Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “I don’t attend school any longer,” said Van, stifling a yawn; “and, furthermore, in my works, I try not to ‘explain’ anything, I merely describe.”

  “Still, you cannot deny that certain insights—”

  It went on and on like that for more than an hour and Van’s clenched jaws began to ache. Finally, Ada got up, and Dorothy followed suit but continued to speak standing:

  “Tomorrow dear Aunt Beloskunski-Belokonski is coming to dinner, a delightful old spinster, who lives in a villa above Val-vey. Terriblement grande dame et tout ça. Elle aime taquiner Andryusha en disant qu’un simple cultivateur comme lui n’ aurait pas dû épouser la fille d’une actrice et d’un inarch and de tableaux. Would you care to join us—Jean?”

  Jean replied: “Alas, no, dear Daria Andrevna: Je dois ‘surveiller les kilos.’ Besides, I have a business dinner tomorrow.”

  “At least”—(smiling)—“you could call me Dasha.”

  “I do it for Andrey,” explained Ada, “actually the grand’ dame in question is a vulgar old skunk.”

  “Ada!” uttered Dasha with a look of gentle reproof.

  Before the two ladies proceeded toward the lift, Ada glanced at Van—and he—no fool in amorous strategy—refrained to comment on her “forgetting” her tiny black silk handbag on the seat of her chair. He did not accompany them beyond the passage leading liftward and, clutching the token, awaited her planned return behind a pillar of hotel-hall mongrel design, knowing that in a moment she would say to her accursed companion (by now revising, no doubt, her views on the “beau ténébreux”) as the lift’s eye turned red under a quick thumb: “Akh, sumochku zabila (forgot my bag)!”—and instantly flitting back, like Vere’s Ninon, she would be in his arms.

  Their open mouths met in tender fury, and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening.

  “We’ll vroom straight to my place as soon as you wake up, don’t bother to bathe, jump into your lenclose—” and, with the burning sap brimming, he again devoured her, until (Dorothy must have reached the sky!) she danced three fingers on his wet lips—and escaped.

  “Wipe your neck!” he called after her in a rapid whisper (who, and where in this tale, in this life, had also attempted a whispered cry?)

  That night, in a post-Moët dream, he sat on the talc of a tropical beach full of sun-baskers, and one moment was rubbing the red, irritated shaft of a writhing boy, and the next was looking through dark glasses at the symmetrical shading on either side of a shining spine with fainter shading between the ribs belonging to Lucette or Ada sitting on a towel at some distance from him. Presently, she turned and lay prone, and she, too, wore sunglasses, and neither he nor she could perceive the exact direction of each other’s gaze through the black amber, yet he knew by the dimple of a faint smile that she was looking at his (it had been his all the time) raw scarlet. Somebody said, wheeling a table nearby: “It’s one of the Vane sisters,” and he awoke murmuring with professional appreciation the oneiric word-play combining his name and surname, and plucked out the wax plugs, and, in a marvelous act of rehabilitation and link-up, the breakfast table clanked from the corridor across the threshold of the adjacent room, and, already munching and honey-crumbed, Ada entered his bedchamber. It was only a quarter to eight!

  “Smart girl!” said Van; “but first of all I must go to the petit endroit (W.C.)”

  That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-stayed, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white “Nuremberg Virgin”-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor—in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovi-denced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs. Vine-lander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus.

  “I shall walk you home—we have just returned from a conference with the Luzon bankers and I’m walking you back to your hotel from mine”—this was the phrase consacrée that Van invariably uttered to inform the fates of the situation. One little precaution they took from the start was to strictly avoid equivocal exposure on their lakeside balcony which was visible to every yellow or mauve flowerhead on the platbands of the promenade.

  They used a back exit to leave the hotel.

  A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a “Lebanese cedar”—if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a princely paulownia (“mulberry tree!” snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. A ginkgo (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbor, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or “She Yawns Castle”). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon.

