Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №7
...sant "high-class" resort ina Midwestern state, which advertised "raid-the-icebox" midnight snacks and,
intrigued by my accent, wanted to know my dead wife's and dead mother's
maiden names. A two-days' stay there cost me a hundred and twenty-four
dollars! And do you remember, Miranda, that other "ultrasmart" robbers' den
with complimentary morning coffee and circulating ice water, and no children
under sixteen (no Lolitas, of course)?
Immediately upon arrival at one of the plainer motor courts which
became our habitual haunts, she would set the electric fan a-whirr, or
induce me to drop a quarter into the radio, or she would read all the signs
and inquire with a whine why she could not go riding up some advertised
trail or swimming in that local pool of warm mineral water. Most often, in
the slouching, bored way she cultivated, Lo would fall prostrate and
abominably desirable into a red springchair or a green chaise longue, or a
steamer chair of striped canvas with footrest and canopy, or a sling chair,
or any other lawn chair under a garden umbrella on the patio, and it would
take hours of blandishments, threats and promises to make her lend me for a
few seconds her brown limbs in the seclusion of the five-dollar room before
undertaking anything she might prefer to my poor joy.
A combination of naоvetи and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue
silks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating
brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom,
intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and
what is called goofing off--a kind of diffused clowning which she thought
was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a
disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey
fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth--these were the
obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels
I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I still
hear the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with names
like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty and Rex, and
sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various
candies were to my palate. She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any
advertisement or advice that that appeared in Movie Love or Screen
Land--Starasil Starves Pimples, or "You better watch out if you're
wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you
shouldn't." If a roadside sign said: Visit Our Gift Shop--we had to
visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus
candy. The words "novelties and souvenirs" simply entranced her by their
trochaic lilt. If some cafи sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she was
automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She it
was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object
of every foul poster. And she attempted--unsuccessfully-to patronize only
those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon
the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads.
In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the system of
monetary bribes which was to work such havoc with my nerves and her morals
somewhat later. I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescent
concubine in submission and passable temper. A few years before, she had
spent a rainy summer under Miss Phalen's bleary eye in a dilapidated
Appalachian farmhouse that had belonged to some gnarled Haze or other in the
dead past. It still stood among its rank acres of golden rod on the edge of
a flowerless forest, at the end of a permanently muddy road, twenty miles
from the nearest hamlet. Lo recalled that scarecrow of a house, the
solitude, the soggy old pastures, the wind, the bloated wilderness, with an
energy of disgust that distorted her mouth and fattened her half-revealed
tongue. And it was there that I warned her she would dwell with me in exile
for months and years if need be, studying under me French and Latin, unless
her "present attitude" changed. Charlotte, I began to understand you!
A simple child, Lo would scream no! and frantically clutch at my
driving hand whenever I put a stop to her tornadoes of temper by turning in
the middle of a highway with the implication that I was about to take her
straight to that dark and dismal abode. The farther, however, we traveled
away from it west, the less tangible that menace became, and I had to adopt
other methods of persuasion.
Among these, the reformatory threat is the one I recall with the
deepest moan of shame. From the very beginning of our concourse, I was
clever enough to realize that I must secure her complete co-operation in
keeping our relations secret, that it should become a second nature with
her, no matter what grudge she might bear me, no matter what other pleasure
she might seek.
"Come and kiss your old man," I would say, "and drop that moody
nonsense. In former times, when I was still your dream male [the reader will
notice what pains I took to speak Lo's tongue], you swooned to records of
the number one throb-and-sob idol of your coevals [Lo: "Of my what? Speak
English"]. That idol of your pals sounded, you thought, like friend Humbert.
But now, I am just your old man, a dream dad protecting his dream
daughter.
"My chхre Dolorиs ! I want to protect you, dear, from all the
horrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways, and alas,
comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, in the blueberry woods
during the bluest of summers. Through thick and thin I will still stay your
guardian, and if you are good, I hope a court may legalize that guardianship
before long. Let us, however, forget, Dolores Haze, so-called legal
terminology, terminology that accepts as rational the term 'lewd and
lascivious cohabitation.' I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking
indecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am the
therapist--a matter of nice spacing in the way of distinction. I am your
daddum, Lo. Look, I've a learned book here about young girls. Look, darling,
what it says. I quote: the normal girl--normal, mark you--the normal girl is
usually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the
forerunner of the desired elusive male ('elusive' is good, by Polonius!).
