Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  He ordered an orgy of orchids from the rez-de-chaussée flower shop, and one ham sandwich from Room Service. He survived a long night (with Alpine Choughs heckling a cloudless dawn) in a bed hardly two-thirds the size of the tremendous one at their unforgettable flat twelve years ago. He breakfasted on the balcony—and ignored a reconnoitering gull. He allowed himself an opulent siesta after a late lunch; took a second bath to drown time; and with stops at every other bench on the promenade spent a couple of hours strolling over to the new Bellevue Palace, just half a mile southeast.

  One red boat marred the blue mirror (in Casanova’s days there would have been hundreds!). The grebes were there for the winter but the coots had not yet returned.

  Ardis, Manhattan, Mont Roux, our little rousse is dead. Vrubel’s wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me.

  Mount Russet, the forested hill behind the town, lived up to its name and autumnal reputation, with a warm glow of curly chestnut trees; and on the opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex (Scex) Noir, Black Rock.

  He felt hot and uncomfortable in silk shirt and gray flannels—one of his older suits that he had chosen because it happened to make him look slimmer; but he should have omitted its tightish waistcoat. Nervous as a boy at his first rendezvous! He wondered what better to hope for—that her presence should be diluted at once by that of other people or that she should manage to be alone, for the first minutes, at least? Did his glasses and short black mustache really make him look younger, as polite whores affirmed?

  When he reached at long last the whitewashed and blue-shaded Bellevue (patronized by wealthy Estotilanders, Rheinlanders, and Vinelanders, but not placed in the same superclass as the old, tawny and gilt, huge, sprawling, lovable Trois Cygnes), Van saw with dismay that his watch still lagged far behind 7:00 P.M., the earliest dinner hour in local hotels. So he recrossed the lane and had a double kirsch, with a lump of sugar, in a pub. A dead and dry hummingbird moth lay on the window ledge of the lavatory. Thank goodness, symbols did not exist either in dreams or in the life in between.

  He pushed through the revolving door of the Bellevue, tripped over a gaudy suitcase, and made his entrée at a ridiculous run. The concierge snapped at the unfortunate green-aproned cameriere, who had left the bag there. Yes, they were expecting him-in the lounge. A German tourist caught up with him, to apologize, effusively, and not without humor, for the offending object, which, he said, was his.

  “If so,” remarked Van, “you should not allow spas to slap their stickers on your private appendages.”

  His reply was inept, and the whole episode had a faint param-nesic tang—and next instant Van was shot dead from behind (such things happen, some tourists are very unbalanced) and stepped into his next phase of existence.

  He stopped on the threshold of the main lounge, but he had hardly begun to scan the distribution of its scattered human contents when an abrupt flurry occurred in a distant group. Ada, spurning decorum, was hurrying toward him. Her solitary and precipitate advance consumed in reverse all the years of their separation as she changed from a dark-glittering stranger with the high hair-do in fashion to the pale-armed girl in black who had always belonged to him. At that particular twist of time they happened to be the only people conspicuously erect and active in the huge room, and heads turned and eyes peered when the two met in the middle of it as on a stage; but what should have been, in culmination of her headlong motion, of the ecstasy in her eyes and fiery jewels, a great explosion of voluble love, was marked by incongruous silence; he raised to his unbending lips and kissed her cygneous hand, and then they stood still, staring at each other, he playing with coins in his trouser pockets under his “humped” jacket, she fingering her necklace, each reflecting, as it were, the uncertain light to which all that radiance of mutual welcome had catastrophically decreased. She was more Ada than ever, but a dash of new elegancy had been added to her shy, wild charm. Her still blacker hair was drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise. He was trying to form a succint sentence (to warn her about the device he planned for securing a rendezvous), but she interrupted his throat clearing with a muttered injunction: Sbrif usï! (that mustache must go) and turned away to lead him to the far corner from which she had taken so many years to reach him.

