Describing his tryst with Ada in the vicinity of Ardis Hall, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River:
Van rented a room under a false name (Boucher) at the only inn of Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River, some twenty miles from Ardis. He spent the night fighting the celebrated mosquito, or its cousin, that liked him more than the Ardis beast had. The toilet on the landing was a black hole, with the traces of a fecal explosion, between a squatter’s two giant soles. At 7 A.M. on July 25 he called Ardis Hall from the Malahar post office and got connected with Bout who was connected with Blanche and mistook Van’s voice for the butler’s.
‘Dammit, Pa,’ he said into his bedside dorophone, ‘I’m busy!’
‘I want Blanche, you idiot,’ growled Van.
‘Oh, pardon,’ cried Bout, ‘un moment, Monsieur.’
A bottle was audibly uncorked (drinking hock at seven in the morning!) and Blanche took over, but scarcely had Van begun to deliver a carefully worded message to be transmitted to Ada, when Ada herself who had been on the qui vive all night answered from the nursery, where the clearest instrument in the house quivered and bubbled under a dead barometer.
‘Forest Fork in Forty-Five minutes. Sorry to spit.’
‘Tower!’ replied her sweet ringing voice, as an airman in heaven blue might say ‘Roger.’
He rented a motorcycle, a venerable machine, with a saddle upholstered in billiard cloth and pretentious false mother-of-pearl handlebars, and drove, bouncing on tree roots along a narrow ‘forest ride.’ The first thing he saw was the star gleam of her dismissed bike: she stood by it, arms akimbo, the black-haired white angel, looking away in a daze of shyness, wearing a terrycloth robe and bedroom slippers. As he carried her into the nearest thicket he felt the fever of her body, but only realized how ill she was when after two passionate spasms she got up full of tiny brown ants and tottered, and almost collapsed, muttering about gipsies stealing their jeeps.
It was a beastly, but beautiful, tryst. He could not remember —
(That’s right, I can’t either. Ada.)
— one word they said, one question, one answer, he rushed her back as close to the house as he dared (having kicked her bike into the bracken) — and that evening when he rang up Blanche, she dramatically whispered that Mademoiselle had une belle pneumonie, mon pauvre Monsieur.
Ada was much better three days later, but he had to return to Man to catch the same boat back to England — and join a circus tour which involved people he could not let down.
His father saw him off. Demon had dyed his hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze. Lyudi oglyadïvalis’ (people turned to look). A temporary Tamara, all kohl, kasbek rouge, and flamingo-boa, could not decide what would please her daemon lover more — just moaning and ignoring his handsome son or acknowledging bluebeard’s virility as reflected in morose Van, who could not stand her Caucasian perfume, Granial Maza, seven dollars a bottle.
(You know, that’s my favorite chapter up to now, Van, I don’t know why, but I love it. And you can keep your Blanche in her young man’s embrace, even that does not matter. In Ada’s fondest hand.) (1.29)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): cousin: mosquito.
mademoiselle etc.: the young lady has a pretty bad pneumonia, I regret to say, Sir.
Granial Maza: a perfume named after Mt Kazbek’s ‘gran’ almaza’ (diamond’s facet) of Lermontov’s The Demon.
In his essay M. Yu. Lermontov - poet sverkhchelovtchestva ("Lermontov as a Poet of the Superhuman," 1911) Merezhkovski says that Lermontov was the first Russian writer who raised the religious question about evil:
Лермонтов первый в русской литературе поднял религиозный вопрос о зле. (chapter VII)
In his poem À une Malabaraise (“To a Lady of Malabar”) included in Les Fleurs du Mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) Baudelaire mentions la plus belle blanche (the fairest white woman) and les moustiques rôdeurs (the roving mosquitoes):
Tes pieds sont aussi fins que tes mains, et ta hanche
Est large à faire envie à la plus belle blanche;
À l'artiste pensif ton corps est doux et cher;
Tes grands yeux de velours sont plus noirs que ta chair.
Aux pays chauds et bleus où ton Dieu t'a fait naître,
Ta tâche est d'allumer la pipe de ton maître,
De pourvoir les flacons d'eaux fraîches et d'odeurs,
De chasser loin du lit les moustiques rôdeurs,
Et, dès que le matin fait chanter les platanes,
D'acheter au bazar ananas et bananes.
Tout le jour, où tu veux, tu mènes tes pieds nus,
Et fredonnes tout bas de vieux airs inconnus;
Et quand descend le soir au manteau d'écarlate,
Tu poses doucement ton corps sur une natte,
Où tes rêves flottants sont pleins de colibris,
Et toujours, comme toi, gracieux et fleuris.
Pourquoi, l'heureuse enfant, veux-tu voir notre France,
Ce pays trop peuplé que fauche la souffrance,
Et, confiant ta vie aux bras forts des marins,
Faire de grands adieux à tes chers tamarins?
Toi, vêtue à moitié de mousselines frêles,
Frissonnante là-bas sous la neige et les grêles,
Comme tu pleurerais tes loisirs doux et francs
Si, le corset brutal emprisonnant tes flancs
Il te fallait glaner ton souper dans nos fanges
Et vendre le parfum de tes charmes étranges,
Oeil pensif, et suivant, dans nos sales brouillards,
Des cocotiers absents les fantômes épars!
