I’m brewing with inner rebellion. I can’t explain its source easily, but this was the right perfume for tearing at your constraints. I put it on just before getting in my car and felt a little engulfed by its surprising masculinity. (Honestly, it’d probably be super hot on the right kind of guy — someone intellectual, understated, quiet with a blazing mind).

I drove a little wildly, the long way, to the city limits and back. Night lights speeding by, a blur out my window. Megadeth and Nirvana and Sonic Youth at an obscene volume, my hand on the gearshift, my eyes steady and focused, changing lanes too many times, feeling the limits of my performance tires (can I take this ramp at this speed? I think so… yes…yes, even faster maybe), pressed back into my seat, music pulsating, me and the car and Peace Sells (“If there’s a new way, / I’ll be the first in line. / But it’d better work this time”) and this orange bubbly smoky fragrance in a cloud around me, all one thing in motion, going nowhere fast.

It’s the thing I would wear if I knew I was going to run into a man who’d wronged me, or to a court appearance, or maybe to Church when I’d sinned in kind of a fun way and didn’t quite feel sorry yet.

Courage and eternity and oblivion and a wild dash of rebellion in a bottle.

I think of that Altamura man in that sinkhole. Who knows how he got there? To decay into this beautiful, horrible form, alone — he walked the earth, presumably loved and laughed and felt fear and bravery and grief. The cosmic fate that awaited him would have been unknowable to him, surely grander and stranger than he could ever have imagined. Certainly he didn’t know he was living his days out on this planet orbiting the sun, as part of our little solar system, itself a small fragment of the Milky Way galaxy, a corner of a vast and still-expanding cosmos.

Yet here he is, preserved and visible in this way, an object of tragic beauty and unlikely inspiration, locked, stuck. Like all of us.