Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  They talked about their studies and teachers, and Van said:

  “I would like your opinion, Ada, and yours, Cordula, on the following literary problem. Our professor of French literature maintains that there is a grave philosophical, and hence artistic, flaw in the entire treatment of the Marcel and Albertine affair. It makes sense if the reader knows that the narrator is a pansy, and that the good fat cheeks of Albertine are the good fat buttocks of Albert. It makes none if the reader cannot be supposed, and should not be required, to know anything about this or any other author’s sexual habits in order to enjoy to the last drop a work of art. My teacher contends that if the reader knows nothing about Proust’s perversion, the detailed description of a heterosexual male jealously watchful of a homosexual female is preposterous because a normal man would be only amused, tickled pink in fact, by his girl’s frolics with a female partner. The professor concludes that a novel which can be appreciated only by quelque petite blanchisseuse who has examined the author’s dirty linen is, artistically, a failure.”

  “Ada, what on earth is he talking about? Some Italian film he has seen?”

  “Van,” said Ada in a tired voice, “you do not realize that the Advanced French Group at my school has advanced no farther than to Racan and Racine.”

  “Forget it,” said Van.

  “But you’ve had too much Marcel,” muttered Ada.

  The railway station had a semi-private tearoom supervised by the stationmaster’s wife under the school’s idiotic auspices. It was empty, save for a slender lady in black velvet, wearing a beautiful black velvet picture hat, who sat with her back to them at a “tonic bar” and never once turned her head, but the thought brushed him that she was a cocotte from Toulouse. Our damp trio found a nice corner table and with sighs of banal relief undid their raincoats. He hoped Ada would discard her heavy-seas hat but she did not, because she had cut her hair because of dreadful migraines, because she did not want him to see her in the rôle of a moribund Romeo.

  (On fait son grand Joyce after doing one’s petit Proust. In Ada’s lovely hand.)

  (But read on; it is pure V.V. Note that lady! In Van’s bed-buvard scrawl.)

  As Ada reached for the cream, he caught and inspected her dead-shamming hand. We remember the Camberwell Beauty that lay tightly closed for an instant upon our palm, and suddenly our hand was empty. He saw, with satisfaction, that her fingernails were now long and sharp.

  “Not too sharp, are they, my dear,” he asked for the benefit of dura Cordula, who should have gone to the “powder room”—a forlorn hope.

  “Why, no,” said Ada.

  “You don’t,” he went on, unable to stop, “you don’t scratch little people when you stroke little people? Look at your little girl friend’s hand” (taking it), “look at those dainty short nails (cold innocent, docile little paw!). She could not catch them in the fanciest satin, oh, no, could you, Ardula—I mean, Cordula?”

  Both girls giggled, and Cordula kissed Ada’s cheek. Van hardly knew what reaction he had expected, but found that simple kiss disarming and disappointing. The sound of the rain was lost in a growing rumble of wheels. He glanced at his watch; glanced up at the clock on the wall. He said he was sorry—that was his train.

  “Not at all,” wrote Ada (paraphrased here) in reply to his abject apologies, “we just thought you were drunk; but I’ll never invite you to Brownhill again, my love.”

  28

  The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive—somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s “Headless Horseman” poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers—and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows—English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions—parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding—and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr. Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper.

  Mr. Plunkett had been, in the summer of his adventurous years, one of the greatest shuler’s, politely called “gaming conjurers,” both in England and America. At forty, in the middle of a draw-poker session he had been betrayed by a fainting fit of cardiac origin (which allowed, alas, a bad loser’s dirty hands to go through his pockets), had spent several years in prison, had become reconverted to the Roman faith of his forefathers and, upon completing his term, had dabbled in missionary work, written a handbook on conjuring, conducted bridge columns in various papers and done some sleuthing for the police (he had two stalwart sons in the force). The outrageous ravages of time and some surgical tampering with his rugged features had made his gray face not more attractive but at least unrecognizable to all but a few old cronies, who now shunned his chilling company, anyway. To Van he was even more fascinating than King Wing. Gruff but kindly Mr. Plunkett could not resist exploiting that fascination (we all like to be liked) by introducing Van to the tricks of an art now become pure and abstract, and therefore genuine. Mr. Plunkett considered the use of all mechanical media, mirrors and vulgar “sleeve rakes” as leading inevitably to exposure, just as jellies, muslin, rubber hands and so on sully and shorten a professional medium’s career. He taught Van what to look for when suspecting the cheater with bright objects around him (“Xmas tree” or “twinkler,” as those amateurs, some of them respectable clubmen, are called by professionals). Mr. Plunkett believed only in sleight-of-hand; secret pockets were useful (but could be turned inside out and against you). Most essential was the “feel” of a card, the delicacy of its palming, and digitation, the false shuffle, deck-sweeping, pack-roofing, prefabrication of deals, and above all a finger agility that practice could metamorphose into veritable vanishing acts or, conversely, into the materialization of a joker or the transformation of two pairs into four kings. One absolute requisite, if using privately an additional deck, was memorizing discards when hands were not prearranged. For a couple of months Van practiced card tricks, then turned to other recreations. He was an apprentice who learned fast, and kept his labeled phials in a cool place.

