Car Showroom

I am brushing my teeth when a combination of toothpaste and a stale odour from the drain fuses into the smell of a car showroom. A highly distinctive smell, rarely conjured anywhere except inside these hangars on the outskirts of town, filled with new vehicles, no doubt deliciously perfumed so that the buyer can breathe in his future.

He can compare it with the reek of chips in the car he drove there in. Because it is a he. The entire arrangement is built around this he who is meant to feel like a winner. Leather and a newly built engine, exclusive plastic and untouched tyres awaken the man’s desire for another man inside the man, proud and assured and suddenly within reach. The note of the door closing, with precisely the right balance of softness and firmness in its suspension, and then that indoor feeling inside the cabin. A new solitude settles in, in which one’s new self makes its entrance as a promise of greatness, of superiority, something that will spread into one’s behaviour in every other room, as though the scent were transferred to the owner: a man with a V8, who can effortlessly glide into the overtaking lane and quite legitimately remain there, perhaps for the rest of his life.

I could live here, the man thinks.

For a period, I frequented car showrooms often. Not because I took the initiative myself, but because I was a child, and children have to adapt to their parents’ interests, and my father liked new cars. Nor did I have any objections to the destination, since there was often hot chocolate in the machines at the back beside the sales offices. The drink dripped mechanically into brown plastic cups, which heated the skin so fiercely that I had to change hands from time to time. The tip of my tongue soon went numb. There was also often a bowl of hard blue sweets wrapped in plastic, which I cracked between my teeth to gain time. The lozenges were really too strong. A foretaste of spirits, perhaps, and probably just as well to get used to it, to stretch the taste buds upwards.

At times I wandered alone among the cars, which stood like flagships beneath the high, long rows of windows. For how could these untouched vessels possibly have been brought across the gleaming floor, something as inconceivable as driving over herringbone parquet? As a rule, I settled into one of the more expensive makes, breathed in the fumes of exclusivity, brought my palm towards a gear lever decorated with wood, but took care not to touch the handbrake. Sometimes the radio could be switched on.

Then I placed my fingers over the steering wheel and imagined driving, without imagining in the slightest that I might one day actually drive. A boy cannot drive, and how could I imagine myself as anything other than a boy?

I understood, however, that somewhere inside these cars lay the key to something decisive, something capable of awakening the desire of other men. The newer the car smelled, the better, more masculine and more competent the driver, a man who could afford it and also possessed enough sense of smell to understand how to prioritise. A capitalist test of manhood, effective because everyone bought into the concept.

Sometimes we were allowed to take a test drive, to feel the surge of acceleration on the motorway, but then the smell vanished, the same smell that unexpectedly drifts towards me as I finish brushing my teeth and hurry towards the door. I have a doctor’s appointment to keep and must catch the metro.