Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  6

  Father:

  enclosed is a self-explanatory letter which, please, read and, if unobjectionable in your opinion, forward to Mrs. Vinelander, whose address I don’t know. For your own edification—although it hardly matters at this stage—Lucette never was my mistress, as an obscene ass, whom I cannot trace, implies in the “write-up” of the tragedy.

  I’m told you’ll be back East next month. Have your current secretary ring me up at Kingston, if you care to see me.

  Ada:

  I wish to correct and amplify the accounts of her death published here even before I arrived. We were not “traveling together.” We embarked at two different ports and I did not know that she was aboard. Our relationship remained what it had always been. I spent the next day (June 4) entirely with her, except for a couple of hours before dinner. We basked in the sun. She enjoyed the brisk breeze and the bright brine of the pool. She was doing her best to appear carefree but I saw how wrong things were. The romantic attachment she had formed, the infatuation she cultivated, could not be severed by logic. On top of that, somebody she could not compete with entered the picture. The Robinsons, Robert and Rachel, who, I know, planned to write to you through my father, were the penultimate people to talk to her that night. The last was a bartender. He was worried by her behavior, followed her up to the open deck and witnessed but could not stop her jump.

  I suppose it is inevitable that after such a loss one should treasure its every detail, every string that snapped, every fringe that frayed, in the immediate precession. I had sat with her through the greater part of a movie, Castles in Spain (or some title like that), and its liberal villain was being directed to the last of them, when I decided to abandon her to the auspices of the Robinsons, who had joined us in the ship’s theater. I went to bed—and was called around 1 A.M. marïTime, a few moments after she had jumped overboard. Attempts to rescue her were made on a reasonable scale, but, finally, the awful decision to resume the voyage, after an hour of confusion and hope, had to be taken by the Captain. Had I found him bribable, we would still be circling today the fatal spot.

  As a psychologist, I know the unsoundness of speculations as to whether Ophelia would not have drowned herself after all, without the help of a treacherous sliver, even if she had married her Voltemand. Impersonally I believe she would have died in her bed, gray and serene, had V. loved her; but since he did not really love the wretched little virgin, and since no amount of carnal tenderness could or can pass for true love, and since, above all, the fatal Andalusian wench who had come, I repeat, into the picture, was unforgettable, I am bound to arrive, dear Ada and dear Andrej, at the conclusion that whatever the miserable man could have thought up, she would have pokonchila s soboy (“put an end to herself”) all the same. In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet Lucettes are doomed.

  Some poor little things belonging to her—a cigarette case, a tulle evening frock, a book dog’s-eared at a French picnic—have had to be destroyed, because they stared at me. I remain your obedient servant.

  Son:

  I have followed your instructions, anent that letter, to the letter. Your epistolary style is so involute that I should suspect the presence of a code, had I not known you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton. I do not give a damn whether you slept or not with Lucette; but I know from Dorothy Vinelander that the child had been in love with you. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl’s career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his “fantasy” on Cervantes’s crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as “Quicks.” Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. Come and have dinner with me on July w. Evening dress.

  Cher ami,

  Nous fûmes, mon mari et moi, profondément bouleversés par l’effroyable nouvelle. C’est à moi—et je m’en souviendrai toujours!—que presqu’à la veille de sa mort cette pauvre fille s’est adressée pour arranger les choses sur le Tobakoff qui est toujours bondé, et que désormais je ne prendrai plus, par un peu de superstition et beaucoup de sympathie pour la douce, la tendre Lucette. J’étais si heureuse de faire mon possible, car quelqu’un m’avait dit que vous aussi y seriez; d’ailleurs, elle m’en a parlé elle-même: elle semblait tellement joyeuse de passer quelques jours sur le “pont des gaillards” avec son cher cousin! La psychologie du suicide est un mystère que nul savant ne peut expliquer.

  Je n’ai jamais versé tant de larmes, la plume m’en tombe des doigts. Nous revenons à Malbrook vers la mi-août. Bien à vous,

  Cordula de Prey-Tobak

  Van:

  Andre y and I were deeply moved by the additional data you provide in your dear (i.e., insufficiently stamped!) letter. We had already received, through Mr. Grombchevski, a note from the Robinsons, who cannot forgive themselves, poor well-meaning friends, for giving her that seasickness medicine, an overdoze of which, topped by liquor, must have impaired her capacity to survive—if she changed her mind in the cold dark water. I cannot express, dear Van, how unhappy I am, the more so as we never learned in the arbors of Ardis that such unhappiness could exist.

