Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №3
... and there was a bit ofadhesive tape across her big toe; and, God, what would I not have given to
kiss then and there those delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet!
Suddenly her hand slipped into mine and without our chaperon's seeing, I
held, and stroked, and squeezed that little hot paw, all the way to the
store. The wings of the diver's Marlenesque nose shone, having shed or
burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue anent
the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat
her painted lashes in profile, while I prayed we would never get to that
store, but we did.
I have nothing else to report, save, primo: that big Haze had
little Haze sit behind on our way home, and secundo: that the lady
decided to keep Humbert's Choice for the backs of her own shapely ears.
Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical
beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People's
Encyclopedia, I found a map of the states that a child's pencil had
started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of
which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was
a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the
Ramsdale school. It is a poem I know already by heart.
Angel, Grace
Austin, Floyd
Beale, Jack
Beale, Mary
Buck, Daniel
Byron, Marguerite
Campbell, Alice
Carmine, Rose
Chatfield, Phyllis
Clarke, Gordon
Cowan, John
Cowan, Marion
Duncan, Walter
Falter, Ted
Fantasia, Stella
Flashman, Irving
Fox, George
Glave, Mabel
Goodale, Donald
Green, Lucinda
Hamilton, Mary Rose
Haze, Dolores
Honeck, Rosaline
Knight, Kenneth
McCoo, Virginia
McCrystal, Vivian
McFate, Aubrey
Miranda, Anthony
Miranda, Viola
Rosato, Emil
Schlenker, Lena
Scott, Donald
Sheridan, Agnes
Sherva, Oleg
Smith, Hazel
Talbot, Edgar
Talbot, Edwin
Wain, Lull
Williams, Ralph
Windmuller, Louise
A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this
"Haze, Dolores" (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of
roses--a fairy princess between her two maids of honor. I am trying to
analyze the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those
others. What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick
tears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of this
name with its formal veil ("Dolores") and that abstract transposition of
first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask?
Is "mask" the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the
semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and
the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is
it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around
my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her
lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling
clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust;
pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers
touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. And
there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by
teachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita.
Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake.
Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently
eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in
my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my
explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave
Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for
instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings,
school-artware); he might have bribed her--and got away with it. A simpler
and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial
substitutes--if you know where to go, I don't. Despite my many looks, I am
horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought
of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea
monsters. "Mais allez-y, allez-y!" Annabel skipping on one foot to
get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her.
Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a
dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently
proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would
go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing
before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by
the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her
being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the
mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would
say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder--and
plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and
the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly
knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she
could not possibly behave. At 3 a.m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and
presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a
kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed
over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain
to break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered
on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me
a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files.
Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze
rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and
down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only
elastic air--one of those little omissions due to the absentmindedness of
the dream agent.
Saturday. My heart is still thumping. I still squirm and emit
low moans of remembered embarrassment.
Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gym
shorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the act of tearing off leaves from a
poplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk with a newspaper boy below
(Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who had just propelled the Ramsdale
Journal with a very precise thud onto the porch. I began creeping up
to her--"crippling" up to her as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were
convex surfaces between which--rather than upon which--I slowly progressed
by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider. I must have
taken hours to reach her: I seemed to see her through the wrong end of a
telescope, and toward her taut little rear I moved like some paralytic, on
soft distorted limbs, in terrible concentration. At last I was right behind
her when I had the unfortunate idea of blustering a trifle--shaking her by
the scruff of the neck and that sort of thing to cover my real
manхge, and she said in a shrill brief whine: "Cut it out!"--most
coarsely, the little wench, and with a ghastly grin Humbert the Humble beat
a gloomy retreat while she went on wisecracking streetward.
