[ 130 ]

	Ada, who had thought she was alone (pulling out and scanning
	the utterly unrewarding Arabian Nights), mistook his fall for
	the shadow of a door being stealthily opened by some soft-
	fleshed eunuch.
131.05	Her intimacy with her cher, trop cher René, as she sometimes
	called Van in gentle jest, changed the reading situation entirely
	—whatever decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air. Soon
	upon his arrival at Ardis, Van warned his former governess
	(who had reasons to believe in his threats) that if he were not
131.10	permitted to remove from the library at any time, for any
	length of time, and without any trace of "en lecture," any
	volume, collected works, boxed pamphlets or incunabulum that
	he might fancy, he would have Miss Vertograd, his father's
	librarian, a completely servile and infinitely accommodative
131.15	spinster of Verger's format and presumable date of publication,
	post to Ardis Hall trunkfuls of eighteenth-century libertines,
	German sexologists, and a whole circus of Shastras and Nefsawis
	in literal translation with apocryphal addenda. Puzzled Mlle
	Larivière would have consulted the Master of Ardis, but she
131.20	never discussed with him anything serious since the day (in
	January, 1876) when he had made an unexpected (and rather
	halfhearted, really—let us be fair) pass at her. As to dear,
	frivolous Marina, she only remarked, when consulted, that at
	Van's age she would have poisoned her governess with anti-
131.25	roach borax if forbidden to read, for example, Turgenev's
	Smoke. Thereafter, anything Ada wanted or might have wanted
	to want was placed by Van at her disposal in various safe nooks,
	and the only visible consequence of Verger's perplexities and
	despair was an increase in the scatter of a curious snow-white
131.30	dust that he always left here and there, on the dark carpet, in
	this or that spot of plodding occupation—such a cruel curse on
	such a neat little man!
	At a nice Christmas party for private librarians arranged un-
	der the auspices of the Braille Club in Raduga a couple of years

[ 131 ]

	earlier, emphatic Miss Vertograd had noticed that she and
	giggling Verger, with whom she was in the act of sharing a
	quiet little cracker (tugged apart with no audible result—nor
	did the gold paper frilled at both ends yield any bonbon or
132.05	breloque or other favor of fate), shared also a spectacular skin
	disease that had been portrayed recently by a famous American
	novelist in his Chiron and described in side-splitting style by a
	co-sufferer who wrote essays for a London weekly. Very deli-
	cately, Miss Vertograd would transmit through Van library
132.10	slips to the rather unresponsive Frenchman with this or that
	concise suggestion: "Mercury!" or "Höhensonne works won-
	ders." Mademoiselle, who was in the know, too, looked up
	"Psoriasis" in a one-volume medical encyclopedia, which her
	late mother had left her and which had not only helped her and
132.15	her charges on various minor occasions but had suggested suit-
	able illnesses for the characters in the stories she contributed to
	the Québec Quarterly. In the present case, the cure optimis-
	tically advised was to "take a warm bath at least twice a month
	and avoid spices"; this she typed out and passed on to her cousin
132.20	in a Get-Well envelope. Finally, Ada showed Van a letter from
	Dr. Krolik on the same subject; it said (English version):
	"Crimson-blotched, silver-scaled, yellow-crusted wretches, the
	harmless psoriatics (who cannot communicate their skin trouble
	and are otherwise the healthiest of people—actually, their bo-
132.25	bo's protect them from bubas and buboes, as my teacher used
	to observe) were confused with lepers—yes, lepers—in the
	Middle Ages, when thousands if not millions of Vergers and
	Vertograds crackled and howled bound by enthusiasts to stakes
	erected in the public squares of Spain and other fire-loving
132.30	countries." But this note they decided not to plant in the meek
	martyr's index under PS as they had first intended: lepidop-
	terists are overeloquent on lepidosis.
	Novels, poems, scientific and philosophical works wandered
	out unnoticed after the poor librarian gave his démission

[ 132 ]

	éplorée on the first of August, 1884. They crossed lawns and
	traveled along hedges somewhat in the manner of the objects
	carried away by the Invisible Man in Wells' delightful tale, and
	landed in Ada's lap wherever she and Van had their trysts. Both
133.05	sought excitement in books as the best readers always do; both
	found in many renowned works pretentiousness, tedium and
	facile misinformation.
	In a story by Chateaubriand about a pair of romantic siblings,
	Ada had not quite understood when she first read it at nine or
133.10	ten the sentence "les deux enfants pouvaient donc s'abandonner
	au plaisir sans aucune crainte." A bawdy critic in a collection of
	articles which she now could gleefully consult (Les muses
	s'amusent) explained that the "donc" referred both to the in-
	fertility of tender age and to the sterility of tender consanguin-
133.15	ity. Van said, however, that the writer and the critic erred, and
	to illustrate his contention, drew his sweetheart's attention to
	a chapter in the opus "Sex and Lex" dealing with the effects on
	the community of a disastrous caprice of nature.
	In those times, in this country "incestuous" meant not only
133.20	"unchaste"—the point regarded linguistics rather than legalistics
	—but also implied (in the phrase "incestuous cohabitation," and
	so forth) interference with the continuity of human evolution.
	History had long replaced appeals to "divine law" by common
	sense and popular science. With those considerations in mind,
133.25	"incest" could be termed a crime only inasmuch as inbreeding
	might be criminal. But as Judge Bald pointed out already dur-
	ing the Albino Riots of 1835, practically all North American
	and Tartar agriculturists and animal farmers used inbreeding as
	a method of propagation that tended to preserve, and stimulate,
133.30	stabilize and even create anew favorable characters in a race
	or strain unless practiced too rigidly. If practiced rigidly incest
	led to various forms of decline, to the production of cripples,
	weaklings, "muted mutates" and, finally, to hopeless sterility.
	Now that smacked of "crime," and since nobody could be

