Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  By 5:30 I had consumed, in a fit of private celebration, most of the caviar and all the champagne in the friendly fridge of our bungalow on the green grounds of the Gandora Palace Hotel. I found you on the veranda and told you I would like you to devote the next hour to reading attentively—

  “I read everything attentively.”

  “—this batch of thirty cards from Ardis.” After which I thought you might meet me somewhere on my way back from my late-afternoon stroll: always the same—to the spartitraffico fountain (ten minutes) and thence to the edge of a pine plantation (another ten minutes). I left you reclining in a lounge chair with the sun reproducing the amethyst lozenges of the veranda windows on the floor, and barring your bare shins and the insteps of your crossed feet (right toe twitching now and then in some obscure connection with the tempo of assimilation or a twist in the text). In a matter of minutes you would have learned (as only Iris had learned before you—the others were no eaglesses) what I wished you to be aware of when consenting to be my wife.

  “Careful, please, when you cross,” you said, without raising your eyes but then looking up and tenderly pursing your lips before going back to Ardis.

  Ha! Weaving a little! Was that really I, Prince Vadim Blonsky, who in 1815 could have outdrunk Pushkin’s mentor, Kaverin? In the golden light of a mere quart of the stuff all the trees in the hotel park looked like araucarias. I congratulated myself on the neatness of my stratagem though not quite knowing whether it concerned my third wife’s recorded frolics or the disclosure of my infirmity through a bloke in a book. Little by little the soft spicy air did me good: my soles clung more firmly to gravel and sand, clay and stone. I became aware that I had gone out wearing morocco slippers and a torn, bleached denim trousers-and-top with, paradoxically, my passport in one nipple pocket and a wad of Swiss bank notes in the other. Local people in Gandino or Gandora, or whatever the town was called, knew the face of the author of Un regno sul mare or Ein Königreich an der See or Un Royaume au Bord de la Mer, so it would have been really fatuous on my part to prepare the cue and the cud for the reader in case a car was really to hit me.

  Soon I was feeling so happy and bright that when I passed by the sidewalk café just before reaching the square, it seemed a good idea to stabilize the fizz still ascending in me by means of a jigger of something—and yet I demurred, and passed by, cold-eyed, knowing how sweetly, yet firmly, you disapproved of the most innocent tippling.

  One of the streets projecting west beyond the traffic island traversed the Corso Orsini and immediately afterwards, as if having achieved an exhausting feat, degenerated into a soft dusty old road with traces of gramineous growth on both sides, but none of pavement.

  I could say what I do not remember having been moved to say in years, namely: My happiness was complete. As I walked, I read those cards with you, at your pace, your diaphanous index at my rough peeling temple, my wrinkled finger at your turquoise temple-vein. I caressed the facets of the Blackwing pencil you kept gently twirling, I felt against my raised knees the fifty-year-old folded chessboard, Nikifor Starov’s gift (most of the noblemen were badly chipped in their baize-lined mahogany box!), propped on your skirt with its pattern of irises. My eyes moved with yours, my pencil queried with your own faint little cross in the narrow margin a solecism I could not distinguish through the tears of space. Happy tears, radiant, shamelessly happy tears!

  A goggled imbecile on a motorcycle who I thought had seen me and would slow down to let me cross Corso Orsini in peace swerved so clumsily to avoid killing me that he skidded and ended up facing me some way off after an ignominious wobble. I ignored his roar of hate and continued my steady stroll westward in the changed surroundings I have already mentioned. The practically rural old road crept between modest villas, each in its nest of tall flowers and spreading trees. A rectangle of cardboard on one of the west-side wickets said “Rooms” in German; on the opposite side an old pine supported a sign “For Sale” in Italian. Again on the left, a more sophisticated houseowner offered “Lunchings.” Still fairly far was the green vista of the pineta.

  My thoughts reverted to Ardis. I knew that the bizarre mental flaw you were now reading about would pain you; I also knew that its display was a mere formality on my part and could not obstruct the natural flow of our common fate. A gentlemanly gesture. In fact, it might compensate for what you did not yet know, what I would have to tell you too, what I suspected you would call the not quite savory little method (gnusnovaten’kiy sposob) of my “getting even” with Louise. All right—but what about Ardis? Apart from my warped mind, did you like it or loathe it?