But now listen to what happened next. After lunch I was reclining in a
low chair trying to read. Suddenly two deft little hands were over my eyes:
she had crept up from behind as if re-enacting, in a ballet sequence, my
morning maneuver. Her fingers were a luminous crimson as they tried to blot
out the sun, and she uttered hiccups of laughter and jerked this way and
that as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without otherwise changing
my recumbent position. My hand swept over her agile giggling legs, and the
book like a sleigh left my lap, and Mrs. Haze strolled up and said
indulgently: "Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly
meditations. How I love this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn't
it divine in the sun [no question mark either]." And with a sign of feigned
content, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and looked up at the sky
as she leaned back on her splayed-out hands, and presently an old gray
tennis ball bounced over her, and Lo's voice came from the house haughtily:
"Pardonnez, Mother. I was not aiming at you." Of course not,
my hot downy darling.
12
This proved to be the last of twenty entries or so. It will be seem
from them that for all the devil's inventiveness, the scheme remained daily
the same. First he would tempt me--and then thwart me, leaving me with a
dull pain in the very root of my being. I knew exactly what I wanted to do,
and how to do it, without impinging on a child's chastity; after all, I had
had some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed
dappled nymphets in parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into the
hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of straphanging school
children. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my
pathetic machinations. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze
woman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo's deriving some
pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for
that nymphet--for the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last
by my awkward, aching, timid claws--would have certainly landed me again in
a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some
relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer.
The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake. It would
have been logical on the part of Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that
devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the
presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent
one: she had not told me that Mary Rose Hamilton (a dark little beauty in
her own right) was to come too, and that the two nymphets would be
whispering apart, and playing apart, and having a good time all by
themselves, while Mrs. Haze and her handsome lodger conversed sedately in
the seminude, far from prying eyes. Incidentally, eyes did pry and tongues
did wag. How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended
to woo. Before my actual arrival, my landlady had planned to have an old
spinster, a Miss Phalen, whose mother had been cook in Mrs. Haze's family,
come to stay in the house with Lolita and me, while Mrs. Haze, a career girl
at heart, sought some suitable job in the nearest city. Mrs. Haze had seen
the whole situation very clearly: the bespectacled, round-backed Herr
Humbert coming with his Central-European trunks to gather dust in his corner
behind a heap of old books; the unloved ugly little daughter firmly
supervised by Miss Phalen who had already once had my Lo under her buzzard
wing (Lo recalled that 1944 summer with an indignant shudder); and Mrs. Haze
herself engaged as a receptionist in a great elegant city. But a not too
complicated event interfered with that program. Miss Phalen broke her hip in
Savannah, Ga., on the very day I arrived in Ramsdale.
13
The Sunday after the Saturday already described proved to be as bright
as the weatherman had predicted. When putting the breakfast things back on
the chair outside my room for my good landlady to remove at her convenience,
I gleaned the following situation by listening from the landing across which
I had softly crept to the banisters in my old bedroom slippers--the only old
things about me.
There had been another row. Mrs. Hamilton had telephoned that her
daughter "was running a temperature." Mrs. Haze informed her daughter
that the picnic would have to be postponed. Hot little Haze informed big
cold Haze that, if so, she would not go with her to church. Mother said very
well and left.
I had come out on the landing straight after shaving, soapy-earlobed,
still in my white pajamas with the cornflower blue (not the lilac) design on
the back; I now wiped off the soap, perfumed my hair and armpits, slipped on
a purple silk dressing gown, and, humming nervously, went down the stairs in
quest of Lo.
I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to
replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how
careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my
lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, "impartial sympathy." So
let us get started. I have a difficult job before me.
Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June.
Place: sunlit living room. Props: old, candy-striped davenport, magazines,
phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze--God bless the
good man--had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed
room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores,
were all over the place). She wore that day a pretty print dress that I had
seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice,
short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the color
scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a
beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church. And
her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph.
My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning,
subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit. She
tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it--it made a cupped
polished plot.
Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple.
"Give it back," - she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms.
I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like
snow under thin crimson skin, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so
typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the
magazine I had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the
monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves). Rapidly,
hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently
through the pages in search of something she wished Humbert to see. Found it
at last. I faked interest by bringing my head so close that her hair touched
my temple and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her wrist.
