Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  One common orchid, a Lady’s Slipper, was all that wilted in the satchel which she had left on a garden table and now dragged upstairs. Marina and the mirror had gone. He peeled off his training togs and took one last dip in the pool over which the butler stood, looking meditatively into the false-blue water with his hands behind his back.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if I haven’t just seen a tadpole.”

  The novelistic theme of written communications has now really got into its stride. When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: “One must not berne you.” Only a French-speaking person would use that word for “dupe.” Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction—descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. To interview them all—torture the males, rape the females—would be, of course, absurd and degrading. With a puerile wrench he broke his best black butter fly on the wheel of his exasperation. The pain from the fang bite was now reaching his heart. He found another tie, finished dressing and went to look for Ada.

  He found both girls and their governess in one of the “nursery parlors,” a delightful sitting room with a balcony on which Mlle Larivière was sitting at a charmingly ornamented Pembroke table and reading with mixed feelings and furious annotations the third shooting script of Les Enfants Maudits. At a larger round table in the middle of the inner room, Lucette under Ada’s direction was trying to learn to draw flowers; several botanical atlases, large and small, were lying about. Everything appeared as it always used to be, the little nymphs and goats on the painted ceiling, the mellow light of the day ripening into evening, the remote dreamy rhythm of Blanche’s “linen-folding” voice humming “Malbrough” (… ne sait quand reviendra, ne sait quand reviendra) and the two lovely heads, bronze-black and copper-red, inclined over the table. Van realized that he must simmer down before consulting Ada—or indeed before telling her he wished to consult her. She looked gay and elegant; she was wearing his diamonds for the first time; she had put on a new evening dress with jet gleams, and—also for the first time—transparent silk stockings.

  He sat down on a little sofa, took at random one of the open volumes and stared in disgust at a group of brilliantly pictured gross orchids whose popularity with bees depended, said the text, “on various attractive odors ranging from the smell of dead workers to that of a tomcat.” Dead soldiers might smell even better.

  In the meantime obstinate Lucette kept insisting that the easiest way to draw a flower was to place a sheet of transparent paper over the picture (in the present case a red-bearded pogonia, with indecent details of structure, a plant peculiar to the Ladoga bogs) and trace the outline of the thing in colored inks. Patient Ada wanted her to copy not mechanically but “from eye to hand and from hand to eye,” and to use for model a live specimen of another orchid that had a brown wrinkled pouch and purple sepals; but after a while she gave in cheerfully and set aside the crystal vaselet holding the Lady’s Slipper she had picked. Casually, lightly, she went on to explain how the organs of orchids work—but all Lucette wanted to know, after her whimsical fashion, was: could a boy bee impregnate a girl flower through something, through his gaiters or woolies or whatever he wore?

  “You know,” said Ada in a comic nasal voice, turning to Van, “you know, that child has the dirtiest mind imaginable and now she is going to be mad at me for saying this and sob on the Larivière bosom, and complain she has been pollinated by sitting on your knee.”

  “But I can’t speak to Belle about dirty things,” said Lucette quite gently and reasonably.

  “What’s the matter with you, Van?” inquired sharp-eyed Ada.

  “Why do you ask?” inquired Van in his turn.

  “Your ears wiggle and you clear your throat.”

  “Are you through with those horrible flowers?”

  “Yes. I’m now going to wash my hands. We’ll meet downstairs. Your tie is all crooked.”

  “All right, all right,” said Van.

  “Mon page, won beau page,

  —Mir onton-mironton-mir ont aine—

  Mon page, mon beau page …”

  Downstairs, Jones was already taking down the dinner gong from its hook in the hall.

  “Well, what’s the matter?” she asked when they met a minute later on the drawing-room terrace.

  “I found this in my jacket,” said Van.

  Rubbing her big front teeth with a nervous forefinger, Ada read and reread the note.

  “How do you know it’s meant for you?” she asked, giving him back the bit of copybook paper.

  “Well, I’m telling you,” he yelled.

  “Tishe (quiet!)!” said Ada.

  “I’m telling you I found it here” (pointing at his heart).

  “Destroy and forget,” said Ada.

  “Your obedient servant,” replied Van.

  41

  Pedro had not yet returned from California. Hay fever and dark glasses did not improve G. A. Vronsky’s appearance. Adorno, the star of Hate, brought his new wife, who turned out to have been one of the old (and most beloved) wives of another guest, a considerably more important comedian, who after supper bribed Bouteillan to simulate the arrival of a message necessitating his immediate departure. Grigoriy Akimovich went with him (having come with him in the same rented limousine), leaving Marina, Ada, Adorno and his ironically sniffing Marianne at a card table. They played biryuch, a variety of whist, till a Ladore taxi could be obtained, which was well after 1:00 A.M.

