Lolita, by Vladimir Nabukov
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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.
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 expression of regret in reply. They were
full 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such
outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my
poor, bruised child.
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was
despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je
t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell
to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when
after having had my fill of her--after fabulous, insane exertions that left
me limp and azure-barred--I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a
mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming
from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes
matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever--for all the world a
little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major
operation)--and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I
would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her
warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the
peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually
hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically,
horribly, lust would swell again--and "oh, no," Lolita would say with
a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure--all
would be shattered.
Mid-twentieth century ideas concerning child-parent relationship have
been considerably tainted by the scholastic rigmarole and standardized
symbols of the psychoanalytic racket, but I hope I am addressing myself to
unbiased readers. Once when Avis's father had honked outside to signal papa
had come to take his pet home, I felt obliged to invite him into the parlor,
and he sat down for a minute, and while we conversed, Avis, a heavy,
unattractive, affectionate child, drew up to him and eventually perched
plumply on his knee. Now, I do not remember if I have mentioned that Lolita
always had an absolutely enchanting smile for strangers, a tender furry
slitting of the eyes, a dreamy sweet radiance of all her features which did
not mean a thing of course, but was so beautiful, so endearing that one
found it hard to reduce such sweetness to but a magic gene automatically
lighting up her face in atavistic token of some ancient rite of
welcome--hospitable prostitution, the coarse reader may say. Well, there she
stood while Mr. Byrd twirled his hat and talked, and--yes, look how stupid
of me, I have left out the main characteristic of the famous Lolita smile,
namely: while the tender, nectared, dimpled brightness played, it was never
directed at the stranger in the room but hung in its own remote flowered
void, so to speak, or wandered with myopic softness over chance objects--and
this is what was happening now: while fat Avis sidled up to her papa, Lolita
gently beamed at a fruit knife that she fingered on the edge of the table,
whereon she leaned, many miles away from me. Suddenly, as Avis clung to her
father's neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy
and large offspring, I saw Lolita's smile lose all its light and become a
frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table
and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made
her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face
awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush,
she was gone--to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who
had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a
brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had
nothing. And I have a neat pendant to that little scene--also in a Beardsley
setting. Lolita, who had been reading near the fire, stretched herself, and
then inquired, her elbow up, with a grunt: "Where is she buried anyway?"
"Who?" "Oh, you know, my murdered mummy." "And you know where her
grave is," I said controlling myself, whereupon I named the cemetery--just
outside Ramsdale, between the railway tracks and Lakeview Hill. "Moreover,"
I added, "the tragedy of such an accident is somewhat cheapened by the
epithet you saw fit to apply to it. If you really wish to triumph in your
mind over the idea of death--" "Ray," said Lo for hurrah, and languidly left
the room, and for a long while I stared with smarting eyes into the fire.
Then I picked up her book. It was some trash for young people. There was a
gloomy girl Marion, and there was her stepmother who turned out to be,
against all expectations, a young, gay, understanding redhead who explained
to Marion that Marion's dead mother had really been a heroic woman since she
had deliberately dissimulated her great love for Marion because she was
dying, and did not want her child to miss her. I did not rush up to her room
with cries. I always preferred the mental hygiene of noninterference. Now,
squirming and pleading with my own memory, I recall that on this and similar
occasions, it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita's states of
mind while comforting my own base self. When my mother, in a livid wet
dress, under the tumbling mist (so I vividly imagined her), had run panting
ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled there by a
thunderbolt, I was but an infant, and in retrospect no yearnings of the
accepted kind could I ever graft upon any moment of my youth, no matter how
savagely psychotherapists heckled me in my later periods of depression. But
I admit that a man of my power of imagination cannot plead personal
ignorance of universal emotions. I may also have relied too much on the
abnormally chill relations between Charlotte and her daughter. But the awful
point of the whole argument is this. It had become gradually clear to my
conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even
the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest,
which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.
