CAPITAL SANDALWOOD
Winter 1952,
That night, just before daybreak, it snowed.
Collar up, a child on his way to school. A thin white veil slipped under his feet, leading up to the wadded-up words: “I’m going to be late! First, he thought about catching up, then, as if this idea belonged to a second, simultaneously, he made it worse.
From that moment on, the North Pole was inside him. He skirted the walls, holding on tightly. Despite the storm, he pulled up his alibi and left the documentary. In the middle of the cold, on the sidewalk, he put down his satchel, placed the flat of his hands against his breath and thought. He held back time. When he judged that enough time had elapsed, his fingers warmed and his script ready, he set off again. Once in class, after politely blaming the morning, the frost, the alarm clock and the slippery cobblestones that were “doing everything to make him fall”, he excused the twenty minutes that had held him up, put on his dust cover and returned to his seat.
The hands of the clock were not yet pointing to playtime.
When he was seated, out of tension, the warmth of the stove helping, the kid calmed down.
With his back to the students, Mr. Vantienen was holding a long ruler in his hand – a cheese – where, on a map of France, he was trying to draw our attention back to the summit of Mont Gerbier -de- Jonc.
The kid, distracted at first, left the guide, then the Seine for elsewhere.
For what reason, by a choice that hadn’t yet made itself known, did the kid’s eyes lift to a skylight every day? Why did he hold his gaze on the trembling of a tiny branch? How, through this image under glass, did he duplicate and flesh himself out? Was it really necessary for Vantienen, with a sonorous Lutens !, to pull the dreamer out of the dream?
– Lutens! All rise!
The moon didn’t know what to do.
– Why always these capital letters for no reason and in front of, and I quote: Gold, Wolf, Fire, Dungeon, Flower… and so on!
He was commenting on an essay handed in the day before, in which the student had illuminated his Middle Ages. Silence swelled.
Vantienen insisted:
– I asked you a question. Please answer!
-…
The kid was counting the suspension points.
Yet we – all of us – know that mirrors invert images. What we don’t know is that mirrors can turn images upside down.
mirrors.
And so the kid, that mold of all being, hesitated:
– I don’t know.
– That’s not an answer!
The “ça” stung the kid to the quick. He had to capitalize it. So, as if it were obvious, he said:
– Because it’s me!
Vantienen with red balls, fired:
– It’s you! The sky? The snow, the wolf, the flower? Ah… I forgot, the princess. Explain yourself!
On the anvil, with three iron words, the kid hammered out these syllables:
– Yes. It is. That’s me.
A shrug of the shoulders and a joking rumor from the back of the class brought down the curtain on Vantienen’s Silence ! All was said.
Pride observes itself. And so, under an enclosing suit of armor, perched on a horse, the terrible princess wearing the color of mourning, saw herself, with a clatter of hooves, entering the High Mass of the coronation, at the precise moment of transubstantiation. The very moment when the priest raises the giant host to the cross, with the cross nailed to it.
Serge Lutens
CAPITAL SANDALWOOD
50 ml – €99
Currently available at Palais Royal-Serge Lutens, department stores, perfumeries and online.
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
