When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) visits Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie) in Ward Five of the Kalugano hospital (where hopeless cases are kept), Rack tells Van that he sent his last flute melody, and a letter for all the family, and no answer has come:
Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then went back to the article that engrossed him — ‘A Clever Piggy (from the memoirs of an animal trainer),’ or else ‘The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops.’ A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from behind the farther screen and disappeared again.
Will he ask me to transmit a message? Shall I refuse? Shall I consent — and not transmit it?
‘Have they all gone to Hollywood already? Please, tell me, Baron von Wien.’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Van. ‘They probably have. I really —’
‘Because I sent my last flute melody, and a letter for all the family, and no answer has come. I must vomit now. I ring myself.’ (1.42)
When Ada refuses to leave her sick husband, Van walks some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flies to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range:
She led him around the hotel to an ugly rotunda, out of the miserable drizzle, and there she attempted to embrace him but he evaded her lips. She was leaving in a few minutes. Heroic, helpless Andrey had been brought back to the hotel in an ambulance. Dorothy had managed to obtain three seats on the Geneva-Phoenix plane. The two cars were taking him, her and the heroic sister straight to the helpless airport.
She asked for a handkerchief, and he pulled out a blue one from his windjacket pocket, but her tears had started to roll and she shaded her eyes, while he stood before her with outstretched hand.
‘Part of the act?’ he inquired coldly.
She shook her head, took the handkerchief with a childish ‘merci,’ blew her nose and gasped, and swallowed, and spoke, and next moment all, all was lost.
She could not tell her husband while he was ill. Van would have to wait until Andrey was sufficiently well to bear the news and that might take some time. Of course, she would have to do everything to have him completely cured, there was a wondermaker in Arizona —
‘Sort of patching up a bloke before hanging him,’ said Van.
‘And to think,’ cried Ada with a kind of square shake of stiff hands as if dropping a lid or a tray, ‘to think that he dutifully concealed everything! Oh, of course, I can’t leave him now!’
‘Yes, the old story — the flute player whose impotence has to be treated, the reckless ensign who may never return from a distant war!’
‘Ne ricane pas!’ exclaimed Ada. ‘The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?’
As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.
‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’
‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’
‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet —’
‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).
‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène —’
‘Ach, perestagne!’
‘— et le phalène.’
‘Je t’emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’
‘Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!’
There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.
‘Stay with me, girl,’ said Van, forgetting everything — pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.
For an instant she seemed to waver — or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.
‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ll write you,’ murmured my poor love in tears.
Van kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry about his car, letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry about Eveline’s skin trouble, he walked some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flew to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range
— And o'er the summits of the Basset — (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): phalène: moth (see also p.111).
tu sais etc.: you know it will kill me.
Bozhe moy: Russ., oh, my God.
The basset horn is a member of the clarinet family of musical instruments (Mozart uses it at the beginning of his Requiem):
The flute player whose impotence has to be treated (as Van calls Rack) makes one think of Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute," 1791). Its characters include Tamino and Pamina, Papageno and Papagena. Tamino and Pamina bring to mind Tennessee Williams' play Camino Real (1953). Its title ("Royal Road" in Spanish) suggests some sort of road, but the setting is a dead-end place, a Spanish-speaking town surrounded by desert with only sporadic transportation to the outside world. It is described by Williams as "nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in." A character in Mozart's opera, Papageno is der Vogelfänger (the bird catcher). Ada's husband, Andrey Vinelander is a great sportsman who knows American game remarkably well:
Some kind of musical gadget played jungle jingles; the open bags of a Tirolese couple stood unpleasantly near — and Van bribed the waiter to carry their table out, onto the boards of an unused pier. Ada admired the waterfowl population: Tufted Ducks, black with contrasty white flanks making them look like shoppers (this and the other comparisons are all Ada’s) carrying away an elongated flat carton (new tie? gloves?) under each arm, while the black tuft recalled Van’s head when he was fourteen and wet, having just taken a dip in the brook. Coots (which had returned after all), swimming with an odd pumping movement of the neck, the way horses walk. Small grebes and big ones, with crests, holding their heads erect, with something heraldic in their demeanor. They had, she said, wonderful nuptial rituals, closely facing each other — so (putting up her index fingers bracketwise) — rather like two bookends and no books between, and, shaking their heads in turn, with flashes of copper.
