Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №6
...?" I muttered (word-control gone) intoher hair.
"If you must know," she said, "you do it the wrong way."
"Show, wight ray."
"All in good time," responded the spoonerette.
Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kizelans, dementissima. Elevator
clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in corridoro. Hanc nisi mors mihi
adimet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondissime, nobserva nihil
quidquam; but, of course, in another moment I might have committed some
dreadful blunder; fortunately, she returned to the treasure box.
From the bathroom, where it took me quite a time to shift back into
normal gear for a humdrum purpose, I heard, standing, drumming, retaining my
breath, my Lolita's "oo's" and "gee's" of girlish delight.
She had used the soap only because it was sample soap.
"Well, come on, my dear, if you are as hungry as I am."
And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father
walking in front (nota bene: never behind, she is not a lady). As we stood
(now side by side) waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned
without restraint and shook her curls.
"When did they make you get up at that camp?"
"Half-past--" she stifled another yawn--"six"--yawn in full with a
shiver of all her frame. "Half-past," she repeated, her throat filling up
again.
The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It
was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted
hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of
pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen,
and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining
room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were,
happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.
"Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?" said Lo in a soft
voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at
the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.
"Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?"
Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her
dancing glass.
"Course not," she said with a splutter of mirth. "I meant the writer
fellow in the Dromes ad."
Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina!
When the dessert was plunked down--a huge wedge of cherry pie for the
young lady and vanilla ice cream her protector, most of which she
expeditiously added to her pie--I produced a small vial containing Papa's
Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and
monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of
that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all
seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself
that the last diner had left, removed the stopped, and with the utmost
deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed
before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and
swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial
with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty's Sleep.
"Blue!" she exclaimed. "Violet blue. What are they made of?"
"Summer skies," I said, "and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of
emperors."
"No, seriously--please."
"Oh, just purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want
to try one?"
Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.
I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a
long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister
was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to
tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume--oh,
how fast the magic potion worked!--and had been active in other ways too.
The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we
watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator,
she leaned against me, faintly smiling--wouldn't you like me to tell
you--half closing her dark-lidded eyes. "Sleepy, huh?" said Uncle Tom who
was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as
two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail,
tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling. I had almost to carry her into our
room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking
in dove-dull, long-drawn tones.
"If I tell you--if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so
sleepy--head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won't make complaints?"
"Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I'll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give
you ten minutes."
"Oh, I've been such a disgusting girl," she went on, shaking her hair,
removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. "Lemme tell you--"
"Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed--for goodness sake, to bed."
I pocketed the key and walked downstairs.
28
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit
of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my
Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her
foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of
her thigh up to the crotch of her panties--she had always been singularly
absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was
the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in--after satisfying myself
that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of
carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and
formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few
minutes--say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle
Gustave used to say--I would let myself into that "342" and find my nymphet,
my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my
happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a
deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit
key "342" at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the
hemisphere,--indeed, the globe--that very same night.
Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self-accusatory
innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her
purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely
anesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto-even
if that "purity" (incidentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had
been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no doubt
homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in my old-fashioned,
old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first
met her, that she was as unravished as the stereotypical notion of "normal
child" had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C. and its
fascinating practices. We are not surrounded in our enlightened era by little
slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they
used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals
did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft
between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old
link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed
nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in
psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After
all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time
and place--even bearing in mind the crude behavior of American
schoolchildren--I still was under the impression that whatever went on among
those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment.
Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation) the moralist in me
by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what
twelve-year-old girls should be. The child therapist in me (a fake, as most
of them are--but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a
dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the "latency" period of girlhood.
Finally, the sensualist in me (a great and insane monster) had no objection
to some depravity in his prey. But somewhere behind the raging bliss,
bewildered shadows conferred--and not to have heeded them, this is what I
regret! Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had
already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel,
and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child
that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy
impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have known (by the signs
made to me by something in Lolita--the real child Lolita or some haggard
angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from
the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in
my pocket, she was mine. In the course of evocations and schemes to which I
had dedicated so many insomnias, I had gradually eliminated all the
superfluous blur, and by stacking level upon level of translucent vision,
had evolved a final picture. Naked, except for one sock and her charm
bracelet, spread-eagled on the bed where my philter had felled her--so I
foreglimpsed her; a velvet hair ribbon was still clutched in her hand; her
honey-brown body, with the white negative image of a rudimentary swimsuit
patterned against her tan, presented to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy
lamplight, a little pubic floss glistened on its plump hillock. The cold key
with its warm wooden addendum was in my pocket.
