OLIVER QUINTO

The Smell of Tuesdays

There are things a calloused brain dismisses without a second thought. The hum of the refrigerator at three in the morning. The creak of the third stair. The smell of burnt coffee that Elena left every Tuesday because she always always always forgot to switch off the percolator before leaving. I had learnt, with some equanimity, to ignore all these disagreeable facts of existence whilst she was alive. Now that she is gone, they are the only things keeping me sane.

Or perhaps it is the other way round.

Seven grim months have passed since the accident. I know this precisely because I keep count in a black hardback notebook with a wire-o spine that I bought at a stationer’s on the day of the funeral, when I still believed that recording time was an intelligent way of controlling it. Page one: the fourteenth of August. Day one. The notebook now runs to two hundred and fourteen pages and time has still not learned to obey me. Stupid thing.

Elena was not a woman who made grand gestures. She did not leave notes on the bathroom mirror or press wildflowers into books or say I love you at airport departures with the theatrical gravity people reserve for those occasions. What she did instead was remember. She remembered that I took my coffee without sugar but with an extra half-measure of grounds. She remembered that I could not sleep if the bedroom door was left ajar at precisely forty-five degrees — fully open was fine, fully closed was fine, but that particular angle let in a wedge of hallway light that, for reasons I have never been able to rationalise, made it impossible for me to settle. She remembered the name of my secondary school geography teacher, whom I had mentioned exactly once, in passing, four years before she died. She stored these things with no apparent effort and no expectation of acknowledgment, the way a well-designed system stores data: quietly, reliably, without fuss.

I am an engineer. I spent eleven years living with a woman who was, in her own way, a far more elegant piece of architecture than anything I have ever built. I did not fully appreciate this until there was nothing left to appreciate.

I first felt her in October.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading for the third time a report I could not make head nor tail of — the words kept rearranging themselves into sentences that had nothing whatsoever to do with systems engineering. Outside, it was raining with that grey, grinding insistence rain has when it sets about reducing human tolerance to nil. The flat felt enormous in the way that flats do when they have been designed for two and are being occupied by one: not empty, exactly, but wrongly proportioned, like a coat that fits in all the right places but has one sleeve that hangs half an inch too long. I had grown accustomed to the weight of another person in a room, the small acoustic adjustments that come with cohabitation — the particular quality of silence that belongs to a space where someone else is also breathing — and its absence was a presence of its own, loud and shapeless and persistent.

And then I smelt it: burnt coffee. Dense, almost corporeal, spreading from the percolator that had been switched off, cold, dirty and empty for weeks.

I stood up, uneasy. I checked every ring on the hob. I opened windows with hesitant hands. I looked for an electrical explanation, a chemical one, a rational one. I found sod all. The smell lasted precisely as long as it took Elena to come downstairs, cross the sitting room and say I know, I know, bloody hell, I forgot again in that voice she kept especially for Tuesdays — softer than her other voices, as though on Tuesdays she too needed people to be a little more patient with her.

Then it vanished. Just like that. Gone.

I noted everything down. Date, time, duration, intensity. I’m an engineer, for heaven’s sake. When confronted with the inexplicable, I measure.

The second Tuesday there was no smell. Nor the third. I began to think it had been a minor hallucination, a grief that had taken olfactory form — what the psychology books call sensory bereavement experiences, and which are apparently far more common than people care to admit. I felt almost relieved. Practically disappointed.

During this period the world made several well-intentioned attempts to reclaim me. My brother Nico rang every other evening at half past seven with the regularity of a direct debit, always opening with just checking in, mate in a tone that made abundantly clear he was doing considerably more than that. My colleague Farhan sent messages that I read and did not answer, their timestamps forming a patient, unanswered column in my phone: Hey, missed you at the Alderton meeting. Hope you’re holding up. Let me know if you need anything. Then, a week later: Still here if you need to talk. Then, after another fortnight of silence on my part: Genuinely not sure if you’re getting these. Ring me when you can. I did not ring him. I was not, strictly speaking, getting them — I was reading them in the way one reads instructions one has already decided not to follow.

