Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

Of all their many houses, in Europe and in the Tropics, the château recently built in Ex, in the Swiss Alps, with its pillared front and crenelated turrets, became their favorite, especially in midwinter, when the famous glittering air, le cristal d’Ex, ‘matches the highest forms of human thought — pure mathematics & decipherment’ (unpublished ad).

At least twice a year our happy couple indulged in fairly long travels. Ada did not breed or collect butterflies any more, but throughout her healthy and active old age loved to film them in their natural surroundings, at the bottom of her garden or the end of the world, flapping and flitting, settling on flowers or filth, gliding over grass or granite, fighting or mating. Van accompanied her on picture-shooting journeys to Brazil, the Congo, New Guinea, but secretly preferred a long drink under a tent to a long wait under a tree for some rarity to come down to the bait and be taken in color. One would need another book to describe Ada’s adventures in Adaland. The films — and the crucified actors (Identification Mounts) — can be seen by arrangement at the Lucinda Museum, 5, Park Lane, Manhattan.

2

He had lived up to the ancestral motto: ‘As healthy a Veen as father has been.’ At fifty he could look back at the narrowing recession of only one hospital corridor (with a pair of white-shod trim feet tripping away), along which he had ever been wheeled. He now noticed, however, that furtive, furcating cracks kept appearing in his physical well-being, as if inevitable decomposition were sending out to him, across static gray time, its first emissaries. A stuffed nose caused a stifling dream, and, at the door of the slightest cold, intercostal neuralgia waited with its blunt spear. The more spacious his bedside table grew the more cluttered it became with such absolute necessities of the night as nose drops, eucalyptic pastilles, wax earplugs, gastric tablets, sleeping pills, mineral water, zinc ointment, a spare cap for its tube lest the original escape under the bed, and a large handkerchief to wipe the sweat accumulating between right jaw and right clavicle, neither being accustomed to his new fleshiness and insistence to sleep on one side only, so as not to hear his heart: he had made the mistake one night in 1920 of calculating the maximal number of its remaining beats (allowing for another half-century), and now the preposterous hurry of the countdown irritated him and increased the rate at which he could hear himself dying. During his solitary and quite superfluous peregrinations, he had developed a morbid sensitivity to night noises in luxury hotels (the gogophony of a truck rated three distressibles; the Saturday-night gawky cries exchanged by young apprentices in the empty street, thirty; a radiator-relayed snore from downstairs, three hundred); but, though indispensable at times of total despair, earplugs had the disadvantage (especially after too much wine) of magnifying the throbbing in his temples, the weird squeaks in his inexplored nasal cavity, and the atrocious creak of his neck vertebras. To an echo of that creak, transmitted vascularly to the brain before the system of sleep took over, he put down the eerie detonation that took place somewhere in his head at the instant that his senses played false to his consciousness. Antacid mints and the like proved sometimes insufficient to relieve the kind of good old-fashioned heartburn, which invariably afflicted him after certain rich sauces; but on the other hand, he looked forward with juvenile zest to the delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the ‘funnies’ of his boyhood.

Before he met (at eighty) tactful and tender, ribald and learned, Dr Lagosse who thenceforth resided and traveled with him and Ada, he had detested physicians. Notwithstanding his own medical training, he could not shake off a sneaky, credulous feeling, befitting a yokel, that the doctor who pumped up a sphygmomanometer or listened in to his wheeze already knew (but still kept secret) what fatal illness had been diagnosed with the certainty of death itself. He wryly remembered his late brother-in-law, when he caught himself concealing from Ada that his bladder troubled him on and off or that he had had another spell of dizziness after paring his toenails (a task he performed himself, being unable to endure any human hand to touch his bare feet).