Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “She was never a baby,” said Belle emphatically. “She could break the back of her pony before she could walk.”

  “I wonder,” asked Marina, “how many miles you rode to have our athlete drained so thoroughly.”

  “Only seven,” replied Ada with a munch smile.

  25

  On a sunny September morning, with the trees still green, but the asters and fleabanes already taking over in ditch and dalk, Van set out for Ladoga, N.A., to spend a fortnight there with his father and three tutors before returning to school in cold Luga, Mayne.

  Van kissed Lucette on each dimple and then on the neck—and winked to prim Larivière who looked at Marina.

  It was time to go. They saw him off: Marina in her shlafrok, Lucette petting (substitutionally) Dack, Mlle Larivière who did not know yet that Van had left behind an inscribed book she had given him on the eve, and a score of copiously tipped servants (among whom we noticed kitchen Kim with his camera)—practically the entire household, except Blanche who had the headache, and dutiful Ada who had asked to be excused, having promised to visit an infirm villager (she had a heart of gold, that child, really—as Marina so willingly, so wisely used to observe).

  Van’s black trunk and black suitcase, and black king-size dumbbells, were heaved into the back of the family motorcar; Bouteillan put on a captain’s cap, too big for him, and grape blue goggles; “remouvez votre bottom, I will drive,” said Van—and the summer of 1884 was over.

  “She rolls sweetly, sir,” remarked Bouteillan in his quaint old-fashioned English. “Tous les pneus sont neufs, but, alas, there are many stones on the way, and youth drives fast. Monsieur should be prudent. The winds of the wilderness are indiscreet. Tel un lis sauvage confiant au désert—”

  “Quite the old comedy retainer, aren’t you?” remarked Van drily.

  “Non, Monsieur,” answered Bouteillan, holding on to his cap. “Non. Tout simplement j’aime bien Monsieur et sa demoiselle.”

  “If,” said Van, “you’re thinking of little Blanche, then you’d better quote Delille not to me, but to your son, who’ll knock her up any day now.”

  The old Frenchman glanced at Van askance, pozheval gubami (chewed his lips), but said nothing.

  “One will stop here for a few minutes,” said Van, as they reached Forest Fork, just beyond Ardis. “I intend to pick some boletes for Father to whom I shall certainly (Bouteillan having sketched a courteous gesture) transmit your salute. This handbrake must have been—damn it—in use before Louis the Sixteenth migrated to England.”

  “It needs to be greased,” said Bouteillan and consulted his watch; “yes, we have ample time to catch the 9:04.”

  Van plunged into the dense undergrowth. He wore a silk shirt, a velvet jacket, black breeches, riding boots with star spurs—and this attire was hardly convenient for making klv zdB AoyvBno vokh gvozxm dqg kzvoAAqvo z gwttp vq wifhm Ada in a natural bower of aspens; xliC mujzikml, after which she said:

  “Yes—so as not to forget. Here’s the formula for our correspondence. Learn this by heart and then eat it up like a good little spy.”

  “Poste restante both ways; and I want at least three letters a week, my white love.”

  It was the first time he had seen her in that luminous frock nearly as flimsy as a nightgown. She had braided her hair, and he said she resembled the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova in the letter scene in Tschchaikow’s opera Onegin and Olga.

  Ada, doing her feminine best to restrain and divert her sobs by transforming them into emotional exclamations, pointed out some accursed insect that had settled on an aspen trunk.

  (Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best known imitators. In Ada’s angry hand.)

  “Tomorrow you’ll come here with your green net,” said Van bitterly, “my butterfly.”

  She kissed him all over the face, she kissed his hands, then again his lips, his eyelids, his soft black hair. He kissed her ankles, her knees, her soft black hair.

  “When, my love, when again? In Luga? Kaluga? Ladoga? Where, when?”

  “That’s not the point,” cried Van, “the point, the point, the point is—will you be faithful, will you be faithful to me?”

  “You spit, love,” said wan-smiling Ada, wiping off the P’s and the F’s. “I don’t know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go. But! But, my love, my Van, I’m physical, horribly physical, I don’t know, I’m frank, qu’y puis-je? Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying—”

  “The girls don’t matter,” said Van, “it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you. Last night I tried to make a poem about it for you, but I can’t write verse; it begins, it only begins: Ada, our ardors and arbors—but the rest is all fog, try to fancy the rest.”

  They embraced one last time, and without looking back he fled.

  Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop, Van returned to the Forest Fork. Morio, his favorite black horse, stood waiting for him, held by young Moore. He thanked the groom with a handful of Stellas and galloped off, his gloves wet with tears.

  26

  For their correspondence in the first period of separation, Van and Ada had invented a code which they kept perfecting during the next fifteen months after Van left Ardis. The entire period of that separation was to span almost four years (“our black rainbow,” Ada termed it), from September, 1884 to June, 1888, with two brief interludes of intolerable bliss (in August, 1885 and June, 1886) and a couple of chance meetings (“through a grille of rain”). Codes are a bore to describe; yet a few basic details must be, reluctantly, given.

  One-letter words remained undisguised. In any longer word each letter was replaced by the one succeeding it in the alphabet at such an ordinal point—second, third, fourth, and so forth—which corresponded to the number of letters in that word. Thus “love,” a four-letter word, became “pszi” (“p” being the fourth letter after “l” in the alphabetic series, “s” the fourth after “o,” et cetera), whilst, say, “lovely” (in which the longer stretch made it necessary, in two instances, to resume the alphabet after exhausting it) became “ruBkrE,” where the letters overflowing into the new alphabetic series were capitalized: B, for instance, standing for “v” whose substitute had to be the sixth letter (“lovely” consists of six letters) coming after it: wxyzAB, and “y” going still deeper into that next series: zABCDE. There is an awful moment in popular books on cosmic theories (that breezily begin with plain straightforward chatty paragraphs) when there suddenly start to sprout mathematical formulas, which immediately blind one’s brain. We do not go as far as that here. If he approaches the description of our lovers’ code (the “our” may constitute a source of irritation in its own right, but never mind) with a little more attention and a little less antipathy, the simplest-minded reader will, one trusts, understand that “overflowing” into the next ABC business.

  Unfortunately, complications arose. Ada suggested certain improvements, such as beginning every message in ciphered French, then, switching to ciphered English after the first two-letter word, switching back to French after the first three-letter word, and reshuffling the shuttle with additional variations. Owing to these improvements the messages became even harder to read than to write, especially as both correspondents, in the exasperation of tender passion, inserted afterthoughts, deleted phrases, rephrased insertions and reinstated deletions with misspellings and miscodings, owing as much to their struggle with inexpressible distress as to their overcomplicating its cryptogram.

  In the
second period of separation, beginning in 1886, the code was radically altered. Both Van and Ada still knew by heart the seventy-two lines of Marvell’s “The Garden” and the forty lines of Rimbaud’s “Mémoire.” It was from those two texts that they chose the letters of the words they needed. For example, 12.11. 11.2.20. 12.8 meant “love,” with “l” and the number following it denoting the line in the Marvell poem, and the next number giving the position of the letter in that line, 12.11, meaning “eleventh letter in second line.” I hold this to be pretty clear; and when, for the sake of misleading variety, the Rimbaud poem was used, the letter denoting the line would simply be capitalized. Again, this is a nuisance to explain, and the explanation is fun to read only for the purpose (thwarted, I am afraid) of looking for errors in the examples. Anyway, it soon proved to have defects even more serious than those of the first code. Security demanded they should not possess the poems in print or script for consultation and however marvelous their power of retention was, errors were bound to increase.

  They wrote to each other in the course of 1886 as often as before, never less than a letter per week; but, curiously enough, in their third period of separation, from January, 1887, to June, 1888 (after a very long long-distance call and a very brief meeting), their letters grew scarcer, dwindling to a mere twenty in Ada’s case (with only two or three in the spring of 1888) and about twice as many coming from Van. No passages from the correspondence can be given here, since all the letters were destroyed in 1889.

  (I suggest omitting this little chapter altogether. Ada’s note.)

  27

  “Marina gives me a glowing account of you and says uzhe chuvstvuetsya osen’. Which is very Russian. Your grandmother would repeat regularly that ‘already-is-to-be-felt-autumn’ remark every year, at the same time, even on the hottest day of the season at Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her. You look splendid, sïnok moy, but I can well imagine how fed up you must be with her two little girls. Therefore, I have a suggestion—”

  “Oh, I liked them enormously,” purred Van. “Especially dear little Lucette.”

  “My suggestion is, come with me to a cocktail party today. It is given by the excellent widow of an obscure Major de Prey—obscurely related to our late neighbor, a fine shot but the light was bad on the Common, and a meddlesome garbage collector hollered at the wrong moment. Well, that excellent and influential lady who wishes to help a friend of mine” (clearing his throat) “has, I’m told, a daughter of fifteen summers, called Cordula, who is sure to recompense you for playing Blindman’s Buff all summer with the babes of Ardis Wood.”

