Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Our modest Present is, then, the time span that one is directly and actually aware of, with the lingering freshness of the Past still perceived as part of the nowness. In regard to everyday life and the habitual comfort of the body (reasonably healthy, reasonably strong, breathing the green breeze, relishing the aftertaste of the most exquisite food in the world—a boiled egg), it does not matter that we can never enjoy the true Present, which is an instant of zero duration, represented by a rich smudge, as the dimensionless point of geometry is by a sizable dot in printer’s ink on palpable paper. The normal motorist, according to psychologists and policemen, can perceive, visually, a unit of time as short in extension as one tenth of a second (I had a patient, a former gambler, who could identify a playing card in a five-times-faster flash!). It would be interesting to measure the instant we need to become aware of disappointed or fulfilled expectation. Smells can be very sudden, and in most people the ear and sense of touch work quicker than the eye. Those two hitchhikers really smelled—the male one revoltingly.

  Since the Present is but an imaginary point without an awareness of the immediate past, it is necessary to define that awareness. Not for the first time will Space intrude if I say that what we are aware of as “Present” is the constant building up of the Past, its smoothly and relentlessly rising level. How meager! How magic!

  Here they are, the two rocky ruin-crowned hills that I have retained for seventeen years in my mind with decalcomaniac romantic vividness—though not quite exactly, I confess; memory likes the otsebyatina (“what one contributes oneself”); but the slight discrepancy is now corrected and the act of artistic correction enhances the pang of the Present. The sharpest feeling of nowness, in visual terms, is the deliberate possession of a segment of Space collected by the eye. This is Time’s only contact with Space, but it has a far-reaching reverberation. To be eternal the Present must depend on the conscious spanning of an infinite expansure. Then, and only then, is the Present equatable with Timeless Space. I have been wounded in my duel with the Impostor.

  And now I drive into Mont Roux, under garlands of heartrending welcome. Today is Monday, July 14, 1922, five-thirteen P.M. by my wrist watch, eleven fifty-two by my car’s built-in clock, four-ten by all the timepieces in town. The author is in a confused state of exhilaration, exhaustion, expectancy and panic. He has been climbing with two Austrian guides and a temporarily adopted daughter in the incomparable Balkan mountains. He spent most of May in Dalmatia, and June in the Dolomites, and got letters in both places from Ada telling him of her husband’s death (April 23, in Arizona). He started working his way west in a dark-blue Argus, dearer to him than sapphires and morphos because she happened to have ordered an exactly similar one to be ready for her in Geneva. He col lected three additional villas, two on the Adriatic and one at Ardez in the Northern Grisons. Late on Sunday, July 13, in nearby Alvena, the concierge of the Alraun Palace handed him a cable that had waited for him since Friday

  ARRIVING MONT ROUX TROIS CYGNES MONDAY DINNERTIME I WANT YOU TO WIRE ME FRANKLY IF THE DATE AND THE WHOLE TRALALA ARE INCONVENIENT.

  He transmitted by the new “instantogram,” flashed to the Geneva airport, a message ending in the last word of her 1905 cable; and despite the threats of a torrential night set out by car for the Vaud. Traveling too fast and too wildly, he somehow missed the Oberhalbstein road at the Sylvaplana fork (150 kilometers south of Alvena); wriggled back north, via Chiavenna and Splügen, to reach in apocalyptic circumstances Highway 19 (an unnecessary trip of 100 kilometers); veered by mistake east to Chur; performed an unprintable U-turn, and covered in a couple of hours the 175-kilometer stretch westward to Brig. The pale flush of dawn in his rear-vision mirror had long since turned to passionately bright daylight when he looped south, by the new Pfynwald road, to Sorcière, where seventeen years ago he had bought a house (now Villa Jolana). The three or four servants he had left there to look after it had taken advantage of his lengthy absence to fade away; so, with the enthusiastic help of two hitch-hikers stranded in the vicinity—a disgusting youth from Hilden and his long-haired, slatternly, languorous Hilda—he had to break into his own house. His accomplices were mistaken if they expected to find loot and liquor there. After throwing them out he vainly courted sleep on a sheetless bed and finally betook himself to the bird-mad garden, where his two friends were copulating in the empty swimming pool and had to be shooed off again. It was now around noon. He worked for a couple of hours on his Texture of Time, begun in the Dolomites at the Lammermoor (not the best of his recent hotels). The utilitarian impulse behind the task was to keep him from brooding on the ordeal of happiness awaiting him 150 kilometers west; it did not prevent a healthy longing for a hot breakfast from making him interrupt his scribbling to seek out a roadside inn on his way to Mont Roux.

