from The Invention of Everyday Life 


Vincenzo d’Orti is a man who smells. Day in, day out,

waking or sleeping his nostrils register the world and convey

it to his simple brain. Like many, Vincenzo moves

between thinking his life a torment and thinking it a joy.
Outside his house grows a mean, gnarled lemon tree —

unusual, because lemons grow well in Half Moon Bay.

The fruit is a dirty yellow colour, not much larger than

golf balls and just as hard. There are almost no leaves.

While Vincenzo’s wife complains bitterly about the

lemons, he is grateful that there is one less smell to

torment or gladden him.
Spring is the worst. Vincenzo often joins his neighbours

on the surgery porch hoping for some relief, not unlike

that prescribed for hay fever. But aside from breathing

continually through his mouth, which of course cannot

be healthy, swathing his nostrils in scented cloths, or

wearing an oxygen mask, there is nothing that can be

done for him. And he suffers.
The first delivery of mangoes, as the truck rolls down

the highway from Queensland — the smell reaching him

from as far away as Werris Creek — soon mingles with the

tomatoes and flowers and onions in the huge produce

market in the centre of the city, a terrible cacophony of

odours! Rotten fruit, rat filth, chickens.
At night Vincenzo smells the sewers and drainpipes of

the city after the first rains come and feels he is in a cave

that has never been opened. Beneath his house he can

smell the black mould spores multiplying; outside, shit

from a thousand dogs on verges and in parks. He can

smell the opening of chrysalis and the slick wet of new

butterfly wings fanning the air to dry; passionfruit inside

their thick leathery skin, hanging green and hard like

secrets on the vine; their ripeness, when it comes, almost

more than he can bear, mixed as it is with the lovemaking

of the young couple next door and the clean laundry

blowing on the line in the sun.
He can smell the pages of books being turned in the

library on West Street, the photographs in his family

albums quietly fading. The carpet shrinking.
In spring there is the fragrance of new basil being

planted out from thousands of little pots and the smell of

artichokes cooking in the kitchens of old women — this in

and around the smell of algae and mud and mangroves

and garbage coming up from the bay; in the evening the

smell of crickets singing and in the morning the dew as it

settles on the grass; for weeks tomcats screaming and

fighting under the moon.
For Vincenzo there are some days which are unbearable

anguish. These days he smells himself — his body aging,

decaying, his blood moving sluggishly like a dirty river,

the bones in his hands and feet curling ever so slightly. On

these days the soap his wife uses, and has always used even

when she was young and had beautiful hair, smells worse

than urine. The meat she places before him stinks of

death, as do orchids and strawberries.
Vincenzo, like many, spends much of his life wishing it

were over and terrified that some day it will be.