The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived)
will encourage a companionship between father and daughter,
realizing--excuse the corny style--that the girl forms her ideals of romance
and of men from her association with her father. Now, what association does
this cheery book mean--and recommend? I quote again: Among Sicilians sexual
relations between a father and his daughter are accepted as a matter of
course, and the girl who participates in such relationship is not looked
upon with disapproval by the society of which she is part. I'm a great
admirer of Sicilians, fine athletes, fine musicians, fine upright people,
Lo, and great lovers. But let's not digress. Only the other day we read in
the newspapers some bunkum about a middle-aged morals offender who pleaded
guilty to the violation of the Mann Act and to transporting a nine-year-old
girl across state lines for immoral purposes, whatever these are. Dolores
darling! You are not nine but almost thirteen, and I would not advise you to
consider yourself my cross-country slave, and I deplore the Mann Act as
lending itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semantics
take against tight-zippered Philistines. I am your father, and I am
speaking English, and I love you.
"Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of having
impaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn, what happens if you
complain to the police of my having kidnapped and raped you? Let us suppose
they believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one to
know her carnally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree
sodomy, depending on the technique; and the maximum penalty is ten years.
So, I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan?
Well, you are luckier. You become the ward of the Department of Public
Welfare--which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim matron of the
Miss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away
your lipstick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don't know if you
have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected, incorrigible
and delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy
neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more
or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile
detention home, or one of those admirable girls' protectories where you knit
things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will go
there, Lolita--my Lolita, this Lolita will leave plainer
words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized,
my pet, c'est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here,
my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no,
allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the
situation, this is the choice. Don't you think that under the circumstances
Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?"
By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite a
certain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was not as intelligent a
child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that
background of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in
keeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had
to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to
look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a
shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and
collapsed. The object in view might be anything--a lighthouse in Virginia, a
natural cave in Arkansas converted to a cafи, a collection of guns and
violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in
Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local
museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever--but it had to be
there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would
feign gagging as soon as we got to it.
By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my
best for hours on end to give her the impression of "going places," of
rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. I have
never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us,
across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those
long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance
floors. Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my
calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; which
I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the
delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By a
paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside
had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused
recognition because of those painted oilclothes which were imported from
America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European
nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic
green views they depicted--opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the
dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills of
greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities
became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them.
Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow
suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm,
peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray
cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced
trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a
wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into
misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral
swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon,
pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer,
and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green
corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.
Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance
toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of
humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper
cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A
great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by
toilet signs--Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck's-Doe's; while
lost in an artist's dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of the
gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant
hill scrambling out--scarred but still untamed--from the wilderness of
agriculture that was trying to swallow it.
At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant
Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little
sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the
heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks
would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be a
furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote
car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang
for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot haze. And as we
pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush"
appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red
bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading
into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady
gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking
pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along
the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows,
immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across
all human rules of traffic.
My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerary
we followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point where I cannot avoid
that chore. Roughly, during that mad year (August 1947 to August 1948), our
route began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, then
meandered south, up and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qu'on
appelle Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there,
veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this is not
too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any notes, and
have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes,
almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past, in which to check these
recollections); crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through
southern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north
through the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almost
reached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and bad
lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite little Lo's
strident remonstrations, little Lo's birthplace, in a corn, coal and hog
producing area; and finally returned to the fold of the East, petering out
in the college town of Beardsley.
2
Now, in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only
the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many sidetrips and tourist
traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far
from being an indolent partie de plaisir, our tour was a hard,
twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d'йtre (these French
clichиs are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from
kiss to kiss.
Thumbing through that battered tour book, I dimly evoke that Magnolia
Garden in a southern state which cost me four bucks and which, according to
the ad in the book, you must visit for three reasons: because John
Galsworthy (a stone-dead writer of sorts) acclaimed it as the world's
fairest garden; because in 1900 Baedeker's Guide had marked it with a star;
and finally, because . . . O, Reader, My Reader, guess! . . . because
children (and by Jingo was not my Lolita a child!) will "walk starry-eyed
and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven, drinking in beauty that can
influence a life." "Not mine," said grim Lo, and settled down on a bench
with the fillings of two Sunday papers in her lovely lap.