  In the meantime Van changed back to shorts, cloaked himself in the tartan plaid and retired to his bosquet, where the berga-mask lamps had not been lit at all that night which had not proved as festive as Marina had expected. He climbed into his hammock and drowsily started reviewing such French-speaking domestics as could have slipped him that ominous but according to Ada meaningless note. The first, obvious, choice was hysterical and fantastic Blanche—had there not been her timidity, her fear of being “fired” (he recalled a dreadful scene when she groveled, pleading for mercy, at the feet of Larivière, who accused her of “stealing” a bauble that eventually turned up in one of Larivière’s own shoes). The ruddy face of Bouteillan and his son’s grin next appeared in the focus of Van’s fancy; but presently he fell asleep, and saw himself on a mountain smothered in snow, with people, trees, and a cow carried down by an avalanche.

  Something roused him from that state of evil torpor. At first he thought it was the chill of the dying night, then recognized the slight creak (that had been a scream in his confused nightmare), and raising his head saw a dim light in between the shrubs where the door of the toolroom was being pushed ajar from the inside. Ada had never once come there without their prudently planning every step of their infrequent nocturnal trysts. He scrambled out of his hammock and padded toward the lighted doorway. Before him stood the pale wavering figure of Blanche. She presented an odd sight: bare armed, in her petticoat, one stocking gartered, the other down to her ankle; no slippers; armpits glistening with sweat; she was loosening her hair in a wretched simulacrum of seduction.

  “C’est ma dernière nuit au château,” she said softly, and rephrased it in her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in obsolete novels. “ ’Tis my last night with thee.”

  “Your last night? With me? What do you mean?” He considered her with the eerie uneasiness one feels when listening to the utterances of delirium or intoxication.

  But despite her demented look, Blanche was perfectly lucid. She had made up her mind a couple of days ago to leave Ardis Hall. She had just slipped her demission, with a footnote on the young lady’s conduct, under the door of Madame. She would go in a few hours. She loved him, he was her “folly and fever,” she wished to spend a few secret moments with him. />
  He entered the toolroom and slowly closed the door. The slowness had its uncomfortable cause. She had placed her lantern on the rung of a ladder and was already gathering up and lifting her skimpy skirt. Compassion, courtesy and some assistance on her part might have helped him to work up the urge which she took for granted and whose total absence he carefully concealed under his tartan cloak; but quite aside from the fear of infection (Bout had hinted at some of the poor girl’s troubles), a graver matter engrossed him. He diverted her bold hand and sat down on the bench beside her.

  Was it she who had placed that note in his jacket?

  It was. She had been unable to face departure if he was to remain fooled, deceived, betrayed. She added, in naive brackets, that she had been sure he always desired her, they could talk afterwards. Je suis à toi, c’est bientôt l’aube, your dream has come true.

  “Parlez pour vous,” answered Van. “I am in no mood for love-making. And I will strangle you, I assure you, if you do not tell me the whole story in every detail, at once.”

  She nodded, fear and adoration in her veiled eyes. When and how had it started? Last August, she said. Votre demoiselle picking flowers, he squiring her through the tall grass, a flute in his hand. Who he? What flute? Mais le musicien allemand, Monsieur Rack. The eager informer had her own swain lying upon her on the other side of the hedge. How anybody could do it with l’immonde Monsieur Rack, who once forgot his waistcoat in a haystack, was beyond the informer’s comprehension. Perhaps because he made songs for her, a very pretty one was once played at a big public ball at the Ladore Casino, it went … Never mind how it went, go on with the story. Monsieur Rack, one starry night, in a boat on the river, was heard by the informer and two gallants in the willow bushes, recounting the melancholy tale of his childhood, of his years of hunger and music and loneliness, and his sweetheart wept and threw her head back and he fed on her bare throat, il la mangeait de baisers dégoûtants. He must have had her not more than a dozen times, he was not as strong as another gentleman—oh, cut it out, said Van—and in winter the young lady learnt he was married, and hated his cruel wife, and in April when he began to give piano lessons to Lucette the affair was resumed, but then—

  “That will do!” he cried and, beating his brow with his fist, stumbled out into the sunlight.

  It was a quarter to six on the wristwatch hanging from the net of the hammock. His feet were stone cold. He groped for his loafers and walked aimlessly for some time among the trees of the coppice where thrushes were singing so richly, with such sonorous force, such fluty fioriture that one could not endure the agony of consciousness, the filth of life, the loss, the loss, the loss. Gradually, however, he regained a semblance of self-control by the magic method of not allowing the image of Ada to come anywhere near his awareness of himself. This created a vacuum into which rushed a multitude of trivial reflections. A pantomime of rational thought.

