Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  At this point, as in a well-constructed play larded with comic relief, the brass campophone buzzed and not only did the radiators start to cluck but the uncapped soda water fizzed in sympathy.

  Van (crossly): “I don’t understand the first word … What’s that? L’adorée? Wait a second” (to Lucette). “Please, stay where you are.” (Lucette whispers a French child-word with two “p”s.). “Okay” (pointing toward the corridor). “Sorry, Polly. Well, is it l’adorée? No? Give me the context. Ah—la durée. La durée is not … sin on what? Synonymous with duration. Aha. Sorry again, I must stopper that orgiastic soda. Hold the line.” (Yells down the ‘cory door,’ as they called the long second-floor passage at Ardis.) “Lucette, let it run over, who cares!”

  He poured himself another glass of brandy and for a ridiculous moment could not remember what the hell he had been—yes, the polliphone.

  It had died, but buzzed as soon as he recradled the receiver, and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same time.

  “La durée … For goodness sake, come in without knocking … No, Polly, knocking does not concern you—it’s my little cousin. All right. La durée is not synonymous with duration, being saturated—yes, as in Saturday—with that particular philosopher’s thought. What’s wrong now? You don’t know if it’s dorée or durée? D, U, R. I thought you knew French. Oh, I see. So long.

  “My typist, a trivial but always available blonde, could not make out durée in my quite legible hand because, she says, she knows French, but not scientific French.”

  “Actually,” observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained, “Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.”

  “Spotting Bergson,” said the assistant lecher, “rates a B minus dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you with a kiss on your krestik—whatever that is?”

  Wincing and rearranging his legs, our young Vandemonian cursed under his breath the condition in which the image of the four embers of a vixen’s cross had now solidly put him. One of the synonyms of “condition” is “state,” and the adjective “human” may be construed as “manly” (since L’Humanité means “Mankind”!), and that’s how, my dears, Lowden recently translated the title of the malheureux Pompier’s cheap novel La Condition Humaine, wherein, incidentally, the term “Vandemonian” is hilariously glossed as “Koulak tasmanien d’origine hollandaise.” Kick her out before it is too late.

  “If you are serious,” said Lucette, passing her tongue over her lips and slitting her darkening eyes, “then, my darling, you can do it right now. But if you are making fun of me, then you’re an abominably cruel Vandemonian.”

  “Come, come, Lucette, it means ‘little cross’ in Russian, that’s all, what else? Is it some amulet? You mentioned just now a little red stud or pawn. Is it something you wear, or used to wear, on a chainlet round your neck? a small acorn of coral, the glandulella of vestals in ancient Rome? What’s the matter, my dear?”

  Still watching him narrowly, “I’ll take a chance,” she said. “I’ll explain it, though it’s just one of our sister’s ‘tender-turret’ words and I thought you were familiar with her vocabulary.”

  “Oh, I know,” cried Van (quivering with evil sarcasm, boiling with mysterious rage, taking it out on the redhaired scape-goatling, naive Lucette, whose only crime was to be suffused with the phantasmata of the other’s innumerable lips). “Of course, I remember now. A foul taint in the singular can be a sacred mark in the plural. You are referring of course to the stigmata between the eyebrows of pure sickly young nuns whom priests had over-anointed there and elsewhere with crosslike strokes of the myrrherabol brush.”

  “No, it’s much simpler,” said patient Lucette. “Let’s go back to the library where you found that little thing still erect in its drawer—”

  “Z for Zemski. As I had hoped, you do resemble Dolly, still in her pretty pantelets, holding a Flemish pink in the library portrait above her inscrutable.”

  “No, no,” said Lucette, “that indifferent oil presided over your studies and romps at the other end, next to the closet, above a glazed bookcase.”

  When will this torture end? I can’t very well open the letter in front of her and read it aloud for the benefit of the audience. I have not art to reckon my groans.

  “One day, in the library, kneeling on a yellow cushion placed on a Chippendale chair before an oval table on lion claws—”

  [The epithetic tone strongly suggests that this speech has an epistolary source. Ed.]