Elena’s mother, Constance, rang in November to invite me for coffee. She had that particular quality of grief that presents itself as practicality — she had already organised the death certificate, the bank accounts, the cancellation of Elena’s magazine subscriptions — and I suspected that coffee with her would involve a great deal of doing things properly and very little of anything else. I told her I was not up to it yet. She said she understood. She rang again in December and I told her the same thing. In January she stopped ringing and began, instead, to leave voicemails that I kept without listening to, a row of small unopened parcels accumulating in my phone.

In December the smell returned.

This time it was not only the smell. There was also the sound: the particular shuffle of her ancient Tasmanian Devil slippers against the wooden floor, that soft drag I used to ask her to correct, and which she never corrected because she maintained that slippers were for shuffling and anyone who failed to grasp that understood nothing fundamental about domestic life. It was seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning and I had my cup in my hand and for three complete seconds — I counted, I noted, I catalogued, three wretched seconds — I was absolutely certain that if I turned round I would see her.

I did not turn round. Obviously.

That too I noted: Did not turn round. Do not know whether from fear of seeing her or fear of not seeing her.

I understood, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, that these were not equivalent fears. Fear of seeing her and being wrong — of turning to find only kitchen, only morning, only the ordinary devastating fact of the room — was a fear I recognised and could name. The other fear was different in kind. It had no clean edges. It lived in the part of the mind that knows things before it has permission to know them, and what it knew was this: that there was something she had not yet finished. That whatever was coming back on Tuesdays was not simply residue. It was intention.

I did not write that in the notebook. I wrote: Did not turn round. Four words. Sufficient.

My brother Nico says I ought to see a therapist. He says this with that clumsy tenderness men have when they want to help but haven’t the faintest idea how, offering solutions the way one offers tools for a plumbing problem. In January he came round unannounced on a Wednesday — not a Tuesday, I noted, as though even he were observing some protocol he didn’t know about — and stood in my kitchen looking at the percolator with an expression I can only describe as carefully neutral, the expression of a man working very hard not to say what he is thinking. The percolator was on. The coffee had been burning for forty minutes. The smell was thick enough to lean against.

You’ve got to eat something that isn’t toast, he said eventually.

I told him I had been eating fine. This was partially true. I had been eating things that required no preparation and produced no washing up, standing over the kitchen sink in the manner of a man who has decided that the rituals of civilised eating are, for the time being, suspended.

He sat down at the kitchen table then, which I had not expected. He did not make any further observations about my diet or my mental state or the percolator. He simply sat, with his hands around a mug of tea he had made for himself without asking, and we remained like that for some time — twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour — in a silence that was not entirely uncomfortable. At some point he said, very quietly, I miss her too, you know. I said I knew. He nodded. We did not pursue it further, because we are the kind of brothers who say the essential thing once and then leave it alone, which is either a virtue or a failing depending on the circumstances.

When he left he washed the mugs without being asked. At the door he gripped my shoulder — my left shoulder, not the right — briefly and said call me in a way that meant something more than the words. I told him I would. We both knew I wouldn’t, not really, not yet. I stood in the hallway after he had gone and listened to his footsteps on the stairs and the click of the front door below, and then I went back to the kitchen and sat in my chair and looked at the cold percolator and thought about the fact that he had sat at the table for half an hour and had not once mentioned the smell.

What I am doing is waiting for Tuesdays.

Because she always comes back on Tuesdays. Only Tuesdays.

I have started preparing the percolator even when I have no desire for coffee. I leave it on until the coffee burns, the way she used to, and I sit in my usual chair and read or pretend to read and I wait. Sometimes nothing happens. Those Tuesdays are the worst. The waiting has a quality all of its own on those mornings — taut and airless, like the moment before a storm that does not come — and when eleven o’clock arrives and the smell has not appeared and the flat is simply a flat and the chair simply a chair, I feel something I am not proud to record: abandonment. As though she has chosen not to come. As though I have done something wrong and am being made to understand it through absence rather than reproach, which was never her way, but grief does strange things to the logic of a person.

