Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №11
...nd grunting ona lake beach with his otherwise very complete bathing suit jauntily stripped
from one shoulder. This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the
towel on his name walked back with false insouciance to the pool. And as if
the sun had gone out of the game, Lo slackened and slowly got up ignoring
the ball that the terrier placed before her. Who can say what heartbreaks
are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp? I started to say something,
and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and
vomited a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.
I saw Lolita's eyes, and they seemed to be more calculating than
frightened. I heard her saying to a kind lady that her father was having a
fit. Then for a long time I lay in a lounge chair swallowing pony upon pony
of gin. And next morning I felt strong enough to drive on (which in later
years no doctor believed).
22
The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone,
turned out to belong to the glossily browned pine-log kind that Lolita used
to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how
different things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After
all--well, really . . . After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly
clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars
were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence
and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky Gallic part
of my brain--and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman
or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and
otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I
remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of
the "Birdsley" telephone call . . . But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had
dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with
the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably
unattainable and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics
told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me.
An additional, abominable, and perfectly gratuitous worry was lovingly
prepared for me in Elphinstone. Lo had been dull and silent during the last
lap--two hundred mountainous miles uncontaminated by smoke-gray sleuths or
zigzagging zanies. She hardly glanced at the famous, oddly shaped,
splendidly flushed rock which jutted above the mountains and had been the
take-off for nirvana on the part of a temperamental show girl. The town was
newly built, or rebuilt, on the flat floor of a seven-thousand-foot-high
valley; it would soon bore Lo, I hoped, and we would spin on to California,
to the Mexican border, to mythical bays, saguaro desserts, fatamorganas.
Josи Lizzarrabengoa, as you remember, planned to take his Carmen to the
Etats Unis. I conjured up a Central American tennis competition in
which Dolores Haze and various Californian schoolgirl champions would
dazzlingly participate. Good-will tours on that smiling level eliminate the
distinction between passport and sport. Why did I hope we would be happy
abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed
loves, and lungs, rely.
Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor
court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a
Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish.
I registered, Hays gave me the key and a tinkling smile, and, still
twinkling, showed me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a
little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the
cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook
of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I thought, shamming, no doubt,
to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper
in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill.
Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally,
then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after
laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the
intimate centigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which at least made
sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of
temperature--even exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip
of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an
examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen
that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her
brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She complained
of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebrae--and I thought of
poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of
intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind
Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. "You are lucky it
happened here," she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the
district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be,
despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkжnig in pursuit,
thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and
guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom
Mrs. Haus had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose
learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it
was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu,
curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all
of which sounded like the "ague" of the ancients. I wondered if I should
mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a
minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend, but
knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if
necessary. To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter's
age as "practically sixteen." While I was not looking, my child was taken
away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a
"welcome" mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up
constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to
tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as
we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and
very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black
eyes--of Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd,
a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it
for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new
solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumined, very square
and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up
at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute
montagne where at the moment Mary's father, lonely Joseph Lore was
dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas--que sais-je!--or seducing a ewe.
Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in
times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt
fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the
motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way.
Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangular shadows. I made out what
looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school
playground; and in another wastelike black there rose in domed silence the
pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the
motel, where millions of so-called "millers," a kind of insect, were
swarming around the neon contours of "No Vacancy"; and, when, at 3 a.m.,
after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to
fix a man's despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of
chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special
French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to
assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was
separated from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness was
somehow the development of a theme--that it had the same taste and tone as
the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during
our journey; I imagined that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or
hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital--and Aurora
had hardly "warmed her hands," as the pickers of lavender way in the country
of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again,
knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stool-less, in despair.
This was Tuesday, and Wednesday or Thursday, splendidly reacting like
the darling she was to some "serum" (sparrow's sperm or dugong's dung), she
was much better, and the doctor said that in a couple of days she would be
"skipping" again.
Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains sharply
engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat to come for I felt all
hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too. None will
know the strain it was to carry that bouquet, that load of love, those books
that I had traveled sixty miles to buy: Browning's Dramatic Works, The
history of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet, Flowers of
the Rockies, the Theatre Guild Anthology, Tennis by Helen Wills, who had
won the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of fifteen. As I was
staggering up to the door of my daughter's thirteen-dollar-a day private
room, Mary Lore, the beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an
unconcealed dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray, placed it
with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament jigging, shot
back into the room--probably to warn her poor little Dolores that the
tyrannical old father was creeping up on crepe soles, with books and
bouquet: the latter I had composed of wild flowers and beautiful leaves
gathered with my own gloved hands on a mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly
slept at all that fateful week).
Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On a
yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had contained
something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on it--nothing
at all, save a phony armorial design with "Ponderosa Lodge" in green
letters; thereupon I performed a chassи-croisи with Mary, who was in
the act of bustling out again--wonderful how fast they move and how little
they do, those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put
back, uncrumpled.
"You better not touch," she said, nodding directionally. "Could burn
your fingers."
Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:
"Je croyais que c'иtait un bill--not a billet doux."
Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: "Bonjour, mon petit."
"Dolores," said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, though me, the
plump whore, and blinking, and starting to fold very rapidly a white flannel
blanket as she blinked: "Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters
from my boy friend. It's me (smugly tapping herself on the small gilt cross
she wore) gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours."
She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted,
hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on neat coverleat, lay
innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper
napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun.
"what gruesome funeral flowers," she said. "Thanks all the same. But do
you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody."
Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and
garlic, with the Desert News, which her fair patient eagerly
accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought.
"My sister Ann," said Marry (topping information with afterthought),
"works at the Ponderosa place."
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m'aimes
plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as
hopeless as ever--and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting
in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and
say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental
Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her
fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse
whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins
into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting
room--all were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy
father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between
Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were
rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that "snow" and "joy juice").
My throat hurt. I stood, swallowing, at the window and stared at the
mountains, at the romantic rock high up in the smiling plotting sky.
"My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes), "we shall
leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed."
"Incidentally, I want all my clothes," said the gitanilla, humping up
her knees and turning to another page.
". . . Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying
here."
"There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.
I lowered myself into a cretonne chair and, opening the attractive
botanical work, attempted, in the fever-humming hush of the room, to
identify my flowers. This proved impossible. Presently a musical bell softly
sounded somewhere in the passage.
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were
lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a
hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However--likewise for reasons
of show--regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the
wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary
Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating
through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at
her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily, Dolores Haze
reminded me to bring her next morning . . . She did not remember where the
various things she wanted were . . . "Bring me," she cried (out of sight
already, door on the move, closing, closed), "the new gray suitcase and
Mother's trunk"; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying
nit he motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could
do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags
over with the widow's beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo
displaying her treasures to Mary . . . No doubt, I was a little
delirious--and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a
solid, for when I looked out the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw
Dolly's beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the
graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow
perched on the saddle--but it was the landlady's bike, and smiling a little,
and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed,
and lay as quiet as a saint--
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine--
--which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed,
and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the
firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five
minutes to two p.m. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the
half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it.
It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on
its jamb, leaning forward a little.
Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better
and would I come today?
At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as
now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars--had been blown through a wall overseas;
but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish,
hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either
because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a
sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the
one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated
sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a
naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on
the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs
while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head. Oh, delicious . . . reclining
against the woodwork, like some sly fairy.
I asked him to tell Mary Lore I would stay in bed all day and would get
into touch with my daughter sometime tomorrow if I felt probably Polynesian.
He noticed the direction of my gaze and made her right hip twitch
amorously.
"Okey-dokey," big Frank sang out, slapped the jamb, and whistling,
carried my message away, and I went on drinking, and by morning the fever
was gone, and although I was as limp as a toad, I put on the purple dressing
gown over my maize yellow pajamas, and walked over to the office telephone.
