Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №12
...on of regret in reply. They werefull up. They had one bathless basement room with four beds which they
thought I would not want. Their note paper was headed:
The Enchanted Hunters
Near Churches No Dogs
All legal beverages
I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have for
instance sidewalk grenadine? I also wondered if a hunter, enchanted or
otherwise, would not need a pointer more than a pew, and with a spasm of
pain I recalled a scene worthy of a great artist: petite nymphe
accroupie; but that silky cocker spaniel had perhaps been a baptized
one. No--I felt I could not endure the throes of revisiting that lobby.
There was a much better possibility of retrievable time elsewhere in soft,
rich-colored, autumnal Briceland. Leaving Rita in a bar, I made for the town
library. A twittering spinster was only too glad to help me disinter
mid-August 1947 from the bound Briceland Gazette, and presently, in a
secluded nook under a naked light, I was turning the enormous and fragile
pages of a coffin-black volume almost as big as Lolita.
Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since
his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he
could at least enjoy a secret part of it--which reminds one of the tenth or
twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl's black shawl over
her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his
military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get
was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image
while the Gazette's photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock
and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the
artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me on my dark way to
Lolita's bed--what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the true
nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning
curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little
figures--still life practically, and everybody about to throw up--at an
early morning execution, and the patient's expression impossible to make out
in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of
the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed
. . . Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the
24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom, independent tobacco auctioneer, said
that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his
petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58
Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host.
Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses' socks, 39 c. Saddle
Oxfords 3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the author of Dark Age who
refused to be photographed, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give
me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every
time. Dimples are caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues.
Greeks repulse a heavy guerrilla assault--and, ah, at last, a little figure
in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was
brushing against his ample form--nothing of myself could I make out.
I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile
to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old man saying this was--what
was the name again, son?--a former schoolmate of hers. He tried to retain
her, and in the slight scuffle that followed I hurt my thumb against his
hard head. In the silent painted part where I walked her and aired her a
little, she sobbed and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had,
and I sang her a wistful French ballad, and strung together some fugitive
rhymes to amuse her:
The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query:
What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell
endorses to make of Picture Lake a very
blood bath of trees before the blue hotel?
She said: "Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven's sake?" and
started to cry again, and I marched her to the car, and we drove on to New
York, and soon she was reasonably happy again high up in the haze on the
little terrace of our flat. I notice I have somehow mixed up two events, my
visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Carntrip, and our passing through
Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming
colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.
27
My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the type that allows one
to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed slit. Several times
already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass upon an
alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita's script causing
me almost to collapse as I leant against an adjacent urn, almost my own.
Whenever that happened--whenever her lovely, childish scrawl was horribly
transformed into the dull hand of one of my few correspondents--I used to
recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian
past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my
lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out
from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her
Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which
made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach,
with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an
appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity
has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy
child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections
fill the gap between the little given and the great promised--the great
rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenйtres! Hanging above blotched sunset
and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my
desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take
off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take off--whereupon the
lighted image would move and Even would revert to a rib, and there would be
nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper.
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality,
the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the
fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. "Savez-vous qu'ю dix ans
ma petite иtait folle de vous?" said a woman I talked to at a tea in
Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away, and I could not
even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis
courts, a dozen years before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse, the
promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated seductively but also
to be nobly held--all this, chance denied me--chance and a change to smaller
characters on the pale beloved writer's part. My fancy was both
Proustianized and Procrusteanized; for that particular morning, late in
September 1952, as I had come down to grope for my mail, the dapper and
bilious janitor with whom I was on execrable terms started to complain that
a man who had seen Rita home recently had been "sick like a dog" on the
front steps. In the process of listening to him and tipping him, and then
listening to a revised and politer version of the incident, I had the
impression that one of the two letters which that blessed mail brought was
from Rita's mother, a crazy little woman, whom we had once visited on Cape
Cod and who kept writing me to my various addresses, saying how wonderfully
well matched her daughter and I were, and how wonderful it would be if we
married; the other letter which I opened and scanned rapidly in the elevator
was from John Farlow.