We passed and re-passed through the whole gamut of American roadside
restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its deer head (dark trace of long tear
at inner canthus), "humorous" picture post cards of the posterior "Kurort"
type, impaled guest checks, life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of
celestial sundaes, one half of a chocolate cake under glass, and several
horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the
ignoble counter; and all the way to the expensive place with the subdued
lights, preposterously poor table linen, inept waiters (ex-convicts or
college boys), the roan back of a screen actress, the sable eyebrows of her
male of the moment, and an orchestra of zoot-suiters with trumpets.
We inspected the world's largest stalagmite in a cave where three
southeastern states have a family reunion; admission by age; adults one
dollar, pubescents sixty cents. A granite obelisk commemorating the Battle
of Blue Licks, with old bones and Indian pottery in the museum nearby, Lo a
dime, very reasonable. The present log cabin boldly simulating the past log
cabin where Lincoln was born. A boulder, with a plaque, in memory of the
author of "Trees" (by now we are in Poplar Cove, N.C., reached by what my
kind, tolerant, usually so restrained tour book angrily calls "a very narrow
road, poorly maintained," to which, though no Kilmerite, I subscribe). From
a hired motor-boat operated by an elderly, but still repulsively handsome
White Russian, a baron they said (Lo's palms were damp, the little fool),
who had known in California good old Maximovich and Valeria, we could
distinguish the inaccessible "millionaires' colony" on an island, somewhere
off the Georgia coast. We inspected further: a collection of European hotel
picture post cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort,
where with a hot wave of pride I discovered a colored photo of my father's
Mirana, its striped awnings, its flag flying above the retouched palm trees.
"So what?" said Lo, squinting at the bronzed owner of an expensive car who
had followed us into the Hobby House. Relics of the cotton era. A forest in
Arkansas and, on her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pink swelling (the work
of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent poison between my
long thumbnails and then sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood.
Bourbon Street (in a town named New Orleans) whose sidewalks, said the tour
book, "may [I liked the "may"] feature entertainment by pickaninnies who
will {I liked the "will" even better] tap-dance for pennies" (what fun),
while "its numerous small and intimate night clubs are thronged with
visitors" (naughty). Collections of frontier lore. Ante-bellum homes with
iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie
ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the
fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way,
and the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing. The Menninger
Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of it. A patch of
beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy
with creeping white flies. Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the
Old Oregon Trail; and Abiliene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something
Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties
never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill;
south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and
sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing
from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of
neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen;
pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words"
(blasи Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant
lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up,
their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush;
oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a
rich rug of lucerne at its foot.
Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and
the snow banks, and the cushionets of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow;
down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was
snowballed by some youngsters, and retaliated in kind comme on dit.
Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired blue flowers. The various
items of a scenic drive. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear
Creeks, Soda Springs, Painted Canyons. Texas, a drought-struck plain.
Crystal Chamber in the longest cave in the world, children under 12 free, Lo
a young captive. A collection of a local lady's homemade sculptures, closed
on a miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland. Conception Park, in a
town on the Mexican border which I dared not cross. There and elsewhere,
hundreds of gray hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim
flowers. Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man Russian Bill
was colorfully hanged seventy years ago. Fish hatcheries. Cliff dwellings.
The mummy of a child (Florentine Bea's Indian contemporary). Our twentieth
Hell's Canyon. Our fiftieth Gateway to something or other fide that
tour book, the cover of which had been lost by that time. A tick in my
groin. Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away
the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. A hazy blue
view beyond railings on a mountain pass, and the backs of a family enjoying
it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless
whisper--"Look, the McCrystals, please, let's talk to them, please"--let's
talk to them, reader!--"please! I'll do anything you want, oh, please. .
."). Indian ceremonial dances, strictly commercial. ART: American
Refrigerator Transit Company. Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, aboriginal
pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty
million years ago, when I was a child. A lanky, six-foot, pale boy with an
active Adam's apple, ogling Lo and her orange-brown bare midriff, which I
kissed five minutes later, Jack. Winter in the desert, spring in the
foothills, almonds in bloom. Reno, a dreary town in Nevada, with a nightlife
said to be "cosmopolitan and mature." A winery in California, with a church
built in the shape of a wine barrel. Death Valley. Scotty's Castle. Works of
Art collected by one Rogers over a period of years. The ugly villas of
handsome actresses. R. L. Stevenson's footprint on an extinct volcano.