  In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel).

  Sometime during the winter of 1886–7, at dismally cold Chose, in the course of a poker game with two Frenchmen and a fellow student whom we shall call Dick, in the latter’s smartly furnished rooms in Serenity Court, he noticed that the French twins were losing not only because they were happily and hopelessly tight, but also because milord was that “crystal cretin” of Plunkett’s vocabulary, a man of many mirrors—small reflecting surfaces variously angled and shaped, glinting discreetly on watch or signet
ring, dissimulated like female fireflies in the undergrowth, on table legs, inside cuff or lapel, and on the edges of ashtrays, whose position on adjacent supports Dick kept shifting with a negligent air—all of which, as any card-sharper might tell you, was as dumb as it was redundant.

  Having bided his time, and lost several thousands, Van decided to put some old lessons into practice. There was a pause in the game. Dick got up and went to a speaking-tube in the corner to order more wine. The unfortunate twins were passing to each other a fountain pen, thumb-pressing and re-pressing it in disastrous transit as they calculated their losses, which exceeded Van’s. Van slipped a pack of cards into his pocket and stood up rolling the stiffness out of his mighty shoulders.

  “I say, Dick, ever met a gambler in the States called Plunkett? Bald gray chap when I knew him.”

  “Plunkett? Plunkett? Must have been before my time. Was he the one who turned priest or something? Why?”

  “One of my father’s pals. Great artist.”

  “Artist?”

  “Yes, artist. I’m an artist. I suppose you think you’re an artist. Many people do.”

  “What on earth is an artist?”

  “An underground observatory,” replied Van promptly.

  “That’s out of some modern novel,” said Dick, discarding his cigarette after a few avid inhales.

  “That’s out of Van Veen,” said Van Veen.

  Dick strolled back to the table. His man came in with the wine. Van retired to the W.C. and started to “doctor the deck,” as old Plunkett used to call the process. He remembered that the last time he had made card magic was when showing some tricks to Demon—who disapproved of their poker slant. Oh, yes, and when putting at ease the mad conjurer at the ward whose pet obsession was that gravity had something to do with the blood circulation of a Supreme Being.

  Van felt pretty sure of his skill—and of milord’s stupidity—but doubted he could keep it up for any length of time. He was sorry for Dick, who, apart from being an amateur rogue, was an amiable indolent fellow, with a pasty face and a flabby body—you could knock him down with a feather, and he frankly admitted that if his people kept refusing to pay his (huge and trite) debts, he would have to move to Australia to make new ones there and forge a few checks on the way.

  He now constatait avec plaisir, as he told his victims, that only a few hundred pounds separated him from the shoreline of the minimal sum he needed to appease his most ruthless creditor, whereupon he went on fleecing poor Jean and Jacques with reckless haste, and then found himself with three honest aces (dealt to him lovingly by Van) against Van’s nimbly mustered four nines. This was followed by a good bluff against a better one; and with Van’s generously slipping the desperately flashing and twinkling young lord good but not good enough hands, the latter’s martyrdom came to a sudden end (London tailors wringing their hands in the fog, and a moneylender, the famous St. Priest of Chose, asking for an appointment with Dick’s father). After the heaviest betting Van had yet seen, Jacques showed a forlorn couleur (as he called it in a dying man’s whisper) and Dick surrendered with a straight flush to his tormentor’s royal one. Van, who up to then had had no trouble whatever in concealing his delicate maneuvers from Dick’s silly lens, now had the pleasure of seeing him glimpse the second joker palmed in his, Van’s, hand as he swept up and clasped to his bosom the “rainbow ivory”—Plunkett was full of poetry. The twins put on their ties and coats and said they had to quit.

