Transparent Things

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Presently she appeared from another side of the terrace, in glossy green nylon, carrying her skis, but with her formidable boots still on. He had spent enough time studying skiwear in Swiss shops to know that shoe leather had been replaced by plastic, and laces by rigid clips. "You look like the first girl on the moon," he said, indicating her . boots, and if they had not been especially close fitting she would have wiggled her toes inside as a woman does when her footwear happens to be discussed in flattering terms (smiling toes taking over the making of mouths).

  "Listen," she said as she considered her Mondstein Sexy (their incredible trade name), "I'll leave my skis here, and change into walking shoes and return to Witt with you А deux. I've quarreled with Jacques, and he has left with his dear friends. All is finished, thank God."

  Facing him in the heavenly cable car she gave a comparatively polite version of what she was to tell him a little later in disgustingly vivid detail. Jacques had demanded her presence at the onanistic sessions he held with the Blake twins at their chalet. Once already he had made Jack show her his implement but she had stamped her foot and made them behave themselves. Jacques had now presented her with an ultimatum – either she join them in their nasty games or he would cease being her lover. She was ready to be ultramodern, socially and sexually, but this was offensive, and vulgar, and as old as Greece.

  The gondola would have gone on gliding forever in a blue haze sufficient for paradise had not a robust attendant stopped it before it turned to reascend for good. They got out. It was spring in the shed where the machinery performed its humble and endless duty. Armande with a prim "excuse me" absented herself for a moment. Cows stood among the dandelions .outside, and radio music came from the adjacent buvette.

  In a timid tremor of young love Hugh wondered if he might dare kiss her at some likely pause in their walk down the winding path. He would try as soon as they reached the rhododendron belt where they might stop, she to shed her parka, he to remove a pebble from his right shoe. The rhododendrons and junipers gave way to alder, and the voice of familiar despair started urging him to put off the pebble and the butterfly kiss to some later occasion. They had entered the fir forest when she stopped, looked around, and said (as casually as if she were suggesting they pick mushrooms or raspberries) :

  "And now one is going to make love. I know a nice mossy spot just behind those trees where we won't be disturbed, if you do it quickly."

  Orange peel marked the place. He wanted to embrace her in the preliminaries required by his nervous flesh (the "quickly" was a mistake) but she withdrew with a fishlike flip of the body, and sat down on the whortleberries to take off her shoes and trousers. He was further dismayed by the ribbed fabric of thick-knit black tights that she wore under her ski pants. She consented to pull them down only just as far as necessary. Nor did she let him kiss her, or caress her thighs.

  "Well, bad luck," she said finally but as she twisted against him trying to draw up her tights, he regained all at once the power to do what was expected of him. "One will go home now," she remarked immediately afterwards in her usual neutral tone, and in silence they continued their brisk downhill walk.

  At the next turn of the trail the first orchard of Witt appeared at their feet, and farther down one could see the glint of a brook, a lumberyard, mown fields, brown cottages.

  "I hate Witt," said Hugh. "I hate life. I hate myself. I hate that beastly old bench." She stopped to look the way his fierce finger pointed, and he embraced her. At first she tried to evade his lips but he persisted desperately. All at once she gave in, and the minor miracle happened. A shiver of tenderness rippled her features, as a breeze does a reflection. Her eyelashes were wet, her shoulders shook in his clasp. That moment of soft agony was never to be repeated – or rather would never be granted the time to come back again after completing the cycle innate in its rhythm; yet that brief vibration in which she dissolved with the sun, the cherry trees, the forgiven landscape, set the tone for his new existence with its sense of "all-is-well" despite her worst moods, her silliest caprices, her harshest demands. That kiss, and not anything preceding it, was the real beginning of their courtship.

  She disengaged herself without a word. A long file of little boys followed by a scoutmaster climbed toward them along the steep path. One of them hoisted himself on an adjacent round rock and jumped down with a cheerful squeal. "Gruss Gott," said their teacher in passing by Armande and Hugh. "Hello there," responded Hugh. "He'll think you're crazy," said she.