Your feet are as slender as your hands and your hips
Are broad; they'd make the fairest white woman jealous;
To the pensive artist your body's sweet and dear;
Your wide, velvety eyes are darker than your skin.
In the hot blue country where your God had you born
It is your task to light the pipe of your master,
To keep the flasks filled with cool water and perfumes,
To drive far from his bed the roving mosquitoes,
And as soon as morning makes the plane-trees sing, to
Buy pineapples and bananas at the bazaar.
All day long your bare feet follow your whims,
And, very low, you hum old, unknown melodies;
And when evening in his scarlet cloak descends,
You stretch out quietly upon a mat and there
Your drifting dreams are full of humming-birds and are
Like you, always pleasant and adorned with flowers.
Why, happy child, do you wish to see France,
That over-peopled country which suffering mows down,
And entrusting your life to the strong arms of sailors,
Bid a last farewell to your dear tamarinds?
You, half-dressed in filmy muslins,
Shivering over there in the snow and the hail,
How you would weep for your free, pleasant leisure, if,
With a brutal corset imprisoning your flanks,
You had to glean your supper in our muddy streets
And sell the fragrance of your exotic charms,
With pensive eye, following in our dirty fogs
The sprawling phantoms of the absent coco palms!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
“The sprawling phantoms of the absent coco palms” bring to mind encore un petit enfantôme (as Cordula calls an abortion, 1.42) and “get yourself a cocoanut,” a phrase used by Van in his conversation with Pedro (a young Latin actor):
In the meantime, Herr Rack swam up again and joined Ada on the edge of the pool, almost losing his baggy trunks in the process of an amphibious heave.
‘Permit me, Ivan, to get you also a nice cold Russian kok?’ said Pedro — really a very gentle and amiable youth at heart. ‘Get yourself a cocoanut,’ replied nasty Van, testing the poor faun, who did not get it, in any sense, and, giggling pleasantly, went back to his mat. Claudius, at least, did not court Ophelia. (1.32)
Ananas et bananes (pineapples and bananas) bring to mind a dialogue at the next table overheard by Van and Ada after their reunion in 1922:
‘What I’m telling you,’ he said harshly, ‘has nothing to do with timepieces.’ The waiter brought them their coffee. She smiled, and he realized that her smile was prompted by a conversation at the next table, at which a newcomer, a stout sad Englishman, had begun a discussion of the menu with the maître d’hôtel.
‘I’ll start,’ said the Englishman, ‘with the bananas.’
‘That’s not bananas, sir. That’s ananas, pineapple juice.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, give me some clear soup.’
Young Van smiled back at young Ada. Oddly, that little exchange at the next table acted as a kind of delicious release. (Part Four)
In his essay “The Texture of Time” Van mentions clepsydras:
Such a drought affected Hippo in the most productive months of Augustine’s bishopric that clepsydras had to be replaced by sandglasses. He defined the Past as what is no longer and the future as what is not yet (actually the future is a fantasm belonging to another category of thought essentially different from that of the Past which, at least, was here a moment ago — where did I put it? Pocket? But the search itself is already ‘past’). (ibid.)
In the penultimate stanza of his poem L'Horloge (“The Clock”) Baudelaire mentions la clepsydre:
Souviens-toi que le Temps est un joueur avide
Qui gagne sans tricher, à tout coup! c'est la loi.
Le jour décroît; la nuit augmente; Souviens-toi!
Le gouffre a toujours soif; la clepsydre se vide.
Remember, Time is a greedy player
Who wins without cheating, every round! It's the law.
The daylight wanes; the night deepens; remember!
The abyss thirsts always; the water-clock runs low.
(tr. W. Aggeler)
In a conversation with Demon a Bohemian lady called the picture that Demon showed to her lover, Baron d’Onsky (an art expert), “Eve on the Clepsydrophone:”
Next day Demon was having tea at his favorite hotel with a Bohemian lady whom he had never seen before and was never to see again (she desired his recommendation for a job in the Glass Fish-and-Flower department in a Boston museum) when she interrupted her voluble self to indicate Marina and Aqua, blankly slinking across the hall in modish sullenness and bluish furs with Dan Veen and a dackel behind, and said:
'Curious how that appalling actress resembles "Eve on the Clepsydrophone" in Parmigianino's famous picture.'
'It is anything but famous,' said Demon quietly, 'and you can't have seen it. I don't envy you,' he added; 'the naive stranger who realizes that he or she has stepped into the mud of an alien life must experience a pretty sickening feeling. Did you get that small-talk information directly from a fellow named d'Onsky or through a friend of a friend of his?'
'Friend of his,' replied the hapless Bohemian lady. (1.2)
“Clepsydrophone” blends clepsydra (water-clock) with dorophone (hydraulic telephone). In the last stanza of his poem Les Petites Vieilles (“Little Old Women”) Baudelaire mentions Eves octogénaires (eighty-year-old Eves):
Ruines! ma famille! ô cerveaux congénères!
