Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  The situation was repeated in a much more pleasing strain a few hours later. For supper Ada wore another dress, of crimson cotton, and when they met at night (in the old toolroom by the glow of a carbide lantern) he unzipped her with such impetuous force that he nearly tore it in two to expose her entire beauty. They were still fiercely engaged (on the same bench covered with the same tartan lap robe—thoughtfully brought) when the outside door noiselessly opened, and Blanche glided in like an imprudent ghost. She had her own key, was back from a rendezvous with old Sore the Burgundian night watchman, and stopped like a fool gaping at the young couple. “Knock next time,” said Van with a grin, not bothering to pause—rather enjoying, in fact, the bewitching apparition: she wore a miniver cloak that Ada had lost in the woods. Oh, she had become wonderfully pretty, and elle le mangeait des yeux—but Ada slammed the lantern shut, and with apologetic groans, the slut groped her way to the inner passage. His true love could not help giggling; and Van resumed his passionate task.

  They stayed on and on, quite unable to part, knowing any explanation would do if anybody wondered why their rooms had remained empty till dawn. The first ray of the morning dabbed a toolbox with fresh green paint, when, at last moved by hunger, they got up and quietly repaired to the pantry.

  “Chto, vïspalsya, Vahn (well, slept your fill, Van)?” said Ada, beautifully mimicking her mother’s voice, and she continued in her mother’s English: “By your appetite, I judge. And, I think, it is only the first brekfest.”

  “Okh,” grumbled Van, “my kneecaps! That bench was cruel. And I am hongry.”

  They sat, facing each other, at a breakfast table, munching black bread with fresh butter, and Virginia ham, and slices of genuine Emmenthaler cheese—and here’s a pot of transparent honey: two cheerful cousins, “raiding the icebox” as children in old fairy tales, and the thrushes were sweetly whistling in the bright-green garden as the dark-green shadows drew in their claws.

  “My teacher,” she said, “at the Drama School thinks I’m better in farces than in tragedy. If they only knew!”

  “There is nothing to know,” retorted Van. “Nothing, nothing has changed! But that’s the general impression, it was too dim down there for details, we’ll examine them tomorrow on our little island: ‘My sister, do you still recall …’ ”

  “Oh shut up!” said Ada. “I’ve given up all that stuff—petits vers, vers de soie …”

  “Come, come,” cried Van, “some of the rhymes were magnificent acrobatics on the part of the child’s mind: ‘Oh! qui me rendra, ma Lucile, et le grand chêne and zee big hill’ Little Lucile,” he added in an effort to dissipate her frowns with a joke, “little Lucile has become so peachy that I think I’ll switch over to her if you keep losing your temper like that. I remember the first time you got cross with me was when I chucked a stone at a statue and frightened a finch. That’s memory!”

  She was on bad terms with memory. She thought the servants would be up soon now, and then one could have something hot. That fridge was all fudge, really.

  “Why, suddenly sad?”

  Yes, she was sad, she replied, she was in dreadful trouble, her quandary might drive her insane if she did not know that her heart was pure. She could explain it best by a parable. She was like the girl in a film he would see soon, who is in the triple throes of a tragedy which she must conceal lest she lose her only true love, the head of the arrow, the point of the pain. In secret, she is simultaneously struggling with three torments—trying to get rid of a dreary dragging affair with a married man, whom she pities; trying to nip in the bud—in the sticky red bud—a crazy adventure with an attractive young fool, whom she pities even more; and trying to keep intact the love of the only man who is all her life and who is above pity, above the poverty of her feminine pity, because as the script says, his ego is richer and prouder than anything those two poor worms could imagine.

  What had she actually done with the poor worms, after Krolik’s untimely end?

  “Oh, set them free” (big vague gesture), “turned them out, put them back onto suitable plants, buried them in the pupal state, told them to run along, while the birds were not looking—or alas, feigning not to be looking.

  “Well, to mop up that parable, because you have the knack of interrupting and diverting my thoughts, I’m in a sense also torn between three private tortures, the main torture being ambition, of course. I know I shall never be a biologist, my passion for creeping creatures is great, but not all-consuming. I know I shall always adore orchids and mushrooms and violets, and you will still see me going out alone, to wander alone in the woods and return alone with a little lone lily; but flowers, no matter how irresistible, must be given up, too, as soon as I have the strength. Remains the great ambition and the greatest terror: the dream of the bluest, remotest, hardest dramatic climbs—probably ending as one of a hundred old spider spinsters teaching drama students, knowing, that, as you insist, sinister insister, we can’t marry, and having always before me the awful example of pathetic, second-rate, brave Marina.”

  “Well, that bit about spinsters is rot,” said Van, “we’ll pull it off somehow, we’ll become more and more distant relations in artistically forged papers and finally dwindle to mere namesakes, or at the worst we shall live quietly, you as my housekeeper, I as your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, ‘we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds.’ ”

  “Did you find them all, Uncle Van?” she inquired, sighing, laying her dolent head on his shoulder. She had told him everything.

