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Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangular shadows. I made out what
looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school
playground; and in another wastelike black there rose in domed silence the
pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the
motel, where millions of so-called "millers," a kind of insect, were
swarming around the neon contours of "No Vacancy"; and, when, at 3 a.m.,
after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to
fix a man's despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of
chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special
French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to
assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was
separated from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness was
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somehow the development of a theme--that it had the same taste and tone as
the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during
our journey; I imagined that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or
hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital--and Aurora
had hardly "warmed her hands," as the pickers of lavender way in the country
of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again,
knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stool-less, in despair.
This was Tuesday, and Wednesday or Thursday, splendidly reacting like
the darling she was to some "serum" (sparrow's sperm or dugong's dung), she
was much better, and the doctor said that in a couple of days she would be
"skipping" again.
Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains sharply
engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat to come for I felt all
hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too. None will
know the strain it was to carry that bouquet, that load of love, those books
that I had traveled sixty miles to buy: Browning's Dramatic Works, The
history of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet, Flowers of
the Rockies, the Theatre Guild Anthology, Tennis by Helen Wills, who had
won the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of fifteen. As I was
staggering up to the door of my daughter's thirteen-dollar-a day private
room, Mary Lore, the beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an
unconcealed dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray, placed it
with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament jigging, shot
back into the room--probably to warn her poor little Dolores that the
tyrannical old father was creeping up on crepe soles, with books and
bouquet: the latter I had composed of wild flowers and beautiful leaves
gathered with my own gloved hands on a mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly
slept at all that fateful week).
Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On a
yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had contained
something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on it--nothing
at all, save a phony armorial design with "Ponderosa Lodge" in green
letters; thereupon I performed a chassè-croisè with Mary, who was in
the act of bustling out again--wonderful how fast they move and how little
they do, those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put
back, uncrumpled.
"You better not touch," she said, nodding directionally. "Could burn
your fingers."
Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:
"Je croyais que c'ètait un bill--not a billet doux."
Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: "Bonjour, mon petit."
"Dolores," said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, though me, the
plump whore, and blinking, and starting to fold very rapidly a white flannel
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blanket as she blinked: "Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters
from my boy friend. It's me (smugly tapping herself on the small gilt cross
she wore) gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours."
She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted,
hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on neat coverleat, lay
innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper
napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun.
"what gruesome funeral flowers," she said. "Thanks all the same. But do
you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody."
Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and
garlic, with the Desert News, which her fair patient eagerly
accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought.
"My sister Ann," said Marry (topping information with afterthought),
"works at the Ponderosa place."
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m'aimes
plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]