  “—I got stuck with six Buchstaben in the last round of a Flavita game. Mind you, I was eight and had not studied anatomy, but was doing my poor little best to keep up with two Wunderkinder. You examined and fingered my groove and quickly redistributed the haphazard sequence which made, say, LIKROT or ROTIKL and Ada flooded us both with her raven silks as she looked over our heads, and when you had completed the rearrangement, you and she came simultaneously, si je puis le mettre comme ça (Canady French), came falling on the black carpet in a paroxysm of incomprehensible merriment; so finally I quietly composed ROTIK (“little mouth”) and was left with my own cheap initial. I hope I’ve thoroughly got you mixed up, Van, because la plus laide fille du monde peut donner beaucoup plus qu’elle n’a, and now let us say adieu, yours ever.”

  “Whilst the machine is to him,” murmured Van.

  “Hamlet,” said the assistant lecturer’s brightest student.

  “Okay, okay,” replied her and his tormentor, “but, you know, a medically minded English Scrabbler, having two more letters to cope with, could make, for example, STIRCOIL, a well-known sweat-gland stimulant, or CITROILS, which grooms use for rubbing fillies.”

  “Please stop, Vandemonian,” she moaned. “Read her letter and bring me my coat.”

  But he continued, his features working:

  “I’m amazed! I never imagined that a hand-reared scion of Scandinavian kings, Russian grand princes and Irish barons could use the language of the proverbial gutter. Yes, you’re right, you behave as a cocotte, Lucette.”

  In sad meditation Lucette said: “As a rejected cocotte, Van.”

  “O moya dushen’ka (my dear darling),” cried Van, struck by his own coarseness and cruelty. “Please, forgive me! I’m a sick man. I’ve been suffering for these last four years from consanguineocanceroformia—a mysterious disease described by Coniglietto. Don’t put your little cold hand on my paw—that could only hasten your end and mine. On with your story.”

  “Well, after teaching me simple exercises for one hand that I could practice alone, cruel Ada abandoned me. True, we never really stopped doing it together every now and then—in the ranchito of some acquaintances after a party, in a white saloon she was teaching me to drive, in the sleeping car tearing across the prairie, at sad, sad Ardis where I spent one night with her before coming to Queenston. Oh, I love her hands, Van, because they have the same rodinka (small birthmark), because the fingers are so long, because, in fact, they are Van’s in a reducing mirror, in tender diminutive, v laskatel’noy forme” (the talk—as so often happened at emotional moments in the Veen-Zemski branch of that strange family, the noblest in Estotiland, the grandest on Antiterra—was speckled with Russian, an effect not too consistently reproduced in this chapter—the readers are restless tonight).

  “She abandoned me,” continued Lucette, tchucking on one side of the mouth and smoothing up and down with an abstract palm her flesh-pale stocking. “Yes, she started a rather sad little affair with Johnny, a young star from Fuerteventura, c’est dans la famille, her exact odnoletok (coeval), practically her twin in appearance, born the same year, the same day, the same instant—”

  That was a mistake on silly Lucette’s part.

  “Ah, that cannot be,” interrupted morose Van and after rocking this side and that with clenched hands and furrowed brow (how one would like to apply a boiling-water-soaked Wattebausch, as poor Rack used to call her limp arpeggiation, to
that ripe pimple on his right temple), “that simply cannot be. No damned twin can do that. Not even those seen by Brigitte, a cute little number I imagine, with that candle flame flirting with her exposed nipples. The usual difference in age between twins”—he went on in a madman’s voice so well controlled that it sounded overpedantic—“is seldom less than a quarter of an hour, the time a working womb needs to rest and relax with a woman’s magazine, before resuming its rather unappetizing contractions. In very rare cases, when the matrix just goes on pegging away automatically, the doctor can take advantage of that and ease out the second brat who then can be considered to be, say, three minutes younger, which in dynastic happy events—doubly happy events—with all Egypt agog—may be, and has been, even more important than in a marathon finish. But the creatures, no matter how numerous, never come out à la queue-leu-leu. ‘Simultaneous twins’ is a contradiction in terms.”

  “Nu uzh ne znayu (well, I don’t know),” muttered Lucette (echoing faithfully her mother’s dreary intonation in that phrase, which seemingly implied an admission of error and ignorance, but tended somehow—owing to a hardly perceptible nod of condescension rather than consent—to dull and dilute the truth of her interlocutor’s corrective retort).

  “I only meant,” she continued, “that he was a handsome Hispano-Irish boy, dark and pale, and people mistook them for twins. I did not say they were really twins. Or ‘driblets.’ ”

  Driblets? Driplets? Now who pronounced it that way? Who? Who? A dripping ewes-dropper in a dream? Did the orphans live? But we must listen to Lucette.