  Through a beech grove and across a river, they reached the outskirts of Witt. A short cut down a muddy slope between half-built chalets took them to Villa Nastia. Anastasia Petrovna was in the kitchen, placing flowers in vases. "Come here. Mamma," cried Armande: "Zheniba privela, I've brought my fiancЙ."

  16

  Witt had a new tennis court. One day Armande challenged Hugh to a set.

  Ever since childhood and its nocturnal fears, sleep had been our Person's habitual problem. The problem was twofold. He was obliged, sometimes for hours, to woo the black automaton with an automatic repetition of some active image – that was one trouble. The other referred to the quasi-insane state into which sleep put him, once it did come. He could not believe that decent people had the sort of obscene and absurd nightmares which shattered his night and continued to tingle throughout the day. Neither the incidental accounts of bad dreams reported by friends nor the case histories in Freudian dream books, with their hilarious elucidations, presented anything like the complicated vileness of his almost nightly experience.

  In his adolescence he attempted to solve the first part of the problem by an ingenious method which worked better than pills (these if too mild induced too little sleep, and if strong enhanced the vividness of monstrous visions). The method he hit upon was repeating in mind with metronomic precision the successive strokes of an outdoor game. The only game he had ever played in his youth and could still play at forty was tennis. Not only did he play tolerably well, with a certain easy stylishness (caught years ago from a dashing cousin who coached the boys at the New England school of which his father had been headmaster), but he had invented a shot which neither Guy, nor Guy's brother-in-law, an even finer professional, could either make or take. It had an element of art-for-art's sake about it, since it could not deal with low, awkward balls, required an ideally balanced stance (not easy to assume in a hurry) and, by itself, never won him a match. The Person Stroke was executed with a rigid arm and blended a vigorous drive with a clinging cut that followed the ball from the moment of impact to the end of the stroke. The impact (and this was the nicest part) had to occur at the far end of the racket's netting, with the performer standing well away from the bounce of the ball and as it were reaching out for it. The bounce had to be fairly high for the head of the racket to adhere properly, without a shadow of "twist," and then to propel the "glued" ball in a stiff trajectory. If the "cling" was not enduring enough or if it started too proximally, in the middle of the racket, the result was a very ordinary, floppy, slow-curving "galosh," quite easy, of course, to return; but when controlled accurately, the stroke reverberated with a harsh crack throughout one's forearm and whizzed off in a strongly controlled, very straight skim to a point near the baseline. On hitting the ground it clung to it in a way felt to be of the same order as the adherence of the ball to the strings during the actual stroke. While retaining its direct velocity, the ball hardly rose from the ground; in fact, Person believed that, with tremendous, all-consuming practice, the shot could be made nor to bounce at all but roll with lightning speed along the surface of the court. Nobody could return an unbouncing ball, and no doubt in the near future such shots would be ruled out as illegal spoilsports. But even in its inventor's rough version it could be delightfully satisfying. The return was invariably botched in a most ludicrous fashion, because of the low-darting ball refusing to be scooped up, let alone properly hit. Guy and the other Guy were intrigued and annoyed whenever Hugh managed to bring off his "cli
ng drive" – which unfortunately for him was not often. He recouped himself by not telling the puzzled professionals, who tried to imitate the stroke (and achieved merely a feeble spin), that the trick lay not in the cut but in the cling, and not only in the cling itself but in the place where it occurred at the head of the strings as well as in the rigidity of the reaching-out movement of the arm. Hugh treasured his stroke mentally for years, long after the chances to use it dwindled to one or two shots in a desultory game. (In fact, the last time he executed it was that day at Witt with Armande, whereupon she walked off the court and could not be coaxed back.) Its chief use had been a means of putting himself to sleep. In those predormitory exercises he greatly perfected his stroke, such as quickening its preparation (when tackling a fast serve) and learning to reproduce its mirror image backhandedly (instead of running around the ball like a fool). No sooner had he found a comfortable place for his cheek on a cool soft pillow than the familiar firm thrill would start running through his arm, and he would be slamming his way through one game after another. There were additional trimmings: explaining to a sleepy reporter, "Cut it hard and yet keep it intact"; or winning in a mist of well-being the Davis Cup brimming with the poppy.

