Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “And now,” she said, and stopped, staring at him.

  “Yes?” he said, “and now?”

  “Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you—after you trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium, it’s in the room next to mine” (which he never saw, never—how odd, come to think of it!).

  She carefully closed a communicating door as they entered into what looked like a glorified rabbitry at the end of a marble-flagged hall (a converted bathroom, as it transpired). In spite of the place’s being well aired, with the heraldic stained-glass windows standing wide open (so that one heard the screeching and catcalls of an undernourished and horribly frustrated bird population), the smell of the hutches—damp earth, rich roots, old greenhouse and maybe a hint of goat—was pretty appalling. Before letting him come nearer, Ada fiddled with little latches and grates, and a sense of great emptiness and depression replaced the sweet fire that had been consuming Van since the beginning of their innocent games on that day.

  “Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe (I’m crazy about everything that crawls),” she said.

  “Personally,” said Van, “I rather like those that roll up in a muff when you touch them—those that go to sleep like old dogs.”

  “Oh, they don’t go to sleep, quelle idée, they swoon, it’s a little syncope,” explained Ada, frowning. “And I imagine it may be quite a little shock for the younger ones.”

  “Yes, I can well imagine that, too. But I suppose one gets used to it, by-and-by, I mean.”

  But his ill-informed hesitations soon gave way to esthetic empathy. Many decades later Van remembered having much admired the lovely, naked, shiny, gaudily spotted and streaked sharkmoth caterpillars, as poisonous as the mullein flowers clustering around them, and the flat larva of a local catocalid whose gray knobs and lilac plaques mimicked the knots and lichens of the twig to which it clung so closely as to practically lock with it, and, of course, the little Vaporer fellow, its black coat enlivened all along the back with painted tufts, red, blue, yellow, of unequal length, like those of a fancy toothbrush treated with certified colors. And that kind of simile, with those special trimmings, reminds me today of the entomological entries in Ada’s diary—which we must have somewhere, mustn’t we, darling, in that drawer there, no? you don’t think so? Yes! Hurrah! Samples (your round-cheeked script, my love, was a little larger, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing has changed):

  “The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth belong to a most uncaterpillarish caterpillar, with front segments shaped like bellows and a face resembling the lens of a folding camera. If you gently stroke its bloated smooth body, the sensation is quite silky and pleasant—until the irritated creature ungratefully squirts at you an acrid fluid from a slit in its throat.”

  “Dr. Krolik received from Andalusia and kindly gave me five young larvae of the newly described very local Carmen Tortoiseshell. They are delightful creatures, of a beautiful jade nuance with silvery spikes, and they breed only on a semi-extinct species of high-mountain willow (which dear Crawly also obtained for me).”

  (At ten or earlier the child had read—as Van had—Les Malheurs de Swann, as the next sample reveals):

  “I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby (‘There’s something indecent about a little girl’s keeping such revolting pets…,’ ‘Normal young ladies should loathe snakes and worms,’ et cetera) if I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy enough!) the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus, flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff ‘Sphinxian’ attitude.”

  (Lovely stuff! said Van, but even I did not quite assimilate it, when I was young. So let us not bore the boor who flips through a book and thinks: “what a hoaxer, that old V.V.!”)

  At the end of his so remote, so near, 1884 summer Van, before leaving Ardis, was to make a visit of adieu to Ada’s larvarium.

  The porcelain-white, eye-spotted Cowl (or “Shark”) larva, a highly prized gem, had safely achieved its next metamorphosis, but Ada’s unique Lorelei Underwing had died, paralyzed by some ichneumon that had not been deceived by those clever prominences and fungoid smudges. The multicolored toothbrush had comfortably pupated within a shaggy cocoon, promising a Persian Vaporer later in the autumn. The two Puss Moth larvae had assumed a still uglier but at least more vermian and in a sense venerable aspect: their pitchforks now limply trailing behind them, and a purplish flush dulling the cubistry of their extravagant colors, they kept “ramping” rapidly all over the floor of their cage in a surge of prepupational locomotion. Aqua had walked through a wood and into a gulch to do it last year. A freshly emerged Nymphalis carmen was fanning its lemon and amber-brown wings on a sunlit patch of grating, only to be choked with one nip by the nimble fingers of enraptured and heartless Ada; the Odettian Sphinx had turned, bless him, into an elephantoid mummy with a comically encased trunk of the guermantoid type; and Dr. Krolik was swiftly running on short legs after a very special orange-tip above timberline, in another hemisphere, Antocharis ada Krolik (1884)—as it was known until changed to A. prittivitzi Stümper (1883) by the inexorable law of taxonomic priority.

