Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Fine,” said Van, “that’s certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling,” he continued, “the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair’s swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June 10—a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis.”

  “I remember the cards,” she said, “and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover—but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies.”

  “Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes, I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand.”

  “It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?”

  “On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt.”

  “Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren’t we?”

  “All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect—”

  “Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then—zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn!”

  19

  A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mile Stop-chin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Château Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?

  Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried? Larivière? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?

  No, she was fast ablaze—I mean, asleep. I know, said Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your water-colors to touch up her eyes, or so Larivière said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic sins.

  Oh, of course! But not Marina’s poor French—it was our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version.

  “And do you remember, Van, how warm the night was?”

  “Eshchyo bï! (as if I did not!). That night because of the blink—”

  That night because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping-arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room. The tumult in the house and the maid’s shriek interrupted a rare, brilliant, dramatic dream, whose subject he was unable to recollect later, although he still held it in a saved jewel box. As usual, he slept naked, and wavered now between pulling on a pair of shorts, or draping himself in his tartan lap robe. He chose the second course, rattled a matchbox, lit his bedside candle, and swept out of his room, ready to save Ada and all her larvae. The corridor was dark, somewhere the dachshund was barking ecstatically. Van gleaned from subsiding cries that the so-called “baronial barn,” a huge beloved structure three miles away, was on fire. Fifty cows would have been without hay and Larivière without her midday coffee cream had it happened later in the season. Van felt slighted. They’ve all gone and left me behind, as old Fierce mumbles at the end of the Cherry Orchard (Marina was an adequate Mme Ranevski).

  With the tartan toga around him, he accompanied his black double down the accessory spiral stairs leading to the library. Placing a bare knee on the shaggy divan under the window, Van drew back the heavy red curtains.

  Uncle Dan, a cigar in his teeth, and kerchiefed Marina with Dack in her clutch deriding the watchdogs, were in the process of setting out between raised arms and swinging lanterns in the runabout—as red as a fire engine!—only to be overtaken at the crunching curve of the drive by three English footmen on horseback with three French maids en croupe. The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the Stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle, in the room adjacent to the old nursery where little Lucette lay for a minute awake before running after her dream and jumping into the last furniture van.

  Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure … Take over.

  That multiple departure really presented a marvelous sight against the pale star-dusted firmament of practically subtropical Ardis, tinted between the black trees with a distant flamingo flush at the spot where the Barn was Burning. To reach it one had to drive round a large reservoir which I could make out breaking into scaly light here and there every time some adventurous hostler or pantry boy crossed it on water skis or in a Rob Roy or by means of a raft—typical raft ripples like fire snakes in Japan; and one could now follow with an artist’s eye the motorcar’s lamps, fore and aft, progressing east along the AB bank of that rectangular lake, then turning sharply upon reaching its B corner, trailing away up the short side and creeping back west, in a dim and diminished aspect, to a middle point on the far margin where they swung north and disappeared.

  As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break, that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.

  “Can one see anything, oh, can one see?” the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. “You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent,” she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man’s hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.

  “Look, gipsies,” she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms—two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf—circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candle-lit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons as if taking pictures.

  “I stayed home on purpose, because I hoped you would too—it was a contrived coincidence,” she said, or said later she’d said—while he continued to fondle the flow of her hair, and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little hiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed. She turned to him and next moment he was kissing her bare shoulder, and pushing against her like that soldier behind in the queue.

  First time I hear about him. I though
t old Mr. Nymphobottomus had been my only predecessor.

  Last spring. Trip to town. French theater matinée. Mademoiselle had mislaid the tickets. The poor fellow probably thought “Tartuffe” was a tart or a stripteaser.

  Ce qui n’est pas si bête, au fond. Which was not so dumb after all. Okay. In that scene of the Burning Barn—

  Yes?

  Nothing. Go on.

  Oh, Van, that night, that moment as we knelt side by side in the candlelight like Praying Children in a very bad picture, showing two pairs of soft-wrinkled, once arboreal-animal, soles—not to Grandma who gets the Xmas card but to the surprised and pleased Serpent, I remember wanting so badly to ask you for a bit of purely scientific information, because my sidelong glance—

  Not now, it’s not a nice sight right now and it will be worse in a moment (or words to that effect).

  Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky—now drained of its fire color—or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter.

  Wait, not right now, he replied in a half-muffled mutter.

  She insisted: I wannask, I wannano—

  He caressed and parted with his fleshy folds, parties très charnues, in the case of our passionate siblings, her lank loose, nearly lumbus-length (when she threw back her head as now) black silks as he tried to get at her bed-warm splenius. (It is not necessary, here or elsewhere, there was another similar passage, to blotch a reasonably pure style with vague anatomical terms that a psychiatrist remembers from his student days. In Ada’s late hand.)

  “I wannask,” she repeated as he greedily reached his hot pale goal.

  “I want to ask you,” she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the maid in Georgian novels—inconceivable without the presence of elettricità—

  (I protest. You cannot. It is banned even in Lithuanian and Latin. Ada’s note.)

