At the lunch with Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) in Alphonse Four (Lucette's Paris hotel) Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) compares herself to Dolores who says (apparently, in Osberg's novel The Gitanilla) that she is "only a picture painted on air:"
She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.
‘You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?’
‘Everybody is un peu snob,’ said Lucette. ‘Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband’s neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe moy — it has just occurred to me — I shall have to look into this — maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, "cypress frogs," one of those silly commercial names. I’ll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?’
‘Are you still half-a-martyr — I mean half-a-virgin?’ inquired Van.
‘A quarter,’ answered Lucette. ‘Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.’
‘You can sit for a minute in my lap.’
‘No — unless we undress and you ganch me.’
‘My dear, as I’ve often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?’
‘I have no set, I’m a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when I’m in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It’s a dull life, Van.
‘I enjoy — oh, loads of things,’ she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. ‘I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts — but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness. I’m like Dolores — when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air."’
‘Never could finish that novel — much too pretentious.’
‘Pretentious but true. It’s exactly my sense of existing — a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can’t we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?’
‘It’s safer and faster by plane,’ said Van. ‘And for Log’s sake, speak Russian.’ (3.3)
On Demonia (Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra), VN's novel Lolita (1955) is known as The Gitanilla by the Spainsh writer Osberg (anagram of Borges). A picture painted on air brings to mind Arnor's poem about a miragarl (mirage girl) mentioned by Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962):
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin. (note to Line 80)
Arnor, Romulus, poet about town and Zemblan patriot, 1914-1958, his poem quoted, 80; executed by the Extremists. (Index)
The poet in Pale Fire, John Shade is fond of word golf. Arnor → arbor → ardor (cf. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, the novel's full title). Arnor is an anagram of Raron (Fr., Rarogne, a municipality in the district of Raron in the canton of Valais in Switzerland). An Austrian poet and novelist who was born in Prague (Franz Kafka's home city), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) died on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was was buried on 2 January 1927, in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp. A municipality, a town, and the capital of the district of Visp in the canton of Valais in Switzerland, Visp (pronounced Fisp, Fr., Viège) brings to mind Lucette's sense of existing — a fragment, a wisp of color. Rilke's epitaph, Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, / Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern (Rose, o pure contradiction, desire / to be no one's sleep beneath so many lids), brings to mind "Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say," a stranger's words to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in Lolita) on the pillared porch of The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where Humbert Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together):
Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
“Where the devil did you get her?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the weather is getting better.”
“Seems so.”
“Who’s the lassie?”
“My daughter.”
“You lie - she’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.”
“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”
“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?”
“Not now.”
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotels - and his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus. (1.28)
During her second road trip with Humbert Humbert across the USA, Lolita falls ill and on Tuesday, June 28, 1949, is hospitalized in Elphinstone (a small town in the Rocky Mountains). Describing his visits to the Elphinstone hospital, Humbert mentions un belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch who will appear to visionary nurse Mary Lore next time:
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 reasons of show - regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. (2.22)
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) is a famous ballad by John Keats (an English poet, 1795-1821, who died and was buried in Rome). Fragment on Keats (1821) is a poem by P. B. Shelley (an English poet, 1792-1822):
ON KEATS, WHO DESIRED THAT ON HIS TOMB SHOULD BE INSCRIBED -
'Here lieth One whose name was writ on water.'
But, ere the breath that could erase it blew,
Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter,
Death, the immortalizing winter, flew
Athwart the stream, - and time's printless torrent grew
A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name
Of Adonais!
The element that destroys Lucette (who on June 4, 1901, commits suicide by jumping into the Atlantic from Admiral Tobakoff) is water. Just before Lucette's death, Van and Ada watch in the Tobakoff cinema hall Don Juan's Last Fling, a film in which Ada played the gitanilla. The element that destroys Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father who in March 1905 perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) is air (cf. "a picture painted on air"). Van does not realize that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair.