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Anne Ryan. “Perfumeria.” The Commonweal 28.2 (May 6, 1938) : 44
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paragraphs numbered for ease of reference

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  1. In Lisbon the women are dressy, and on Sundays the children look like dolls, led up and down by their black-satin Mammas, very conscious of their brief, tilted skirts or best sailor suits.
  2. On Saturday morning all the tiny beauty shops are crowded. The Perfumeria of Santa Eulalia is named from the church across the way. The stone-carved almonry door — always with the same two beggars outside — looks across at the worldliness of the little shop. Women coming out from their devotions can see the painted lintel, the door open and inviting, and are compelled to stop for a moment in the ambient air crowded with scents of flowers. it seems to them as if their own patios were inside, blooming invisibly.
  3. The only light in the shop is from the doorway, but the Perfumeria of Santa Eulalia is the more brilliant because of the reflected sun thrown vividly from the great walls of the church. On the shelves before the delicate mirrors, vials gleam like tiny flames. The counter is white, painted in fine renaissance scrolls, and on the window-sill where the shutters are drawn a brown cat dozes among the flower-pots.
  4. Two girls enter. They want rice powder and an ounce of jasmine perfume. They have brought their own box for the powder, a box made of wood-inlay as fine as a mosaic, and a tiny crystal bottle curved and shaped like a pear. Everyone brings their own containers and another cost is saved. If a foreigner coming in to purchase has not a box or a bottle a sits hone frown appears on all faces, they are all worried, and finally the errand boy is sent out. He returns looking as sheepish as if he had borrowed from a neighbor.
  5. Delicately the rice powder is weighed out on the tiny, glinting scales. Enough powder is purchased to half fill the little box. The girls are careful, and no one thinks less of their thrift but admires such a division, such an accuracy — besides the Perfumeria is ever available, ever across the street from the door of Santa Eulalia.
  6. Now the jasmine. The shopkeeper turns the bottle up with a quick shake, touches the stopper to the palm of the girl and enjoys with pride the fine scent. They are all lost in thought, remembering for an instant an arbor at evening where the white stars of jasmine open against the sky.
  7. They are kind and lenient with foreigners who ask the price of everything and wish to smell all the bottles. They like to chat. Immediately they want to know about New York; it seems the only place in America for them. The high buildings — how many stories? That is always the first question, and it is asked with the head on the side. They are sceptical. Eighty stories, but that is impossible! Even customers coming in in the middle of their astonishment assent and wonder, No one can imagine it. But the clouds, they say, the clouds must be pushed up, and how the poor little perfume shops must be lost in such immense buildings!
  8. After a while they return from where they have been soaring, look around their little store, at the chromatic colors in the bottles, at the cat sleeping in the window, at the mellow light in the doorway. They are content, life is much easier here, much simpler, more leisured. “Yes, it is better here,” each one agrees separately, the weigher of powder, the customers, the shop-boy — and the cat yawns.
  9. In the tower of Santa Eulalia cut far above against the blue sky, the toll of the bell sounds, floats down and dissolves in the golden air. It is time to close the doors for siesta, for the afternoon nap which in summer lasts until five o’clock.
     

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