Everything was fine. A bright voice informed me that yes, everything was
fine, my daughter had checked out the day before, around two, her uncle, Mr.
Gustave, had called for her with a cocker spaniel pup and a smile for
everyone, and a black Caddy Lack, and had paid Dolly's bill in cash, and
told them to tell me I should not worry, and keep warm, they were at
Grandpa's ranch as agreed.
Elphinstone was, and I hope still is, a very cute little town. It was
spread like a maquette, you know, with its neat greenwool trees and
red-roofed houses over the valley floor and I think I have alluded earlier
to its model school and temple and spacious rectangular blocks, some of
which were, curiously enough, just unconventional pastures with a mule or a
unicorn grazing in the young July morning mist. Very amusing: at one
gravel--groaning sharp turn I sideswiped a parked car but said to myself
telestically--and, telepathically (I hoped), to its gesticulating
owner--that I would return later, address Bird School, Bird, New Bird, the
gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain, and after some lapses and
losses common to dream sequences, I found myself in the reception room,
trying to beat up the doctor, and roaring at people under chairs, and
clamoring for Mary who luckily for her was not there; rough hands plucked at
my dressing gown, ripping off a pocket, and somehow I seem to have been
sitting on a bald brown-headed patient, whom I had mistaken for Dr. Blue,
and who eventually stood up, remarking with a preposterous accent: "Now, who
is nevrotic, I ask?"--and then a gaunt unsmiling nurse presented me with
seven beautiful, beautiful books and the exquisitely folded tartan
lap robe, and demanded a receipt; and in the sudden silence I became aware
of a policeman in the hallway, to whom my fellow motorist was pointing me
out, and meekly I signed the very symbolic receipt, thus surrendering my
Lolita to all those apes. But what else could I do? One simple and stark
thought stood out and this was: "Freedom for the moment is everything." One
false move--and I might have been made to explain a life of crime. So I
simulated a coming out of a daze. To my fellow motorist I paid what he
thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in
tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily
diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish
that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly
good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I
still had my gun, and was still a free man--free to trace the fugitive, free
to destroy my brother.
23
A thousand-mile stretch of silk-smooth road separated Kasbeam, where,
to the best of my belief, the red fiend had been scheduled to appear for the
first time, and fateful Elphinstone which we had reached about a week before
Independence Day. The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom
made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day, spending the
rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places,
all of them also prearranged, no doubt. It was that stretch, then, along
which the fiend's spoor should be sought; and to this I devoted myself,
after several unmentionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly
radiating roads in the vicinity of Elphinstone.
Imagine me, reader , with my shyness, my distaste for any ostentation,
my inherent sense of the comme il faut, imagine me masking the frenzy
of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual
pretext to flip through the hotel register: "Oh," I would say, "I am almost
positive that I stayed here once--let me look up the entries for
mid-June--no, I see I'm wrong after all--what a very quaint name for a home
town, Kawtagain. Thanks very much." Or: "I had a customer staying here--I
mislaid his address--may I . . .?" And every once in a while, especially if
the operator of the place happened to be a certain type of gloomy male,
personal inspection of the books was denied me.
I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to
Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342
hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations
between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend
("N. Petit, Larousse, Ill."); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully
so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least
fifty places where I merely inquired at the desk--but that was a futile
quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of verisimilitude and good
will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300
or so books inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering
fiend had stopped even more often than we, or else--he was quite capable of
that--he had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well
furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at
the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita's pillow. In some
instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block;
not infrequently he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two
bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our departure
from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and
marking laps and stops with her lipstick!