Because of the burnished mist through which I peered at the picture, I was
slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently
against each other. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter
relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster
replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said
the legend. I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham
effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby
wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted
herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the
davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her
legs across my lap.
By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but
I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed
to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her
guileless limbs. It was no easy matter to divert the little maiden's
attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the
success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching
up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my
patter--and all the while keeping a maniac's inner eye on my distant golden
goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an
illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but
psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and
robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and
the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. Having, in the course of my
patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them
slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular--O my Carmen, my
little Carmen, something, something, those something nights, and the stars,
and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic
stuff and holding her under its special spell (spell because of the
garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God
might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which
all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced me to work, for
the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately
modulated enjoyment. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and
the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her; her voice stole
and corrected the tune I had been mutilating. She was musical and
apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I
stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl,
Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its
juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its
sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the
sofa--and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to
conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between
beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her
dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Under my glancing finger tips I felt the minute hairs bristle ever so
slightly along her shins. I lost myself in the pungent but healthy heat
which like summer haze hung about little Haze. Let her stay, let her stay .
. . As she strained to chuck the core of her abolished apple into the
fender, her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom,
shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a
sudden a mysterious change came over my senses. I entered a plane of being
where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What
had begun as a delicious distention of my innermost roots became a glowing
tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security,
confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the deep
hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate
convulsion, I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow. Lolita
had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied
poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy,
gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien
to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still
forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my
consciousness. Everything was now ready. The nerves of pleasure had been
laid bare. The corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of frenzy. The
least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose. I had ceased to be
Humbert the Hound, the sad-eyed degenerate cur clasping the boot that would
presently kick him away. I was above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond
the possibilities of retribution. In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant
and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom,
postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his
slaves. Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety of
physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts) I kept
repeating the chance words after her--barmen, alarmin', my charmin', my
carmen, ahmen, ahahamen--as one talking and laughing in his sleep while my
happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed.
The day before she had collided with the heavy chest in the hall and--"Look,
look!"--I gasped--"look what you've done, what you've done to yourself, ah,
look"; for there was, I swear, a yellowish-violet bruise on her lovely
nymphet thigh which my huge hairy hand massaged and slowly enveloped--and
because of her very perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to
prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin--just as
you might tickle and caress a giggling child--just that--and: "Oh, it's
nothing at all," she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she
wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her
glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen
of the jury, almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her
left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever
known.
Immediately afterward (as if we had been struggling and now my grip had
eased) she rolled off the sofa and jumped to her feet--to her foot,
rather--in order to attend to the formidably loud telephone that may have
been ringing for ages as far as I was concerned. There she stood and
blinked, cheeks aflame, hair awry, her eyes passing over me as lightly as
they did over the furniture, and as she listened or spoke (to her mother who
was telling her to come to lunch with her at the Chatfileds--neither Lo nor
Hum knew yet what busybody Haze was plotting), she kept tapping the edge of
the table with the slipper she held in her hand. Blessed be the Lord, she
had noticed nothing!
With a handkerchief of multicolored silk, on which her listening eyes
rested in passing, I wiped the sweat off my forehead, and, immersed in a
euphoria of release, rearranged my royal robes. She was still at the
telephone, haggling with her mother (wanted to be fetched by car, my little
Carmen) when, singing louder and louder, I swept up the stairs and set a
deluge of steaming water roaring into the tub.
At this point I may as well give the words of that song hit in full--to
the best of my recollection at least--I don't think I ever had it right.
Here goes:
O my Carmen, my little Carmen!
Something, something those something nights,
And the stars, and the cars, and the bars and the barmen--
And, O my charmin', our dreadful fights.
And the something town where so gaily, arm in
Arm, we went, and our final row,
And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen,
The gun I am holding now.
(Drew his .32 automatic, I guess, and put a bullet through his moll's
eye.)
