Death in Venice

  That night he had a terrifying dream—if dream be the word for the physical and mental experience which did indeed befall him with a life of its own and a sensuous immediacy while he was in a deep sleep, yet in which he did not see himself present, moving through space, external to the events, its scene being rather his very soul, and the events breaking in from without, violently crushing his resistance, a deep, spiritual resistance, and, having run their course, leaving his entire being, the culture of a lifetime, devasted, obliterated.

  It began with fear, fear and desire and a dire curiosity about what was to come. Night reigned, yet his senses were vigilant, for from afar there approached a din, a racket, a jumble of noise: a rattling, a blaring and muffled thundering, a shrill cheering as well, and a kind of howl in the form of a long-drawn-out u—all of it permeated with, overlain by the eerily sweet tones of a deep-cooing, insidiously persistent flute casting its shamelessly tenacious spell on his innermost being. But he knew a word, obscure yet naming what was to come: “the strangergod.” In the glow of some smoky embers he discerned a mountainous region similar to the one in which his summerhouse was located, and down from the wooded heights, in the spotty light, past tree trunks and mossy boulders, down tumbled whirling men and beasts, a swarm, a raging horde, inundating the slope with bodies, flames, bedlam, a reeling round-dance: women, stumbling over long hide garments hanging free from the waist, shaking tambourines over heads flung back and moaning, brandishing blazing, sparking torches and naked daggers, holding up snakes with flickering tongues by the middle of their bodies, or cupping their breasts in both hands and shrieking; men with horns coming out of their foreheads, fur loincloths, and shaggy torsos, with necks bent and arms and thighs raised, with a pounding of brazen cymbals and the frenzied beating of drums; smooth-skinned youths prodding he-goats with leafy staffs, clutching their horns, letting themselves be dragged along and whooping at each leap. And the elated revelers howled out their call of soft consonants ending in a long-drawn-out u—sweet and wild at once, like none heard ever before, here resounding in the air like the belling of a stag, there resumed by a multitude of voices in boisterous triumph—and goading one another on to dance and fling their limbs about they never let it fade. Yet infusing it all, dominating it all, were the deep alluring tones of the flute. Did they not lure him too, much as he resisted the experience, did they not lure him with shameless resolve to the festivities and the enormity of the ultimate sacrifice? Great was his repugnance, great his fear, honorable his intention to defend his domain against the stranger, the enemy of the serene and dignified intellect. But the noise, the howling, intensified many times over by the reverberating mountainside, grew out of control and swelled into raging madness. His mind was muddled by fumes: the goats’ pungent stench, the reek of panting bodies, a smell like that of stagnant waters, and another smell, likewise familiar—the smell of sores and rampant disease. His heart throbbed to the drumbeats, his brain reeled, he was seized by wrath, by blindness, by numbing lust, and his soul longed to join in the round-dance of the god. The obscene symbol, gigantic and made of wood, was bared and raised with a roar of their watchword more ferocious than ever. On they raged, mouths foaming, enflaming one another with lascivious gestures and licentious hands, laughing and groaning, thrusting the goads into one another’s flesh and licking the blood from their limbs. But the dreamer was now with them, within them: he belonged to the strangergod. Yes, they were now his own self as they hurled themselves upon the animals, lacerating them, slaughtering them, devouring gobbets of steaming flesh, as they dropped to the trampled mossy ground for unbridled coupling, an offering to the god. And his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom.

  The stricken man awoke from his dream unnerved and shaken, powerless in the demon’s thrall. He no longer shunned the curious glances of the people around him: whether he aroused their suspicion was of no concern to him. They were fleeing, were they not, leaving Venice: many of the cabanas were vacant, a number of tables in the dining room unoccupied, and in the city there was scarcely a foreigner to be seen. The truth seemed to have leaked out despite the tenacious solidarity among interested parties in their attempt to ward off panic. But the woman in pearls stayed on with her family either because the rumors had not reached her or because she was too proud and fearless to heed them. Thus Tadzio stayed on, and Aschenbach, in his beleaguered state, occasionally had the feeling that flight and death might eliminate all life standing in his way and leave him alone on this island with the beautiful boy; indeed, when he sat in the morning by the sea, his gaze—heavy, injudicious, and fixed—resting on the object of his desire, or when, as evening fell, he resumed his undignified pursuit through the narrow streets clandestinely haunted by loathsome dying, things monstrous seemed auspicious and the moral code null and void.

  Like any lover, he wished to please and dreaded the thought that it might be impossible. He added cheery, youthful touches to his wardrobe, wore jewels, and used scent; he spent long hours several times a day at his toilet, coming to table bedizened, excited, and tense. Gazing at the sweet youth who had won his heart he was sickened by his aging body: the sight of his gray hair, his pinched features filled him with shame and despair. He felt an urge to revitalize himself, restore himself physically, and patronized the hotel barber with increasing frequency.

