Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page A

hate to have his innocent sister pawed by all the
rastaquouères
of the Côte.
    “Incidentally,” he added, “I don’t much care for P.’s obsession with moneylenders. He practically ruined the best one in Cambridge but has nothing but conventional evil to repeat about them.”
    “My brother is a funny person,” said Iris, turning to me as in play. “He conceals our ancestry like a dark treasure, yet will flare up publicly if someone calls someone a Shylock.”
    Ivor prattled on: “Old Maurice (his employer) is dining with us tonight. Cold cuts and a
macédoine au
kitchen rum. I’ll also get some tinned asparagus at the English shop; it’s much better than the stuff they grow here. The car is not exactly a Royce, but it rolls. Sorry Vivian is too queasy to come. I saw Madge Titheridge this morning and she said French reporters pronounce her family name ‘
Si c’est riche.
’ Nobody’s laughing today.”

9
    Being too excited to take my usual siesta, I spent most of the afternoon working on a love poem (and this is the last entry in my 1922 pocket diary—exactly one month after my arrival in Carnavaux). In those days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one, who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the initial, evanescent, savage perfection. The treacherous music of Russian rhythms came to my specious rescue like those demons who break the black silence of an artist’s hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistorical birds. Another and final deception would come with the Fair Copy in which, for a short while, calligraphy, vellum paper, and India ink beautified a dead doggerel. And to think that for almost five years I kept trying and kept getting caught—until I fired that painted, pregnant, meek, miserable little assistant!
    I dressed and went downstairs. The french window giving on the terrace was open. Old Maurice, Iris, andIvor sat enjoying Martinis in the orchestra seats of a marvelous sunset. Ivor was in the act of mimicking someone, with bizarre intonations and extravagant gestures. The marvelous sunset has not only remained as a backdrop of a life-transforming evening, but endured, perhaps, behind the suggestion I made to my British publishers, many years later, to bring out a coffee-table album of auroras and sunsets, in the truest possible shades, a collection that would also be of scientific value, since some learned celestiologist might be hired to discuss samples from various countries and analyze the striking and never before discussed differences between the color schemes of evening and dawn. The album came out eventually, the price was high and the pictorial part passable; but the text was supplied by a luckless female whose pretty prose and borrowed poetry botched the book (Allan and Overton, London, 1949).
    For a couple of moments, while idly attending to Ivor’s strident performance, I stood watching the huge sunset. Its wash was of a classical light-orange tint with an oblique bluish-black shark crossing it. What glorified the combination was a series of ember-bright cloudlets riding along, tattered and hooded, above the red sun which had assumed the shape of a pawn or a baluster. “Look at the sabbath witches!” I was about to cry, but then I saw Iris rise and heard her say: “That will do, Ives. Maurice has never met the person, it’s all lost on him.”
    “Not at all,” retorted her brother, “he will meet him in a minute and
recognize
him (the verb was an artist’s snarl), that’s the point!”
    Iris left the terrace via the garden steps, and Ivor did not continue his skit, which a swift playback that now burst on my