  “After a year or so she found out that an old pederast kept him and she dismissed him, and he shot himself on a beach at high tide but surfers and surgeons saved him, and now his brain is damaged; he will never be able to speak.”

  “One can always fall back on mutes,” said Van gloomily. “He could act the speechless eunuch in ‘Stambul, my bulbul’ or the stable boy disguised as a kennel girl who brings a letter.”

  “Van, I’m boring you?”

  “Oh, nonsense, it’s a gripping and palpitating little case history.”

  Because that was really not bad: bringing down three in as many years—besides winging a fourth. Jolly good shot—Adiana! Wonder whom she’ll bag next.

  “You must not press me for the details of our sweet torrid and horrid nights together, before and between that poor guy and the next intruder. If my skin were a canvas and her lips a brush, not an inch of me would have remained unpainted and vice versa. Are you horrified, Van? Do you loathe us?”

  “On the contrary,” replied Van, bringing off a passable imitation of bawdy mirth. “Had I not been a heterosexual male, I would have been a Lesbian.”

  His trite reaction to her set piece, to her desperate cunning, caused Lucette to give up, to dry up, as it were, before a black pit with people dismally coughing here and there in the invisible and eternal audience. He glanced for the hundredth time at the blue envelope, its near long edge not quite parallel to that of the glossy mahogany, its left upper corner half hidden behind the tray with the brandy and soda, its right lower corner pointing at Van’s favorite novel The Slat Sign that lay on the sideboard.

  “I want to see you again soon,” said Van, biting his thumb, brooding, cursing the pause, yearning for the contents of the blue envelope. “You must come and stay with me at a flat I now have on Alex Avenue. I have furnished the guest room with bergères and torchères and rocking chairs; it looks like your mother’s boudoir.”

  Lucette curtseyed with the wicks of her sad mouth, à l’ Américaine.

  “Will you come for a few days? I promise to behave properly. All right?”

  “My notion of propriety may not be the same as yours. And what about Cordula de Prey? She won’t mind?”

  “The apartment is mine,” said Van, “and besides, Cordula is now Mrs. Ivan G. Tobak. They are making follies in Florence. Here’s her last postcard. Portrait of Vladimir Christian of Den mark, who, she claims, is the dead spit of her Ivan Giovanovich. Have a look.”

  “Who cares for Sustermans,” observed Lucette, with something of her uterine sister’s knight move of specious response, or a Latin footballer’s rovesciata.

  No, it’s an elm. Half a millennium ago.

  “His ancestor,” Van pattered on, “was the famous or fameux Russian admiral who had an épée duel with Jean Nicot and after whom the Tobago Islands, or the Tobakoff Islands, are named, I forget which, it was so long ago, half a millennium.”

  “I mentioned her only because an old sweetheart is easily annoyed by the wrong conclusions she jumps at like a cat not quite making a fence and then running off without trying again, and stopping to look back.”

  “Who told you about that lewd cordelude—I mean, interlude?”

  “Your father, mon cher—we saw a lot of him in the West. Ada supposed, at first, that Tapper was an invented name—that you fought your duel with another person—but that was before anybody heard of the other person’s death in Kalugano. Demon said you should have simply cudgeled him.”

  “I could not,” said Van, “the rat was rotting away in a hospital bed.”

  “I meant the real Tapper,” cried Lucette (who was making a complete mess of her visit), “not my poor, betrayed, poisoned, innocent teacher of music, whom not even Ada, unless she fibs, could cure of his impotence.”

  “Driblets,” said Van.

  “Not necessarily his,” said Lucette. “His wife’s lover played the triple viol. Look, I’ll borrow a book” (scanning on the nearest bookshelf The Gitanilla, Clichy Clichés, Mertvago Forever, The Ugly New Englander) “and curl up, komondi, in the next room for a few minutes, while you—Oh, I adore The Slat Sign.”

  “There’s no hurry,” said Van.

  Pause (about fifteen minutes to go to the end of the act).

  “At the age of ten,” said Lucette to say something, “I was at the Vieux-Rose Stopchin stage, but our (using, that day, that year, the unexpected, thronal, authorial, jocular, technically loose, forbidden, possessive plural in speaking of her to him) sister had read at that age, in three languages, many more books than I did at twelve. However! After an appalling illness in California, I recouped myself: the Pioneers vanquished the Pyogenes. ‘I’m not showing off but do you happen to know a great favorite of mine: Herodas?”

