Describing his conversation with Demon (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's father) before the family dinner in "Ardis the Second," Van Veen says that nothing is fuller than an empty mind:
‘I must warn Marina,’ said Demon after a gum-rinse and a slow swallow, ‘that her husband should stop swilling tittery, and stick to French and Califrench wines — after that little stroke he had. I met him in town recently, near Mad Avenue, saw him walking toward me quite normally, but then as he caught sight of me, a block away, the clockwork began slowing down and he stopped — oh, helplessly! — before he reached me. That’s hardly normal. Okay. Let our sweethearts never meet, as we used to say, up at Chose. Only Yukonians think cognac is bad for the liver, because they have nothing but vodka. Well, I’m glad you get along so well with Ada. That’s fine. A moment ago, in that gallery, I ran into a remarkably pretty soubrette. She never once raised her lashes and answered in French when I — Please, my boy, move that screen a little, that’s right, the stab of a sunset, especially from under a thunderhead, is not for my poor eyes. Or poor ventricles. Do you like the type, Van — the bowed little head, the bare neck, the high heels, the trot, the wiggle, you do, don’t you?’
‘Well, sir —’
(Tell him I’m the youngest Venutian? Does he belong, too? Show the sign? Better not. Invent.)
‘— Well, I’m resting after my torrid affair, in London, with my tango-partner whom you saw me dance with when you flew over for that last show — remember?’
‘Indeed, I do. Curious, you calling it that.’
‘I think, sir, you’ve had enough brandy.’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Demon, wrestling with a subtle question which only the ineptitude of a kindred conjecture had crowded out of Marina’s mind, granted it could have entered by some back door; for ineptitude is always synonymous with multitude, and nothing is fuller than an empty mind.
The next thing will be ‘paternal repetitiousness.’)
‘— but a good son should put up with a little paternal repetitiousness — Well, she tells me her boy and Ada see a lot of each other, et cetera. Is that true?’
‘Not really,’ said Van. ‘They meet now and then — at the usual parties. Both like horses, and races, but that’s all. There is no et cetera, that’s out of the question.’ (1.38)
Van's remark brings to mind Leo Tolstoy's aphorism: "the one who has nothing to say speaks the most." Describing Lucette's visit to Kingston (Van's American University), Van mentions two ideas that were locked up in his head: 'We-have-so-much-to say’ and ‘We have absolutely nothing to say:’
‘Like some tea?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t stay long. Besides, you said something about a busy day over the phone. One can’t help being dreadfully busy after four absolutely blank years’ (he would start sobbing too if she did not stop).
‘Yes. I don’t know. I have an appointment around six.’
Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was 'We-have-so-much-to say’; the other was ‘We have absolutely nothing to say.’ But that sort of thing can change in one instant.
‘Yes, I have to see Rattner at six-thirty,’ murmured Van, consulting a calendar he did not see.
Rattner on Terra!’ ejaculated Lucette. ‘Van is reading Rattner on Terra. Pet must never, never disturb him and me when we are reading Rattner!’
‘I implore, my dear, no impersonations. Let us not transform a pleasant reunion into mutual torture.’
What was she doing at Queenston? She had told him before. Of course. Tough course? No. Oh. From time to time both kept glancing askance at the letter to see if it was behaving itself — not dangling its legs, not picking its nose.
Return it sealed?
‘Tell Rattner,’ she said, gulping down her third brandy as simply as if it were technicolored water. ‘Tell him’ (the liquor was loosening her pretty viper tongue) —
(Viper? Lucette? My dead dear darling?)
— ‘Tell him that when in the old days you and Ada —’
The name yawned like a black doorway, then the door banged.
‘— left me for him, and then came back, I knew every time that you vsyo sdelali (had appeased your lust, had allayed your fire).’
‘One remembers those little things much too clearly, Lucette. Please, stop.’
‘One remembers, Van, those little things much more clearly than the big fatal ones. As for example the clothes you wore at any given moment, at a generously given moment, with the sun on the chairs and the floor. I was practically naked, of course, being a neutral pure little child. But she wore a boy’s shirt and a short skirt, and all you had on were those wrinkled, soiled shorts, shorter because wrinkled, and they smelled as they always did after you’d been on Terra with Ada, with Rattner on Ada, with Ada on Antiterra in Ardis Forest — oh, they positively stank, you know, your little shorts of lavendered Ada, and her catfood, and your caked algarroba!’ (2.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): vsyo sdelali: Russ., had done everything.
The action in Ada takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. In his conversation with Van in "Ardis the Second" Demon mentions Terra (Demonia's twin planet) and that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer:
‘I don’t know if you know,’ said Van, resuming his perch on the fat arm of his father’s chair. ‘Uncle Dan will be here with the lawyer and Lucette only after dinner.’
‘Capital,’ said Demon.
‘Marina and Ada should be down in a minute — ce sera un dîner à quatre.’
