Vladimir Nabokov

Ursus & Ada's red-lacquered talons in Ada

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 11 May, 2022

Describing his debauch à trois with Ada and Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) after the dinner in Ursus (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Ada’s red-lacquered talons:

 

Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams (actually all is shadowy up there, for the blinds are still drawn, shutting out the gray morning), we have the large island of the bed illumined from our left (Lucette’s right) by a lamp burning with a murmuring incandescence on the west-side bedtable. The top sheet and quilt are tumbled at the footboardless south of the island where the newly landed eye starts on its northern trip, up the younger Miss Veen’s pried-open legs. A dewdrop on russet moss eventually finds a stylistic response in the aquamarine tear on her flaming cheekbone. Another trip from the port to the interior reveals the central girl’s long white left thigh; we visit souvenir stalls: Ada’s red-lacquered talons, which lead a man’s reasonably recalcitrant, pardonably yielding wrist out of the dim east to the bright russet west, and the sparkle of her diamond necklace, which, for the nonce, is not much more valuable than the aquamarines on the other (west) side of Novelty Novel lane. The scarred male nude on the island’s east coast is half-shaded, and, on the whole, less interesting, though considerably more aroused than is good for him or a certain type of tourist. The recently repapered wall immediately west of the now louder-murmuring (et pour cause) dorocene lamp is ornamented in the central girl’s honor with Peruvian’ honeysuckle’ being visited (not only for its nectar, I’m afraid, but for the animalcules stuck in it) by marvelous Loddigesia Hummingbirds, while the bedtable on that side bears a lowly box of matches, a karavanchik of cigarettes, a Monaco ashtray, a copy of Voltemand’s poor thriller, and a Lurid Oncidium Orchid in an amethystine vaselet. The companion piece on Van’s side supports a similar superstrong but unlit lamp, a dorophone, a box of Wipex, a reading loupe, the returned Ardis album, and a separatum ‘Soft music as cause of brain tumors,’ by Dr Anbury (young Rattner’s waggish pen-name). Sounds have colors, colors have smells. The fire of Lucette’s amber runs through the night of Ada’s odor and ardor, and stops at the threshold of Van’s lavender goat. Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet. Ada’s loose black hair accidentally tickles the local curio she holds in her left fist, magnanimously demonstrating her acquisition. Unsigned and unframed. (3.8)

 

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): et pour cause: and no wonder.

karavanchik: small caravan of camels (Russ.).

 

In Chapter One (XVI) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin describes Onegin’s dinner with Kaverin at Talon’s:

 

Уж тёмно: в санки он садится.
«Пади, пади!» — раздался крик;
Морозной пылью серебрится
Его бобровый воротник.
К Talon4 помчался: он уверен,
Что там уж ждет его Каверин.
Вошел: и пробка в потолок,
Вина кометы брызнул ток;
Пред ним roast-beef окровавленный,
И трюфли, роскошь юных лет,
Французской кухни лучший цвет,
И Страсбурга пирог нетленный
Меж сыром лимбургским живым
И ананасом золотым.

 

'Tis dark by now. He gets into a sleigh.

The cry “Way, way!” resounds.

With frostdust silvers

his beaver collar.

To Talon's4 he has dashed off: he is certain

that there already waits for him [Kavérin];

has entered — and the cork goes ceilingward,

the flow of comet wine spurts forth,

a bloody roast beef is before him,

and truffles, luxury of youthful years,

the best flower of French cookery,

and a decayless Strasbourg pie

between a living Limburg cheese

and a golden ananas.