I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had
planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit. At the very first motel
office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously human
ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy
connotations could not fail to strike me, of course. The landlady deigned to
inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days with a bad cold,
that he had left his car for repairs in some garage or other and that he had
checked out on the 4th of July. Yes, a girl called Ann Lore had worked
formerly at the Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One
moonlit night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street; an automaton,
she was about to shriek, but I managed to humanize her by the simple act of
falling on my knees and with pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not
know a thing, she swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to
waver. I whipped out a hundred-dollar bill. She lifted it to the light of
the moon. "He is your brother," she whispered at last. I plucked the bill
out of her moon-cold hand, and spitting out a French curse turned and ran
away. This taught me to rely on myself alone. No detective could discover
the clues Trapp had tuned to my mind and manner. I could not hope, of
course, he would ever leave his correct name and address; but I did hope he
might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring, say, to introduce a
richer and more personal shot of color than strictly necessary, or by
revealing too much through a qualitative sum of quantitative parts which
revealed too little. In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly
enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With infinite
skill, he swayed and staggered, and regained an impossible balance, always
leaving me with the sportive hope--if I may use such a term in speaking of
betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and hate--that he might give himself away
next time. He never did--though coming damn close to it. We all admire the
spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in
the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert
wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I
should know.
The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his
personality, or at least a certain homogenous and striking personality; his
genre, his type of humor--at its best at leat--the tone of his brain, had
affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were
definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. he was versed in
logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine
handwriting. He would change his name but he could not disguise, no matter
how he slanted them, his very peculiar t's, w's and l's. Quelquepart Island
was one of his favorite residences. He did not use a fountain pen which
fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a
repressed undinist. One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.
His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness, what a
tease the poor fellow was! He challenged my scholarship. I am sufficiently
proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all; and I
daresay I missed some elements in that cryprogrammic paper chase. What a
shiver of triumph and loathing shook my frail frame when, among the plain
innocent names in the hotel recorder, his fiendish conundrum would ejaculate
in my face! I noticed that whenever he felt his enigmas were becoming too
recondite, even for such a solver as I, he would lure me back with an easy
one. "Arsхne Lupin" was obvious to a Frenchman who remembered the detective
stories of his youth; and one hardly had to be a Coleridgian to appreciate
the trite poke of "A. Person, Porlock, England." In horrible taste but
basically suggestive of a cultured man--not a policeman, not a common good,
not a lewd salesman--were such assumed names as "Arthur Rainbow"--plainly
the travestied author of Le Bateau Bleu--let me laugh a little too,
gentlemen--and "Morris Schmetterling," of L'Oiseau Ivre fame
(touchи, reader!). The silly but funny "D. Orgon, Elmira, NY," was
from Moliхre, of course, and because I had quite recently tried to interest
Lolita in a famous 18th-century play, I welcomed as an old friend "Harry
Bumper, Sheridan, Wyo." An ordinary encyclopedia informed me who the
peculiar looking "Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH" was; and any good Freudian,
with a German name and some interest in religious prostitution, should
recognize at a glance the implication of "Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss." So far
so good. That sort of fun was shoddy but on the whole impersonal and thus
innocuous. Among entries that arrested my attention as undoubtable clues
per se but baffled me in respect to their finer points I do not care
to mention many since I feel I am groping in a border-land mist with verbal
phantoms turning, perhaps, into living vacationists. Who was "Johnny
Randall, Ramble, Ohio"? Or was he a real person who just happened to write a
hand similar to "N.S. Aristoff, Catagela, NY"? What was the sting in
"Catagela"? And what about "James Mavor Morell, Hoaxton, England"?
"Aristophanes," "hoax"--fine, but what was I missing?
There was one strain running through all that pseudonymity which caused
me especially painful palpitations when I came across it. Such things as "G.
Trapp, Geneva, NY." was the sign of treachery on Lolita's part. "Aubrey
Beardsley, Quelquepart Island" suggested more lucidly than the garbled
telephone message had that the starting point of the affair should be looked
for in the East. "Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa." insinuated that my Carmen
had betrayed my pathetic endearments to the impostor. Horribly cruel,
forsooth, was "Will Brown, Dolores, Colo." The gruesome "Harold Haze,
Tombstone, Arizona" (which at another time would have appealed to my sense
of humor) implied a familiarity with the girl's past that in nightmare
fashion suggested for a moment that my quarry was an old friend of the
family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte's, maybe a redresser of wrongs
("Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev."). But the most penetrating bodkin was the
anagramtailed entry in the register of Chestnut Lodge "Ted Hunter, Cane,
NH."
