Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Read on, read, it all becomes clear,” said G.A., riffling through his own copy.

  “Incidentally,” observed Marina, “I hope dear Ida will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can’t be made to recite French poetry.”

  “If she protests,” said Vronsky, “she can go and stick a telegraph pole—where it belongs.”

  The indecent “telegraph” caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis’ so sviehu vrode Adï): “But let’s be serious, I still don’t see how and why his wife—I mean the second guy’s wife—accepts the situation (polozhenie).”

  Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.

  “Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)? She is blissfully ignorant of their affair and besides, she knows she is fubsy and frumpy, and simply cannot compete with dashing Hélène.”

  “I see, but some won’t,” said Marina.

  In the meantime, Herr Rack swam up again and joined Ada on the edge of the pool, almost losing his baggy trunks in the process of an amphibious heave.

  “Permit me, Ivan, to get you also a nice cold Russian kok?” said Pedro—really a very gentle and amiable youth at heart. “Get yourself a cocoanut,” replied nasty Van, testing the poor faun, who did not get it, in any sense, and, giggling pleasantly, went back to his mat. Claudius, at least, did not court Ophelia.

  The melancholy young German was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought “would present him with driplets in dry weeks.” He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of “mutual aberration” stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski’s Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job.

  “When are you leaving?” asked Ada.

  “Forestday—after tomorrow.”

  “Fine. That’s fine. Adieu, Mr. Rack.”

  Poor Philip drooped, fingerpainting sad nothings on wet stone, shaking his heavy head, gulping visibly.

  “One feels … One feels,” he said, “that one is merely playing a role and has forgotten the next speech.”

  “I’m told many feel that,” said Ada; “it must be a furchtbar feeling.”

  “Cannot be helped? No hope any more at all? I am dying, yes?”

  “You are dead, Mr. Rack,” said Ada.

  She had been casting sidelong glances, during that dreadful talk, and now saw pure, fierce Van under the tulip tree, quite a way off, one hand on his hip, head thrown back, drinking beer from a bottle. She left the pool edge, with its corpse, and moved toward the tulip tree making a strategic detour between the authoress, who—still unaware of what they were doing to her novel—was dozing in a deckchair (out of whose wooden arms her chubby fingers grew like pink mushrooms), and the leading lady, now puzzling over a love scene where the young chatelaine’s “radiant beauty” was mentioned.

  “But,” said Marina, “how can one act out ‘radiant,’ what does radiant beauty mean?”

  “Pale beauty,” said Pedro helpfully, glancing up at Ada as she passed by, “the beauty for which many men would cut off their members.”

  “Okay,” said Vronsky. “Let us get on with this damned script. He leaves the pool-side patio, and since we contemplate doing it in color—”

  Van left the pool-side patio and strode away. He turned into a side gallery that led into a grovy part of the garden, grading insensibly into the park proper. Presently, he noticed that Ada had hastened to follow him. Lifting one elbow, revealing the black star of her armpit, she tore off her bathing cap and with a shake of her head liberated a torrent of hair. Lucette, in color, trotted behind her. Out of charity for the sisters’ bare feet, Van changed his course from gravel path to velvet lawn (reversing the action of Dr. Ero, pursued by the Invisible Albino in one of the greatest novels of English literature). They caught up with him in the Second Coppice. Lucette, in passing, stopped to pick up her sister’s cap and sunglasses—the sunglasses of much-sung lasses, a shame to throw them away! My tidy little Lucette (I shall never forget you …) placed both objects on a tree stump near an empty beer bottle, trotted on, then went back to examine a bunch of pink mushrooms that clung to the stump, snoring. Double take, double exposure.

  “Are you furious, because—” began Ada upon overtaking him (she had prepared a sentence about her having to be polite after all to a piano tuner, practically a servant, with an obscure heart ailment and a vulgar pathetic wife—but Van interrupted her).

  “I object,” he said, expelling it like a rocket, “to two things. A brunette, even a sloppy brunette, should shave her groin before exposing it, and a well-bred girl does not allow a beastly lecher to poke her in the ribs even if she must wear a moth-eaten, smelly rag much too short for her charms.” “Ach!” he added, “why the hell did I return to Ardis!”