  Composing, as I do, whole books in my mind before releasing the inner word and taking it down in pencil or pen, I find that the final text remains for a while committed to memory, as distinct and perfect as the floating imprint that a light bulb leaves on the retina. I was able therefore to rerun the actual images of those cards you read: they were projected on the screen of my fancy together with the gleam of your topaz ring and the beat of your eyelashes, and I could calculate how far you had read not simply by consulting my watch but by actually following one line after the other to the right-hand brink of each card. The lucidity of the image was correlated with the quality of the writing. You knew my work too well to be ruffled by a too robust erotic detail, or annoyed by a too recondite literary allusion. It was bliss reading Ardis with you that way, triumphing that way over the stretch of colored space separating my lane from your lounge chair. Was I an excellent writer? I was an excellent writer. That avenue of statues and lilacs where Ada and I drew our first circles on the dappled sand was visualized and re-created by an artist of lasting worth. The hideous suspicion that even Ardis, my most private book, soaked in reality, saturated with sun flecks, might be an unconscious imitation of another’s unearthly art, that suspicion might come later; at the moment—6:18 P.M. on June 15, 1970, in the Tessin—nothing could scratch the rich humid gloss of my happiness.

  I was now reaching the end of my usual preprandial walk. The ra-ta-ta, ta-ta, tac of a typist’s finishing a last page came from a window through motionless foliage, reminding me pleasantly that I had long since eschewed the long labor of having my immaculate manuscripts typed when they could be reproduced photographically in one hum. It was now the publisher who bore the brunt of having my hand transformed directly into printed characters; and I know he disliked the procedure as a well-bred entomologist may find revolting an irregular insect’s skipping some generally accepted stage of metamorphosis.

  Only a few steps—twelve, eleven—remained before I would start to walk back: I felt you were thinking of this in a reversal of distant perception, just as I felt a kind of mental loosening, which told me you had finished reading those thirty cards, placed them in their proper order, tidied the stack by knocking its base slightly against the table, found the elastic lying there in the assumed shape of a heart, banded the batch, carried it to the safety of my desk, and were now preparing to meet me on my way back to Gandora Palace.

  A low wall of gray stone, waist-high, paunch-thick, built in the general shape of a transversal parapet, put an end to whatever life the road still had as a town street. A narrow passage for pedestrians and cyclists divided the parapet in the middle, and the width of that gap was preserved beyond it in a path which after a flick or two slithered into a fairly dense young pinewood. You and I had rambled there many times on gray mornings, when lakeside or poolside lost all attraction; but that evening, as usual, I terminated my stroll at the parapet, and stood in perfect repose, facing the low sun, my spread hands enjoying the smoothness of its top edge on both sides of the passage. A tactile something, or the recent ra-ta-tac, brought back and completed the image of my 733, twelve centimeters by ten-and-a-half Bristol cards, which you would read chapter by chapter whereupon a great pleasure, a parapet of pleasure, would perfect my task: in my mind there arose, endowed with the clean-cut compactness of some great solid—an altar! a mesa!—the image of the shiny photoco
pier in one of the offices of our hotel. My trustful hands were still spread, but my soles no longer sensed the soft soil. I wished to go back to you, to life, to the amethyst lozenges, to the pencil lying on the veranda table, and I could not. What used to happen so often in thought, now had happened for keeps: I could not turn. To make that movement would mean rolling the world around on its axis and that was as impossible as traveling back physically from the present moment to the previous one. Maybe I should not have panicked, should have waited quietly for the stone of my limbs to regain some tingle of flesh. Instead, I performed, or imagined performing, a wild wrenching movement—and the globe did not bulge. I must have hung in a spread-eagle position for a little while longer before ending supine on the intangible soil.

  Part Seven

  1

  There exists an old rule—so old and trite that I blush to mention it. Let me twist it into a jingle—to stylize the staleness:

  The I of the book

  Cannot die in the book.

