Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

Mere pity, a Russian girl’s zhalost’, drew me to R. (whom musical critics have now ‘discovered’). He knew he would die young and was always, in fact, mostly corpse, never once, I swear, rising to the occasion, even when I showed openly my compassionate non-resistance because I, alas, was brimming with Van-less vitality, and had even considered buying the services of some rude, the ruder the better, young muzhik. As to P., I could explain my submitting to his kisses (first tender and plain, later growing fiercely expert, and finally tasting of me when he returned to my mouth — a vicious circle set spinning in early Thargelion, 1888) by saying that if I stopped seeing him he would divulge my affair with my cousin to my mother. He did say he could produce witnesses, such as the sister of your Blanche, and a stable boy who, I suspect, was impersonated by the youngest of the three demoiselles de Tourbe. witches all — but enough. Van, I could make much of those threats in explaining my conduct to you. I would not mention, naturally, that they were made in a bantering tone, hardly befitting a genuine blackmailer. Nor would I mention that even if he had proceeded to recruit anonymous messengers and informers, it might have ended in his wrecking his own reputation as soon as his motives and actions were exposed, as they were bound to be in the long ruin [sic! ‘run’ in her blue stocking. Ed.]. I would conceal, in a word, that I knew the coarse banter was meant only to drill-jar your poor brittle Ada — because, despite the coarseness, he had a keen sense of honor, odd though it may seem to you and me. No. I would concentrate entirely on the effect of the threat upon one ready to submit to any infamy rather than face the shadow of disclosure, for (and this, of course, neither he nor his informers could know), shocking as an affair between first cousins might have seemed to a law-abiding family, I refuse to imagine (as you and I have always done) how Marina and Demon would have reacted in ‘our’ case. By the jolts and skids of my syntax you will see that I cannot logically explain my behavior. I do not deny that I experienced a strange weakness during the perilous assignations I granted him, as if his brutal desire kept fascinating not only my inquisitive senses but also my reluctant intellect. I can swear, however, solemn Ada can swear that in the course of our ‘sylvan trysts’ I successfully evaded if not pollution, at least possession before and after your return to Ardis — except for one messy occasion when he half-took me by force — the over-eager dead man.

I’m writing from Marina Ranch — not very far from the little gulch in which Aqua died and into which I myself feel like creeping some day. For the time being, I’m returning for a while to the Pisang Hotel.

I salute the good auditor.

When Van retrieved in 1940 this thin batch of five letters, each in its VPL pink silk-paper case, from the safe in his Swiss bank where they had been preserved for exactly one half of a century, he was baffled by their small number. The expansion of the past, the luxuriant growth of memory had magnified that number to at least fifty. He recalled that he had also used as a cache the desk in his Park Lane studio, but he knew he had kept there only the innocent sixth letter (Dreams of Drama) of 1891, which had perished, together with her coded notes (of 1884-88) when the irreplaceable little palazzo burnt down in 1919. Rumor attributed the bright deed to the city fathers (three bearded elders and a blue-eyed young Mayor with a fabulous amount of front teeth), who could no longer endure their craving for the space that the solid dwarf occupied between two alabaster colossi; but instead of selling them the blackened area as expected, Van gleefully erected there his famous Lucinda Villa, a miniature museum just two stories high, with a still growing collection of microphotographed paintings from all public and private galleries in the world (not excluding Tartary) on one floor and a honeycomb of projection cells on the other: a most appetizing little memorial of Parian marble, administered by a considerable staff, guarded by three heavily armed stalwarts, and open to the public only on Mondays for a token fee of one gold dollar regardless of age or condition.

No doubt the singular multiplication of those letters in retrospect could be explained by each of them casting an excruciating shadow, similar to that of a lunar volcano, over several months of his life, and tapering to a point only when the no less pangful precognition of the next message began to dawn. But many years later, when working on his Texture of Time, Van found in that phenomenon additional proof of real time’s being connected with the interval between events, not with their ‘passage,’ not with their blending, not with their shading the gap wherein the pure and impenetrable texture of time transpires.