Juan Villoro
Perfumes include stinky ingredients, metaphysics is meaningless without physics, and certain people are contradictory. The elusive Michel de Nostradamus was born in 1503 in Provence. He was one of the brightest and darkest figures of his century. An event defined his fate: the plague.
Before a magician of such caliber, there are more conjectures than certainties. Alberto Savinio tried to interpret it in a human key without resorting to the occult. Brother of Giorgio de Chirico, Savinio was a writer, musician, playwright, and painter. A minority author, almost secret, he appreciated the erudition shared by the initiates. It is not by chance that he was interested in “Dr. Our Lady.”
Born into a Jewish and Italian descent family, Nostradamus had a childhood fondness for unanswered questions, which foreshadowed his scientific vocation. In his youth, he concentrated on astrology and astronomy, then inseparable. He conceived ideas about the Earth’s roundness until his father warned him that it could lead to the stake. He accepted that the Earth is flat and professed the Catholic faith.
He studied medicine in Montpellier, where students could evict neighbors who made noise and prevented reading. In anatomy classes, he met a surface more interesting than the sky: the skin of women. Chaste to the point of prejudice, he idealized the female epidermis and prepared sublimates to protect it. “The iridescent range of makeup is born from his hands,” writes Savinio: “like a rainbow captured and put at the service of cosmetics. His skull is the bed of the Institute of Beauty. What would become of Elizabeth Arden, of Helena Rubinstein, of the great Antoine himself, without the teachings of Michel de Nostradamus? “.
His pharmacopeia skill led him to make jams and jellies so that the fragrance of the fruits would tone the body.
The significant change came with a scourge represented as a “jungle beast,” a fantastic creature with bat wings that held a torch from which yellow smoke was coming out. The plague had taken hold of Europe. It was not a new adversary; Between 1000 and 1400, there had been thirty-two such epidemics.
Nostradamus became so interested in this evil that he decided to follow it to the cities where it acted with cruel caprice. Sometimes it devastated the population; others left many alive and turned them into an erotic frenzy. The doctors wore the “plague diving suit,” a suit covering the body, with protective glasses and sponges on the nose. They also chewed garlic. Nostradamus, who had written a Treatise on Adornments, devised another remedy, an aromatic recipe with carnation, aloe, golden reeds, and roses collected before dew. According to legend, those who took that specific survived the plague.
The fame of the doctor became extraordinary. He was entertained at banquets until he met the most paralyzing of threats: Happiness, embodied in a woman who responded to his beautician dreams.
The misanthrope who did good found himself faced with the possibility of enjoying life without having to solve it. He had helped eradicate the plague; he had celebrity, love, and fortune. Two beautiful children would soon arrive. What does a person do who has everything but can’t stop thinking? The day part of the doctor gave way to the night part of him. The compote workshop became a magician’s sanctuary.
Overwhelmed by bliss, he began to have a “crisis of clairvoyance.” He saw a young friar in the street and knelt, calling him “Holiness.” Sometime later, that religious man would be Sixtus V.
From then on, he would become a prophet. His wife and his children died without him being able to do anything about it. “Was it for this result, oh, Happiness, that you insisted so much in offering your graces?” Savinio wonders.
Nostradamus left numerous prophecies for the future, many of them dire, none as enigmatic as his life. Before the plague, he offered ointments, remedies, and flavors; he bravely weathered the epidemic, but he could not with the secret adversary of a restless mind: Happiness. Rebellious in the face of disease, he was overcome by plenitude. Bitter teaching worthy of the contradictory prophet who prepared jams.
