Chapter 36 Chapter two

Now, in reading the following statement, the reader should bear in mind not only the outline of the excursion sketched above, but also the many incidental itineraries, places where travelers were ripped off, recirculations, and variable deviations, And also the fact that our trip was by no means a languid partie de plaisir, but the product of a painstaking, tortuous teleology whose only raison degtre (these French clichés indicate something wrong) was to make me partner stays in a good mood between kisses. Flipping through the battered travel brochure, I vaguely remembered Magnolia Park in a southern state that cost me four dollars.According to the advertisement in the brochure, there are three reasons why a visit there should be made: first because John Galsworthy (a lifeless mediocre writer) called it the most beautiful garden in the world; It was starred by Baedeker's Guide; finally, because... oh, reader, my reader, guess what! ...for the child (oh, my Lolita was not a child!) "walks reverently through the garden full of fantasies, having a foretaste of paradise, intoxicated by the beauties which may affect his life" . "Not in my life," said grim Lo, sitting down on a bench with two Sunday papers on her lovely lap.

Time and time again we passed all kinds of eateries along American roads, from the lowly "snack bars" with the deer's head on them (with a dark tear trail at the inner corner of the eye) all the way to the overpriced ones.The snack bar is filled with "humorous" graphic postcards showing Courott's back, guest bills on iron picks, life buoys, sunglasses, a sundae in the writer's imagination of paradise, with Half a chocolate cake, a few very sophisticated flies slithering over the sticky syrup poured out on the filthy counter; and expensive restaurants with subdued lighting and poor tablecloths , the waiters are dumb (ex-convicts or male college students), posted a picture of a movie actress with a reddish-brown back and the black eyebrows of her then male partner, and wearing a Zote suit, holding a small An orchestra composed of trumpet players.

We visited the world's largest stalagmite in a cave where family gatherings are being held in three southeastern states; tickets vary by age; one yuan for adults and six cents for children.There was a granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Blue Rix; a nearby museum had ancient remains and Indian pottery, and Lowe paid a dime for admission, which was fair.The current log cabin is a bold imitation of the past log cabin in which Lincoln was born.There was a huge boulder with a plaque on it commemorating the author of "The Tree." We were now in Poplar Cove, North Carolina, by what my mild, tolerant, and often terribly discreet travel guide angrily called Arrived "by a very narrow road very poorly maintained", and though I am not Kilmer's kind, I agree with that opinion. Repulsive White Russia, said to be driven by a baron (Lo's palms got wet, little fool) who befriended the good Maximovich and Valeria in California; on that motorboat we could Identify the inaccessible "Millionaire's Enclave" on an island off the coast of Georgia.We also visited a hobby museum in a Mississippi resort that contained art postcards from European restaurants.There I found a color photograph of my father's Milano Hotel, with a burst of elation, showing its striped awning and its flag flying above manicured palm trees. "So what?" Lo said, squinting at the tanned owner of a limo as he followed us into the Hobby Museum.A relic of the cotton age.Arkansas forest.On her brown shoulder, there was a purple and red bump (from mosquito bites), I used my long thumbnail to pinch out the beautiful transparent venom, and then sucked it until my mouth was full It's all her fragrant blood.On the sidewalks of Bourbon Street (in a city called New Orleans), according to travel brochures, "it is possible (I like the word 'can') to see black children put on a show, and they will (I prefer" will "The word) dances for a few bucks" (how interesting), and "there are numerous small private nightclubs that are always full of customers" (obscene).There's also the Tales of the Outback collection.Pre-Civil War homes with iron-latticed balconies and hand-made staircases; the kind of stairs where sun-kissed movie girls lift their ruffled little hands in unique ways in brightly colored films. Skirt frontal run down the stairs!There is often a loyal black maid standing at the top of the stairs shaking her head.The Menninger Foundation is actually a psychiatric clinic, so named just for fun.A beautifully eroded soil; yucca flowers so pure, so soft, yet attracting so many wriggling white flies.Independence, Missouri is the starting point of the old Oregon Trail.Abilene, Kansas is the hometown of that fanatical Bill So-and-So Rodeo.mountains in the distance.nearby mountains.More mountains; the magnificent green hills that have never been climbed or are constantly becoming inhabited hills; the mountains in the southeast, as the peaks go away, the height gradually decreases; Clouds, gray snow-veined stone colossi, and relentless peaks loomed suddenly at the bends of the road; the forested, menacing mountains were covered with neat, overlapping, dark fir trees, interspersed here and there with pale, fluffy poplars; and combined clumps of pink and lavender plants, pharaonic and phallic, "too old to express" (impassive Lo); lonely mountains of black lava; The hills of early spring, their ridges covered with the fine hair of young elephants; Gray hills interspersed with thick green oaks; and finally a large russet hill with a lush clover at the foot.

