Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  He had not seen her since 1888. In the fall of 1891 she had sent him from California a rambling, indecent, crazy, almost savage declaration of love in a ten-page letter, which shall not be discussed in this memoir [See, however, a little farther. Ed.]. At present, she was studying the History of Art (“the second-rater’s last refuge,” she said) in nearby Queenston College for Glamorous and Glupovatïh (“dumb”) Girls. When she rang him up and pleaded for an interview (in a new, darker voice, agonizingly resembling Ada’s), she intimated that she was bringing him an important message. He suspected it would be yet another installment of her unrequited passion, but he also felt that her visit would touch off infernal fires.

  As he awaited her, walking the whole length of his brown-carpeted suite and back again, now contemplating the emblazed trees, that defied the season, through the northeast casement at the end of the passage, then returning to the sitting room which gave on sun-bordered Greencloth Court, he kept fighting Ardis and its orchards and orchids, bracing himself for the ordeal, wondering if he should not cancel her visit, or have his man convey his apologies for the suddenness of an unavoidable departure, but knowing all the time he would go through with it. With Lucette herself, he was only obliquely concerned: she inhabited this or that dapple of drifting sunlight, but could not be wholly dismissed with the rest of sun-flecked Ardis. He recalled, in passing, the sweetness in his lap, her round little bottom, her prasine eyes as she turned toward him and the receding road. Casually he wondered whether she had become fat and freckled, or had joined the graceful Zemski group of nymphs. He had left the parlor door that opened on the landing slightly ajar, but somehow missed the sound of her high heels on the stairs (or did not distinguish them from his heartbeats) while he was in the middle of his twentieth trudge “back to the ardors and arbors! Eros qui prend son essor! Arts that our marblery harbors: Eros, the rose and the sore.” I am ill at these numbers, but e’en rhymery is easier “than confuting the past in mute prose.” Who wrote that? Voltimand or Voltemand? Or the Burning Swine? A pest on his anapest! “All our old loves are corpses or wives.” All our sorrows are virgins or whores.

  A black bear with bright russet locks (the sun had reached its first parlor window) stood awaiting him. Yes—the Z gene had won. She was slim and strange. Her green eyes had grown. At sixteen she looked considerably more dissolute than her sister had seemed at that fatal age. She wore black furs and no hat.

  “My joy (moya radost’),” said Lucette—just like that; he had expected more formality: all in all he had hardly known her before—except as an embered embryo.

  Eyes swimming, coral nostrils distended, red mouth perilously disclosing her tongue and teeth in a preparatory half-open skew (tame animal signaling by that slant the semblance of a soft bite), she advanced in the daze of a commencing trance, of an unfolding caress—the aurora, who knows (she knew), of a new life for both.

  “Cheekbone,” Van warned the young lady.

  “You prefer skeletiki (little skeletons),” she murmured, as Van applied light lips (which had suddenly become even drier than usual) to his half-sister’s hot hard pommette. He could not help inhaling briefly her Degrasse, smart, though decidedly “paphish,” perfume and, through it, the flame of her Little Larousse as he and the other said when they chose to emprison her in bath water. Yes, very nervous and fragrant. Indian summer too sultry for furs. The cross (krest) of the best-groomed redhead (rousse). Its four burning ends. Because one can’t stroke (as he did now) the upper copper without imagining at once the lower fox cub and the paired embers.

  “This is where he lives,” she said, looking around, turning around, as he helped her with wonder and sorrow out of her soft, deep, dark coat, side-thinking (he liked furs): sea bear (kotik)? No, desman (vïhuhol’). Assistant Van admired her elegant slenderness, the gray tailor-made suit, the smoky fichu and as it wafted away, her long white neck. Take your jacket off, he said or thought he said (standing with extended hands, in his charcoal suit, spontaneous combustion, in his bleak parlor, in the bleak house anglophilically named Voltemand Hall at Kingston University, fall term 1892, around four P.M.).

  “I think I’ll take off my jacket,” she said with the usual flitting frown of feminine fuss that fits the “thought.” “You’ve got central heating; we girls have tiny fireplaces.”