  I am speaking of serious novels, naturally. In so-called Planchette-Fiction the unruffled narrator, after describing his own dissolution, can continue thus: “I found myself standing on a staircase of onyx before a great gate of gold in a crowd of other bald-headed angels …”

  Cartoon stuff, folklore rubbish, hilarious atavistic respect for precious minerals!

  And yet—

  And yet I feel that during three weeks of general paresis (if that is what it was) I have gained some experience; that when my night really comes I shall not be totally unprepared. Problems of identity have been, if not settled, at least set. Artistic insights have been granted. I was allowed to take my palette with me to very remote reaches of dim and dubious being.

  Speed! If I could have given my definition of death to the stunned fisherman, to the mower who stopped wiping his scythe with a handful of grass, to the cyclist embracing in terror a willow sapling on one green bank and actually getting up to the top of a taller tree on the opposite side with his machine and girlfriend, to the black horses gaping at me like people with trick dentures all through my strange skimming progress, I would have cried one word: Speed! Not that those rural witnesses ever existed. My impression of prodigious, inexplicable, and to tell the truth rather silly and degrading speed (death is silly, death is degrading) would have been conveyed to a perfect void, without one fisherman tearing by, without one blade of grass bloodied by his catch, without any reference mark altogether. Imagine me, an old gentleman, a distinguished author, gliding rapidly on my back, in the wake of my outstretched dead feet, first through that gap in the granite, then over a pinewood, then along misty water meadows, and then simply between marges of mist, on and on, imagine that sight!

  Madness had been lying in wait for me behind this or that alder or boulder since infancy. I got used by degrees to feeling the sepia stare of those watchful eyes as they moved smoothly along the line of my passage. Yet I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence of an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.

  For practical purposes, such as keeping body-mind and mind-body in a state of ordinary balance, so as not to imperil one’s life or become a burden to friends or governments, I preferred the latent variety, the awfulness of that watchful thing that meant at best the stab of neuralgia, the distress of insomnia, the battle with inanimate things which have never disguised their hatred of me (the runaway button which condescends to be located, the paper clip, a thievish slave, not content to hold a couple of humdrum letters, but managing to catch a precious leaf from another batch), and at worst a sudden spasm of space as when the visit to one’s dentist turns into a burlesque party. I preferred the muddle of such attacks to the motley of madness which, after pretending to adorn my existence with special forms of inspiration, mental ecstasy, and so forth, would stop dancing and flitting around me and would pounce upon me, and cripple me, and for all I know destroy me.

  2

  At the start of the great seizure, I must have been totally incapacitated, from top to toe, while my mind, the images racing through me, the tang of thought, the genius of insomnia, remained as strong and active as ever (except for the blots in between). By the time I had been flown to the Lecouchant Hospital in coastal France, highly recommended by Dr. Genfer, a Swiss relative of its director, I became aware of certain curious details: from the head down I was paralyzed in symmetrical patches separated by a geography of weak tactility. When in the course of that first week my fingers “awoke” (a circumstance that stupefied and even angered the Lecouchant sages, experts in dementia paralytica, to such a degree that they advised you to rush me off to some more exotic and broadminded institution—which you did) I derived much entertainment from mapping my sensitive spots which were always situated in exact opposition, e.g. on both sides of my forehead, on the jaws, orbital parts, breasts, testicles, knees, flanks. At an average stage of observation, the average size of each spot of life never exceeded that of Australia (I felt gigantic at times) and never dwindled (when I dwindled myself) below the diameter of a medal of medium merit, at which level I perceived my entire skin as that of a leopard painted by a meticulous lunatic from a broken home.