  “I promise, I promise to be more careful from now on and not let lousy Pedro come near,” she said with happy rigorous nods—and an exhalation of glorious relief, the cause of which was to torture Van only much later.

  “Oh, wait for me!” yelped Lucette.

  (Torture, my poor love! Torture! Yes! But it’s all sunk and dead. Ada’s late note.)

  The three of them formed a pretty Arcadian combination as they dropped on the turf under the great weeping cedar, whose aberrant limbs extended an oriental canopy (propped up here and there by crutches made of its own flesh like this book) above two black and one golden-red head as they had above you and me on dark warm nights when we were reckless, happy children.

  Van, sprawling supine, sick with memories, put his hands behind his nape and slit his eyes at the Lebanese blue of the sky between the fascicles of the foliage. Lucette fondly admired his long lashes while pitying his tender skin for the inflamed blotches and prickles between neck and jaw where shaving caused the most trouble. Ada, her keepsake profile inclined, her mournful magdalene hair hanging down (in sympathy with the weeping shadows) along her pale arm, sat examining abstractly the yellow throat of a waxy-white helleborine she had picked. She hated him, she adored him. He was brutal, she was defenseless.

  Lucette, always playing her part of the clinging, affectionately fussy lassy, placed both palms on Van’s hairy chest and wanted to know why he was cross.

  “I’m not cross with you,” replied Van at last.

  Lucette kissed his hand, then attacked him.

  “Cut it out!” he said, as she wriggled against his bare thorax. “You’re unpleasantly cold, child.”

  “It’s not true, I’m hot,” she retorted.

  “Cold as two halves of a canned peach. Now, roll off, please.”

  “Why two? Why?”

  “Yes, why,” growled Ada with a shiver of pleasure, and, leaning over, kissed him on the mouth. He struggled to rise. The two girls were now kissing him alternatively, then kissing each other, then getting busy upon him again—Ada in perilous silence, Lucette with soft squeals of delight. I do not remember what Les Enfants Maudits did or said in Monparnasse’s novelette—they lived in Bryant’s château, I think, and it began with bats flying one by one out of a turret’s oeil-de-boeuf into the sunset, but these children (whom the novelettist did not really know—a delicious point) might also have been filmed rather entertainingly had snoopy Kim, the kitchen photo-fiend, possessed the necessary apparatus. One hates to write about those matters, it all comes out so improper, esthetically speaking, in written description, but one cannot help recalling in this ultimate twilight (where minor artistic blunders are fainter than very fugitive bats in an insect-poor wilderness of orange air) that Lucette’s dewy little contributions augmented rather than dampened Van’s invariable reaction to the only and main girl’s lightest touch, actual or imagined. Ada, her silky mane sweeping over his nipples and navel, seemed to enjoy doing everything to jolt my present pencil and make, in that ridiculously remote pa
st, her innocent little sister notice and register what Van could not control. The crushed flower was now being merrily crammed under the rubber belt of his black trunks by twenty tickly fingers. As an ornament it had not much value; as a game it was inept and dangerous. He shook off his pretty tormentors, and walked away on his hands, a black mask over his carnival nose. Just then, the governess, panting and shouting, arrived on the scene. “Mais qu’est-ce qu’il t’a fait, ton cousin?” she kept anxiously asking, as Lucette, shedding the same completely unwarranted tears that Ada had once shed, rushed into the mauve-winged arms.

  33

  The following day began with a drizzle; but cleared up after lunch. Lucette had her last piano lesson with gloomy Herr Rack. The repetitive tinkle-thump-tinkle reached Van and Ada during a reconnaissance in a second-floor passage. Mile Larivière was in the garden, Marina had fluttered away to Ladore, and Van suggested they take advantage of Lucette’s being “audibly absent” by taking refuge in an upstairs dressing room.

