The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page B

would always transpire through her metamorphoses, nourishing their translucent strata from its internal fountainhead. And this very process wouldallow 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 charredlogs 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