The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (21 page)

“Now then,” went on McGore in a bored tone, “your supposition that it was indeed your son who painted in that figure is doubtless right. But, in addition, I gather from a note that was left for me that he departed at daybreak with my wife.”

The Colonel was a gentleman and an Englishman. He immediately
felt that to vent one’s anger in front of a man whose wife had just run off was improper. Therefore, he went over to a window, swallowed half his anger and blew the other half outdoors, smoothed his mustache, and, regaining his calm, addressed McGore.

“Allow me, my dear friend,” he said courteously, “to assure you of my sincerest, deepest sympathy, rather than dwell on the wrath I feel toward the perpetrator of your calamity. Nevertheless, while I understand the state you are in, I must—I am obliged, my friend—to ask an immediate favor of you. Your art will rescue my honor. Today I am expecting young Lord Northwick from London, the owner, as you know, of another painting by the same del Piombo.”

McGore nodded. “I’ll bring the necessary implements, Colonel.”

He was back in a couple of minutes, still in his dressing gown, carrying a wooden case. He opened it immediately, produced a bottle of ammonia, a roll of cotton wool, rags, scrapers, and went to work. As he scraped and rubbed Simpson’s dark figure and white face from the varnish he did not give a thought to what he was doing, and what he
was
thinking about should not arouse the curiosity of a reader respectful of another’s grief. In half an hour Simpson’s portrait was completely gone, and the slightly damp paints of which he had consisted remained on McGore’s rags.

“Remarkable,” said the Colonel. “Remarkable. Poor Simpson has disappeared without a trace.”

On occasion some chance remark sets off very important thoughts. This is what happened now to McGore who, as he was gathering his instruments, suddenly stopped short with a shocked tremor.

How strange, he thought, how very strange. Is it possible that—He looked at the rags with the paint sticking to them, and abruptly, with an odd frown, wadded them together and tossed them out the window by which he had been working. Then he ran his palm across his forehead with a frightened glance at the Colonel—who, interpreting his agitation differently, was trying not to look at him—and, with uncharacteristic haste, went out of the hall straight into the garden.

There, beneath the window, between the wall and the rhododendrons, the gardener stood scratching the top of his head over a man in black lying facedown on the lawn. McGore quickly approached.

Moving his arm, the man turned over. Then, with a flustered smirk, he got up.

“Simpson, for heaven’s sake, what’s happened?” asked McGore, peering into his pale countenance.

Simpson gave another laugh.

“I’m awfully sorry.… It’s so silly.… I went out for a stroll last
night and fell right asleep, here on the grass. Ow, I’m all aches and pains.… I had a monstrous dream.… What time is it?”

Left alone, the gardener gave a disapproving shake of his head as he looked at the matted lawn. Then he bent down and picked up a small dark lemon bearing the imprint of five fingers. He stuck the lemon in his pocket and went to fetch the stone roller he had left on the tennis court.

Thus the dry, wrinkled fruit the gardener happened to find remains the only riddle of this whole tale. The chauffeur, dispatched to the station, returned with the black car and a note Frank had inserted into the leather pouch above the seat.

The Colonel read it aloud to McGore:

“Dear Father,”
wrote Frank,
“I have fulfilled two of your wishes. You did not want any romances going on in your house, so I am leaving, and taking with me the woman without whom I cannot live. You also wanted to see a sample of my art. That is why I made you a portrait of my former friend, whom you can tell for me, by the way, that informers only make me laugh. I painted him at night, from memory, so if the resemblance is imperfect it is from lack of time, poor light, and my understandable haste. Your new car runs fine. I am leaving it for you at the station garage.”

“Splendid,” hissed the Colonel. “Except I’d be very curious to know what money you’re going to live on.”

McGore, paling like a fetus in alcohol, cleared his throat and said, “There is no reason to conceal the truth from you, Colonel. Luciani never painted your
Veneziana
. It is nothing more than a magnificent imitation.”