  Draped in the hairdressing gown, leaning back in the chair under the prattler’s ministering hands, he peered in dismay at his image in the looking glass.

  “Gray,” he said, with a grimace.

  “Slightly,” the fellow replied. “And all for a wee bit of negligence, a disregard for externals, which, understandable though it is in important personages, is not altogether commendable, especially as it is precisely those persons who should rise above such distinctions as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial.’ Were the strictures of certain individuals visà-vis the cosmetic art extended logically to include the teeth, the result would be more than a bit repellent. After all, we are only as old as we feel in our minds and hearts, and in certain circumstances gray hair can be more of an untruth than the disparaged corrective. A man like you, sir, has every right to his natural hair color. Will you permit me simply to restore to you what is yours?”

  “How so?” asked Aschenbach.

  The eloquent barber rinsed his client’s hair in two kinds of liquid—one clear, the other dark—and it was as black as it had been in his youth, whereupon he set it in soft waves with his curling iron and stepped back to observe the results.

  “All that is left to be done,” he said, “is to freshen up the face a bit.”

  And like someone who cannot stop, is never satisfied, he passed with energetic solicitude from one treatment to the next. Aschenbach, reclining comfortably, unable to resist, indeed, full of hope for the outcome, watched his eyebrows arch more distinctly and evenly, his eyes grow longer, their brightness enhanced by a light line beneath the lids, and farther down, where the skin had been brownish and leathery, saw a blush of sparingly applied carmine, saw his lips, anemic only a moment before, swell raspberry-red and the furrows in his cheeks and around his mouth, the wrinkles under his eyes vanish beneath face cream and the glow of youth—he saw, his heart pounding, a young man in his prime. The cosmetician finally proclaimed himself satisfied by thanking him with the abject courtesy characteristic of such people when serving their clients. “A trifling readjustment,” he said, putting the finishing touches on Aschenbach’s appearance. “Now the gentleman need have no qualms about falling in love.” The spellbound lover left, agitated and confused, yet as happy as in a dream. His necktie was red, his broad-brimmed straw hat wound round with a gaudy striped ribbon.

  A tepid storm wind had come up, and while the rain was light and intermittent the air was humid, thick, and pregnant with noisome fumes. Besieged by fluttering, clattering, whistling noises, feverish under his rouge, Aschenbach had the feeling that an evil breed of wind spirits was carrying on in space, monstrous sea creatures rooting i
n, gnawing at, befouling the condemned man’s victuals. For the salty weather had robbed him of his appetite, nor could he help imagining food to be tainted by infection.

  Trailing the beautiful boy one afternoon, Aschenbach penetrated the stricken city’s tangled core. His sense of direction having failed him—the alleys, canals, bridges, and tiny squares in the labyrinth were too much alike—he was no longer certain of even the compass points; all he cared about was keeping track of the vision he was so ardently pursuing and, forced by ignominious vigilance to flatten himself against walls and take cover behind the people ahead of him, he was long unaware of the fatigue, the exhaustion that emotion and unremitting tension had wreaked upon his body and mind. Tadzio walked behind his family, usually letting the governess and his nunlike sisters pass ahead of him when the street narrowed and, sauntering along on his own, he would turn his head periodically to glance over his shoulder with his unusual twilight-gray eyes and make certain his admirer was still following him. He would see him and did not betray him. Intoxicated by this knowledge, lured forward by those eyes, tied inextricably to his passion’s apron strings, the love-smitten traveler prowled on after his unseemly hope—only to see it slip away from him in the end. The Poles had crossed an arched bridge, the height of the arch concealing them from their pursuer, and by the time he reached its peak they had disappeared from view. He looked for them in three directions—straight ahead and to the left and right, on both sides of the narrow, dirty quay—but in vain. Unnerved and debilitated, he was finally forced to give up the search.

  His head was burning, his body sticky with sweat, his neck quivering, and, plagued by an intolerable thirst, he looked round for immediate refreshment of any kind. He bought some fruit at a little greengrocer’s shop—strawberries, soft, overripe goods—and ate as he walked. A small deserted square that seemed under a curse opened up before him, and he recognized it: it was there he had formulated his abortive escape plan a few weeks before. He sank down on the steps of the well in the middle of the square, resting his head against its iron rim. All was quiet. There was grass coming up between the cobblestones and litter lying about. Among the weathered buildings of unequal height ringing the square he noticed one resembling a palazzo and having Gothic arch windows with empty space behind them and balconies adorned by lions. There was an apothecary on the ground floor of another, and the smell of carbolic acid wafted over to him on an occasional gust of warm wind.

