What Does Time Smell Of?

Smell, old age, ruin and death.

’I’ll never forget the smell of Andrew Freedman Home, I can still chew it. It was, without a doubt, the hardest project I’ve worked on.’ The director of that institution, which paradoxically called itself ’No Longer Empty’, nodded, as if she too had that smell stuck in her throat, and went on to talk about the carpet and the junk.

Two days earlier, when I was still working in the building, I had asked: ’Do old people smell old because they are in old places or does this place smell old because it was full of old people?’ Laura, my disinterested assistant and shield against the ghosts, sighed, looked around and concentrated once more on the brush, the rabbit-skin glue and the fat.

Linarejos Moreno