‘Capital,’ he repeated. ‘You look splendid, my dear, dear fellow — and I don’t have to exaggerate compliments as some do in regard to an aging man with shoe-shined hair. Your dinner jacket is very nice — or, rather it’s very nice recognizing one’s old tailor in one’s son’s clothes — like catching oneself repeating an ancestral mannerism — for example, this (wagging his left forefinger three times at the height of his temple), which my mother did in casual, pacific denial; that gene missed you, but I’ve seen it in my hairdresser’s looking-glass when refusing to have him put Crêmlin on my bald spot; and you know who had it too — my aunt Kitty, who married the Banker Bolenski after divorcing that dreadful old wencher Lyovka Tolstoy, the writer.’
Demon preferred Walter Scott to Dickens, and did not think highly of Russian novelists. As usual, Van considered it fit to make a corrective comment:
‘A fantastically artistic writer, Dad.’
‘You are a fantastically charming boy,’ said Demon, shedding another sweet-water tear. He pressed to his cheek Van’s strong shapely hand. Van kissed his father’s hairy fist which was already holding a not yet visible glass of liquor. Despite the manly impact of their Irishness, all Veens who had Russian blood revealed much tenderness in ritual overflows of affection while remaining somewhat inept in its verbal expression.
‘I say,’ exclaimed Demon, ‘what’s happened — your shaftment is that of a carpenter’s. Show me your other hand. Good gracious’ (muttering:) ‘Hump of Venus disfigured, Line of Life scarred but monstrously long...’ (switching to a gipsy chant:) ‘You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man’ (reverting to his ordinary voice:) ‘What puzzles me as a palmist is the strange condition of the Sister of your Life. And the roughness!’
‘Mascodagama,’ whispered Van, raising his eyebrows.
‘Ah, of course, how blunt (dumb) of me. Now tell me — you like Ardis Hall?’
‘I adore it,’ said Van. ‘It’s for me the château que baignait la Dore. I would gladly spend all my scarred and strange life here. But that’s a hopeless fancy.’
‘That’s very black of you, Dad,’ said pleased Van, using a slang phrase he had learned from his tender young nurse, Ruby, who was born in the Mississippi region where most magistrates, public benefactors, high priests of various so-called’ denominations,’ and other honorable and generous men, had the dark or darkish skin of their West-African ancestors, who had been the first navigators to reach the Gulf of Mexico.
‘I wonder,’ Demon mused. ‘It would cost hardly more than a couple of millions minus what Cousin Dan owes me, minus also the Ladore pastures, which are utterly mucked up and should be got rid of gradually, if the local squires don’t blow up that new kerosene distillery, the stïd i sram (shame) of our county. I am not particularly fond of Ardis, but I have nothing against it, though I detest its environs. Ladore Town has become very honky-tonky, and the gaming is not what it used to be. You have all sorts of rather odd neighbors. Poor Lord Erminin is practically insane. At the races, the other day, I was talking to a woman I preyed upon years ago, oh long before Moses de Vere cuckolded her husband in my absence and shot him dead in my presence — an epigram you’ve heard before, no doubt from these very lips —’ (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): ce sera etc.: it will be a dinner for four
Wagging his left forefinger: that gene did not miss his daughter (see p.178, where the name of the cream is also prefigured).
Lyovka: derogative or folksy diminutive of Lyov (Leo).
Reading Van's palm, Demon predicts his own death. In March, 1905, Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7). 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.
Demon learns about his children's affair by chance, because of Uncle Dan's death. Describing Demon's visit to his Manhattan flat, Van compares Demon (who cannot stop speaking) to a crazy spectrum, a talking palette:
‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet. Ada is marrying an outdoor man, but her mind is a closed museum, and she, and dear Lucette, once drew my attention, by a creepy coincidence, to certain details of that other triptych, that tremendous garden of tongue-in-cheek delights, circa 1500, and, namely, to the butterflies in it — a Meadow Brown, female, in the center of the right panel, and a Tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower — mark the "as if," for here we have an example of exact knowledge on the part of those two admirable little girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and color, and what we have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice — but you are not following me, you want me to go, so that you may interrupt her beauty sleep, lucky beast! A propos, I have not been able to alert Lucette, who is somewhere in Italy, but I’ve managed to trace Marina to Tsitsikar — flirting there with the Bishop of Belokonsk — she will arrive in the late afternoon, wearing, no doubt, pleureuses, very becoming, and we shall then travel à trois to Ladore, because I don’t think —’
Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —
‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’
‘I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’
Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please go.
‘My gloves! Cloak! Thank you. Can I use your W.C.? No? All right. I’ll find one elsewhere. Come over as soon as you can, and we’ll meet Marina at the airport around four and then whizz to the wake, and —’
And here Ada entered. Not naked — oh no; in a pink peignoir so as not to shock Valerio — comfortably combing her hair, sweet and sleepy. She made the mistake of crying out ‘Bozhe moy!’ and darting back into the dusk of the bedroom. All was lost in that one chink of a second.
‘Or better — come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.’ He spoke, or thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers, blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now — when everything had gone to the hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken and the molti aspetti affascinati of his enigmatica arte, as Dan explained with a last sigh to Dr Nikulin and to nurse Bellabestia (‘Bess’) to whom he bequeathed a trunkful of museum catalogues and his second-best catheter. (2.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): c’est le mot: that’s the right word.
pleureuses: widow’s weeds.
Bozhe moy: Russ., good Heavens.