Transparent Things

by Vladimir Nabokov

  She had strange whims. During their honeymoon in Stresa, on their last night there (his New York office was clamoring for his return), she decided that last nights were statistically the most dangerous ones in hotels without fire escapes, and their hotel looked indeed most combustible, in a massive old-fashioned way. For some reason or other, television producers consider that there is nothing more photogenic and universally fascinating than a good fire. Armande, viewing the Italian telenews, had been upset or feigned to be upset (she was fond of making herself interesting) by one such calamity on the local screen – little flames like slalom flaglets, huge ones like sudden demons, water squirting in intersecting curves like so many rococo fountains, and fearless men in glistening oilskin who directed all sorts of muddled operations in a fantasy of smoke and destruction. That night at Stresa she insisted they rehearse (he in his sleeping shorts, she in a Chudo-Yudo pajama) an acrobatic escape in the stormy murk by climbing down the overdecorated face of their hotel, from their fourth story to the second one, and thence to the roof of a gallery amidst tossing remonstrative trees. Hugh vainly reasoned with her. The spirited girl affirmed that as an expert rock-climber she knew it could be done by using footholds which various applied ornaments, generous juttings and little railed balconies here and there provided for one's careful descent. She ordered Hugh to follow her and train an electric torch on her from above. He was also supposed to keep close enough to help her if need be by holding her suspended, and thus increased in vertical length, while she probed the next step with a bare toe.

  Hugh, despite forelimb strength, was a singularly inept anthropoid. He badly messed up the exploit. He got stuck on a ledge just under their balcony. His flashlight played erratically over a small part of the faЗade before slipping from his grasp. He called down from his perch entreating her to return. Underfoot a shutter opened abruptly. Hugh managed to scramble back onto his balcony, still roaring her name, though persuaded by now that she had perished. Eventually, however, she was located in a third-floor room where he found her wrapped up in a blanket smoking peacefully, supine on the bed of a stranger, who sat in a chair by the bed, reading a magazine.

  Her sexual oddities perplexed and distressed Hugh. He put up with them during their trip. They became routine stuff when he returned with a difficult bride to his New York apartment. Armande decreed they regularly make love around teatime, in the living room, as upon an imaginary stage, to the steady accompaniment of casual small talk, with both performers decently clothed, he wearing his best business suit and a polka-dotted tie, she a smart black dress closed at the throat. In concession to nature, undergarments could be parted, or even undone, but only very, very discreetly, without the least break in the elegant chit-chat: impatience was pronounced unseemly, exposure, monstrous. A newspaper or coffee-table book hid such preparations as he absolutely had to conduct, wretched Hugh, and woe to him if he winced or fumbled during the actual commerce; but far worse than the awful pull of long underwear in the chaos of his pinched crotch or the crisp contact with her armor-smooth stockings was the prerequisite of light colloquy, about acquaintances, or politics, or zodiacal signs, or servants, and in the meantime, with visible hurry banned, the poignant work had to be brought surreptitiously to a convulsive end in a twisted half-sitting position on an uncomfortable little divan. Hugh's mediocre potency might not have survived the ordeal had she concealed from him more completely than she thought she did the excitement derived from the contrast between the fictitious and the factual – a contrast which after all has certain claims to artistic subtlety if we recall the customs of certain Far Eastern people, virtually halfwits in many other respects. But his chief support lay in the never deceived expectancy of the dazed ecstasy that gradually idiotized her dear features, notwithstanding her efforts to maintain the flippant patter. In a sense he preferred the parlor setting to the even less normal decor of those rare occasions when she desired him to possess her in bed, well under the bedclothes, while she telephoned, gossiping .with a female friend or hoaxing an unknown male. Our Person's capacity to condone all this, to find reasonable explanations and so forth, endears him to us, but also provokes limpid mirth, alas, at times. For example, he told himself that she refused to strip because she was shy of her tiny pouting breasts and the scar of a ski accident along her thigh. Silly Person!

