Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Now run along,” she said, “quick, quick, I’m busy,” and as he lagged like an idiot, she anointed his flushed forehead with her paintbrush in the semblance of an ancient Estotian “sign of the cross.” “I have to finish this,” she added, pointing with her violet-purple-soaked thin brush at a blend of Ophrys scolopax and Ophrys veenae, “and in a minute we must dress up because Marina wants Kim to take our picture—holding hands and grinning” (grinning, and then turning back to her hideous flower).

  17

  The hugest dictionary in the library said under Lip: “Either of a pair of fleshy folds surrounding an orifice.”

  Mileyshiy Emile, as Ada called Monsieur Littré, spoke thus: “Partie extérieure et charnue qui forme le contour de la bouche … Les deux bords d’une plaie simple” (we simply speak with our wounds; wounds procreate) “… C’est le membre qui lèche.” Dearest Emile!

  A fat little Russian encyclopedia was solely concerned with guba, lip, as meaning a district court in ancient Lyaska or an arctic gulf.

  Their lips were absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van’s upper one resembled in shape a long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that brutality existed in the case of Ada’s lips, but the bow shape of the upper one and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque pink repeated Van’s mouth in a feminine key.

  During our children’s kissing phase (a not particularly healthy fortnight of long messy embraces), some odd pudibund screen cut them off, so to speak, from each other’s raging bodies. But contacts and reactions to contacts could not help coming through like a distant vibration of desperate signals. Endlessly, steadily, delicately, Van would brush his lips against hers, teasing their burning bloom, back and forth, right, left, life, death, reveling in the contrast between the airy tenderness of the open idyll and the gross congestion of the hidden flesh.

  There were other kisses. “I’d like to taste,” he said, “the inside of your mouth. God, how I’d like to be a goblin-sized Gulliver and explore that cave.”

  “I can lend you my tongue,” she said, and did.

  A large boiled strawberry, still very hot. He sucked it in as far as it would go. He held her close and lapped her palate. Their chins got thoroughly wet. “Hanky,” she said, and informally slipped her hand into his trouser pocket, but withdrew it quickly, and had him give it himself. No comment.

  (“I appreciated your tact,” he told her when they recalled, with amusement and awe that rapture and that discomfort. “But we lost a lot of time—irretrievable opals.”)

  He learned her face. Nose, cheek, chin—all possessed such a softness of outline (associated retrospectively with keepsakes, and picture hats, and frightfully expensive little courtesans in Wicklow) that a mawkish admirer might well have imagined the pale plume of a reed, that unthinking man—pascaltrezza—shaping her profile, while a more childish and sensual digit would have liked, and did like, to palpate that nose, cheek, chin. Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue. The fillet of black velvet binding her hair that day (the day of the mental picture) brought out its sheen at the silk of the temple and along the chalk of the parting. It hung lank and long over the neck, its flow disjoined by the shoulder; so that the mat white of her neck through the black bronze stream showed in triangular elegancy.

  Accentuating her nose’s slight tilt turned it into Lucette’s; smoothing it down, into Samoyed. In both sisters, the front teeth were a trifle too large and the nether lip too fat for the ideal beauty of marble death; and because their noses were permanently stuffed, both girls (especially later, at fifteen and twelve) looked a little dreamy or dazed in profile. The luster-less whiteness of Ada’s skin (at twelve, sixteen, twenty, thirty-three, et cetera) was incomparably rarer than Lucette’s golden bloom (at eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five, finis). In both, the long pure line of the throat, coming straight from Marina, tormented the senses with unknown, ineffable promises (not kept by the mother).

  The eyes. Ada’s dark brown eyes. What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word “deified”? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi? Yet I have to describe yours. The iris: black brown with amber specks or spokes placed around the serious pupil in a dial arrangement of identical hours. The eyelids: sort of pleaty, v skladochku (rhyming in Russian with the diminutive of her name in the accusative case). Eye shape: languorous. The procuress in Wicklow, on that satanic night of black sleet, at the most tragic, and almost fatal point of my life (Van, thank goodness, is ninety now—in Ada’s hand) dwelt with peculiar force on the “long eyes” of her pathetic and adorable grandchild. How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world!

  He discovered her hands (forget that nail-biting business). The pathos of the carpus, the grace of the phalanges demanding helpless genuflections, a mist of brimming tears, agonies of un-resolvable adoration. He touched her wrist, like a dying doctor. A quiet madman, he caressed the parallel strokes of the delicate down shading the brunette’s forearm. He went back to her knuckles. Fingers, please.

  “I am sentimental,” she said. “I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”

  She had on the back of her left hand the same small brown spot that marked his right one. She was sure, she said—either disingenuously or giddily—it descended from a birthmark Marina had had removed surgically from that very place years ago when in love with a cad who complained it resembled a bedbug.

  On very still afternoons one could hear the pre-tunnel toot of the two-two to Toulouse from the hill, where that exchange can be localized.

  “Cad is too strong,” remarked Van.

  “I used it fondly.”

  “Even so. I think I know the man. He has less heart than wit, that’s a fact.”