  My only love:

  This letter will never be posted. It will lie in a steel box buried under a cypress in the garden of Villa Armina, and when it turns up by chance half a millennium hence, nobody will know who wrote it and for whom it was meant. It would not have been written at all if your last line, your cry of unhappiness, were not my cry of triumph. The burden of that excitement must be… [The rest of the sentence was found to be obliterated by a rusty stain when the box was dug up in 1928. The letter continues as follows]:… back in the States, I started upon a singular quest. In Manhattan, in Kingston, in Ladore, in dozens of other towns, I kept pursuing the picture which I had not [badly discolored] on the boat, from cinema to cinema, every time discovering a new item of glorious torture, a new convulsion of beauty in your performance. That [illegible] is a complete refutation of odious Kim’s odious stills. Artistically, and ardisiacally, the best moment is one of the last—when you follow barefoot the Don who walks down a marble gallery to his doom, to the scaffold of Dona Anna’s black-curtained bed, around which you flutter, my Zegris butterfly, straightening a comically drooping candle, whispering delightful but futile instructions into the frowning lady’s ear, and then peering over that mauresque screen and suddenly dissolving in such natural laughter, helpless and lovely, that one wonders if any art could do without that erotic gasp of schoolgirl mirth. And to think, Span ish orange-tip, that all in all your magic gambol lasted but eleven minutes of stopwatch time in patches of two- or three-minute scenes!

  Alas, there came a night, in a dismal district of workshops and bleary shebeens, when for the very last time, and only halfway, because at the seduction scene the film black-winked and shriveled, I managed to catch [the entire end of the letter is damaged].

  7

  He greeted the dawn of a placid and prosperous century (more than half of which Ada and I have now seen) with the beginning of his second philosophic fable, a “denunciation of space” (never to be completed, but forming, in rear vision, a preface to his Texture of Time). Part of that treatise, a rather mannered affair, but nasty an
d sound, appeared in the first issue (January, 1904) of a now famous American monthly, The Artisan, and a comment on the excerpt is preserved in one of the tragically formal letters (all destroyed save this one) that his sister sent him by public post now and then. Somehow, after the interchange occasioned by Lucette’s death such nonclandestine correspondence had been established with the tacit sanction of Demon:

  And o’er the summits of the Tacit

  He, banned from Paradise, flew on:

  Beneath him, like a brilliant’s facet,

  Mount Peck with snows eternal shone.

  It would seem indeed that continued ignorance of each other’s existence might have looked more suspicious than the following sort of note:

  Agavia Ranch

  February 5, 1905

  I have just read Reflections in Sidra, by Ivan Veen, and I regard it as a grand piece, dear Professor. The “lost shafts of destiny” and other poetical touches reminded me of the two or three times you had tea and muffins at our place in the country about twenty years ago. I was, you remember (presumptuous phrase!), a petite fille modèle practicing archery near a vase and a parapet and you were a shy schoolboy (with whom, as my mother guessed, I may have been a wee bit in love!), who dutifully picked up the arrows I lost in the lost shrubbery of the lost castle of poor Lucette’s and happy, happy Ad-ette’s childhood, now a “Home for Blind Blacks”—both my mother and L., I’m sure, would have backed Dasha’s advice to turn it over to her Sect. Dasha, my sister-in-law (you must meet her soon, yes, yes, yes, she’s dreamy and lovely, and lots more intelligent than I), who showed me your piece, asks me to add she hopes to “renew” your acquaintance—maybe in Switzerland, at the Bellevue in Mont Roux, in October. I think you once met pretty Miss “Kim” Blackrent, well, that’s exactly dear Dasha’s type. She is very good at perceiving and pursuing originality and all kinds of studies which I can’t even name! She finished Chose (where she read History—our Lucette used to call it “Sale Histoire,” so sad and funny!). For her you’re le beau ténébreux, because once upon a time, once upon libellula wings, not long before my marriage, she attended—I mean at that time, I’m stuck in my “turnstyle”—one of your public lectures on dreams, after which she went up to you with her latest little nightmare all typed out and neatly clipped together, and you scowled darkly and refused to take it. Well, she’s been after Uncle Dementiy to have him admonish le beau ténébreux to come to Mont Roux Bellevue Hotel, in October, around the seventeenth, I guess, and he only laughs and says it’s up to Dashenka and me to arrange matters.