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the
stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No
matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good
king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly
reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally,
revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear.
Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between
the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect
our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have
fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would
clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never
commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all
arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the
more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of
him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained
would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to
have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it
turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by
Farlow's hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly
expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and
reliable person he had always been. Now he wrote that after a brief visit to
the U.S. he had returned to South America and had decided that whatever
affairs he had controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller
of that town, a lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed particularly relieved to
get rid of the Haze "complications." He had married a Spanish girl. He had
stopped smoking and had gained thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski
champion. They were going to India for their honeymonsoon. Since he was
"building a family" as he put it, he would have no time henceforth for my
affairs which he termed "very strange and very aggravating." Busybodies--a
whole committee of them, it appeared--had informed him that the whereabouts
of little Dolly Haze were unknown, and that I was living with a notorious
divorcee in California. His father-in-law was a count, and exceedingly
wealthy. The people who had been renting the Haze house for some years now
wished to buy it. He suggested that I better produce Dolly quick. he had
broken his leg. He enclosed a snapshot of himself and a brunette in white
wool beaming at each other among the snows of Chile.
I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at
least we shall now track them down--when the other letter began talking to
me in a small matter-of-fact voice:
Dear Dad:
How's everything? I'm married. I'm going to have a baby. I guess he's
going to be a big one. I guess he'll come right for Christmas. This is a
hard letter to write. I'm going nuts because we don't have enough to pay our
debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very
specialized corner of the mechanical field, that's all I know about it but
it's really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address but you may
still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You
can't see the morons for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could
manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome, you
might sell my old things, because once we go there the dough will just start
rolling in. Writ, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship.
Yours expecting,
Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)
28
I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan,
again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world when I read that letter
and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me. I had glanced at her
as she smiled in her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had
left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped to her
navel--otherwise she might not have found it.
"Alone" did I say? Pas tout ю fait. I had my little black chum
with me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot, I rehearsed Mr. Richard
F. Schiller's violent death. I had found a very old and very dirty gray
sweater of mine in the back of the car, and this I hung up on a branch, in a
speechless glade, which I had reached by a wood road from the now remote
highway. The carrying out of the sentence was a little marred by what seemed
to me a certain stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I
should get some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I had no time to
spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with additional
perforations, and having reloaded warm Chum, I continued my journey.
The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22), and
the address she gave was "General Delivery, Coalmont" (not "Va.," not "Pa.,"
not "Tenn."--and not Coalmont, anyway--I have camouflaged everything, my
love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight
hundred miles from New York City. At first I planned to drive all day and
all night, but then thought better of it and rested for a couple of hours
around dawn in a motor court room, a few miles before reaching the town. I
had made up my mind that the fiend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman
who had perhaps got to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in Beardsley--the
day her bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor--and that he had got
into some trouble since then. The corpse of the executed sweater, no matter
how I changed its contours as it lay on the back seat of the car, had kept
revealing various outlines pertaining to Trapp-Schiller--the grossness and
obscene bonhomie of his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse
corruption I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart as I
pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at the set hour
of six a.m. Then, with the stern and romantic care of a gentleman about to
fight a duel, I checked the arrangement of my papers, bathed and perfumed my
delicate body, shaved my face and chest, selected a silk shirt and clean
drawers, pulled on transparent taupe socks, and congratulated myself for
having with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes--a waistcoat with
nacreous buttons, for instance, a pale cashmere tie and so on.
I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that
physicality as a trivial contretemps, wiped my mouth with a gossamer
handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a blue block of ice for
heart, a pill on my tongue and solid death in my hip pocket, I stepped
neatly into a telephone booth in Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its little door)
and rang up the only Schiller--Paul, Furniture--to be found in the battered
book. Hoarse Paul told me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin of his,
and his address was, let me see, 10 Killer Street (I am not going very far
for my pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door.