  As he looks, the palm of a gipsy asking for alms fades into that of the almsgiver asking for a long life. (When will filmmakers reach the stage we have reached?) Blinking in the green sunshine under a birch tree, Ada explained to her passionate fortuneteller that the circular marblings she shared with Turgenev’s Katya, another innocent girl, were called “waltzes” in California (“because the señorita will dance all night”).

  On her twelfth birthday, July 21, 1884, the child had stopped biting her fingernails (but not her toenails) in a grand act of will (as her quitting cigarettes was to be, twenty years later). True, one could list some compensations—such as a blessed lapse into delicious sin at Christmas, when Culex chateaubriandi Brown does not fly. A new and conclusive resolution was taken on New Year’s Eve after Mlle Larivière had threatened to smear poor Ada’s fingertips with French mustard and tie green, yellow, orange, red, pink riding hoods of wool around them (the yellow index was a trouvaille).

  Soon after the birthday picnic, when kissing the hands of his little sweetheart had become a tender obsession with Van, her nails, although still on the squarish side, became strong enough to deal with the excruciating itch that local children experienced in midsummer.

  During the last week of July, there emerged, with diabolical regularity, the female of Chateaubriand’s mosquito. Chateaubriand (Charles), who had not been the first to be bitten by it … but the first to bottle the offender, and with cries of vindictive exultation to carry it to Professor Brown who wrote the rather slap-bang Original Description (“small black palpi … hyaline wings … yellowy in certain lights … which should be extinguished if one keeps open the kasements [German printer!] …” The Bo
ston Entomologist for August, quick work, 1840) was not related to the great poet and memoirist born between Paris and Tagne (as he’d better, said Ada, who liked crossing orchids).

  Mon enfant, ma soeur,

  Songe à l’épaisseur

  Du grand chêne à Tagne;

  Songe à la montagne,

  Songe à la douceur—

  —of scraping with one’s claws or nails the spots visited by that fluffy-footed insect characterized by an insatiable and reckless appetite for Ada’s and Ardelia’s, Lucette’s and Lucile’s (multiplied by the itch) blood.

  The “pest” appeared as suddenly as it would vanish. It settled on pretty bare arms and legs without the hint of a hum, in a kind of recueilli silence, that—by contrast—caused the sudden insertion of its absolutely hellish proboscis to resemble the brass crash of a military band. Five minutes after the attack in the crépuscule, between porch step and cricket-crazed garden, a fiery irritation would set in, which the strong and the cold ignored (confident it would last a mere hour) but which the weak, the adorable, the voluptuous took advantage of to scratch and scratch and scratch scrumptiously (canteen cant). “Sladko! (Sweet!)” Pushkin used to exclaim in relation to a different species in Yukon. During the week following her birthday, Ada’s unfortunate fingernails used to stay garnet-stained and after a particularly ecstatic, lost-to-the-world session of scratching, blood literally streamed down her shins—a pity to see, mused her distressed admirer, but at the same time disgracefully fascinating—for we are visitors and investigators in a strange universe, indeed, indeed.

  The girl’s pale skin, so excitingly delicate to Van’s eye, so vulnerable to the beast’s needle, was, nevertheless, as strong as a stretch of Samarkand satin and withstood all self-flaying attempts whenever Ada, her dark eyes veiled as in the erotic trances Van had already begun to witness during their immoderate kissing, her lips parted, her large teeth lacquered with saliva, scraped with her five fingers the pink mounds caused by the rare insect’s bite—for it is a rather rare and interesting mosquito (described—not quite simultaneously—by two angry old men—the second was Braun, the Philadelphian dipterist, a much better one than the Boston professor), and rare and rapturous was the sight of my beloved trying to quench the lust of her precious skin, leaving at first pearly, then ruby, stripes along her enchanting leg and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum, the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength.

  “Look here,” said Van, “if you do not stop now when I say one, two, three, I shall open this knife” (opening the knife) “and slash my leg to match yours. Oh, please, devour your fingernails! Anything is more welcome.”

  Because, perhaps, Van’s lifestream was too bitter—even in those glad days—Chateaubriand’s mosquito never cared much for him. Nowadays it seems to be getting extinct, what with the cooler climate and the moronic draining of the lovely rich marshes in the Ladore region as well as near Kaluga, Conn., and Lugano, Pa. (A short series, all females, replete with their fortunate captor’s blood, has recently been collected, I am told, in a secret habitat quite far from the above-mentioned stations. Ada’s note.)

