Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Dammit, Pa,” he said into his bedside dorophone, “I’m busy!”

  “I want Blanche, you idiot,” growled Van.

  “Oh, pardon” cried Bout, “un moment, Monsieur.”

  A bottle was audibly uncorked (drinking hock at seven in the morning!) and Blanche took over, but scarcely had Van begun to deliver a carefully worded message to be transmitted to Ada, when Ada herself who had been on the qui vive all night answered from the nursery, where the clearest instrument in the house quivered and bubbled under a dead barometer.

  “Forest Fork in Forty-Five minutes. Sorry to spit.”

  “Tower!” replied her sweet ringing voice, as an airman in heaven blue might say “Roger.”

  He rented a motorcycle, a venerable machine, with a saddle upholstered in billiard cloth and pretentious false mother-of-pearl handlebars, and drove, bouncing on tree roots along a narrow “forest ride.” The first thing he saw was the star gleam of her dismissed bike: she stood by it, arms akimbo, the black-haired white angel, looking away in a daze of shyness, wearing a terrycloth robe and bedroom slippers. As he carried her into the nearest thicket he felt the fever of her body, but only realized how ill she was when after two passionate spasms she got up full of tiny brown ants and tottered, and almost collapsed, muttering about gipsies stealing their jeeps.

  It was a beastly, but beautiful, tryst. He could not remember—

  (That’s right, I can’t either. Ada.)

  —one word they said, one question, one answer; he rushed her back as close to the house as he dared (having kicked her bike into the bracken)—and that evening when he rang up Blanche, she dramatically whispered that Mademoiselle had une belle pneumonie, mon pauvre Monsieur.

  Ada was much better three days later, but he had to return to Man to catch the same boat back to England—and join a circus tour which involved people he could not let down.

  His father saw him off. Demon had dyed his hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze. Lyudi oglyadïvalis’ (people turned to look). A temporary Tamara, all kohl, kasbek rouge, and flamingo-boa, could not decide what would please her daemon lover more—just moaning and ignoring his handsome son or acknowledging bluebeard’s virility as reflected in morose Van, who could not stand her Caucasian perfume, Granial Maza, seven dollars a bottle.

  (You know, that’s my favorite chapter up to now, Van, I don’t know why, but I love it. And you can keep your Blanche in her young man’s embrace, even that does not matter. In Ada’s fondest hand.)

  30

  On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as “the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.” It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition “Foreign eccentric” gave any indication either of the exact nature of the “stunt” or of the performer’s identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War)—three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent)—had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed “Chunnel.” Mascodagama’s spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays, with queens and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen, and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at Oxford (a womens’ college nearby) by local rowdies. A shrewd reporter, who had heard him curse a crease in the stage carpet, commented in print on his “Yankee twang.” Dear Mr. “Vascodagama” received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose—the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P. O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id.

  During his first summer vacation, Van worked under Tyomkin, at the Chose famous clinic, on an ambitious dissertation he never completed, “Terra: Eremitic Reality or Collective Dream?” He interviewed numerous neurotics, among whom there were variety artists, and literary men, and at least three intellectually lucid, but spiritually “lost,” cosmologists who either were in telepathic collusion (they had never met and did not even know of one another’s existence) or had discovered, none knew how or where, by means, maybe, of forbidden “ondulas” of some kind, a green world rotating in space and spiraling in time, which in terms of matter-and-mind was like ours and which they described in the same specific details as three people watching from three separate windows would a carnival show in the same street.

  He spent his free time in gross dissipation.

  Sometime in August he was offered a contract for a series of matinées and nights in a famous London theater during the Christmas vacation and on weekends throughout the winter season. He accepted gladly, being badly in need of a strict distraction from his perilous studies: the special sort of obsession under which Tyomkin’s patients labored had something about it that made it liable to infect its younger investigators.

  Mascodagama’s fame reached inevitably the backwoods of America: a photograph of him, masked, it is true, but unable to mislead a fond relative or faithful retainer, was reproduced by the Ladore, Ladoga, Laguna, Lugano and Luga papers in the first week of 1888; but the accompanying reportage was not. The work of a poet, and only a poet (“especially of the Black Belfry group,” as some wit said), could have adequately described a certain macabre quiver that marked Van’s extraordinary act.