  Was she faithful to him throughout the months of their marriage spent in frail, lax, merry America? During their first and last winter there she went a few times to ski without him, at Aval, Quebec, or Chute, Colorado.. While alone, he forbade himself to dwell in thought on the banalities of ' betrayal, such as holding hands with a chap or permitting him to kiss her good night. Those banalities were to him quite as excruciating to imagine as would be voluptuous intercourse. A steel door of the spirit remained securely shut as long as she was away, but no sooner had she arrived, her face brown and shiny, her figure as trim as that . of an air hostess, in that blue coat with flat buttons as bright as counters of gold, than something ghastly opened up in him and a dozen lithe athletes started swarming around and prying her apart in all the motels of his mind, although actually, as we know, she had enjoyed full conjunction with only a dozen crack lovers in the course of three trips.

  Nobody, least of all her mother, could understand why Armande married a rather ordinary American with a not very solid jt"b, but we must end now our discussion of love.

  18

  In the second week of February, about one month before death separated them, the Persons flew over to Europe for a few days: Armande, to visit her mother dying in a Belgian hospital (the dutiful daughter came too late), and Hugh, at his firm's request, to look up Mr. R. and another American writer, also residing in Switzerland.

  It was raining hard when a taxi deposited him in front of R.'s big, old, and ugly country house above Versex. He made his way up a graveled path between streams of bubbly rainwater running on both sides of it. He found the front door ajar, and while tramping the mat noticed with amused surprise Julia Moore standing with her back to him at the telephone table in the vestibule. She now wore again the pretty pageboy hairdo of the past and the same' orange blouse. He had finished wiping his feet when she put back the receiver and turned out to be a totally different girl.

  "Sorry to have made you wait," she said, fixing on him a pair of smiling eyes. "I'm replacing Mr. Tamworth, who is vacationing in Morocco."

  Hugh Person entered the library, a comfortably furnished but decidedly old-fashioned and quite inadequately lighted room, lined with encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, and the author's copies of the author's books in multiple editions and translations. He sat down in a club chair and drew a list of points to be discussed from his briefcase. The two main questions were: how to alter certain much too recognizable people in the typescript of Tralatitions and what to do with that commercially impossible title.

  Presently R. came in. He had not shaved for three or four days and wore ridiculous blue overalls which he found convenient for distributing about him the tools of his profession, such as pencils, ball pens, three pairs of glasses, cards, jumbo clips, elastic bands, and – in an invisible state – the dagger which after a few words of welcome he pointed at our Person.

  "I can only repeat," he said, collapsing in the armchair vacated by Hugh and motioning him to a similar one opposite, "what I said not once but often already: you can alter a cat but you cannot alter my characters. As to the title, which is a perfectly respectable synonym of the word 'metaphor,' no savage steeds will pull it from under me. My doctor advised Tamworth to lock up my cellar, which he did and concealed the key which the locksmith will not be able to duplicate before Monday and I'm too proud, you know, to buy the cheap wines they have in the village, so all I can offer you – you shake your head in advance and you're jolly right, son – is a can of apricot juice. Now allow me to talk to you about titles and libels. You know, that letter you wrote me tickled me black in the face. I have been accused of trifling with minors, but m
y minor characters are untouchable, if you permit me a pun."

  He went on to explain that if your true artist had chosen to form a character on the basis of a living individual, any rewriting aimed at disguising that character was tantamount to destroying the living prototype as would driving, you know, a pin through a little doll of clay, and the girl next door falls dead. If the composition was artistic, if it held not only water but wine, then it was invulnerable in one sense and horribly fragile in another. Fragile, because when a timid editor made the artist change "slender" to "plump," or "brown" to "blond" he disfigured both the image and the niche where it stood and the entire chapel around it; and invulnerable, because no matter how drastically you changed the image, its prototype would remain recognizable by the shape of the hole left in the texture of the tale. But apart from all that, the customers whom he was accused of portraying were much too cool to announce their presence and their resentment. In fact they would rather enjoy listening to the tattle in literary salons with a little knowing air, as the French say.