At 10 Killer Street, a tenement house, I interviewed a number of
dejected old people and two long-haired strawberry-blond incredibly grubby
nymphets (rather abstractly, just for the heck of it, the ancient beast in
me was casting about for some lightly clad child I might hold against me for
a minute, after the killing was over and nothing mattered any more, and
everything was allowed). Yes, Dick Skiller had lived there, but had moved
when he married. Nobody knew his address. "They might know at the store,"
said a bass voice from an open manhole near which I happened to be standing
with the two thin-armed, barefoot little girls and their dim grandmothers. I
entered the wrong store and a wary old Negro shook his head even before I
could ask anything. I crossed over to a bleak grocery and there, summoned by
a customer at my request, a woman's voice from some wooden abyss in the
floor, the manhole's counterpart, cried out: Hunter Road, last house.
Hunter Road was miles away, in an even more dismal district, all dump
and ditch, and wormy vegetable garden, and shack, and gray drizzle, and red
mud, and several smoking stacks in the distance. I stopped at the last
"house"--a clapboard shack, with two or three similar ones farther away from
the road and a waste of withered weeds all around. Sounds of hammering came
from behind the house, and for several minutes I sat quite still in my old
car, old and frail, at the end of my journey, at my gray goal, finis,
my friends, finis, my friends. The time was around two. My pulse was
40 one minute and 100 the next. The drizzle crepitated against the hood of
the car. My gun had migrated to my right trouser pocket. A nondescript cur
came out from behind the house, stopped in surprise, and started
good-naturedly woof-woofing at me, his eyes slit, his shaggy belly all
muddy, and then walked about a little and woofed once more.
29
I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how
square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day! Woof,
commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated
through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what
depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and
woosh-woof went the door.
Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo,
new ears. How simple! The moment, the death I had kept conjuring up for
three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely
pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but
let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her
pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all
their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless
cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers.
"We--e--ell!" she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder
and welcome.
"Husband at home?" I croaked, fist in pocket.
I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see,
I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever
sight.
"Come in," she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against the
splintery deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller flattened herself as best she
could (even rising on tiptoe a little) to let me pass, and was crucified for
a moment, looking down, smiling down at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with
round pommettes, her watered-milk-white arms outspread on the wood. I
passed without touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell, with a faint fried
addition. My teeth chattered like an idiot's. "No, you stay out" (to the
dog). She closed the door and followed me and her belly into the dollhouse
parlor.
"Dick's down there," she said pointing with an invisible tennis racket,
inviting my gaze to travel from the drab parlor-bedroom where we stood,
right across the kitchen, and through the back doorway where, in a rather
primitive vista, a dark-haired young stranger in overalls, instantaneously
reprieved, was perched with his back to me on a ladder fixing something near
or upon the shack of his neighbor, a plumper fellow with only one arm, who
stood looking up.
This pattern she explained from afar, apologetically ("Men will be
men"); should she call him in?
No.
Standing in the middle of the slanting room and emitting questioning
"hm's," she made familiar Javanese gestures with her wrists and hands,
offering me, in a brief display of humorous courtesy, to choose between a
rocker and the divan (their bed after ten p.m.). I say "familiar" because
one day she had welcomed me with the same wrist dance to her party in
Beardsley. We both sat down on the divan. Curious: although actually her
looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how
much she looked--had always looked--like Botticelli's russet Venus--the same
soft nose, the same blurred beauty. In my pocket my fingers gently let go
and repacked a little at the tip, within the handkerchief it was nested in,
my unused weapon.
"that's not the fellow I want," I said.
The diffuse look of welcome left her eyes. Her forehead puckered as in
the old bitter days:
"Not who?"
"Where is he? Quick!"
"Look," she said, inclining her head to one side and shaking it in that
position. "Look, you are not going to bring that up."
