Love Faded Away

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Loleeta: the tip of

the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.

lita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for

grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an Eng

informed, simple, noblewinged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial

lish girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset par

a fancy prose style.

blue picturepostcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two

Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in

racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of

my arms she was always Lolita.

girlchild. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lo

Lo. Lee. Ta.

the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the mis

I was born in 90, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easygoing person, a salad of

sons, experts in obscure subjects paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three,

had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time

infinitelysoftpartings,inPichon'ssumptuousLe Beauté Humaine that that I had

in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought

whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various ladyfriends, beautiful and kind

the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am

a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she

suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer

me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and waterski, read to me

redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or

ets and fives,andgotexcellentmarks,andwasonperfecttermswithschoolmatesand

and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within

traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded

teachers alike. TheonlydefinitesexualeventsthatI canrememberashavingoccurred

tentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning

Don Quixote and Les Misérables, and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him

neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and house

gidity of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of

could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa, took

den of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motionpicture

the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity the fatal ri

knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great

time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pinkrimmed azure eyes and

on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who

I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rack

Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue

greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned potscrubber to the flanneledpo

keeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he

writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those

reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with

filchedfromunderamountainofmarblebound Graphics in the hotel library. Later,

My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then

beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful

ange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel

motherlessness.

a firmandacquiredabitofrealestate.

before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I firstsawmylittleAnnabel)were:asol

emn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose gar

dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright would of illustrated books, clean sand, or

actress whom he seldom saw in the threedimensional world; and some interesting

I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 923, to a lycée in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year,

3

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: halfEnglish, halfDutch, in her case.

I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before

plain to, nobody to consult.

he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to com

I knew Lolita.