  Why did he give up that specific remedy for insomnia when he married Armande? Surely not because she criticized his pet stroke as an insult and a bore? Was it the novelty of the shared bed, and the presence of another brain humming near his, that disturbed the privacy of the somnorific – and rather sophomoric – routine? Perhaps. Anyhow he gave up trying, persuaded himself that one or two entirely sleepless nights per week constituted for him a harmless norm, and on other nights contented himself with reviewing the events of the day (an automaton in its own right), the cares and misИres of routine life with now and then the peacock spot that prison psychiatrists called "having sex."

  He had said that on top of the trouble in going to sleep, he experienced dream anguish?

  Dream anguish was right! He might vie with the best lunatics in regard to the recurrence of certain nightmare themes. In some cases he could establish a first rough draft, with versions following in well-spaced succession, changing in minute detail, polishing the plot, introducing some new repulsive situation, yet every time rewriting a version of the same, otherwise inexisting, story. Let's hear the repulsive part. Well, one erotic dream in particular had kept recurring with cretinous urgency over a period of several years, before and after Armande's death. In that dream which the psychiatrist (a weirdie, son of an unknown soldier and a Gypsy mother) dismissed as "much too direct," he was offered a sleeping beauty on a great platter garnished with flowers, and a choice of tools on a cushion. These differed in length and breadth, and their number and assortment varied from dream to dream. They lay in a row, neatly aligned: a yard-long one of vulcanized rubber with a violet head, then a thick short burnished bar, then again a thinnish skewerlike affair, with rings of raw meat and translucent lard alternating, and so on – these are random samples. There was not much sense in selecting one rather than another – the coral or the bronze, or the terrible rubber – since whatever he took changed in shape and size, and could not be properly fitted to his own anatomical system, breaking off at the burning point or snapping in two between the legs or bones of the more or less disarticulated lady. He desired to stress the following point with the fullest, fiercest, anti-Freudian force. Those oneiric torments had nothing to do, either directly or in a "symbolic" sense, with anything he had experienced in conscious life. The erotic theme was just one theme among others, as A Boy for Pleasure remained just an extrinsic whimsy in relation to the whole fiction of the serious, too serious writer who had been satirized in a recent novel.

  In another no less ominous nocturnal experience, he would find himself trying to stop or divert a trickle of grain or fine gravel from a rift in the texture of space and being hampered in every conceivable respect by cobwebby, splintery, filamentary elements, confused heaps and hollows, brittle debris, collapsing colossuses. He was finally blocked by masses of rubbish, and that was death. Less frightening but perhaps imperiling a person's brain to an even greater extent were the "avalanche" nightmares at the rush of awakening when their imagery turned into the movement of verbal colluvia in the valleys of Toss and Thurn, whose gray rounded rocks. Roches ЙtonnЙes, are so termed because of their puzzled and grinning surface, marked by dark "goggles" (ecarquillages). Dream-man is an idiot not wholly devoid of animal cunning; the fatal flaw in his mind corresponds to the splutter produced by tongue twisters: "the risks scoundrels take."

  He was told what a pity he had not seen his analyst as soon as the nightmares grew worse. He replied 'he did not own one. Very patiently the doctor rejoined that the pronoun had been used not possessively but domestically as, for example, in advertisements: "Ask your grocer." Had Armande ever consulted an analyst? If that was a reference 'to Mrs. Person and not to a child or a cat, then the answer was no. As a girl she seemed to have been interested in Neobuddhism and that sort of stuff, but in America new friends urged her to get, what you call, analyzed and she said she might try it after completing her Oriental studies. He was advised that in calling her by her first name one simply meant to induce an informal atmosphere. One always did that. Only yesterday one had put another prisoner completely at ease by saying: You'd better tell Uncle your dreams or you might burn. Did Hugh, or rather Mr. Person, have "destructive urges" in his dreams – this was something that had not been made sufficiently clear. The term itself might not be sufficiently clear. A sculptor could sublimate the destructive urge by attacking an inanimate object with chisel and hammer. Major surgery offered one of the most useful means of draining off the destructive urge: a respected though not always lucky practitioner had admitted privately how difficult he found it to stop himself from hacking out every organ in sight during an operation. Everyone had secret tensions stored up from infancy. Hugh need not be ashamed of them. In fact at puberty sexual desire arises as a substitute for the desire to kill, which one normally fulfills in one's dreams; and insomnia is merely the fear of becoming aware in sleep of one's unconscious desires for slaughter and sex. About eighty percent of all dreams enjoyed by adult males are sexual. See Clarissa Dark's findings – she investigated singlehanded some two hundred healthy jailbirds whose terms of imprisonment were shortened, of course, by the number of nights spent in the Center's dormitory. Well, one hundred seventy-eight of the men were seen to have powerful erections during the stage of sleep called HAREM ("Has A Rapid Eye Movement") marked by visions causing a lustful ophthalmic roll, a kind of internal ogling. By the way, when did Mr. Person begin to hate Mrs. Person? No answer. Was hate, maybe, part of his feeling for her from the very first moment? No answer. Did he ever buy her a turtleneck sweater? No answer. Was he annoyed when she found it too tight at the throat?

