I suspect that I have always had an innate capacity to receive smells with a blurred, diffuse profile, and a marked inclination to identify one smell in terms of another, what makes me more than qualified to smudge an exact cartography of the territory in which it moves.

Chema Madoz

A writer recounts that he asked a boy of the Papago tribe in Arizona what the desert smelled like. ‘The desert smells like rain,’ he replied. The aroma of the creosote bushes, released by the water, was what prompted his memory. [Children invent magic, poets die for it.] ‘He smells like a wet horse,’ Rojas said of his father when he returned in the saddle after having crossed the river Lebu; Snyder’s ‘perfume of sagebrush after rain’ and the ‘knotted perfumed rushes’ of Wang Wei, which form the roof through which the clouds are glimpsed.

No one had caught one yet, for it to be cut out caged against the sky. ‘Fantasy is a place where it rains,’ Calvino wrote.

My nose tells me that Madoz captures clouds so as not to be always soaked.

Nacho Fernández, June 2005

[poem by José Luis Gallero]