The Scents of Time
HAVANA TIMES – Today I lit an incense stick my niece brought me from Mexico. I lit it and went out to walk my dogs. However, the scent had clung to the tips of my fingers, and when I caught a whiff of it, I was transported to a place I couldn’t consciously reach, but which emanated a sweet sense of security.
Like those projections one makes into the future in the midst of youthful vitality. Ah, how convincing illusion can be!
Few things transport me to a past moment with such overwhelming clarity as a melody or a scent. They are perfect time machines.
Suddenly, you’re there—at the moment when you experienced them for the first time.
The smell of an apple, for instance, takes me back to the 1980s, to the Fin de Siglo store and the offerings of a budding local cosmetics industry. But they also sold products from socialist Europe: apple-scented soaps and shampoos from East Germany, and a Bulgarian cologne that distilled the essence of the fruit in all its glory.
What wonderful moments, when one could dive into the intangible through a single object.
I’m convinced that many of the scents that trigger intense emotions have origins lost in a time beyond this life. They are so ancient that the mind gets lost in the mist, unable to find what it’s looking for. Not even knowing what it’s looking for.
So, all that remains is the feeling. Something one wishes to share with someone else—but it’s so personal, so non-transferable!
I came to know the smell of apples through cosmetics, but especially from the fruit sold at the agromarket: delicious, soft, yellow apples imported from Bulgaria.
It was around that time that I discovered Radio Enciclopedia, the Cuban light instrumental music station. So that scent also takes me back to a program I used to listen to, to the friend I shared my crush on French pianist Richard Clayderman with, and to the day we went to an event organized by the station at El Quijote park, in Vedado.
From that gathering, a friendship was born with the program’s host, and one day we visited his home—an impressive mansion in Havana’s Santos Suarez neighborhood.
I remember the huge rooms and tall windows. That feeling that space belonged to us without restrictions. The circular office with glass-fronted bookshelves, the cedarwood desk, and the rug that hid a door to the basement. The photo of the homeowner as a child in his father’s arms, and next to them, Che Guevara, a family friend or acquaintance.
A mysterious house that whispered stories of Cuba’s long-lost prosperity. Something intangible, too, still preserved by that kind of heir: a certain manner of speaking and acting, a legacy they cling to as the last thing anyone could take from them.
My friend and I pinned all hopes of progress on traveling to one of those socialist countries that offered us these unfamiliar scents.
She made it through a labor cooperation program between the CAME countries. She lived in Berlin for two years while working at a T-shirt factory. On vacation, she returned loaded with whatever she could carry, saying she would never go back—that she hated the cold and the Germans.
At that time, I had met my first boyfriend and discovered hotels where it was still possible to rent a room in Cuban pesos at a reasonable price.
That smell of transient places, impersonal and unpleasant. And quicker to evoke memories than the black-and-white photos my boyfriend used to take with a Zenit camera on the rooftop of the crumbling building where we lived. No matter how much I look at them, none lead me to such intimate landscapes as those preserved by scent.
Even if memory blends the scent of apples with the tune Love is Blue, played by Paul Mauriat’s orchestra, and the nostalgia of the melody stubbornly preserves the conviction of triumph. Of a pristine, free, and radiant world that I believed I was heading toward, no matter how uncertain the path.
The world around me crumbled as subtly as aging creeps in, and when I realized it, there were only empty stores left, increasingly deteriorated streets where you’re sure you won’t see a familiar face. What remains are the scents and the music orbiting in their own impermanence. But all the people tied to those memories are gone.
Read more from the diary of Veronica Vega here on Havana Times.