14
I had lunch in town--had not been so hungry for years. The house was
still Lo-less when I strolled back. I spent the afternoon musing, scheming,
blissfully digesting my experience of the morning.
I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without
impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had
poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady's new white
purse; and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my
ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe--and I was safe.
What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another,
fanciful Lolita--perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her;
floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness--indeed,
no life of her own.
The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing
prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if
she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble
hunchback abusing myself in the dark. The afternoon drifted on and on, in
ripe silence, and the sappy tall trees seemed to be in the know; and desire,
even stronger than before, began to afflict me again. Let her come soon, I
prayed, addressing a loan God, and while mamma is in the kitchen, let a
repetition of the davenport scene be staged, please, I adore her so
horribly.
No: "horribly" is the wrong word. The elation with which the vision of
new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic. I qualify it as
pathetic. Pathetic--because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal
appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect
the purity of that twelve-year-old child.
And now see how I was repaid for my pains. No Lolita came home--she had
gone with the Chatfields to a movie. The table was laid with more elegance
than usual: candlelight, if you please. In this mawkish aura, Mrs. Haze
gently touched the silver on both sides of her plate as if touching piano
keys, and smiled down on her empty plate (was on a diet), and said she hoped
I liked the salad (recipe lifted from a woman's magazine). She hoped I liked
the cold cuts, too. It had been a perfect day. Mrs. Chatfield was a lovely
person. Phyllis, her daughter, was going to a summer camp tomorrow. For
three weeks. Lolita, it was decided, would go Thursday. Instead of waiting
till July, as had been initially planned. And stay there after Phyllis had
left. Till school began. A pretty prospect, my heart.
Oh, how I was taken aback--for did it not mean I was losing my darling,
just when I had secretly made her mine? To explain my grim mood, I had to
use the same toothache I had already simulated in the morning. Must have
been an enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry.
"We have," said Haze, "an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr.
Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass?
Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him 'brace' her, as my
mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been
bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a couple of
stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I
left her with the Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet.
The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no
earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry
about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more reasonable to let me
contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, you
know, I think a summer camp is so much healthier, and--well, it is all so
much more reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use
mamma's lipstick, and pursue shy studious gentlemen, and go into tantrums at
the least provocation."
"Are you sure," I said at last, "that she will be happy there?" (lame,
lamentably lame!)
"She'd better," said Haze. "And it won't be all play either. The camp
is run by Shirley Holmes--you know, the woman who wrote Campfire
Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things--health,
knowledge, temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility towards
other people. Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the
piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?"
Nurse that tooth.
15
Next day they drove downtown to buy things needed for the camp: any
wearable purchase worked wonders with Lo. She seemed her usual sarcastic
self at dinner. Immediately afterwards, she went up to her room to plunge
into the comic books acquired for rainy days at Camp Q (they were so
thoroughly sampled by Thursday that she left them behind). I too retired to
my lair, and wrote letters. My plan now was to leave for the seaside and
then, when school began, resume my existence in the Haze household; for I
knew already that I could not live without the child. On Tuesday they went
shopping again, and I was asked to answer the phone if the camp mistress
rang up during their absence. She did; and a month or so later we had
occasion to recall our pleasant chat. That Tuesday, Lo had her dinner in her
room. She had been crying after a routine row with her mother and, as had
happened on former occasions, had not wished me to see her swollen eyes: she
had one of those tender complexions that after a good cry get all blurred
and inflamed, and morbidly alluring. I regretted keenly her mistake about my
private aesthetics, for I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that
raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes; and, naturally, her
bashful whim deprived me of many opportunities of specious consolation.
There was, however, more to it than I thought. As we sat in the darkness of
the verandah (a rude wind had put out her red candles), Haze, with a dreary
laugh, said she had told Lo that her beloved Humbert thoroughly approved of
the whole camp idea "and now," added Haze, "the child throws a fit; pretext:
you and I want to get rid of her; actual reason: I told her we would
exchange tomorrow for plainer stuff some much too cute night things that she
bullied me into buying for her. You see, she sees herself as a
starlet; I see her as a sturdy, healthy, but decidedly homely kid.
