22

They went boating and swimming in Ladore, they followed the bends of its adored river, they tried to find more rhymes to it, they walked up the hill to the black ruins of Bryant’s Castle, with the swifts still flying around its tower. They traveled to Kaluga and drank the Kaluga Waters, and saw the family dentist. Van, flipping through a magazine, heard Ada scream and say “chort” (devil) in the next room, which he had never heard her do before. They had tea at a neighbor’s, Countess de Prey—who tried to sell them, unsuccessfully, a lame horse. They visited the fair at Ardisville where they especially admired the Chinese tumblers, a German clown, and a sword-swallowing hefty Circassian Princess who started with a fruit knife, went on to a be jeweled dagger and finally engulfed, string and all, a tremendous salami sausage.

They made love—mostly in glens and gullies.

To the average physiologist, the energy of those two youngsters might have seemed abnormal. Their craving for each other grew unbearable if within a few hours it was not satisfied several times, in sun or shade, on roof or in cellar, anywhere. Despite uncommon resources of ardor, young Van could hardly keep pace with his pale little amorette (local French slang). Their immoderate exploitation of physical joy amounted to madness and would have curtailed their young lives had not summer, which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom, begun to hint hazily at possible failings and fadings, at the fatigue of its fugue—the last resort of nature, felicitous alliterations (when flowers and flies mime one another), the coming of a first pause in late August, a first silence in early September. The orchards and vineyards were partie ularly picturesque that year; and Ben Wright was fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Larivière home from the Vendange Festival at Brantôme near Ladore.

Which reminds us. Catalogued in the Ardis library under “Exot Lubr” was a sumptuous tome (known to Van through Miss Vertograd’s kind offices) entitled “Forbidden Masterpieces: a hundred paintings representing a private part of Nat. Gal. (Sp. Set.), printed for H.R.M. King Victor.” This was (beautifully photographed in color) the kind of voluptuous and tender stuff that Italian masters allowed themselves to produce in between too many pious Resurrections during a too long and lusty Renaissance. The volume itself had been either lost or stolen or lay concealed in the attic among Uncle Ivan’s effects, some of them pretty bizarre. Van could not recollect whose picture it was that he had in mind, but thought it might have been attributed to Michelangelo da Caravaggio in his youth. It was an oil on unframed canvas depicting two misbehaving nudes, boy and girl, in an ivied or vined grotto or near a small waterfall overhung with bronze-tinted and dark emerald leaves, and great bunches of translucent grapes, the shadows and limpid reflections of fruit and foliage blending magically with veined flesh.

Anyway (this may be purely a stylistic transition), he felt himself transferred into that forbidden masterpiece, one afternoon, when everybody had gone to Brantôme, and Ada and he were sunbathing on the brink of the Cascade in the larch plantation of Ardis Park, and his nymphet had bent over him and his detailed desire. Her long straight hair that seemed of a uniform bluish-black in the shade now revealed, in the gem-like sun, strains of deep auburn alternating with dark amber in lanky strands which clothed her hollowed cheek or were gracefully cleft by her raised ivory shoulder. The texture, gloss and odor of those brown silks had once inflamed his senses at the very beginning of that fatal summer, and continued to act upon him, strongly and poignantly, long after his young excitement had found in her other sources of incurable bliss. At ninety, Van remembered his first fall from a horse with scarcely less breathlessness of thought than that first time she had bent over him and he had possessed her hair. It tickled his legs, it crept into his crotch, it spread all over his palpitating belly. Through it the student of art could see the summit of the trovipe-l’oeil school, monumental, multicolored, jutting out of a dark background, molded in profile by a concentration of caravagesque light. She fondled him; she entwined him: thus a tendril climber coils round a column, swathing it tighter and tighter, biting into its neck ever sweeter, then dissolving strength in deep crimson softness. There was a crescent eaten out of a vine leaf by a sphingid larva. There was a well-known microlepidopterist who, having run out of Latin and Greek names, created such nomenclatorial items as Marykisme, Adakisme, Ohkisme. She did. Whose brush was it now? A titillant Titian? A drunken Palma Vecchio? No, she was anything but a Venetian blonde. Dosso Dossi, perhaps? Faun Exhausted by Nymph? Swooning Satyr? Doesn’t that new-filled molar hurt your own tongue? It bruised me. I’m joking, my circus Circassian.

A moment later the Dutch took over: Girl stepping into a pool under the little cascade to wash her tresses, and accompanying the immemorial gesture of wringing them out by making wringing-out mouths—immemorial too.