Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

This letter will never be posted. It will lie in a steel box buried under a cypress in the garden of Villa Armina, and when it turns up by chance half a millennium hence, nobody will know who wrote it and for whom it was meant. It would not have been written at all if your last line, your cry of unhappiness, were not my cry of triumph. The burden of that excitement must be… [The rest of the sentence was found to be obliterated by a rusty stain when the box was dug up in 1928. The letter continues as follows]:…back in the States, I started upon a singular quest. In Manhattan, in Kingston, in Lahore, in dozens of other towns, I kept pursuing the picture which I had not [badly discolored] on the boat, from cinema to cinema, every time discovering a new item of glorious torture, a new convulsion of beauty in your performance. That [illegible] is a complete refutation of odious Kim’s odious stills. Artistically, and ardisiacally, the best moment is one of the last — when you follow barefoot the Don who walks down a marble gallery to his doom, to the scaffold of Dona Anna’s black-curtained bed, around which you flutter, my Zegris butterfly, straightening a comically drooping candle, whispering delightful but futile instructions into the frowning lady’s ear, and then peering over that mauresque screen and suddenly dissolving in such natural laughter, helpless and lovely, that one wonders if any art could do without that erotic gasp of schoolgirl mirth. And to think, Spanish orange-tip, that all in all your magic gambol lasted but eleven minutes of stopwatch time in patches of two- or three-minute scenes!

Alas, there came a night, in a dismal district of workshops and bleary shebeens, when for the very last time, and only halfway, because at the seduction scene the film black-winked and shriveled, I managed to catch [the entire end of the letter is damaged].

7

He greeted the dawn of a placid and prosperous century (more than half of which Ada and I have now seen) with the beginning of his second philosophic fable, a ‘denunciation of space’ (never to be completed, but forming in rear vision, a preface to his Texture of Time). Part of that treatise, a rather mannered affair, but nasty and sound, appeared in the first issue (January, 1904) of a now famous American monthly, The Artisan, and a comment on the excerpt is preserved in one of the tragically formal letters (all destroyed save this one) that his sister sent him by public post now and then. Somehow, after the interchange occasioned by Lucette’s death such nonclandestine correspondence had been established with the tacit sanction of Demon:

And o’er the summits of the Tacit

He, banned from Paradise, flew on:

Beneath him, like a brilliant’s facet,

Mount Peck with snows eternal shone.

It would seem indeed that continued ignorance of each other’s existence might have looked more suspicious than the following sort of note:

Agavia Ranch

February 5, 1905