Despair

by Vladimir Nabokov

  There ... I have mentioned you, my first reader, you, the well-known author of psychological novels. I have read them and found them very artificial, though not badly constructed. What will you feel, reader-writer, when you tackle my tale? Delight? Envy? Or even ... who knows? ... you may use my termless removal to give out my stuff for your own ... for the fruit of your own crafty ... yes, I grant you that ... crafty and experienced imagination; leaving me out in the cold. It would not be hard for me to take in advance proper measures against such impudence. Whether I shall take them, that is another question. What if I find it rather flattering that you should steal my property? Theft is the best compliment one can possibly pay a thing. And do you know the most amusing part? I assume that, having made up your mind to effect that pleasant robbery, you will suppress the compromising lines, the very lines I am writing now, and, moreover, fashion certain bits to your liking (which is a less pleasant thought) just as a motorcar thief repaints the car he has stolen. And, in this respect, I shall allow myself to relate a little story, which is certainly the funniest little story I know.

  Some ten days ago, that is, about the tenth of March 1931 (half a year has suddenly gone--a fall in a dream, a run in time's stocking), a person, or persons, passing along the highway or through the wood (that, I think, will be settled in due course) espied, on its edge, and unlawfully took possession of, a small blue car of such and such a make and power (I leave out the technical details). And, as a matter of fact, that is all.

  I do not claim that this story has universal appeal: its point is none too obvious. It made me scream with laughter only because I was in the know. I may add that nobody told it me, nor have I read it anywhere; what I did was, really, to deduce it by means of some close reasoning from the bare fact of the car's disappearance, a fact quite wrongly interpreted by the papers. Back again, time!

  "Can you drive?" was, I remember, the question I suddenly put to Felix, when the waiter, failing to notice anything particular about us, placed before me a lemonade and before Felix a tankard of beer, into the profuse froth of which my blurred double eagerly dipped his upper lip.

  "What?" he uttered, with a beatific grunt.

  "I was asking if you can drive a car."

  "Can't I just! I once chummed up with a chauffeur who worked at a castle near my village. One fine day we ran over a sow. Lord, how she squealed!"

  The waiter brought us some sort of gravy-logged hash, a great deal of it, and mashed potatoes, also drowned in sauce. Where the deuce had I already seen a pince-nez on a waiter's nose? Ah--it comes back to me (only now, while writing this!)--at a rotten little Russian restaurant in Berlin; and that other waiter was very like this one--the same sort of sullen straw-haired little man, but of gentler birth.

  "So that's that, Felix. We have eaten and drunk; now, let us talk. You have made certain suppositions concerning me and these have proved correct. Now, before going deeper into the business on hand, I want to sketch out for your benefit a general picture of my personality and life; you won't be long in understanding why it is urgent. To begin with ..."

  I took a sip and resumed:

  "To begin with, I was born of a rich family. We had a house and a garden--ah, what a garden, Felix! Imagine, not merely rose trees but rose thickets, roses of all kinds, each variety bearing a framed label: roses, you know, receive names as resounding as those given to racehorses. Besides roses, there grew in our garden a quantity of other flowers, and when, of a morning, the whole place was brilliant with dew, the sight, Felix, was a dream. When still a child, I loved to look after our garden and well did I know my job: I had a small watering can, Felix, and a small mattock, and my parents would sit in the shade of an old cherry tree, planted by my grandfather, and look on, with tender emotion, at me, the small busybody (just imagine, imagine the picture!) engaged in removing from the roses, and squelching, caterpillars that looked like twigs. We had plenty of farmyard creatures, as, for example, rabbits, the most oval animal of all, if you know what I mean; and choleric turkeys with carbuncular caruncles (I made a gobbling sound) and darling little kids and many, many others.

  "Then my parents lost all their money and died, and the lovely garden vanished; and it is only now that happiness seems to have come my way once more: I have lately managed to acquire a bit of land on the edge of a lake, and there will be a new garden still better than the old one. My sappy boyhood was perfumed through and through with all those flowers and fruits, whereas the neighboring wood, huge and thick, cast over my soul a shadow of romantic melancholy.

  "I was always lonely, Felix, and I am lonely still. Women ... No need to talk of those fickle and lewd beings. I have traveled a good deal; just like you, I love to rove with a bag strapped to my shoulders, although, to be sure, there were always certain reasons (which I wholly condemn) for my wanderings to be more agreeable than yours. It is really a striking thing: have you ever pondered over the following matter?--two men, alike poor, live not alike; one say, as you, frankly and hopelessly leading a beggar's existence, while the other, though quite as poor, living in a very different style--a carefree, well-fed fellow, moving among the gay rich....

  "Why is it so? Because, Felix, those two belong to different classes; and speaking of classes, let us imagine a man who travels fourth-class without a ticket and another who travels first, without one either: X sits on a hard bench; Mr. Y lolls on a cushioned seat; but both have empty purses--or, to be precise, Mr. Y has got a purse to show, though empty, whereas X has not even that and can show nothing but holes in the lining of his pocket.

