Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter

Raising drawbridges might be an effective system of protection until such time as the flowering chasm itself reached up to the chamber with a robust young branch. Yet, precisely because during the first two years or so the captive would be ignorant of the temporarily noxious nexus between the puppet in her hands and the puppet-master’s panting, between the plum in her mouth and the rapture of the distant tree, he would have to be particularly cautious, not to let her go anywhere alone, make frequent changes of domicile (the ideal would be a mini-villa in a blind garden), keep a sharp eye out lest she make friends with other children or have occasion to start chatting with the woman from the greengrocer’s or the char, for there was no telling what impudent elf might fly from the lips of enchanted innocence—and what monster a stranger’s ear would carry off for examination and discussion by the sages. And yet, for what could one possibly reproach the enchanter?

He knew he would find sufficient delights in her so as not to disenchant her prematurely, emphasize anything about her by unduly obvious manifestations of rapture, or push his way too insistently into some little blind alley as he acted out his monastic promenade. He knew he would make no attempt on her virginity in the tightest and pinkest sense of the term until the evolution of their caresses had ascended a certain invisible step. He would hold back until that morning when, still laughing, she would hearken to her own responsiveness and, growing mute, demand that the search for the hidden musical string be made jointly.

As he imagined the coming years, he continued to envision her as an adolescent—such was the carnal postulate. However, catching himself on this premise, he realized without difficulty that, even if the putative passage of time contradicted, for the moment, a permanent foundation for his feelings, the gradual progression of successive delights would assure natural renewals of his pact with happiness, which took into account, as well, the adaptability of living love. Against the light of that happiness, no matter what age she attained—seventeen, twenty—her present image would always transpire through her metamorphoses, nourishing their translucent strata from its internal fountainhead. And this very process would allow him, with no loss or diminishment, to savor each unblemished stage of her transformations. Besides, she herself, delineated and elongated into womanhood, would never again be free to dissociate, in her consciousness and her memory, her own development from that of their love, her childhood recollections from her recollections of male tenderness. Consequently, past, present, and future would appear to her as a single radiance whose source had emanated, as she had herself, from him, from her viviparous lover.

Thus they would live on—laughing, reading books, marveling at gilded fireflies, talking of the flowering walled prison of the world, and he would tell her tales and she would listen, his little Cordelia, and nearby the sea would breathe beneath the moon…. And exceedingly slowly, at first with all the sensitivity of his lips, then in earnest, with all their weight, ever deeper, only thus—for the first time—into your inflamed heart, thus, forcing my way, thus, plunging into it, between its melting edges …

The lady who had been sitting across from him for some reason suddenly got up and went into another compartment; he glanced at the blank face of his wristwatch—it wouldn’t be long now—and then he was already ascending next to a white wall crowned with blinding shards of glass as a multitude of swallows flew overhead.

He was met on the porch by the late person’s friend, who explained the presence of a heap of ashes and charred logs in a corner of the garden by the fact that there had been a fire that night; the firemen had had trouble bringing the raging flames under control, had broken a young apple tree, and of course nobody had gotten any sleep. Just then she came out, in a dark knit dress (in this heat!) with a shiny leather belt, and a chain on her neck, wearing long black stockings, the poor thing, and at this very first instant he had the impression that she was not quite as pretty as before, that she had grown more snub-nosed and leggier. Gloomily, rapidly, with nothing but a feeling of acute tenderness for her mourning, he took her by the shoulder and kissed her warm hair.

“Everything could have caught fire!” she exclaimed, raising her rosily illumined face with the shadows of foliage on her forehead and goggling her eyes, in which shimmered the liquidly transparent reflections of sun and garden.

She contentedly held onto his arm as they entered the house behind its loudly talking mistress—and the spontaneity had already evaporated, already he was awkwardly bending his arm (or was it hers?)—and, at the door to the parlor, where resounded the monologue that had preceded them accompanied by the opening of shutters, he freed his hand and, feigning an absentminded caress (but actually totally engrossed for an instant in a good, firm feel, complete with dimple), he patted her on the hip—as if to say, run along, child—and then he was already sitting down, finding a place for his walking stick, lighting up, looking for an ashtray, saying something in answer to a question, filled all the while with a savage exultation.

He refused tea, explaining that at any moment the car he had ordered at the station would arrive, that it already contained his luggage (this detail, as occurs in dreams, had a certain glimmer of meaning), and that “you and I will be off to the seashore”—which he almost shouted in the direction of the girl who, looking back in mid-step, nearly crashed into a stool, but instantly regained her youthful balance, turned, and sat down, covering the stool with her settling skirt.

“What?” she asked, brushing back her hair with a sidewise glance at the hostess (the stool had already once been broken). He said it again. She joyously raised her eyebrows—she had no idea it would happen like this, today.

“And I was hoping,” lied the hostess, “that you would spend the night with us.”

“Oh, no!” cried the girl, rushing over to him with a parquet slide, and then continued with unexpected rapidity, “Do you think I can learn how to swim soon? A friend of mine says you can, right away, all you have to do is learn not to be afraid first, and that takes a month….” But the woman was already nudging her by the elbow so she would go finish packing, with Maria, the things that had been laid out in the left section of the wardrobe.

“I confess I don’t envy you,” she said, turning over her tutelage, after the child had run out. “Lately, especially after her flu, she’s been having all kinds of outbursts and tantrums; the other day she was rude to me—it’s a difficult age. All in all I think it would be a good thing if you hired some young woman to look after her and, in the fall, found her a good Catholic boarding school. As you can see, the death of her mother has not been too much of a shock to her—of course, she may be holding it in, for all I know. Our shared existence is over with…. By the way, I still owe you… No, no, I won’t hear of it, I insist…. Oh, he doesn’t get home from work till around seven—he’ll be very disappointed…. That’s life, what can you do. At least she has found her peace in Heaven, poor thing, and you are looking better too…. If it hadn’t been for our encounter… I simply don’t see how I could have kept supporting someone else’s child, and as for orphanages, they lead directly you know where. That’s why I always say—you never know in life. Remember that day, on the bench—remember? It never occurred to me she could find a second husband, and yet my feminine intuition told me that something in you was longing for just that kind of refuge.”