Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “I assume,” said Van (knowing his girl), “that you did not want any tips from Marina for your Irina?”

  “It would have only resulted in a row. I always resented her suggestions because they were made in a sarcastic, insulting manner. I’ve heard mother birds going into neurotic paroxysms of fury and mockery when their poor little tailless ones (bezkh-vostie bednyachki) were slow in learning to fly. I’ve had enough of that. By the way, here’s the program of my flop.”

  Van glanced through the list of players and D.P.’s and noticed two amusing details: the role of Fedotik, an artillery officer (whose comedy organ consists of a constantly clicking camera), had been assigned to a “Kim (short for Yakim) Eskimossoff” and somebody called “John Starling” had been cast as Skvortsov (a Sekundant in the rather amateurish duel of the last act) whose name comes from skvorets, starling. When he communicated the latter observation to Ada, she blushed as was her Old World wont.

  “Yes,” she said, “he was quite a lovely lad and I sort of flirted with him, but the strain and the split were too much for him—he had been, since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet master, Dangleleaf, and he finally committed suicide. You see (‘the blush now replaced by a matovaya pallor’) I’m not hiding one stain of what rhymes with Perm.”

  “I see. And Yakim—”

  “Oh, he was nothing.”

  “No, I mean, Yakim, at least, did not, as his rhymesake did, take a picture of your brother embracing his girl. Played by Dawn de Laire.”

  “I’m not sure. I seem to recall that our director did not mind some comic relief.”

  “Dawn en robe rose et verte, at the end of Act One.”

  “I think there was a click in the wings and some healthy mirth in the house. All poor Starling had to do in the play was to hollo off stage from a rowboat on the Kama River to give the signal for my fiancé to come to the dueling ground.”

  But let us shift to the didactic metaphorism of Chehov’s friend, Count Tolstoy.

  We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in the Old World subalpine zone. At first one opens them with the utmost care, very slowly, in the vain hope of hushing the excruciating creak, the growing groan that the door emits midway. Before long one discovers, however, that if it is opened or closed with celerity, in one resolute sweep, the hellish hinge is taken by surprise, and triumphant silence achieved. Van and Ada, for all the exquisite and powerful bliss that engulfed and repleted them (and we do not mean here the rose sore of Eros alone), knew that certain memories had to be left closed, lest they wrench every nerve of the soul with their monstrous moan. But if the operation is performed swiftly, if indelible evils are mentioned between two quick quips, there is a chance that the anesthetic of life itself may allay unforgettable agony in the process of swinging its door.

  Now and then she poked fun at his sexual peccadilloes, though generally she tended to ignore them as if demanding, by tacit implication, a similar kind of leniency in regard to her frailty. He was more inquisitive than she but hardly managed to learn more from her lips than he had from her letters. To her past admirers Ada attributed all the features and faults we have already been informed of: incompetence of performance, inanity and nonentity; and to her own self nothing beyond easy feminine compassion and such considerations of hygiene and sanity as hurt Van more than would a defiant avowal of passionate betrayal. Ada had made up her mind to transcend his and her sensual sins, the adjective being a near synonym of “senseless” and “soulless” and therefore not represented in the ineffable hereafter that both our young people mutely and shyly believed in. Van endeavored to follow the same line of logic but could not forget the shame and the agony even while reaching heights of happiness he had not known at his brightest hour before his darkest one in the past.

  10

  They took a great many precautions—all absolutely useless, for nothing can change the end (written and filed away) of the present chapter. Only Lucette and the agency that forwarded letters to him and to Ada knew Van’s address. Through an amiable lady in waiting at Demon’s bank, Van made sure that his father would not turn up in Manhattan before March 30. They never came out or went in together, arranging a meeting place at the Library or in an emporium whence to start the day’s excursions—and it so happened that the only time they broke that rule (she having got stuck in the lift for a few panicky moments and he having blithely trotted downstairs from their common summit), they issued right into the visual field of old Mrs. Arfour who happened to be passing by their front door with her tiny tan-and-gray long-silked Yorkshire terrier. The simultaneous association was immediate and complete: she had known both families for years and was now interested to learn from chattering (rather than chatting) Ada that Van had happened to be in town just when she, Ada, had happened to return from the West; that Marina was fine; that Demon was in Mexico or Oxmice; and that Lenore Colline had a similar adorable pet with a similar adorable parting along the middle of the back. That same day (February 3, 1893) Van rebribed the already gorged janitor to have him answer all questions which any visitor, and especially a dentist’s widow with a caterpillar dog, might ask about any Veens, with a brief assertion of utter ignorance. The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel.

  Van’s father had just left one Santiago to view the results of an earthquake in another, when Ladore Hospital cabled that Dan was dying. He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling. He had not many interests in life.

  At the airport of the moonlit white town we call Tent, and Tobakov’s sailors, who built it, called Palatka, in northern Florida, where owing to engine trouble he had to change planes, Demon made a long-distance call and received a full account of Dan’s death from the inordinately circumstantial Dr. Nikulin (grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov—we can’t get rid of the lettuce). Daniel Veen’s life had been a mixture of the ready-made and the grotesque; but his death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch.