  There he sat, the master, the eminently dignified artist, the author of “A Wretched Figure,” who had rejected bohemian excess and the murky depths in a form of exemplary purity, who had renounced all sympathy for the abyss and reprehended the reprehensible, climbed the heights, and, having transcended his erudition and outgrown all irony, accepted the obligations that come with mass approbation, a man whose fame was official, whose name had been made noble, and whose style schoolboys were exhorted to emulate—there he sat, his eyes closed, with only an occasional, rapidly disappearing sidelong glance, scornful and sheepish, slipping out from under them and a few isolated words issuing from his slack, cosmetically embellished lips, the result of the curious dream logic of his half-slumbering brain.

  “For beauty, Phaedrus, mark thou well, beauty and beauty alone is at once divine and visible; it is hence the path of the man of the senses, little Phaedrus, the path of the artist to the intellect. But dost thou believe, dear boy, that the man for whom the path to the intellect leads through the senses can ever find wisdom and the true dignity of man? Or dost thou rather believe (I leave it to thee to decide) that it is a perilously alluring path, indeed, a path of sin and delusion that must needs lead one astray? For surely thou knowest that we poets cannot follow the path of beauty lest Eros should join forces with us and take the lead; yes, though heroes we may be after our fashion and chaste warriors, we are as women, for passion is our exultation and our longing must ever be love—such is our bliss and our shame. Now dost thou see that we poets can be neither wise nor dignified? That we must needs go astray, ever be wanton and adventurers of the emotions? The magisterial guise of our style is all falsehood and folly, our fame and prestige a farce, the faith that the public places in us nothing if not ludicrous, and the use of art to educate the nation and its youth a hazardous enterprise that should be outlawed. For how can a man be worthy as an educator if he have a natural, inborn, incorrigible penchant for the abyss? Much as we renounce it and seek dignity, we are drawn to it. Thus do we reject, say, analytical knowledge: knowledge, Phaedrus, lacks dignity and rigor; it is discerning, understanding, forgiving, and wanting in discipline and form; it is in sympathy with the abyss; it is the abyss. We do therefore firmly resolve to disavow it and devote ourselves henceforth to beauty alone, which is to say, simplicity, grandeur and a new rigor, a second innocence, and form. But form and innocence, Phaedrus, lead to intoxication and desire; they may even lead a noble man to horrifying crimes of passion that his own beautiful rigor reprehends as infamous; they lead to the abyss; they too lead to the abyss. They lead us poets thither, I tell thee, because we are incapable of taking to the heavens, we are capable only of taking to profligacy. Now I shall go, Phaedrus, and thou shalt remain. And when thou seest me no more, then thou too shalt go.”

  Several days thereafter Gustav von Aschenbach left the Hôtel des Bains later in the morning than usual, as he had been feeling indisposed. He was suffering from dizzy spells that were only partly physical: they were accompanied by a precipitously mounting anxiety and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, though whether those feelings were contingent upon the outside world or his own existence was unclear. He noticed a large assemblage of luggage waiting to be dispatched in the lobby, asked a doorman which guests were departing, and was given the aristocratic Polish name he had secretly expected to hear. He received the news with no change in his sunken features but with that slight lift of the head one uses to show one has registered something one does not need to know, and then asked, “When?”

  “After lunch,” he was told, and he nodded and went down to the sea.

  It was desolate there. Tremulous ripples ran outward over the broad, flat surface separating the beach from the first long sandbar. An autumnal, off-season mood seemed to lie upon the once so colorful and animated, now all but deserted pleasure haunt, its sand no longer kept clean. A camera, apparently abandoned, stood on its tripod at the edge of the water, the black cloth draped over it flapping noisily in the chilly wind.

  Tadzio, with the three or four playmates left to him, was moving about on the right in front of the family cabana, and Aschenbach, resting on his chaise longue about midway between the sea and the row of cabanas, a blanket over his knees, was watching him once again. Their play, which went unsupervised, the women being presumably occupied with travel preparations, looked unruly and was getting out of hand. That stocky fellow with the belted linen suit and black, slicked-down hair—the one they addressed as Jasiu—aroused and blinded by a handful of sand thrown in his face, had forced Tadzio into a wrestling match, which ended in the swift defeat of the beautiful yet weaker boy. But now that it was time to part, the underling’s deferential sentiments seemed to have turned to brutal cruelty as he sought revenge for his long enslavement, and the victor, far from releasing his victim, knelt on his back and drove his face so relentlessly into the sand that Tadzio, already breathless from the struggle, appeared in danger of suffocating. His efforts at shaking off the burden of his attacker were convulsive and ceased for moments at a time, recurring only as twitches. Horrified, Aschenbach was about to spring to his aid when the ruffian finally let his quarry free. Tadzio, very pale, raised his body halfway and sat motionless for several minutes, leaning on one arm, hair disheveled and eyes darkening. Then he got to his feet and walked slowly off. The boys called out to him, cheerily at first, then anxiously, imploringly; he did not hear. The dark boy, who must have felt immediate remorse at having gone so far, ran after him and tried to make peace. A heave of the shoulder rebuffed him. T
adzio moved on at an angle towards the water. He was barefoot and wearing the striped linen suit with the red bow.