  "By speaking thus I am trying to make you grasp the difference between us: I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting. You are denied even that; and you would have always remained a pauper, had not a miracle occurred; that miracle is my meeting you.

  "There is not a thing, Felix, that one could not exploit. Nay, more: there is not a thing that one could not exploit for a very long time, and very successfully. Maybe in the more fiery of your dreams you saw a number of two figures, the limit of your aspirations. Now, however, the dream does not only come true, but at once runs into three figures. None too easy for your fancy to comprehend, is it, for didn't you feel you were nearing a hardly thinkable infinity when you reckoned above ten? And now we are turning the corner of that infinity, and a century beams at you, and over its shoulder--another; and who knows, Felix, maybe a fourth figure is ripening; yes, it makes the head swim, and the heart beat, and the nerves tingle, but it is true nevertheless. See here: you have grown so used to your miserable fate that I doubt whether you catch my meaning; what I say seems dark to you, and strange; what comes next will seem still darker and stranger."

  I spoke a long while in that vein. He kept glancing at me with distrust; quite likely, he had gradually acquired the notion that I was making fun of him. Fellows of his kind remain good-natured up to a certain point only. As it dawns upon them that they are about to be put upon, all their goodness comes off, there appears in their eyes a vitreous glint, they work themselves heavily into a state of solid passion.

  I spoke obscurely, but my object was not to infuriate him. On the contrary, I wished to curry favor with him; to perplex, but at the same time to attract; in a word, to convey to him vaguely but cogently the image of a man of his nature and inclinations. My fancy, however, ran riot and that rather disgustingly, with the weighty playfulness of an elderly but still smirking lady who has had a drop too much.

  Upon my noting the impression I was making, I stopped for a minute, half sorry I had frightened him, but then, all at once, I felt how sweet it was to be able to make one's listener thoroughly uncomfortable. So I smiled and continued thus:

  "You must forgive me, Felix, for all this chatter, but, you see, I seldom have occasion to take my soul for an outing. Then, too, I am in a great hurry to demonstrate myself from all sides, for I want to give you an exhaustive description
of the man with whom you will have to work, the more so as the work in question will be directly concerned with our resemblance. Tell me, do you know what an understudy is?"

  He shook his head, his lower lip drooped; I had long observed that he breathed preferably through his mouth--his nose being stuffed up, or something.

  "If you don't, let me explain. Imagine that the manager of a film company--you have been to the cinema, haven't you?"

  "Well, yes...."

  "Good. So imagine that such a manager or director ... Excuse me, friend, you seem to be wanting to say something?"

  "Well, I haven't been often. When I want to spend money I find something better than pictures."

  "Agreed, but there are people who think differently--if there weren't, then there wouldn't be such a profession as mine, would there? So, as I was saying, a director has offered me, for a small remuneration--something like ten thousand dollars--just a trifle, certainly, just air, but prices have dropped nowadays--to act in a film where the hero is a musician. This suits me admirably, as in real life I love music too, and can play several instruments. On summer evenings I sometimes take my violin to the nearest grove--but to get back to the point--an understudy, Felix, is a person who can, in case of emergency, replace a given actor.

  "The actor plays his part, with the camera shooting him; an insignificant little scene remains to be done; the hero, say, is to drive past in his car; but he can't, he is in bed with a bad cold. There is no time to be lost, and so his double takes over and coolly sails past in the car (splendid that you can manage cars) and when at last the film is shown, not a single spectator is aware of the substitution. The better the likeness, the dearer its price. There even exist special companies whose business consists in supplying movie stars with star ghosts. And the life of the ghost is fine, seeing he gets a fixed salary but has to work only occasionally, and not much of work either--just putting on exactly the same clothes as the hero, and whizzing past in a smart car, in the hero's stead, that's all! Naturally an understudy ought not to blab about his job; there would be the hell of a row if some reporter got wind of the stratagem and the public learned that a bit of its pet actor's part had been faked. You understand now why I was so delightfully excited at finding in you an exact replica of myself. That has always been one of my fondest dreams. Just think how much it means to me--especially at present when the filming has started, and I, a man of delicate health, am cast for the leading part. If anything happens to me they at once call you, you arrive--"

  "Nobody calls me and I arrive nowhere," interrupted Felix.

  "Why do you speak like that, my dear chap?" said I, with a note of gentle rebuke.

  "Because," said Felix, "it is unkind of you to pull a poor man's leg. First I believed you. I thought you'd offer me some honest work. It's been a long dreary tramp coming here. Look at the state of my soles ... and now, instead of work--no, it doesn't suit me."