  “But, afterwards, when all these beasties have hatched,” asked Van, “what do you do with them?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I take them to Dr. Krolik’s assistant who sets them and labels them and pins them in glassed trays in a clean oak cabinet, which will be mine when I marry. I shall then have a big collection, and continue to breed all kinds of leps—my dream is to have a special Institute of Fritillary larvae and violets—all the special violets they breed on. I would have eggs or larvae rushed to me here by plane from all over North America, with their foodplants—Redwood Violets from the West Coast, and a Pale Violet from Montana, and the Prairie Violet, and Egglestone’s Violet from Kentucky, and a rare white violet from a secret marsh near an unnamed lake on an arctic mountain where Krolik’s Lesser Fritillary flies. Of course, when the things emerge, they are quite easy to mate by hand—you hold them—for quite a while, sometimes—like this, in folded-wing profile” (showing the method, ignoring her poor fingernails), “male in your left hand, female in your right, or vice versa, with the tips of their abdomens touching, but they must be quite fresh and soaked in their favorite violet’s reek.”

  9

  Was she really pretty, at twelve? Did he want—would he ever want to caress her, to really caress her? Her black hair cascaded over one clavicle and the gesture she made of shaking it back and the dimple on her pale cheek were revelations with an element of immediate recognition about them. Her pallor shone, her blackness blazed. The pleated skirts she liked were becomingly short. Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one’s gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood. The iridal dark-brown of her serious eyes had the enigmatic opacity of an Oriental hypnotist’s look (in a magazine’s back-page advertisement) and seemed to be placed higher than usual so that between its lower rim and the moist lower lid a cradle crescent of white remained when she stared straight at you. Her long eyelashes seemed blackened, and in fact were. Her features were saved from elfin prettiness by the thickish shape of her parched lips. Her plain Irish nose was Van’s in miniature. Her teeth were fairly white, but not very even.

  Her poor pretty hands—one could not help cooing with pity over them—rosy in comparison to the translucent skin of the arm, rosier even than the elbow that seemed to be blushing for the state of her nails: she bit them so thoroughly that all vestige of free margin was replaced by a groove cutting into the flesh with the tightness of wire and lending an additional spatule of length to her naked fingertips. Later, when he was so fond of kissing he
r cold hands she would clench them, allowing his lips nothing but knuckle, but he would fiercely pry her hand open to get at those flat blind little cushions. (But, oh my, oh, the long, languid, rose-and-silver, painted and pointed, delicately stinging onyxes of her adolescent and adult years!)

  What Van experienced in those first strange days when she showed him the house—and those nooks in it where they were to make love so soon—combined elements of ravishment and exasperation. Ravishment—because of her pale, voluptuous, impermissible skin, her hair, her legs, her angular movements, her gazelle-grass odor, the sudden black stare of her wide-set eyes, the rustic nudity under her dress; exasperation—because between him, an awkward schoolboy of genius, and that precocious, affected, impenetrable child there extended a void of light and a veil of shade that no force could overcome and pierce. He swore wretchedly in the hopelessness of his bed as he focused his swollen senses on the glimpse of her he had engulfed when, on their second excursion to the top of the house, she had mounted upon a captain’s trunk to unhasp a sort of illuminator through which one acceded to the roof (even the dog had once gone there), and a bracket or something wrenched up her skirt and he saw—as one sees some sickening miracle in a Biblical fable or a moth’s shocking metamorphosis—that the child was darkly flossed. He noticed that she seemed to have noticed that he had or might have noticed (what he not only noticed but retained with tender terror until he freed himself of that vision—much later—and in strange ways), and an odd, dull, arrogant look passed across her face: her sunken cheeks and fat pale lips moved as if she were chewing some thing, and she emitted a yelp of joyless laughter when he, big Van, slipped on a tile after wriggling in his turn through the skylight. And in the sudden sun, he realized that until then, he, small Van, had been a blind virgin, since haste, dust and dusk had obscured the mousy charms of his first harlot, so often possessed.

  His sentimental education now went on fast. Next morning, he happened to catch sight of her washing her face and arms over an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand, her hair knotted on the top of her head, her nightgown twisted around her waist like a clumsy corolla out of which issued her slim back, rib-shaded on the near side. A fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin, and as both the reptile and he stopped to watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud-breasts in profile, a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand, and her black-socked foot hooked the door shut with a bang which was more the echo of the soap’s crashing against the marble board than a sign of pudic displeasure.

  10

  Weekday lunch at Ardis Hall. Lucette between Marina and the governess; Van between Marina and Ada; Dack, the golden-brown stoat, under the table, either between Ada and Mlle Larivière, or between Lucette and Marina (Van secretly disliked dogs, especially at meals, and especially that smallish longish freak with a gamey breath). Arch and grandiloquent, Ada would be describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device—Paul Bourget’s “monologue intérieur” borrowed from old Leo—or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol’nïy tulup, “a muzhik’s sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,” as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies. Her spectacular handling of subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent monosyllables (“Idiot Elsie simply can’t read”)—all this somehow finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he both resented and perversely enjoyed.

  “My precious” her mother called her, punctuating Ada’s discourse with little ejaculations: “Terribly funny!” “Oh, I adore that!” but also indulging in more admonitory remarks, such as “Do sit a wee bit straighter” or “Eat, my precious” (accenting the “eat” with a motherly urge very unlike the malice of her daughter’s spondaic sarcasms).

