4I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keepasking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that therift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only thefirst evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my owncravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort ofretrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundlessalternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-forkwithout end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced,however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated thefrustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to anyfurther romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and thephysical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remainincomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngstersof today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine.Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We foundstrange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary hadfluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh,Lolita, had you loved me thus! I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account ofour unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the viciousvigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at theback of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall.Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques oflighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory,appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game waskeeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner ofher parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palelyglowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrantsky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in thesky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Herlegs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my handlocated what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure,half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher thanI, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her headwould bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful,and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; andher quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion,with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try torelieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine;then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and thenagain come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with agenerosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, myentrails, I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder--I believe she stoleit from her mother's Spanish maid--a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. Itmingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled tothe brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them fromoverflowing--and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veinsattended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house hermother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note--and Dr. Cooperponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove--the haze ofstars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me,and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted meever since--until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell byincarnating her in another.5The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from mein a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of usedtissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of theobservation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical,ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paidladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although notparticularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatryand many manquи talents do; but I was even more manquи thanthat; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and Iswitched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end aspipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movieswith expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I publishedtortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches: ...Frдulen von Kulp may turn, her hand upon the door; I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor that Gull. A paper of mine entitled "The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats toBenjamin Bailey" was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it.I launched upon an "Histoire abregиe de la poиsie anglaise" for aprominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of Frenchliterature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn fromEnglish writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties--and the lastvolume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. I found a job--teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then aschool for boys employed me for a couple of winters. Now and then I tookadvantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers andpsychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such asorphanages and reform schools, where pale pubescent girls with mattedeyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that grantedone in dreams. Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits ofnine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is nothuman, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I proposeto designate as "nymphets." It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. Infact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as theboundaries--the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks--of an enchanted islandhaunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not.Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, wouldhave long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity,or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impaircertain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty,soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from suchcoevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world ofsynchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time whereLolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of truenymphets is trickingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or justnice, or "cute," or even "sweet" and "attractive," ordinary, plumpish,formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies andpigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at theugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed intostunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph ofschool girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one willnot necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist anda madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison inyour loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtlespine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once,by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, theslenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame andtears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the little deadly demon among thewholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconsciousherself of her fantastic power. Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in thematter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be agap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty orforty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man toenable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell. It is a question of focaladjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount,and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perversedelight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was nonymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that sameenchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nineyears have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elfin my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by afierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad andsurvived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open,and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man oftwenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve. No wonder, then, that my adult life during the European period of myexistence proved monstrously twofold. Overtly, I had so-called normalrelationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pearsfor breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust forevery passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach.The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I amready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication weremuch the same as those known to normal big males consorting with theirnormal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The troublewas that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of anincomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was athousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer ofgenius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. Iwas aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both would betermed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses,"they were as different as mist and mast." All this I rationalize now. In mytwenties and early thirties, I did not understand my throes quite soclearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body'severy plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklesslyoptimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me withpseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object ofamorous tremor were sisters of Annabel's, her handmaids and girl-pages,appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other times I wouldtell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was reallynothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remindmy reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young PersonAct in 1933, the term "girl-child" is defined as "a girl who is over eightbut under fourteen years" (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, thestatutory definition is "young person"). In Massachusetts, U.S., on theother hand, a "wayward child" is, technically, one "between seven andseventeen years of age" (who, moreover, habitually associates with viciousor immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign ofJames the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age.This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing atthe mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts intoa little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who couldthe nymphet sing in a single tone, but probably preferred a lad's perineum.Here are two of King Akhnaten's and Queen Nefertiti's pre-nubile Niledaughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but manynecklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousandyears, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes.Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum,the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage andcohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certainEast Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls ofeight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with Beatricewhen she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled,in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast inthe merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with hisLaureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in thepollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried fromthe hills of Vaucluse. But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to begood. Really and truly, he id. He had the utmost respect for ordinarychildren, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstanceswould he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was theleast risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng,he espied a demon child, "enfant charmante et fourbe," dim eyes,bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her.So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but itwas Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early(10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. Andthe next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmentedpubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles. A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger's shiveringchild. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fanciedadventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in atrembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if hewere a familiar statue or part of an old tree's shadow and sheen. Once aperfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavilyarmed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me andrighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with mybook for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee,and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limbnext to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hungover me in the metro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtainedremained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of theseone-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell.It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lightedwindow across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act ofundressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, thevision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speedtoward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender patternof nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-litbare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open windowin the hot, damp, hopeless summer night. Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next tome on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lostmarble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave mealone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around meforever. Never grow up.6A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? Inthis wrought-iron would of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be thatthe hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I hadpossessed her--and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tellsometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving herimage in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great andterrible wonder. I learned, however, what they looked like, those lovely, maddening,thin-armed nymphets, when they grew up. I remember walking along an animatedstreet on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slimgirl passed me at a rapid, high-heeled, tripping step, we glanced back atthe same moment, she stopped and I accosted her. She came hardly up to mychest hair and had the kind of dimpled round little face French girls sooften have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dresssheathing in pearl-gray her young body which still retained--and that wasthe nymphic echo, the chill of delight, the leap in my loins--a childishsomething mingling with the professional fretillement of her smallagile rump. I asked her price, and she promptly replied with melodioussilvery precision (a bird, a very bird!) "Cent." I tried to hagglebut she saw the awful lone longing in my lowered eyes, directed so far downat her round forehead and rudimentary hat (a band, a posy); and with onebeat of her lashes: "Tant pis," she said, and made as if to moveaway. Perhaps only three years earlier I might have seen her coming homefrom school! That evocation settled the matter. She led me up the usualsteep stairs, with the usual bell clearing the way for the monsieurwho might not care to meet another monsieur, on the mournful climb tothe abject room, all bed and bidet. As usual, she asked at once forher petit cadeau, and as usual I asked her name (Monique) and her age(eighteen). I was pretty well acquainted with the banal way ofstreetwalkers. They all answer "dix-huit"--a trim twitter, a note offinality and wistful deceit which they emit up to ten times per day, thepoor little creatures. But in Monique's case there could be no doubt shewas, if anything, adding one or two years to her age. This I deduced frommany details of her compact, neat, curiously immature body. Having shed herclothes with fascinating rapidity, she stood for a moment partly wrapped inthe dingy gauze of the window curtain listening with infantile pleasure, aspat as pat could be, to an organ-grinder in the dust-brimming courtyardbelow. When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to theirgrubby fingernails, she said with a naive frown "Oui, ce n'est pasbien," and went to the wash-basin, but I said it did not matter, did notmatter at all. With her brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin,she looked perfectly charming. Her hips were no bigger than those of asquatting lad; in fact, I do not hesitate to say (and indeed this is thereason why I linger gratefully in that gauze-gray room of memory with littleMonique) that among the eighty or so grues I had had operate upon me,she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. "Il иtaitmalin, celui qui a inventи ce truc-la," she commented amiably, and gotback into her clothes with the same high-style speed. I asked for another, more elaborate, assignment later the same evening,and she said she would meet me at the corner cafe at nine, and swore she hadnever pose un lapin in all her young life. We returned to the sameroom, and I could not help saying how very pretty she was to which sheanswered demurely: "Tu es bien gentil de dire ca" and then, noticingwhat I noticed too in the mirror reflecting our small Eden--the dreadfulgrimace of clenched-teeth tenderness that distorted my mouth--dutiful littleMonique (oh, she had been a nymphet, all right!) wanted to know if sheshould remove the layer of red from her lips avant qu'on se couche incase I planned to kiss her. Of course, I planned it. I let myself go withher more completely than I had with any young lady before, and my lastvision that night of long-lashed Monique is touched up with a gaiety that Ifind seldom associated with any event in my humiliating, sordid, taciturnlove life. She looked tremendously pleased with the bonus of fifty I gaveher as she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbertlumbering in her narrow wake. Stopping before a window display she said withgreat gusto: "Je vais m'acheter des bas!" and never may I forget theway her Parisian childish lips exploded on "bas," pronouncing it withan appetite that all but changed the "a" into a brief buoyant bursting "o"as in "bot". I had a date with her next day at 2.15 P.M. in my own rooms, but it wasless successful, she seemed to have grown less juvenile, more of a womanovernight. A cold I caught from her led me to cancel a fourth assignment,nor was I sorry to break an emotional series that threatened to burden mewith heart-rending fantasies and peter out in dull disappointment. So lether remain, sleek, slender Monique, as she was for a minute or two: adelinquent nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore. My brief acquaintance with her started a train of thought that may seempretty obvious to the reader who knows the ropes. An advertisement in a lewdmagazine landed me, one brave day, in the office of a Mlle Edith who beganby offering me to choose a kindred soul from a collection of rather formalphotographs in a rather soiled album ("Regardez-moi cette bellebrune!". When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt outmy criminal craving, she looked as if about to show me the door; however,after asking me what price I was prepared to disburse, she condescended toput me in touch with a person qui pourrait arranger la chose. Nextday, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with analmost farcical Provenгal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip,took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, afterexplosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify thedelectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside acurtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large andunfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrouslyplump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribbonedthick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll.When I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman,talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the younggiantess' torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded sonargent. A door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who hadbeen dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen,bare-necked, very swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy anda begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic ofa nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said hehad served in the police, lui, so that I had better do as I was told.I went up to Marie--for that was her stellar name--who by then had quietlytransferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumedher interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge ofpity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into herindifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon Iwas suffered to leave.