The Colonel slowly rose.

“It was done by your son,” went on McGore, and suddenly the corners of his mouth began to tremble and drop. “In Rome. I procured the canvas and paints for him. He seduced me with his talent. Half the sum you paid went to him. Oh, dear God …”

The Colonel’s jaw muscles contracted as he looked at the dirty handkerchief with which McGore was wiping his eyes and realized the poor fellow was not joking.

Then he turned and looked at
la Veneziana
. Her forehead glowed against the dark background, her long fingers glowed more gently, the lynx fur was slipping bewitchingly from her shoulder, and there was a secretly mocking smile at the corner of her lips.

“I’m proud of my son,” calmly said the Colonel.

T
HERE
was a fleeting mention in the newspapers not long ago that the once famous pianist and composer Bachmann had died, forgotten by the world, in the Swiss hamlet of Marival, at the St. Angelica Home. This brought to my mind the story about a woman who loved him. It was told me by the impresario Sack. Here it is.

Mme. Perov met Bachmann some ten years before his death. In those days the golden throb of the deep and demented music he played was already being preserved on wax, as well as being heard live in the world’s most famous concert halls. Well, one evening—one of those limpid-blue autumn evenings when one feels more afraid of old age than of death—Mme. Perov received a note from a friend. It read,
“I want to show you Bachmann. He will be at my house after the concert tonight. Do come.”

I imagine with particular clarity how she put on a black, décolleté dress, flicked perfume onto her neck and shoulders, took her fan and her turquoise knobbed cane, cast a parting glance at herself in the tri-fold depths of a tall mirror, and sunk into a reverie that lasted all the way to her friend’s house. She knew that she was plain and too thin, and that her skin was pale to the point of sickliness; yet this faded woman, with the face of a madonna that had not quite come out, was attractive thanks to the very things she was ashamed of: the pallor of her complexion, and a barely perceptible limp, which obliged her to carry a cane. Her husband, an energetic and astute businessman, was away on a trip. Sack did not know him personally.

When Mme. Perov entered the smallish, violet-lighted drawing room where her friend, a stout, noisy lady with an amethyst diadem, was fluttering heavily from guest to guest, her attention was immediately attracted by a tall man with a clean-shaven, lightly powdered face
who stood leaning his elbow on the case of the piano, and entertaining with some story three ladies grouped around him. The tails of his dress coat had a substantial-looking, particularly thick silk lining, and, as he talked, he kept tossing back his dark, glossy hair, at the same time inflating the wings of his nose, which was very white and had a rather elegant hump. There was something about his entire figure benevolent, brilliant, and disagreeable.

“The acoustics were terrible!” he was saying, with a twitch of his shoulder, “and everybody in the audience had a cold. You know how it is: let one person clear his throat, and right away several others join in, and off we go.” He smiled, throwing back his hair. “Like dogs at night exchanging barks in a village!”

Mme. Perov approached, leaning slightly on her cane, and said the first thing that came into her head:

“You must be tired after your concert, Mr. Bachmann?”

He bowed, very flattered.

“That’s a little mistake, madame. The name is Sack. I am only the impresario of our Maestro.”

All three ladies laughed. Mme. Perov lost countenance, but laughed too. She knew about Bachmann’s amazing playing only from hearsay, and had never seen a picture of him. At that moment the hostess surged toward her, embraced her, and with a mere motion of the eyes as if imparting a secret, indicated the far end of the room, whispering, “There he is—look.”

Only then did she see Bachmann. He was standing a little away from the other guests. His short legs in baggy black trousers were set wide apart. He stood reading a newspaper. He held the rumpled page close up to his eyes, and moved his lips as semiliterate people do when reading. He was short, balding, with a modest lick of hair athwart the top of his head. He wore a starched turndown collar that seemed too large for him. Without taking his eyes off the paper he absentmindedly checked the fly of his trousers with one finger, and his lips began to move with even greater concentration. He had a very funny small rounded blue chin that resembled a sea urchin.