  The Three Swans where he had reserved rooms 508–509–510 had undergone certain changes since 1905. A portly, plum-nosed Lucien did not recognize him at once—and then remarked that Monsieur was certainly not “deperishing”—although actually Van had almost reverted to his weight of seventeen years earlier, having shed several kilos in the Balkans rock-climbing with crazy little Acrazia (now dumped in a fashionable boarding school near Florence). No, Madame Vinn Landère had not called. Yes, the hall had been renovated. Swiss-German Louis Wicht now managed the hotel instead of his late father-in-law Luigi Fantini. In the lounge, as seen through its entrance, the huge memorable oil—three ample-haunched Ledas swapping lacustrine impressions—had been replaced by a neoprimitive masterpiece showing three yellow eggs and a pair of plumber’s gloves on what looked like wet bathroom tiling. As Van stepped into the “elevator” followed by a black-coated receptionist, it acknowledged his footfall with a hollow clank and then, upon moving, feverishly began transmitting a fragmentary report on some competition—possibly a tricycle race. Van could not help feeling sorry that this blind functional box (even smaller than the slop-pail lift he had formerly used at the back) now substituted for the luxurious affair of yore—an ascentive hall of mirrors—whose famous operator (white whiskers, eight languages) had become a button.

  In the hallway of 509, Van recognized the Bruslot à la sonde picture next to the pregnant-looking white closet (under whose round sliding doors the corner of the carpet, now gone, would invariably catch). In the salon itself, only a lady’s bureau and the balcony view were familiar. Everything else—the semi transparent shredded-wheat ornaments, the glass flowerheads, the silk-covered armchairs—had been superseded by Hochmodern fixtures.

  He showered and changed, and finished the flask of brandy in his dressing case, and called the Geneva airport and was told that the last plane from America had just arrived. He went for a stroll—and saw that the famous “mûrier,” that spread its great limbs over a humble lavatory on a raised terrace at the top of a cobbled lane, was now in sumptuous purple-blue bloom. He had a beer at the café opposite the railway station, and then, automatically, entered the flower shop next door. He must be gaga to have forgotten what she said the last time about her strange anthophobia (somehow stemming from that débauche à trois thirty years ago). Roses she never liked anyway. He stared and was easily outstared by small Carols from Belgium, long-stemmed Pink Sensations, vermilion Superstars. There were also zinnias, and chrysanthemums, and potted aphelandras, and two graceful fringetails in an inset aquarium. Not wishing to disappoint the courteous old florist, he bought seventeen odorless Baccara roses, asked for the directory, opened it at Ad-Au, Mont Roux, lit upon “Addor, Yolande, Mlle secret., rue des Délices, 6,” and with American presence of mind had his bouquet sent there.

  People were already hurrying home from work. Mademoiselle Addor, in a sweat-stained frock, was climbing the stairs. The streets had been considerably quieter in the sourdine Past. The old Morris pillar, upon which the present Queen of Portugal figured once as an actress, no longer stood at the corner of Chemin de Mustrux (old corruption of the town’s name). Must Trucks roar through Must Rux?

  The
chambermaid had drawn the curtains. He wrenched them all open as if resolved to prolong to its utmost limit the torture of that day. The ironwork balcony jutted out far enough to catch the slanting rays. He recalled his last glimpse of the lake on that dismal day in October, 1905, after parting with Ada. Fuligula ducks were falling and rising upon the rain-pocked swell in concentrated enjoyment of doubled water; along the lake walk scrolls of froth curled over the ridges of advancing gray waves and every now and then a welter heaved sufficiently high to splash over the parapet. But now, on this radiant summer evening, no waves foamed, no birds swam; only a few seagulls could be seen, fluttering white over their black reflections. The wide lovely lake lay in dreamy serenity, fretted with green undulations, ruffed with blue, patched with glades of lucid smoothness between the ackers; and, in the lower right corner of the picture, as if the artist had wished to include a very special example of light, the dazzling wake of the westering sun pulsated through a lakeside lombardy poplar that seemed both liquefied and on fire.