  The question of the title – Tralatitions – was another kettle of fish. Readers did not realize that two types of title existed. One type was the title found by the dumb author or the clever publisher after the book had been written. . That was simply a label stuck on and tapped with the side ' of the fist. Most of our worst best-sellers had that kind of title. But there was the other kind: the title that .shone through the book like a watermark, the title that was born with the book, the title to which the author had grown so accustomed during the years of accumulating the written pages that it had become part of each and of all. No, Mr. R. could not give up Tralatitions.

  Hugh made bold to remark that the tongue tended to substitute an "l" for the Зecond of the three "ts." "The tongue of ignorance," shouted Mr. R. His pretty little secretary tripped in and announced that he should not get excited or tired. The great man rose with an effort and stood quivering and grinning, and proffering a large hairy hand. "Well," said Hugh, "I shall certainly tell Phil how strongly you feel about the points he has raised. Good-bye, sir, you will be getting a sample of the jacket design next week." "So long and soon see," said Mr. R.

  19

  We are back in New York and this is their last evening together.

  After serving them an excellent supper (a little on the rich side, perhaps, but not overabundant – neither was a big eater) obese Pauline, the -femme de mЙnage, whom they shared with a Belgian artist in the penthouse immediately above them, washed the dishes and" left at her usual hour (nine fifteen or thereabouts). Since she had the annoying propensity of sitting down for a moment to enjoy a bit of TV, Armande always waited for her to have gone before running it for her own pleasure. She now turned it on, let it live for a moment, changed channels – and killed the picture with a snort of disgust (her likes and dislikes in these matters lacked all logic, she might watch one or two programs with passionate regularity or on the contrary not touch the set for a week as if punishing that marvelous invention for a misdemeanor known only to her, and Hugh preferred to ignore her obscure feuds with actors and commentators). She opened a book, but here Phil's wife rang up to invite her on the morrow to the preview of a Lesbian drama with a Lesbian cast. Their conversation lasted twenty-five minutes, Armande using a confidential undertone, and Phyllis speaking so sonorously that Hugh, who sat at a round table correcting a batch of galleys, could have heard, had he felt so inclined, both sides of the trivial

  torrent. He contented himself instead with the resume Ar-piande gave him upon returning to the settee of gray plush near the fake fireplace. As had happened on previous occasions, around ten o'clock a most jarring succession of bumps and scrapes suddenly came from above: it was the cretin upstairs dragging a heavy piece of inscrutable sculpture (catalogued as "Pauline anide") from the center of his studio to the corner it occupied at night. In invariable response, Armande glared at the ceiling and remarked that in the case of a less amiable and helpful neighbor she would have complained long ago to Phil's cousin (who managed the apartment house). When placidity was restored, she started to look for the book she had had in her hand before the telephone rang. Her husband always felt a flow of special tenderness that reconciled him to the boring or brutal ugliness of what not very happy people call "life" every time that he noted in neat, efficient, clear-headed Armande the beauty and helplessness of human abstraction. He now found the object of her pathetic search (it was in the magazine rack near the telephone) and, as he restored it to her, he was allowed to touch with reverent lips her temple and a strand of blond hair. Then he went back to the galleys of Tralatitions and she to her book, which was a French touring guide that listed many splendid restaurants, forked and starred, but not very many "pleasant, quiet, well-situated hotels" with three or more turrets and sometimes a little red songbird on a twig.

  "Here's a cute coincidence," observed Hugh. "One of his characters, in a rather bawdy passage – by the way should it be 'Savoie' or 'Savoy'?" "What's the coincidence?"

  "Oh. One of his characters is consulting a Michelin, and says: there's many a mile between Condom in Gascogne and Pussy in Savoie."

  "The Savoy is a hotel," said Armande and yawned twice, first with clenched jaws, then openly. "I don't know why I'm so tired," she added, "but I know all this yawning only sidetracks sleep. I think I'll sample my new tablets tonight."

  "Try imagining you're skimming on skis down a very smooth slope. I used to play tennis mentally when I was young and it often helped, especially with new, very white balls."

