Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

He transmitted by the new ‘instantogram,’ flashed to the Geneva airport, a message ending in the last word of her 1905 cable; and despite the threats of a torrential night set out by car for the Vaud. Traveling too fast and too wildly, he somehow missed the Oberhalbstein road at the Sylvaplana fork (150 kilometers south of Alvena); wriggled back north, via Chiavenna and Splügen, to reach in apocalyptic circumstances Highway 19 (an unnecessary trip of 100 kilometers); veered by mistake east to Chur; performed an unprintable U-turn, and covered in a couple of hours the 175-kilometer stretch westward to Brig. The pale flush of dawn in his rear-vision mirror had long since turned to passionately bright daylight when he looped south, by the new Pfynwald road, to Sorcière, where seventeen years ago he had bought a house (now Villa Jolana). The three or four servants he had left there to look after it had taken advantage of his lengthy absence to fade away; so, with the enthusiastic help of two hitch-hikers stranded in the vicinity — a disgusting youth from Hilden and his long-haired, slatternly, languorous Hilda — he had to break into his own house. His accomplices were mistaken if they expected to find loot and liquor there. After throwing them out he vainly courted sleep on a sheetless bed and finally betook himself to the bird-mad garden, where his two friends were copulating in the empty swimming pool and had to be shooed off again. It was now around noon. He worked for a couple of hours on his Texture of Time, begun in the Dolomites at the Lammermoor (not the best of his recent hotels). The utilitarian impulse behind the task was to keep him from brooding on the ordeal of happiness awaiting him 150 kilometers west; it did not prevent a healthy longing for a hot breakfast from making him interrupt his scribbling to seek out a roadside inn on his way to Mont Roux.

The Three Swans where he had reserved rooms 508-509-510 had undergone certain changes since 1905. A portly, plum-nosed Lucien did not recognize him at once — and then remarked that Monsieur was certainly not ‘deperishing’ — although actually Van had almost reverted to his weight of seventeen years earlier, having shed several kilos in the Balkans rock-climbing with crazy little Acrazia (now dumped in a fashionable boarding school near Florence). No, Madame Vinn Landère had not called. Yes, the hall had been renovated. Swiss-German Louis Wicht now managed the hotel instead of his late father-in-law Luigi Fantini. In the lounge, as seen through its entrance, the huge memorable oil — three ample-haunched Ledas swapping lacustrine impressions — had been replaced by a neoprimitive masterpiece showing three yellow eggs and a pair of plumber’s gloves on what looked like wet bathroom tiling. As Van stepped into the ‘elevator’ followed by a black-coated receptionist, it acknowledged his footfall with a hollow clank and then, upon moving, feverishly began transmitting a fragmentary report on some competition — possibly a tricycle race. Van could not help feeling sorry that this blind functional box (even smaller than the slop-pail lift he had formerly used at the back) now substituted for the luxurious affair of yore — an ascentive hall of mirrors — whose famous operator (white whiskers, eight languages) had become a button.

In the hallway of 509, Van recognized the Bruslot à la sonde picture next to the pregnant-looking white closet (under whose round sliding doors the corner of the carpet, now gone, would invariably catch). In the salon itself, only a lady’s bureau and the balcony view were familiar. Everything else — the semi-transparent shredded-wheat ornaments, the glass flowerheads, the silk-covered armchairs — had been superseded by Hochmodern fixtures.