Ramsdale revisited. I approached it from the side of the lake. The
sunny noon was all eyes. As I rode by in my mud-flecked car, I could
distinguish scintillas of diamond water between the far pines. I turned into
the cemetery and walked among the long and short stone monuments.
Bonzhur, Charlotte. On some of the graves there were pale,
transparent little national flags slumped in the windless air under the
evergreens. Gee, Ed, that was bad luck--referring to G. Edward Grammar, a
thirty-five-year-old New York office manager who had just been arrayed on a
charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the
perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and put her into a car. The case
came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar's new big
blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily
down a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The
car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard grass, wild
strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently
spinning in the mellow sunlight when the officers removed Mrs. G's body. It
appeared to be routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman's battered
body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did
better.
I rolled on. It was funny to see again the slender white church and the
enormous elms. Forgetting that in an American suburban street a lone
pedestrian is more conspicuous than a lone motorist, I left the car in the
avenue to walk unobtrusively past 342 Lawn Street. Before the great
bloodshed, I was entitled to a little relief, to a cathartic spasm of mental
regurgitation. Closed were the white shutters of the Junk mansion, and
somebody had attached a found black velvet hair ribbon to the white FOR SALE
sign which was leaning toward the sidewalk. No dog barked. No gardener
telephoned. No Miss Opposite sat on the vined porch--where to the lone
pedestrian's annoyance two pony-tailed young women in identical polka-dotted
pinafores stopped doing whatever they were doing to stare at him: she was
long dead, no doubt, these might be her twin nieces from Philadelphia.
Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a torrent of
Italian music came from an open window--that of the living room: what
romantic soul was playing the piano where no piano had plunged and plashed
on that bewitched Sunday with the sun on her beloved legs? All at once I
noticed that from the lawn I had mown a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet
of nine or ten, in white shorts, was looking at me with wild fascination in
her large blue-black eyes. I said something pleasant to her, meaning no
harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in
haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man,
glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of
identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-embarrassment, I became aware
of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my
bum's bloodshot eyes. Without saying a word, I turned and plodded back the
way I had come. An aster-like anemic flower grew out of a remembered chink
in the sidewalk. Quietly resurrected, Miss Opposite was being wheeled out by
her nieces, onto her porch, as if it were a stage and I the star performer.
Praying she would not call to me, I hurried to my car. What a steep little
street. What a profound avenue. A red ticket showed between wiper and
windshield; I carefully tore it into two, four, eight pieces.
Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown
hotel where I had arrived with a new bag more than five years before. I took
a room, made two appointments by telephone, shaved, bathed, put on black
clothes and went down for a drink in the bar. Nothing had changed. The
barroom was suffused with the same dim, impossible garnet-red light that in
Europe years ago went with low haunts, but here meant a bit of atmosphere in
a family hotel. I sat at the same little table where at the very start of my
stay, immediately after becoming Charlotte's lodger, I had thought fit to
celebrate the occasion by suavely sharing with her half a bottle of
champagne, which had fatally conquered her poor brimming heart. As then, a
moon-faced waiter was arranging with stellar care fifty sherries on a round
tray for a wedding party. Murphy-Fantasia, this time. It was eight minutes
to three. As I walked though the lobby, I had to skirt a group of ladies who
with mille grбces were taking leave of each other after a luncheon
party. With a harsh cry of recognition, one pounced upon me. She was a
stout, short woman in pearl-gray, with a long, gray, slim plume to her small
hat. It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attacked me with a fake smile, all aglow
with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a
fifty-year-old mechanic, had done o eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?)
Very soon I had that avid glee well under control She thought I was in
California. How was--? With exquisite pleasure I informed her that my
stepdaughter had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a
hush-hush job in the Northwest. She said she disapproved of such early
marriages, she would never let her Phillys, who was now eighteen--
"Oh yes, of course," I said quietly. "I remember Phyllis. Phyllis and
Camp Q. yes, of course. By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes
debauched there his mother's little charges?"
Mrs. Chatfiled's already broken smile now disintegrated completely.
