Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Van thrust his bare toe into a sneaker, retrieving the while its mate from under the bed; he hurried down, past a pleased-looking Prince Zemski and a grim Vincent Veen, Bishop of Balticomore and Como.

  But she was not down yet. In the bright dining room, full of yellow flowers in drooping clusters of sunshine, Uncle Dan was feeding. He wore suitable clothes for a suitably hot day in the country—namely, a candy-striped suit over a mauve flannel shirt and piqué waistcoat, with a blue-and-red club tie and a safety-goldpinned very high soft collar (all his trim stripes and colors were a little displaced, though, in the process of comic strip printing, because it was Sunday). He had just finished his first buttered toast, with a dab of ye-old Orange Marmalade and was making turkey sounds as he rinsed his dentures orally with a mouthful of coffee prior to swallowing it and the flavorous flotsam. Being, as I had reason to believe, plucky, I could make myself suffer a direct view of the man’s pink face with its (rotating) red “tashy,” but I was not obliged (mused Van, in 1922, when he saw those baguenaudier flowers again) to stand his chinless profile with its curly red sideburn. So Van considered, not without appetite, the blue jugs of hot chocolate and baton-segments of bread prepared for the hungry children. Marina had her breakfast in bed, the butler and Price ate in a recess of the pantry (a pleasing thought, somehow) and Mlle Larivière did not touch any food till noon, being a doom-fearing “midinette” (the sect, not the shop) and had actually made her father confessor join her group.

  “You could have taken us to see the fire, Uncle dear,” remarked Van, pouring himself a cup of chocolate.

  “Ada will tell you all about it,” replied Uncle Dan, lovingly buttering and marmalading another toast. “She greatly enjoyed the excursion.”

  “Oh, she went with you, did she?”

  “Yes—in the black charabanc, with all the butlers. Jolly good fun, rally” (pseudo-British pronunciation).

  “But that must have been one of the scullery maids, not Ada,” remarked Van. “I didn’t realize,” he added, “we had several here—I mean, butlers.”

  “Oh, I imagine so,” said Uncle Dan vaguely. He repeated the internal rinsing process, and with a slight cough put on his spectacles, but no morning paper had come—and he took them off again.

  Suddenly Van heard her lovely dark voice on the staircase saying in an upward direction, “Je l’ai vu dans une des corbeilles de la bibliothèque”—presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or slipper orchid. There was a “bannister pause,” as photographers say, and after the maid’s distant glad cry had come from the library Ada’s voice added: “Je me demande, I wonder qui Va mis là, who put it there.” Aussitôt après she entered the dining room.

  She wore—though not in collusion with him—black shorts, a white jersey and sneakers. Her hair was drawn back from her big round brow and thickly pigtailed. The rose of a rash under her lower lip glistened with glycerine through the patchily dabbed-on powder. She was too pale to be really pretty. She carried a book of verse. My eldest is rather plain but has nice hair, and my youngest is pretty, but foxy red, Marina used to say. Ungrateful age, ungrateful light, ungrateful artist, but not ungrateful lover. A veritable wave of adoration buoyed him up from the pit of the stomach to heaven. The thrill of seeing her, and knowing she knew, and knowing nobody else knew what they had so freely, and dirtily, and delightfully indulged in, less than six hours ago, turned out to be too much for our green lover despite his trying to trivialize it with the moral corrective of an opprobrious adverb. Fluffing badly a halfhearted “hello,” not a habitual morning greeting (which, besides, she ignored), he bent over his breakfast while watching with a secret polyphemic organ her every movement. She slapped lightly Mr. Veen’s bald head with her book in passing behind him and noisily moved the chair next to him on the other side from Van. Blinking, doll-lashing daintily, she poured herself a big cup of chocolate. Though it had been thoroughly sweetened, the child placed a lump of sugar on her spoon and eased it into the cup, relishing the way the hot brown liquid suffused and dissolved one crystal-grained crumbling corner and then the entire piece.

  Meanwhile, Uncle Dan, in delayed action, chased an imaginary insect off his pate, looked up, looked around, and at last acknowledged the newcomer.

  “Oh yes, Ada,” he said, “Van here is anxious to know something. What were you doing, my dear, while he and I were taking care of the fire?”