  The first person whom she introduced him to, at that island of fauteuils and androids, now getting up from around a low table with a copper ashbowl for hub, was the promised belle-soeur, a short plumpish lady in governess gray, very oval-faced, with bobbed auburn hair, a sallowish complexion, smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril, added to its hypercritical curve by an afterthought of nature as not seldom happens when a Russian’s face is mass-produced. The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband’s public parts. But as Ada, beaming again, made fluttery introductions with an invisible wand, the person Van had grossly mistaken for Andrey Vinelander was transformed into Yuzlik, the gifted director of the ill-fated Don Juan picture. “Vasco de Gama, I presume,” Yuzlik murmured. Beside him, ignored by him, unknown by name to Ada, and now long dead of dreary anonymous ailments, stood in servile attitudes the two agents of Lemorio, the flamboyant comedian (a bearded boor of exceptional, and now also forgotten, genius, whom Yuzlik passionately wanted for his next picture). Lemorio had stood him up twice before, in Rome and San Remo, each time sending him for “preliminary contact” those two seedy, incompetent, virtually insane, people with whom by now Yuzlik had nothing more to discuss, having exhausted everything, topical gossip, Lemorio’s sex life, Hoole’s hooliganism, as well as the hobbies of his, Yuzlik’s, three sons and those of their, the agents’, adopted child, a lovely Eurasian lad, who had recently been slain in a night-club fracas—which closed that subject. Ada had welcomed Yuzlik’s unexpected reality in the lounge of the Bellevue not only as a counterpoise to the embarrassment and the deceit, but also because she hoped to sidle into What Daisy Knew; however, besides having no spells left in the turmoil of her spirit for business blandishments, she soon understood that if Lemorio were finally engaged, he would want her part for one of his mistresses.

  Finally Van reached Ada’s husband.

  Van had murdered good Andrey Andreevich Vinelander so often, so thoroughly, at all the dark crossroads of the mind, that now the poor chap, dressed in a hideous, funereal, double-breasted suit, with those dough-soft features slapped together anyhow, and those sad-hound baggy eyes, and the dotted lines of sweat on his brow, presented all the depressing features of an unnecessary resurrection. Through a not-too-odd oversight (or rather “undersight”) Ada omitted to introduce the two men. Her husband enunciated his name, patronymic, and surname with the didactic intonations of a Russian educational-film narrator. “Obnimemsya, dorogoy” (let us embrace, old boy), he added in a more vibrant voice but with his mournful expression unchanged (oddly remindful of that of Kosygin, the mayor of Yukonsk, receiving a girl scout’s bouquet or inspecting the damage caused by an earthquake). His breath carried the odor of what Van recognized with astonishment as a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudobronchitis. As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil. He kept his dun-colored hair as short as a soldier’s by means of his own clippers. He had the korrektniy and neat appearance of the one-bath-per-week Estotian hobereau.

  We all flocked to the dining room. Van brushed against the past as he shot an arm out to forestall a door-opening waiter, and the past (still fingering his ne
cklace) recompensed him with a sidelong “Dolores” glance.

  Chance looked after the seating arrangement.

  Lemorio’s agents, an elderly couple, unwed but having lived as man and man for a sufficiently long period to warrant a silver-screen anniversary, remained unsplit at table between Yuzlik, who never once spoke to them, and Van, who was being tortured by Dorothy. As to Andrey (who made a thready “sign of the cross” over his un-unbuttonable abdomen before necking in his napkin), he found himself seated between sister and wife. He demanded the “cart de van” (affording the real Van mild amusement), but, being a hard-liquor man, cast only a stunned look at the “Swiss White” page of the wine list before “passing the buck” to Ada who promptly ordered champagne. He was to inform her early next morning that her “Kuzen proizvodit (produces) udivitel’no simpatichnoe vpechatlenie (a remarkably sympathetic, in the sense of ‘fetching,’ impression).” The dear fellow’s verbal apparatus consisted almost exclusively of remarkably sympathetic Russian commonplaces of language, but—not liking to speak of himself—he spoke little, especially since his sister’s sonorous soliloquy (lapping at Van’s rock) mesmerized and childishly engrossed him. Dorothy preambled her long-delayed report on her pet nightmare with a humble complaint (“Of course, I know that for your patients to have bad dreams is a zhidovskaya prerogativa”), but her reluctant analyst’s attention every time it returned to her from his plate fixed itself so insistently on the Greek cross of almost ecclesiastical size shining on her otherwise unremarkable chest that she thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with the eruption of a dream volcano) to say: “I gather from your writings that you are a terrible cynic. Oh, I quite agree with Simone Traser that a dash of cynicism adorns a real man; yet I’d like to warn you that I object to anti-Orthodox jokes in case you intend making one.”