  “Oh yes,” answered Van negligently. “A ribald contemporary of Justinus, the Roman scholar. Yes, great stuff. Blinding blend of subtility and brilliant coarseness. You read it, dear, in the literal French translation with the Greek en regard—didn’t you?—but a friend of mine here showed me a scrap of newfound text, which you could not have seen, about two children, a brother and sister, who did it so often that they finally died in Qach other’s limbs, and could not be separated—it just stretched and stretched, and snapped back in place every time the perplexed parents let go. It is all very obscene, and very tragic, and terribly funny.”

  “No, I don’t know that passage,” said Lucette. “But Van, why are you—”

  “Hay fever, hay fever!” cried Van, searching five pockets at once for a handkerchief. Her stare of compassion and the fruitless search caused such a swell of grief that he preferred to stomp out of the room, snatching the letter, dropping it, picking it up, and retreating to the farthest room (redolent of her Degrasse) to read it in one gulp.

  “O dear Van, this is the last attempt I am making. You may call it a document in madness or the herb of repentance, but I wish to come and live with you, wherever you are, for ever and ever. If you scorn the maid at your window I will aerogram my immediate acceptance of a proposal of marriage that has been made to your poor Ada a month ago in Valentine State. He is an Arizonian Russian, decent and gentle, not over bright and not fashionable. The only thing we have in common is a keen interest in many military-looking desert plants, especially various species of agave, hosts of the larvae of the most noble animals in America, the Giant Skippers (Krolik, you see, is burrowing again). He owns horses, and Cubi
stic pictures, and Oil wells’ (whatever they are—our father in hell who has some too, does not tell me, getting away with off-color allusions as is his wont). I have told my patient Valentinian that I shall give him a definite answer after consulting the only man I have ever loved or shall love. Try to ring me up tonight. Something is very wrong with the Ladore line, but I am assured that the trouble will be grappled with and eliminated before rivertide. Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya (thine). A.”

  Van took a clean handkerchief from a tidy pile in a drawer, an action he analogized at once by plucking a leaf from a writing pad. It is wonderful how helpful such repetitive rhythms on the part of coincidental (white, rectangular) objects can be at such chaotic moments. He wrote a short aerogram and returned to the parlor. There he found Lucette putting on her fur coat, and five uncouth scholars, whom his idiot valet had ushered in, standing in a silent circle around the bland graceful modeling of the coming winter’s fashions. Bernard Rattner, a heavily bespectacled black-haired, red-cheeked thick-set young man greeted Van with affable relief.

  “Good Log!” exclaimed Van, “I had understood we were to meet at your uncle’s place.”

  With a quick gesture he centrifuged them to waiting-room chairs, and despite his pretty cousin’s protests (“It’s a twenty minute’s walk; don’t accompany me”) campophoned for his car. Then he clattered, in Lucette’s wake, down the cataract of the narrow staircase, katrakatra (quatre à quatre). Please, children, not katrakatra (Marina).

  “I also know,” said Lucette as if continuing their recent exchange, “who he is.”

  She pointed to the inscription “Voltemand Hall” on the brow of the building from which they now emerged.

  Van gave her a quick glance—but she simply meant the courtier in Hamlet.

  They passed through a dark archway, and as they came out into the colored air of a delicate sunset, he stopped her and gave her the note he had written. It told Ada to charter a plane and be at his Manhattan flat any time tomorrow morning. He would leave Kingston around midnight by car. He still hoped the Ladore dorophone would be in working order before his departure. Le château que baignait le Dorophone. Anyway, he assumed the aerogram would reach her in a couple of hours. Lucette said “uhn-uhn,” it would first fly to Mont-Dore—sorry, Ladore—and if marked “urgent” would arrive at sunrise by dazzled messenger, galloping east on the postmaster’s fleabitten nag, because on Sundays you could not use motorcycles, old local law, l’ivresse de la vitesse, conceptions dominicales; but even so, she would have ample time to pack, find the box of Dutch crayons Lucette wanted her to bring if she came, and be in time for breakfast in Cordula’s recent bedroom. Neither half-sibling was at her or his best that day.