Death in Venice and Other Tales

  Such were the enraptured Aschenbach’s thoughts; such were the feelings of which he had become capable. A charming scene materialized before him that was put together from the rushing sea and glittering sunlight. It was the ancient plane tree, not far from the walls of Athens—that place of holy shadows and scents of agnus castus, adorned by sacred statues and pious tributes in honor of the waters of the Achelous and its nymphs. The river ran crystal clear over the smooth pebbles at the foot of the broad tree. Crickets chirped. On the meadow, which sloped gently so as to allow both the body to recline and the head to be held upright, two people were taking shelter from the midday heat: one older and the other young, one ugly and the other beautiful, the wise man with the adorable boy. Paying compliments all the while, couching his overtures in witty remarks, Socrates instructed Phaedrus as to the nature of desire and virtue. He told him of the searing panic of the passionate soul upon glimpsing a likeness of eternal beauty, told him of the envy felt by the profane, base soul, unable to conceive of beauty even while viewing its image and thus incapable of awe, told him of the divine terror of the noble soul before the sight of a godlike countenance or a perfect body—told him how that soul starts to tremble and lose composure, hardly daring to look, yet reveres the individual who possesses beauty almost to the point of offering up sacrifices, as though to an idol, were it not for the fear of appearing foolish before other men. For beauty, good Phaedrus, and beauty alone is both visible to the human eye and worthy of adoration: it is—mark my words!—the only form of the sublime that our senses can both perceive and endure. What would become of us if other divine ideals, if reason and virtue and truth, were to reveal themselves to our senses? Would we not perish, burn up with love just as Semele once did before Zeus? Beauty is thus the path of the passionate toward divine spirit—yet only the path, only a means, young Phaedrus. . . . Then he made his subtlest pronouncement, that sly suitor, namely that the lover is more blessed than the beloved because God resides in the former, not the latter—probably the most tender and mocking of thoughts that has ever been conceived and one that still spawns all the mischievous and most secret lusting of the human heart.

  The writer’s greatest joy is thought become feeling, feeling become thought. At this moment, just such a pulsating thought, just such a precise feeling was in the solitary writer’s power and possession, namely, that nature itself shudders with delight whenever the human mind bows to honor beauty. He suddenly longed to write. The god Eros may love idle hands, as it’s said. He may even exist especially for them. Nonetheless, the restlessness of the haunted Aschenbach in this his moment of crisis ran toward productivity. It was almost inconsequential what the occasion was. A call had gone out into the educated world for closely scrutinized debate on a certain great burning question of culture and taste and had caught up with the traveling writer. He knew the subject—he had indeed experienced it firsthand—and all of a sudden his craving to illuminate it in the light of his own words was irresistible. In fact, what he longed for was to work on it in Tadzio’s presence, to use the boy’s appearance as a model while writing, to let his style follow the contours of this body which seemed to be so divine, transporting its physical beauty into the realm of the sublime imagination as the mythical eagle had once transported the Trojan shepherd into the ether. Never had he known the desire for language to be more sweet, never had he been so certain that the god of love resided in the written word, as during the perilously delicious hours at his makeshift desk under the awning, in full view of his sacred image, the music of the boy’s voice in his ears. He crafted his short essay on Tadzio’s beauty, that page and a half of exquisite prose whose unalloyed purity, nobility and soaring emotional tautness were soon to win widespread admiration. It’s a good thing the world knows only the finished work and not its origins or the circumstances of its creation, for knowing the sources from which inspiration comes to the artist would only create confusion and mistrust, thereby robbing excellence of its effect. What extraordinary hours! What extraordinarily nerve-racking labor! What exceptionally fertile intercourse between the mind and one individual body! As Aschenbach put away his work and left the beach, he felt exhausted, indeed shattered, as though from stirrings of conscience after a bout of excess.

  It was on the following morning when, in the process of leaving the hotel, he noticed from atop the front steps that the already ocean-bound Tadzio was approaching—alone—the gate that led to the beach. He was seized by a wish, an ever so simple plan. He could exploit the opportunity and establish easy, friendly contact with the unwitting cause of his great inner uprising and turmoil. He could address the boy, then bask in the attention when he responded. The beautiful boy was ambling along, he was slow enough to be overtaken, and Aschenbach hurried his steps. He catches up with him on the wooden stairs to the rear of the huts, he’s determined to lay a hand on the boy’s head or clap him on the shoulders and say something; an amiable French phrase is on the tip of his tongue. But then he feels his heart beating like a hammer—perhaps this is also due to the physical exertion—and senses how panting and tremulous his voice will sound with him breathing so heavily. He hesitates, tries to regain composure and suddenly fears that he has trailed the boy for too long, that something will attract his attention and make him turn around. He begins another approach and breaks it off, before finally giving up and walking past his quarry with his head down.