Sometimes the smell comes alone. Sometimes the smell and the sound come together. I have begun to understand the gradations: a faint smell means she is near but not quite present, the way a radio station is near when the signal is almost right but not quite. The smell and the shuffling together means something more — a fuller presence, something closer to weight and intention. I have a chart for this in the notebook. Nico would not merely have me committed; he would have me sectioned and the key disposed of somewhere inconvenient.

In January she moved something.

I had left a paperback face-down on the kitchen table — a habit Elena despised, because she said it broke the spine, which was true, and I said the spine existed to be broken, which was also true, and we had argued about this with great pleasure on numerous occasions over the years. On the Tuesday morning I found it closed, with a folded receipt used as a bookmark. Her handwriting was not on the receipt. There was nothing on the receipt except the itemised record of a supermarket shop from three years prior — Elena’s handwriting was not on it because of course it was not, because of course she had not been in the kitchen the night before — but the book was closed and the receipt was inside it and I stood in the kitchen doorway for a long time, not going in.

I went in eventually. I measured the temperature. I photographed the bookmark. I noted: Receipt dated April 2022. Eggs, semi-skimmed, washing powder, the good olive oil she only bought when it was on offer. The last item: one bunch of tulips.

I did not throw the receipt away.

That same week, Farhan sent another message: Heard from Nico that you’re not great. For what it’s worth, your desk is exactly as you left it and there’s no pressure. But mate — please talk to someone. I’m worried. I read it at half past eleven on a Wednesday night, standing in the hallway in my coat because I had just come back from a walk I did not remember deciding to take. I noted the message in the notebook because it seemed like data. Then I put my coat on the hook and went to bed and lay awake until four, listening to the hum of the refrigerator.

In February — a rainy Tuesday much like the first — I felt the weight of a hand on my right shoulder.

It was so real that I sat motionless, frozen, for what must have been several minutes. Endless ones. The hand did not grip. It simply rested, with the absolute familiarity of someone who had repeated the gesture for eleven years. Elena would place her hand on my right shoulder when she wanted to tell me something important without telling me yet. It was her way of announcing a conversation. I had learnt to read it the way one learns to read the sky before rain.

This time, I turned round.

There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. But the air in that corner of the kitchen was several degrees colder than the rest of the room, and on the table, beside my cup, there was a spoon I was quite certain I had not taken from the drawer.

I noted it. I measured the temperature with a kitchen thermometer. I photographed the spoon.

Nico, mate, if you ever read this notebook you’d have me committed.

That night I did not sleep at all. I sat in the kitchen until sunrise, watching the spoon, which did not move, and trying to determine whether what I felt was terror or relief, and concluding that the question was malformed — that what I felt was something for which I did not have a word, something that required both terror and relief as components the way certain compounds require two elements that would be dangerous in isolation. I wanted her to come back. I was afraid of what she had come back to say. These were not contradictory positions. They were, I was beginning to understand, the same position described from two different angles.

The cold in that corner of the kitchen lasted until morning. I kept the thermometer on the table. At six forty-seven it returned to normal. I noted the time.

I began to research. Not on spiritualist forums or paranormal websites, but in the manner I research any problem: methodically, with systematic scepticism towards my own conclusions. I read about hypnagogic hallucinations, about the way the grieving brain can generate coherent and convincing sensory experiences, about documented cases of widowers and widows who reported presences for months or years after their loss. Science had reasonable answers. I noted them all down. None explained the spoon.

I read further. I read about the phenomenology of grief — the bargaining, the magical thinking, the way the bereaved mind will locate the lost person in objects, habits, weather. I read about olfactory memory and its peculiar resistance to decay, how smell bypasses the rational brain entirely and arrives directly in the limbic system, ancient and ungovernable. I read a paper by a Finnish neurologist who argued that bereavement hallucinations were not pathological but adaptive — the brain’s attempt to maintain attachment in the face of permanent absence, to keep the internal model of a person running even after the external referent had ceased to exist.