[ 133 ]

[ 134 ]

	same day Gamaliel (then a stout young senator) thumped a
	conference table with such force that he hurt his fist and de-
	manded a retrial and capital punishment. It was, of course,
	only a temperamental gesture; but the Ivanov affair cast a long
135.05	shadow upon the little matter of "favorable inbreeding." By
	mid-century not only first cousins but uncles and grandnieces
	were forbidden to intermarry; and in some fertile parts of
	Estoty the izba windows of large peasant families in which up
	to a dozen people of different size and sex slept on one blin-like
135.10	mattress were ordered to be kept uncurtained at night for the
	convenience of petrol-torch-flashing patrols—"Peeping Pats,"
	as the anti-Irish tabloids called them.
	Another hearty laugh shook Van when he unearthed for
	entomologically-minded Ada the following passage in a reliable
135.15	History of Mating Habits. "Some of the perils and ridicule
	which attend the missionary position adopted for mating pur-
	poses by our puritanical intelligentsia and so justly derided by
	the 'primitive' but healthy-minded natives of the Begouri Is-
	lands are pointed out by a prominent French orientalist [thick
135.20	footnote, skipped here] who describes the mating habits of the
	fly Serromyia amorata Poupart. Copulation takes place with
	both ventral surfaces pressed together and the mouths touching.
	When the last throb (frisson) of intercourse is terminated the
	female sucks out the male's body content through the mouth of
135.25	her impassioned partner. One supposes (see Pesson et al.) [an-
	other copious footnote] that the titbits, such as the juicy leg
	of a bug enveloped in a webby substance, or even a mere token
	(the frivolous dead end or subtle beginning of an evolutionary
	process—qui le sait!) such as a petal carefully wrapped up and
135.30	tied up with a frond of red fern, which certain male flies (but
	apparently not the femorata and amorata morons) bring to the
	female before mating, represent a prudent guarantee against the
	misplaced voracity of the young lady."
	Still more amusing was the "message" of a Canadian social

[ 135 ]

	worker, Mme de Réan-Fichini, who published her treatise,
	On Contraceptive Devices, in Kapuskan patois (to spare the
	blushes of Estotians and United Statians; while instructing
	hardier fellow-workers in her special field). "Sole sura metoda,"
136.05	she wrote, "por decevor natura, est por un strong-guy de
	contino-contino-contino jusque le plesir brimz; et lors, a lultima
	instanta, svitchera a l'altra gropa [groove]; ma perquoi una
	femme ardora andor ponderosa ne se retorna kvik enof, la
	transita e facilitata per positio torovago"; and that term an
136.10	appended glossary explained in blunt English as "the posture
	generally adopted in rural communities by all classes, beginning
	by the country gentry and ending with the lowliest farm
	animals throughout the United Americas from Patagony to
	Gasp." Ergo, concluded Van, our missionary goes up in smoke.
136.15	"Your vulgarity knows no bounds," said Ada.
	"Well, I prefer to burn than to be slurped up alive by the
	Cheramie—or whatever you call her—and have my widow lay
	a lot of tiny green eggs on top of it!"
	Paradoxically, "scient" Ada was bored by big learned works
136.20	with woodcuts of organs, pictures of dismal medieval whore-
	houses, and photographs of this or that little Caesar in the
	process of being ripped out of the uterus as performed by
	butchers and masked surgeons in ancient and modern times;
	whereas Van, who disliked "natural history" and fanatically
136.25	denounced the existence of physical pain in all worlds, was
	infinitely fascinated by descriptions and depictions of harrowed
	human flesh. Otherwise, in more flowery fields, their tastes and
	titters proved to be much the same. They liked Rabelais and
	Casanova; they loathed le sieur Sade and Herr Masoch and
136.30	Heinrich Müller. English and French pornographic poetry,
	though now and then witty and instructive, sickened them in
	the long run, and its tendency, especially in France before the
	invasion, of having monks and nuns perform sexual feats seemed
	to them as incomprehensible as it was depressing.

[ 136 ]

	The collection of Uncle Dan's Oriental Erotica prints turned
	out to be artistically second-rate and inept calisthenically. In the
	most hilarious, and expensive, picture, a Mongolian woman with
	an inane oval face surmounted by a hideous hair-do was shown
137.05	communicating sexually with six rather plump, blank-faced
	gymnasts in what looked like a display window jammed with
	screens, potted plants, silks, paper fans and crockery. Three of
	the males, contorted in attitudes of intricate discomfort, were
	using simultaneously three of the harlot's main orifices; two
137.10	older clients were treated by her manually; and the sixth, a
	dwarf, had to be contented with her deformed foot. Six other
	voluptuaries were sodomizing her immediate partners, and one
	more had got stuck in her armpit. Uncle Dan, having patiently
	disentangled all those limbs and belly folds directly or indirectly
137.15	connected with the absolutely calm lady (still retaining some-
	how parts of her robes), had penciled a note that gave the
	price of the picture and identified it as: "Geisha with 13 lovers."
	Van located, however, a fifteenth navel thrown in by the
	generous artist but impossible to account for anatomically.
137.20	That library had provided a raised stage for the unforgettable
	scene of the Burning Barn; it had thrown open its glazed doors;
	it had promised a long idyll of bibliolatry; it might have become
	a chapter in one of the old novels on its own shelves; a touch
	of parody gave its theme the comic relief of life.

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