  She threw it off, revealing a sleeveless frilly white blouse. She raised her arms to pass her fingers through her bright curls, and he saw the expected bright hollows.

  Van said, “All three casements pourtant are open and can open wider; but they can do it only westward and that green yard down below is the evening sun’s praying rug, which makes this room even warmer. Terrible for a window not to be able to turn its paralyzed embrasure and see what’s on the other side of the house.”

  Once a Veen, always a Veen.

  She unclicked her black-silk handbag, fished out a handkerchief and, leaving the gaping bag on the edge of the sideboard, went to the farthest window and stood there, her fragile shoulders shaking unbearably.

  Van noticed a long, blue, violet-sealed envelope protruding from the bag.

  “Lucette, don’t cry. That’s too easy.”

  She walked back, dabbing her nose, curbing her childishly humid sniffs, still hoping for the decisive embrace.

  “Here’s some brandy,” he said. “Sit down. Where’s the rest of the family?”

  She returned the balled handkerchief of many an old romance to her bag, which, however, remained unclosed. Chows, too, have blue tongues.

  “Mamma dwells in her private Samsara. Dad has had another stroke. Sis is revisiting Ardis.”

  “Sis! Cesse, Lucette! We don’t want any baby serpents around.”

  “This baby serpent does not quite know what tone to take with Dr. V. V. Sector. You have not changed one bit, my pale darling, except that you look like a ghost in need of a shave without your summer Glanz.”

  And summer Mädel. He noticed that the letter, in its long blue envelope, lay now on the mahogany sideboard. He stood in the middle of the parlor, rubbing his forehead, not daring, not daring, because it was Ada’s notepaper.

  “Like some tea?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t stay long. Besides, you said something about a busy day over the phone. One can’t help being dreadfully busy after four absolutely blank years” (he would start sobbing too if she did not stop).

  “Yes. I don’t know. I have an appointment around six.”

  Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was “We-have-so-much- to say”; the other was “We have absolutely nothing to say.” But that sort of thing can change in one instant.

  “Yes, I have to see Rattner at six-thirty,” murmured Van, consulting a calendar he did not see.

  “Rattner on Terra!” ejaculated Lucette. “Van is reading Rattner on Terra. Pet must never, never disturb him and me when we are reading Rattner!”

  “I implore, my dear, no impersonations. Let us not transform a pleasant reunion into mutual torture.”

  What was she doing at Queenston? She had told him before. Of course. Tough course? No. Oh. From time to time both kept glancing askance at the letter to see if it was behaving itself—not dangling its legs, not picking its nose.

  Return it sealed?

  “Tell Rattner,” she said, gulping down her third brandy as simply as if it were technicolored water. “Tell him” (the liquor was loosening her pretty viper tongue)—

  (Viper? Lucette? My dead dear darling?)

  —“Tell him that when in the old days you and Ada—”

  The name yawned like a black doorway, then the door banged.

  “—left me for him, and then came back, I knew every time that you vsyo sdelali (had appeased your lust, had allayed your fire).”

  “One remembers those little things much too clearly, Lucette. Please, stop.”

  “One remembers, Van, those little things much more clearly than the big fatal ones. As for examp
le the clothes you wore at any given moment, at a generously given moment, with the sun on the chairs and the floor. I was practically naked, of course, being a neutral pure little child. But she wore a boy’s shirt and a short skirt, and all you had on were those wrinkled, soiled shorts, shorter because wrinkled, and they smelled as they always did after you’d been on Terra with Ada, with Rattner on Ada, with Ada on Antiterra in Ardis Forest—oh, they positively stank, you know, your little shorts, of lavendered Ada, and her catfood, and your caked algarroba!”

  Should that letter, now next to the brandy, listen to all this? Was it from Ada after all (there was no address)? Because it was Lucette’s mad, shocking letter of love that was doing the talking.

  “Van, it will make you smile” [thus in the MS. Ed.].

  “Van,” said Lucette, “it will make you smile” (it did not: that prediction is seldom fulfilled), “but if you posed the famous Van Question, I would answer in the affirmative.”

