The Dark Heart of Old Havana

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• olorami

  September 16, 2014

  

  The Dark Heart of Old Havana is the name of this perfume, and Old Havana is my home, where I grew up and lived my whole life before becoming an exile. As I read, it’s based on the tourist trip Sarah McCartney made to Old Havana in 1998, created inspired by her memories of this wonderful city. I can’t help but link Old Havana with the scent of the perfume, because that is exactly what it’s about. Let me share my experience: it has been a unique olfactory journey. If there were a gourmand oriental category, this perfume would fit it perfectly. It smells sweet, sweet, sweet to the point of exhaustion, which is both good and bad, because it’s adorned with other notes that make it a delight, such as coffee and tobacco, which you can distinguish with a little effort. It’s a perfume where one tiny bottle is enough, and its sweetness settles as the minutes pass to reveal its oriental character. Despite that sweetness, I visualise it much more as a man’s scent. On Obispo Street in Old Havana there is a place called La Casa de la Natilla; adding to that the aroma of flans, their caramel, the scent of sugared coffee coming from the hot kitchens of my Old Havana, that is what this perfume smells like, but it feels too small, I’m sorry. Old Havana is not just sweet; it’s dusty, it’s smoky from the old cars cruising its streets, it carries the salt of the bay that surrounds it, it holds the smell of millennia-old leather and old books from exclusive museums. I don’t feel the touch of salt or leather, nor is it a dirty, enigmatic and dark perfume as its name suggests and as my Havana truly is. Is it a rich perfume? Yes, it’s a delight, but it represents only the sweet side tourists see in my Old Havana, a millennial city with a history etched into its ribs. It should have been a dangerous perfume, a deeper perfume, a perfume to love like Havana itself. I’m glad to use it, I’m glad to have it, I’m glad it was inspired by my city, I’m glad that wearing it transmits good humour to me; its sweetness is no more than that of its residents who forget their pain and offer the world nothing but a smile.