Mission Dolores: good title for book. Surf-carved sandstone festoons. A man
having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park.
Blue, blue Crater Lake. A fish hatchery in Idaho and the State Penitentiary.
Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows
of bubbling mud--symbols of my passion. A herd of antelopes in a wildlife
refuge. Our hundredth cavern, adults one dollar, Lolita fifty cents. A
chateau built by a French marquess in N.D. The Corn Palace in S.D.; and the
huge heads of presidents carved in towering granite. The Bearded Woman read
our jingle and now she is no longer single. A zoo in Indiana where a large
troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus'
flagship. Billions of dead, or halfdead, fish-smelling May flies in every
window of every eating place all along a dreary sandy shore. Fat gulls on
big stones as seen from the ferry City of Cheboygan, whose brown
woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the
aquamarine lake. A motel whose ventilator pipe passed under the city sewer.
Lincoln's home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture
that most visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings.
We had rows, minor and major. The biggest ones we had took place: at
Lacework Cabins, Virginia; on Park Avenue, Little Rock, near a school; on
Milner Pass, 10,759 feet high, in Colorado; at the corner of Seventh Street
and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona; on Third Street, Los Angeles,
because the tickets to some studio or other were sold out; at a motel called
Poplar Shade in Utah, where six pubescent trees were scarcely taller than my
Lolita, and where she asked, ю propos de rien, how long did I think
we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together and
never behaving like ordinary people? On N. Broadway, Burns, Oregon, corner
of W. Washington, facing Safeway, a grocery. In some little town in the Sun
Valley of Idaho, before a brick hotel, pale and flushed bricks nicely mixed,
with, opposite, a poplar playing its liquid shadows all over the local Honor
Roll. In a sage brush wilderness, between Pinedale and Farson. Somewhere in
Nebraska, on Main Street, near the First National Bank, established 1889,
with a view of a railway crossing in the vista of the street, and beyond
that the white organ pipes of a multiple silo. And on McEwen St., corner of
Wheaton Ave., in a Michigan town bearing his first name.
We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man, Homo
pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms; the modest
soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki's
viatric appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing
to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with
brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the
college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly
as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his
sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the
clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud
shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs
to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings.
"Let's take him," Lo would often plead, rubbing her knees together in a
way she had, as some particularly disgusting pollex, some man of my
age and shoulder breadth, with the face ю claques of unemployed
actor, walked backwards, practically in the path of our car.
Oh, I had to keep a very sharp eye on Lo, little limp Lo! Owing perhaps
to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, despite her very childish
appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel
pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued
pools, into fits of concupiscence which might have tickled my pride, had it
not incensed my jealousy. For little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and
I would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some
amiable male, some grease monkey, with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and
watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this
very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a
perfect love song of wisecracks.
When, during our longer stops, I would relax after a particularly
violent morning in bed, and out of the goodness of my lulled heart allow
her--indulgent Hum!--to visit the rose garden or children's library across
the street with a motor court neighbor's plain little Mary and Mary's
eight-year-old brother, Lo would come back an hour late, with barefoot Mary
trailing far behind, and the little boy metamorphosed into two gangling,
golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea. The reader may
well imagine what I answered my pet when--rather uncertainly, I admit--she
would ask me if she could go with Carl and Al here to the roller-skating
rink.
I remember the first time, a dusty windy afternoon, I did let her go to
one such rink. Cruelly she said it would be no fun if I accompanied her,
since that time of day was reserved for teenagers. We wrangled out a
compromise: I remained in the car, among other (empty) cars with their noses
to the canvas-topped open-air rink, where some fifty young people, many in
pairs, were endlessly rolling round and round to mechanical music, and the
wind silvered the trees. Dolly wore blue jeans and white high shoes, as most
of the other girls did. I kept counting the revolutions of the rolling
crowd--and suddenly she was missing. When she rolled past again, she was
together with three hoodlums whom I had heard analyze a moment before the
girl skaters from the outside--and jeer at a lovely leggy young thing who
had arrived clad in red shorts instead of those jeans and slacks.
