Have you met Annabel? No? Me neither. I never did. The reason I ask is that I was watching the news the other day, and there was this story about this man who had killed another man and had kidnapped his own daughter and was awaiting trial in jail. He had a very strange name, one that was so familiar to me because of its strangeness, but I could not place it immediately.
I realized that I met Humbert Humbert about thirty years ago, while I was a child and he was a child, while on vacation for the summer in the Riviera with my father’s cousin, Dr. James Cooper. Uncle James (as I called him, he was always more uncle to me than second cousin or first cousin once removed or whatever our relation actually was) was attempting to woo a woman, whose name I do not remember for it was a particularly normal one, and this woman was Humbert Humbert’s aunt.
Uncle James, when he met Humbert’s aunt, wanted to spend time with her, and not me, which is something I understand in retrospect. Humbert’s aunt, when she met my uncle, wanted to spend time with him and not with Humbert, something I really, truly, understand in retrospect. So, us being close in age, separated by about two years, I his elder, we were natural play mates.
When they introduced us, Uncle James and Humbert’s aunt, they told us to go play on the beach. And Humbert asked me, before even asking my name, before the obvious pleasantries of ‘where are you from?’ or the obvious criticism of my uncle for attempting to sleep with his aunt, he asked me, “Have you met Annabel?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “She’s mine.”
Humbert and I became playmates by necessity. It is no fun to be a child surrounded only by adults who don’t want you around. Humbert and I would often go to the beach, sometimes play in the surf, but mostly just sit on the beach, talking about the unimportant matters that children talk about. He would lift handfuls of sand and sift it through his fingers, allowing the sand to settle on his legs. I was never sure what he was looking for. We would sit on the beach and talk for hours, he playing with the sand, I watching him, skeptically, as he continued to comb the beach. Humbert loved tennis, I remember that now, and talked about it at length, sometimes even finding drift wood on the beach and swinging at the small jelly fish that washed up, attempting to drive them back into the ocean but usually – splat – they wouldn’t make it back to the water.
I remember one afternoon, he and I walked the length of the beach, talking about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I planned to be a doctor in some Asiatic country, where people needed helping and I could make a difference. He didn’t acknowledge me, instead noticing something maybe twenty feet ahead of us, lying on the sand. He ran up, leaving me behind, examined the overturned horseshoe crab, alive, “It’s legs are still moving!” He screamed back to me.
Then he jumped and landed with all his weight on the crab, cracking its exoskeleton in pieces, spilling its crab innards. He looked back at me and, with a devious half-smile, announced, “I’m going to be a secret agent.” My sunglasses fell off and I did not pick them up again. They became two eyes permanently on the beach; the image of a helpless animal being crushed forever burned into their tinted retinas.
My uncle James invited Humbert’s aunt and Humbert to our villa, which was not far from the hotel that Humbert’s family owned and operated, one night for dinner. We ate, the four of us, at the table, and when dinner was over the adults ordered us to go play. Humbert looked at me, announced he was preoccupied, too preoccupied to play with me, went into the small bag he had brought with him, removed a book of Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, and went out to sit in the garden.
I did not follow immediately. Instead, I went to my room, picked a book, and began reading by my window. I could see Humbert at the far end of the garden, lying on his stomach, book open on the ground, raising and lowering his hips in rhythm.
I went downstairs, through the study to avoid the adults in the living room, and out into the garden. “Humbert?” I said. “What are you doing?”
Humbert quickly rose from the ground, embarrassment on his cheeks, holding the book of poems across his groin. He got angry, screamed at me some unintelligible mad rantings, until his aunt heard and came outside. My uncle followed.
Their evening ruined, the adults were upset with us children. When they asked what we had been doing, I told them I had only just come out here a minute ago, Humbert accused me of lying, and our forced friendship became a forced acquaintanceship. We were still made to play together on a regular basis, but now we would be watched incessantly, which was fine by me because I was not sure how many more living and semi-living sea creatures I could watch Humbert kill on the beach.
Now when we went to the beach we were allowed out of earshot but never out of sight. Our days became tedious, Humbert talking about this Annabel I had never met, would never meet, while I tried my best to ignore him.
The last day of the summer could not come quickly enough. I was ready to move onto our next engagement, but my uncle was sad to be leaving Humbert’s aunt, so one final dinner was arranged. The four of us ate at a sidewalk cafe that night, My uncle and Humbert’s aunt and I on one side of the table, Humbert on the other, nose in his book, separate from us.
I ate a chocolate glacé for dessert and Humbert stopped reading for a moment to watch me enjoy it. Then, suddenly, he was gone, and his aunt and my uncle did not seem to care. I certainly did not.
The next day my uncle and I boarded a boat bound for Greece. I stayed for three weeks with him on that island, Corfu, before it was time for me to go back to England and back to school. Three months later, my uncle died of typhus.
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