Death in Venice and Other Tales

  He went up to a shopkeeper who was leaning amidst coral necklaces and fake amethyst jewelry in his arched doorway and asked for information about the ominous smell. The man quickly perked up and his heavy-lidded eyes looked him over. “A preventive measure, sir!” he answered, gesticulating. “A police ordinance deserving our support. This is oppressive sort of weather. The sirocco makes people feel sick and exhausted. In short—you understand—probably an exaggerated precaution. . . .” Aschenbach thanked him and moved on. Even on board the vaporetto to the Lido, he could now detect the smell of the antibacterial agent.

  Back at the hotel he went straight to the reading table in the lobby with the newspapers and flipped through several of them. He found nothing in the non-German ones. Those from home, however, offered up rumors, cited contradictory statistics, quoted official denials and questioned their veracity. That explained the sudden disappearance of the German and Austrian contingents. The guests of other nationalities apparently knew nothing; unsuspecting, they felt no need for alarm. This is supposed to be a secret, the excited Aschenbach thought, tossing the papers back on the table. It’s being kept quiet. But at the same time his heart was filled with happiness at the adventure the outside world was getting into, for passion, like criminality, cannot abide the security and welfare of everyday proceedings. It welcomes any relaxation of bourgeois law and order, any chaos and disruption in the world at large, cherishing the nebulous hope of finding some advantage. Thus Aschenbach felt a vague satisfaction at what was going on under the cover of official silence in the squalid alleys of Venice—at the merger of this terrible citywide secret with his own most personal one, which had been so important for him to protect. Being in love, he worried only that Tadzio might leave, recognizing with a trace of horror that he might not know how to go on living if that should happen.

  By now, he was no longer content to trust daily routine and luck to put the beautiful boy within visible proximity. He had taken to following him, even shadowing him. On Sundays, for example, the Polish family never appeared on the beach. Having guessed that they attended mass at San Marco, he had rushed over and, escaping the Piazza’s midday heat into the golden dusk of that holy shrine, had found the sorely missed Tadzio kneeling over a prie-dieu saying his prayers. Now every week he stood at the rear on the cracked mosaic floor amidst a crowd of kneeling, murmuring and cross-making worshippers, the solid grandeur of the Oriental basilica impressing itself upon him in all its opulence. Up front the ornately vested priest walked back and forth, handling objects and singing, billowing incense enshrouded the tiny hapless flames of the votive candles, and another faint scent seemed to mingle with the musty, sweetly sacrificial air: the odor of the contaminated city. But through the smoke and twinkling lights Aschenbach could see the beautiful boy up in front turn his head and search him out.

  Then, when the giant doors opened and the crowds streamed out onto the bright Piazza, aswarm with pigeons, the enthralled Aschenbach hid in the vestibule, lying in wait. He watched the Polish family depart from church, watched the children take ceremonious leave of their mother, who turned into the Piazetta toward home. He confirmed that the beautiful boy, the cloistral sisters and their governess had turned right through the gateway of the clock tower into the Merceria; and, after letting them get a head start, he followed them, followed them surreptitiously as they strolled through Venice. He had to stop whenever they lingered, had to duck into snack shops and courtyards every time they changed direction; he would lose them and search in frantic exhaustion, over bridges and in dirty dead-end alleys, only to endure minutes of mortal agony whenever he suddenly spotted them coming toward him in a narrow passage with no possible escape. Nonetheless, you couldn’t say that he suffered. His head and his heart were drunk, and his steps were directed by that demon who takes pleasure at trampling man’s reason and dignity underfoot.

  Usually Tadzio and his family took a gondola. Aschenbach, who had been protected from discovery by a protruding structure or fountain while they got in and pushed away, always did the same. He spoke quickly and in hushed tones as he promised the gondolier a nice tip to follow at an inconspicuous distance the vehicle just turning the corner up there, and a shiver ran down his spine when the man, illicit and obliging as a panderer, assured him in the same tone that his wishes would be carried out, carried out to the letter.

  Thus, reclining in soft black cushions, he glided and swayed along in pursuit of the other long-beaked black vessel, to whose wake passion held him chained. Ever so often it pulled away, leaving him worried and restless. But his gondolier, who always seemed to have had a lot of experience with such requests, never failed, thanks to some clever maneuvers, quick crossings and short cuts, to put Aschenbach back within eyeshot of that which he coveted. The air was stagnant and smelly; the burning sun cut through the fog, which had turned the sky slate gray. Water gurgled against wood and stone. The gondolier’s call—part warning, part greeting—was returned in the otherwise silent labyrinth as if by some strange prior arrangement. Umbelliferous blossoms hung down white and purple and almond-scented from the tiny elevated gardens over the crumbling stone walls. Reflections of Moorish window frames appeared in the bracken. The marble steps of a church descended into the water. A beggar who squatted upon them protesting his misery held out his hat and displayed the whites of his eyes as if blind. An antiquities dealer in front of his cellar shop beckoned the passer-by with a crawling gesture in hopes he would stop and be swindled. That was Venice in all its alluring and deeply dubious beauty, the city—part fairy tale, part tourist trap—in whose putrid air the arts had once flourished with such prodigious rampancy and which had fed musicians with seductively lulling, soothing tones. To the ongoing adventurer, it seemed as if his eyes were literally drinking in that opulence, his ears being wooed by the same such melodies. Moreover, whenever he recalled that the city had taken ill and was concealing that fact out of greed, he peered with even greater abandon at the gondola bobbing up and down in front of him.

