Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  A longish pause not unlike a fellow actor’s dry-up, came in response to his well-rehearsed speech.

  Finally, Demon: “The second fact may horrify you even more than the first. I know it caused me much deeper worry—moral of course, not monetary—than Ada’s case—of which eventually her mother informed Cousin Dan, so that, in a sense—”

  Pause, with an underground trickle.

  “Some other time I’ll tell you about the Black Miller; not now; too trivial.”

  (Dr. Lapiner’s wife, born Countess Alp, not only left him, in 1871, to live with Norbert von Miller, amateur poet, Russian translator at the Italian Consulate in Geneva, and professional smuggler of neonegrine—found only in the Valais—but had imparted to her lover the melodramatic details of the subterfuge which the kindhearted physician had considered would prove a boon to one lady and a blessing to the other. Versatile Norbert spoke English with an extravagant accent, hugely admired wealthy people and, when name-dropping, always qualified such a person as “enawmously rich” with awed amorous gusto, throwing himself back in his chair and spreading tensely curved arms to enfold an invisible fortune. He had a round head as bare as a knee, a corpse’s button nose, and very white, very limp, very damp hands adorned with rutilant gems. His mistress soon left him. Dr. Lapiner died in 1872. About the same time, the Baron married an innkeeper’s innocent daughter and began to blackmail Demon Veen; this went on for almost twenty years, until aging Miller was shot dead by an Italian policeman on a little-known border trail, which had seemed to get steeper and muddier every year. Out of sheer kindness, or habit, Demon bade his lawyer continue to send Miller’s widow—who mistook it naively for insurance money—the trimestrial sum which had been swelling with each pregnancy of the robust Swissess. Demon used to say that he would publish one day “Black Miller’s” quatrains which adorned his letters with the jingle of verselets on calendarial leaves:

  My spouse is thicker, I am leaner.

  Again it comes, a new bambino.

  You must be good like I am good.

  Her stove is big and wants more wood.

  We may add, to complete this useful parenthesis, that in early February, 1893, not long after the poet’s death, two other less successful blackmailers were waiting in the wings: Kim who would have bothered Ada again had he not been carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood; and the son of one of the former employees of the famous clandestine-message agency after it had been closed by the U.S. Government in 1928, when the past had ceased to matter, and nothing but the straw of a prison cell could reward the optimism of second-generation rogues.)

  The most protracted of the several pauses having run its dark course, Demon’s voice emerged to say, with a vigor that it had lacked before:

  “Van, you receive the news I impart with incomprehensible calmness. I do not recall any instance, in factual or fictional life, of a father’s having to tell his son that particular kind of thing in these particular circumstances. But you play with a pencil and seem as unruffled as if we were discussing your gaming debts or the demands of a wench knocked up in a ditch.”

  Tell him about the herbarium in the attic? About the indiscretions of (anonymous) servants? About a forged wedding date? About everything that two bright children had so gaily gleaned? I will. He did.

  “She was twelve,” Van added, “and I was a male primatal of fourteen and a half, and we just did not care. And it’s too late to care now.”

  “Too late?” shouted his father, sitting up on his couch.

  “Please, Dad, do not lose your temper,” said Van. “Nature, as I informed you once, has been kind to me. We can afford to be careless in every sense of the word.”

  “I’m not concerned with semantics—or semination. One thing, and only one, matters. It is not too late to stop that ignoble affair—”

  “No shouting and no philistine epithets,” interrupted Van.

  “All right,” said Demon. “I take back the adjective, and I ask you instead: Is it too late to prevent your affair with your sister from wrecking her life?”

  Van knew this was coming. He knew, he said, this was coming. “Ignoble” had been taken care of; would his accuser define “wrecking”?

  The conversation now took a neutral turn that was far more terrible than its introductory admission of faults for which our young lovers had long pardoned their parents. How did Van imagine his sister’s pursuing a scenic career? Would he admit it would be wrecked if they persisted in their relationship? Did he envisage a life of concealment in luxurious exile? Was he ready to deprive her of normal interests and a normal marriage? Children? Normal amusements?

  “Don’t forget ‘normal adultery,’ ” remarked Van.