"For shame," she cried, "for shame, Mr. Humbert! The poor boy has just
been killed in Korea."
I said didn't she think "vient de," with the infinitive,
expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English "just," with
the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said.
There were only two blocks to Windmuller's office. He greeted me with a
very slow, very enveloping, strong, searching grip. He thought I was in
California. Had I not lived at one time at Beardsley? His daughter had just
entered Beardsley College. And how was--? I have all necessary information
about Mrs. Schiller. We had a pleasant business conference. I walked out
into the hot September sunshine a contented pauper.
Now that everything had been put out of the way, I could dedicate
myself freely to the main object of my visit to Ramsdale. In the methodical
manner on which I have always prided myself, I had been keeping Clare
Quilty's face masked in my dark dungeon, where he was waiting for me to come
with barber and priest: "Rиveillez-vous, Laqueue, il est temps de
mourir!" I have no time right now to discuss the mnemonics of
physiognomization--I am on my way to his uncle and walking fast--but let me
jot down this: I had preserved in the alcohol of a clouded memory the toad
of a face. In the course of a few glimpses, I had noticed its slight
resemblance to a cheery and rather repulsive wine dealer, a relative of mine
in Switzerland. With his dumbbells and stinking tricot, and fat hairy arms,
and bald patch, and pig-faced servant-concubine, he was on the whole a
harmless old rascal. Too harmless, in fact, to be confused with my prey. In
the state of mind I now found myself, I had lost contact with Trapp's image.
It had become completely engulfed by the face of Clare Quilty--as
represented, with artistic precision, by an easeled photograph of him that
stood on his uncle's desk.
In Beardsley, at the hands of charming Dr. Molnar, I had undergone a
rather serious dental operation, retaining only a few upper and lower front
teeth. The substitutes were dependent on a system of plates with an
inconspicuous wire affair running along my upper gums. The whole arrangement
was a masterpiece of comfort, and my canines were in perfect health.
However, to garnish my secret purpose with a plausible pretext, I told Dr.
Quilty that, in hope of alleviating facial neuralgia, I had decided to have
all my teeth removed. What would a complete set of dentures cost? How long
would the process take, assuming we fixed our first appointment for some
time in November? Where was his famous nephew now? Would it be possible to
have them all out in one dramatic session?
A white-smocked, gray-haired man, with a crew cut and the big flat
cheeks of a politician, Dr. Quilty perched on the corner of his desk, one
foot dreamily and seductively rocking as he launched on a glorious
long-range plan. He would first provide me with provisional plates until the
gums settled. Then he would make me a permanent set. He would like to have a
look at that mouth of mine. He wore perforated pied shoes. He had not
visited with the rascal since 1946, but supposed he could be found at his
ancestral home, Grimm Road, not far from Parkington. It was a noble dream.
His foot rocked, his gaze was inspired. It would cost me around six hundred.
He suggested he take measurements right away, and make the first set before
starting operations. My mouth was to him a splendid cave full of priceless
treasures, but I denied him entrance.
"No," I said. "On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr.
Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course a much better dentist than
you."
I do not know if any of my readers will ever have a chance to say that.
It is a delicious dream feeling. Clare's uncle remained sitting on the desk,
still looking dreamy, but his foot had stopped push-rocking the cradle of
rosy anticipation. On the other hand, his nurse, a skeleton-thin, faded
girl, with the tragic eyes of unsuccessful blondes, rushed after me so as to
be able to slam the door in my wake.
Push the magazine into the butt. Press home until you hear or feel the
magazine catch engage. Delightfully snug. Capacity: eight cartridges. Full
Blued. Aching to be discharged.