I found this oddly moving. I also found it insufficient.

What I found, in a cognitive neurology paper that had nothing to do with what I was looking for, was this: the brain does not store memories as static files. It reconstructs them each time they are evoked, and in that reconstruction it alters them. Rather like a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece is square. What we remember is not the original event but the last time we remembered it. Memory is a translation of a translation of a translation. Traduttore, traditore.

I thought of Elena. Of course I thought of Elena.

I thought about how many times I had recalled her voice over these seven months, and whether the voice I now recalled was still hers or a degraded version, a photocopy of a photocopy, losing definition with each evocation. I thought about the receipt with the tulips. I thought about the fact that I could no longer be entirely certain whether her eyes had been dark brown or very dark green — I had looked at photographs, and the photographs said brown, but the photographs were taken in daylight and what I remembered was her eyes in the kitchen at seven in the morning, in the particular quality of winter light that came through the north-facing window, and in that light they had been something else entirely, something without a reliable name. I wondered whether the Tuesdays were her way of correcting me. Of updating my memories before they degraded beyond retrieval. The thought that she might be running out of time — that whatever this was had a limit I could not calculate — settled in my chest like a stone I hadn’t noticed until it had already sunk.

In the second week of March, Constance left a voicemail I almost did not listen to. I had grown practised at letting them accumulate — there were nine now, a small archive of her voice at various degrees of worry — but something made me press play that evening. She said she had been going through Elena’s things and had found a cardigan she thought I might want to keep. She said she had made too much soup and it was in the freezer if I wanted some. She said, after a pause that went on long enough that I thought the message had ended, that she did not expect anything from me, that she knew grief was not a timetable, that Elena had loved me very much and Constance had loved Elena very much and that was, she supposed, enough to be going on with. Her voice was steady throughout. It was the steadiness of someone who has been practising.

I rang her back. We spoke for eleven minutes. I noted the duration. I told her I would come for coffee the following week, and I meant it, and then the following Tuesday arrived and I did not go, because I could not leave the kitchen.

The first Tuesday in March she did not come.

I had prepared everything with particular care that morning — ground the beans fresh, which I had not done since August, because Elena maintained that pre-ground coffee was a form of civilisational decline and I had always bought pre-ground out of laziness and we had bickered about this so pleasurably and so often that the argument had become a kind of intimacy in itself. I ground the beans. I set the percolator. I sat in my chair at six forty-five and I waited with a quality of attention I had not brought to anything else in seven months, focused and still in the way that only fear can make a person focused and still.

At eleven o’clock I was still sitting there. The coffee had long since burnt to a black crust. The flat was simply a flat. The chair was simply a chair. The morning light moved across the kitchen floor in its ordinary way, indifferent and unhurried, and I sat in it and felt the specific cold of a person who has been waiting for something that is not coming and has just understood this.

I thought: that is it, then. Whatever it was, it is finished. She has said what she came to say, or she has given up saying it, or I have somehow failed to hear it and now it is too late. The thought arrived not with the violence I might have expected but with a flat, grey finality, like a door closing at the end of a long corridor. I sat with it for a while. Then I got up and unplugged the percolator and washed it out for the first time in months, which felt like a kind of surrender and which I performed with the mechanical efficiency of a man who has decided that feeling things is, for the moment, inadvisable.

That night I listened to Constance’s remaining voicemails. All of them, in order, from November through to the most recent. Afterwards I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. I did not note the duration.

The second Tuesday in March, I spoke to her.