  Its reflection invaded Ada. Van had never seen a girl (as translucently white-skinned as she), or indeed anybody else, porcelain or peach, blush so substantially and habitually, and the habit distressed him as being much more improper than any act that might cause it. She stole a foolish glance at the somber boy and began saying something about having been fast ablaze in her bedroom.

  “You were not,” interrupted Van harshly, “you were with me looking at the blaze from the library window. Uncle Dan is all wet.”

  “Ménagez vos américanismes,” said the latter—and then opened his arms wide in paternal welcome as guileless Lucette trotted into the room with a child’s pink, stiff-bagged butterfly net in her little fist, like an oriflamme.

  Van shook his head disapprovingly at Ada. She showed him the sharp petal of her tongue, and with a shock of self-indignation her lover felt himself flushing in his turn. So much for the franchise. He ringed his napkin and retired to the mestechko (“little place”) off the front hall.

  After she too had finished breakfasting, he waylaid her, gorged with sweet butter, on the landing. They had one moment to plan things, it was all, historically speaking, at the dawn of the novel which was still in the hands of parsonage ladies and French academicians, so such moments were precious. She stood scratching one raised knee. They agreed to go for a walk before lunch and find a secluded place. She had to finish a translation for Mlle Larivière. She showed him her draft. François Coppée? Yes.

  Their fall is gentle. The woodchopper

  Can tell, before they reach the mud,

  The oak tree by its leaf of copper,

  The maple by its leaf of blood.

  “Leur chute est lente,” said Van, “on peut les suivre du regard en reconnaissant—that paraphrastic touch of ‘chopper’ and ‘mud’ is, of course, pure Lowden (minor poet and translator, 1815–1895). Betraying the first half of the stanza to save the second is rather like that Russian nobleman who chucked his coachman to the wolves, and then fell out of his sleigh.”

  “I think you are very cruel and stupid,” said Ada. “This is not meant to be a work of art or a brilliant parody. It is the ransom exacted by a demented governess from a poor overworked schoolgirl. Wait for me in the Baguenaudier Bower,” she added. “I’ll be down in exactly sixty-three minutes.”

  Her hands were cold, her neck was hot; the postman’s boy had rung the doorbell; Bout, a young footman, the butler’s bastard, crossed the resonant flags of the hall.

  On Sunday mornings the mail came late, because of the voluminous Sunday supplements of the papers from Balticomore, and Kaluga, and Luga, which Robin Sherwood, the old postman, in his bright green uniform, distributed on horseback throughout the somnolent countryside. As Van, humming his school song—the only tune he could ever carry—skipped down the terrace steps, he saw Robin on his old bay holding the livelier black stallion of his Sunday helper, a handsome English lad whom, it was rumored behind the rose hedges, the old man loved more vigorously than his office required.

  Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, “like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy” (Floeberg’s Ursula).

  Blue butterflies nearly the size of Small Whites, and likewise of European origin, were flitting swiftly around the shrubs and settling on the drooping clusters of yellow flowers. In less complex circumstances, forty years hence, our lovers were to see again, with wonder and joy, the same insect and the same b
ladder-senna along a forest trail near Susten in the Valais. At the present moment he was looking forward to collecting what he would recollect later, and watched the big bold Blues as he sprawled on the turf, burning with the evoked vision of Ada’s pale limbs in the variegated light of the bower, and then coldly telling himself that fact could never quite match fancy. When he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet, with wet hair and tingling skin, Van got the rare treat of finding his foreglimpse of live ivory accurately reproduced, except that she had loosened her hair and changed into the curtal frock of sunbright cotton that he was so fond of and had so ardently yearned to soil in the so recent past.

  He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet; and this Van accomplished as soon as Ada and he got sufficiently deep in the larchwood which closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Ardis and Ladore.

  Neither could establish in retrospect, nor, indeed, persisted in trying to do so, how, when and where he actually “deflowered” her—a vulgarism Ada in Wonderland had happened to find glossed in Phrody’s Encyclopedia as: “to break a virgin’s vaginal membrane by manly or mechanical means,” with the example: “The sweetness of his soul was deflowered (Jeremy Taylor).” Was it that night on the lap robe? Or that day in the larchwood? Or later in the shooting gallery, or in the attic, or on the roof, or on a secluded balcony, or in the bathroom, or (not very comfortably) on the Magic Carpet? We do not know and do not care.

  (You kissed and nibbled, and poked, and prodded, and worried me there so much and so often that my virginity was lost in the shuffle; but I do recall definitely that by midsummer the machine which our forefathers called “sex” was working as smoothly as later, in 1888, etc., darling. Marginal note in red ink.)