  “More or less,” he replied, not realizing she had. “Anyway, I made the best study of the dustiest floor ever accomplished by a romantic character. One bright little bugger rolled under the bed where there grows a virgin forest of fluff and fungi. I’ll have them reassembled in Ladore when I motor there one of these days. I have lots of things to buy—a gorgeous bathrobe in honor of your new swimming pool, a cream called Chrysanthemum, a brace of dueling pistols, a folding beach mattress, preferably black—to bring you out not on the beach but on that bench, and on our isle de Ladore.”

  “Except,” she said, “that I do not approve of your making a laughingstock of yourself by looking for pistols in souvenir shops, especially when Ardis Hall is full of old shotguns and rifles, and revolvers, and bows and arrows—you remember, we had lots of practice with them when you and I were children.”

  Oh, he did, he did. Children, yes. In point of fact, how puzzling to keep seeing that recent past in nursery terms. Because nothing had changed—you are with me, aren’t you?—nothing, not counting little improvements in the grounds and the governess.

  Yes! Wasn’t that a scream? Larivière blossoming forth, bosoming forth as a great writer! A sensational Canadian best-selling author! Her story “The Necklace” (La rivière de diamants) had become a classic in girls’ schools and her gorgeous pseudonym “Guillaume de Monparnasse” (the leaving out of the “t” made it more intime) was well-known from Quebec to Kaluga. As she put it in her exotic English: “Fame struck and the roubles rolled, and the dollars poured” (both currencies being used at the time in East Estotiland); but good Ida, far from abandoning Marina, with whom she had been platonically and irrevocably in love ever since she had seen her in “Bilitis,” accused herself of neglecting Lucette by overindulging in Literature; consequently she now gave the child, in spurts of vacational zeal, considerably more attention than poor little Ada (said Ada) had received at twelve, after her first (miserable) term at school. Van had been such an idiot: suspecting Cordula! Chaste, gentle, dumb, little Cordula de Prey, when Ada had explained to him, twice, thrice, in different codes, that she had invented a nasty tender schoolmate, at a time when she had been literally torn from him, and only assumed—in advance, so to speak—such a girl’s existence. A kind of blank check that she wanted from him; “Well, you got it,” said Van, “but now it’s destroyed and will not be renewed; but why did you run after fat Percy, what was so important?”

  “Oh, very importan
t,” said Ada, catching a drop of honey on her nether lip, “his mother was on the dorophone, and he said please tell her he was on his way home, and I forgot all about it, and rushed up to kiss you!”

  “At Riverlane,” said Van, “we used to call that a Doughnut Truth: only the truth, and the whole truth, with a hole in the truth.”

  “I hate you,” cried Ada, and made what she called a warning frog face, because Bouteillan had appeared in the doorway, his mustache shaved, coatless, tieless, in crimson braces that were holding up to his chest his well-filled black trousers. He disappeared, promising to bring them their coffee.

  “But let me ask you, dear Van, let me ask you something. How many times has Van been unfaithful to me since September, 1884?”

  “Six hundred and thirteen times,” answered Van. “With at least two hundred whores, who only caressed me. I’ve remained absolutely true to you because those were only Ob-manipulations’ (sham, insignificant strokings by unremembered cold hands).”

  The butler, now fully dressed, arrived with the coffee and toast. And the Ladore Gazette. It contained a picture of Marina being fawned upon by a young Latin actor.

  “Pah!” exclaimed Ada. “I had quite forgotten. He’s coming today, with a movie man, and our afternoon will be ruined. But I feel refreshed and fit,” she added (after a third cup of coffee). “It is only ten minutes to seven now. We shall go for a nice stroll in the park; there are one or two places that you might recognize.”

  “My love,” said Van, “my phantom orchid, my lovely bladder-senna! I have not slept for two nights—one of which I spent imagining the other, and this other turned out to be more than I had imagined. I’ve had enough of you for the time being.”

  “Not a very fine compliment,” said Ada, and rang resonantly for more toast.

  “I’ve paid you eight compliments, as a certain Venetian—”

  “I’m not interested in vulgar Venetians. You have become so coarse, dear Van, so strange …”

  “Sorry,” he said, getting up. “I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m dead tired, I’ll see you at lunch.”

  “There will be no lunch today,” said Ada. “It will be some messy snack at the poolside, and sticky drinks all day.”

  He wanted to kiss her on her silky head but Bouteillan at that moment came in and while Ada was crossly rebuking him for the meager supply of toast, Van escaped.

  32

  The shooting script was now ready. Marina, in dorean robe and coolie hat, reclined reading in a long-chair on the patio. Her director, G. A. Vronsky, elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest, was alternately sipping his vodka-and-tonic and feeding Marina typewritten pages from a folder. On her other side, crosslegged on a mat, sat Pedro (surname unknown, stagename forgotten), a repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor, with satyr ears, slanty eyes, and lynx nostrils, whom she had brought from Mexico and was keeping at a hotel in Ladore.