  “We played mostly Scrabble and Snap,” said Van. “Is the needy friend also in my age group?”

  “She’s a budding Duse,” replied Demon austerely, “and the party is strictly a ‘prof push.’ You’ll stick to Cordula de Prey, I, to Cordelia O’Leary.”

  “D’accord,” said Van.

  Cordula’s mother, an overripe, overdressed, overpraised comedy actress, introduced Van to a Turkish acrobat with tawny hairs on his beautiful orangutan hands and the fiery eyes of a charlatan—which he was not, being a great artist in his circular field. Van was so taken up by his talk, by the training tips he lavished on the eager boy, and by envy, ambition, respect and other youthful emotions, that he had little time for Cordula, round-faced, small, dumpy, in a turtle-neck sweater of dark-red wool, or even for the stunning young lady on whose bare back the paternal hand kept resting lightly as Demon steered her toward this or that useful guest. But that very same evening Van ran into Cordula in a bookshop and she said, “By the way, Van—I can call you that, can’t I? Your cousin Ada is my schoolmate. Oh, yes. Now, explain, please, what did you do to our difficult Ada? In her very first letter from Ardis, she positively gushed—our Ada gushed!—about how sweet, clever, unusual, irresistible—”

  “Silly girl. When was that?”

  “In June, I imagine. She wrote again later, but her reply—because I was quite jealous of you—really I was!—and had fired back lots of questions—well, her reply was evasive, and practically void of Van.”

  He looked her over more closely than he had done before. He had read somewhere (we might recall the precise title if we tried, not Tiltil, that’s in Blue Beard …) that a man can recognize a Lesbian, young and alone (because a tailored old pair can fool no one), by a combination of three characteristics: slightly trembling hands, a cold-in-the-head voice, and that skidding-in-panic of the eyes if you happen to scan with obvious appraisal such charms as the occasion might force her to show (lovely shoulders, for instance). Nothing whatever of all that (yes—Mytilène, petite isle, by Louis Pierre) seemed to apply to Cordula, who wore a “garbotosh” (belted mackintosh) over her terribly unsmart turtle and held both hands deep in her pockets as she challenged his stare. Her bobbed hair was of a neutral shade between dry straw and damp. Her light blue iris could be matched by millions of similar eyes in pigment-poor families of French Estoty. Her mouth was doll-pretty when consciously closed in a mannered pout so as to bring out what portraitists call the two “sickle folds” which, at their best, are oblong dimples and, at their worst, the creases down the well-chilled cheeks of felt-booted apple-cart girls. When her lips parted, as they did now, they revealed braced teeth, which, however, she quickly remembered to shutter.

  “My cousin Ada,” said Van, “is a little girl of eleven or twelve, and much too young to fall in love with anybody, except people in books. Yes, I too found her sweet. A trifle on the blue-stocking side, perhaps, and, at the same time, impudent and capricious—but, yes, sweet.”

  “I wonder,” murmured Cordula, with such a nice nuance of pensive tone that Van could not tell whether she meant to close the subject, or leave it ajar, or open a new one.

  “How could I get in touch with you?” he asked. “Would you come to Riverlane? Are you a virgin?”

  “I don’t date hoodlums,” she replied calmly, “but you can always ‘contact’ me through Ada. We are not in the same class, in more ways than one” (laughing); “she’s a little genius, I’m a plain American ambivert, but we are enrolled in the same Advanced French group, and the Advanced French group is assigned the same dormitory so that a dozen blondes, three brunettes and one redhead, la Rousse, can whisper French in their sleep” (laughing alone).

  “What fun. Okay, thanks. The even number means bunks, I guess. Well, I’ll be seeing you, as the hoods say.”

  In his next coded letter to Ada Van inquired if Cordula might not be the lezbianochka mentioned by Ada with such unnecessary guilt. I would as soon be jealous of your own little hand. Ada replied, “What rot, leave what’s-her-name out of it”; but even though Van did not know yet how fiercely untruthful Ada could be when shielding an accomplice, Van remained unconvinced.