  Too late! he thought. Too late! But was it too late? The action he had just postponed taking might very well have had positive results, unburdening him and heartening him for a healthy sobering up. The truth was most likely that the aging Aschenbach didn’t want sobriety, that his intoxication was just too precious. Who can solve the eternal riddle of that peculiar stamp of humanity, the artist? Who can fully comprehend the deep merging of instincts for discipline and abandon that makes artists what they are? For the inability to want sobriety and health is the very definition of abandon. Aschenbach was no longer in the mood for self-criticism; his tastes and his state of mind in his later years—dignity, maturity and late-found directness—left him disinclined to dissect his motives and examine whether it was conscience, or dissipation and weakness, that lay behind his failure to carry out his plan. He was agitated, afraid that someone, if only the lifeguard, might have seen his hasty approach and capitulation. He was very afraid indeed of appearing ridiculous. On the other hand, he looked upon his comically devout fears with a sense of humor. Felled, he thought, felled like a gamecock too scared to raise its wings during a fight. This is the true face of the god who breaks our courage at the very moment we catch sight of the one we adore, leaving our pride trampled in the dust. Aschenbach toyed with this thought, became rhapsodic and was far too full of himself to fear an emotion.

  Already he no longer registered the dwindling of his self-allotted time off, and the thought of returning home never occurred to him even once. He had withdrawn ample money from his accounts. His only worry was the possible departure of the Polish family, although from a casually dropped question he had found out from the hotel coiffeur that these excellent guests had settled in there only just prior to his own arrival. Meanwhile his hands and face grew brown in the sun, and the salty air invigorated him to further emotion. But whereas he usually expended any energy recuperated from sleep, nourishment or the outdoors on some great work, he now gleefully squandered all the strength he gathered from his daily relaxation in the sun and salt air on intoxicated feelings.

  He slept in short bursts, his exquisitely uniform days broken up by short nights of happy restlessness. Although he always retired early—for him, the day seemed over by nine o’clock, when Tadzio disappeared—he awoke suddenly, as though from a light shock, at the break of dawn. His heart recalled its ongoing adventure, it drove him from his pillows, and he got up, wrapped in a light robe against the morning chill, to sit by his open window waiting for sunrise. That miraculous event filled his soul, still solemn from sleep, with pious reverence. S
ky, earth and sea lay motionless behind a ghostly, glassy pale; one dying star still floated visible against the void. Then a breeze came up, a giddy harbinger from unapproachable domains, announcing Eos’ imminent rise from her husband’s side, and that first sweet blush of the furthest stretches of sea and sky began, indicating that things were to become knowable to the senses. The goddess approached, that seductress of young men, that thief of Cleitus and Cephalus, who, braving the envy of all Olympus, had reveled in the love of beautiful Orion. Roses were strewn at the edge of the world. There was a shining and blossoming too fair for words. Infant clouds, transfigured and illuminated, hovered like attending amoretti in the pinkish blue haze. Crimson descended over the sea, whose waves seemed to wash it shoreward. Golden spears shot from below toward the highest reaches of heaven, their radiance igniting. Silent, driven by a superior force of divinity, heat and fire and burning flames surged upward, and the heavenly coursers of brother Apollo tucked their hooves and ascended over the surface of the earth. Basking in the god’s splendor, Aschenbach sat alone and awake, his eyes shut, letting glory kiss his lids. Emotions once felt—precious heartaches from the past that had perished before his life’s strict sense of duty—now returned, strangely transformed. He recognized them with a smile of confusion and astonishment. He pondered, he daydreamed, slowly a name formed on his lips, and, still smiling, with his face upturned and his hands folded in his lap, he fell asleep again in his armchair.

  But the day that began with such fiery ceremony continued on strangely exalted, mythically transformed. Where did that breeze come from, which played, all at once, like a higher intimation, so gently yet so significantly around his temples and ears? Bands of feathery white clouds stood scattered across the sky like the grazing herds of the gods. The wind increased, and the steeds of Poseidon reared up and ran, bulls, no doubt, too, also property of the blue-haired god, which lowered their horns and bellowed as they charged. On the other hand, among the scree of the more distant beach, the waves sprang in the air like mountain goats. A world full of Panically driven life enveloped the captivated Aschenbach, and his heart dreamt tender fables. More than once, as the sun set behind Venice, he sat on a bench in the hotel park and watched as Tadzio played happily with a ball on the rolled gravel courtyard in a white outfit with a colorful belt. He could have sworn he was watching Hyacinth, who was fated to die young because a pair of gods loved him. He could literally feel Zephyr’s agonized jealousy at how his competitor neglected oracle, bow and zither in order to play endlessly with the beautiful boy. He could see the discus, directed by terrible envy, strike the boy’s adorable head. Turning pale himself, he caught the twisted body, and the flower that bloomed from the boy’s sweet blood was inscribed with his never-ending lament. . . .

  Nothing is more bizarre and uncomfortable than the relationship between people acquainted only by sight—people who come face to face on a daily, even hourly basis yet feel compelled by etiquette or foolish obstinacy to forgo all words of greeting, each maintaining a pretense of blithe unawareness of the other’s existence. Unease and overworked curiosity hang in the air between them, the neurotic expression of an unsatisfied, unnaturally repressed need for recognition and interaction, along with a kind of tense respect. People, after all, only love and respect other people so long as they remain unable to judge them. Longing is a child of ignorance.