Je vous fais chaque soir un solennel adieu!
Où serez-vous demain, Eves octogénaires,
Sur qui pèse la griffe effroyable de Dieu?
Ruins! my family! O kindred minds!
I bid you each evening a solemn farewell!
Octogenarian Eves, upon whom rests
God's terrible claw, where will you be tomorrow?
(tr. W. Aggeler)
After Demon’s sword duel with d’Onsky the latter marries the Bohemian lady. Bohémiens en voyage (“Traveling Gypsies”) and Duellum (“The Duel”) are sonnets by Baudelaire included in Les Fleurs du Mal.
At the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) shows to Van and Lucette the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a magnetic telephone nested and pronounces the words ‘currents’ and ‘circuits’ with an actress’s désinvolture (uninhibitedness):
Marina’s contribution was more modest, but it too had its charm. She showed Van and Lucette (the others knew all about it) the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a magnetic telephone nested, communicating with Ardis Hall. After the banning of ‘currents and circuits,’ she said (rapidly but freely, with an actress’s désinvolture pronouncing those not quite proper words — while puzzled Lucette tugged at the sleeve of Van, of Vanichka, who could explain everything), her husband’s grandmother, an engineer of great genius, ‘tubed’ the Redmount rill (running just below the glade from a hill above Ardis). She made it carry vibrational vibgyors (prismatic pulsations) through a system of platinum segments. These produced, of course, only one-way messages, and the installation and upkeep of the ‘drums’ (cylinders) cost, she said, a Jew’s eye, so that the idea was dropped, however tempting the possibility of informing a picnicking Veen that his house was on fire. (1.13)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): vibgyor: violet-indigo-blue-green-yellow-orange-red.
Electricity was banned on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century (1.3). The Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. In his essay on Dostoevski (in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers”) Ayhenvald mentions volny i vibratsii (waves and vibrations) that the world is sending to Dostoevski:
Мир посылает ему все свои волны и вибрации, мучит его обнажённые нервы, мир раздражает его. Порог раздражения лежит для него очень низко.
In his essay on Garshin (in “The Silhouettes of Russian Writers”) Ayhenvald compares Garshin to Dostoevski and points out that the most red flower is a flower of evil:
У Гаршина - та же стихия, что и у Достоевского; только, помимо размеров дарования, между ними есть и та разница, что первый, как писатель, - вне своего безумия, а последний - значительно во власти своего чёрного недуга.
Самый красный цветок – это цветок зла. Ничто не требует такой душевной силы, такого напряжения и действенности, как именно убийство.
In his story Krasnyi tsvetok (“The Red Flower,” 1883) Garshin mentions Ariman (Ahriman, the evil spirit in the Zoroastrianism):
Цветок в его глазах осуществлял собою всё зло; он впитал в себя всю невинно пролитую кровь (оттого он и был так красен), все слёзы, всю жёлчь человечества. Это было таинственное, страшное существо, противоположность Богу, Ариман, принявший скромный и невинный вид.
In his eyes the flower personified the entire evil; it has absorbed all innocently spilled blood (that’s why it was so red), all the tears and all the bile of humanity. It was a mysterious, terrible creature, God’s opposite, Ahriman, that adopted a humble and innocent disguise. (chapter V)
Ariman = Marina = Armina (Demon Veen's Mediterranian villa where Van was conceived):
Marina arrived in Nice a few days after the duel, and tracked Demon down in his villa Armina, and in the ecstasy of reconciliation neither remembered to dupe procreation, whereupon started the extremely interesnoe polozhenie (‘interesting condition’) without which, in fact, these anguished notes could not have been strung. (1.2)
In his poem Danse macabre (“The Dance of Death”) Baudelaire mentions Death’s nonchalance and désinvolture of a skinny coquette and un ruisseau lascif qui se frotte au rocher (a lecherous brook that rubs against the rocks):
Fière, autant qu'un vivant, de sa noble stature
Avec son gros bouquet, son mouchoir et ses gants
Elle a la nonchalance et la désinvolture
D'une coquette maigre aux airs extravagants.
Vit-on jamais au bal une taille plus mince?
Sa robe exagérée, en sa royale ampleur,
S'écroule abondamment sur un pied sec que pince
Un soulier pomponné, joli comme une fleur.
La ruche qui se joue au bord des clavicules,
Comme un ruisseau lascif qui se frotte au rocher,
Défend pudiquement des lazzi ridicules
Les funèbres appas qu'elle tient à cacher...
Proud as a living person of her noble stature,
With her big bouquet, her handkerchief and gloves,
She has the nonchalance and easy manner
Of a slender coquette with bizarre ways.
Did one ever see a slimmer waist at a ball?
Her ostentatious dress in its queenly fullness
Falls in ample folds over thin feet, tightly pressed
Into slippers with pompons pretty as flowers.
The swarm of bees that plays along her collar-bones
Like a lecherous brook that rubs against the rocks
Modestly protects from cat-calls and jeers
The funereal charms that she's anxious to hide...