A gas station attendant in Parkington explained to me very clearly how
to get to Grimm Road. Wishing to be sure Quilty would be at home, I
attempted to ring him up but learned that his private telephone had recently
been disconnected. Did that mean he was gone? I started to drive to Grimm
Road, twelve miles north of the town. By that time night had eliminated most
of the landscape and as I followed the narrow winding highway, a series of
short posts, ghostly white, with reflectors, borrowed my own lights to
indicate this or that curve. I could make out a dark valley on one side of
the road and wooded slopes on the other, and in front of me, like derelict
snowflakes, moths drifted out of the blackness into my probing aura. At the
twelfth mile, as foretold, a curiously hooded bridge sheathed me for a
moment and, beyond it, a white-washed rock loomed on the right, and a few
car lengths further, on the same side, I turned off the highway up gravelly
Grimm Road. For a couple of minutes all was dank, dark, dense forest. Then,
Pavor Manor, a wooden house with a turret, arose in a circular clearing. Its
windows glowed yellow and red; its drive was cluttered with half a dozen
cars. I stopped in the shelter of the trees and abolished my lights to
ponder the next move quietly. He would be surrounded by his henchmen and
whores. I could not help seeing the inside of that festive and ramshackle
castle in terms of "Troubled Teens," a story in one of her magazines, vague
"orgies," a sinister adult with penele cigar, drugs, bodyguards. At least,
he was there. I would return in the torpid morning.
Gently I rolled back to town, in that old faithful car of mine which
was serenely, almost cheerfully working for me. My Lolita! There was still a
three-year-old bobby pin of hers in the depths of the glove compartment.
There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my
headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the
roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night
lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its
contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting
away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his
arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding
world,--and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation.
I left Insomnia Lodge next morning around eight and spent some time in
Parkington. Visions of bungling the execution kept obsessing me. Thinking
that perhaps the cartridges in the automatic had gone stale during a week of
inactivity, I removed them and inserted a fresh batch. Such a thorough oil
bath did I give Chum that now I could not get rid of the stuff. I bandaged
him up with a rag, like a maimed limb, and used another rag to wrap up a
handful of spare bullets.
A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road, but
when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was visible again, burning like a man,
and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and
decrepit house seemed to stand in a kind of daze, reflecting as it were my
own state, for I could not help realizing, as my feet touched the springy
and insecure ground, that I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business.
A guardedly ironic silence answered my bell. The garage, however, was
loaded with his car, a black convertible for the nonce. I tried the knocker.
Re-nobody. With a petulant snarl, I pushed the front door--and, how nice, it
swung open as in a medieval fairy tale. Having softly closed it behind me, I
made my way across a spacious and very ugly hall; peered into an adjacent
drawing room; noticed a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet;
decided that master was still asleep in the master bedroom.
So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum in my
pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters. Of the three bedrooms I
inspected, one had obviously been slept in that night. There was a library
full of flowers. There was a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors
and a polar bear skin on the slippery floor. There were still other rooms. A
happy though struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional
in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an
unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from
locking himself up in a room. Consequently, for at least five minutes I went
about--lucidly insane, crazily calm, an enchanted and very tight
hunter--turning whatever keys in whatever locks there were and pocketing
more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the
only lockable locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned
parenthood.
Speaking of bathrooms--I was about to visit a third one when master
came out of it, leaving a brief waterfall behind him. The corner of a
passage did not quite conceal me. Gray-faced, baggy-eyed, fluffily
disheveled in a scanty balding way, but still perfectly recognizable, he
swept by me in a purple bathrobe, very like one I had. He either did not
notice me, or else dismissed me as some familiar and innocuous
hallucination--and, showing me his hairy calves, he proceeded,
sleepwalker-wise, downstairs. I pocketed my last key and followed him into
the entrance hall. He had half opened his mouth and the front door, to peer
out through a sunny chink as one who thinks he has heard a half-hearted
visitor ring and recede. Then, still ignoring the raincoated phantasm that
had stopped in midstairs, master walked into a cozy boudoir across the hall
from the drawing room, through which--taking it easy, knowing he was safe--I
now went away from him, and in a bar-adorned kitchen gingerly unwrapped
dirty Chum, talking care not to leave any oil stains on the chrome--I think
I got the wrong product, it was black and awfully messy. In my usual
meticulous way, I transferred naked Chum to a clean recess about me and made
for the little boudoir. My step, as I say, was springy--too springy perhaps
for success. But my heart pounded with tiger joy, and I crunched a cocktail
glass underfoot.