  So “congs” again, dear Ivan! You are, we both think, a marvelous, inimitable artist who should also “only laugh,” if cretinic critics, especially lower-upper-middle-class Englishmen, accuse his turnstyle of being “coy” and “arch,” much as an American farmer finds the parson “peculiar” because he knows Greek.

  P.S.

  Dushevno klanyayus’ (“am souledly bowing” an incorrect and vulgar construction evoking the image of a “bowing soul”) nashemu zaochno dorogomu professoru (“to our ‘unsight-unseen’ dear professor”), o kotorom mnogo slïshal (about whom have heard much) ot dobrago Dementiya Dedalovicha i sestritsï (from good Denton and my sister).

  S uvazheniem (with respect),

  Andrey Vaynlender

  Furnished Space, l’espace meublé (known to us only as furnished and full even if its contents be “absence of substance”—which seats the mind, too), is mostly watery so far as this globe is concerned. In that form it destroyed Lucette. Another variety, more or less atmospheric, but no less gravitational and loathsome, destroyed Demon.

  Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region. A list of “leading figures” dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be—

  “I’m hongree,” said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.

  “Use bell,” said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:

  —the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency—

  The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father.

  “The lost shafts of every man’s destiny remain scattered all around him,” etc. (Reflections in Sidra).

  The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house, in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Gromb-chevski and Gromwell), Dr. Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon’s new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl’s eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced “seminal” by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 (“Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,” “Sween as poet and person,” “Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography”) both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman’s control of background adjustment—or Demon’s edict.

  The table talk dealt mainly with business matters. Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill (as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr. Sween, a greedy practitioner with flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were thrown in. The deal did not come off.

  Van pursued his studies in private until his election (at thirty-five!) to the Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston. The Council’s choice had been a consequence of disaster and desperation; the two other candidates, solid scholars much older and altogether better than he, esteemed even in Tartary where they often traveled, starry-eyed, hand-in-hand, had mysteriously vanished (perhaps dying under false names in the never-explained accident above the smiling ocean) at the “eleventh hour,” for the Chair was to be dismantled if it remained vacant for a legally limited length of time, so as to give another, less-coveted but perfectly good seat the chance to be brought in from the back parlor. Van neither needed nor appreciated the thing, but accepted it in a spirit of good-natured perversity or perverse gratitude, or simply in memory of his father who had been somehow involved in the whole affair. He did not take his task too seriously, reducing to a strict minimum, ten or so per year, the lectures he deli
vered in a nasal drone mainly produced by a new and hard to get “voice recorder” concealed in his waistcoat pocket, among anti-infection Venus pills, while he moved his lips silently and thought of the lamplit page of his sprawling script left unfinished in his study. He spent in Kingston a score of dull years (variegated by trips abroad), an obscure figure around which no legends collected in the university or the city. Unbeloved by his austere colleagues, unknown in local pubs, unregretted by male students, he retired in 1922, after which he resided in Europe.

  8

  arriving mont roux bellevue sunday

  dinnertime adoration sorrow rainbows

  Van got this bold cable with his breakfast on Saturday, October 10, 1905, at the Manhattan Palace in Geneva, and that same day moved to Mont Roux at the opposite end of the lake. He put up there at his usual hotel, Les Trois Cygnes. Its small, frail, but almost mythically ancient concierge had died during Van’s stay four years earlier, and instead of wizened Julien’s discreet smile of mysterious complicity that used to shine like a lamp through parchment, the round rosy face of a recent bellboy, who now wore a frockcoat, greeted fat old Van.

  “Lucien,” said Dr. Veen, peering over his spectacles, “I may have—as your predecessor would know—all kinds of queer visitors, magicians, masked ladies, madmen—que sais-je? and I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here’s a prefatory bonus.”

  “Merci infiniment,” said the concierge, and, as usual, Van felt infinitely touched by the courteous hyperbole provoking no dearth of philosophical thought.

  He engaged two spacious rooms, 509 and 510: an Old World salon with golden-green furniture, and a charming bed chamber joined to a square bathroom, evidently converted from an ordinary room (around 1875, when the hotel was renovated and splendified). With thrilling anticipation, he read the octagonal cardboard sign on its dainty red string: Do not disturb. Prière de ne pas déranger. Hang this notice on the doorhandle outside. Inform Telephone Exchange. Avisez en particulier la téléphoniste (no emphasis, no limpid-voiced girl in the English version).