 

4. Well-known restaurateur. (Pushkin’s note)

 

Ursus is the traveling artist in Vitor Hugo’s novel L’Homme qui rit (“The Man who Laughs,” 1869). On the other hand, ursus is Latin for “bear” and brings to mind the bear in Tatiana’s wondrous dream in chapter Five (XII - XIV) of EO:

 

Как на досадную разлуку,
Татьяна ропщет на ручей;
Не видит никого, кто руку
С той стороны подал бы ей;
Но вдруг сугроб зашевелился.
И кто ж из-под него явился?
Большой, взъерошенный медведь;
Татьяна ах! а он реветь,
И лапу с острыми когтями
Ей протянул; она скрепясь
Дрожащей ручкой оперлась
И боязливыми шагами
Перебралась через ручей;
Пошла — и что ж? медведь за ней!

 

Она, взглянуть назад не смея,
Поспешный ускоряет шаг;
Но от косматого лакея
Не может убежать никак;
Кряхтя, валит медведь несносный;
Пред ними лес; недвижны сосны
В своей нахмуренной красе;
Отягчены их ветви все
Клоками снега; сквозь вершины
Осин, берез и лип нагих
Сияет луч светил ночных;
Дороги нет; кусты, стремнины
Метелью все занесены,
Глубоко в снег погружены.

 

Упала в снег; медведь проворно
Ее хватает и несет;
Она бесчувственно-покорна,
Не шевельнется, не дохнет;
Он мчит ее лесной дорогой;
Вдруг меж дерев шалаш убогой;
Кругом все глушь; отвсюду он
Пустынным снегом занесен,
И ярко светится окошко,
И в шалаше и крик и шум;
Медведь промолвил: «Здесь мой кум:
Погрейся у него немножко!»
И в сени прямо он идет
И на порог ее кладет.

 

She, to look back not daring,

accelerates her hasty step;

but from the shaggy footman

can in no way escape;

grunting, the odious bear keeps lumbering on.

Before them is a wood; the pines

are stirless in their frowning beauty;

all their boughs are weighed down

by snow flocks; through the summits

of aspens, birches, lindens bare

the beam of the night luminaries shines;

there is no path; shrubs, precipices, all

are drifted over by the blizzard,

plunged deep in snow.

 

Into the forest goes Tatiana; the bear follows;

up to her knee comes yielding snow;

now by the neck a long branch suddenly

catches her, or by force it tears

out of her ears their golden pendants;

now in the crumbly snow sticks fast

a small wet shoe come off her charming foot;

now she lets fall her handkerchief —

she has no time to pick it up,

is frightened, hears the bear behind her,

and even is too shy to raise

with tremulous hand the hem of her dress;

she runs; he keeps behind her;

and then she has no force to run.

 

Into the snow she's fallen; the bear deftly

snatches her up and carries her;

she is insensibly submissive;

stirs not, breathes not;

he rushes her along a forest road;

sudden, 'mongst trees, there is a humble hut;

dense wildwood all around; from every side

'tis drifted over with desolate snow,

and brightly glows a window;

and in the hut are cries and noise;

the bear quoth: “Here's my gossip,

do warm yourself a little in his home!”

and straight he goes into the hallway

and on the threshold lays her down.

 

Tatiana’s dream foreshadows Lenski’s death in his duel with Onegin. After Lucette’s has left, Ada tells Van that some day, after a sunbath or dance, he will sleep with Lucette:

 

After a while he adored [sic! Ed.] the pancakes. No Lucette, however, turned up, and when Ada, still wearing her diamonds (in sign of at least one more caro Van and a Camel before her morning bath) looked into the guest room, she found the white valise and blue furs gone. A note scrawled in Arlen Eyelid Green was pinned to the pillow.

 

Would go mad if remained one more night shall ski at Verma with other poor woolly worms for three weeks or so miserable

Pour Elle

 

Van walked over to a monastic lectern that he had acquired for writing in the vertical position of vertebrate thought and wrote what follows:

 

Poor L.

We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.

Tenderly yours A & V.

 

(in alphabetic order).

 

‘I call this pompous, puritanical rot,’ said Ada upon scanning Van’s letter. ‘Why should we apollo for her having experienced a delicious spazmochka? I love her and would never allow you to harm her. It’s curious — you know, something in the tone of your note makes me really jealous for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for "life." Ed.] Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!’