Also, we visited a small drift ice lake somewhere in Colorado with snow-covered shores, patches of small alpine flowers and more snow; Lo wearing a red pointed bonnet and screaming She wanted to slide down the snow-covered hillside, but several teenagers threw snowballs at her, so she comme on dit, and she responded in the same way.The dryness of the burnt poplar, the cone-shaped blue flowers.A sightseeing trip, all kinds of projects.Hundreds of sightseeing tours, thousands of bear creeks, soda springs, colorful canyons.Texas is a dry plain.The Crystal Palace in the longest cave in the world, free for children under the age of twelve, Luo is completely mesmerized by it.An exhibition of homemade sculptures by a local woman closed on a bad Monday morning surrounded by dust, wind and barren land.Embryo Park is located in a small town on the Mexican border, and I didn't dare to cross the border.There and elsewhere hundreds of gray hummingbirds appeared at dusk, probing the necks of dimly lit flowers.Shakespeare is the eerie little town in New Mexico where the Russian villain Bill was hanged in a remarkable way seventy years ago.Fish farms.A cliff cave where people live.The mummy of a child (an Indian contemporary of Florentine Bea).The twentieth valley of hell we passed.We entered the fiftieth population of somewhere, and the travel brochure detailed, its cover had disappeared by then.There was a throbbing in my groin.There are always three old men, wearing hats and overalls, spending their summer afternoons under the trees by the public fountain.Beyond the fence of a mountain pass, there is a misty blue landscape, and the backs of a family enjoying it (Luo warm, happy, feverish, tense, hopeful and hopeless whispers— "Look, it's the McChrystals, let's go talk to 'em, please"—let's talk to 'em, reader!—"Please! I'll do what you want me to do, oh ,please……").The ceremonial dance of the Indians has become completely commercialized. ART: American Refrigerator Transport Company.Apparently in Arizona, Indian village houses, Aboriginal petroglyphs, a dinosaur track in a desolate canyon left there thirty million years ago when I was a kid.A six-foot tall, slender, pale boy with an active Adam's Apple stared at Lo and her exposed orange-brown belly; five minutes later I kissed that spot, Jack.It was still winter in the desert, but it was spring in the foothills, and the apricot blossoms were in full bloom.Reno is a dreary city in Nevada whose nightlife is said to be "cosmopolitan and grown-up."A distillery in California where even the church is built to look like wine barrels.Death Valley.Scott's Castle.A work of art collected over the years by a man named Rogers.Beautiful actress, ugly villa.Loe Lou Stevenson's footprints on an extinct volcano.Mission Dolores: What a title.Sandstone festoons carved by the impact of waves.A man collapsed on the ground in Russian Canyon State Park after a sudden seizure.Blue, blue crater lake.A fish farm and state prison in Idaho.Dusky Yellowstone, with its colorful hot springs, tiny geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud—all symbolize my passion.A herd of antelope hiding in a hidden hideout living in the wild.The hundredth big cave we visited costs one yuan for adults and five cents for Lolita.A castle built by a French Marquis in North Dakota.South Dakota's "Corn Palace"; a giant head of the president carved into a tall granite rock. "Woman with a beard" said our rhyming sentences, and she was no longer celibate.At an Indiana zoo, a colony of monkeys colonizes a concrete replica of Christopher Columbus's flagship.Along the desolate beach, in every window of every small restaurant, there are countless dead or half-dead mayflies emitting a fishy smell.Fat seagulls perched on boulders could be seen from the Cheboygan City ferry, whose woolly brown smoke curled into the green shadow it cast on the sea-blue lake.There is a motel whose ventilation ducts run under the city's sewers.Lincoln's home, furnished mostly falsely, contained books and contemporary furniture in the parlor, which most visitors believed devoutly to be his personal property.

We also had quarrels, sometimes big and sometimes small.Some of our worst fights have taken place at Lace Chalet in Virginia; Park Avenue in Little Rock, near a school; Milner Pass at 10,759 feet in Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona on the corner of Seventh and Center Avenues in Los Angeles; on Third Street in Los Angeles because a certain art museum was sold out; The young growing tree is barely taller than my Lolita; she asks me there a propos de rien that we live like this in a stuffy log cabin and do dirty things together and never behave like normal people How much longer would it be like that; our quarrel still took place on North Broadway in Burns, Oregon, at the corner of West Washington Street, opposite a grocery store called Safeway; In front of a brick hotel in a small town in Sun Valley, Idaho, the red and white bricks of this hotel look very harmonious, and there is a poplar tree opposite the hotel, whose shadow is in the local The Stele of Loyalty kept flickering and swaying.Our quarrel also took place in a wilderness overgrown with sagebrush between Pine Hollow and Fasson; on a high street somewhere in Nebraska, near the First National Bank, founded There was a view of a railroad crossing far down the street, and the white organ-pipe ventilation ducts of a multi-purpose silo beyond the crossing.Our quarrel also took place on McEwan Street at the corner of Wheaton Avenue in the Michigan city that bears his name.

