Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  As he gloomily looked at her thin bare shoulders, so mobile and tensile that one wondered if she could not cross them in front of her like stylized angel wings, he reflected abjectly that he would have to endure, if conforming to his innermost code of honor, five such days of ruttish ache—not only because she was lovely and special but because he could never go without girl pleasure for more than forty-eight hours. He feared precisely that which she wanted to happen: that once he had tasted her wound and its grip, she would keep him insatiably captive for weeks, maybe months, maybe more, but that a harsh separation would inevitably come, with a new hope and the old despair never able to strike a balance. But worst of all, while aware, and ashamed, of lusting after a sick child, he felt, in an obscure twist of ancient emotions, his lust sharpened by the shame.

  They had sweet, thick Turkish coffee and surreptitiously he looked at his wrist watch to check—what? How long the torture of self-denial could still be endured? How soon were certain events coming such as a ballroom dance competition? Her age? (Lucinda Veen was only five hours old if one reversed the human “time current.”)

  She was such a pathetic darling that, as they proceeded to leave the grill, he could not help, for sensuality is the best breeding broth of fatal error, caressing her glossy young shoulder so as to fit for an instant, the happiest in her life, its ideal convexity bilboquet-wise within the hollow of his palm. Then she walked before him as conscious of his gaze as if she were winning a prize for “poise.” He could describe her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches), accentuating as it did the swing of her stance, the length of her legs in ninon stockings. Objectively speaking, her chic was keener than that of her “vaginal” sister. As they crossed landings where velvet ropes were being hastily stretched by Russian sailors (who glanced with sympathy at the handsome pair speaking their incomparable tongue) or walked this or that deck, Lucette made him think of some acrobatic creature immune to the rough seas. He saw with gentlemanly displeasure that her tilted chin and black wings, and free stride, attracted not only blue innocent eyes but the bold stare of lewd fellow passengers. He loudly exclaimed that he would slap the next jackanapes, and involuntarily walked backward with ridiculous truculent gestures into a folded deck chair (he also running the reel of time backward, in a minor way), which caused her to emit a yelp of laughter. Feeling now much happier, enjoying his gallant champagne-temper, she steered Van away from the mirage of her admirers, back to the lift.

  They examined without much interest the objects of pleasure in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swim-suit. The presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van. Half a dozen glossy-jacketed copies of Salzman were impressively heaped between a picture of the handsome, thoughtful, now totally forgotten, author and a Mingo-Bingo vase of immortelles.

  He clutched at a red rope and they entered the lounge.

  “Whom did she look like?” asked Lucette. “En laid et en lard?”

  “I don’t know,” he lied. “Whom?”

  “Skip it,” she said. “You’re mine tonight. Mine, mine, mine!”

  She was quoting Kipling—the same phrase that Ada used to address to Dack. He cast around for a straw of Procrustean procrastination.

  “Please,” said Lucette, “I’m tired of walking around, I’m frail, I’m feverish, I hate storms, let’s all go to bed!”

  “Hey, look!” he cried, pointing to a poster. “They’re showing something called Don Juan’s Last Fling. It’s prerelease and for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!”

  “It’s going to be an unmethylated bore,” said Lucy (Houssaie School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance drapery.

  They came in at the beginning of an introductory picture, featuring a cruise to Greenland, with heavy seas in gaudy technicolor. It was a rather irrelevant trip since their Tobakoff did not contemplate calling at Godhavn; moreover, the cinema theater was swaying in counterrhythm to the cobalt-and-emerald swell on the screen. No wonder the place was eviptovato, as Lucette observed, and she went on to say that the Robinsons had saved her life by giving her on the eve a tubeful of Quietus Pills.

  “Want one? One a day keeps ‘no shah’ away. Pun. You can chew it, it’s sweet.”

  “Jolly good name. No, thank you, my sweet. Besides you have only five left.”

  “Don’t worry, I have it all planned out. There may be less than five days.”

  “More in fact, but no matter. Our measurements of time are meaningless; the most accurate clock is a joke; you’ll read all about it someday, you just wait.”

  “Perhaps, not. I mean, perhaps I shan’t have the patience. I mean, his charwoman could never finish reading Leonardo’s palm. I may fall asleep before I get through your next book.”

  “An art-class legend,” said Van.

  “That’s the final iceberg, I know by the music. Let’s go, Van! Or you want to see Hoole as Hooan?”

  She brushed his cheek with her lips in the dark, she took his hand, she kissed his knuckles, and he suddenly thought: after all, why not? Tonight? Tonight.

  He enjoyed her impatience, the fool permitted himself to be stirred by it, the cretin whispered, prolonging the free, new, apricot fire of anticipation:

  “If you’re a good girl we’ll have drinks in my sitting room at midnight.”

  The main picture had now started. The three leading parts—cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old, Donna Anna—were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in “semi-stills,” or as some say “translucencies,” in a brief introduction. Contrary to expectations, the picture turned out to be quite good.

  On the way to the remote castle where the difficult lady, widowed by his sword, has finally promised him a long night of love in her chaste and chilly chamber, the aging libertine nurses his potency by spurning the advances of a succession of robust belles. A gitana predicts to the gloomy cavalier that before reaching the castle he will have succumbed to the wiles of her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit). She also predicted something to Van, for even before Dolores came out of the circus tent to water Juan’s horse, Van knew who she would be.

  In the magic rays of the camera, in the controlled delirium of ballerina grace, ten years of her life had glanced off and she was again that slip of a girl qui n’en porte pas (as he had jested once to annoy her governess by a fictitious Frenchman’s mistranslation): a remembered triviality that intruded upon the chill of his present emotion with the jarring stupidity of an innocent stranger’s asking an absorbed voyeur for directions in a labyrinth of mean lanes.