"I certainly am," I said, and for a moment--strangely enough the only
merciful, endurable one in the whole interview--we were bristling at each
other as if she were still mine.
A wise girl, she controlled herself.
Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her
father. He thought she had run away from an upper-class home just to wash
dishes in a diner. He believed anything. Why should I want to make things
harder than they were by raking up all that muck?
But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl (with
her bare drum under that thin brown stuff), she must understand that if she
expected the help I had come to give, I must have at least a clear
comprehension of the situation.
"Come, his name!"
She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischievous and
melancholy smile) such a sensational name. I would never believe it. She
could hardly believe it herself.
His name, my fall nymph.
It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would I like
a cigarette?
No. His name.
She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was too late
to raise hell and I would never believe the unbelievably unbelievable--
I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her.
She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other
hand, after all--"Do you really want to know who it was? Well, it was--"
And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her
parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not
untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has
guessed long ago.
Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness?
I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no
surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order,
into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with
the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes,
with the express and perverse purpose of rendering--she was talking but I
sat melting in my golden peace--of rendering that golden and monstrous peace
through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical
reader should experience now.
She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the
only man she had ever been crazy about. What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a
lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And
I had never counted, of course?
She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible--and
somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary--fact that the distant, elegant,
slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had
known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her
washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a
moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a
rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum
exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.
I just managed to jerk my knee out of the range of a sketchy tap--one
of her acquired gestures.
She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I had been a good
father, she guessed--granting me that. Proceed, Dolly Schiller.
Well, did I know that he had known her mother? That he was practically
an old friend? That he had visited with his uncle in Ramsdale?--oh, years
ago--and spoken at Mother's club, and had tugged and pulled her, Dolly, by
her bare arm onto his lap in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she
was ten and furious with him? Did I know he had seen me and her at the inn
where he was writing the very play she was to rehearse in Beardsley, two
years later? Did I know--It had been horrid of her to sidetrack me into
believing that Clare was an old female, maybe a relative of his or a
sometime lifemate--and oh, what a close shave it had been when the Wace
Journal carried his picture.
The Briceland Gazette had not. Yes, very amusing.
Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody
wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it.
At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into
which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they
noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.
"Dick, this is my Dad!" cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that
struck me as a totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad,
because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing.
Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We shook
hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took pride in working wonders with one
hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened. Wanted to withdraw. The
exquisite courtesy of simple folks. Was made to stay. A beer ad. In point of
fact, I preferred it that way, and so did the Schillers. I switched to the
jittery rocker. Avidly munching, Dilly plied me with marshmallows and potato
chips. The men looked at her fragile, frileux, diminutive, old-world,
youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest, maybe a viscount.
They were under the impression I had come to stay, and Dick with a
great wrinkling of brows that denoted difficult thought, suggested Dolly and
he might sleep in the kitchen on a spare mattress. I waved a light hand and
told Dolly who transmitted it by means of a special shout to Dick that I had
merely dropped in on my way to Readsburg where I was to be entertained by
some friends and admirers. It was then noticed that one of the few thumbs
remaining to Bill was bleeding (not such a wonder-worker after all). How
womanish and somehow never seen that way before was the shadowy division
between her pale breasts when she bent down over the man's hand! She took
him for repairs to the kitchen. For a few minutes, three or four little
eternities which positively welled with artificial warmth, Dick and I
remained alone. He sat on a hard chair rubbing his forelimbs and frowning. I
had an idle urge to squeeze out the blackheads on the wings of his
perspiring nose with my long agate claws. He had nice sad eyes with
beautiful lashes, and very white teeth. His Adam's apple was large and
hairy. Why don't they shave better, those young brawny chaps? He and his
Dolly had had unrestrained intercourse on that couch there, at least a
hundred and eighty times, probably much more; and before that--how long had
she known him? No grudge. Funny--no grudge at all, nothing except grief and
nausea. He was now rubbing his nose. I was sure that when finally he would
open his mouth, he would say (slightly shaking his head): "Aw, she's a swell
kid, Mr. Haze. She sure is. And she's going to make a swell mother." He
opened his mouth--and took a sip of beer. This gave him countenance--and he
went on sipping till he frothed at the mouth. He was a lamb. He had cupped
her Florentine breasts. His fingernails were black and broken, but the
phalanges, the whole carpus, the strong shapely wrist were far, far finer
than mine: I have hurt too much too many bodies with my twisted poor hands
to be proud of them. French epithets, a Dorset yokel's knuckles, an Austrian
tailor's flat finger tips--that's Humbert Humbert.