We gradually learned about the various oddball characters on the roadside—people asking for a ride, those scientific homo pollex, including many subspecies and derivative forms: neatly dressed and demure soldiers waited calmly, calmly aware of the khaki The travel appeal of military uniforms; the schoolboy wishing to walk two blocks; the murderer wishing to walk two thousand miles; the enigmatic, nervous older gentleman with his new leather bag and trimmed mustache; Threesomes of upbeat Mexicans; college students showing off the grime of their outdoor work over the holidays with the same exhausted, Desperate women; well-groomed, smooth-haired, deceitful-eyed, white-faced bums in fancy shirts and blouses, forcefully, almost impulsively, stretching out their nervous thumbs, seducing solitary with all sorts of whimsical entreaties Woman or useless salesman.

"Let's just take him," after seeing a particularly obnoxious hitchhiker, a man about my age with broad shoulders and the face a claque of an out-of-work actor, walking back, In fact, when we were on the road where our car was driving, Luo often pleaded and rubbed his knees against each other habitually. Oh, I have to keep an eye out for Luo, this delicate little Luo!Perhaps because of her frequent coquettishness, despite her childish appearance, she exuded a certain effeminacy that captivated the gas station worker, the hotel valet, the vacationer, the fool in the fancy car, the waitress. The black person idiots around the blue pool had a fit of lust that would have made me rather smug if it hadn't aroused my jealousy.Because Lo knew this look in herself so well, I often found her coulant un regard to an amiable man, a greasy rogue with strong golden-brown forearms and a watch on his wrist.As soon as I turned around and was about to buy a lollipop for Luo, I heard her and the fair-skinned mechanic singing a playful and beautiful love song.

Where we stayed longer, I always loosened up a bit after a particularly fervent lovemaking in the morning, and always let her--doting Heng! ——with the plain-looking little Mary next door to the motel and Mary's eight-year-old brother to hang out in the rose garden or the children's library across the street, Luo always comes back in an hour, and the barefoot Mary follows far behind, Instead, the little boy transformed into two tall, blond, high-school ugliests, muscular and gonorrhea.Readers can pretty well imagine my answer to my darling when she—quite hesitantly, I admit—asked me if she could go roller skating with Carl and Al.

I remember the first time I let her go to one of those rinks, one windy, dusty afternoon.She said very cruelly that it would be no fun if I was with her, because that time of day was reserved for teenagers.We quarreled and came to a compromise: I stayed in the car, among the (empty) crowd of other cars facing the canvas-topped skating rink.There were about fifty young men on the field, many in pairs, spinning endlessly to and fro to a dull, monotonous music, and the wind silvered the trees.Lori wore blue jeans and white high-tops, like most other girls.I kept counting the turns of the spinning crowd of skaters—and suddenly, she was gone.When she slipped past again, there were already three little hooligans by her side.Just a little while ago, I heard them talking about the skating girls on the sidelines - and laughing at a cute, spindly-legged young chick for showing up in a pair of red shorts instead of jeans or slacks .

At the checkpoints on the highways entering Arizona or California, a buddy of the police would always stare at us so intently that my poor heart trembled. "Are there any pretty girls?" he always asked.Every time, my cute little fool giggles.An image still pops up in my mind—and vibrating with my optic nerves—of Lo on horseback, led for a short distance along a carriageway: Walking slowly, there was an old woman riding a horse in front, followed by a lecherous, red-necked farm manager.I followed him, resenting his fat back in a flowered shirt even more than a motorist would resent a truck slowing down a mountain road.Or else, in a small ski hotel, I would see her in a light lift with a seat, floating away from my eyes, alone, as if in the sky, and kept going up until she arrived. On a shining peak, several shirtless and laughing athletes were waiting for her, waiting for her.