The garbled license numbers left by all these Persons and Orgons and
Morells and Trapps only told me that motel keepers omit to check if guests'
cars are accurately listed. References--incompletely or incorrectly
indicated--to the cars the fiend had hired for short laps between Wace and
Elphinstone were of course useless; the license of the initial Aztec was a
shimmer of shifting numerals, some transposed, others altered or omitted,
but somehow forming interrelated combinations (such as "WS 1564" and "SH
1616," and "Q32888" or "CU88322") which however were so cunningly contrived
as to never reveal a common denominator.
It occurred to me that after he had turned that convertible over to
accomplices at Wace and switched to the stage-motor car system, his
successors might have been less careful and might have inscribed at some
hotel office the archtype of those interrelated figures. But if looking for
the fiend along a road I knew he had taken was such a complicated vague and
unprofitable business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace unknown
motorists traveling along unknown routes?
24
By the time I reached Beardsley, in the course of the harrowing
recapitulation I have now discussed at sufficient length, a complete image
had formed in my mind; and through the--always risky--process of elimination
I had reduced this image to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration
and torpid memory could give it.
Except for the Rev. Rigor Mortis (as the girls called him), and an old
gentleman who taught non-obligatory German and Latin, there were no regular
male teachers t Beardsley School. But on two occasions an art instructor on
the Beardsley College faculty had come over to show the schoolgirls magic
lantern pictures of French castles and nineteenth-century paintings. I had
wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont,
had asked me not to, period. I also remembered that Gaston had referred to
that particular lecturer as a brilliant garгon; but that was all;
memory refused to supply me with the name of the chateau-lover.
On the day fixed for the execution, I walked though the sleet across
the campus to the information desk in Maker Hall, Beardsley College. There I
learned that the fellow's name was Riggs (rather like that of the minister),
that he was a bachelor, and that in ten minutes he would issue from the
"Museum" where he was having a class. In the passage leading to the
auditorium I sat on a marble bench of sorts donated by Cecilia Dalrymple
Ramble. As I waited there, in the prostatic discomfort, drunk,
sleep-starved, with my gun in my fist in my raincoat pocket, it suddenly
occurred to me that I was demented and was about to do something stupid.
There was not one chance in a million that Albert Riggs, Ass. Prof., was
hiding my Lolita at his Beardsley home, 24 Pritchard Road. He could not be
the villain. It was absolutely preposterous. I was losing my time and my
wits. He and she were in California and not here at all.
Presently, I noticed a vague commotion behind some white statues; a
door-not the one I had been staring at--opened briskly, and amid a bevy of
women students a baldish head and two bright brown eyes bobbed, advanced.
He was a total stranger to me but insisted we had met at a lawn party
at Beardsley School. How was my delightful tennis-playing daughter? He had
another class. He would be seeing me.
Another attempt at identification was less speedily resolved: through
an advertisement in one of Lo's magazines I dared to get in touch with a
private detective, an ex-pugilist, and merely to give him some idea of the
method adopted by the fiend, I acquainted him with the kind of names
and addresses I had collected. He demanded a goodish deposit and for two
years--two years, reader!--that imbecile busied himself with checking those
nonsense data. I had long severed all monetary relations with him when he
turned up one day with the triumphant information that an eighty-year-old
Indian by the name of Bill Brown lived near Dolores, Colo.
25
This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which
(had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be
called "Dolorхs Disparue," there would be little sense in analyzing
the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be
marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing
open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with
its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered
her--as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind during my
daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but she
appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte,
or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift
after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would
recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh
ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball's bladder. I would bind myself,
dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres
garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that
generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and
being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of
auctioneered Viennese bric-ю-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of
tragic old women who had just been gassed.