  “My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.” (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). “And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.”

  “Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight—there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: ‘I will not cheat the poor grubs!’ Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch—an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums—which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for ‘popping the hymen’—whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.”

  “Extraordinary,” said Van, “they had been growing younger and younger—I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.”

  “You never loved your father,” said Ada sadly.

  “Oh, I did and do—tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.”

  “I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated—without quite understanding it�
�Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian ‘tssk-tssk’ and a shake of the head—complimentary and all that—‘what a balagur (wag) you are!’—And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i bala gur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable (‘priceless for impudence and absurdity’) Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.”

  “Could one hear more about that?” asked Van.

  “Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.”

  “One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture—frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells—”

  “Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,” said Ada, and then pointed to a lawn-side circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles?

  The last butterflies of 1905, indolent Peacocks and Red Admirables, one Queen of Spain and one Clouded Yellow, were making the most of the modest blossoms. A tram on their left passed close to the promenade, where they rested and cautiously kissed when the whine of wheels had subsided. The rails hit by the sun acquired a beautiful cobalt sheen—the reflection of noon in terms of bright metal.

  “Let’s have cheese and white wine under that pergola,” suggested Van. “The Vinelanders will lunch à deux today.”

  Some kind of musical gadget played jungle jingles; the open bags of a Tirolese couple stood unpleasantly near—and Van bribed the waiter to carry their table out, onto the boards of an unused pier. Ada admired the waterfowl population: Tufted Ducks, black with contrasty white flanks making them look like shoppers (this and the other comparisons are all Ada’s) carrying away an elongated flat carton (new tie? gloves?) under each arm, while the black tuft recalled Van’s head when he was fourteen and wet, having just taken a dip in the brook. Coots (which had returned after all), swimming with an odd pumping movement of the neck, the way horses walk. Small grebes and big ones, with crests, holding their heads erect, with something heraldic in their demeanor. They had, she said, wonderful nuptial rituals, closely facing each other—so (putting up her index fingers bracket wise)—rather like two bookends and no books between, and, shaking their heads in turn, with flashes of copper.

  “I asked you about Andrey’s rituals.”

  “Ach, Andrey is so excited to see all those European birds! He’s a great sportsman and knows our Western game remarkably well. We have in the West a very cute little grebe with a black ribbon around its fat white bill. Andrey calls it pestro-klyuvaya chomga. And that big choviga there is hohlushka, he says. If you scowl like that once again, when I say something innocent and on the whole rather entertaining, I’m going to kiss you on the tip of the nose, in front of everybody.”

  Just a tiny mite artificial, not in her best Veen. But she recovered instantly:

  “Oh, look at those sea gulls playing chicken.”

  Several rieuses, a few of which were still wearing their tight black summer bonnets, had settled on the vermilion railing along the lakeside, with their tails to the path, and watched which of them would stay staunchly perched at the approach of the next passerby. The majority flapped waterward as Ada and Van neared; one twitched its tail feathers and made a movement analogous to “bending one’s knees” but saw it through and remained on the railing.

  “I think we noticed that species only once in Arizona—at a place called Saltsink—a kind of man-made lake. Our common ones have quite different wing tips.”

  A Crested Grebe, afloat some way off, slowly, very slowly started to sink, then abruptly executed a jumping fish plunge, showing its glossy white underside, and vanished.

  “Why on earth,” asked Van, “didn’t you let her know, in one way or another, that you were not angry with her? Your phoney letter made her most unhappy!”

  “Pah!” uttered Ada. “She put me in a most embarrassing situation. I can quite understand her being mad at Dorothy (who meant well, poor stupid thing—stupid enough to warn me against possible ‘infections’ such as ‘labial lesbianitis.’ Labial lesbianitis!) but that was no reason for Lucette to look up Andrey in town and tell him she was great friends with the man I had loved before my marriage. He didn’t dare annoy me with his revived curiosity, but he complained to Dorothy of Lucette’s neopravdannaya zhestokosf (unjustified cruelty).”