  A distant idiot leaning backward on waterskis behind a speedboat started to rip the canvas; fortunately, he collapsed before doing much harm, and at the same instant the drawing-room telephone rang.

  Now it so happened that she had never—never, at least, in adult life—spoken to him by phone; hence the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little “leap” in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the contour of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode. It was the timbre of their past, as if the past had put through that call, a miraculous connection (“Ardis, one eight eight six”—comment? Non, non, pas huitante-huit—huitante-six). Goldenly, youthfully, it bubbled with all the melodious characteristics he knew—or better say recollected, at once, in the sequence they came: that entrain, that whelming of quasi-erotic pleasure, that assurance and animation—and, what was especially delightful, the fact that she was utterly and innocently unaware of the modulations entrancing him.

  There had been trouble with her luggage. There still was. Her two maids, who were supposed to have flown over the day before on a Laputa (freight airplane) with her trunks, had got stranded somewhere. All she had was a little valise. The concierge was in the act of making some calls for her. Would Van come down? She was neveroyatno golodnaya (incredibly hungry).

  That telephone voice, by resurrecting the past and linking it up with the present, with the darkening slate-blue mountains beyond the lake, with the spangles of the sun wake dancing through the poplar, formed the centerpiece in his deepest perception of tangible time, the glittering “now” that was the only reality of Time’s texture. After the glory of the summit there came the difficult descent.

  Ada had warned him in a recent letter that she had “changed considerably, in contour as well as in color.” She wore a corset which stressed the unfamiliar stateliness of her body enveloped in a black-velvet gown of a flowing cut both eccentric and monastic, as their mother used to favor. She had had her hair bobbed page-boy-fashion and dyed a brilliant bronze. Her neck and hands were as delicately pale as ever but showed unfamiliar fibers and raised veins. She made lavish use of cosmetics to camouflage the lines at the outer corners of her fat carmined lips and dark-shadowed eyes whose opaque iris now seemed less mysterious than myopic owing to the nervous flutter of her painted lashes. He noted that her smile revealed a gold-capped upper premolar; he had a similar one on the other side of his mouth. The metallic sheen of her fringe distressed him less than that velvet gown, full-skirted, square-shouldered, of well-below-the-calf length, with hip-padding which was supposed both to diminish the waist and disguise by amplification the outline of the now buxom pelvis. Nothing remained of her gangling grace, and the new mellowness, and the velvet stuff, had an irritatingly dignified air of obstacle and defense. He loved her much too tenderly, much too irrevocably, to be unduly depressed by sexual misgivings; but his senses certainly remained stirless—so stirless in fact, that he did not feel at all anxious (as she and he raised their flashing champagne glasses in parody of the crested-grebe ritual) to involve his masculine pride in a half-hearted embrace immediately after dinner. If he was expected to do so, that was too bad; if he was not, that was even worse. At their earlier reunions the constraint, subsisting as a dull ache after the keen agonies of Fate’s surgery, used to be soon drowned in sexual desire, leaving life to pick up by and by. Now they were on their own.

  The utilitarian trivialities of their table talk—or, rather, of his gloomy monologue—seemed to him positively degrading. He explained at length—fighting her attentive silence, sloshing across the puddles of pauses, abhorring himself—that he had a long and hard journey; that he slept badly; that he was working on an investigation of the nature of Time, a theme that meant struggling with the octopus of one’s own brain. She looked at her wrist watch.

  “What I’m telling you,” he said harshly, “has nothing to do with timepieces.” The waiter brought them their coffee. She smiled, and he realized that her smile was prompted by a conversation at the next table, at which a newcomer, a stout sad Englishman, had begun a discussion of the menu with the maître d’hôtel.