At inspection stations on highways entering Arizona or California, a
policeman's cousin would peer with such intensity at us that my poor heart
wobbled. "Any honey?" he would inquire, and every time my sweet fool
giggled. I still have, vibrating all along my optic nerve, visions of Lo on
horseback, a link in the chain of a guided trip along a bridle trail: Lo
bobbing at a walking pace, with an old woman rider in front and a lecherous
red-necked dude-rancher behind; and I behind him, hating his fat
flowery-shirted back even more fervently than a motorist does a slow truck
on a mountain road. Or else, at a ski lodge, I would see her floating away
from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a
glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting
for her, for her.
In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way,
anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools, the number of
children in the nearest school and so forth; and at school bus time, smiling
and twitching a little (I discovered this tic nerveux because cruel
Lo was the first to mimic it), I would park at a strategic point, with my
vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave
school--always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore my so
easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other
people's whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me
while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green
boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun.
As a sort of compromise, I freely advocated whenever and wherever
possible the use of swimming pools with other girl-children. She adored
brilliant water and was a remarkably smart diver. Comfortably robed, I would
settle down in the rich post-meridian shade after my own demure dip, and
there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or
nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped,
bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants
and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly would I marvel that she
was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of
the mourning doves, and devise the late afternoon one, and slitting my
sun-speared eyes, compare Lolita to whatever other nymphets parsimonious
chance collected around her for my anthological delectation and judgment;
and today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think that
any of them ever surpassed her in desirability, or if they did, it was so
two or three times at the most, in a certain light, with certain perfumes
blended in the air--once in the hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the
daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and another time--mais je
divague.
Naturally, I had to be always wary, fully realizing, in my lucid
jealousy, the danger of those dazzling romps. I had only to turn away for a
moment--to walk, say, a few steps in order to see if our cabin was at last
ready after the morning change of linen--and Lo and Behold, upon returning,
I would find the former, les yeux perdus, dipping and kicking her
long-toed feet in the water on the stone edge of which she lolled, while, on
either side of her, there crouched a brun adolescent whom her russet
beauty and the quicksilver in the baby folds of her stomach were sure to
cause to se tordre--oh Baudelaire!--in recurrent dreams for months to
come.
I tried to teach her to play tennis so we might have more amusements in
common; but although I had been a good player in my prime, I proved to be
hopeless as a teacher; and so, in California, I got her to take a number of
very expensive lessons with a famous coach, a husky, wrinkled old-timer,
with a harem of ball boys; he looked an awful wreck off the court, but now
and then, when, in the course of a lesson, to keep up the exchange, he would
put out as it were an exquisite spring blossom of a stroke and twang the
ball back to his pupil, that divine delicacy of absolute power made me
recall that, thirty years before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish
the great Gobbert! Until she began taking those lessons, I thought she would
never learn the game. On this or that hotel court I would drill Lo, and try
to relive the days when in a hot gale, a daze of dust, and queer lassitude,
I fed ball after ball to gay, innocent, elegant Annabel (gleam of bracelet,
pleated white skirt, black velvet hair band). With every word of persistent
advice I would only augment Lo's sullen fury. To our games, oddly enough,
she preferred--at least, before we reached California--formless pat ball
approximations--more ball hunting than actual play--with a wispy, weak,
wonderfully pretty in an ange gauche way coeval. A helpful spectator,
I would go up to that other child, and inhale her faint musky fragrance as I
touched her forearm and held her knobby wrist, and push this way or that her
cool thigh to show her the back-hand stance. In the meantime, Lo, bending
forward, would let her sunny-brown curls hang forward as she stuck her
racket, like a cripple's stick, into the ground and emitted a tremendous ugh
of disgust at my intrusion. I would leave them to their game and look on,
comparing their bodies in motion, a silk scarf round my throat; this was in
south Arizona, I think--and the days had a lazy lining warmth, and awkward
Lo would slash at the ball and miss it, and curse, and send a simulacrum of
a serve into the net, and show the wet glistening young down of her armpit
as she brandished her racket in despair, and her even more insipid partner
would dutifully rush out after every ball, and retrieve none; but both were
enjoying themselves beautifully, and in clear ringing tones kept the exact
score of their ineptitudes all the time.
