“À deux odeurs”
Cherry“À deux odeurs” is a toast that compresses erotic appetite and the threat of death into a single, flamboyant image. Spoken over double pours of Red Label, it makes living for one smell and dying by the other sound like parts of the same appetite.
The Toast
Before proposing a toast, the speaker makes sure everyone has a double Red Label. He names the two odors as that of female sex and gunpowder, declares that one is worth living for and the other dying by, and says he loves the smell of both. The group drinks. The expression’s force lies in its blunt pairing: intimacy and violence are not separated into different worlds but raised together in the same celebratory gesture.
The Evening Around It
The toast leads into a loose sequence of drinking and departures rather than a formal ceremony. Nathan goes outside and vomits in a flower bed; Borges says he wants to go to a strip club. The group asks the lieutenants to join them, but they decline. The men thank them again and take their leave. Against these ordinary, disorderly details, the toast’s grand equation of desire and death sounds both performative and precarious: it is voiced amid conviviality, while the evening quickly disperses into nausea, a proposed night out, and separate choices.