  21

  Ada was denied the free use of the library. According to the latest list (printed May 1, 1884), it contained 14,841 items, and even that dry catalogue her governess preferred not to place in the child’s hands—“pour ne pas lui donner des idées.” On her own shelves, to be sure, Ada had taxonomic works on botany and entomology as well as her schoolbooks and a few innocuous popular novels. But not only was she not supposed to browse in the library unsupervised, but every book she took out to read in bed or bower had to be checked by her mentor and charged “en lecture” with name and stamped date in the index-card files kept in a careful mess by Mlle Larivière and in a kind of desperate order (with the insertion of queries, calls of distress, and even imprecations, on bits of pink, red or purple paper) by a cousin of hers, Monsieur Philippe Verger, a diminutive old bachelor, morbidly silent and shy, who moused in, every other week, for a few hours of quiet work—so quiet, in fact, that one afternoon when a tallish library ladder suddenly went into an eerie backward slow-motion swoon with him high up on it embracing a windmill of volumes, he reached the floor, supine, with his ladder and books, in such a hush that guilty Ada, who had thought she was alone (pulling out and scanning the utterly unrewarding Arabian Nights), mistook his fall for the shadow of a door being stealthily opened by some soft-fleshed eunuch.

  Her intimacy with her cher, trop cher René, as she sometimes called Van in gentle jest, changed the reading situation entirely—whatever decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air. Soon upon his arrival at Ardis, Van warned his former governess (who had reasons to believe in his threats) that if he were not permitted to remove from the library at any time, for any length of time, and without any trace of “en lecture” any volume, collected works, boxed pamphlets or incunabulum that he might fancy, he would have Miss Vertograd, his father’s librarian, a completely servile and infinitely accommodative spinster of Verger’s format and presumable date of publication, post to Ardis Hall trunkfuls of eighteenth-century libertines, German sexologists, and a whole circus of Shastras and Nefsawis in literal translation with apocryphal addenda. Puzzled Mile Larivière would have consulted the Master of Ardis, but she never discussed with him anything serious since the day (in January, 1876) when he had made an unexpected (and rather halfhearted, really—let us be fair) pass at her. As to dear, frivolous Marina, she only remarked, when consulted, that at Van’s age she would have poisoned her governess with anti-roach borax if forbidden to read, for example, Turgenev’s Smoke. Thereafter, anything Ada wanted or might have wanted to want was placed by Van at her disposal in various safe nooks, and the only visible consequence of Verger’s perplexities and despair was an increase in the scatter of a curious snow-white dust that he always left here and there, on the dark carpet, in this or that spot of plodding occupation—such a cruel curse on such a neat little man!

  At a nice Christmas party for private librarians arranged under the auspices of the Braille Club in Raduga a couple of years earlier, empathic Miss Vertograd had noticed that she and giggling Verger, with whom she was in the act of sharing a quiet little cracker (tugged apart with no audible result—nor did the gold paper frilled at both ends yield any bonbon or breloque or other favor of fate), shared also a spectacular skin disease that had been portrayed recently by a famous American novelist in his Chiron and described in side-splitting style by a co-sufferer who wrote essays for a London weekly. Very delicately, Miss Vertograd would transmit through Van library slips to the rather unresponsive Frenchman with this or that concise suggestion: “Mercury!” or “Höhensonne works wonders.” Mademoiselle, who was in the know, too, looked up “Psoriasis” in a one-volume medical encyclopedia, which her late mother had left her and which had not only helped her and her charges on various minor occasions but had suggested suitable illnesses for the characters in the stories she contributed to the Québec Quarterly. In the present case, the cure optimistically advised was to “take a warm bath at least twice a month and avoid spices”; this she typed out and passed on to her cousin in a Get-Well envelope. Finally, Ada showed Van a letter from Dr. Krolik on the same subject; it said (English version): “Crimson-blotched, silver-scaled, yellow-crusted wretches, the harmless psoriatics (who cannot communicate their skin trouble and are otherwise the healthiest of people—actually, their bobo’s protect them from bubas and buboes, as my teacher used to observe) were confused with lepers—yes, lepers—in the Middle Ages, when thousands if not millions of Vergers and Vertograds crackled and howled bound by enthusiasts to stakes erected in the public squares of Spain and other fire-loving countries.” But this note they decided not to plant in the meek martyr’s index under PS as they had first intended: lepidopterists are overeloquent on lepidosis.