  He took a tepid shower in the poolside shed, doing everything with comic deliberation, very slowly and cautiously, lest he break the new, unknown, brittle Van born a moment ago. He watched his thoughts revolve, dance, strut, clown a little. He found it delightful to imagine, for instance, that a cake of soap must be solid ambrosia to the ants swarming over it, and what a shock to be drowned in the midst of that orgy. The code, he reflected, did not allow to challenge a person who was not born a gentleman but exceptions might be made for artists, pianists, flutists, and if a coward refused, you could make his gums bleed with repeated slaps or, still better, thrash him with a strong cane—must not forget to choose one in the vestibule closet before leaving forever, forever. Great fun! He relished as something quite special the kind of one-legged jig a naked fellow performs when focusing on the shorts he tries to get into. He sauntered through a side gallery. He ascended the grand staircase. The house was empty, and cool, and smelled of carnations. Good morning, and good-bye, little bedroom. Van shaved, Van pared his toe-nails, Van dressed with exquisite care: gray socks, silk shirt, gray tie, dark-gray suit newly pressed—shoes, ah yes, shoes, mustn’t forget shoes, and without bothering to sort out the rest of his belongings, crammed a score of twenty-dollar gold coins into a chamois purse, distributed handkerchief, checkbook, passport, what else? nothing else, over his rigid person and pinned a note to the pillow asking to have his things packed and forwarded to his father’s address. Son killed by avalanche, no hat found, contraceptives donated to Old Guides’ Home. After the passage of about eight decades all this sounds very amusing and silly—but at the time he was a dead man going through the motions of an imagined dreamer. He bent down with a grunt, cursing his knee, to fix his skis, in the driving snow, on the brink of the slope, but the skis had vanished, the bindings were shoelaces, and the slope, a staircase.

  He walked down to the mews and told a young groom, who was almost as drowsy as he, that he wished to go to the railway station in a few minutes. The groom looked perplexed, and Van swore at him.

  Wristwatch! He returned to the hammock where it was strapped to the netting. On his way back to the stables, around the house, he happened to look up and saw a black-haired girl of sixteen or so, in yellow slacks and a black bolero, standing on a third-floor balcony and signaling to him. She signaled telegraphically, with expansive linear gestures, indicating the cloudless sky (what a cloudless sky!), the Jacaranda summit in bloom (blue! bloom!) and her own bare foot raised high and placed on the parapet (have only to put on my sandals!). Van, to his horror and shame, saw Van wait for her to come down.

  She walked swiftly toward him across the iridescently glisten ing lawn. “Van,” she said, “I must tell you my dream before I forget. You and I were high up in the Alps—Why on earth are you wearing townclothes?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” drawled dreamy Van. “I’ll tell you why. From a humble but reliable sauce, I mean source, excuse my accent, I have just learned qu’on vous culbute behind every hedge. Where can I find your tumbler?”

  “Nowhere,” she answered quite calmly, ignoring or not even perceiving his rudeness, for she had always known that disaster would come today or tomorrow, a question of time or rather timing on the part of fate.

  “But he exists, he exists,” muttered Van, looking down at a rainbow web on the turf.

  “I suppose so,” said the haughty child, “however, he left yesterday for some Greek or Turkish port. Moreover, he was going to do everything to get killed, if that information helps. Now listen, listen! Those walks in the woods meant nothing. Wait, Van! I was weak only twice when you had hurt him so hideously, or perhaps three times in all. Please! I can’t explain in one gush, but eventually you will understand. Not everybody is as happy as we are. He’s a poor, lost, clumsy boy. We are all doomed, but some are more doomed than others. He is nothing to me. I shall never see him again. He is nothing, I swear. He adores me to the point of insanity.”

  “I think,” said Van, “we’ve got hold of the wrong lover. I was asking about Herr Rack, who has such delectable gums and also adores you to the point of insanity.”

  He turned, as they say, on his heel, and walked toward the house.

  He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture—which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. Tiffs between them had been very rare, very brief, but there had been enough of them to make up the enduring mosaic. There was the time she stood with her back against a tree trunk, facing a traitor’s doom; the time he had refused to show her some silly Chose snapshots of punt girls and had torn them up in fury and she had looked away knitting her brows and slitting her eyes at an invisible view in the window. Or that ti
me she had hesitated, blinking, shaping a soundless word, suspecting him of a sudden revolt against her odd prudishness of speech, when he challenged her brusquely to find a rhyme to “patio” and she was not quite sure if he had in mind a certain foul word and if so what was its correct pronunciation. And perhaps, worst of all, that time when she stood fiddling with a bunch of wild flowers, a gentle half-smile hanging back quite neutrally in her eyes, her lips pursed, her head making imprecise little movements as if punctuating with self-directed nods secret decisions and silent clauses in some sort of contract with herself, with him, with unknown parties hereinafter called Comfortless, Inutile, Unjust—while he indulged in a brutal outburst triggered by her suggesting—quite sweetly and casually (as she might suggest walking a little way on the edge of a bog to see if a certain orchid was out)—that they visit the late Krolik’s grave in a churchyard by which they were passing—and he had suddenly started to shout (“You know I abhor churchyards, I despise, I denounce death, dead bodies are burlesque, I refuse to stare at a stone under which a roly-poly old Pole is rotting, let him feed his maggots in peace, the entomologies of death leave me cold, I detest, I despise—”); he went on ranting that way for a couple of minutes and then literally fell at her feet, kissing her feet, imploring her pardon, and for a little while longer she kept gazing at him pensively.

  Those were the fragments of the tesselation, and there were others, even more trivial; but in coming together the harmless parts made a lethal entity, and the girl in yellow slacks and black jacket, standing with her hands behind her back, slightly rocking her shoulders, leaning her back now closer now less closely against the tree trunk, and tossing her hair—a definite picture that he knew he had never seen in reality—remained within him more real than any actual memory.

  Marina, in kimono and curlers, stood surrounded by servants before the porch and was asking questions that nobody seemed to answer.