No matter which city we stopped in, I always asked, with European delicacy, where swimming pools, museums, and local schools were, and how many students were in the nearest school, and so on.When the school bus arrives, I'm smiling and twitching (I discovered the tic nerveux because the ruthless Lo was the first to make fun of it) and park the car in a convenient place to see the kids leave from school. Strategically positioned, seated next to me by my wandering schoolgirls—always a beautiful sight.This approach soon bored my easily bored Lolita.Her childish lack of sympathy for other people's whims was a little brunette with blue eyes in blue shorts, a reddish-brown girl in a green jacket, and faded slacks, Smudged, boyish blond chick insulting me and my desire to be petted by her as she walked by in the sun. As a compromise, I generously offered her to go swimming with the other little girls whenever and wherever possible.She loves the sparkling water very much, and is a very agile diving child.After a timid dip in the water, I always comfortably put on my bathrobe and settle in the thick afternoon shade with a ostentatious book or a bag of candy, or both, or Empty hands, just sat there with excited gonads, watching her bouncing up and down.In her bonnet, beaded and tanned, in shape-fitting satin shorts and a stretch bra, she was as happy as a commercial.Miaoling's sweetheart!She was mine, mine, mine, how smugly I marveled at that, and relived the new-morning ecstasy and the murmur of the coyote, plotting the evening's arrangements; compared Lolita to any other nymphet around whom stingy chances had gathered for my compilation to enjoy and judge; and today, I painfully ask myself, I feel that neither of them could be more charming than charming. He was better than her, even if he beat her, it would only be two or three times at most, and a certain kind of light had to be used, and a certain kind of fragrance was mixed in the air—once, there was no way, it was a pale face The Spanish child, the daughter of a nobleman with a thick jaw, another time—mais je divague. Naturally, I had to be on my toes, for in my sane suspicions I was fully aware of the danger posed by the bewildering rascals.I had to turn my face away for a moment - say, to take a few steps to see if our cabin was finally tidied up after the sheets were changed in the morning - and Lo, lo and behold, I always find her les yeux perdus when I go back , leaning lazily on the stone by the pool, dipping her long-toed feet in the water and kicking them, while there is always a brun adolescent squatting beside her, Lolita's russet beauty and her belly as delicate as quicksilver The creases of his body would certainly provoke se tordre in his dreams for many months to come—O Baudelaire! I tried to teach her tennis so that we could have more mutual recreation; but although I played well in my prime, I turned out to be a very bad coach.So, in California, I paid a very high fee for her to have many lessons with a famous instructor.The coach was a stocky, wrinkled veteran with a troop of ball-picking boys under him.He looks old off the court, but in class, in order to make the trade worthwhile, he sometimes hits a shot that can be said to be pleasing to the eye, and returns the ball to his students with a magical sound. The wonderful, tangible power reminds me of thirty years ago, when I saw him beat the great Gobert in Cannes!Before she went to class, I didn't think she would ever learn the sport again.I used to train Lo on the tennis courts of the various hotels; before, in the blazing wind, in the blinding dust, in odd moments of listlessness, I would hit ball after ball to the jovial, Innocent, debonair Annabelle (shiny bracelets, pleated white dress, black velvet headband), I try to recreate the bygone days.My insistence on giving instructions only made Lo feel more morose and exasperated.Oddly enough, she didn't like our sport much—at least until we got to California—and preferred to play that game like an ange gauche with a small, slender, very charming kid her age. A game that resembles running post without a set form -- mostly chasing the ball rather than actually hitting it.As a spectator pointing from the sidelines, I would walk up to the child opposite, touch her forearm, hold her bony wrist, inhale the faint musk-like fragrance of her body, and cool her cool Pushing the thigh left and pulling right, taught her the posture of backhand hitting.And now Lo was bending forward, propping his racket on the field like a cripple's crutch, letting his sun-drenched brown curls hang in front of his eyes, and letting out a "whew" in disgust at my intrusion.I had no choice but to let them play their balls, and I watched with a silk scarf tied around my neck, comparing their running bodies.I think it's a thing in southern Arizona -- the weather has a languid sultriness to it, and the clumsy Lo is slamming the ball, cursing when he misses it, and throwing another phantom serve into the net; showing the wet, shiny hairs of her armpits as she swung her racquet desperately; Not a single ball came back; but the two had a great time, and kept telling the exact score of their clumsy strokes in clear, loud voices. I remember one day I suggested going back to the hotel to get them some cold drinks, and I went up the gravel path and came back with two big glasses of pineapple juice, soda and ice.When I caught sight of the empty tennis court, a sudden feeling of emptiness in my chest stopped me.I stooped to put the glass on a bench, and somehow I saw Charlotte's dead face, cold and clear, and looking around, I saw Lo in white shorts, walking along a tree-shaded Walking along the path in the mottled garden, he