This, I guess, is at the root of our troubles."
On Wednesday I managed to waylay Lo for a few seconds: she was on the
landing, in sweatshirt and green-stained white shorts, rummaging in a trunk.
I said something meant to be friendly and funny but she only emitted a snort
without looking at me. Desperate, dying Humbert patted her clumsily on her
coccyx, and she struck him, quite painfully, with one of the late Mr. Haze's
shoetrees. "Doublecrosser," she said as I crawled downstairs rubbing my arm
with a great show of rue. She did not condescend to have dinner with Hum and
mum: washed her hair and went to bed with her ridiculous books. And on
Thursday quiet Mrs. Haze drove her to Camp Q.
As greater authors than I have put it: "Let readers imagine" etc. On
second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I
knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not
be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so
she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a "young girl," and
then, into a "college girl"--that horror of horrors. The word "forever"
referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my
blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that
today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident
voice and rich brown hair--of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the
curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar
vocabulary--"revolting," "super," "luscious," "goon," "drip"--that
Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So how could I
afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months
out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as
a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the
outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: "Let
us adopt that deep-voiced D.P.," and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe
au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores
Haze!
Idle dry dreams. Two months of beauty, two months of tenderness, would
be squandered forever, and I could do nothing about it, but nothing, mais
rien.
One drop of rare honey, however, that Thursday did hold in its acorn
cup. Haze was to drive her to the camp in the early morning. Upon sundry
sounds of departure reaching me, I rolled out of bed and leaned out of the
window. Under the poplars, the car was already athrob. On the sidewalk,
Louise stood shading her eyes with her hand, as if the little traveler were
already riding into the low morning sun. The gesture proved to be premature.
"Hurry up!" shouted Haze. My Lolita, who was half in and about to slam the
car door, wind down the glass, wave to Louise and the poplars (whom and
which she was never to see again), interrupted the motion of fate: she
looked up--and dashed back into the house (Haze furiously calling after
her). A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart
expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the
pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived,
in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and then she was in my arms, her
innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my
palpitating darling! The next instant I heart her--alive, unraped--clatter
downstairs. The motion of fate was resumed. The blond leg was pulled in, the
car door was slammed--was re-slammed--and driver Haze at the violent wheel,
rubber-red lips writhing in angry, inaudible speech, swung my darling away,
while unnoticed by them or Louise, old Miss Opposite, an invalid, feebly but
rhythmically waved from her vined verandah.
16
The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita--full of the feel
of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation
of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I
held her. I marched into her tumbled room, threw open the door of the
closet, and plunged into a heap of crumpled things that had touched her.
There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid
odor in the seam. I wrapped in it Humbert's huge engorged heart. A poignant
chaos was welling within me--but I had to drop those things and hurriedly
regain my composure, as I became aware of the maid's velvety voice calling
me softly from the stairs. She had a message for me, she said; and, topping
my automatic thanks with a kindly "you're welcome," good Louise left an
unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my shaking hand.
"This is a confession. I love you [so the letter began; and for a
distorted moment I mistook its hysterical scrawl for a schoolgirl's
scribble]. Last Sunday in church--bad you, who refused to come to see our
beautiful new windows!--only last Sunday, my dear one, when I asked the Lord
what to do about it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is
no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a
passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life.
Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, cher monsieur, you have read
this; now you know. So, will you please, at once, pack and leave.
This is a landlady's order. I am dismissing a lodger. I am kicking you out.
Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty
both ways and don't have an accident (but what would it matter?), and I do
not wish to find you in the house. Please, please, leave at once,
now, do not even read this absurd note to the end. Go. Adieu.
The situation, chиri, is quite simple. Of course, I know with
absolute certainty that I am nothing to you, nothing at all to you,
nothing at all. Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me), you
have grown fond of our friendly house, of the books I like, of my lovely
garden, even of Lo's noisy ways--but I am nothing to you. Right? Right.