  The stage would be empty when the curtain went up; then, after five heartbeats of theatrical suspense, something swept out of the wings, enormous and black, to the accompaniment of dervish drums. The shock of his powerful and precipitous entry affected so deeply the children in the audience that for a long time later, in the dark of sobbing insomnias, in the glare of violent nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private accretions, something similar to the “primordial qualm,” a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of fever which came in a cavern draft from the uncanny stage. Into the harsh light of its gaudily carpeted space a masked giant, fully eight feet tall, erupted, running strongly in the kind of soft boots worn by Cossack dancers. A voluminous, black shaggy cloak of the burka type enveloped his silhouette inquiétante (according to a female Sorbonne correspondent—we’ve kept all those cuttings) from neck to knee or what appeared to be those sections of his body. A Karakul cap surmounted his top. A black mask covered the upper part of his heavily bearded face. The unpleasant colossus kept strutting up and down the stage for a while, then the strut changed to the restless walk of a caged madman, then he whirled, and to a clash of cymbals in the orchestra and a cry of terror (per haps faked) in the gallery, Mascodagama turned over in the air and stood on his head.

  In this weird position, with his cap acting as a pseudopodal pad, he jumped up and down, pogo-stick fashion—and suddenly came apart. Van’s face, shining with sweat, grinned between the legs of the boots that still shod his rigidly raised arms. Simultaneously his real feet kicked off and away the false head with its crumpled cap and bearded mask. The magical reversal “made the house gasp.” Frantic (“deafening,” “delirious,” “a veritable tempest of”) applause followed the gasp
. He bounded offstage—and next moment was back, now sheathed in black tights, dancing a jig on his hands.

  We devote so much space to the description of his act not only because variety artists of the “eccentric” race are apt to be forgotten especially soon, but also because one wishes to analyze its thrill. Neither a miraculous catch on the cricket field, nor a glorious goal slammed in at soccer (he was a College Blue in both those splendid games), nor earlier physical successes, such as his knocking out the biggest bully on his first day at Riverlane School, had ever given Van the satisfaction Mascodagama experienced. It was not directly related to the warm breath of fulfilled ambition, although as a very old man, looking back at a life of unrecognized endeavor, Van did welcome with amused delight—more delight than he had actually felt at the time—the banal acclaim and the vulgar envy that swirled around him for a short while in his youth. The essence of the satisfaction belonged rather to the same order as the one he later derived from self-imposed, extravagantly difficult, seemingly absurd tasks when V.V. sought to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all—nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression). It was Ada’s castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the idea-mongers and so forth. Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life—acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children.

  Neither was the sheer physical pleasure of maniambulation a negligible factor, and the peacock blotches with which the carpet stained the palms of his hands during his gloveless dance routine seemed to be the reflections of a richly colored nether world that he had been the first to discover. For the tango, which completed his number on his last tour, he was given a partner, a Crimean cabaret dancer in a very short scintillating frock cut very low on the back. She sang the tango tune in Russian:

  Pod znóynim nébom Argentinï,

  Pod strástniy góvor mandolínï

  ’Neath sultry sky of Argentina,

  To the hot hum of mandolina

  Fragile, red-haired “Rita” (he never learned her real name), a pretty Karaite from Chufut Kale, where, she nostalgically said, the Crimean cornel, kizil’, bloomed yellow among the arid rocks, bore an odd resemblance to Lucette as she was to look ten years later. During their dance, all Van saw of her were her silver slippers turning and marching nimbly in rhythm with the soles of his hands. He recouped himself at rehearsals, and one night asked her for an assignation. She indignantly refused, saying she adored her husband (the make-up fellow) and loathed England.

  Chose had long been as famous for the dignity of its regulations, as for the brilliancy of its pranksters. Mascodagama’s identity could not escape the interest and then the knowledge of the authorities. His college tutor, a decrepit and dour homosexual, with no sense of humor whatever and an innate respect for all the conventions of academic life, pointed out to a highly irritated and barely polite Van that in his second year at Chose he was not supposed to combine his university studies with the circus, and that if he insisted on becoming a variety artist he would be sent down. The old gentleman also wrote a letter to Demon asking him to make his son forget Physical Stunts for the sake of Philosophy and Psychiatry, especially since Van was the first American to have won (at seventeen!) the Dudley Prize (for an essay on Insanity and Eternal Life). Van was not quite sure yet what compromise pride and prudence might arrive at, when he left for America early in June, 1888.

  31

  Van revisited Ardis Hall in 1888. He arrived on a cloudy June afternoon, unexpected, unbidden, unneeded; with a diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket. As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him. A big party seemed to be breaking up. Three young ladies in yellow-blue Vass frocks with fashionable rainbow sashes surrounded a stoutish, foppish, baldish young man who stood, a flute of champagne in his hand, glancing down from the drawing-room terrace at a girl in black with bare arms: an old runabout, shivering at every jerk, was being cranked up by a hoary chauffeur in front of the porch, and those bare arms, stretched wide, were holding outspread the white cape of Baroness von Skull, a grand-aunt of hers. Against the white cape Ada’s new long figure was profiled in black—the black of her smart silk dress with no sleeves, no ornaments, no memories. The slow old Baroness stood groping for something under one armpit, under the other—for what? a crutch? the dangling end of tangled bangles?—and as she half-turned to accept the cloak (now taken from her grandniece by a belated new footman) Ada also half-turned, and her yet ungemmed neck showed white as she ran up the porch steps.