  Ada, now sitting straight, incurving her supple spine in her chair, then, as the dream or adventure (or whatever she was relating) reached a climax, bending over the place from which Price had prudently removed her plate, and suddenly all elbows, sprawling forward, invading the table, then leaning back, extravagantly making mouths, illustrating “long, long” with both hands up, up!

  “My precious, you haven’t tried the—oh, Price, bring the—”

  The what? The rope for the fakir’s bare-bottomed child to climb up in the melting blue?

  “It was sort of long, long. I mean (interrupting herself) … like a tentacle … no, let me see” (shake of head, jerk of features, as if unknotting a tangled skein with one quick tug).

  No: enormous purple pink plums, one with a wet yellow burst-split.

  “And so there I was—” (the tumbling hair, the hand flying to the temple, sketching but not terminating the brushing-off-strand stroke; then a sudden peal of rough-rippled laughter ending in a moist cough).

  “No, but seriously, Mother, you must imagine me utterly speechless, screaming speechlessly, as I realized—”

  At the third or fourth meal Van also realized something. Far from being a bright lass showing off for the benefit of a newcomer, Ada’s behavior was a desperate and rather clever attempt to prevent Marina from appropriating the conversation and transforming it into a lecture on the theater. Marina, on the other hand, while awaiting a chance to trot out her troika of hobby horses, took some professional pleasure in playing the hackneyed part of a fond mother, proud of her daughter’s charm and humor, and herself charmingly and humorously lenient toward their brash circumstantiality: she was showing off—not Ada! And when Van had understood the true situation, he would take advantage of a pause (which Marina was on the point of filling with some choice Stanislavskiana) to launch Ada upon the troubled waters of Botany Bay, a voyage which at other times he dreaded, but which now proved to be the safest and easiest course for his girl. This was particularly important at dinner, since Lucette and her governess had an earlier evening meal upstairs, so that Mlle Larivière was not there, at those critical moments, and could not be relied on to take over from lagging Ada with a breezy account of her work on a new novella of her composition (her famous Diamond Necklace was in the last polishing stage) or with memories of Van’s early boyhood such as those eminently acceptable ones concerning his beloved Russian tutor, who gently courted Mlle L., wrote “decadent” Russian verse in sprung rhythm, and drank, in Russian solitude.

  Van: “That yellow thingum” (pointing at a floweret prettily depicted on an Eckercrown plate) “—is it a buttercup?”

  Ada: “No. That yellow flower is the common Marsh Marigold, Caltha palustris. In this country, peasants miscall it ‘Cowslip,’ though of course the true Cowslip, Primula veris, is a different plant altogether.”

  “I see,” said Van.

  “Yes, indeed,” began Marina, “when I was playing Ophelia, the fact that I had once collected flowers—”

  “Helped, no doubt,” said Ada. “Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.”

  “Ah,” said Van.

  “As in the case of many flowers,” Ada went on, with a mad scholar’s quiet smile, “the unfortunate French name of our plant, souci d’eau, has been traduced or shall we say transfigured—”

  “Flowers into bloomers,” punned Van Veen.

  “Je vous en prie, vies enfants!” put in Marina, who had been following the conversation with difficulty and now, through a secondary misunderstanding, thought the reference was to the undergarment.

  “By chance, this very morning,” said Ada, not deigning to enlighten her mother, “our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who—”

  (First time she pronounced it—at that botanical lesson!)

  “—is pretty hard on English-speaking transmongrelizers—monkeys called ‘ursine h
owlers’—though I suspect her reasons are more chauvinistic than artistic and moral—drew my attention—my wavering attention—to some really gorgeous bloomers, as you call them, Van, in a Mr. Fowlie’s soi-disant literal version—called ‘sensitive’ in a recent Elsian rave—sensitive!—of Mémoire, a poem by Rimbaud (which she fortunately—and farsightedly—made me learn by heart, though I suspect she prefers Musset and Coppée)”—

  “… les robes vertes et déteintes des fillettes …” quoted Van triumphantly.

  “Egg-zactly” (mimicking Dan). “Well, Larivière allows me to read him only in the Feuilletin anthology, the same you have apparently, but I shall obtain his oeuvres completes very soon, oh very soon, much sooner than anybody thinks. Incidentally, she will come down after tucking in Lucette, our darling copperhead who by now should be in her green nightgown—”

  “Angel moy,” pleaded Marina, “I’m sure Van cannot be interested in Lucette’s nightdress!”

  “—the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into ‘the sky’s bed’ instead of ‘bed ceiler.’ But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d’or in that collection of fouled French is the trans formation of souci d’eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine ‘care of the water’—although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, marybud, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.”

  “On the other hand,” said Van, “one can well imagine a similarly bilingual Miss Rivers checking a French version of, say, Marvell’s Garden—”