  It was inevitable that some sort of relationship and acquaintance would develop between Aschenbach and young Tadzio, and the older man was delighted to discover that his interest and attention did not go wholly unreciprocated. What, for example, had motivated the beautiful boy to stop using the wooden stairs in the back for his morning walk to the beach and to take to strolling via the sand to join his family, passing sometimes so unnecessarily close to Aschenbach’s domain that he would nearly brush up against his table or chair? Was it an attraction, a fascination exercised by a superior emotion on its delicate and unthinking object? Aschenbach awaited Tadzio’s arrival every day. Sometimes he pretended to be busy when the actual event took place and let the beautiful boy pass seemingly unnoticed. But other times, he glanced up and their eyes met. Both parties turned deeply solemn whenever that happened. Nothing in the cultured and dignified expression of the older man betrayed any inner turmoil. There was, however, an inquisitive look in Tadzio’s eyes, a look of reflective questioning. A moment’s hesitation would often break his stride, he would bat his eyes charmingly, and after he had passed, something in his posture would seem to indicate that only his proper upbringing kept him from looking back.

  On one occasion, however, in the evening, things turned out differently. The Polish children and their governess had been absent from dinner in the main dining room—a fact that Aschenbach had noted with great concern. He was getting some fresh air after the meal, strolling in formal evening attire and a straw hat at the foot of the hotel’s front terrace, feeling quite uneasy about their whereabouts, when he suddenly saw the nunlike sisters and their tutor appear in the light of the arc lamps. Tadzio was four steps behind. They were obviously returning from the vaporetto landing, having dined, for whatever reason, in the city. It must have been cool out on the water. Tadzio wore a dark blue seaman’s jacket with gold buttons and a matching cap on his head. He seemed to be impervious to the burning sun and the harsh sea air—his skin retained its original marble yellow—but today he appeared even paler than usual, either because of the chill or the bleaching effect of the artificial moonlight. His even brows emerged more sharply, and his eyes shone deep and black. He was more beautiful than words can express, and Aschenbach was painfully aware, as so often before, that words can only praise physical beauty, not reproduce it.

  He was unprepared for this priceless apparition. It came unannounced, leaving him no time to assume an expression of composed dignity. Joy, surprise and wonder must have been splashed across his face as his eye met that of the missing boy, for at precisely that second it happened that Tadzio smiled, smiled at him with an insinuating, familiar, charming and unabashed smile, his lips parting only slowly at the end. It was the smile of Narcissus bending down over his reflection in the water, that deep, mesmerized, prolonged smile with which he reaches out toward the reflection of his own beauty—an ever so slightly off-kilter smile, distorted by the futility of wanting to kiss the fair lips of his own shadow, coquettish, curious and a bit troubled, enthralled and enthralling.

  The man on the receiving end of this smile spirited it away like a fatal gift. He was shaken so profoundly that he felt compelled to flee the light of the terrace and the front garden and sought out the darkness of the park in the back. Strangely indignant protestations of delicacy escaped his lips: “You shouldn’t smile that way! No one, do you hear, should be allowed to smile at a person that way!” He threw himself upon a bench and inhaled the night fragrance of the park flora, completely beside himself. And leaning back with his arms at his sides, stunned and overwhelmed, shuddering, he whispered that standing formula of human longing, impossible in this case, ridiculous and nonetheless still sacred, still worthy of respect even here: “I love you!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  During the fourth week of his stay on the Lido, Gustav von Aschenbach made several troubling realizations concerning the world at large. To begin with, it seemed to him as if, with the height of the tourist season approaching, the number of guests were actually on the decline, and in particular as if the German language were fading into silence around him, to the point where, whether at his table or on the beach, only foreign sounds reached his ear. Then one day in conversation with the coiffeur, to whom he was now paying regular visits, he seized upon a word that aroused his suspicions. The man mentioned a German family who had departed suddenly after a short stay, adding as a bit of conversational flattery: “But you’re staying, sir. You’re not scared of any affliction.” Aschenbach looked at him. “Affliction,” he repeated. The gossip fell silent, fiddled with something, ignored the question. Then,
when Aschenbach posed it again, more forcefully, he declared he knew nothing and tried with sheepish eloquence to change the subject.

  That was around twelve. That afternoon in the dead calm and burning sun Aschenbach took the ferry over to Venice. He was now driven by a mania for following the Polish children, whom he had seen start for the vaporetto landing with their governess. He failed to find his demigod at the Piazza San Marco. But over tea, sitting at a round iron table on the shadowy side of the square, he suddenly detected a peculiar aroma in the air, which all at once seemed as though it had been present in his senses for days without ever penetrating his consciousness—a sweet antiseptic smell reminiscent of suffering and wounds and dubious hygiene. Pensive, he pondered it until he knew what it was, then finished his tea and exited the Piazza on the end opposite the Basilica. The smell was stronger in the narrow streets. On every corner hung printed notices from the city council reporting the occurrence of certain gastric ailments, not uncommon in such weather, and warning the public against the consumption of oysters or mussels, as well as any contact with canal water. The euphemistic nature of this announcement was obvious. People congregated silently on bridges and in squares, and the foreigner stood among them, taking things in and brooding.