  “Same here, Dick,” said Van. “Pity you had to rely on your crystal balls. I have often wondered why the Russian for it—I think we have a Russian ancestor in common—is the same as the German for ‘schoolboy,’ minus the umlaut”—and while prattling thus, Van refunded with a rapidly written check the ecstatically astonished Frenchmen. Then he collected a handful of cards and chips and hurled them into Dick’s face. The missiles were still in flight when he regretted that cruel and commonplace bewgest, for the wretched fellow could not respond in any conceivable fashion, and just sat there covering one eye and examining his damaged spectacles with the other—it was also bleeding a little—while the French twins were pressing upon him two handkerchiefs which he kept good-naturedly pushing away. Rosy aurora was shivering in green Serenity Court. Laborious old Chose.

  (There should be a sign denoting applause. Ada’s note.)

  Van fumed and fretted the rest of the morning, and after a long soak in a hot bath (the best adviser, and prompter and inspirer in the world, except, of course, the W.C. seat) decided to pen—pen is the word—a note of apology to the cheated cheater. As he was dressing, a messenger brought him a note from Lord C. (he was a cousin of one of Van’s Riverlane schoolmates), in which generous Dick proposed to substitute for his debt an introduction to the Venus Villa Club to which his whole clan belonged. Such a bounty no boy of eighteen could hope to obtain. It was a ticket to paradise. Van tussled with his slightly overweight conscience (both grinning like old pals in their old gymnasium)—and accepted Dick’s offer.

  (I think, Van, you should make it clearer why you, Van, the proudest and cleanest of men—I’m not speaking of abject physicalities, we are all organized that way—but why you, pure Van, could accept the offer of a rogue who no doubt continued to “flash and twinkle” after that fiasco. I think you should explain, primo, that you were dreadfully overworked, and secundo, that you could not bear the thought that the rogue knew, that he being a rogue, you could not call him out, and were safe, so to speak. Right? Van, do you hear me? I think—.)

  He did not “twinkle” long after that. Five or six years later, in Monte Carlo, Van was passing by an open-air café when a hand grabbed him by the elbow, and a radiant, ruddy, comparatively respectable Dick C. leaned toward him over the petunias of the latticed balustrade:

  “Van,” he cried, “I’ve given up all that looking-glass dung, congratulate me! Listen: the only safe way is to mark ‘em! Wait, that’s not all, can you imagine, they’ve invented a microscopic—and I mean microscopic—point of euphorion, a precious metal, to insert under your thumbnail, you can’t see it with the naked eye, but one minuscule section of your monocle is made to magnify the mark you make with it, like killing a flea, on one card after another, as they come along in the game, that’s the beauty of it, no preparations, no props, nothing! Mark ’em! Mark ’em!” good Dick was still shouting, as Van walked away.

  29

  In mid-July, 1886, while Van was winning the table-tennis tournament on board a “luxury” liner (that now took a whole week to reach in white dignity Manhattan from Dover!), Marina, both her daughters, their governess, and two maids were shivering in more or less simultaneous stages of Russian influentsa at various stops on their way by train from Los Angeles to Ladore. A hydrogram from Chicago awaiting Van at his father’s house on July 21 (her dear birthday!) said: “dadaist impatient patient arriving between twenty-fourth and seventh call doris can meet regards vicinity.”

  “Which reminds me painfully of the golubyanki (petits bleus) Aqua used to send me,” remarked Demon with a sigh (having mechanically opened the message). “Is tender Vicinity some girl I know? Because you may glare as much as you like, but this is not a wire from doctor to doctor.”

  Van raised his eyes to the Boucher plafond of the breakfast room and, shaking his head in derisive admiration, commented on Demon’s acumen. Yes, that was right. He had to travel incontinently to Garders (anagram of “regards,” see?) to a hamlet the opposite way from Letham (see?) to see a mad girl artist called Doris or Odris who drew only gee-gees and sugar daddies.

  Van rented a room under a false name (Boucher) at the only inn of Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River, some twenty miles from Ardis. He spent the night fighting the celebrated mosquito, or its cousin, that liked him more than the Ardis beast had. The toilet on the landing was a black hole, with the traces of a fecal explosion, between a squatter’s two giant soles. At 7 A.M. on July 25 he called Ardis Hall from the Malahar post office and got connected with Bout who w
as connected with Blanche and mistook Van’s voice for the butler’s.