Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [112]
“Look, Lo,” I said quietly. “Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other? However”I went on as we got back into the car”I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove compartment), on this pad I have our boy friend’s car number.”
As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheater of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edgesa capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the stateone adjacent to the state Beardsley was in.
I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.
And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself... But it was all of no avail. both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution.
In a street of Wace, on its outskirts... Oh, I am quite sure it was not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the Aztec Red Convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or five loud young people of several sexesbut I said nothing. After Wace a totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and then I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and was still with us, in this or that rented car.
A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existence of garages specializing in “stage-automobile” operations, but I never could discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the