She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks, she was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always – Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin. My soul.
Lolita.
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago – but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man’s child. She could fade and wither – I didn’t care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.
What I heard then was the melody of children at play, nothing but that. And I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus.
Don’t touch me; I’ll die if you touch me.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if my happiness could have talked it would have filled that hotel with a deafening roar.
The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved was gone, but I kept looking for her – long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn’t heal.
A normal man, given a group photograph of school girls and asked to point out the loveliest one, will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them.
Lo, listen a moment. For all intents and purposes I am your father and I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich, so when we travel, we shall be – we shall uh… we shall be thrown together a great deal. And two people who enter into a cohabitation inevitably lead into a kind of…
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.
I was not quite prepared for the reality of my dual role. On the one hand, the willing corruptor of an innocent, and on the other, Humbert the happy housewife.
Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise – a paradise whose skies were the colour of hell-flames – but still a paradise.