Nothing to you whatever. But if, after reading my "confession," you
decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for
you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be
a criminal--worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child. You see, chиri.
If you decided to stay, if I found you at home (which I know I
won't--and that's why I am able to go on like this), the fact of your
remaining would only mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you:
as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with mine
forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.
Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since I
know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in
the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon trхs, trхs cher, what a
world of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June! I know
how reserved you are, how "British." Your old-world reticence, your sense of
decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American girl! You who conceal
your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing
open my poor bruised heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments
came my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid person, a sterling soul, but he
happened to be twenty years my senior, and--well, let us not gossip about
the past. My dearest, your curiosity must be well satisfied if you have
ignored my request and read this letter to the bitter end. Never mind.
Destroy it and go. Do not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room.
And some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dollars I owe
you till the end of the month. Good-bye, dear one. Pray for me--if you ever
pray.
C.H."
What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I
remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including that awful French). It
was at least twice longer. I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or
less skipped at the time, concerning Lolita's brother who died at 2 when she
was 4, and how much I would have liked him. Let me see what else can I say?
Yes. There is just a chance that "the vortex of the toilet" (where the
letter did go) is my own matter-of-fact contribution. She probably begged me
to make a special fire to consume it.
My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like
a friend's calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time. I
did. I came out of my daze and found myself still in Lo's room. A full-page
ad ripped out of a slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed,
between a crooner's mug and the lashes of a movie actress. It represented a
dark-haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his Irish eyes. He
was modeling a robe by So-and-So and holding a bridgelike tray by So-and-So,
with breakfast for two. The legend, by the Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a
"conquering hero." The thoroughly conquered lady (not shown) was presumably
propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bed-fellow was
to get under the bridge without some messy mishap was not clear. Lo had
drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover's face and had put, in block
letters: H.H. And indeed, despite a difference of a few years, the
resemblance was striking. Under this was another picture, also a colored ad.
A distinguished playwright was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked
Dromes. The resemblance was slight. Under this was Lo's chase bed, littered
with "comics." The enamel had come off the bedstead, leaving black, more or
less rounded, marks on the white. Having convinced myself that Louise had
left, I got into Lo's bed and reread the letter.
17
Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions pertaining
to the business in hand--if I may coin an expression--had not drifted across
my mind before. My mind had not retained them in any logical form or in any
relation to definitely recollected occasions; but I cannot swear--let me
repeat--that I had not toyed with them (to rig up yet another expression),
in my dimness of thought, in my darkness of passion. There may have been
times--there must have been times, if I know my Humbert--when I had brought
up for detached inspection the idea of marrying a mature widow (say,
Charlotte Haze) with not one relative left in the wide gray world, merely in
order to have my way with her child (Lo, Lola, Lolita). I am even prepared
to tell my tormentors that perhaps once or twice I had cast an appraiser's
cold eye at Charlotte's coral lips and bronze hair and dangerously low
neckline, and had vaguely tried to fit her into a plausible daydream. This I
confess under torture. Imaginary torture, perhaps, but all the more
horrible. I wish I might digress and tell you more of the pavor
nocturnus that would rack me at night hideously after a chance term had
struck me in the random readings of my boyhood, such as peine forte et
dure (what a Genius of Pain must have invented that!) or the dreadful,
mysterious, insidious words "trauma," "traumatic event," and "transom." But
my tale is sufficiently incondite already.
After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and
ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned
through clenched teeth and suddenly--Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt
a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips)
like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and
perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother's husband would be
able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three times a day,
every day. All my troubles would be expelled, I would be a healthy man. "To
hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's
kiss . . ." Well-read Humbert!