was accompanied by a tall man holding two tennis rackets.I ran after them, but as I rushed through the bushes, I saw another scene before me, as if the course of life was always branching, and I saw Lo in slacks and her partner in shorts. Walking up and down the weedy patch, poking through the undergrowth with tennis rackets, looking listlessly for the ball they just missed. I dwell on these pleasant trifles, chiefly to show the judges that I did everything I could to make my Lolita really happy.How fun it was to see her, a child herself, show another child one of her few samples, such as a special way of skipping rope!She held her left arm behind her untanned spine with her right hand, and the smaller nymphet, a dainty babe, was watching intently, like a sun of all colours, engrossed in bloom. gravel paths under blossoming trees; and my freckle-faced, slutty girl skipping rope in the middle of that staring heaven, repeating my sun-filled, watered, damp Smelly sidewalks and ramparts to watch so many other kids do.After a while, she handed the rope back to her Spanish friend, and watched her repeat the actions she had just taught, brushing up her forehead hair, crossing her arms, and putting one toe on the other. or resting my hands loose on her half-plump hip; I'm always trying to find out if that damned waiter finally got our cabin ready.Then I smiled at my princess's timid little black-haired maid, and from behind I thrust my father's fingers deep into Lo's hair, and gently but firmly grasped the nape of her neck. , took my reluctant darling into our cabin for a quick sex before dinner. "Whose cat scratched you poor thing?" was one of those repulsively mature, buxom, pretty women who used to go to dinner in a small hotel (I promised Lo I'd dance with her afterwards) Ask me this way, I am always particularly attractive to this kind of woman.This is one of the reasons I want to keep people as far away as possible, while Lo, on the contrary, does her best to attract as many potential witnesses as she can into her circle of life. Metaphorically speaking, she would wag her little tail, which is actually a little bit of her ass, like a little bitch would do—and a grinning stranger would come up to us and start talking. had a lively conversation comparing car license plates.Far from home!The inquisitive parents, trying to get Lo's questions out of me, always suggested that she go to the movies with their children.We narrowly escaped danger several times.This cascading nasty thing of course trails me in every motel we live in.But I never realized how thin the material of the hotel walls is.Then one night, the coughing of a man in the next room filled the interval after my raucous, airy pleasure, his voice crystal clear, and so, presumably, mine.The next morning I was having breakfast at the dairy counter (Lo is a late riser and I like to bring a pot of hot coffee for her to drink in bed) and the neighbor from the night before, an old fool, was of good character Fang wore a pair of ordinary glasses on his long nose, and pinned a badge of a conference representative on the lapel of his jacket, trying to find something to strike up a conversation with me.During the conversation, he asked if my wife, like his wife, was less inclined to get up early when she was not on the farm.I hastily rose from my stool, and replied icily that I am a widower, thank God; The thin lips, the odd look of surprise on the weather-beaten face. How fun it would be to bring her the pot of coffee and not drink it until she had done her morning chores!And I was a very considerate friend, a very loving father, and a very good pediatrician who took care of all the needs of my little auburn girl!The only grudge I have against nature is that I cannot turn my Lolita inside out and kiss her young womb, her unexplored heart, her nacreous her liver, her sargassum lungs, and her beautiful kidneys.On particularly hot afternoons, during sweltering siesta hours, I held her in my lap, enjoying the coolness of my strong, naked body against the leather of the armchair.She'd always sit there, quite a typical child, picking her nostrils with her hands, buried in the lighter pages of the paper, not paying any attention to my fascination, as if it were something she was sitting under. , is a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, she is too lazy to leave.Her eyes always followed the adventures of a few characters in her favorite comic strips—there was a well-drawn sluggish girl with high cheekbones and a stiff posture—so I was just entertaining myself.She carefully watches the photography of cars head-on collisions; she never doubts the truth of the time, place and circumstances that accompany the pictures of beautiful women with bare thighs; Wearing a wedding dress, holding a bouquet and wearing glasses. A fly would come down and linger near her navel, or probe her soft, pale areola.She tried to grab it with her hands (Charlotte's way), then turned to the "Let's Test Your Intellect" column. "Let's test your intelligence. Wouldn't sex crimes decrease if children obeyed a few commandments? Don't play around public restrooms. Don't take candy from strangers or give them rides. If you do, note the license plate Number." "And the candy label," I offered. She read on, her (receding) face touching mine (moving forward).It's a good day, remember, oh reader! "If you don't have a pencil, but you're old enough to read—" "We," I quoted derisively, "medieval sailors, put in this bottle—" "What if," she repeated, "you don't have a pencil, but you're old enough to read and write—that's what the guy means, right, you fool—try to scribble that number on the side. " "Use your little paws, Lolita."