One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of
teen-magazines. You know the sort. Stone age at heart; up to date, or at
least Mycenaean, as to hygiene. A handsome, very ripe actress with huge
lashes and a pulpy red underlip, endorsing a shampoo. Ads and fads. Young
scholars dote on plenty of pleats--que c'иtait loin, tout cela! It is
your hostess' duty to provide robes. Unattached details take all the sparkle
out of your conversation. All of us have known "pickers"--one who picks her
cuticle at the office party. Unless he is very elderly or very important, a
man should remove his gloves before shaking hands with a woman. Invite
Romance by wearing the Exciting New Tummy Flattener. Trims tums, nips hips.
Tristram in Movielove. Yessir! The Joe-Roe marital enigma is making yaps
flap. Glamorize yourself quickly and inexpensively. Comics. Bad girl dark
hair fat father cigar; good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache.
Or that repulsive strip with the big gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide.
Et moi qui t'offrais mon genie . . . I recalled the rather charming
nonsense verse I used to write her when she was a child: "nonsense," she
used to say mockingly, "is correct."
The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits
Have certain obscure and peculiar habits.
Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets.
The snake when he walks holds his hands in his pockets. . .
Other things of hers were harder to relinquish. Up to the end of 1949,
I cherished and adored, and stained with my kisses and merman tears, a pair
of old sneakers, a boy's shirt she had worn, some ancient blue jeans I found
in the trunk compartment, a crumpled school cap, suchlike wanton treasures.
Then, when I understood my mind was cracking, I collected those sundry
belongings, added to them what had been stored in Beardsley--a box of books,
her bicycle, old coats, galoshes--and on her fifteenth birthday mailed
everything as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned girls on a windy
lake, on the Canadian border.
It is just possible that had I gone to a strong hypnotist he might have
extracted from me and arrayed in a logical pattern certain chance memories
that I have threaded through my book with considerably more ostentation than
they present themselves with to my mind even now when I know what to seek in
the past. At the time I felt I was merely losing contact with reality; and
after spending the rest of the winter and most of the following spring in a
Quebec sanatorium where I had stayed before, I resolved first to settle some
affairs of mine in New York and then to proceed to California for a thorough
search there.
Here is something I composed in my retreat:
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or "starlet."
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
Why are you hiding, darling?
(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,
I cannot get out, said the starling).
Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?
What make is the magic carpet?
Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?
And where are you parked, my car pet?
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?
Still one of those blue-caped star-men?
Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays,
And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!
Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!
Are you still dancin', darlin'?
(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts,
And I, in my corner, snarlin').
Happy, happy is gnarled McFate
Touring the States with a child wife,
Plowing his Molly in every State
Among the protected wild life.
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?
L'autre soir un air froid d'opиra m'alita:
Son fиlи--bien fol est qui s'y fie!
Il neige, le dиcor s'иcroule, Lolita!
Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie?
Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse, I'm dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.
Officer, officer, there they go--
In the rain, where that lighted store is!
And her socks are white, and I love her so,
And her name is Haze, Dolores.
Officer, officer, there they are--
Dolores Haze and her lover!
Whip out your gun and follow that car.
Now tumble out, and take cover.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.
By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac's
masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to
certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified
parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by
their astute trainers. I wrote many more poems. I immersed myself in the
poetry of others. But not for a second did I forget the load of revenge.
I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the
shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis. My accursed nature could not
change, no matter how my love for her did. On playgrounds and beaches, my
sullen and stealthy eye, against my will, still sought out the flash of a
nymphet's limbs, the sly tokens of Lolita's handmaids and rosegirls. But one
essential vision in me had withered: never did I dwell now on possibilities
of bliss with a little maiden, specific or synthetic, in some out-of-the-way
place; never did my fancy sink its fangs into Lolita's sisters, far far
away, in the coves of evoked islands. That was all over, for the time
being at least. On the other hand, alas, two years of monstrous indulgence
had left me with certain habits of lust: I feared lest the void I lived in
might drive me to plunge into the freedom of sudden insanity when confronted
with a chance temptation in some lane between school and supper. Solitude
was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical
unreliable organ. This is how Rita enters the picture.
