Youssef Rakha wallows in the scent of luxury Yearning for coffee, feeling ill at ease in my casual outfit, abandoned, it occurs to me that the invite states emphatically how the press conference "starts at 19.00 sharp " (italics mine). My mobile phone says 19.38 and I am still alone in the aptly christened Nostalgie Ball Room, barring a handful of meticulously besuited men at the door. I'm getting more ancy by the second, a class-rooted angst that places like Le Pasha tend to exacerbate. I think back to a photo story on Yves Saint Laurent, purportedly the object of this so far deeply disappointing event: how inconsolable he seemed, his humble beginnings, his superlative feats, and how his couture, as my rather more knowing partner told me that morning, transformed fashion into "sculpture of the human form". Well, nothing remotely as stimulating seems to be forthcoming -- only the self-important busyness of a handful of people, decked out in dark suits, who appear as corporate stooges with ambitions to high society. Which corporation? And does it have anything to do with the revered Yves? And who on earth is Antoine Chaer, whose name is mentioned on the invite alongside the latter? It's been a trial from the start, what with the somewhat suspicious looks of security personnel -- the fools, I had declaimed in silence: Don't they realise that the occasional white-tipped pimple in a bed of stubble is not a security risk for the well-being of the nation as it unravels in the Nostalgie Ball room? -- plus my initial, overriding confusion about who to direct my queries to. On reaching the ballroom I was somewhat relieved: No doubt I would be attended to now, given information and directed to personages. There were only two men smoking idly at the door, and though I flashed my most effective smile as I introduced myself, speaking deliberately, articulately, their principal priority -- I thought on my way upstairs, where one of them directed me with a cursory gesture, later adding, in my notebook, "if they're not paying attention to journalists what on earth do they think they're here for?" -- was to do everything in their power to ignore me. Upstairs was not much better. Directly above Nostalgie, a line of chefs were being paraded in the dimly lit atmosphere of a typical Cairo hotel restaurant -- a rather larger hall, this. I walked up to the nearest person -- a particularly vicious- looking woman with a mane of blonde-from-the-bottle hair, it turned out, whose attitude combined the insouciant rudeness of the nouveaux riches with the staid arrogance of the impoverished bourgeoisie -- but, appallingly, as I thought, the grande hanim would not condescend to speak to me. First, since I wasn't in a suit, I suppose, she simply took me for one of several native minions -- fein Ashour (where is Ashour), she barked shrilly. I must have had an expression of absolute incomprehension, because she looked away from me and repeated the question in a slightly less emphatic tone. No sooner had I opened my mouth, however -- "My name is Youssef Rakha, I am from Al-Ahr..." -- than she looked away, instantly adopting the initial shrill tone. "Speak to Ustaz So-and- so," she grunted dismissively, looking elsewhere and taking a step away from me. Besought me of the next nearest person, humiliated. This was a stocky, accommodating smooth operator with a marked mustachio, and he handed me over to his lanky, happy-go- lucky assistant -- the only in person not dressed in a suit -- with suggestions of good breeding. The latter did ask to see the invite, however, as he directed me back downstairs, to the armchair I'm now occupying, offering not so much as a drink of water as he asked me to wait till the conference started; the conference, I later surmised, was to be followed by a set gala dinner with a live string quartet ah well, their eloquence impossibly boosted with the aid of microphones... At this point I've noticed the huge posters showing a high society young lady -- her ambitions had been realised -- surrounded by five gorgeous male faces, but it hasn't occurred to me to question the assumption that the event is about a new line of clothing. If not for the willingness of a small, beautifully dressed dark Frenchman to introduce himself to the only non-company person in the room -- he was not authorised to give interviews, he insisted in a Hollywood French accent, so he could help me with information but I must not mention his name -- I would never have found out either that Yves Saint Laurent, the company that produces perfume, is different from Yves Saint Laurent, the clothing company, neither of them have much to do with the designer my partner told me about or that the former is in effect a division of the global fashion and aesthetics conglomerate, Gucci. The conference started soon enough after that -- an embarrassingly rudimentary exposition on the nature and intention of Cinéma, accompanied by a video presentation that included the filmed advertisement, charts displaying the fragrance's various constituent odours (almond blossom, amaryllis and amber) and ended with the statement "Women can discover Cinéma on the Egyptian market as of this week" -- but, except for the scented swabs distributed among us and bearing a miniature photo of The Bottle (many besotted journalists were still sniffing them long after we moved upstairs), there was no interaction of any kind. Soon the principal speaker, the selfsame company official who was kind enough to (not) introduce himself, was ushering the gathering upstairs, where he said we would experience the same presentation again in different form. Thirty minutes in the company of the Egyptian fashion photography contingent was more than I could bear, however, and as important- looking people continued to file through the door, it was all I could do to lug my small but shiny gift bag (that turned out to include nothing but printed matter) and leave as inconspicuously as I had entered, finally, breathing. Cinéma indeed: In the relative comfort of my humble pistachio-green Toyota it finally dawned on me how the whole experience had been like a bad film -- the boisterous confidence of the stooges, the fake eyelashes of the woman upstairs, the podium-mediated stuttering of my irreconcilably French facilitator, the musicians from Eastern Europe imbuing their performance with a mock passion, the emaciated journalist with a terribly rugged face: he arrived late in the company of a baladi pinup who managed to upstage the fragrance in due course. The reason I had been so ancy, perhaps, was not class- consciousness per se, but the fear of being caught on the set of a film that rehearsed, again and tirelessly, the consumerist phantasmagoria of a class that hated everything about itself, where it lived, the hair colour it was born with, some absurd un-divine comedy staged by an international conglomerate like Gucci, about the launch of a new perfume. At least the hullabaloo was confined to an appropriate venue, I conceded as I drove away, too speedily for safety, but the thought of my own relatively trivial dispossession in there lingered as a foul aftertaste. Perfume is as much as anything a matter of personal taste and dermatological harmony. "Unfortunately for Cinéma," I pulled over to write in the notebook, "the event has made it smell not only foul but profoundly repulsive..."