  In some connection with those “tactile symmetries” (about which I am still attempting to correspond with a not too responsive medical journal, swarming with Freudians), I would like to place the first pictorial compositions, flat, primitive images, which occurred in duplicate, right and left of my traveling body, on the opposite panels of my hallucinations. If, for example, Annette boarded a bus with her empty basket on the left of my being, she came out of that bus on my right with a load of vegetables, a royal cauliflower presiding over the cucumbers. As the days passed, the symmetries got replaced by more elaborate inter-responses, or reappeared in miniature within the limits of a given image. Picturesque episodes now accompanied my mysterious voyage. I glimpsed Bel rummaging after work amidst a heap of naked babies at the communal day-nursery, in frantic search for her own firstborn, now ten months old, and recognizable by the symmetrical blotches of red eczema on its sides and little legs. A glossy-haunched swimmer used one hand to brush away from her face wet strands of hair, and pushed with the other (on the other side of my mind) the raft on which I lay, a naked old man with a rag around his foremast, gliding supine into a full moon whose snaky reflections rippled among the water lilies. A long tunnel engulfed me, half-promised a circlet of light at its far end, half-kept the promise, revealing a publicity sunset, but I never reached it, the tunnel faded, and a familiar mist took over again. As was “done” that season, groups of smart idlers visited my bed, which had slowed down in a display hall where Ivor Black in the role of a fashionable young doctor demonstrated me to three actresses playing society belles: their skirts ballooned as they settled down on white chairs, and one lady, indicating my groin, would have touched me with her cold fan, had not the learned Moor struck it aside with his ivory pointer, whereupon my raft resumed its lone glide.

  Whoever charted my destiny had moments of triteness. At times my swift course became a celestial affair at an allegorical altitude that bore unpleasant religious connotations—unless simply reflecting transportation of cadavers by commercial aircraft. A certain notion of daytime and nighttime, in more or less regular alternation, gradually established itself in my mind as my grotesque adventure reached its final phase. Diurnal and nocturnal effects were rendered obliquely at first with nurses and other stagehands going to extreme lengths in the handling of movable properties, such as the bouncing of fake starlight from reflecting surfaces or the daubing of dawns here and there at suitable intervals. It had never occurred to me before that, historically, art, or at least artifacts, had preceded, not followed, nature; yet that is exactly what happened in my case. Thus, in the mute remoteness clouding around me, recognizable sounds were produced at first optically in the pale margin of the film track during the
taking of the actual scene (say, the ceremony of scientific feeding); eventually something about the running ribbon tempted the ear to replace the eye; and finally hearing returned—with a vengeance. The first crisp nurse-rustle was a thunderclap; my first belly wamble, a crash of cymbals.

  I owe thwarted obituarists, as well as all lovers of medical lore, some clinical elucidations. My lungs and my heart acted, or were induced to act, normally; so did my bowels, those buffoons in the cast of our private miracle plays. My frame lay flat as in an Old Master’s Lesson of Anatomy. The prevention of bedsores, especially at the Lecouchant Hospital, was nothing short of a mania, explicable, maybe, by a desperate urge to substitute pillows and various mechanical devices for the rational treatment of an unfathomable disease. My body was “sleeping” as a giant’s foot might be “sleeping”; more accurately, however, my condition was a horrible form of protracted (twenty nights!) insomnia with my mind as consistently alert as that of the Sleepless Slav in some circus show I once read about in The Graphic. I was not even a mummy; I was—in the beginning, at least—the longitudinal section of a mummy, or rather the abstraction of its thinnest possible cut. What about the head?—readers who are all head must be clamoring to be told. Well, my brow was like misty glass (before two lateral spots got cleared somehow or other); my mouth stayed mute and benumbed until I realized I could feel my tongue—feel it in the phantom form of the kind of air bladder that might help a fish with his respiration problems, but was useless to me. I had some sense of duration and direction—two things which a beloved creature seeking to help a poor madman with the whitest of lies, affirmed, in a later world, were quite separate phases of a single phenomenon. Most of my cerebral aqueduct (this is getting a little technical) seemed to descend wedgewise, after some derailment or inundation, into the structure housing its closest ally—which oddly enough is also our humblest sense, the easiest and sometimes the most gratifying to dispense with—and, oh, how I cursed it when I could not close it to ether or excrements, and, oh (cheers for old “oh”), how I thanked it for crying “Coffee!” or “Plage!” (because an anonymous drug smelled like the cream Iris used to rub my back with in Cannice half a century ago!).