I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for
the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure--even when the
velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon--that some rival devil or
influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph. In common
parlance, I needed a drink; but there was no barroom in that venerable place
full of perspiring philistines and period objects.
I drifted to the Men's Room. There, a person in the clerical black--a
"hearty party" comme on dit--checking with the assistance of Vienna,
if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd's talk, and
looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy.
Upon which, I neatly chucked the tissue paper I had been wiping my sensitive
finger tips with into the receptacle provided for it, and sallied lobbyward.
Comfortably resting my elbows on the counter, I asked Mr. Potts was he quite
sure my wife had not telephoned, and what about that cot? He answered she
had not (she was dead, of course) and the cot would be installed tomorrow if
we decided to stay on. From a big crowded place called The Hunters' Hall
came a sound of many voices discussing horticulture or eternity. Another
room, called The Raspberry Room, all bathed in light, with bright little
tables and a large one with "refreshments," was still empty except for a
hostess (that type of worn woman with a glassy smile and Charlotte's manner
of speaking); she floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if
so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. "What a name for a woman," I said
and strolled away.
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood. I would give her till
half-past-nine. Going back to the lobby, I found there a change: a number of
people in floral dresses or black cloth had formed little groups here and
there, and some elfish chance offered me the sight of a delightful child of
Lolita's age, in Lolita's type of frock, but pure white, and there was a
white ribbon in her black hair. She was not pretty, but she was a nymphet,
and her ivory pale legs and lily neck formed for one memorable moment a most
pleasurable antiphony (in terms of spinal music) to my desire for Lolita,
brown and pink, flushed and fouled. The pale child noticed my gaze (which
was really quite casual and debonair), and being ridiculously
self-conscious, lost countenance completely, rolling her eyes and putting
the back of her hand to her cheek, and pulling at the hem of her skirt, and
finally turning her thin mobile shoulder blades to me in specious chat with
her cow-like mother.
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at
the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black
night, full of ripple and stir. All I would do--all I would dare do--would
amount to such a trifle . . . Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next
to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could
not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off,
then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was
about to move away when his voice addressed me:
"Where the devil did you get her?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: the weather is getting better."
"Seems so."
"Who's the lassie?"
"My daughter."
"You lie--she's not."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: July was hot. Where's her mother?"
"Dead."
"I see. Sorry. By the way, why don't you two lunch with me tomorrow.
That dreadful crowd will be gone by then."
"We'll be gone too. Good night."
"Sorry. I'm pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot
of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?"
"Not now."
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was,
the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those
permanent guests of old hotels--and his white rocker. Nobody said anything
and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer
cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus.
I left the porch. At least half an hour in all had elapsed. I ought to
have asked for a sip. The strain was beginning to tell. If a violin string
can ache, then I was that string. But it would have been unseemly to display
any hurry. As I made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one
corner of the lobby, there came a blinding flash--and beaming Dr. Braddock,
two orchid-ornamentalized matrons, the small girl in white, and presumably
the bared teeth of Humbert Humbert sidling between the bridelike lassie and
the enchanted cleric, were immortalized--insofar as the texture and print of
small-town newspapers can be deemed immortal. A twittering group had
gathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs. 342 was near the fire
escape. One could still--but the key was already in the lock, and then I was
in the room.
29
The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a
skeleton glow came though the Venetian blind from the outside arclights;
these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealed
the following situation.
Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, my Lolita lay on her side with
her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and bare
limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a
band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae.
I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas with the kind
of fantastic instantaneousness which is implied when in a cinematographic
scene the process of changing is cut; and I had already placed my knee on
the edge of the bed when Lolita turned her head and stared at me though the
striped shadows.
Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The whole
pill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous soit dit) had had for
object a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed,
and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me "Barbara." Barbara,
wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poised
motionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly
turned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I
waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade
parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Her
faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto my
narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piled
up to the south of my stone-cold heels--and Lolita lifted her head and gaped
at me.
As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill did
not even belong to the big and noble family of barbiturates, and though it
might have induced sleep in a neurotic who believed it to be a potent drug,
it was too mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeit
weary, nymphet. Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a charlatan or a shrewd old
rogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was that I had
been deceived. When Lolita opened her eyes again, I realized that whether or
not the drug might work later in the night, the security I had relied upon
was a sham one. Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair
amount of pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled
hair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half a
shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by the
rate of her respiration. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I
might risk getting a little closer to that lovely and maddening glimmer; but
hardly had I moved into its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended,
and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would
explode in screams if I touched her with any part of my wretchedness.
Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly
sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these
essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try
to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's
even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I
almost wrote "frinstance"), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of
heartburn (they call those fries "French," grand Dieu!) was added to
my discomfort.
She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to
launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l'Amant
Ridicule. Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had
so thoroughly numbed her mummy. In the glove compartment--or in the
Gladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up again? The
science of nympholepsy is a precise science. Actual contact would do it in
one second flat. An interspace of a millimeter would do it in ten. Let us
wait.
There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was
supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place--"gracious living"
and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator's gate--some twenty yards
northeast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left
temple--alternated with the banging and booming of the machine's various
evolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then, immediately
east of my left ear (always assuming I lay on my back, not daring to direct
my viler side toward the nebulous haunch of my bed-mate), the corridor would
brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of
good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my
cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and
it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the
wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick,
almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like
a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally all
the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the
avenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake--a staid,
eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees--degenerated into the
despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night.
And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous
Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved towards her again,
and this time the creak of the mattress did not awake her. I managed to
bring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare
shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek. And then, she sat up, gasped,
muttered with insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheets
and lapsed back into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As she tossed,
within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn, at present lunar, her
arm struck me across the face. For a second I held her. She freed herself
from the shadow of my embrace--doing this not consciously, not violently,
not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of a
child demanding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the same:
Lolita with her curved spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his
hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.
The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water
which is the best medicine I know in my case, except perhaps milk with
radishes; and when I re-entered the strange pale-striped fastness where
Lolita's old and new clothes reclined in various attitudes of enchantment on
pieces of furniture that seemed vaguely afloat, my impossible daughter sat
up and in clear tones demanded a drink, too. She took the resilient and cold
paper cup in her shadowy hand and gulped down its contents gratefully, her
long eyelashes pointing cupward, and then, with an infantile gesture that
carried more charm than any carnal caress, little Lolita wiped her lips
against my shoulder. She fell back on her pillow (I had subtracted mine
while she drank) and was instantly asleep again.
I had not dared offer her a second helping of the drug, and had not
abandoned hope that the first might still consolidate her sleep. I started
to move toward her, ready for any disappointment, knowing I had better wait
but incapable of waiting. My pillow smelled of her hair. I moved toward my
glimmering darling, stopping or retreating every time I thought she stirred
or was about to stir. A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my
thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface
reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again
my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere
of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting
into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing.
Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meet
halfway the enchanted hunter, that her haunch was working its way toward me
under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpled
dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever.
If I dwell at some length on the tremors and groupings of that distant
night, it is because I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and
never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions
though which I crept were the patrimonies of poets--not crime's
prowling ground. Had I reached my goal, my ecstasy would have been all
softness, a case of internal combustion of which she would hardly have felt
the heat, even if she were wide awake. But I still hoped she might gradually
be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more
than a glimmer of her. And so, in between tentative approximations, with a
confusion of perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of moonlight or a
fluffy flowering bush, I would dream I regained consciousness, dream I lay
in wait.
In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless hotel
night. Then around four the corridor toilet cascaded and its door banged. A
little after five a reverberating monologue began to arrive, in several
installments, from some courtyard or parking place. It was not really a
monologue, since the speaker stopped every few seconds to listen
(presumably) to another fellow, but that other voice did not reach me, and
so no real meaning could be derived from the part heard. Its matter-of-fact
intonations, however, helped to bring in the dawn, and the room was already
suffused with lilac gray, when several industrious toilets went to work, one
after the other, and the clattering and whining elevator began to rise and
take down early risers and downers, and for some minutes I miserably dozed,
and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere in the passage
Dr. Boyd said "Good morning to you" in a fruity voice, and birds were busy
in the trees, and then Lolita yawned.
Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps
years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by
six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am
going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.
Upon hearing her first morning yawn, I feigned handsome profiled sleep.