  “Ada, Ada,” groaned Van, “I want you to get rid of that husband of yours, and his sister, right now!”

  “Give me a fortnight,” she said, “I have to go back to the ranch. I can’t bear the thought of her poking among my things.”

  At first everything seemed to proceed according to the instructions of some friendly genius.

  Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to visit him “because of the constant necessity of routine tests”—or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude.

  During the next days, Dorothy used her leisure to spy upon Ada. The woman was sure of three things: that Ada had a lover in Switzerland; that Van was her brother; and that he was arranging for his irresistible sister secret trysts with the person she had loved before her marriage. The delightful phenomenon of all three terms being true, but making nonsense when hashed, provided Van with another source of amusement.

  The Three Swans overwinged a bastion. Anyone who called, flesh or voice, was told by the concierge or his acolytes that Van was out, that Madame André Vinelander was unknown, and that all they could do was to take a message. His car, parked in a secluded bosquet, could not betray his presence. In the forenoon he regularly used the service lift that communicated directly with the backyard. Lucien, something of a wit, soon learned to recognize Dorothy’s contralto: “La voix cuivrée a téléphoné,” “La Trompette n’était pas contente ce matin,” et cetera. Then the friendly Fates took a day off.

  Andrey had had a first copious hemorrhage while on a business trip to Phoenix sometime in August. A stubborn, independent, not overbright optimist, he had ascribed it to a nosebleed having gone the wrong way and concealed it from everybody so as to avoid “stupid talks.” He had had for years a two-pack smoker’s fruity cough, but when a few days after that first “postnasal blood drip” he spat a scarlet gob into his washbasin, he resolved to cut down on cigarettes and limit himself to tsigarki (cigarillos). The next contretemps occurred in Ada’s presence, just before they left for Europe; he managed to dispose of his bloodstained handkerchief before she saw it, but she remembered him saying “Vot te na” (well, that’s odd) in a bothered voice. Believing with most other Estotians that the best doctors were to be found in Central Europe, he told himself he would see a Zurich specialist whose name he got from a member of his “lodge” (meeting place of brotherly moneymakers), if he again coughed up blood. The American hospital in Valvey, next to the Russian church built by Vladimir Chevalier, his granduncle, proved to be good enough for diagnosing advanced tuberculosis of the left lung.

  On Wednesday, October 22, in the early afternoon, Dorothy, “frantically” trying to “locate” Ada (who after her usua
l visit to the Three Swans was spending a couple of profitable hours at Paphia’s “Hair and Beauty” Salon) left a message for Van, who got it only late at night when he returned from a trip to Sorcière, in the Valais, about one hundred miles east, where he bought a villa for himself et via cousine, and had supper with the former owner, a banker’s widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but pretty, daughter Eveline, both of whom seemed erotically moved by the rapidity of the deal.

  He was still calm and confident; after carefully studying Dorothy’s hysterical report, he still believed that nothing threatened their destiny; that at best Andrey would die right now, sparing Ada the bother of a divorce; and that at worst the man would be packed off to a mountain sanatorium in a novel to linger there through a few last pages of epilogical mopping up far away from the reality of their united lives. Friday morning, at nine o’clock—as bespoken on the eve—he drove over to the Bellevue, with the pleasant plan of motoring to Sorcière to show her the house.

  At night a thunderstorm had rather patly broken the back of the miraculous summer. Even more patly the sudden onset of her flow had curtailed yesterday’s caresses. It was raining when he slammed the door of his car, hitched up his velveteen slacks, and, stepping across puddles, passed between an ambulance and a large black Yak, waiting one behind the other before the hotel. All the wings of the Yak were spread open, two bellboys had started to pile in luggage under the chauffeur’s supervision, and various parts of the old hackney car were responding with discreet creaks to the grunts of the loaders.