'Unless you run out of love potions. Do you allow me to send her these lines?’

‘I do, but want to add a few words.’

Her P.S. read:

The above declaration is Van’s composition which I sign reluctantly. It is pompous and puritanical. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. When you’re sick of Queen, why not fly over to Holland or Italy?

A.

‘Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,’ suggested Van. ‘I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.’

‘Last night two men recognized me,’ she said. ‘Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow — with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.’

‘We shall now go for a ride in the park,’ said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel — or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.

‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’ observed Ada.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘You are breaking her heart,’ said Ada.

‘Ada girl, adored girl,’ cried Van, ‘I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.’

‘Au fond,’ said Ada, ‘first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day,’

She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.

‘Tower,’ she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: ‘And you?’

‘A regular ziggurat.’ (2.8)

 

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): spazmochka: Russ., little spasm.

bretteur: duelling bravo.

au fond: actually.

 

Eight and a half years later Lucette commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic. On the last day of her life Lucette takes a sunbath with Van:

 

To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhythmically flushed the green tiles, but Lucette was a hardy girl used to bracing winds no less than to the detestable sun. Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs, which looked lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the breeze dried her skin. With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse.

She returned after a brief swim to the sun terrace where Van lay and said:

‘You can’t imagine’ — (‘I can imagine anything,’ he insisted) — ‘you can imagine, okay, what oceans of lotions and streams of creams I am compelled to use — in the privacy of my balconies or in desolate sea caves — before I can exhibit myself to the elements. I always teeter on the tender border between sunburn and suntan — or between lobster and Obst as writes Herb, my beloved painter — I’m reading his diary published by his last duchess, it’s in three mixed languages and lovely, I’ll lend it to you. You see, darling, I’d consider myself a pied cheat if the small parts I conceal in public were not of the same color as those on show.’

You looked to me kind of sandy allover when you were inspected in 1892,’ said Van.

‘I’m a brand-new girl now,’ she whispered. ‘A happy new girl. Alone with you on an abandoned ship, with ten days at least till my next flow. I sent you a silly note to Kingston, just in case you didn’t turn up.’ (3.5)

 

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Obst: Germ., fruit.

 

On Tobakoff Van quotes Onegin’s words to Tatiana in Chapter Four of EO:

 

Your father,’ added Lucette, ‘paid a man from Belladonna to take pictures — but of course, real fame begins only when one’s name appears in that cine-magazine’s crossword puzzle. We all know it will never happen, never! Do you hate me now?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, passing his hand over her sun-hot back and rubbing her coccyx to make pussy purr. ‘Alas, I don’t! I love you with a brother’s love and maybe still more tenderly. Would you like me to order drinks?’

‘I’d like you to go on and on,’ she muttered, her nose buried in the rubber pillow. (ibid.)

 

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): I love you with a brother’s love etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Four: XVI: 3-4.

 

The element that destroys Lucette is water, the element that destroys Demon (Van’s and Ada’s father who perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific, 3.7) is air. Van does not realize that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. Ada's crime (bound to remain unsolved) makes one think of the two Russian idioms in which voda (water) is mentioned: spryatat' kontsy v vodu (tying up loose ends; literally: "hide ends into the water") and vyiti sukhim iz vody (get away with it; literally: "come out dry from the water). Demon's wife Aqua (Marina's poor mad twin sister) believed that she could understand the language of her namesake, water:

 

She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether. (1.3)

 

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.

my lad, my pretty, etc: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.

ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a ‘little ballad’ by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300). The relevant lines are: ‘you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.’

 

I hope, I will be pardoned for the following impromptu little poem:

 

Прощание с Европой

 

Сбылось старинное пророчество. Похлопай!

Мы повернулись к ним своею азиатской ж…

 

Farewell to Europe

 

An ancient prophesy has come true. Applause, please!

We have turned to them with our Asiatic arse.