  Lucette’s first tricycle stood there in a corner; a shelf above a cretonne-covered divan held some of the child’s old “untouchable” treasures among which was the battered anthology he had given her four years ago. The door could not be locked, but Van was impatient, and the music would surely endure, as firm as a wall, for at least another twenty minutes. He had buried his mouth in Ada’s nuque, when she stiffened and raised a warning finger. Heavy slow steps were coming up the grand staircase. “Send him away,” she muttered. “Chort (hell),” swore Van, adjusting his clothes, and went out on the landing. Philip Rack was trudging up, Adam’s apple bobbing, ill-shaven, livid, gums exposed, one hand on his chest, the other clutching a roll of pink paper while the music continued to play on its own as if by some mechanical device.

  “There’s one downstairs in the hall,” said Van, assuming, or feigning to assume, that the unfortunate fellow had stomach cramps or nausea. But Mr. Rack only wanted “to make his farewells”—to Ivan Demonovich (accented miserably on the second “o”), to Fraülein Ada, to Mademoiselle Ida, and of course to Madame. Alas, Van’s cousin and aunt were in town, but Phil might certainly find his friend Ida writing in the rose garden. Was Van sure? Van was damned well sure. Mr. Rack shook Van’s hand with a deep sigh, looked up, looked down, tapped the banisters with his mysterious pink-paper tube, and went back to the music room, where Mozart had begun to falter. Van waited for a moment, listening and grimacing involuntarily, and presently rejoined Ada. She sat with a book in her lap.

  “I must wash my right hand before I touch you or anything,” he said.

  She was not really reading, but nervously, angrily, absently flipping through the pages of what happened to be that old anthology—she who at any time, if she picked up a book, would at once get engrossed in whatever text she happened to slip into “from the book’s brink” with the natural movement of a water creature put back into its brook.

  “I have never clasped a wetter, limper, nastier forelimb in all my life,” said Van, and cursing (the music downstairs had stopped), went to the nursery W.C. where there was a tap. From its window he saw Rack put his lumpy black briefcase into the front basket of his bicycle and weave away, taking his hat off to an unresponsive gardener. The clumsy cyclist’s balance did not survive his futile gesture: he brushed harshly against the hedge on the other side of the path, and crashed. For a moment or two Rack remained in tangled communion with the privet, and Van wondered if he should not go down to his aid. The gardener had turned his back on the sick or drunken musician, who, thank goodness, was now getting out of the bushes and replacing his briefcase in its basket. He rode away slowly, and a surge of obscure disgust made Van spit into the toilet bowl.

  Ada had left the dressing room by the time he returned. He discovered her on a balcony, where she was peeling an apple for Lucette. The kind pianist would always bring her an apple, or sometimes an inedible pear, or two small plums. Anyway, that was his last gift.

  “Mademoiselle is calling you,” said Van to Lucette.

  “Well, she’ll have to wait,” said Ada, leisurely continuing her “ideal peel,” a yellow-red spiral which Lucette watched with ritual fascination.

  “Have some work to do,” Van blurted out. “Bored beyond words. Shall be in the library.”

  “Okay,” limpidly responded Lucette without turning—and emitted a cry of pleasure as she caught the finished festoons.

  He spent half an hour seeking a book he had put back in the wrong place. When he found it at last, he saw he had finished annotating it and so did not need it any more. For a while he lay on the black divan, but that seemed only to increase the pressure of passionate obsession. He decided to return to the upper floor by the cochlea. There he recalled with anguish, as something fantastically ravishing and hopelessly irretrievable, her hurrying up with her candlestick on the night of the Burning Barn, capitalized in his memory forever—he with his dancing light behind her hurdies and calves and mobile shoulders and streaming hair, and the shadows in huge surges of black geometry overtaking them, in their winding upward course, along the yellow wall. He now found the third-floor door latched on the other side, and had to return down to the library (memories now blotted out by trivial exasperation) and take the grand staircase.

  As he advanced toward the bright sun of the balcony door he heard Ada explaining something to Lucette. It was something amusing, it had to do with—I do not remember and cannot invent. Ada had a way of hastening to finish a sentence before mirth overtook her, but sometimes, as now, a brief burst of it would cause her words to explode, and then she would catch up with them and conclude the phrase with still greater haste, keeping her mirth at bay, and the last word would be followed by a triple ripple of sonorous, throaty, erotic and rather cosy laughter.