Master met me in the Oriental parlor.
"Now who are you?" he asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands thrust
into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes fixing a point to the northeast of
my head. "Are you by any chance Brewster?"
By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and completely
at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy myself.
"That's right," I answered suavely. "Je suis Monsieur Brustхre.
Let us chat for a moment before we start."
He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat.
I was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, no tie. We sat down in two easy
chairs.
"You know," he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek
and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin, "you don't look
like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is not particularly striking.
Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company."
To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage . . . To
look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands . . . To wander with
a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the
punctures, and mess, and music of pain . . . To know that this
semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling--oh, my
darling, this was intolerable bliss!
"No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters."
He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever.
"Guess again, Punch."
"Ah," said Punch, "so you have not come to bother me about those
long-distance calls?"
"You do make them once in a while, don't you?"
"Excuse me?"
I said I had said I thought he had said he had never--
"People," he said, "people in general, I'm not accusing you, Brewster,
but you know it's absurd the way people invade this damned house without
even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the kitchen, they use
the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to
pay. You have a funny accent, Captain."
"Quilty," I said, "do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze,
Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?"
"Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash.,
Hell Canyon. Who cares?"
"I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father."
"Nonsense," he said. "You are not. You are some foreign literary agent.
A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fiertи de la
Chair. Absurd."
"She was my child, Quilty."
In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything,
but his blustering manner was not quite convincing. A sort of wary inkling
kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled
again.
"I'm very fond of children myself," he said, "and fathers are among my
best friends."
He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He
attempted to rise from his seat.
"Down!" I said--apparently much louder than I intended.
"You need not roar at me," he complained in his strange feminine
manner. "I just wanted a smoke. I'm dying for a smoke."
"You're dying anyway."
"Oh, chucks," he said. "You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you
French, mister? Wooly-woo-boo-are? Let's go to the barroomette and have a
stiff--"
He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it
to him.
"Say!" he drawled (now imitating the underworld numskull of movies),
"that's a swell little gun you've got there. What d'you want for her?"
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box
on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
"Here they are," he said cheerfully. "You recall Kipling: une femme
est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches."
"Quilty," I said. "I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a
moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of
excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday.
Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you."
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it.
"I am willing to try," he said. "You are either Australian, or a German
refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile's house, you know. Maybe,
you'd better run along. And do stop demonstrating that gun. I've an old
Stern-Luger in the music room."
I pointed Chum at his slippered foot and crushed the trigger. It
clicked. He looked at his foot, at the pistol, again at his foot. I made
another awful effort, and, with a ridiculously feeble and juvenile sound, it
went off. The bullet entered the thick pink rug, and I had the paralyzing
impression that it had merely trickled in and might come out again.
"See what I mean?" said Quilty. "You should be a little more careful.
Give me that thing for Christ's sake."
He reached for it. I pushed him back into the chair. The rich joy was
waning. It was high time I destroyed him, but he must understand why he was
being destroyed. His condition infected me, the weapon felt limp and clumsy
in my hand.
"Concentrate," I said, "on the thought of Dolly Haze whom you
kidnapped--"
"I did not!" he cried. "You're all wet. I saved her from a beastly
pervert. Show me your badge instead of shooting at my foot, you ape, you.
Where is that badge? I'm not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd!
That joy ride, I grant you, was a silly stunt but you got her back, didn't
you? Come, let's have a drink."
I asked him whether he wanted to be executed sitting or standing.
"Ah, let me think," he said. "It is not an easy question.
Incidentally--I made a mistake. Which I sincerely regret. You see, I had no
fun with your Dolly. I am practically impotent, to tell the melancholy
truth. And I gave her a splendid vacation. She met some remarkable people.