  “—to ask you …”

  “Ask,” cried Van, “but don’t spoil everything” (such as feeding upon you, writhing against you).

  “Well, why,” she asked (demanded, challenged, one flame crepitated, one cushion was on the floor), “why do you get so fat and hard there when you—”

  “Get where? When I what?”

  In order to explain, tactfully, tactually, she belly-danced against him, still more or less kneeling, her long hair getting in the way, one eye staring into his ear (their reciprocal positions had become rather muddled by then).

  “Repeat!” he cried as if she were far away, a reflection in a dark window.

  “You will show me at once,” said Ada firmly.

  He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.

  “Oh, dear,” she said as one child to another. “It’s all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly?”

  “Touch it quick,” he implored.

  “Van, poor Van,” she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, “yes, I’m sure, it smarts, would it help if I’d touch, are you sure?”

  “You bet,” said Van, “on n’est pas bête à ce point” (“there are limits to stupidity,” colloquial and rude).

  “Relief map,” said the primrose prig, “the rivers of Africa.” Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. “Now what’s this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact” (positively chattering), “I’m reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom.”

  “God, we all are,” said Van.

  “Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!”

  “Squeeze, you goose, can’t you see I’m dying.”

  But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly—and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.

  She looked down in dismay.

  “Not what you think,” remarked Van calmly. “This is not number one. Actually it’s as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Speke.”

  (I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertrips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no—if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. But we are not “different”! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am—it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That’s better, said Ada.)

  Please, take over.

  Van stretched himself naked in the now motionless candlelight.

  “Let us sleep here,” he said. “They won’t be back before dawn relights Uncle’s cigar.”

  “My nightie is trempée,” she whispered.

  “Take it off, this plaid sleeps two.”

  “Don’t look, Van.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said and helped her to slip it up and over her hair-shaking head. She was shaded with a mere touch of coal at the mystery point of her chalk-white body. A bad boil had left a pink scar between two ribs. He kissed it, and lay back on his clasped hands. She was inspecting from above his tanned body the ant caravan to the oasis of the navel; he was decidedly hirsute for so young a boy. Her young round breasts were just above his face. I denounce the philistine’s postcoital cigarette both as a doctor and an artist. It is, however, true that Van was not unaware of a glass box of Turkish Traumatis on a console too far to be reached with an indolent stretch. The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter, and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch, and ponderous upswing of virile revival.

  But the shag of the couch was as tickly as the star-dusted sky. Before anything new happened, Ada went on all fours to rearrange the lap robe and cushions. Native girl imitating rabbit. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy’s sandcastle-molding position; but she turned over, naively ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. She was right. For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languages—the three greatest in all the world—pet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if she had been love-making for years in all our dreams—but impatient young passion (brimming like Van’s overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing thé reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cook’s niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas)—and our two naked chil dren, grabbing lap robe and nightdress, and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms.

  “And do you remember,” said gray-moustached Van as he took a Cannabina cigarette from the bedside table and rattled a yellow-blue matchbox, “how reckless we were, and how Larivière stopped snoring but a moment later went on shaking the house, and how cold the iron steps were, and how disconcerted I was�
�by your—how shall I put it?—lack of restraint.”

  “Idiot,” said Ada, from the wall side, without turning her head.

  Summer 1960? Crowded hotel somewhere between Ex and Ardez?

  Ought to begin dating every page of the manuscript: Should be kinder to my unknown dreamers.

  20

  Next morning, his nose still in the dreambag of a deep pillow contributed to his otherwise austere bed by sweet Blanche (with whom, by the parlor-game rules of sleep, he had been holding hands in a heartbreaking nightmare—or perhaps it was just her cheap perfume), the boy was at once aware of the happiness knocking to be let in. He deliberately endeavored to prolong the glow of its incognito by dwelling on the last vestiges of jasmine and tears in a silly dream; but the tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being.

  That exhilaration of a newly acquired franchise! A shade of it he seemed to have kept in his sleep, in that last part of his recent dream in which he had told Blanche that he had learned to levitate and that his ability to tread air with magic ease would allow him to break all records for the long jump by strolling, as it were, a few inches above the ground for a stretch of say thirty or forty feet (too great a length might be suspicious) while the stands went wild, and Zambovsky of Zambia stared, arms akimbo, in consternation and disbelief.

  Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams. One half of the fantastic joy Van was to taste from now on (forever, he hoped) owed its force to the certainty that he could lavish on Ada, openly and at leisure, all the puerile petting that social shame, male selfishness, and moral apprehension had prevented him from envisaging before.

  On weekends, all three meals of the day were heralded by three gongs, small, medium and big. The first now announced breakfast in the dining room. Its vibration suscitated the thought that in twenty-six steps Van would join his young accomplice, whose delicate musk he still preserved in the hollow of his hand—and affected Van with a kind of radiant amazement: Had it really happened? Are we really free? Certain caged birds, say Chinese amateurs shaking with fatman mirth, knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes) every blessed morning, right upon awakening, in an automatic, dream-continuing, dreamlined dash—although they are, those iridescent prisoners, quite perky and docile and talkative the rest of the time.