I just did not know what to do. Would she be shocked at finding me by her
side, and not in some spare bed? Would she collect her clothes and lock
herself up in the bathroom? Would she demand to be taken at once to
Ramsdale--to her mother's bedside--back to camp? But my Lo was a sportive
lassie. I felt her eyes on me, and when she uttered at last that beloved
chortling note of hers, I knew her eyes had been laughing. She rolled over
to my side, and her warm brown hair came against my collarbone. I gave a
mediocre imitation of waking up. We lay quietly. I gently caressed her hair,
and we gently kissed. Her kiss, to my delirious embarrassment, had some
rather comical refinements of flutter and probe which made me conclude she
had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian. No Charlie boy could
have taught her that. As if to see whether I had my fill and learned
the lesson, she drew away and surveyed me. Her cheekbones were flushed, her
full underlip glistened, my dissolution was near. All at once, with a burst
of rough glee (the sign of the nymphet!), she put her mouth to my ear--but
for quite a while my mind could not separate into words the hot thunder of
her whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried
again, and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream
world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she
was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had
played. "You mean you have never--?"--her features twisted into a stare of
disgusted incredulity. "You have never--" she started again. I took time out
by nuzzling her a little. "Lay off, will you," she said with a twangy whine,
hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious the
way she considered--and kept doing so for a long time--all caresses except
kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either "romantic slosh" or
"abnormal".)
"You mean," she persisted, now kneeling above me, "you never did it
when you were a kid?"
"Never," I answered quite truthfully.
"Okay," said Lolita, "here is where we start."
However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of
Lolita's presumption. Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I
perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern
co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly
and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of a
youngster's furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes
of procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in
an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget
unconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids,
she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid's life
and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange
predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way--at least
while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am
not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those
elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all
the perilous magic of nymphets.
30
I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you,
veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now
in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you
wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you
fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! had I been a painter, had the
management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and
commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own
making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:
There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in
flame-flower. There would have been nature studies--a tiger pursuing a bird
of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat.
There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as
it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb
a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal
glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have
been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group,
Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have
been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal
dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color,
stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.
31
I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present
boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of
heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world--nymphet love. The beastly
and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to
fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?
The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl may marry
at twelve, was adopted by the Church, and is still preserved, rather
tacitly, in some of the United States. And fifteen is lawful everywhere.
There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed
by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery
and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride. "In such
stimulating temperate climates [says an old magazine in this prison library]
as St. Louis, Chicago and Cincinnati, girls mature about the end of their
twelfth year." Dolores Haze was born less than three hundred miles from
stimulating Cincinnati. I have but followed nature. I am nature's faithful
hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of
her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first
lover.
32
She told me the way she had been debauched. We ate flavorless mealy
bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato chips, and die
Kleine told me everything. Her voluble but disjointed account was
accompanied by many a droll moue. As I think I have already observed,
I especially remember one wry face on an "ugh!" basis: jelly-mouth distended
sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation
and tolerance for young frailty.
Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her
tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a "very select" one as
she put it. That tent-mate ("quite a derelict character," "half-crazy," but
a "swell kid") instructed her in various manipulations. At first, loyal Lo
refused to tell me her name.
"Was it Grace Angel?" I asked.
She shook her head. No, it wasn't it was the daughter of a big shot.
He--
"Was it perhaps Rose Carmine?"
"No, of course not. Her father--"
"Was it, then, Agnes Sheridan perchance?"
She swallowed and shook her head--and then did a double take.
"Say, how come you know all those kids?"
I explained.
"Well," she said. "They are pretty bad, some of that school bunch, but
not that bad. If you have to know, her name was Elizabeth Talbot, she goes
now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive."
I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte
used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits as "when my daughter
was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl."
I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions?
"Gosh no," exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief, pressing a
falsely fluttering hand to her chest.
I was more interested, however, in heterosexual experience. She had
entered the sixth grade at eleven, soon after moving to Ramsdale from the
Middle West. What did she mean by "pretty bad"?
Well, the Miranda twins had shared the same bed for years, and Donald
Scott, who was the dumbest boy in the school, had done it with Hazel Smith
in his uncle's garage, and Kenneth Knight--who was the brightest--used to
exhibit himself wherever and whenever he had a chance, and--
"Let us switch to Camp Q," I said. And presently I got the whole story.
Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and by far the
camp's best swimmer, had a very special canoe which she shared with Lo
"because I was the only other girl who could make Willow Island" (some
swimming test, I imagine). Through July, every morning--mark, reader, every
blessed morning--Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx or
Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress'
son, aged thirteen--and the only human male for a couple of miles around
(excepting an old meek stone-deaf handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who
sometimes sold the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning, oh my
reader, the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful
innocent forest brimming with all the emblems of youth, dew, birdsongs, and
at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel,
while Barbara and the boy copulated behind a bush.