“Don’t be surprised,” said Sack, “he is a barbarian in the literal sense of the word—as soon as he arrives at a party he immediately picks up something and starts reading.”

Bachmann suddenly sensed that everybody was looking at him. He slowly turned his face and, raising his bushy eyebrows, smiled a wonderful, timid smile that made his entire face break out in soft little wrinkles.

The hostess hurried toward him.

“Maestro,” she said, “allow me to present another of your admirers, Mme. Perov.”

He thrust out a boneless, dampish hand. “Very glad, very glad indeed.”

And once again he immersed himself in his newspaper.

Mme. Perov stepped away. Pinkish spots appeared on her cheekbones. The joyous to-and-fro flicker of her black fan, gleaming with jet, made the fair curls on her temples flutter. Sack told me later that on that first evening she had impressed him as an extraordinarily “temperamental,” as he put it, extraordinarily high-strung woman, despite her unpainted lips and severe hairdo.

“Those two were worth each other,” he confided to me with a sigh. “As for Bachmann, he was a hopeless case, a man completely devoid of brains. And then, he drank, you know. The evening they met I had to whisk him away as on wings. He had demanded cognac all of a sudden, and he wasn’t supposed to, he wasn’t supposed to at all. In fact, we had begged him: ‘For five days don’t drink, for just five days’—he had to play those five concerts, you see. ‘It’s a contract, Bachmann, don’t forget.’ Imagine, some poet fellow in a humor magazine actually made a play on ‘unsure feet’ and ‘forfeit’! We were literally on our last legs. And moreover, you know, he was cranky, capricious, grubby. An absolutely abnormal individual. But how he played …”

And, giving his thinning mane a shake, Sack rolled his eyes in silence.

As Sack and I looked through the newspaper clippings pasted in an album as heavy as a coffin, I became convinced that it was precisely then, in the days of Bachmann’s first encounters with Mme. Perov, that began the real, worldwide—but, oh, how transitory!—fame of that astonishing person. When and where they became lovers, nobody knows. But after the soirée at her friend’s house she began to attend all of Bachmann’s concerts, no matter in what city they took place. She always sat in the first row, very straight, smooth-haired, in a black, open-necked dress. Somebody nicknamed her the Lame Madonna.

Bachmann would walk onstage rapidly, as if escaping from an enemy or simply from irksome hands. Ignoring the audience, he would hurry up to the piano and, bending over the round stool, would begin tenderly turning the wooden disc of the seat, seeking a certain mathematically precise level. All the while he would coo, softly and earnestly, appealing to the stool in three languages. He would go on
fussing thus for quite a while. English audiences were touched, French, diverted, German, annoyed. When he found the right level, Bachmann would give the stool a loving little pat and seat himself, feeling for the pedals with the soles of his ancient pumps. Then he would take out an ample, unclean handkerchief and, while meticulously wiping his hands with it, would examine the first row of seats with a mischievous yet timid twinkle. At last he would bring his hands down softly onto the keys. Suddenly, though, a tortured little muscle would twitch under one eye; clucking his tongue, he would climb off the stool and again begin rotating its tenderly creaking disc.

Sack thinks that when she came home after hearing Bachmann for the first time, Mme. Perov sat down by the window and remained there till dawn, sighing and smiling. He insists that never before had Bachmann played with such beauty, such frenzy, and that subsequently, with every performance, his playing became still more beautiful, still more frenzied. With incomparable artistry, Bachmann would summon and resolve the voices of counterpoint, cause dissonant chords to evoke an impression of marvelous harmonies, and, in his Triple Fugue, pursue the theme, gracefully, passionately toying with it, as a cat with a mouse: he would pretend he had let it escape, then, suddenly, in a flash of sly glee, bending over the keys, he would overtake it with a triumphant swoop. Then, when his engagement in that city was over, he would disappear for several days and go on a binge.