Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

A remote cousin, no longer René’s sister, not even his half-sister (so lyrically anathematized by Monparnasse), she stepped over him as over a log and returned the embarrassed dog to Marina. The actor, who quite likely would run into some body’s fist in a forthcoming scene, made a filthy remark in broken French.

‘Du sollst nicht zuhören,’ murmured Ada to German Dack before putting him back in Marina’s lap under the ‘accursed children.’ ‘On ne parle pas comme ça devant un chien,’ added Ada, not deigning to glance at Pedro, who nevertheless got up, reconstructed his crotch, and beat her to the pool with a Nurjinski leap.

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture. The silly girl had heaped her hair under a rubber cap, and this gave an unfamiliar, vaguely clinical look to her neck, with its odd dark wisps and strags, as if she had obtained a nurse’s job and would never dance again. Her faded, bluish-gray, one-piece swimsuit had a spot of grease and a hole above one hip — nibbled through, one might conjecture, by a tallow-starved larva — and seemed much too short for careless comfort. She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia. None of those minor matters would have annoyed Van, had she and he been alone together; but the presence of the all-male actor made everything obscene, drab and insupportable. We move back to the lip of the pool.

Our young man, being exceptionally brezgliv (squeamish, easily disgusted), had no desire to share a few cubic meters of chlorinated celestino (‘blues your bath’) with two other fellows. He was emphatically not Japanese. He always remembered, with — shudders of revulsion, the indoor pool of his prep school, the running noses, the pimpled chests, the chance contacts with odious male flesh, the suspicious bubble bursting like a small stink bomb, and especially, especially, the bland, sly, triumphant and absolutely revolting wretch who stood in shoulder-high water and secretly urinated (and, God, how he had beaten him up, though that Vere de Vere was three years older than he).

He now kept carefully out of reach of any possible splash as Pedro and Phil snorted and fooled in their foul bath. Presently the pianist, floating up and showing his awful gums in a servile grin, tried to draw Ada into the pool from her outstretched position on the tiled margin, but she evaded the grab of his despair by embracing the big orange ball she had just fished out and, pushing him away with that shield, she then threw it toward Van, who slapped it aside, refusing the gambit, ignoring the gambol, scorning the gambler.

And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).

‘Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,’ he said.

‘Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?’ she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.

‘Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,’ the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.

‘Oh that’ (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). ‘Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.’

‘Next time, maybe, no Pedro?’

‘Too bad,’ said Ada. ‘Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.’

‘E tu?’ Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. ‘Again screwdriver?’

‘Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand’ (turning to Vronsky), ‘why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it fieshbeck), ‘Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.’

‘He does not,’ cried G.A., ‘it’s only a half-hearted flashback. Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?’

‘Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,’ said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns out of her own past.

‘Read on, read, it all becomes clear,’ said G.A., riffling through his own copy.

‘Incidentally,’ observed Marina, ‘I hope dear Ida will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can’t be made to recite French poetry.’

‘If she protests,’ said Vronsky, ‘she can go and stick a telegraph pole — where it belongs.’