At first, Lo had refused "to try what it was like," but curiosity and
camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were doing it by turns with
the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie, who had as much sex
appeal as a raw carrot but sported a fascinating collection of
contraceptives which he used to fish out of a third nearby lake, a
considerably larger and more populous one, called Lake Climax, after the
booming young factory town of that name. Although conceding it was "sort of
fun" and "fine for the complexion," Lolita, I am glad to say, held Charlie's
mind and manners in the greatest contempt. Nor had her temperament been
roused by that filthy fiend. In fact, I think he had rather stunned it,
despite the "fun."
By that time it was close to ten. With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense
of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day,
crept over me and hummed within my temples. Brown, naked, frail Lo, her
narrow white buttocks to me, her sulky face to a door mirror, stood, arms
akimbo, feet (in new slippers with pussy-fur tops) wide apart, and through a
forechanging lock tritely mugged at herself in the glass. From the corridor
came the cooing voices of colored maids at work, and presently there was a
mild attempt to open the door of our room. I had Lo go to the bathroom and
take a much-needed soap shower. The bed was a frightful mess with overtones
of potato chips. She tried on a two-piece navy wool, then a sleeveless
blouse with a swirly clathrate skirt, but the first was too tight and the
second too ample, and when I begged her to hurry up (the situation was
beginning to frighten me), Lo viciously sent those nice presents of mine
hurtling into a corner, and put on yesterday's dress. When she was ready at
last, I gave her a lovely new purse of simulated calf (in which I had
slipped quite a few pennies and two mint-bright dimes) and told her to buy
herself a magazine in the lobby.
"I'll be down in a minute," I said. "And if I were you, my dear, I
would not talk to strangers."
Except for my poor little gifts, there was not much to pack; but I was
forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was she up to something
downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to suggest the abandoned
nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter, instead of an
ex-convict's saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores. Then I finished
dressing and had the hoary bellboy come up for the bags.
Everything was fine. There, in the lobby, she sat, deep in an
overstuffed blood-red armchair, deep in a lurid movie magazine. A fellow of
my age in tweeds (the genre of the place had changed overnight to a spurious
country-squire atmosphere) was staring at my Lolita over his dead cigar and
stale newspaper. She wore her professional white socks and saddle oxfords,
and that bright print frock with the square throat; a splash of jaded
lamplight brought out the golden down on her warm brown limbs. There she
sat, her legs carelessly highcrossed, and her pale eyes skimming along the
lines with every now and then a blink. Bill's wife had worshipped him from
afar long before they ever met: in fact, she used to secretly admire the
famous young actor as he ate sundaes in Schwab's drugstore. Nothing could
have been more childish than her snubbed nose, freckled face or the purplish
spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted, or the
unconscious movement of her tongue exploring a touch of rosy rash around her
swollen lips; nothing could be more harmless than to read about Jill, an
energetic starlet who made her own clothes and was a student of serious
literature; nothing could be more innocent than the part in that glossy
brown hair with that silky sheen on the temple; nothing could be more
naive--But what sickening envy the lecherous fellow whoever he was--come to
think of it, he resembled a little my Swiss uncle Gustave, also a great
admirer of le dиcouvert--would have experienced had he known that
every nerve in me was still anointed and ringed with the feel of her
body--the body of some immortal demon disguised as a female child.
Was pink pig Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He
was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt Clare's place? He
would, indeedie. I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair. She read
to the car. Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few
blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to
eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little
Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a
squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves
were a-jangle. I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her
shoulders and distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had
Phyllis been in the know before she joined her parents in Maine? I asked
with a smile. "Look," said Lo making a weeping grimace, "let us get off the
subject." I then tried--also unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my
lips--to interest her in the road map. Our destination was, let me remind my
patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of
Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in
itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be), and I shook
in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and
what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the
movies in Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert Feel. It was
something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as
if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.
As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of
pain flitted across Lo's face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she
settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my
benefit. Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. "Nothing, you brute,"
she replied. "You what?" I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland.
Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This
was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a
heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times
that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had
surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark--and
plunged into a nightmare. I had been careless, stupid, and ignoble. And let
me be quite frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt the
writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable
nymphet. Mingled with the pangs of guilt was the agonizing through that her
mood might prevent me from making love to her again as soon as I found a
nice country road where to park in peace. In other words, poor Humbert
Humbert was dreadfully unhappy, and while steadily and inanely driving
toward Lepingville, he kept racking his brains for some quip, under the
bright wing of which he might dare turn to his seatmate. It was she,
however, who broke the silence:
"Oh, a squashed squirrel," she said. "What a shame."
"Yes, isn't it?" (eager, hopeful Hum).
"Let us stop at the next gas station," Lo continued. "I want to go to
the washroom."