Good. If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well
do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair,
before I drove to wherever the beast's lair was--and then pulled the
pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger:
I was always a good little follower of the Viennese medicine man. But
presently I became sorry for poor Dick whom, in some hypnotoid way, I was
horribly preventing from making the only remark he could think up ("She's a
swell kid. . .").
"And so," I said, "you are going to Canada?"
In the kitchen, Dolly was laughing at something Bill had said or done.
"And so," I shouted, "you are going to Canada? Not Canada"--I
re-shouted--"I mean Alaska, of course."
He nursed his glass and, nodding sagely, replied: "Well, he cut it on a
jagger, I guess. Lost his right arm in Italy."
Lovely mauve almond trees in bloom. A blown-off surrealistic arm
hanging up there in the pointillistic mauve. A flowergirl tattoo on the
hand. Dolly and band-aided Bill reappeared. It occurred to me that her
ambiguous, brown and pale beauty excited the cripple. Dick, with a grin of
relief stood up. He guessed Bill and he would be going back to fix those
wires. He guessed Mr. Haze and Dolly had loads of things to say to each
other. He guessed he would be seeing me before I left. Why do those people
guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
"Sit down," she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I
relapsed into the black rocker.
"So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?"
She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old woman in
white, stout, beaming, bowlegged, very short dress; old man in his
shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her in-laws. Living with
Dick's brother's family in Juneau.
"Sure you don't want to smoke?"
She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng
verboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully, in a blue mist,
Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him through Uncle Ivory if
she refused.
"Betrayed you? No." She directed the dart of her cigarette, index
rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth exactly as her mother used to do,
and then, like her mother, oh my God, with her fingernail scratched and
removed a fragment of cigarette paper from her underlip. No. She had not
betrayed me. I was among friends. Edusa had warned her that Cue liked little
girls, had been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew she
knew. Yes . . . Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke, darting gesture.
Waxing reminiscent. He saw--smiling--through everything and everybody,
because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun.
Had rocked with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he
had thought so. It was quite safe, under the circumstances, to tell him . .
.
Well, Cue--they all called him Cue--
Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence--. . . took her to a dude
ranch about a day's drive from Elephant (Elphinstone). Named? Oh, some silly
name--Duk Duk Ranch--you know just plain silly--but it did not matter
now, anyway, because the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, she
meant, I could not imagine how utterly lush that ranch was, she meant it had
everything but everything, even an indoor waterfall. Did I remember the
red-haired guy we ("we" was good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the
place really belonged to Red's brother, but he had turned it over to Cue for
the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had them actually go through a
coronation ceremony and then--a terrific ducking, as when you cross the
Equator. You know.
Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation.
"Go on, please."
Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and
arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match scene of a movie
picture based on a play of his--Golden Guts--and perhaps even have
her double one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court.
Alas, it never came to that.
"Where is the hog now?"
He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all
drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and
his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not
imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part
because she loved him, and he threw her out.
"What things?"
"Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and tow
boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the
nude while an old woman took movie pictures." (Sade's Justine was twelve at
the start.)
"What things exactly?"
"Oh, things . . . Oh, I--really I"--she uttered the "I" as a subdued
cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words
spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she
gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her.
That made sense.