  By now Van had more than enough of his mad, but not interestingly mad, convive. He just managed to steady his glass, which a gesture he made to attract Ada’s attention had almost knocked down, and said, without further ado, in what Ada termed afterwards a mordant, ominous and altogether inadmissible tone:

  “Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chère. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette’s accounts in several Swiss banks—” and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. “I suggest,” he added, “that if you have no other engagements”—(sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval)—“you and I go to see Maître Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour’s drive from here—who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh—I mean sign with a sigh—the matter is tedious. All right? All right.”

  “But, Ada,” clarioned Dora, “you forget that tomorrow morning we wanted to visit the Institute of Floral Harmony in the Château Pirón!”

  “You’ll do it after tomorrow, or Tuesday, or Tuesday week,” said Van. “I’d gladly drive all three of you to that fascinating lieu de méditation but my fast little Unseretti seats only one passenger, and that business of untraceable deposits is terribly urgent, I think.”

  Yuzlik was dying to say something. Van yielded to the well-meaning automaton.

  “I’m delighted and honored to dine with Vasco de Gama,” said Yuzlik holding up his glass in front of his handsome facial apparatus.

  The same garbling—and this gave Van a clue to Yuzlik’s source of recondite information—occurred in The Chimes of Chose (a memoir by a former chum of Van’s, now Lord Chose, which had climbed, and still clung to, the “best seller” trellis—mainly because of several indecent but very funny references to the Villa Venus in Ranton Brooks). While he munched the marrow of an adequate answer, with a mouthful of sharlott (not the charlatan “charlotte russe” served in most restaurants, but the hot toasty crust, with apple filling, of the authentic castle pie made by Takomin, the hotel’s head cook, who hailed from California’s Rose Bay), two urges were cleaving Van asunder: one to insult Yuzlik for having placed his hand on Ada’s when asking her to pass him the butter two or three courses ago (he was incomparably more jealous of that liquid-eyed male than of Andrey and remembered with a shiver of pride and hate how on New Year’s Eve, 1892, he had lashed out at a relative of his, foppish Van Zemski, who had permitted himself a similar caress when visiting their restaurant table, and whose jaw he had broken later, under some pretext or other, at the young prince’s club); and the other—to tell Yuzlik how much he had admired Don Juan’s Last Fling. Not being able, for obvious reasons, to satisfy urge number one he dismissed number two as secretly smacking of a poltroon’s politeness and contented himself with replying, after swallowing his amber-soaked mash:

  “Jack Chose’s book is certainly most entertaining—especially that bit about apples and diarrhea, and the excerpts from the Venus Shell Album”—(Yuzlik’s eyes darted aside in specious recollection, whereupon he bowed in effusive tribute to a common memory)—“but the rascal should have neither divulged my name nor botched my thespionym.”

  During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three), he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called “the face”—a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty masks do not count). Ada, on the other hand, could not help her dark eyes from turning to him every other moment, as if, with each glance, she regained her balance; but when the company went back to the lounge and finished their coffee there, difficulties of focalization began to beset Van, whose points de repère disastrously decreased after the three cinematists had left.

  ANDREY: Adochka, dushka (darling), razskazhi zhe pro rancho, pro skot (tell about the ranch, the cattle), emu zhe lyubopitno (it cannot fail to interest him).

  ADA (as if coming out of a trance): O chyom tï (you were saying something)?

