Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

2

He had lived up to the ancestral motto: ‘As healthy a Veen as father has been.’ At fifty he could look back at the narrowing recession of only one hospital corridor (with a pair of white-shod trim feet tripping away), along which he had ever been wheeled. He now noticed, however, that furtive, furcating cracks kept appearing in his physical well-being, as if inevitable decomposition were sending out to him, across static gray time, its first emissaries. A stuffed nose caused a stifling dream, and, at the door of the slightest cold, intercostal neuralgia waited with its blunt spear. The more spacious his bedside table grew the more cluttered it became with such absolute necessities of the night as nose drops, eucalyptic pastilles, wax earplugs, gastric tablets, sleeping pills, mineral water, zinc ointment, a spare cap for its tube lest the original escape under the bed, and a large handkerchief to wipe the sweat accumulating between right jaw and right clavicle, neither being accustomed to his new fleshiness and insistence to sleep on one side only, so as not to hear his heart: he had made the mistake one night in 1920 of calculating the maximal number of its remaining beats (allowing for another half-century), and now the preposterous hurry of the countdown irritated him and increased the rate at which he could hear himself dying. During his solitary and quite superfluous peregrinations, he had developed a morbid sensitivity to night noises in luxury hotels (the gogophony of a truck rated three distressibles; the Saturday-night gawky cries exchanged by young apprentices in the empty street, thirty; a radiator-relayed snore from downstairs, three hundred); but, though indispensable at times of total despair, earplugs had the disadvantage (especially after too much wine) of magnifying the throbbing in his temples, the weird squeaks in his inexplored nasal cavity, and the atrocious creak of his neck vertebras. To an echo of that creak, transmitted vascularly to the brain before the system of sleep took over, he put down the eerie detonation that took place somewhere in his head at the instant that his senses played false to his consciousness. Antacid mints and the like proved sometimes insufficient to relieve the kind of good old-fashioned heartburn, which invariably afflicted him after certain rich sauces; but on the other hand, he looked forward with juvenile zest to the delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the ‘funnies’ of his boyhood.

Before he met (at eighty) tactful and tender, ribald and learned, Dr Lagosse who thenceforth resided and traveled with him and Ada, he had detested physicians. Notwithstanding his own medical training, he could not shake off a sneaky, credulous feeling, befitting a yokel, that the doctor who pumped up a sphygmomanometer or listened in to his wheeze already knew (but still kept secret) what fatal illness had been diagnosed with the certainty of death itself. He wryly remembered his late brother-in-law, when he caught himself concealing from Ada that his bladder troubled him on and off or that he had had another spell of dizziness after paring his toenails (a task he performed himself, being unable to endure any human hand to touch his bare feet).

As if doing his best to avail himself of his body, soon to be removed like a plate wherefrom one collects the last sweet crumbs, he now prized such small indulgences as squeezing out the vermicule of a blackhead, or obtaining with the long nail of his little finger the gem of an itch from the depths of his left ear (the right one was less interesting), or permitting himself what Bouteillan used to brand as le plaisir anglais — holding one’s breath, and making one’s own water, smooth and secret, while lying chin-deep in one’s bath.

On the other hand, the pains of life affected him more acutely than in the past. He groaned, on the tympanic rack, when a saxophone blared, or when a subhuman young moron let loose the thunder of an infernal motorcycle. The obstructive behaviour of stupid, inimical things — the wrong pocket, the ruptured shoestring, the idle hanger toppling with a shrug and a hingle-tingle in the darkness of a wardrobe — made him utter the Oedipean oath of his Russian ancestry.

He had stopped aging at about sixty-five but by sixty-five he had changed in muscle and bone more sharply than people who had never gone in for such a variety of athletic pursuits as he had enjoyed in his prime. Squash and tennis gave way to ping-pong; then, one day, a favorite paddle, still warm from his grip, was forgotten in the playroom of a club, and the club was never revisited. During his sixth decade some punching-bag exercise had done duty for the wrestling and pugilistics of his earlier years. Gravitational surprises now made skiing grotesque. He could still click foils at sixty, but a few minutes of practice blinded him with sweat; so fencing soon shared the fate of the table tennis. He could never overcome his snobbish prejudice against golf; it was too late to begin, anyway. At seventy, he tried jogging before breakfast in a secluded lane, but the clacking and bouncing of his breasts reminded him too dreadfully that he was thirty kilograms heavier than in his youth. At ninety, he still danced on his hands — in a recurrent dream.

Normally, one or two sleeping pills helped him to hold at bay the monster of insomnia for three or four hours in one blessed blur, but sometimes, particularly after he had completed a mental task, a night of excruciating restlessness would grade into morning migraine. No pill could cope with that torment. There he sprawled, curled up, uncurled, turned off and turned on the bedside light (a gurgling new surrogate — real lammer having been forbidden again by 1930), and physical despair pervaded his unresolvable being. Steady and strong struck his pulse; supper had been adequately digested; his daily ration of one bottle of burgundy had not been exceeded — and yet that wretched restlessness continued to make of him an outcast in his own home: Ada was fast asleep, or comfortably reading, a couple of doors away; the various domestics in their more remote quarters had long passed over to the inimical multitude of local sleepers that seemed to blanket the surrounding hills with the blackness of their repose; he alone was denied the unconsciousness he so fiercely scorned and so assiduously courted.