"It is of no importance now," she said pounding a gray cushion with her
fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan. "Crazy things, filthy
things. I said no, I'm just not going to [she used, in all insouciance
really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation,
would be souffler] your beastly boys, because I want only you. Well,
he kicked me out."
There was not much else to tell. That winter 1949, Fay and she had
found jobs. For almost two years she had--oh, just drifted, oh, doing some
restaurant work in small places, and then she had met Dick. No, she did not
know where the other was. In New York, she guessed. Of course, he was so
famous she would have found him at once if she had wanted. Fay had tried to
get back to the Ranch--and it just was not there any more--it had burned to
the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was
so strange, so strange--
She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, leaning back on the cushion,
one felted foot on the floor. The wooden floor slanted, a little steel ball
would have rolled into the kitchen. I knew all I wanted to know. I had no
intention of torturing my darling. Somewhere beyond Bill's shack an
afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with
her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh
white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my
Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in
her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.--and I looked and
looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her
more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for
anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the
nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the
brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown
leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds . . . but
thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to
pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pиchи radieux,
had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I
canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court,
but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I
insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale
and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still
sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine;
Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part oы nous ne serons
jamais sиparиs; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if
those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and
crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn--even
then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face,
at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
"Lolita," I said, "this may be neither here nor there but I have to say
it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a
stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those
twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live
happily ever after."
Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi?
"You mean," she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the
snake that may strike, "you mean you will give us [us] that money only if I
go with you to a motel. Is that what you mean?"
"No," I said, "you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your
incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with
me, and everything with me" (words to that effect).
"You're crazy," she said, her features working.
"Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except,
perhaps--well, no matter." (A reprieve, I wanted to say but did not.)
"Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your . . . trousseau."
"No kidding?" asked Dolly.
I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cash and a check
for three thousand six hundred more.
Gingerly, uncertainly, she received mon petit cadeau; and then
her forehead became a beautiful pink. "You mean," she said, with agonized
emphasis, "you are giving us four thousand bucks?" I covered my face
with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them
winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got
clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist.
"I'll die if you touch me," I said. "You are sure you are not coming
with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this."
"No," she said. "No, honey, no."
She had never called me honey before.
"No," she said, "it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go
back to Cue. I mean--"
She groped for words. I supplied them mentally ("He broke my
heart. You merely broke my life").
"I think," she went on--"oops"--the envelope skidded to the floor--she
picked it up--"I think it's oh utterly grand of you to give us all
that dough. It settles everything, we can start next week. Stop crying,
please. You should understand. Let me get you some more beer. Oh, don't cry,
I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are."
I wiped my face and my fingers. She smiled at the cadeau. She
exulted. She wanted to call Dick. I said I would have to leave in a moment,
did not want to see him at all, at all. We tried to think of some subject of
conversation. For some reason, I kept seeing--it trembled and silkily glowed
on my damn retina--a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold,
"pinging" pebbles at an empty can. I almost said--trying to find some casual
remark--"I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did
she ever get better?"--but stopped in time lest she rejoin: "I wonder
sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl . . ." Finally, I reverted
to money matters. That sum, I said, represented more or less the net rent
from her mother's house; she said: "Had it not been sold years ago?" No (I
admit I had told her this in order to sever all connections with R.);
a lawyer would send a full account of the financial situation later; it was
rosy; some of the small securities her mother had owned had gone up and up.
Yes, I was quite sure I had to go. I had to go, and find him, and destroy
him.
Since I would not have survived the touch of her lips, I kept
retreating in a mincing dance, at every step she and her belly made toward
me.
She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this a rhetorical figure,
I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she had ridden as a child
and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. All she remarked was it was
getting sort of purplish about the gills. I said it was hers, I could go by
bus. She said don't be silly, they would fly to Jupiter and buy a car there.
I said I would buy this one from her for five hundred dollars.
"At this rate we'll be millionnaires next," she said to the ecstatic
dog.