  “How much better that would be!” said grim Demon, sitting on the edge of the couch with both elbows propped on his knees, and nursing his head in his hands: “The awfulness of the situation is an abyss that grows deeper the more I think of it. You force me to bring up the tritest terms such as ‘family,’ ‘honor,’ ‘set,’ ‘law.’… All right, I have bribed many officials in my wild life but neither you nor I can bribe a whole culture, a whole country. And the emotional impact of learning that for almost ten years you and that charming child have been deceiving their parents—”

  Here Van expected his father to take the “it-would-kill-your-mother” line, but Demon was wise enough to keep clear of it. Nothing could “kill” Marina. If any rumors of incest did come her way, concern with her “inner peace” would help her to ignore them—or at least romanticize them out of reality’s reach. Both men knew all that. Her image appeared for a moment and accomplished a facile fade-out.

  Demon spoke on: “I cannot disinherit you: Aqua left you enough ‘ridge’ and real estate to annul the conventional punishment. And I cannot denounce you to the authorities without involving my daughter, whom I mean to protect at all cost. But I can do the next proper thing, I can curse you, I can make this our last, our last—”

  Van, whose finger had been gliding endlessly to and fro along the mute but soothingly smooth edge of the mahogany desk, now heard with horror the sob that shook Demon’s entire frame, and then saw a deluge of tears flowing down those hollow tanned cheeks. In an amateur parody, at Van’s birthday party fifteen years ago, his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov and shed strange, frightening, jet-black tears before rolling down the steps of a burlesque throne in death’s total surrender to gravity. Did those dark streaks, in the present show, come from his blackening his orbits, eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows? The funest gamester … the pale fatal girl, in another well-known melodrama.… In this one. Van gave him a clean handkerchief to replace the soiled rag. His own marble calm did not surprise Van. The ridicule of a good cry with Father adequately clogged the usual ducts of emotion.

  Demon regained his composure (if not his young looks) and said:

  “I believe in you and your common sense. You must not allow an old débaucher to disown an only son. If you love her, you wish her to be happy, and she will not be as happy as she could be once you gave her up. You may go. Tell her to come here on your way down.”

  Down. My first is a vehicle that twists dead daisies around its spokes; my second is Oldmanhattan slang for “money”; and my whole makes a hole.

  As he traversed the second-floor landing, he saw, through the archway of two rooms, Ada in her black dress standing, with her back to him, at the oval window in the boudoir. He told a footman to convey her father’s message to her and passed almost at a run through the familiar echoes of the stone-flagged vestibule.

  My second is also the meeting place of two steep slopes. Right-hand lower drawer of my practically unused new desk—which is quite as big as Dad’s, with Sig’s compliments.

  He judged it would take him as much time to find a taxi at this hour of the day as to walk, with his ordinary swift swing, the ten blocks to Alex Avenue. He was coatless, tieless, hatless; a strong sharp wind dimmed his
sight with salty frost and played Medusaean havoc with his black locks. Upon letting himself in for the last time into his idiotically cheerful apartment, he forthwith sat down at that really magnificent desk and wrote the following note:

  Do what he tells you. His logic sounds preposterous, prepsupposing [sic] a vague kind of “Victorian” era, as they have on Terra according to ‘my mad’ [?], but in a paroxysm of [illegible] I suddenly realized he was right. Yes, right, here and there, not neither here, nor there, as most things are. You see, girl, how it is and must be. In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting [us?] but your second-floor level of vision probably prevented your seeing that he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared. Good-bye, girl.

  Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine, and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened—or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples. It was to gray by the time that Ada, then in her thirties, said, when they spoke of their voluntary separation:

  “I would have killed myself too, had I found Rose wailing over your corpse. ‘Secondes pensées sont les bonnes’, as your other, white, bonne used to say in her pretty patois. As to the apron, you are quite right. And what you did not make out was that the artist had about finished a large picture of your meek little palazzo standing between its two giant guards. Perhaps for the cover of a magazine, which rejected that picture. But, you know, there’s one thing I regret,” she added: “Your use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury—not yours, not my Van’s. I should never have told you about the Ladore policeman. You should never have taken him into your confidence, never connived with him to burn those files—and most of Kalugano’s pine forest. Eto unizitel’no (it is humiliating)

  “Amends have been made,” replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle. “I’m keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.”

  There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do.

  Part Three

  1

  He traveled, he studied, he taught.

  He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands inlaid with pointed black shadows. He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble. On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah’s pet dancer (a naive little thing who thought “baptism of desire” meant something sexual), spilled her morning coffee upon noticing a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van—who for hours, after removing the beautiful animal to a bush, kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl’s tweezers.