Do you happen to know--"
And with a tremendous lurch he fell all over me, sending the pistol
hurtling under a chest of drawers. Fortunately he was more impetuous than
vigorous, and I had little difficulty in shoving him back into his chair.
He puffed a little and folded his arms on his chest.
"Now you've done it," he said. "Vous voilю dans de beaux draps, mon
vieux."
His French was improving.
I looked around. Perhaps, if--Perhaps I could--On my hands and knees?
Risk it?
"Alors, que fait-on?" he asked watching me closely.
I stooped. He did not moved. I stooped lower.
"My dear sir," he said, "stop trifling with life and death. I am a
playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies, fantasies. I have made
private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth-century
sexcapades. I'm the author of fifty-two successful scenarios. I know all the
ropes. Let me handle this. There should be a poker somewhere, why don't I
fetch it, and then we'll fish out your property."
Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while he talked. I
groped under the chest trying at the same time to keep an eye on him. All of
a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed
Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to
wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like
two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I
felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me.
They rolled over him. We rolled over us.
In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first
years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love); and
elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the
Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning
fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed
with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the
part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while
the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin. When at
last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon, and the scenario writer
had been reinstalled in his low chair, both of us were panting as the cowman
and the sheepman never do after their battle.
I decided to inspect the pistol--our sweat might have spoiled
something--and regain my wind before proceeding to the main item in the
program. To fill in the pause, I proposed he read his own sentence--in the
poetical form I had given it. The term "poetical justice" is one that may be
most happily used in this respect. I handed him a neat typescript.
"Yes," he said, "splendid idea. Let me fetch my reading glasses" (he
attempted to rise).
"No."
"Just as you say. Shall I read out loud?"
"Yes."
"Here goes. I see it's in verse.
Because you took advantage of a sinner
because you took advantage
because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage . . .
"That's good, you know. That's damned good."
. . . when I stood Adam-naked
before a federal law and all its stinging stars
"Oh, grand stuff!"
. . . Because you took advantage of a sin
when I was helpless moulting moist and tender
hoping for the best
dreaming of marriage in a mountain state
aye of a litter of Lolitas . . .
"Didn't get that."
Because you took advantage of my inner
essential innocence
because you cheated me--
"A little repetitious, what? Where was I?"
Because you cheated me of my redemption
because you took
her at the age when lads
play with erector sets
"Getting smutty, eh?"
a little downy girl still wearing poppies
still eating popcorn in the colored gloam
where tawny Indians took paid croppers
because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die
"Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I'm
concerned."
He folded and handed it back to me.
I asked him if he had anything serious to say before dying. The
automatic was again ready for use on the person. He looked at it and heaved
a big sigh.
"Now look here, Mac," he said. "You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let
us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends
are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce
is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in
everything--sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am
ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre, sword
or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere--is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence
are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not
an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protиgиe to join me. It
was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as
that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and
winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or
Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the
condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the
way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer
you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady
with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of
nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously
and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise
you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all
the royalties from my next play--I have not much at the bank right now but I
propose to borrow--you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head,
to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have
here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa--curious
name--who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has
daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police
makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American
Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very
humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use
herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your
dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing--you are
going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica
upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration
Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable
lady, a remarkable work--drop that gun--with photographs of eight hundred
and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in
the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant
skies--drop that gun--and moreover I can arrange for you to attend
executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow--"
Feu. This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a black
rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller's--my bullet hit the inside surface
of its back whereupon it immediately went into a rocking act, so fast and
with such zest that any one coming into the room might have been
flabbergasted by the double miracle: that chair rocking in a panic all by
itself, and the armchair, where my purple target had just been, now void of
all life content. Wiggling his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave of his
rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second we were tugging and
gasping on both sides of the door which had a key I had overlooked. I won
again, and with another abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down
before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally
hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely
plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been
absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a
futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman's chest near the
piano. My next bullet caught him somewhere in the side, and he rose from his
chair higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old faithful,
like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude, or so it seemed,
as he rent the air--still shaking with the rich black music--head thrown
back in a howl, hand pressed to his brow, and with his other hand clutching
his armpit as if stung by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a
normal robed man, scurried out into the hall.
