Los Gastos en los presupuestos municipales de 1995-2009

We are fortunate to have Nabokov’s account of the first stirrings of Ada (whose

original title was Villa Venus), jotted down in late 1965:

Sea crashing, retreating with shuffle of pebbles, Juan and beloved young whore – is her name, as they say, Adora? is she Italian, Roumanian, Irish? – asleep in his lap, his opera cloak pulled over her, candle messily burning in its tin cup, next to it a paper-wrapped bunch of long roses, his silk hat on the stone floor near a patch of moonlight, all this in a corner of a decrepit, once palatial whorehouse, Villa Venus, on a rocky Mediterranean coast, a door standing ajar gives on what seems to be a moonlit gallery but is really a half-demolished reception room with a broken outer wall, through a great rip in it the naked sea is heard as a panting space separated from time, it dully booms, dully withdraws dragging its platter of wet pebbles (SO 310).

This seminal visual image, considerably revised and expanded in georgeously descriptive language, eventually appeared near the middle of Ada, in chapter 4 of the novel’s second section. Van has spent several days at a decaying Villa Venus in Italy, satiating himself in a simulacrum of Ada, named, she says, Adora. The worldwide chain of elegant bordellos are the ‘organised’ dream of another Veen, Eric van Veen, who dies in his youth. The details sketched by the boy include a ‘Venus Pink Shell Book’ in which the clientele may write their ‘impressions and desiderata’. The Venus Pink Shell Book is indeed appropriate since the birth of Venus is often represented as Venus stepping from an ocean-borne pink shell onto the shore of the isle of Cythera or Paphos. The allusion is patently to The Birth of

Venus by Sandro Botticelli, a painter so admired by Nabokov that he is mentioned

thrice in Look at the Harlequins!, twice in Lolita, and once each in Laughter in the

Dark and Bend Sinister. Particularly affecting is the comparison of Lolita and

Venus: ‘Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked – had always looked – like Botticelli’s russet Venus – the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty’. The painting hangs in the Uffizi, which the Nabokovs visited near the beginning of

Ada’s composition.

As we have seen, Nabokov’s initial pictorial image of what was to become Ada evolved, in much elaborated form, into Van’s last visit to a decayed Venus Villa. A first visit is also recounted in detail. While his final visit is a poignantly narrated nature morte, the first draws directly upon an easily identifiable wall painting (see colour illustration 28):

I had frequented bordels since my sixteenth year, but although some of the better ones, especially in France and Ireland, rated a triple red symbol in Nugg’s guidebook, nothing about them pre-announced the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus. It was the difference between a den and an Eden. Three Egyptian squaws, dutifully keeping in profile (long ebony eye, lovely snub, braided black mane, honey-hued faro frock, thin amber arms, Negro bangles, doughnut earring of gold bisected by a pleat of the mane, Red Indian hairband, ornamental bib), lovingly borrowed by Eric Veen from a reproduction of a Theban fresco (no doubt pretty banal in 1420 B.C.), printed in Germany (Künstlerpostkarte Nr. 6034, says cynical Dr. Lagosse), prepared me by means of what parched Eric called “exquisite manipulations of certain nerves whose position and power are known only to a few ancient sexologists”, accompanied by the no less exquisite application of certain ointments, not too specifically mentioned in the pornolore of Eric’s Orientalia, for receiving a scared little virgin, the descendant of an Irish king, as Eric was told in his last dream in Ex, Switzer- land, by a master of funerary rather than fornicatory ceremonies.

Those preparations proceeded in such sustained, unendurably delicious rhythms that Eric dying in his sleep and Van throbbing with foul life on a rococo couch (three miles south of Bedford) could not imagine how those three young ladies, now suddenly divested of their clothes (a well-known oneirotic device), could manage to draw out a prelude that kept one so long on the very lip of its resolution. I lay supine and felt twice the size I had ever been (senescent nonsense, says science!) when finally six gentle hands attempted to ease la gosse, trembling Adada, upon the terrible tool. Silly pity – a sentiment I rarely experience – caused my desire to droop, and I had her carried away to a feast of peach tarts and cream. The Egypsies looked disconcerted, but very soon perked up. I summoned all the twenty hirens of the house (including the sweet-lipped, glossy chinned darling) into my resurrected presence. After considerable examination, after much flattering of haunches and necks, I chose a golden Gretchen, a pale Andalusian, and a black belle from New Orleans. The handmaids pounced upon them like pards and, having empasmed them with not unlesbian zest, turned the three rather melancholy graces over to me.… Only one of the girls stung me right in the soul, but I went through all three of them grimly and leisurely, ‘changing mounts in midstream’ (Eric’s advice) before ending every time in the grip of the ardent Ardillusian….’ (353-54)