Then, with all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak, I
conjured up Charlotte as a possible mate. By God, I could make myself bring
her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
Humbert Humbert sweating in the fierce white light, and howled at, and
trodden upon by sweating policemen, is now ready to make a further
"statement" (quel mot!) as he turns his conscience inside out and
rips off its innermost lining. I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in
order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as
killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial
sherry or anything like that; but a delicately allied, pharmacopoeial
thought did tinkle in my sonorous and clouded brain. Why limit myself to the
modest masked caress I had tried already? Other visions of venery presented
themselves to me swaying and smiling. I saw myself administering a powerful
sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter
though the night with perfect impunity. The house was full of Charlotte's
snore, while Lolita hardly breathed in her sleep, as still as a painted
girl-child. "Mother, I swear Kenny never even touched me." "You
either lie, Dolores Haze, or it was an incubus." No, I would not go that
far.
So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed--and the red sun of desire and
decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher,
while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling
glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights. Then,
figuratively speaking, I shattered the glass, and boldly imagined (for I was
drunk on those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my nature)
how eventually I might blackmail--no, that it too strong a word--mauvemail
big Haze into letting me consort with the little Haze by gently threatening
the poor doting Big Dove with desertion if she tried to bar me from playing
with my legal stepdaughter. In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before
such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the
preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.
And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has
been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is with a great effort of
will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the
journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an obstacle. That journal
of mine is no more; but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve
its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now.
Fortunately, my story has reached a point where I can cease insulting poor
Charlotte for the sake of retrospective verisimilitude.
Wishing to spare poor Charlotte two or three hours of suspense on a
winding road (and avoid, perhaps, a head-on collision that would shatter our
different dreams), I made a thoughtful but abortive attempt to reach her at
the camp by telephone. She had left half an hour before, and getting Lo
instead, I told her--trembling and brimming with my mastery over fate--that
I was going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because something
was preventing her from giving me her attention. "Gee, that's swell," she
said laughing. "When is the wedding? Hold on a sec, the pup--That put here
has got hold of my sock. Listen--" and she added she guessed she was going
to have loads of fun . . . and I realized as I hung up that a couple of
hours at that camp had been sufficient to blot out with new impressions the
image of handsome Humbert Humbert from little Lolita's mind. But what did it
matter now? I would get her back as soon as a decent amount of time after
the wedding had elapsed. "The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on
the grave," as a poet might have said. But I am no poet. I am only a very
conscientious recorder.
After Louise had gone, I inspected the icebox, and finding it much too
puritanic, walked to town and bought the richest foods available. I also
bought some good liquor and two or three kinds of vitamins. I was pretty
sure that with the aid of these stimulants and my natural resources, I would
avert any embarrassment that my indifference might incur when called upon to
display a strong and impatient flame. Again and again resourceful Humbert
evoked Charlotte as seen in the raree-show of a manly imagination. She was
well groomed and shapely, this I could say for her, and she was my Lolita's
big sister--this notion, perhaps, I could keep up if only I did not
visualize too realistically her heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the
coarse pink skin of her neck ("coarse" by comparison with silk and honey)
and all the rest of that sorry and dull thing: a handsome woman.
The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into
evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple
juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy
myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded
with dandelions, and a cursed dog--I loathe dogs--had defiled the flat
stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed
from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell
over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras!
There are some eructations that sound like cheers--at least, mine did. An
old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor's garbage
receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our
lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore
I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action)
for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I
lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering
in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved
in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down,
down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite's ivied brick house and
high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own
front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored.
The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two
little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically
followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue
(from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other
feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices.
Leslie, old Miss Opposite's gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and
athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented
by gesture, that I was mighty energetic today. The fool dog of the
prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car--not Charlotte's. The
prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with
little to halt, bright hair--a nymphet, by Pan!--ran back down the street
crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage
of Mr. And Mrs. Humbert's residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy
shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows
snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver
roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman's dog tearing alongside.
There was a smiling pause--and then, with a flutter in my breast, I
witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and
disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale
profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know
whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great
anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo's room. By
sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it.
18
When the bride is a window and the groom is a widower; when the former
has lived in Our Great Little Town for hardly two years, and the latt...