I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of double,
triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite straight on straight legs while
bouncing up twice in his wake, and then bouncing between him and the front
door in a ballet-like stiff bounce, with the purpose of heading him off,
since the door was not properly closed.
Suddenly dignified, and somewhat morose, he started to walk up the
broad stairs, and, shifting my position, but not actually following him up
the steps, I fired three or four times in quick succession, wounding him at
every blaze; and every time I did it to him, that horrible thing to him, his
face would twitch in an absurd clownish manner, as if he were exaggerating
the pain; he slowed down, rolled his eyes half closing them and made a
feminine "ah!" and he shivered every time a bullet hit him as if I were
tickling him, and every time I got him with those slow, clumsy, blind
bullets of mine, he would say under his breath, with a phony British
accent--all the while dreadfully twitching, shivering, smirking, but withal
talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner: "Ah, that hurts,
sir, enough! Ah, that hurts atrociously, my dear fellow. I pray you, desist.
Ah--very painful, very painful, indeed . . . God! Hah! This is abominable,
you should really not--" His voice trailed off as he reached the landing,
but he steadily walked on despite all the lead I had lodged in his bloated
body--and in distress, in dismay, I understood that far from killing him I
was injecting spurts of energy into the poor fellow, as if the bullets had
been capsules wherein a heady elixir danced.
I reloaded the thing with hands that were black and bloody--I had
touched something he had anointed with his thick gore. Then I rejoined him
upstairs, the keys jangling in my pockets like gold.
He was trudging from room to room, bleeding majestically, trying to
find an open window, shaking his head, and still trying to talk me out of
murder. I took aim at his head, and he retired to the master bedroom with a
burst of royal purple where his ear had been.
"Get out, get out of here," he said coughing and spitting; and in a
nightmare of wonder, I saw this blood-spattered but still buoyant person get
into his bed and wrap himself up in the chaotic bedclothes. I hit him at
very close range through the blankets, and then he lay back, and a big pink
bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a
toy balloon, and vanished.
I may have lost contact with reality for a second or two--oh, nothing
of the I-just-blacked-out sort that your common criminal enacts; on the
contrary, I want to stress the fact that I was responsible for every shed
drop of his bubbleblood; but a kind of momentary shift occurred as if I were
in the connubial bedroom, and Charlotte were sick in bed. Quilty was a very
sick man. I held one of his slippers instead of the pistol--I was sitting on
the pistol. Then I made myself a little more comfortable in the chair near
the bed, and consulted my wrist watch. The crystal was gone but it ticked.
The whole sad business had taken more than an hour. He was quiet at last.
Far from feeling any relief, a burden even weightier than the one I had
hoped to get rid of was with me, upon me, over me. I could not bring myself
to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a
quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning
sense of unbelievable luck. My hands were hardly in better condition than
his. I washed up as best I could in the adjacent bathroom. Now I could
leave. As I emerged on the landing, I was amazed to discover that a
vivacious buzz I had just been dismissing as a mere singing in my ears was
really a medley of voices and radio music coming from the downstairs drawing
room.
I found there a number of people who apparently had just arrived and
were cheerfully drinking Quilty's liquor. There was a fat man in an easy
chair; and two dark-haired pale young beauties, sisters no doubt, big one
and small one (almost a child), demurely sat side by side on a davenport. A
florid-faced fellow with sapphire-blue eyes was in the act of bringing two
glasses out of the bar-like kitchen, where two or three women were chatting
and chinking ice. I stopped in the doorway and said: "I have just killed
Clare Quilty." "Good for you," said the florid fellow as he offered one of
the drinks to the elder girl. "Somebody ought to have done it long ago,"
remarked the fat man. "What does he say, Tony?" asked a faded blonde from
the bar. "He says," answered the florid fellow, "he has killed Cue." "Well,"
said another unidentified man rising in a corner where he had been crouching
to inspect some records, "I guess we all should do it to him some day."