  Next day, February 5, around nine A.M., Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan’s lawyer, Demon noted—just as he was about to cross Alexis Avenue—an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs. Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey), contented himself—quite properly—with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out of the way of Mrs. R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation. As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to “contact”) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there—or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)

  With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute, multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.

  “Then we are fellow travelers,” said Demon inhaling not without
gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain.

  On that memorable morning, Van, after ordering breakfast, had climbed out of his bath and donned a strawberry-red terry-cloth robe when he thought he heard Valerio’s voice from the adjacent parlor. Thither he padded, humming tunelessly, looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance).

  Demon, clothed entirely in black, black-spatted, black-scarved, his monocle on a broader black ribbon than usual, was sitting at the breakfast table, a cup of coffee in one hand, and a conveniently folded financial section of the Times in the other.

  He gave a slight start and put down his cup rather jerkily on noting the coincidence of color with a persistent detail in an illumined lower left-hand corner of a certain picture reproduced in the copiously illustrated catalogue of his immediate mind.

  All Van could think of saying was “I am not alone” (je ne suis pas seul), but Demon was brimming too richly with the bad news he had brought to heed the hint of the fool who should have simply walked on into the next room and come back one moment later (locking the door behind him—locking out years and years of lost life), instead of which he remained standing near his father’s chair.

  According to Bess (which is “fiend” in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of “play-zero” (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada’s sudden departure, that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture house of eternity. To Dr. Nikulin Dan described his rider as black, pale-bellied, with a black dorsal buckler shining like a dung beetle’s back and with a knife in his raised forelimb. On a very cold morning in late January Dan had somehow escaped, through a basement maze and a toolroom, into the brown shrubbery of Ardis; he was naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison, and, despite the rough going, had crawled on all fours, like a crippled steed under an invisible rider, deep into the wooded landscape. On the other hand, had he at tempted to warn her she might have made her big Ada yawn and uttered something irrevocably cozy at the moment he opened the thick protective door.

  “I beg you, sir,” said Van, “go down, and I’ll join you in the bar as soon as I’m dressed. I’m in a delicate situation.”

  “Come, come,” retorted Demon, dropping and replacing his monocle. “Cordula won’t mind.”

  “It’s another, much more impressionable girl”—(yet another awful fumble!). “Damn Cordula! Cordula is now Mrs. Tobak.”

  “Oh, of course!” cried Demon. “How stupid of me! I remember Ada’s fiancé telling me—he and young Tobak worked for a while in the same Phoenix bank. Of course. Splendid broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, blond chap. Backbay Tobako-vich!”

  “I don’t care,” said clenched Van, “if he looks like a crippled, crucified, albino toad. Please, Dad, I really must—”

  “Funny your saying that. I’ve dropped in only to tell you poor cousin Dan has died an odd Boschean death. He thought a fantastic rodent sort of rode him out of the house. They found him too late, he expired in Nikulin’s clinic, raving about that detail of the picture. I’m having the deuce of a time rounding up the family. The picture is now preserved in the Vienna Academy of Art.”

  “Father, I’m sorry—but I’m trying to tell you—”

  “If I could write,” mused Demon, “I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously—c’est le mot—art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it—a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower—mark the ‘as if,’ for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and the taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice—but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar—flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk—she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think—”

  Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette—

  “—no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is—I mean, Vinelander is—the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols—or whoever they were—who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders—before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.”

  “I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,” said Van, “what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.”

  “I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other—since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!”

  Volatína, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please, go.

  “My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and—”

  And here Ada entered. Not naked—oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio—comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out “Bozhe moy!” and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.

  “Or better—come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.” He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now—when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam so-bach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Aken and the molti aspetti affascinanti of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr. Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (“Bess”) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter.

  11

  The dragon drug had worn off: its aftereffects are not pleasant, combining as they do physical fatigue with a certain starkness of thought as if all color were drained from the mind. Now clad in a gray dressing gown, Demon lay on a gray couch in his third-floor study. His son stood at the window with his back to the silence. In a damask-padded room on the second floor, immediately below the study, waited Ada, who had arrived with Van a couple o
f minutes ago. In the skyscraper across the lane a window was open exactly opposite the study and an aproned man stood there setting up an easel and cocking his head in search of the right angle.

  The first thing Demon said was:

  “I insist that you face me when I’m speaking to you.”

  Van realized that the fateful conversation must have already started in his father’s brain, for the admonishment had the ring of a self-interruption, and with a slight bow he took a seat.

  “However, before I advise you of those two facts, I would like to know how long this—how long this has been …” (‘going on,’ one presumes, or something equally banal, but then all ends are banal—hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid’s iron sting, shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital, mistaking a drop of thirty thousand feet for the airplane’s washroom, being poisoned by one’s wife, expecting a bit of Crimean hospitality, congratulating Mr. and Mrs. Vine-lander—)

  “It will be nine years soon,” replied Van. “I seduced her in the summer of eighteen eighty-four. Except for a single occasion, we did not make love again until the summer of eighteen eighty-eight. After a long separation we spent one winter together. All in all, I suppose I have had her about a thousand times. She is my whole life.”