  Lucette recognized Ada three or four seconds later, but then clutched his wrist:

  “Oh, how awful! It was bound to happen. That’s she! Let’s go, please, let’s go. You must not see her debasing herself. She’s terribly made up, every gesture is childish and wrong—”

  “Just another minute,” said Van.

  Terrible? Wrong? She was absolutely perfect, and strange, and poignantly familiar. By some stroke of art, by some enchantment of chance, the few brief scenes she was given formed a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks.

  The gitanilla bends her head over the live table of Leporello’s servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder. It is no longer another man’s Dolores, but a little girl twisting an aquarelle brush in the paint of Van’s blood, and Donna Anna’s castle is now a bog flower.

  The Don rides past three windmills, whirling black against an ominous sunset, and saves her from the miller who accuses her of stealing a fistful of flour and tears her thin dress. Wheezy but still game, Juan carries her across a brook (her bare toe acrobatically tickling his face) and sets her down, top up, on the turf of an olive grove. Now they stand facing each other. She fingers voluptuously the j
eweled pommel of his sword, she rubs her firm girl belly against his embroidered tights, and all at once the grimace of a premature spasm writhes across the poor Don’s expressive face. He angrily disentangles himself and staggers back to his steed.

  Van, however, did not understand until much later (when he saw—had to see; and then see again and again—the entire film, with its melancholy and grotesque ending in Donna Anna’s castle) that what seemed an incidental embrace constituted the Stone Cuckold’s revenge. In fact, being upset beyond measure, he decided to go even before the olive-grove sequence dissolved. Just then three old ladies with stony faces showed their disapproval of the picture by rising from beyond Lucette (who was slim enough to remain seated) and brushing past Van (who stood up) in three jerky shuffles. Simultaneously he noticed two people, the long-lost Robinsons, who apparently had been separated from Lucette by those three women, and were now moving over to her. Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and death. They were craning already across her, with radiant wrinkles and twittery fingers toward Van when he pounced upon their intrusion to murmur a humorous bad-sailor excuse and leave the cinema hall to its dark lurching.

  In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord) and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush.

  Then, for the sake of safety, he repeated the disgusting but necessary act.

  He saw the situation dispassionately now and felt he was doing right by going to bed and switching off the “ectric” light (a surrogate creeping back into international use). The blue ghost of the room gradually established itself as his eyes got used to the darkness. He prided himself on his willpower. He welcomed the dull pain in his drained root. He welcomed the thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new, and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting room’s doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair and because Ada was still a child. At that point the surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the telephone. The thing seemed to squat for each renewed burst of ringing and at first he decided to let it ring itself out. Then his nerves surrendered to the insisting signal, and he snatched up the receiver.

  No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him:

  “Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?” asked Lucette.

  “Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),” answered Van.

  A small pause followed; then she hung up.

  After he had stolen away, she had remained trapped between the cozy Robinsons (Rachel, dangling a big handbag, had squeezed by immediately to the place Van had vacated, and Bob had moved one seat up). Because of a sort of pudeur she did not inform them that the actress (obscurely and fleetingly billed as “Theresa Zegris” in the “going-up” lift-list at the end of the picture) who had managed to obtain the small but not unimportant part of the fatal gipsy was none other than the pallid schoolgirl they might have seen in Ladore. They invited Lucette to a Coke with them—proselytical teetotalists—in their cabin, which was small and stuffy and badly insulated, one could hear every word and whine of two children being put to bed by a silent seasick nurse, so late, so late—no, not children, but probably very young, very much disappointed honeymooners.

  “We understand,” said Robert Robinson going for another supply to his portable fridge, “we understand perfectly that Dr. Veen is deeply immersed in his Inter Resting Work—personally, I sometimes regret having retired—but do you think, Lucy, prosit!, that he might accept to have dinner tomorrow with you and us and maybe Another Couple, whom he’ll certainly enjoy meeting? Shall Mrs. Robinson send him a formal invitation? Would you sign it, too?”

  “I don’t know, I’m very tired,” she said, “and the rock and roll are getting worse. I guess I’ll go up to my hutch and take your Quietus. Yes, by all means, let’s have dinner, all of us. I really needed that lovely cold drink.”

  Having cradled the nacred receiver she changed into black slacks and a lemon shirt (planned for tomorrow morning); looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest; ripped out the flyleaf of Herb’s Journal, and tried to think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except that note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces in the W.C.; she poured herself a glass of dead water from a moored decanter, gulped down one by one four green pills, and, sucking the fifth, walked to the lift which took her one click up from her three-room suite straight to the red-carpeted promenade-deck bar. There, two sluglike young men were in the act of sliding off their red toadstools, and the older one said to the other as they turned to leave: “You may fool his lordship, my dear, but not me, oh, no.”

  She drank a “Cossack pony” of Klass vodka—hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another; and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich!

  She had no purse with her. She almost fell from her convex ridiculous seat as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a stray bank note.

  “Beddydee,” said Toby the barman with a fatherly smile, which she mistook for a leer. “Bedtime, miss,” he repeated and patted her ungloved hand.

  Lucette recoiled and forced herself to retort distinctly and haughtily:

  “Mr. Veen, my cousin, will pay you tomorrow and bash your false teeth in.”

  Six, seven—no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something.

  While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave.

  Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep—instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lig
hts of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note.

  Got it.

  The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.

  She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-torn wreath.

  A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.