Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [121]
Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On a yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had contained something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on it—nothing at all, save a phony armorial design with “Ponderosa Lodge” in green letters; thereupon I performed a chassé-croisé with Mary, who was in the act of bustling out again—wonderful how fast they move and how little they do, those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put back, uncrumpled.
“You better not touch,” she said, nodding directionally. “Could burn your fingers.”
Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:
“Je croyais que c’était un bill—not a billet doux.” Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: “Bonjour, mon petit.”
“Dolores,” said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, through me, the plump whore, and blinking, and starting to fold very rapidly a white flannel blanket as she blinked: “Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters from my boy friend. It’s me (smugly tapping herself on the small gilt cross she wore) gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours.”
She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted, hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on neat coverlet, lay innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun.
“What gruesome funeral flowers,” she said. “Thanks all the same. But do you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody.”
Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and garlic, with the Deseret News, which her fair patient eagerly accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought.
“My sister Ann,” said Mary (topping information with afterthought), “works at the Ponderosa place.”
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever—and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting room—all were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that “snow” and “joy juice”).
My throat hurt. I stood, swallowing, at the window and stared at the mountains, at the romantic rock high up in the smiling plotting sky.
“My Carmen,” I said (I used to call her that sometimes), “we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed.”
“Incidentally, I want all my clothes,” said the gitanilla, humping up her knees and turning to another page.
“… Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying here.”
“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita.
I lowered myself into a cretonne chair and, opening the attractive botanical work, attempted, in the fever-humming hush of the room, to identify my flowers. This proved impossible. Presently a musical bell softly sounded somewhere in the passage.
I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However—likewise for