  Novels, poems, scientific and philosophical works wandered out unnoticed after the poor librarian gave his démission éplorée on the first of August, 1884. They crossed lawns and traveled along hedges somewhat in the manner of the objects carried away by the Invisible Man in Wells’ delightful tale, and landed in Ada’s lap wherever she and Van had their trysts. Both sought excitement in books as the best readers always do; both found in many renowned works pretentiousness, tedium and facile misinformation.

  In a story by Chateaubriand about a pair of romantic siblings, Ada had not quite understood when she first read it at nine or ten the sentence “les deux enfants pouvaient donc s’abandonner au plaisir sans aucune crainte.” A bawdy critic in a collection of articles which she now could gleefully consult (Les inuses s’anmsent) explained that the “done” referred both to the infertility of tender age and to the sterility of tender consanguinity. Van said, however, that the writer and the critic erred, and to illustrate his contention, drew his sweetheart’s attention to a chapter in the opus “Sex and Lex” dealing with the effects on the community of a disastrous caprice of nature.

  In those times, in this country “incestuous” meant not only “unchaste”—the point regarded linguistics rather than legalistics—but also implied (in the phrase “incestuous cohabitation,” and so forth) interference with the continuity of human evolution. History had long replaced appea
ls to “divine law” by common sense and popular science. With those considerations in mind, “incest” could be termed a crime only inasmuch as inbreeding might be criminal. But as Judge Bald pointed out already during the Albino Riots of 1835, practically all North American and Tartar agriculturists and animal farmers used inbreeding as a method of propagation that tended to preserve, and stimulate, stabilize and even create anew favorable characters in a race or strain unless practiced too rigidly. If practiced rigidly incest led to various forms of decline, to the production of cripples, weaklings, “muted mutates” and, finally, to hopeless sterility. Now that smacked of “crime,” and since nobody could be supposed to control judiciously orgies of indiscriminate inbreeding (somewhere in Tartary fifty generations of ever woolier and woolier sheep had recently ended abruptly in one hairless, five-legged, impotent little lamb—and the beheading of a number of farmers failed to resurrect the fat strain), it was perhaps better to ban “incestuous cohabitation” altogether. Judge Bald and his followers disagreed, perceiving in “the deliberate suppression of a possible benefit for the sake of avoiding a probable evil” the infringement of one of humanity’s main rights—that of enjoying the liberty of its evolution, a liberty no other creature had ever known. Unfortunately after the rumored misadventure of the Volga herds and herdsmen a much better documented fait divers happened in the U.S.A. at the height of the controversy. An American, a certain Ivan Ivanov of Yukonsk, described as an “habitually intoxicated laborer” (“a good definition,” said Ada lightly, “of the true artist”), managed somehow to impregnate—in his sleep, it was claimed by him and his huge family—his five-year-old great-granddaughter, Maria Ivanov, and, then, five years later, also got Maria’s daughter, Daria, with child, in another fit of somnolence. Photographs of Maria, a ten-year-old granny with little Daria and baby Varia crawling around her, appeared in all the newspapers, and all kinds of amusing puzzles were provided by the genealogical farce that the relationships between the numerous living—and not always clean-living—members of the Ivanov clan had become in angry Yukonsk. Before the sixty-year-old somnambulist could go on procreating, he was clapped into a monastery for fifteen years as required by an ancient Russian law. Upon his release he proposed to make honorable amends by marrying Daria, now a buxom lass with problems of her own. Journalists made a lot of the wedding, and the shower of gifts from well-wishers (old ladies in New England, a progressive poet in residence at Tennesee Waltz College, an entire Mexican high school, et cetera), and on the same day Gamaliel (then a stout young senator) thumped a conference table with such force that he hurt his fist and demanded a retrial and capital punishment. It was, of course, only a temperamental gesture; but the Ivanov affair cast a long shadow upon the little matter of “favorable inbreeding.” By mid-century not only first cousins but uncles and grandnieces were forbidden to intermarry; and in some fertile parts of Estoty the izba windows of large peasant families in which up to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like mattress were ordered to be kept uncurtained at night for the convenience of petrol-torch-flashing patrols—“Peeping Pats,” as the anti-Irish tabloids called them.