Tuesday, September 24, 2013
transformation
Issue: Transformation
"But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be
good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary
children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances
would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the
least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng,
he espied a demon child, "enfant charmante et fourbe," dim eyes,
bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her.
So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it
was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early
(10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And
the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented
pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles."
"'There is another man in my life.'
Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I
confess. To beat her up in the street, there and then, as an honest
vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had
taught me superhuman self-control. So I ushered her into a taxi which had
been invitingly creeping along the curb for some time, and in this
comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. A
mounting fury was suffocating me--not because I had any particular fondness
for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because matters of legal and
illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she was, Valeria,
the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort
and fate. I demanded her lover's name. I repeated my question; but she kept
up a burlesque babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announcing
plans for an immediate divorce. "Mais qui est-ce?" I shouted at last,
striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared
at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug
and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small
cafè and introduced himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name but after
all those years I still see him quite clearly--a stocky White Russian
ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut; there were thousands of
them plying that fool's trade in Paris. We sat down at a table; the Tsarist
ordered wine, and Valeria, after applying a wet napkin to her knee, went on
talking--into me rather than to me; she poured words into this
dignified receptacle with a volubility I had never suspected she had in her.
And every now and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid
lover. The situation was preposterous and became even more so when the
taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold
his views and plans. With an atrocious accent to his careful French,
he delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to enter
hand in hand with his child-wife Valeria. She by now was preening herself,
between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at
her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent,
and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being
transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiser
one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured
certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such
things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or
should read. "I think," - he said, "She will like Jean Christophe?"
Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich."
(The transformation here is two-fold: HHs tone transforms from anger to indifference, and his memory transforms from not knowing the "ridiculous name" to ending the passage with it.)
"A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron would of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that
the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had
possessed her--and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder."
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