  "I shall vomit," said Hugh, "if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot."

  17

  We shall now discuss love.

  What powerful words, what weapons, are stored up in the mountains, at suitable spots, in special caches of the granite heart, behind painted surfaces of steel made to resemble the mottling of the adjacent rocks! But when moved to express his love, in the days of brief courtship and marriage, Hugh Person did not know where to look for words that would convince her, that would touch her, that would bring bright tears to her hard dark eyes! Per contra, something he said by chance, not planning the pang and the poetry, some trivial phrase, would prompt suddenly a hysterically happy response on the part of that dry-souled, essentially unhappy woman. Conscious attempts failed. If, as happened sometimes, at the grayest of hours, without the remotest sexual intent, he interrupted his reading to walk into her room and advance toward her on his knees and elbows like an ecstatic, undescribed, unarboreal sloth, howling his adoration, cool Armande would tell him to get up and stop playing the fool. The most ardent addresses he could think up – my princess, my sweetheart, my angel, my animal, my exquisite beast – merely ex
asperated her. "Why," she inquired, "can't you talk to me in a natural human manner, as a gentleman talks to a lady, why must you put on such a clownish act, why can't you be serious, and plain, and believable?" But love, he said, was anything but believable, real life was ridiculous, yokels laughed at love. He tried to kiss the hem of her skirt or bite the crease of her trouserleg, her instep, the toe of her furious foot – and as he groveled, his unmusical voice muttering maudlin, exotic, rare, common nothings and every-things, into his own ear, as it were, the simple expression of love became a kind of degenerate avian performance executed by the male alone, with no female in sight – long neck straight, then curved, beak dipped, neck straightened again. It all made him ashamed of himself but he could not stop and she could not understand, for at such times he never came up with the right word, the right waterweed.

  He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle. She called her mother, to her face, skotina, "brute" – not being aware, naturally, that she would never see her again after leaving with Hugh for New York and death. She liked to give carefully planned parties, and no matter how long ago this or that gracious gathering had taken place (ten months, fifteen months, or even earlier before her marriage, at her mother's house in Brussels or Witt) every party and topic remained for ever preserved in the humming frost of her tidy mind. She visualized those parties in retrospect as stars on the veil of the undulating past, and saw her guests as the extremities of her own personality: vulnerable points that had to be treated thenceforth with nostalgic respect. If Julia or June remarked casually that they had never met art critic C. (the late Charles Chamar's cousin), whereas both Julia and June had attended the party, as registered in Armande's mind, she might get very nasty, denouncing the mistake in a disdainful drawl, and adding, with belly-dance contortions: "In that case you must have forgotten also the little sandwiches from PИre Igor" (some special shop) "which you enjoyed so much." Hugh had never seen such a vile temper, such morbid amour-propre, so self-centered a nature. Julia, who had skied and skated with her, thought her a darling, but most women criticized her, and in telephone chats with one another mimicked her rather pathetic little tricks of attack and retort. If anybody started to say "Shortly before I broke my leg – " she would chime in with the triumphant: "And I broke both in my childhood!" For some occult reason she used an ironic and on the whole disagreeable tone of voice when addressing her husband in public.