"We shall stop wherever you want," I said. And then as a lovely,
lonely, supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American trees at that stage
were beyond me) started to echo greenly the rush of our car, a red and ferny
road on our right turned its head before slanting into the woodland, and I
suggested we might perhaps--
"Drive on," my Lo cried shrilly.
"Righto. Take it easy." (Down, poor beast, down.)
I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling.
"You chump," she said, sweetly smiling at me. "You revolting creature.
I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you've done to me. I ought to call
the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man."
Was she just joking? An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly
words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started
complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something
inside her. The sweat rolled down my neck, and we almost ran over some
little animal or other that was crossing the road with tail erect, and again
my vile-tempered companion called me an ugly name. When we stopped at the
filling station, she scrambled out without a word and was a long time away.
Slowly, lovingly, an elderly friend with a broken nose wiped my
windshield--they do it differently at every place, from chamois cloth to
soapy brush, this fellow used a pink sponge.
She appeared at last. "Look," she said in that neutral voice that hurt
me so, "give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in that
hospital. What's the number?"
"Get in," I said. "You can't call that number."
"Why?"
"Get in and slam the door."
She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her. I
swung onto the highway.
"Why can't I call my mother if I want to?"
"Because," I answered, "your mother is dead."
33
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box
of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock
with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller
skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing
gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments--swooners,
shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but
in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up
very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
PART TWO
1
It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States. To
any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional
Motel--clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument,
reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. At first, in my dread of arousing
suspicion, I would eagerly pay for both sections of one double unit, each
containing a double bed. I wondered what type of foursome this arrangement
was even intended for, since only a pharisaic parody of privacy could be
attained by means of the incomplete partition dividing the cabin or room
into two communicating love nests. By and by, the very possibilities that
such honest promiscuity suggested (two young couples merrily swapping mates
or a child shamming sleep to earwitness primal sonorities) made me bolder,
and every now and then I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-bed cabin, a
prison cell or paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create a
morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania
and rain.
We came to know--nous connшmes, to use a Flaubertian
intonation--the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the
brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, on what the Tour Book of the
Automobile Association describes as "shaded" or "spacious" or "landscaped"
grounds. The log kind, finished in knotty pine, reminded Lo, by its
golden-brown glaze, of friend-chicken bones. We held in contempt the plain
whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell or some other
gloomy self-conscious stench and nothing to boast of (except "good beds"),
and an unsmiling landlady always prepared to have her gift (". . . well, I
could give you . . .") turned down.
Nous connшmes (this is royal fun) the would-be enticements of
their repetitious names--all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest
Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza
Courts, Green Acres, Mac's Courts. There was sometimes a special line in the
write-up, such as "Children welcome, pets allowed" (You are welcome,
you are allowed). The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an
endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely
non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn
instantly beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your
neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary
complement in the shower you had so carefully blended. Some motels had
instructions pasted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were
unhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage,
beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies; others had special notices under
glass, such as Things to Do (Riding: You will often see riders coming
down Main Street on their way back from a romantic moonlight ride.
"Often at 3 a.m.," sneered unromantic Lo).
Nous connшmes the various types of motor court operators, the
reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among the
males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the
females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid
night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria
in one desperate scream.
We avoided Tourist Homes, country cousins of Funeral ones,
old-fashioned, genteel and showerless, with elaborate dressing tables in
depressingly white-and-pink little bedrooms, and photographs of the
landlady's children in all their instars. But I did surrender, now and then,
to Lo's predilection for "real" hotels. She would pick out in the book,
while I petted her in the parked car in the silence of a dusk-mellowed,
mysterious side-road, some highly recommended lake lodge which offered all
sorts of things magnified by the flashlight she moved over them, such as
congenial company, between-meals snacks, outdoor barbecues--but which in my
mind conjured up odious visions of stinking high school boys in sweatshirts
and an ember-red cheek pressing against hers, while poor Dr. Humbert,
embracing nothing but two masculine knees, would cold-humor his piles on the
damp turf. Most empty to her, too, were those "Colonial" Inns, which apart
from "gracious atmosphere" and picture windows, promised "unlimited
quantities of M-m-m food." Treasured recollections of my father's palatial
hotel sometimes led me to seek for its like in the strange country we
traveled through. I was soon discouraged; but Lo kept following the scent of
rich food ads, while I derived a not exclusively economic kick from such
roadside signs as Timber Hotel, Children under 14 Free. On the other
hand, I shudder when recalling that soi-di...