  What he had asked little Cordula. In that bookshop behind the revolving paperbacks’ stand, The Gitanilla, Our Laddies, Clichy Clichés, Six Pricks, The Bible Unabridged, Mertvago Forever, The Gitanilla… He was known in the beau monde for asking that question the very first time he met a young lady.

  “Oh, to be sure, it was not easy! In parked automobiles and at rowdy parties, thrusts had to be parried, advances fought off! And only last winter, on the Italian Riviera, there was a youngster of fourteen or fifteen, an awfully precocious but terribly shy and neurotic young violinist, who reminded Marina of her brother … Well, for almost three months, every blessed afternoon, I had him touch me, and I reciprocated, and after that I could sleep at last without pills, but otherwise I haven’t once kissed male epithelia in all my love—I mean, life. Look, I can swear I never have, by—by William Shakespeare” (extending dramatically one hand toward a shelf with a set of thick red books).

  “Hold it!” cried Van. “That’s the Collected Works of Falknermann, dumped by my predecessor.”

  “Pah!” uttered Lucette.

  “And, please, don’t use that expletive.”

  “Forgive me—oh, I know, oh, I shan’t.”

  “Of course, you know. All the same, you are very sweet. I’m glad you came.”

  “I’m glad, too,” she said. “But Van! Don’t you dare think I ‘relanced’ you to reiterate that I’m madly and miserably in love with you and that you can do anything you want with me. If I didn’t simply press the button and slip that note into the burning slit and cataract away, it was because I had to see you, because there is something else you must know, even if it makes you detest and despise Ada and me. Otvratitel’no trudno (it is disgustingly hard) to explain, especially for a virgin—well, technically, a virgin, a kokotische virgin, half poule, half puella. I realize the privacy of the subject, mysterious matters that one should not discuss even with a vaginal brother—mysterious, not merely in their moral and mystical aspect—”

  Uterine—but close enough. It certainly came from Lucette’s sister. He knew that shade and that shape. “That shade of blue, that shape of you” (corny song on the Sonorola). Blue in the face from pleading RSVP.

  “—but also in a direct physical sense. Because, darling Van, in that direct physical sense I know as much about our Ada as you.”

  “Fire away,” said Van, wearily.

  “She never wrote you about it?”

  Negative Throat Sound.

  “Something we used to call Pressing the Spring?”

  “We?”

  “She and I.”

  N.T.S.

  “Do you remember Grandmother’s scrutoir between the globe and the gueridon? In the library?”

  “I don’t even know what a scrutoir is; and I do not visualize the gueridon.”

  “But you remember the globe?”

  Dusty Tartary with Cinderella’s finger rubbing the place where the invader would fall.

  “Yes, I do; and a kind of stand with golden dragons painted all over it.”

  “That’s what I meant by ‘gueridon.’ It was really a Chinese stand japanned in red lacquer, and the scrutoir stood in between.”

  “China or Japan? Make up your mind. And I still don’t know how your inscrutable looks. I mean, looked in 1884 or 1888.”

  Scrutoir. Almost as bad as the other with her Blemolopias and Molospermas.

  “Van, Vanichka, we are straying from the main point. The point is that the writing desk or if you like, secretaire—”

  “I hate both, but it stood at the opposite end of the black divan.”

  Now mentioned for the first time—though both had been tacitly using it as an orientator or as a right hand painted on a transparent signboard that a philosopher’s orbitless eye, a peeled hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space; whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the glass sign and sees a left hand shining through—that’s the solution! (Bernard said six-thirty but I may be a little late.) The mental in Van always rimmed the sensuous: unforgettable, roughish, villous, Villaviciosa velour.

  “Van, you are deliberately sidetracking the issue—”

  “One can’t do that with an issue.”

  “—because at the other end, at the heel end of the Vaniada divan—remember?—there was only the closet in which you two locked me up at least ten times.”

  “Nu uzh i desyaf (exaggeration). Once—and never more. It had a keyless hole as big as Kant’s eye. Kant was famous for his cucumicolor iris.”