  "I'm afraid there is a slight misunderstanding," I said softly. "What I'm offering you is neither debasing, nor unduly complicated. We'll sign an agreement. You'll get a hundred marks per month from me. Let me repeat: the job is ridiculously easy; child's play--you know the way children dress up to represent soldiers, ghosts, aviators. Just think: you'll be getting a monthly salary of a hundred marks solely for putting on--very rarely, once a year perhaps--exactly the same clothes I am wearing at present. Now, do you know what we ought to do? Let us fix some date to meet and rehearse some little scene, just to see what it looks like ..."

  "I don't know a thing about such matters, and don't care to know," objected Felix rather rudely. "But I'll tell you something; my aunt had a son who played the buffoon at fairs, he boozed and was too fond of girls, and my aunt broke her heart over him until the day when, thank God, he dashed his brains out by missing a flying swing and his wife's hands. All those picture houses and circuses--"

  Did it actually go on like this? Am I faithfully following the lead of my memory, or has perchance my pen mixed the steps and wantonly danced away? There is something a shade too literary about that talk of ours, smacking of thumb-screw conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevski is at home; a little more of it and we should hear that sibilant whisper of false humility, that catch in the breath, those repetitions of incantatory adverbs--and then all the rest of it would come, the mystical trimming dear to that famous writer of Russian thrillers.

  It even torments me in a way; that is, it does not only torment me, but quite, quite muddles my mind and, I dare say, is fatal to me--the thought that I have somehow been too cocksure about the power of my pen--do you recognize the modulations of that phrase? You do. As for me, I seem to remember that talk of ours admirably, with all its innuendoes, and vsyu podnogotnuyu, "the whole subunguality," the secret under the nail (to use the jargon of the torture chamber, where fingernails were prized off, and a favorite term--enhanced by italics--with our national expert in soul ague and the aberrations of human self-respect). Yes, I remember that talk, but am unable to render it exactly, something clogs me, something hot and abhorrent and quite unbearable, which I cannot get rid of because it is as sticky as a sheet of flypaper into which one has walked naked in a pitch-dark room. And, what is more, you cannot find the light.

  No, our conversation was not such as is set down here; that is, the words maybe were exactly as stated (again that little gasp), but I have not managed or not dared to render the special noises accompanying it; there occurred queer fadings or clottings of sound; and then again that muttering, that susurration, and, suddenly, a wooden voice clearly pronouncing: "Come, Felix, another drink."

  The brown floral design on the wall; an inscription explaining testily that the house was not responsible for lost property; the cardboard rounds serving as bases for beer (with a hurriedly penciled sum across one of them); and the distant bar at which a man drank, legs twisted into a black scroll, and smoke encircling him; all these were commentative notes to our discourse, as meaningless, however, as those in the margins of Lydia's trashy books.

  Had the trio sitting by the bloodred window curtain, far from us, had they turned and looked at us, those three quiet and morose carousers, they would have seen: the fortunate brother and the luckless brother: one with a small mustache and sleek hair, the other clean-shaven, but needing a haircut (that ghostly little mane down the scruff of his lean neck); facing each other, both sitting alike; elbows on the table and fists at the cheekbones. Thus we were reflected by the misty and, to all appearances, sick mirror, with a freakish slant, a streak of madness, a mirror that surely would have cracked at once had it chanced to reflect one single genuine human countenance.

  Thus we sat and I kept up my persuasive drone; I am a bad speaker, and the oration which I seem to render word by word did not flow with the lissom glide it has on paper. Indeed, it is not really possible to set down my incoherent speech, that tumble and jumble of words, the forlornness of subordinated clauses, which have lost their masters and strayed away, and all the superfluous gibber that gives words a support or a creep hole; but my mind worked so rhythmically and pursued its quarry at such a steady pace, that the impression now left me by the trend of my own words is anything but tangled or garbled. My object, however, was still out of reach. The fellow's resistance, proper to one of limited intelligence and timorous humor, had to be broken down somehow. So seduced was I by the neat naturalness of the theme, that I overlooked the probability of its being distasteful to him and even of its frightening him off as naturally as it had appealed to my fancy.

  I do not mean, by that, that I have ever had the least connection with the screen or the stage; in point of fact, the only time I performed was a score of years ago, in a little amateur affair at our squire's country seat (which my father managed). I had to speak only a few words: "The prince bade me announce that he would be here presently. Ah! here he comes," instead of which, full of exquisite delight and all aquiver with glee, I spoke thus: "The prince cannot come: he has cut his throat with a razor";
and, as I spoke, the gentleman in the part of the prince was already coming, with a beaming smile on his gorgeously painted face, and there was a moment of general suspense, the whole world was held up--and to this day I remember how deeply I inhaled the divine ozone of monstrous storms and disasters. But although I have never been an actor in the strict sense of the word, I have nevertheless, in real life, always carried about with me a small folding theatre and have appeared in more than one part, and my acting has always been superfine; and if you think that my prompter's name was Gain--capital G not C--then you are mightily mistaken. It is all not so simple, my dear sirs.