  “And now, my sweet,” she added, kissing Lucette on her dimpled cheek, “do me a favor: run down and tell bad Belle it’s high time you had your milk and petit-beurre. Zhivo (quick)! Meanwhile, Van and I will retire to the bathroom—or somewhere where there’s a good glass—and I’ll give him a haircut; he needs one badly. Don’t you, Van? Oh, I know where we’ll go … Run along, run along, Lucette.”

  34

  That frolic under the sealyham cedar proved to be a mistake. Whenever not supervised by her schizophrenic governess, whenever not being read to, or walked, or put to bed, Lucette was now a pest. At nightfall—if Marina was not around, drinking, say, with her guests under the golden globes of the new garden lamps that glowed here and there in the sudden greenery, and mingled their kerosene reek with the breath of heliotrope and jasmine—the lovers could steal out into the deeper darkness and stay there until the nocturna—a keen midnight breeze—came tumbling the foliage, “troussant la raimée,” as Sore, the ribald night watchman, expressed it. Once, with his emerald lantern, he had stumbled upon them and several times a phantom Blanche had crept past them, laughing softly, to mate in some humbler nook with the robust and securely bribed old glowworm. But waiting all day for a propitious night was too much for our impatient lovers. More often than not they had worn themselves out well before dinnertime, just as they used to in the past; Lucette, however, seemed to lurk behind every screen, to peep out of every mirror.

  They tried the attic, but noticed, just in time, a rent in its floor through which one glimpsed a corner of the mangle room where French, the second maid, could be seen in her corset and petticoat, passing to and fro. They looked around—and could not understand how they had ever been able to make tender love among splintered boxes and projecting nails, or wriggle through the skylight onto the roof, which any green imp with coppery limbs could easily keep under surveillance from a fork of the giant elm.

  There still was the shooting gallery, with its Orientally draped recess under the sloping roof. But it crawled now with bedbugs, reeked of stale beer, and was so grimy and greasy that one could not dream of undressing or using the little divan. All Van saw there of his new Ada were her ivorine thighs and haunches, and the very first time
he clasped them she bade him, in the midst of his vigorous joy, to glance across her shoulder over the window ledge, which her hands were still clutching in the ebbing throbs of her own response, and note that Lucette was approaching—skipping rope, along a path in the shrubbery.

  Those intrusions were repeated on the next two or three occasions. Lucette would come ever nearer, now picking a chanterelle and feigning to eat it raw, then crouching to capture a grasshopper or at least going through the natural motions of idle play and carefree pursuit. She would advance up to the center of the weedy playground in front of the forbidden pavilion, and there, with an air of dreamy innocence, start to jiggle the board of an old swing that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but still healthy old oak (which appeared—oh, I remember, Van!—in a century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young colossus protecting four cows and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare). When our lovers (you like the authorial possessive, don’t you, Van?) happened to look out again, Lucette was rocking the glum dackel, or looking up at an imaginary woodpecker, or with various pretty contortions unhurriedly mounting the gray looped board and swinging gently and gingerly as if never having done it yet, while idiot Dack barked at the locked pavilion door. She increased her momentum so cannily that Ada and her cavalier, in the pardonable blindness of ascending bliss, never once witnessed the instant when the round rosy face with all its freckles aglow swooped up and two green eyes leveled at the astounding tandem.

  Lucette, the shadow, followed them from lawn to loft, from gatehouse to stable, from a modern shower booth near the pool to the ancient bathroom upstairs. Lucette-in-the-Box came out of a trunk. Lucette desired they take her for walks. Lucette insisted on their playing “leaptoad” with her—and Ada and Van exchanged dark looks.

  Ada thought up a plan that was not simple, was not clever, and moreover worked the wrong way. Perhaps she did it on purpose. (Strike out, strike out, please, Van.) The idea was to have Van fool Lucette by petting her in Ada’s presence, while kissing Ada at the same time, and by caressing and kissing Lucette when Ada was away in the woods (“in the woods,” “botanizing”). This, Ada affirmed, would achieve two ends—assuage the pubescent child’s jealousy and act as an alibi in case she caught them in the middle of a more ambiguous romp.