  The rules of her school were old-fashioned and strict to the point of lunacy, but they reminded Marina nostalgically of the Russian Institute for Noble Maidens in Yukonsk (where she had kept breaking them with much more ease and success than Ada or Cordula or Grace could at Brownhill). Girls were allowed to see boys at hideous teas with pink cakes in the headmistress’s Reception Room three or four times per term, and any girl of twelve or thirteen could meet a gentleman’s son in a certified milk-bar, just a few blocks away, every third Sunday, in the company of an older girl of irreproachable morals.

  Van braced himself to see Ada thus, hoping to use his magic wand for transforming whatever young spinster came along into a spoon or a turnip. Those “dates” had to be approved by the victim’s mother at least a fortnight in advance. Soft-toned Miss Cleft, the headmistress, rang up Marina who told her that Ada could not possibly need a chaperone to go out with a cousin who had been her sole companion on day-long rambles throughout the summer. “That’s exactly it,” Cleft rejoined, “two young ramblers are exceptionally prone to intertwine, and a thorn is always close to a bud.”

  “But they are practically brother and sister,” ejaculated Marina, thinking as
many stupid people do that “practically” works both ways—reducing the truth of a statement and making a truism sound like the truth. “Which only increases the peril,” said soft Cleft. “Anyway, I’ll compromise, and tell dear Cordula de Prey to make a third: she admires Ivan and adores Ada—consequently can only add zest to the zipper” (stale slang—stale even then).

  “Gracious, what figli-migli” (mimsey-fimsey), said Marina, after having hung up.

  In a dark mood, unwarned of what to expect (strategic foreknowledge might have helped to face the ordeal), Van waited for Ada in the school lane, a dismal back alley with puddles reflecting a sullen sky and the fence of the hockey ground. A local high-school boy, “dressed to kill,” stood near the gate, a little way off, a fellow waiter.

  Van was about to march back to the station when Ada appeared—with Cordula. La bonne surprise! Van greeted them with a show of horrible heartiness (“And how goes it with you, sweet cousin? Ah, Cordula! Who’s the chaperone, you, or Miss Veen?”). The sweet cousin sported a shiny black raincoat and a down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if somebody was to be salvaged from the perils of life or sea. A tiny round patch did not quite hide a pimple on one side of her chin. Her breath smelled of ether. Her mood was even blacker than his. He cheerily guessed it would rain. It did—hard. Cordula remarked that his trench coat was chic. She did not think it worth while to go back for umbrellas—their delicious goal was just round the corner. Van said corners were never round, a tolerable quip. Cordula laughed. Ada did not: there were no survivors, apparently.

  The milk-bar proved to be so crowded that they decided to walk under The Arcades toward the railway station café. He knew (but could do nothing about it) that all night he would regret having deliberately overlooked the fact—the main, agonizing fact—that he had not seen his Ada for close to three months and that in her last note such passion had burned that the cryptogram’s bubble had burst in her poor little message of promise and hope, baring a defiant, divine line of uncoded love. They were behaving now as if they had never met before, as if this was but a blind date arranged by their chaperone. Strange, malevolent thoughts revolved in his mind. What exactly—not that it mattered but one’s pride and curiosity were at stake—what exactly had they been up to, those two ill-groomed girls, last term, this term, last night, every night, in their pajama-tops, amid the murmurs and moans of their abnormal dormitory? Should he ask? Could he find the right words: not to hurt Ada, while making her bed-filly know he despised her for kindling a child, so dark-haired and pale, coal and coral, leggy and limp, whimpering at the melting peak? A moment ago when he had seen them advancing together, plain Ada, seasick but doing her duty, and Cordula, apple-cankered but brave, like two shackled prisoners being led into the conqueror’s presence, Van had promised himself to revenge deceit by relating in polite but minute detail the latest homosexual or rather pseudo-homosexual row at his school (an upper-form boy, Cordula’s cousin, had been caught with a lass disguised as a lad in the rooms of an eclectic prefect). He would watch the girls flinch, he would demand some story from them to match his. That urge had waned. He still hoped to get rid for a moment of dull Cordula and find something cruel to make dull Ada dissolve in bright tears. But that was prompted by his amour-propre, not by their sale amour. He would die with an old pun on his lips. And why “dirty”? Did he feel any Proustian pangs? None. On the contrary: a private picture of their fondling each other kept pricking him with perverse gratification. Before his inner bloodshot eye Ada was duplicated and enriched, twinned by entwinement, giving what he gave, taking what he took: Corada, Adula. It struck him that the dumpy little Countess resembled his first whorelet, and that sharpened the itch.