  “I’ll start,” said the Englishman, “with the bananas.”

  “That’s not bananas, sir. That’s ananas, pineapple juice.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, give me some clear soup.”

  Young Van smiled back at young Ada. Oddly, that little exchange at the next table acted as a kind of delicious release.

  “When I was a kid,” said Van, “and stayed for the first—or rather, second—time in Switzerland, I thought that ‘Verglas’ on roadway signs stood for some magical town, always around the corner, at the bottom of every snowy slope, never seen, but biding its time. I got your cable in the Engadine where there are real magical places, such as Alraun or Alruna—which means a tiny Arabian demon in a German wizard’s mirror. By the way, we have the old apartment upstairs with an additional bedroom, number five-zero-eight.”

  “Oh dear. I’m afraid you must cancel poor 508. If I stayed for the night, 510 would do for both of us, but I’ve got bad news for you. I can’t stay. I must go back to Geneva directly after dinner to retrieve my things and maids, whom the authorities have apparently put in a Home for Stray Females because they could not pay the absolutely medieval new droits de douane—isn’t Switzerland in Washington State, sort of, après tout? Look, don’t scowl”—(patting his brown blotched hand on which their shared birthmark had got lost among the freckles of age, like a babe in autumn woods, on peut les suivre en reconnaissant only Mascodagama’s disfigured thumb and the beautiful almond-shaped nails)—“I promise to get in touch with you in a day or two, and then we’ll go on a cruise to Greece with the Baynards—they have a yacht and three adorable daughters who still swim in the tan, okay?”

  “I don’t know what I loathe more,” he replied, “yachts or Baynards; but can I help you in Geneva?”

  He could not. Baynard had married his Cordula, after a sensational divorce—Scotch veterinaries had had to saw off her husband’s antlers (last call for that joke).

  Ada’s Argus had not yet been delivered. The gloomy black gloss of the hackney Yak and the old-fashioned leggings of its driver reminded him of her departure in 1905.

  He saw her off—and ascended, like a Cartesian glassman, like spectral Time standing at attention, back to his desolate fifth floor. Had they lived together these seventeen wretched years, they would have been spared the shock and the humiliation; their aging would have been a gradual adjustment, as imperceptible as Time itself.

  His Work-in-Progress, a sheaf of notes tangling with his pajamas, came to the rescue as it had done at Sorcière. Van swallowed a favodorm tablet and, while waiting for it to relieve him of himself, a matter of forty minutes or so, sat down at a lady’s bureau to his “lucubratiuncula.”

  Does the ravage and outrage of age deplored by poets tell the naturalist of Time anything about Time’s essence? Very little. On
ly a novelist’s fancy could be caught by this small oval box, once containing Duvet de Ninon (a face powder, with a bird of paradise on the lid), which has been forgotten in a not-quite-closed drawer of the bureau’s arc of triumph—not, however, triumph over Time. The blue-green-orange thing looked as if he were meant to be deceived into thinking it had been waiting there seventeen years for the bemused, smiling finder’s dream-slow hand: a shabby trick of feigned restitution, a planted coincidence—and a bad blunder, since it had been Lucette, now a mermaid in the groves of Atlantis (and not Ada, now a stranger somewhere near Morges in a black limousine) who had favored that powder. Throw it away lest it mislead a weaker philosopher; what I am concerned with is the delicate texture of Time, void of all embroidered events.

  Let us recapitulate.

  Physiologically the sense of Time is a sense of continuous becoming, and if “becoming” has a voice, the latter might be, not unnaturally, a steady vibration; but for Log’s sake, let us not confuse Time with Tinnitus, and the seashell hum of duration with the throb of our blood. Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong. “To be” means to know one “has been.” “Not to be” implies the only “new” kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future.

  Time is anything but the popular triptych: a no-longer existing Past, the durationless point of the Present, and a “not-yet” that may never come. No. There are only two panels. The Past (ever-existing in my mind) and the Present (to which my mind gives duration and, therefore, reality). If we make a third compartment of fulfilled expectation, the foreseen, the foreordained, the faculty of prevision, perfect forecast, we are still applying our mind to the Present.