One day, I remember, I offered to bring them cold drinks from the
hotel, and went up the gravel path, and came back with two tall glasses of
pineapple juice, soda and ice; and then a sudden void within my chest made
me stop as I saw that the tennis court was deserted. I stooped to set down
the glasses on a bench and for some reason, with a kind of icy vividness,
saw Charlotte's face in death, and I glanced around, and noticed Lo in white
shorts receding through the speckled shadow of a garden path in the company
of a tall man who carried two tennis rackets. I sprang after them, but as I
was crashing through the shrubbery, I saw, in an alternate vision, as if
life's course constantly branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in
shorts, trudging up and down a small weedy area, and beating bushes with
their rackets in listless search for their last lost ball.
I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges that I did
everything in my power to give my Lolita a really good time. How charming it
was to see her, a child herself, showing another child some of her few
accomplishments, such as for example a special way of jumping rope. With her
right hand holding her left arm behind her untanned back, the lesser
nymphet, a diaphanous darling, would be all eyes, as the pavonine sun was
all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, while in the midst of that
oculate paradise, my freckled and raffish lass skipped, repeating the
movements of so many others I had gloated over on the sun-shot, watered,
damp-smelling sidewalks and ramparts of ancient Europe. Presently, she would
hand the rope back to her little Spanish friend, and watch in her turn the
repeated lesson, and brush away the hair from her brow, and fold her arms,
and step on one toe with the other, or drop her hands loosely upon her still
unflared hips, and I would satisfy myself that the damned staff had at last
finished cleaning up our cottage; whereupon, flashing a smile to the shy,
dark-haired page girl of my princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers deep
into Lo's hair from behind, and then gently but firmly clasping them around
the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a
quick connection before dinner.
"Whose cat has scratched poor you?" A full-blown fleshy handsome woman
of the repulsive type to which I was particularly attractive might ask me at
the "lodge," during a table d'hote dinner followed by dancing promised to
Lo. This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people
as possible, while Lo, on the other hand, would do her utmost to draw as
many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could.
She would be, figuratively speaking wagging her tiny tail, her whole
behind in fact as little bitches do--while some grinning stranger accosted
us and began a bright conversation with a comparative study of license
plates. "Long way from home!" Inquisitive parents, in order to pump Lo about
me, would suggest her going to a movie with their children. We had some
close shaves. The waterfall nuisance pursued me of course in all our
caravansaries. But I never realized how wafery their wall substance was
until one evening, after I had loved too loudly, a neighbor's masculine
cough filled the pause as clearly as mine would have done; and next morning
as I was having breakfast at the milk bar (Lo was a late sleeper, and I
liked to bring her a pot of hot coffee in bed), my neighbor of the eve, an
elderly fool wearing plain glasses on his long virtuous nose and a
convention badge on his lapel, somehow managed to rig up a conversation with
me, in the course of which he inquired, if my missus was like his missus a
rather reluctant get-upper when not on the farm; and had not the hideous
danger I was skirting almost suffocated me, I might have enjoyed the odd
look of surprise on his thin-lipped weather-beaten face when I dryly
answered, as I slithered off my stool, that I was thank God a widower.
How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until
she had done her morning duty. And I was such a thoughtful friend, such a
passionate father, such a good pediatrician, attending to all the wants of
my little auburn brunette's body! My only grudge against nature was that I
could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young
matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs,
her comely twin kidneys. On especially tropical afternoons, in the sticky
closeness of the siesta, I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against
my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical
kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper,
as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a
shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.
Her eyes would follow the adventures of her favorite strip characters: there
was one well-drawn sloppy bobby-soxer, with high cheekbones and angular
gestures, that I was not above enjoying myself; she studied the photographic
results of head-on collisions; she never doubted the reality of place, time,
and circumstance alleged to match the publicity pictures of naked-thighed
beauties; and she was curiously fascinated by the photographs of local
brides, some in full wedding apparel, holding bouquets and wearing glasses.
A fly would settle and walk in the vicinity of her navel or explore her
tender pale areolas. She tried to catch it in her fist (Charlotte's method)
and then would turn to the column Let's Explore Your Mind.
"Let's explore your mind. Would sex crimes be reduced if children
obeyed a few don'ts? Don't play around public toilets. Don't take candy or
rides from strangers. If picked up, mark down the license of the car."
