Humbert Humbert, Toper

Cerveza, light of my life, fire of my mesolimbic pathway. My sin, my soul. Cer-ve-za: the blade of the tongue taking a trip of three steps from the teeth to the palate to tap again, at three, on the teeth. Cer. Ve. Za.

She was lager, plain lager, in the morning, as she stood twelve fluid ounces in her can. She was ale in bottles. She was bitter at the pump. She was stout in her imperial glass. But in my hands she was always Cerveza.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Cerveza at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial brewing and fermentation of starch. In a fishing village by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before I met Cerveza as my age was that summer. You can always count on a suicide for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the maenads and satyrs, the mad raving nymphs and well-pelted thyrsus bearers, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.