Valeria's affair and departure

Valeria's affair and departure is the event that shatters Humbert Humbert's first marriage and reveals his capacity for cold, vengeful fury, while also exposing the grotesque absurdity of his domestic life. In the summer of 1939, as Humbert prepares to move to America, his wife Valeria confesses she has a lover, a White Russian taxi driver named Maximovich, and leaves him in a scene that oscillates between farce and menace. The episode marks the end of Humbert's attempt at conventional matrimony and foreshadows the darker, more obsessive relationships to come.

Background and the Marriage's Decay

Humbert had married Valeria in 1935, choosing her because she gave "the imitation she made of a little girl" — a frolicsome, gamine style that appealed to his secret desires. He made her wear a girl's plain nightshirt on their wedding night, but reality soon asserted itself: the bleached curl revealed its melanic root, the down turned to prickles on a shaved shin, and she became in his eyes a "large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba." The marriage lasted from 1935 to 1939, a period of squalid domesticity in a small Paris flat with two rooms, a hazy view, a brick wall, and a shoe-shaped bathtub. They ate most meals at a crowded place on rue Bonaparte, and Humbert found some legal outlets for his predicament through the grocer's little daughter across the street. In the summer of 1939, Humbert's American uncle died, bequeathing him an annual income on condition he come to the States. This prospect was welcome, and he informed Valeria they would sail for New York. She looked distressed and bewildered, and there were tedious difficulties with her Nansen passport.

The Confession and the Lover

One morning, as they came out of an office building with her papers almost in order, Valeria began to shake her poodle head vigorously without saying a word. When Humbert asked if she thought she had something inside, she answered: "There is another man in my life." Humbert, though dazed, ushered her into a taxi that had been creeping along the curb. A mounting fury suffocated him — not because he had any fondness for "that figure of fun, Mme Humbert," but because matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for him alone to decide. He demanded her lover's name, and she pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver. The man pulled up at a small café and introduced himself: Maximovich, a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut. They sat down, and Maximovich ordered wine. Valeria, applying a wet napkin to her knee, poured words into Humbert with a volubility he had never suspected. The taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold his views and plans, speaking of her as if she were a little ward being transferred from one wise guardian to another. He even consulted Humbert on her diet, her periods, her wardrobe, and the books she had read or should read, suggesting she would like "Jean Christophe."

Humbert's Rage and the Departure

Humbert put an end to the gibberish by suggesting Valeria pack her belongings. Maximovich gallantly offered to carry them into the car. All the way to the residence, Valeria talked, and Humbert deliberated with himself whether to kill her, her lover, or both. He remembered once handling an automatic belonging to a fellow student when he had toyed with the idea of enjoying his little sister and then shooting himself. He decided he would limit himself to hurting Valeria very horribly as soon as they were alone. But they never were. Maximovich hovered everywhere, displaying a discreet old-world civility, turning away tactfully when Valeria took down her pink panties from the clothesline, but seeming to be all over the place at once — reading Humbert's newspaper, untying a knotted string, rolling a cigarette, counting the teaspoons, visiting the bathroom. Humbert sat with arms folded, one hip on the window sill, dying of hate and boredom. At last both were out of the apartment, and the vibration of the door he had slammed after them still rang in his every nerve. He stomped to the bathroom and noticed that Maximovich, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That "solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it" struck him as a crowning insult, and he wildly looked around for a weapon. He dashed out of the house with the heroic decision of attacking Maximovich barefisted, but the void of the street revealed nothing of his wife's departure except a rhinestone button she had dropped in the mud.

Aftermath and Revenge

Humbert had his little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told him that Mrs. Maximovich, née Zborovski, had died in childbirth around 1945. The couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. Humbert's informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms in the company of several other hired quadrupeds. Humbert tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology, but they appeared not to have been published yet. He hoped they would be illustrated with photographs when they did get printed, although it was not very likely that a prison library would harbor such erudite works. The divorce proceedings delayed his voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, he at last reached the States.

Significance

The Valeria episode establishes a pattern that will recur throughout Humbert's life: his attempt to force a woman into a role that satisfies his obsession, the inevitable failure of that attempt, and his response of cold, vengeful fury mixed with a kind of grotesque humor. The scene also introduces the theme of the absurd — the taxi-colonel's formal courtesy, the unflushed toilet, the later image of the couple crawling on all fours — that undercuts the gravity of Humbert's suffering and reveals the ridiculousness of his pretensions. It is a rehearsal for the more catastrophic relationships to come, a comic prelude to tragedy.