The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page A

remaining sense of shame will be dealt its final blow. There will be constant merriment, pranks, morning kisses, tussles on the shared bed, a single, huge sponge shedding its tears on four shoulders, squirting with laughter amid four legs.
    Luxuriating in the concentrated rays of an internal sun, he pondered the delicious alliance between premeditation and pure chance, the Edenic discoveries that awaited her, the way the amusing traits peculiar to bodies of different sex, seen at close range, would appear extraordinary yet natural and homey to her, while the subtle distinctions of intricately refined passion would long remain for her but the alphabet of innocent caresses: she would be entertained only with storybook images (the pet giant, the fairy-tale forest, the sack with its treasure), and with the amusing consequences that would ensue when she inquisitively fingered the toy with the familiar but never tedious trick. He was convinced that, as long as novelty still prevailed and she did not look around her, it would be easy, by means of pet names and jokes confirming the essentially aimless simplicity of given oddities, to divert a normal girl’s attention ahead of time from the comparisons,generalizations, and questions that might be prompted by something overheard previously, or a dream, or her first menstruation, so as to prepare a painless transition from a world of semiabstractions of which she was probably semi-conscious (such as the correct interpretation of a neighbor’s autonomously swelling belly, or schoolgirl predilections for the mug of a matinee idol), from everything in any way connected with adult love, into the everyday reality of pleasant fun, while decorum and morality, aware neither of the goings-on nor of the address, would refrain from visiting.
    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 anddiscussion 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