  He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth, and ennui, and discarded “merry-cans” with “Billy” labels, and the jungle jingles of exported jazz coming from syphilitic cafés. He often felt that the famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended garden were but places on the map of his own madness.

  He liked composing his works (Illegible Signatures, 1895; Clair voyeurism, 1903; Furnished Space, 1913; The Texture of Time, begun 1922), in mountain refuges, and in the drawing rooms of great expresses, and on the sundecks of white ships, and on the stone tables of Latin public parks. He would uncurl out of an indefinitely lengthy trance, and note with wonder that the ship was going the other way or that the order of his left-hand fingers was reversed, now beginning, clockwise, with his thumb as on his right hand, or that the marble Mercury that had been looking over his shoulder had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae. He would realize all at once that three, seven, thirteen years, in one cycle of separation, and then four, eight, sixteen, in yet another, had elapsed since he had last embraced, held, bewept Ada.

  Numbers and rows and series—the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time—seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited.

  For seven years, after she had dismissed her life with her husband, a successfully achieved corpse, as irrelevant, and retired to her still dazzling, still magically well-staffed Côte d’Azur villa (the one Demon had once given her), Van’s mother had been suffering from various “obscure” illnesses, which everybody thought she made up, or talentedly simulated, and which she contended could be, and partly were, cured by willpower. Van visited her less often than dutiful Lucette, whom he glimpsed there on two or three occasions; and once, in 1899, he saw, as he entered the arbutus-and-laurel garden of Villa Armina, a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion, clad in neutral black, leaving on a motor bicycle for his Nice parish near the tennis courts. Marina spoke to Van about religion, and Terra, and the Theater, but never about Ada, and just as he did not suspect she knew everything about the horror and ardor of Ardis, none suspected what pain in her bleeding bowels she was trying to allay by incantations, and “self-focusing” or its opposite device, “self-dissolving.” She confessed with an enigmatic and rather smug smile that much as she liked the rhythmic blue puffs of incense, and the dyakoris rich growl on the ambon, and the oily-brown ikon coped in protective filigree to receive the worshipper’s kiss, her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism.

  Early in 1900, a few days before he saw Marina, for the last time, at the clinic in Nice (where he learned for the first time the name of her illness), Van had a “verbal” nightmare, caused, maybe, by the musky smell in the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus. Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some discussion, one repeating “I can’t!” (meaning “can’t die”—a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl), and the other affirming “You can, sir!” She died a fortnight later, and her body was burnt, according to her instructions.

  Van, a lucid soul, considered himself less brave morally than physically. He was always (meaning well into the nineteen-sixties) to recollect with reluctance, as if wishing to suppress in his mind a petty, timorous, and stupid deed (for, actually, who knows, the later antlers might have been set right then, with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the Vinelanders stayed), his reacting from Kingston to Lucette’s cable from Nice (“Mother died this morning the funeral dash cremation dash is to be held after tomorrow at sundown”) with the request to advise him (“please advise”) who else would be there, and upon getting her prompt reply that Demon had already arrived with Andrey and Ada, his cabling back: “Désolé de ne pouvoir être avec vous.”

  He had roamed in Kingston’s Cascadilla Park, in the active sweet-swarming spring dusk, so much more seraphic than that flurry of cables. The last time he had seen mummy-wizened Marina and told her he must r
eturn to America (though actually there was no hurry—only the smell in her hospital room that no breeze could dislodge), she had asked, with her new, tender, myopic, because inward, expression: “Can’t you wait till I’m gone?”; and his reply had been “I’ll be back on the twenty-fifth. I have to deliver an address on the Psychology of Suicide”; and she had said, stressing, now that everything was tripitaka (safely packed), the exact kinship: “Do tell them about your silly aunt Aqua,” whereupon he had nodded, with a smirk, instead of answering: “Yes, mother.” Hunched up in a last band of low sun, on the bench where he had recently fondled and fouled a favorite, lanky, awkward, black girl student, Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection—a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal. He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding, sign of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand. He wondered what really kept him alive on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth and all art a game, when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio’s warm bristly cheek; and whence, from what deep well of hope, did he still scoop up a shivering star, when everything had an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada.

  2

  On a bleak morning between the spring and summer of 1901, in Paris, as Van, black-hatted, one hand playing with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket and the other, fawn-gloved, upswinging a furled English umbrella, strode past a particularly unattractive sidewalk café among the many lining the Avenue Guillaume Pitt, a chubby bald man in a rumpled brown suit with a watch-chained waistcoat stood up and hailed him.