Stan K-Bootle: It may or may not be relevant that the Russian word rooká can mean both arm and hand.This may or may not explain the apparent conflict between the descriptions of Cervantes’ disability by Alexey and Jansy*. Make of it what ye may! Google throws up a strange gitanilla-Lolita coincidence...where Lolita discusses Luis Lucia’s 1954 movie «Morena Clara» faraona y gitanilla

JM: "The gitanilla bends her head over the live table of Leporello’s servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder. It is no longer another man’s Dolores, but a little girl twisting an aquarelle brush in the paint of Van’s blood, and Donna Anna’s castle is now a bog flower.The Don rides past three windmills, whirling black against an ominous sunset, and saves her from the miller who accuses her of stealing a fistful of flour and tears her thin dress. Wheezy but still game, Juan carries her across a brook..." (Ada)

 

SKB's link for the gitanilla-Lolita brings up her mother's career paired with someone named Molinas, ie, windmills. In the paragraph quoted above there's a rude miller and a flickering image of Don Quixote's windmills - besides the operatic Giovanni/Juan, Osberg/Borges, Dolores/Ada/Lolita and even a whiff of Poe/Humbert's little girl. A marvel of compression? There are even three angry ladies like the moira who abandon the movie in three jerky shuffles, as if warning Van against what? Why is it necessary that Van plays it safe (but only twice)?** 

 

Don Giovanni's conquests in Spain total mille e tre***. However, there's another Spanish hero who goes unmentioned in "Ada" but whose wife is mentioned in "Lolita": It's El Cid's Ximena (in Ronsard's lines that help in the word-play with Quilty). Should we bring him in, too? 

 

 

 

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*- Thanks for correcting my left-handed sentence when you quoted it again,SKB.      

 

** -"I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord) and ...vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush./ Then, for the sake of safety, he repeated the disgusting but necessary act." 
Doors, and perhaps drawers that refuse to stay shut, are metaphors for what Van (or Hugh), try to delete and repress from their past! Here it indicates Van's seduction of his younger sister and his childhood love, while Lucette becomes merely a "recent and pertinent image." Strange.