  Ada, lying on the edge of the swimming pool, was doing her best to make the shy dackel face the camera in a reasonably upright and decent position, while Philip Rack, an insignificant but on the whole likable young musician who in his baggy trunks looked even more dejected and awkward than in the green velvet suit he thought fit to wear for the piano lessons he gave Lucette, was trying to take a picture of the recalcitrant chop-licking animal and of the girl’s parted breasts which her half-prone position helped to disclose in the opening of her bathing suit.

  If one dollied now to another group standing a few paces away under the purple garlands of the patio arch, one might take a medium shot of the young maestro’s pregnant wife in a polka-dotted dress replenishing goblets with salted almonds, and of our distinguished lady novelist resplendent in mauve flounces, mauve hat, mauve shoes, pressing a zebra vest on Lucette, who kept rejecting it with rude remarks, learned from a maid but uttered in a tone of voice just beyond deafish Mlle Larivière’s field of hearing.

  Lucette remained topless. Her tight smooth skin was the color of thick peach syrup, her little crupper in willow-green shorts rolled drolly, the sun lay sleek on her russet bob and plumpish torso: it showed but a faint circumlocution of femininity, and Van, in a scowling mood, recalled with mixed feelings how much more developed her sister had been at not quite twelve years of age.

  He had spent most of the day fast asleep in his room, and a long, rambling, dreary dream had repeated, in a kind of pointless parody, his strenuous “Casanovanic” night with Ada and that somehow ominous morning talk with her. Now that I am writing this, after so many hollows and heights of time, I find it not easy to separate our conversation, as set down in an inevitably stylized form, and the drone of complaints, turning on sordid betrayals that obsessed young Van in his dull nightmare. Or was he dreaming now that he had been dreaming? Had a grotesque governess really written a novel entitled Les Enfants Maudits? To be filmed by frivolous dummies, now discussing its adaptation? To be made even triter than the original Book of the Fortnight, and its gurgling blurbs? Did he detest Ada as he had in his dream? He did.

  Now, at fifteen, she was an irritating and hopeless beauty; a rather unkempt one, too; only twelve hours ago, in the dim toolroom he had whispered a riddle in her ear: what begins with a “de” and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant? She was eccentric in habits and clothing. She cared nothing for sunbathing, and not a tinge of the tan that had californized Lucette could be traced on the shameless white of Ada’s long limbs and scrawny shoulder blades.

  A remote cousin, no longer Rene’s sister, not even his half-sister (so lyrically anathematized by Monparnasse), she stepped over him as over a log and returned the embarrassed dog to Marina. The actor, who quite likely would run into somebody’s fist in a forthcoming scene, made a filthy remark in broken French.

  “Du sollst nicht zuhören,” murmured Ada to German Dack before putting him back in Marina’s lap under the “accursed children.” “On ne parle pas connue ça devant un chien,” added Ada, not deigning to glance at Pedro, who nevertheless got up, reconstructed his crotch, and beat her to the pool with a Nurjinski leap.

  Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture. The silly girl had heaped her hair under a rubber cap, and this gave an unfamiliar, vaguely clinical look to her neck, with its odd dark wisps and strags, as if she had obtained a nurse’s job and would never dance again. Her faded, bluish-gray, one-piece swimsuit had a spot of grease and a hole above one hip—nibbled through, one might conjecture, by a tallow-starved larva—and seemed much too short for careless comfort. She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia. None of those minor matters would have annoyed Van, had she and he been alone together; but the presence of the all-male actor made everything obscene, drab and insupportable. We move back to the lip of the pool.

  Our young man, being exceptionally brezgliv (squeamish, easily disgusted), had no desire to share a few cubic meters of chlorinated Celestino (“blues your bath”) with two other fellows. He was emphatically not Japanese. He always remembered, with shudders of revulsion, the indoor pool of his prep school, the running noses, the pimpled chests, the chance contacts with odious male flesh, the suspicious bubble bursting like a small stink bomb, and especially, especially, the bland, sly, triumphant and absolutely revolting wretch who stood in shoulder-high water and secretly urinated (and, God, how he had beaten him up, though that Vere de Vere was three years older than he).

  He now kept carefully out of reach of any possible splash as Pedro and Phil snorted and fooled in their foul bath. Presently the pianist, floating up and showing his awful gums in a servile grin, tried to draw Ada into the pool from her outstretched position on the tiled margin, but she evaded the grab of his despair by embracing the big orange ball she had just fished out and, pushing him away with that shield, she then threw it toward Van, who slapped it aside, refusing the gambit, ignoring the gambol, scorning the gambler.

  And now hairy Pedro
hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).

  “Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,” he said.

  “Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?” she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.

  “Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,” the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.

  “Oh that” (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). “Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.”

  “Next time, maybe, no Pedro?”

  “Too bad,” said Ada. “Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.”

  “E tu?” Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. “Again screwdriver?”

  “Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand” (turning to Vronsky), “why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback—and it is a flashback, I suppose” (she pronounced it fleshbeck), “Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.”

  “He does not,” cried G.A., “it’s only a half-hearted flashback. Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?”

  “Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,” said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns of her own past.