  “Well, that secretaire,” continued Lucette, considering her left shoe, her very chic patent-leather Glass shoe, as she crossed her lovely legs, “that secretaire enclosed a folded card table and a top-secret drawer. And you thought, I think, it was crammed with our grandmother’s love letters, written when she was twelve or thirteen. And our Ada knew, oh, she knew, the drawer was there but she had forgotten how to release the orgasm or whatever it is called in card tables and bureaus.”

  Whatever it is called.

  “She and I challenged you to find the secret chuvstvilishche (sensorium) and make it work. It was the summer Belle sprained her backside, and we were left to our own devices, which had long lost the particule in your case and Ada’s, but were touchingly pure in mine. You groped around, and felt, and felt for the little organ, which turned out to be a yielding roundlet in the rosewood under the felt you felt—I mean, under the felt you were feeling: it was a felted thumb spring, and Ada laughed as the drawer shot out.”

  “And it was empty,” said Van.

  “Not quite. It contained a minuscule red pawn that high” (showing its barleycorn-size with her finger—above what? Above Van’s wrist). “I kept it for luck; I must still have it somewhere. Anyway, the entire incident pre-emblematized, to quote my Professor of Ornament, the depravation of your poor Lucette at fourteen in Arizona. Belle had returned to Canady, because Vronsky had defigured The Doomed Children; her successor had eloped with Demon; papa was in the East, maman hardly ever came home before dawn, the maids joined their lovers at star-rise, and I hated to sleep alone in the corner room assigned to me, even if I did not put out the pink night-light of porcelain with the transparency picture of a lost lamb, because I was afraid of the cougars and snakes” [quite possibly, this is not remembered speech but an extract from her letter or letters. Ed.], “whose cries and rattlings Ada imitated admirably, and, I think, designedly, in the desert’s darkness under my first-floor window. Well [here, it would seem, taped speech is re-turned-on], to make a short story sort of longish—”

  Old Countess de Prey’s phrase in praise of a lame mare in her stables in 1884, thence passed on to her son, who passed it on to his girl who passed it on to her half-sister. Thus instantly reconstructed by Van sitting with tented hands in a red-plush chair.

  “—I took my pillow to Ada’s bedroom where a similar night-light transparency thing showed a blond-bearded faddist in a toweling robe embracing the found lamb. The night
was oven-hot and we were stark naked except for a bit of sticking plaster where a doctor had stroked and pricked my arm, and she was a dream of white and black beauty, pour cogner une fraise, touched with fraise in four places, a symmetrical queen of hearts.”

  Next moment they grappled and had such delicious fun that they knew they would be doing it always together, for hygienic purposes, when boyless and boiling.

  “She taught me practices I had never imagined,” confessed Lucette in rerun wonder. “We interweaved like serpents and sobbed like pumas. We were Mongolian tumblers, monograms, anagrams, adalucindas. She kissed my krestik while I kissed hers, our heads clamped in such odd combinations that Brigitte, a little chambermaid who blundered in with her candle, thought for a moment, though naughty herself, that we were giving birth simultaneously to baby girls, your Ada bringing out une rousse, and no one’s Lucette, une brune. Fancy that.”

  “Side-splitting,” said Van.

  “Oh, it went on practically every night at Marina Ranch, and often during siestas; otherwise, in between those vanouissements (her expression), or when she and I had the flow, which, believe it or not—”

  “I can believe anything,” said Van.

  “—took place at coincident dates, we were just ordinary sisters, exchanging routine nothings, having little in common, she collecting cactuses or running through her lines for the next audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or copying beautiful erotic pictures from an album of Forbidden Masterpieces that we found, apropos, in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy (corsets and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind, and I can assure you, they were far more realistic than the scroll-painting by Mong Mong, very active in 888, a millennium before Ada said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I found it by chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades. So the day passed, and then the star rose, and tremendous moths walked on all sixes up the window panes, and We tangled until we fell asleep. And that’s when I learnt—” concluded Lucette, closing her eyes and making Van squirm by reproducing with diabolical accuracy Ada’s demure little whimper of ultimate bliss.