26
She was twice Lolita's age and three quarters of mine: a very slight,
dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with
charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a
most appealing ensellure to her supple back--I think she had some
Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening
somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between
Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the
Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school
together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses
were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did--and
adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good
sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature
or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer
chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third
husband--and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh
cavalier servant--the others, the mutables, were too numerous and
mobile to tabulate. Her brother was--and no doubt still is--a prominent,
pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and
booster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For
the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several
hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never
never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder,
that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of
all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew
what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the
town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it--"going
round and round," as she phrased it, "like a God-damn mulberry moth."
She had a natty little coupи; and in it we traveled to California so as
to give my venerable vehicle a rest. her natural speed was ninety. Dear
Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer
1952, and she was the sweetest, simplest, gentles, dumbest Rita imaginable.
In comparison to her, Valechka was a Schlegel, and Charlotte a Hegel. There
is no earthly reason why I should dally with her in the margin of this
sinister memoir, but let me say (hi, Rita--wherever you are, drunk or
hangoverish, Rita, hi!) that she was the most soothing, the most
comprehending companion that I ever had, and certainly saved me from the
madhouse. I told her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl's
bully. Rita solemnly approved of the plan--and in the course of some
investigation she undertook on her own (without really knowing a thing),
around San Humbertino, got entangled with a pretty awful crook herself; I
had the devil of a time retrieving her--used and bruised but still cocky.
Then one day she proposed playing Russian roulette with my sacred automatic;
I said you couldn't, it was not a revolver, and we struggled for it, until
at last it went off, touching off a very thin and very comical spurt of hot
water from the hole it made in the wall of the cabin room; I remember her
shrieks of laughter.
The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow
languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is not the artistic
aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans
have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One
rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I
had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in
my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not
having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One
afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they
hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first
names and business and booze--dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our
room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large
transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our
sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he
lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth
was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her
sinuous nudity in my raincoat--the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair
of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses
had been used, which in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches.
The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan
pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness.
He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure
Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his
(worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the
nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten
gyrations, we ewer in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for
news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated
from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of
muses!
I would not have mentioned this incident had it not started a chain of
ideas that resulted in my publishing in the Cantrip Review an essay
on "Mimir and Memory," in which I suggested among other things that seemed
original and important to that splendid review's benevolent readers, a
theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of the blood and
conceptually depending (to fill up this nutshell) on the mind's being
conscious not only of matter but also of its own self, thus crating a
continuous spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past).
In result of this venture--and in culmination of the impression made by my
previous travaux--I was called from New York, where Rita and I were
living in a little flat with a view of gleaming children taking shower baths
far below in a fountainous arbor of Central Park, to Cantrip College, four
hundred miles away, for one year. I lodged there, in special apartments for
poets and philosophers, from September 1951 to June 1952, while Rita whom I
preferred not to display vegetated--somewhat indecorously, I am afraid--in a
roadside inn where I visited her twice a week. Then she vanished--more
humanly than her predecessor had done: a month later I found her in the
local jail. She was trхs digne, had had her appendix removed, and
managed to convince me that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused
of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if
somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. I succeeded in getting her out
without appealing to her touchy brother, and soon afterwards we drove back
to Central Park West, by way of Briceland, where we had stopped for a few
hours the year before.
A curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me.
I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up all hope of tracing
her kidnapper and her. I now attempted to fall back on old settings in order
to save what still could be saved in the way of souvenir, souvenir que me
veux-tu? Autumn was ringing in the air. To a post card requesting twin
beds Professor Hamburg got a prompt expressi...