The fresco depicts an elaborate funerary banquet in the vestibule of the ‘Tomb

of Nakht’ dating from the XVIIIth Dynasty (1534-1296) at Thebes. Nakht was a

scribe and Royal Astronomer at the Temple of Amun at Karnak; his wife, Tawa, was a musician at the Temple. The tomb’s frescoes became famous in 1917, when Egyptologist Norman de Garis Davies and his wife Nina published their well- illustrated The Tomb of Nakht. Nabokov’s description of the trio is quite accurate: ‘long ebony eye, lovely snub, braided black mane, honey-hued faro frock, thin amber arms, Negro bangles, doughnut earring of gold bisected by a pleat of the mane, Red Indian hairband, ornamental bib’.

Photographic reproductions of the continuous fresco vary greatly, since they segment the wall paintings in different ways. Nabokov’s description specifically refers to the three foreground figures. He has transformed the ladies at a funeral feast, however, into Van’s attendants in a theme room at a Villa Venus. (In Belle

Epoque Paris, and doubtless elsewhere, the most elaborate maisons closes had not

only grottoes but Chinese rooms, Persian rooms, an Indian room, and so on.) Often reproductions of the Nakht tomb wall contain only these three fore- ground figures, the handmaidens who in Nabokov’s re-imagined version lovingly prepare Van for the young virgin. If, however, the version of the fresco scene Nabokov had at hand was from a wider angle, we find the second part of Van’s account depicted. Having failed to rise to the occasion, Van resurrects himself

with the trio in the left background, particularly the Ada-like Andalusian – one of the recurring Ada surrogates in the book. Andalusia is a district in Spain where Gypsies, who were wrongly thought to come from Egypt, settled begining in the fifteenth century.

We have come full circle: The Villa Venus bordello scene is superimposed on a fresco from the Egyptian ‘Tomb of Nakht,’ and both are foreshadowed by Ada’s early allusions to the frescoes of Pompeii, and, particularly, those from the famed bordel there that was, alas, closed when the Nabokovs sought entrance.

Nabokov was keenly aware of the prominent role of painting in the composition of Ada. Not only do we have his statement about incorporating the Stabian Flora when he was beginning Ada, then called Villa Venus, but Ada’s final paragraph alludes to the book’s strongly visual character: ‘Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail…’. The temporal span encompassed by paintings and painting styles is impressive. From the ‘Tomb of Nakht’ to Picasso takes in nearly 3,500 years. The geographical range is scarcely less imposing: from Egyptian tomb painting through Roman frescoes, Russia’s early icon tradition, Renaissance Italy, Flemish and Dutch work, Utamaro’s eighteeth- century Japan, Spain, France, and Germany. It has been suggested that Ada is a survey of the history of European literature in its wealth of literary allusion. The statement is no less true in regard to painting. What is most remarkable is the integration of the visual and the verbal. Nabokov has been acclaimed for the ingenious layering of his literary allusions: single allusions often prove to be double or triple; each allusion adds yet another dimension to his text and links one aspect to another often far removed. Note, for example, the ‘gypsy’ motif as a recurrent echo of Ada. It ranges from Pushkin’s unfaithful Zemphira in ‘The Gypsies’, the gypsy girl in the film pastiche of Don Juan, Ada as Carmen, Ada as Cervantes’ La Gitanilla (Borges), Ada as an ‘Egyptian’ courtesan, and so on. In

Ada, Nabokov has intensified his longtime technique of enriching his prose with

allusions to paintings and developing a wide range of ways to integrate the two modalities into a single work of art. Not only do the paintings allude to visual parallels, but they also provide the opportunity to describe scenes ‘in the style’ of various schools and artists. Ada’s paintings also provide a playground for interaction between imagination and artifact. Paintings and artists, both real and imaginary, afford Nabokov a playing field for exploring broad questions of the nature of art and representation. In Ada, Nabokov has created a hybrid entity created almost equally from library and art museum – the interaction between the written word and the visual arts. Ada is Nabokov’s supreme achievement in forging the two art forms into an organic whole.

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