Carmencita, lui demandais-je . . . "One last word," I said in my
horrible careful English, "are you quite, quite sure that--well, not
tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but--well--some day, any day,
you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank
him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope" (to that
effect).
"No," she said smiling, "no."
"It would have made all the difference," said Humbert Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automatic--I mean, this is the kind of fool thing
a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it.
"Good by-aye!" she changed, my American sweet immortal dead love; for
she is dead and immortal if you are reading this. I mean, such is the formal
agreement with the so-called authorities.
Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her
Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fat dolphin, but
he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up.
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with
the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
30
Leaving as I did Coalmont around four in the afternoon (by Route X--I
do not remember the number(, I might have made Ramsdale by dawn had not a
short-cut tempted me. I had to get onto Highway Y. My map showed quite
blandly that just beyond Woodbine, which I reached at nightfall, I could
leave paved X and reached paved Y by means of a transverse dirt road. It was
only some forty miles long according to my map. Otherwise I would have to
follow X for another hundred miles and then use leisurely looping Z to get
to Y and my destination. However, the short-cut in question got worse and
worse, bumpier and bumpier, muddier and muddier, and when I attempted to
turn back after some ten miles of purblind, tortuous and tortoise-slow
progress, my old and weak Melmoth got stuck in deep clay. All was dark and
muggy, and hopeless. My headlights hung over a broad ditch full of water.
The surrounding country, if any, was a black wilderness. I sought to
extricate myself but my rear wheels only whined in slosh and anguish.
Cursing my plight, I took off my fancy clothes, changed into slacks, pulled
on the bullet-riddled sweater, and waded four miles back to a roadside farm.
It started to rain on the way but I had not the strength to go back for a
mackintosh. Such incidents have convinced me that my heart is basically
sound despite recent diagnoses. Around midnight, a wrecker dragged my car
out. I navigated back to Highway X and traveled on. Utter weariness overtook
me and hour later, in an anonymous little town. I pulled up at the curb and
in darkness drank deep from a friendly flask.
The rain had been canceled miles before. It was a black warm night,
somewhere in Appalachia. Now and then cars passed me, red tail-lights
receding, white headlights advancing, but the town was dead. Nobody strolled
and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow,
rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible
thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable
contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage. Sherry-red letters of light marked a
Camera Shop. A large thermometer with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt
on the front of a drugstore. Rubinov's Jewelry company had a display of
artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted green clock swam in
the linenish depths of Jiffy Jeff Laundry. On the other side of the street a
garage said in its sleep--genuflection lubricity; and corrected itself to
Gulflex Lubrication. An airplane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed, droning,
in the velvet heavens. How many small dead-of-night towns I had seen! This
was not yet the last.
Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some way further
across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower than my heart: the
outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full
second or so, into emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters
saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made out as a
latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made
shadow-graphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I
was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
31
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale
(between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case.
With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love.
Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years
before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to
whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a
Protestant's drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to
deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those
frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the
finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the
great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple
human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic
eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the
foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as
I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction--that in
the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child
named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless
this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for
the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of
articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
32
There was the day, during our first trip--our first circle of
paradise--when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to
ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a
boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just
two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn--to mention only mentionable matters.
There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made
her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on--a roller
rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted
to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance
combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face . . . that
look I cannot exactly describe . . . an expression of helplessness so
perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just
because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration--and every
limit presupposes something beyond it--hence the neutral illumination. And
when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of
a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what
reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and
dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure
Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in
an outside world that was real to her.
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves
into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of
Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a
concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my
person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to
something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton
Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on
your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I
simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly,
behind the awful juvenile clichиs, there was in her a garden and a twilight,
and a palace gate--dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and
absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions;
for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total
evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss
something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy
sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified
Harold Haze, might have discussed--an abstract idea, a painting, stippled
Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind.
Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom,
whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of
voice that set my own last t...