I felt ridiculous for approximately four seconds — noted — which is how long it took me to stop feeling ridiculous and begin feeling simply, plainly alone. I said the winter had been long enough to ache. That Nico kept pressing me to sell the flat and I kept being unable to imagine myself anywhere else in this city. On this planet. That I had found, behind the drawer of her bedside table, a handwritten list of things she wanted to do — learn to make fresh pasta, read Fernando Pessoa, tell her mother she loved her more often — and that I did not know what to do with that list, whether it was a document or a wound or, most likely, both things at once. I said that I had spoken to Constance, finally, and that she sounded smaller than I remembered, and that I was sorry. I said that the third stair still creaked and I had not fixed it and I did not intend to.

The smell intensified.

Then it happened — something I cannot catalogue because I have no category for it in my filing system: in approximately five seconds — I timed it afterwards, once I could move my fingers again — I saw things that had not happened.

Not as a dream. Not as a memory. As data. As though the universe had committed the administrative error of sending me files that were not mine to receive.

An ultrasound scan. The dark screen with that white, pulsing constellation I would have recognised at any resolution, because it is the sort of image the brain records before it has permission. Elena pointing at the screen with her index finger and laughing in that particular way she had when she was embarrassed by her own happiness. A sonographer handing her a printed still. Her folding it carefully, precisely, along a crease that did not yet exist, and placing it in her coat pocket with both hands, as though it were something that could break.

And then — and here the voice I use to write in this notebook begins to falter, the way a connection falters that had been holding until now — a hospital room. Her exhausted and drenched and absolutely radiant, holding something wrapped in blue, and me beside her with that vacant expression men wear when they cannot decide whether they are allowed to cry. Her looking at me over the top of the bundle with an expression I had never seen on her face before and would have spent the rest of my life learning to read.

Then the years, too fast, overlapping, a child growing up in jump cuts like a poorly edited film: first day of school with a rucksack too large for shoulders too small, a boy with her eyes — brown, definitively brown, I could see it clearly now — running towards something I could not make out, then a desk covered in textbooks, then a degree ceremony and a jacket that did not sit right on shoulders that had grown broad enough to carry it, then a young woman I would never know laughing at something he had said, then a wedding in a garden somewhere, and Elena beside me in every image, ageing, ageing, ageing, her hair going silver in the way it would have done, the way I had sometimes imagined it would do and thought would suit her and never told her — And then her, very old and very slight in a bed that was not ours, and me beside her with a grown son and a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren who will never be born holding my hand, and the smell of burnt coffee so overwhelming it was almost unbearable, and me understanding, finally, what it means to lose someone: it is not losing what was.

It is losing what will never be.

I do not know how long I sat there after the five seconds ended. The coffee had gone cold in my cup. Outside, a van reversed somewhere on the street below, its warning beep precise and ordinary and very far away. My hands were in my lap and I could see them there but could not immediately determine whether they were shaking or whether that was simply the quality of the light. I looked at the notebook. I looked at the pen beside it. I looked at the spoon on the table. The kitchen was exactly as it always was — the same north-facing window, the same crack in the grout above the hob that I had been meaning to fill since the year before last — and I was sitting in it like a man who has just returned from a very long way away and is still making the necessary adjustments.

Five seconds. I noted: 5s. And then I sat staring at the number written in the notebook without being able to write another word, because for the first time in two hundred and fourteen pages there was nothing that deserved to be measured.

The smell dissipated slowly. The kitchen returned to its usual temperature. On the table, the spoon was exactly where it had been. I was in the chair. And in the space between the two things there was something that was not silence.

I opened the notebook to a new page.

I wrote:

Thank you.

The third stair creaked once, only once, the way it creaks when someone is leaving.

I did not go and check.

I completed the notebook.

There is nothing sadder than a future that will never be lived.

Afterwards, I never wrote again.

Oliver Quinto is a Brazilian fiction writer, art director, and illustrator. He spent over two decades as Art Director at major Brazilian magazines, including Marie Claire and Status, and contributes illustrations to the literary journal Rascunho. His poetry collection De Perecer (Massao Ohno, 1995) was prefaced by writer Julieta de Godoy Ladeira. His work sits at the intersection of visual precision and literary craft. He lives in Valinhos, São Paulo.