"Anyway," said Tony, "he'd better come down. We can't wait for him much
longer if we want to go to that game." "Give this man a drink somebody,"
said the fat person. "What a beer?" said a woman in slacks, showing it to me
from afar.
Only the two girls on the davenport, both wearing black, the younger
fingering a bright something about her white neck, only they said nothing,
but just smiled on, so young, so lewd. As the music paused for a moment,
there was a sudden noise on the stairs. Tony and I stepped out into the
hall. Quilty of all people had managed to crawl out onto the landing, and
there we could see him, flapping and heaving, and then subsiding, forever
this time, in a purple heap.
"Hurry up, Cue," said Tony with a laugh. "I believe, he's still--" He
returned to the drawing room, music drowned the rest of the sentence.
This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me
by Quilty. With a heavy heart I left the house and walked though the spotted
blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it,
and I had some trouble squeezing out.
The rest is a little flattish and faded. Slowly I drove downhill, and
presently found myself going at the same lazy pace in a direction opposite
to Parkington. I had left my raincoat in the boudoir and Chum in the
bathroom. No, it was not a house I would have liked to live in. I wondered
idly if some surgeon of genius might not alter his own career, and perhaps
the whole destiny of mankind, by reviving quilted Quilty, Clare Obscure. Not
that I cared; on the whole I wished to forget the whole mess--and when I did
learn he was dead, the only satisfaction it gave me, was the relief of
knowing I need not mentally accompany for months a painful and disgusting
convalescence interrupted by all kinds of unmentionable operations and
relapses, and perhaps an actual visit from him, with trouble on my part to
rationalize him as not being a ghost. Thomas had something. It is strange
that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than
sight, becomes at critical moment our main, if not only, handle to reality.
I was all covered with Quilty--with the feel of that tumble before the
bleeding.
The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me--not
by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a
novel experience--that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might
as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the
highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant
diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced
by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic
physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road. In a
way, it was a very spiritual itch. Gently, dreamily, not exceeding twenty
miles an hour, I drove on that queer mirror side. Traffic was light. Cars
that now and then passed me on the side I had abandoned to them, honked at
me brutally. Cars coming towards me wobbled, swerved, and cried out in fear.
Presently I found myself approaching populated places. Passing through a red
light was like a sip of forbidden Burgundy when I was a child. Meanwhile
complications were arising. I was being followed and escorted. Then in front
of me I saw two cars placing themselves in such a manner as to completely
block my way. With a graceful movement I turned off the road, and after two
or three big bounces, rode up a grassy slope, among surprised cows, and
there I came to a gentle rocking stop. A kind of thoughtful Hegelian
synthesis linking up two dead women.
I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old
fellow)--and was, indeed, looking forward to surrender myself to many hands,
without doing anything to cooperate, while they moved and carried me,
relaxed, comfortable, surrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and
deriving an eerie enjoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable
support given me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I was
waiting for them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage
of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack
of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain
road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its
population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon
in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a
boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little
way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small
grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud
was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one
belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached
the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like
vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley.
One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and
gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich,
ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing
the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered
mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors--for there
are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company--both
brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory
vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose
to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I
realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but
these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home
and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at
play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of
blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and
divinely enigmatic--one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost
articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of
a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any
movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical
vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a
kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly
poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her
voice from that concord.
This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking
to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of
it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters
than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt
people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a
particularly apt one. There are in my notes "Otto Otto" and "Mesmer Mesmer"
and "Lambert Lambert," but for some reason I think my choice expresses the
nastiness best.
When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in
the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit
tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to
save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mind-composition, however, I
realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of
this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am
opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the
sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at
least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But
even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The
following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed
testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer
alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while
the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part
of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska.
Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to
strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That
husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my
specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull
him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between
him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months
longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I
am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic
sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may
share, my Lolita.