". . . and the brand of the candy," I volunteered.
She went on, her cheek (recedent) against mine (pursuant); and this was
a good day, mark, O reader!
"If you don't have a pencil, but are old enough to read--"
"We," I quip-quoted, "medieval mariners, have placed in this bottle--"
"If," she repeated, "you don't have a pencil, but are old enough to
read and write--this is what the guy means, isn't it, you dope--=scratch the
number somehow on the roadside."
"With your little claws, Lolita."
She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash
curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to
me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain
repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident "what d'you
think you are doing?" was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to
offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To
think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would--invariably, with
icy precision--plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel
than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a
moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly,
I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke.
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impressin
that I did not manage to be happy. Readeer must understand that in the
possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it
were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth
comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that
bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite
our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made,
and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all,
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the
color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
The able psychiatrist who studies my case--and whom by now Dr. Humbert
has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascination--is no doubt
anxious to have me take Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at
last, the "gratification" of a lifetime urge, and release from the
"subconscious" obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial
little Miss Lee.
Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach,
though I also have to confess that by the time we reached its mirage of gray
water, so many delights had already been granted me by my traveling
companion that the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or
whatnot, far from being the impulse of the subconscious, had become the
rational pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill. The angels knew it, and
arranged things accordingly. A visit to a plausible cove on the Atlantic
side was completely messed up by foul weather. A thick damp sky, muddy
waves, a sense of boundless but somehow matter-of-fact mist--what could be
further removed from the crisp charm, the sapphire occasion and rosy
contingency of my Riviera romance? A couple of semitropical beaches on the
Gulf, though bright enough, were starred and spattered by venomous beasties
and swept by hurricane winds. Finally, on a Californian beach, facing the
phantom of the Pacific, I hit upon some rather perverse privacy in a kind of
cave whence you could hear the shrikes of a lot of girl scouts taking their
first surf bath on a separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; but
the fog was like a wet blanket, and the sand was gritty and clammy, and Lo
was all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had as
little desire for her as for a manatee. Perhaps, my learned readers may perk
up if I tell them that even had we discovered a piece of sympathetic seaside
somewhere, it would have come too late, since my real liberation had
occurred much earlier: at the moment, in point of fact, when Annabel Haze,
alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared tome, golden and brown,
kneeling, looking up, on that shoddy veranda, in a kind of fictitious,
dishonest, but eminently satisfactory seaside arrangement (although there
was nothing but a second-rate lake in the neighborhood.).
So much for those special sensations, influence, if not actually
brought about, by the tenets of modern psychiatry. Consequently, I turned
away--I headed my Lolita away--from beaches which were either too bleak when
lone, or too populous when ablaze. However, in recollection, I suppose, of
my hopeless hauntings of public parks in Europe, I was still keenly
interested in outdoor activities and desirous of finding suitable
playgrounds in the open where I had suffered such shameful privations. Here,
too, I was to be thwarted. The disappointment I must now register (as I
gently grade my story into an expression of the continuous risk and dread
that ran through my bliss) should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic,
tragic but never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful,
heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung,
innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and
exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped
and kissed on the trim turf of old-would mountainsides, on the innerspring
moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks,
and in so many cabanes in so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of
America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most
ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's
buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick
his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of
potential snakes--que dis-je, of semi-extinct dragons!--while the
crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to
gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.
I am exaggerating a little. One summer noon, just below timberline,
where heavenly-hued blossoms that I would fain call larkspur crowded all
along a purly moutain brook, we did find, Lolita and I, a secluded romantic
spot, a hundred feet or so above the pass where we had left our car. The
slope seemed untrodden. A last panting pine was taking a well-earned
breather on the rock it had reached. A marmot whistled at us and withdrew.
Beneath the lap-robe I had spread fo Lo, dryflowers crepitated softly.
Venus came and went. The jagged cliff crowning the upper talus and a tangle
of shrugs growing below us seemed to offer us protection from sun and man
alike. Alas, I had not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up in
cagey fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us.
It was then that we came close to detection than ever before, and no
wonder the experience curbed forever my yearning for rural amours.
I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my
arms;--a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had
become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!
I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a
moment of blind impatient passion, and thee she was sprawling and sobbing,
and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the
atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I
know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss;
and so we lay, ...