  ANDREY: Ya govoryu, razskazhi emu pro tvoyo zhit’yo bït’yo (I was saying, tell him about your daily life, your habitual existence). Avos’ zaglyanet k nam (maybe he’d look us up).

  ADA: Ostav’, chto tarn interesnago (forget it, what’s so interesting about it)?

  DASHA (turning to Ivan): Don’t listen to her. Massa interesnago (heaps of interesting stuff). Delo brata og-romnoe, volnuyushchee delo, trebuyushchee ne meríshe truda, chem uchyonaya dissertatsiya (his business is a big thing, quite as demanding as a scholar’s). Nashi sel’skohozyaystvennïya mashinï i ih teni (our agricultural machines and their shadows)—eto tselaya kollektisya predmetov mo demo y skul’pturi i zhivopisi (is a veritable collection of modern art) which I suspect you adore as I do.

  IVAN (to Andrey): I know nothing about farming but thanks all the same.

  (A pause.)

  IVAN (not quite knowing what to add): Yes, I would certainly like to see your machinery some day. Those things always remind me of long-necked prehistoric monsters, sort of grazing here and there, you know, or just brooding over the sorrows of extinction—but perhaps I’m thinking of excavators—

  DOROTHY: Andrey’s machinery is anything but prehistoric! (laughs cheerlessly).

  ANDREY: Slovom, milosti prosim (anyway, you are most welcome). Budete zharif verhom s kuzinoy (you’ll have a rollicking time riding on horseback with your cousin).

  (Pause.)

  IVAN (to Ada): Half-past nine tomorrow morning won’t be too early for you? I’m at the Trois Cygnes. I’ll come to fetch you in my tiny car—not on horseback (smiles like a corpse at Andrey).

  DASHA: DovoÏno skuchno (rather a pity) that Ada’s visit to lovely Lake Leman need be spoiled by sessions with lawyers and bankers. I’m sure you can satisfy most of those needs by having her come a few times chez vous and not to Luzon or Geneva.

  The madhouse babble reverted to Lucette’s bank accounts, Ivan Dementievich explained that she had been mislay
ing one checkbook after another, and nobody knew exactly in how many different banks she had dumped considerable amounts of money. Presently, Andrey who now looked like the livid Yukonsk mayor after opening the Catkin Week Fair or fighting a Forest Fire with a new type of extinguisher, grunted out of his chair, excused himself for going to bed so early, and shook hands with Van as if they were parting forever (which, indeed, they were). Van remained with the two ladies in the cold and deserted lounge where a thrifty subtraction of faraday-light had imperceptibly taken place.

  “How did you like my brother?” asked Dorothy. “On red-chayshiy chelovek (he’s a most rare human being). I can’t tell you how profoundly affected he was by the terrible death of your father, and, of course, by Lucette’s bizarre end. Even he, the kindest of men, could not help disapproving of her Parisian sans-gêne, but he greatly admired her looks—as I think you also did—no, no, do not negate it!—because, as I always said, her prettiness seemed to complement Ada’s, the two halves forming together something like perfect beauty, in the Platonic sense” (that cheerless smile again). “Ada is certainly a ‘perfect beauty,’ a real muirninochka—even when she winces like that—but she is beautiful only in our little human terms, within the quotes of our social esthetics—right, Professor?—in the way a meal or a marriage or a little French tramp can be called perfect.”

  “Drop her a curtsey,” gloomily remarked Van to Ada.

  “Oh, my Adochka knows how devoted I am to her”—(opening her palm in the wake of Ada’s retreating hand). “I’ve shared all her troubles. How many podzharïh (tight-crotched) cowboys we’ve had to fire because they delali ey glazki (ogled her)! And how many bereavements we’ve gone through since the new century started! Her mother and my mother; the Archbishop of Ivankover and Dr. Swissair of Lumbago (where mother and I reverently visited him in 1888); three distinguished uncles (whom, fortunately, I hardly knew); and your father, who, I’ve always maintained, resembled a Russian aristocrat much more than he did an Irish Baron. Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium—you don’t mind, Ada, if I divulge to him ces potins de famille?—our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other—that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?”