  Van followed her inside, in between the hall columns, and through a group of guests, toward a distant table with crystal jugs of cherry ambrozia. She wore, unmodishly, no stockings; her calves were strong and pale, and (I have a note here, for the ghost of a novel) “the low cut of her black dress allowed the establishment of a sharp contrast between the familiar mat whiteness of her skin and the brutal black horsetail of her new hair-do.”

  Excluding each other, private swoons split him in two: the devastating certainty that as soon as he reached, in the labyrinth of a nightmare, a brightly remembered small room with a bed and a child’s washstand, she would join him there in her new smooth long beauty; and, on the shade side, the pang and panic of finding her changed, hating what he wanted, condemning it as wrong, explaining to him dreadful new circumstances—that they both were dead or existed only as extras in a house rented for a motion picture.

  But hands offering him wine or almonds or their open selves, impeded his dream quest. He pressed on, notwithstanding the swoops of recognition: Uncle Dan pointed him out with a cry to a stranger who feigned amazement at the singularity of the optical trick—and, next moment, a repainted, red-wigged, very drunk and tearful Marina was gluing cherry-vodka lips to his jaw and unprotected parts, with smothered mother-sounds, half-moo, half-moan, of Russian affection.

  He disentangled himself and pursued his quest. She had now moved to the drawing room, but by the expression of her back, by the tensed scapulae, Van knew she was aware of him. He wiped his wet buzzing ear and acknowledged with a nod the raised glass of the stout blond fellow (Percy de Prey? Or did Percy have an older brother?). A fourth maiden in the Canadian couturier’s corn-and-bluet summer “creation” stopped Van to inform him with a pretty pout that he did not remember her, which was true. “I am exhausted,” he said. “My horse caught a hoof in a hole in the rotting planks of Ladore Bridge and had to be shot. I have walked eight miles. I think I am dreaming. I think you are Dreaming Too.” “No, I’m Cordula!” she cried, but he was off again.

  Ada had vanished. He discarded the caviar sandwich that he found himself carrying like a ticket and, turning into the pantry, told Bout’s brother, a new valet, to take him to his old room and get him one of those rubber tubs he had used as a child four years ago. Plus somebody’s spare pajamas. His train had broken down in the fields between Ladoga and Ladore, he had walked twenty miles, God knows when they’d send up his bags.

  “They have just come,” said the real Bout with a smile both confidential and mournful (Blanche had jilted him).

  Before tubbing, Van craned out of his narrow casement to catch sight of the laurels and lilacs flanking the front porch whence came the hubbub of gay departures. He made out Ada. He noticed her running after Percy who had put on his gray topper and was walking away across a lawn which his transit at once caused to overlap in Van’s mind with the fleeting memory of the paddock where he and Van had once happe
ned to discuss a lame horse and Riverlane. Ada overtook the young man in a patch of sudden sunlight; he stopped, and she stood speaking to him and tossing her head in a way she had when nervous or displeased. De Prey kissed her hand. That was French, but all right. He held the hand he had kissed while she spoke and then kissed it again, and that was not done, that was dreadful, that could not be endured.

  Leaving his post, naked Van went through the clothes he had shed. He found the necklace. In icy fury, he tore it into thirty, forty glittering hailstones, some of which fell at her feet as she burst into the room.

  Her glance swept the floor.

  “What a shame—” she began.

  Van calmly quoted the punchline from Mlle Larivière’s famous story: “Mais, ma pauvre amie, elle était fausse”—which was a bitter lie; but before picking up the spilled diamonds, she locked the door and embraced him, weeping—the touch of her skin and silk was all the magic of life, but why does everybody greet me with tears? He also wanted to know was that Percy de Prey? It was. Who had been kicked out of Riverlane? She guessed he had. He had changed, he had grown swine-stout. He had, hadn’t he just? Was he her new beau?

  “And now,” said Ada, “Van is going to stop being vulgar—I mean, stop forever! Because I had and have and shall always have only one beau, only one beast, only one sorrow, only one joy.”

  “We can collect your tears later,” he said, “I can’t wait.”

  Her open kiss was hot and tremulous, but when he tried to draw up her dress she flinched with a murmur of reluctant denial, because the door had come alive: two small fists could be heard drumming upon it from the outside, in a rhythm both knew well.

  “Hi, Lucette!” cried Van: “I’m changing, go away.”

  “Hi, Van! They want Ada, not you. They want you downstairs, Ada!”

  One of Ada’s gestures—used when she had to express in a muted flash all the facets of her predicament (“See, I was right, that’s how it is, nichego ne podelaesh’ ”)—consisted of rounding by means of both hands an invisible bowl from rim to base, accompanied by a sad bow. This is what she did now before leaving the room.