‘I asked you about Andrey’s rituals.’
‘Ach, Andrey is so excited to see all those European birds! He’s a great sportsman and knows our Western game remarkably well. We have in the West a very cute little grebe with a black ribbon around its fat white bill. Andrey calls it pestroklyuvaya chomga. And that big chomga there is hohlushka, he says. If you scowl like that once again, when I say something innocent and on the whole rather entertaining, I’m going to kiss you on the tip of the nose, in front of everybody.’
Just a tiny mite artificial, not in her best Veen. But she recovered instantly:
‘Oh, look at those sea gulls playing chicken.’
Several rieuses, a few of which were still wearing their tight black summer bonnets, had settled on the vermilion railing along the lakeside, with their tails to the path and watched which of them would stay staunchly perched at the approach of the next passerby. The majority flapped waterward as Ada and Van neared; one twitched its tail feathers and made a movement analogous to ‘bending one’s knees’ but saw it through and remained on the railing. (3.8)
Fourteen-year-old Van Veen takes a dip in the brook after the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time):
Blue butterflies nearly the size of Small Whites, and likewise of European origin, were flitting swiftly around the shrubs and settling on the drooping clusters of yellow flowers. In less complex circumstances, forty years hence, our lovers were to see again, with wonder and joy, the same insect and the same bladder-senna along a forest trail near Susten in the Valais. At the present moment he was looking forward to collecting what he would recollect later, and watched the big bold Blues as he sprawled on the turf, burning with the evoked vision of Ada’s pale limbs in the variegated light of the bower, and then coldly telling himself that fact could never quite match fancy. When he returned from a swim in the broad and deep brook beyond the bosquet, with wet hair and tingling skin, Van got the rare treat of finding his foreglimpse of live ivory accurately reproduced, except that she had loosened her hair and changed into the curtal frock of sunbright cotton that he was so fond of and had so ardently yearned to soil in the so recent past.
He had resolved to deal first of all with her legs which he felt he had not feted enough the previous night; to sheathe them in kisses from the A of arched instep to the V of velvet; and this Van accomplished as soon as Ada and he got sufficiently deep in the larchwood which closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Ardis and Ladore.
Neither could establish in retrospect, nor, indeed, persisted in trying to do so, how, when and where he actually ‘de-flowered’ her — a vulgarism Ada in Wonderland had happened to find glossed in Phrody’s Encyclopedia as ‘to break a virgin’s vaginal membrane by manly or mechanical means,’ with the example: ‘The sweetness of his soul was deflowered (Jeremy Taylor).’ Was it that night on the lap robe? Or that day in the larchwood? Or later in the shooting gallery, or in the attic, or on the roof, or on a secluded balcony, or in the bathroom, or (not very comfortably) on the Magic Carpet? We do not know and do not care.
(You kissed and nibbled, and poked, and prodded, and worried me there so much and so often that my virginity was lost in the shuffle; but I do recall definitely that by midsummer the machine which our forefathers called’ sex’ was working as smoothly as later, in 1888, etc., darling. Marginal note in red ink.) (1.20)
Because love is blind, Van fails to see that, in the Night of the Burning Barn, Ada (who is barely twelve years old) is not a virgin. Ada's first lover, whose photograph Van later sees in Kim Beauharnais' album, was Dr Krolik's brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik, a Doctor of Philosophy, born in Turkey. Taking place in the main plaza, the play (Tennessee Williams' Camino Real) goes through a series of confusing and almost logic-defying events, including the revival of the Gypsy's daughter (Esmeralda)'s virginity and then the loss of it again. A main theme that the play deals with is coming to terms with the thought of growing older and possibly becoming irrelevant.
Similarly, Van never finds out that Andrey Vinelander and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, "little Violet," and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren.
Btw., Philip Rack's wife Elsie (whose lover played the triple viola) had a complicated miscarriage ("driblets") in the maternity ward of the Kalugano hospital.