  She remained seated, lost in thought, for another moment, then red-ribboned the place and went for a glass to the kitchen.

  Hugh liked to read a set of proofs twice, once for the defects of the type and once for the virtues of the text. It worked better, he believed, if the eye check came first and the mind's pleasure next. He was now enjoying the latter and while not looking for errors, still had a chance to catch a missed boo-boo – his own or the printer's. He also permitted himself to query, with the utmost diffidence, in the margin of a second copy (meant for the author), certain idiosyncrasies of style and spelling, hoping the great man would understand that not genius but grammar was being questioned.

  After a long consultation with Phil it had been decided not to do anything about the risks of defamation involved in the frankness with which R. described his complicated love life. He had "paid for it once in solitude and remorse, and now was ready to pay in hard cash any fool whom his story might hurt" (abridged and simplified citation from his latest letter). In a long chapter of a much more libertine nature (despite the grandiose wording) than the jock talk of the fashionable writers he criticized, R. showed a mother and daughter regaling their young lover with spectacular caresses on a mountain ledge above a scenic chasm and in other less perilous spots. Hugh did not know Mrs. R. intimately enough to assess her resemblance to the matron of the book (loppy breasts, flabby thighs, coon-bear grunts during copulation, and so forth); but the daughter in manner and movement, in breathless speech, in many other features with which he was not consciously familiar but which fitted the picture, was certainly Julia, although the author had made her fair-haired, and played down the Eurasian quality of her beauty. Hugh read with interest and concentration, but through the translucidity of the textual flow he still was correcting proof as some of us try to do – mending a broken letter here, indicating italics there, his eye and his spine (the true reader's main organ) collaborating rather than occluding each other. Sometimes he wondered what the phrase really meant – what exactly did "rimiform" suggest and how did a "balanic plum" look, or should he cap the 'b' and insert a 'k' after '1'? The dictionary he used at home was less informative than the huge battered one in the office and he was now slumped by such beautiful things as "all the gold of a kew tree" and "a dappled nebris." He queried the middle word in the name of an incidental character "Adam von Librikov" because the German particle seemed to clash with the rest; or was the entire combination a sly s
cramble? He finally crossed out his query, but on the other hand reinstated the "Reign of Cnut" in another passage: a humbler proofreader before him had supposed that either the letters in the last word should be transposed or that it be corrected to "the Knout" – she was of Russian descent, like Armande.

  Our Person, our reader, was not sure he entirely approved of R.'s luxuriant and bastard style; yet, at its best ("the gray rainbow of a fog-dogged moon"), it was diabolically evocative. He also caught himself trying to establish on the strength of fictional data at what age, in what

  20

  It was past eleven by now. He put out the lights in the living room and opened the window. The windy March night found something to finger in the room. An electric sign, doppler, shifted to violet through the half-drawn curtains and illumined the deadly white papers he had left on the table.

  He let his eyes get used to the obscurity in the next room, and presently stole in. Her first sleep was marked usually by a clattering snore. One could not help marveling how such a slender and dainty girl could churn up so ponderous a vibration. It had bothered Hugh at the early stage of their marriage because of the implicit threat of its going on all night. But something, some outside noise, or a jolt in her dream, or the discreet clearing of a meek husband's throat, caused her to stir, to sigh, to smack her lips, perhaps, or turn on her side, after which she slept mutely. This change of rhythm had apparently taken place while he was still working in the parlor; and now, lest the entire cycle recur, he tried to undress as quietly as possible. He later remembered pulling out very gingerly an exceptionally creaky drawer (whose voice he never noticed at other times) to get a fresh pair of the briefs which he wore in lieu of pajamas. He swore under his breath at the old wood's stupid plaint and refrained from pushing the drawer back; but the floor boards took over as soon as he started to tiptoe to his side of the double bed. Did that wake her? Yes, it did, hazily, or at least teased a hole in the hay, and she murmured something about the light. Actually all that impinged on the darkness was an angled beam from the living room, the door of which he had left a)ar. He now closed it gently as he groped his way to the bed.