  18

  Not only in ear-trumpet age—in what Van called their dot-dot-dotage—but even more so in their adolescence (summer, 1888), did they seek a scholarly excitement in establishing the past evolution (summer, 1884) of their love, the initial stages of its revelations, the freak discrepancies in gappy chronographies. She had kept only a few—mainly botanical and entomological—pages of her diary, because on rereading it she had found its tone false and finical; he had destroyed his entirely because of its clumsy schoolboyish style combined with heedless, and false, cynicism. Thus they had to rely on oral tradition, on the mutual correction of common memories. “And do you remember, a tï pomnish’, et te souviens-tu” (invariably with that implied codetta of “and,” introducing the bead to be threaded in the torn necklace) became with them, in their intense talks, the standard device for beginning every other sentence. Calendar dates were debated, sequences sifted and shifted, sentimental notes compared, hesitations and resolutions passionately analyzed. If their recollections now and then did not tally, this was often owing to sexual differences rather than to individual temperament. Both were diverted by life’s young fumblings, both saddened by the wisdom of time. Ada tended to see those initial stages as an extremely gradual and diffuse growth, possibly unnatural, probably unique, but wholly delightful in its smooth unfolding which precluded any brutish impulses or shocks of shame. Van’s memory could not help picking out specific episodes branded forever with abrupt and poignant, and sometimes regrettable, physical thrills. She had the impression that the insatiable delectations she arrived at, without having expected or summoned them, were experienced by Van only by the time she attained them: that is, after weeks of cumulative caresses; her first physiological reactions to them she demurely dismissed as related to childish practices which she had indulged in before and which had little to do with the glory and tang of individual happiness. Van, on the contrary, not only could tabulate every informal spasm he had hidden from her before they became lovers, but stressed philosophic and moral distinctions between the shattering force of self-abuse and the overwhelming softness of avowed and shared love.

  When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor. Ada saw herself there as a wonder-eyed waif with a bedraggled nosegay; Van saw himself as a nasty young satyr with clumsy hooves and an ambiguous flue pipe. “But I was only twelve,” Ada would cry when some indelicate detail was brought up. “I was in my fifteenth year,” sadly said Van.

  And did the young lady recall, he asked, producing metaphorically some notes from his pocket, the very first time she guessed that her shy young “cousin” (their official relationship) was physically excited in her presence, though decently swathed in layers of linen and wool and not in contact with the young lady?

  She said, frankly no, she did not—indeed, could not—because at eleven, despite trying numberless times to unlock with every key in the house the cabinet in which Walter Daniel Veen kept “Jap. & Ind. erot. prints” as seen distinctly labeled through the glazed door (the key to which Van found for her in a twinkle—taped to the back of the pediment), she had still been rather hazy about the way human beings mated. She was very observant, of course, and had closely examined various insects in copula, but at the period discussed clear examples of mammalian maleness had rarely come to her notice and had remained unconnected with any idea or possibility of sexual function (such as for example the time she had contemplated the soft-looking beige beak of the Negro janitor’s boy who sometimes urinated in the girls’ water closet at her first school in 1883).

  Two other phenomena that she had observed even earlier proved ridiculously misleading. She must have been about nine when that elderly gentleman, an eminent painter whom she could not and would not name, came several times to dinner at Ardis Hall. Her drawing teacher, Miss Wintergreen, respected him greatly, though actually her natures mortes were considered (in 1888 and again 1958) incomparably superior to the works of the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably from behind—fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts—

  “I know exactly,” interrupted Van angrily, “whom you mean, and would like to place on record that even if his delicious talent is in disfavor today, Paul J. Gigment had every right to paint schoolgirls and poolgirls from any side he pleased. Proceed.”

  Every time (said unruffled Ada) Pig Pigment came, she cowered when hearing him trudge and snort and pant upstairs, ever nearer like the Marmoreal Guest, that immemorial ghost, seeking her, crying for her in a thin, querulous voice not in keeping with marble.

  “Poor old chap,” murmured Van.

  His method of contact, she said
, “puisqu’on aborde ce thème-là, and I’m certainly not making offensive comparisons,” was to insist, with maniacal force, that he help her reach for something—anything, a little gift he had brought, bonbons, or simply some old toy that he’d picked up from the floor of the nursery and hung up high on the wall, or a pink candle burning blue that he commanded her to blow out on an arbre de Noël, and despite her gentle protests he would raise the child by her elbows, taking his time, pushing, grunting, saying: ah, how heavy and pretty she was—this went on and on until the dinner gong boomed or Nurse entered with a glass of fruit juice and what a relief it was, for everybody concerned, when in the course of that fraudulent ascension her poor little bottom made it at last to the crackling snow of his shirtfront, and he dropped her, and buttoned his dinner jacket. And she remembered—

  “Stupidly exaggerated,” commented Van. “Also, I suppose, artificially recolored in the lamplight of later events as revealed still later.”

  And she remembered blushing painfully when somebody said poor Pig had a very sick mind and “a hardening of the artery,” that is how she heard it, or perhaps “heartery”; but she also knew, even then, that the artery could become awfully long, for she had seen Drongo, a black horse, looking, she must confess, most dejected and embarrassed by what was happening to it right in the middle of a rough field with all the daisies watching. She thought, arch Ada said (how truthfully, was another question), that a foal was dangling, with one black rubber leg free, out of Drongo’s belly because she did not understand that Drongo was not a mare at all and had not got a pouch as the kangaroo had in an illustration she worshipped, but then her English nurse explained that Drongo was a very sick horse and everything fell into place.