  The distracted Aschenbach could neither conceive of nor want anything else than to pursue that creature that held him so inflamed, to dream about him in his absence and to whisper sweet nothings to his mere silhouette, as lovers do. Solitude, foreignness and the blessing of such a profound intoxication late in life pushed him further and further, convincing him to risk even potential humiliation without scruple or shame. Late one evening, for instance, upon returning from Venice, he had paused on the second floor in front of the beautiful boy’s room, his head leaned against the door frame in utter bliss, unable for a long time to tear himself away despite the danger of being caught by surprise in such an irrational position and thus found out.

  Nonetheless, he did have moments of introspection and partial consideration of potential consequences. How far! he would think at such moments, crestfallen. How far he’d come! Like any man in whom natural merit has instilled an aristocratic interest in personal ancestry, Aschenbach often thought about his forefathers in times of achievement and triumph, assuring himself of their imagined approval, their satisfaction and hard-won respect. He thought of them also here and now, entangled as he was in such an unseemly adventure, in the grip of such exotic emotional extravagance. He recalled their dignified severity, the respectable masculinity that was their very essence, and smiled gravely. What would they say? But then again, what would they have said about his whole life, which deviated from theirs to the point of degeneracy, this life under the spell of art, which he himself, speaking from his ancestors’ perspective of civic responsibility, had once publicly ridiculed in a youthful polemic and which nonetheless had been so fundamentally similar to their own? He, too, had served. He, too, had been a soldier and a warrior like many of them—for art was war, a gritty struggle full of wear and tear to which these days it was hard to stay long equal. A life of self-conquest, a life “in spite of,” dry, steadfast and abstinent, which he had transformed into a model for the frail heroism of the t
imes—he was well entitled to call it masculine, to call it courageous. It seemed to him that the Eros that had overcome him was somehow especially suited and inclined to this sort of life. Hadn’t the god enjoyed an excellent reputation among the bravest of peoples? Indeed, was it not written that he had thrived in their cities on account of his courage? Various heroic warriors of yore had willingly borne his yoke, for nothing ordained by God could bring disgrace, and actions that would have been castigated as signs of cowardice, had one engaged in them for other reasons—kneeling, oaths, desperate pleading and slavish protestation—such things brought no shame to the lover. On the contrary, one reaped great praise for them.

  Such was the thinking of the enthralled Aschenbach; such did he try to prop himself up and preserve his dignity. But meanwhile, he also turned his inquisitive and determined attention to the shady events in the city center, to that adventure in the world at large that had obscurely merged with the one in his heart, stoking his passion with nebulous and lawless hopes. Obsessed with finding reliable information about the current status of the affliction and the prognosis for the future, he scoured his home papers in the city cafés—they had vanished several days ago from the reading table in the hotel lobby. Claims and denials vied for space on their pages. The number of the infected and the dead was believed to run as high as twenty, forty, even a hundred or more, while every instance of the epidemic, if not flatly denied, was dismissed in response as a completely isolated case imported from abroad. Interspersed were cautionary editorials, protests against the dangerous game being played by the foreign authorities. Certainty was not to be had.

  Nevertheless, the solitary Aschenbach felt a special personal entitlement to share in the secret and, being kept in the dark, took a perverse pleasure in entrapping those in the know with loaded questions, forcing the conspirators into out-and-out lies. One day at breakfast in the main dining room, he conducted such an interrogation with the hotel manager, the small soft-spoken man in the French frock coat, who was moving around greeting the guests and supervising the service and had stopped at Aschenbach’s table to exchange a few idle words. Why, the guest asked in passing, why on earth had they recently begun spreading disinfectant in Venice? — “It’s just official precaution,” answered the slippery fellow. “It’s the authorities’ duty to take such measures in advance to prevent any disruptions or other breakdowns in public health that might result from the unusual heat and humidity.” — “The authorities are to be commended,” responded Aschenbach, and after the exchange of a few meteorological observations, the manager took his leave.

  After dinner that very same day, in the evening, a small group of street musicians from the city happened to give a performance in the hotel’s front garden. They stood, two men and two women, by the iron stanchion of an arc lamp, their faces bathed in white light, looking up toward the main terrace, where the guests had come out to drink coffee and cool drinks and enjoy this local cultural offering. The hotel staff, elevator boys, waiters and front office clerks appeared in the lobby doors to eavesdrop. The Russian family, eager and exacting in matters of entertainment, promptly had wicker chairs arranged in the garden to be nearer the performers and sat gratefully in a semicircle. The old serf stood in the back, a kerchief wrapping her head like a turban.

  Mandolin, guitar, harmonica and a squawking violin began to sound under the hands of the busker virtuosi. Vocal numbers alternated with elaborate instrumentals, the younger woman, for instance, lending her sharp squeak to the tenor’s sweet falsetto in a searching love ballad. The main talent and leader of the ensemble, however, proved to be without doubt the other man, the one with the guitar, a baritone-buffo of a character. He had hardly any voice at all but was a highly skilled mimic and possessed a remarkable comic energy. Often he would detach himself from the others, his giant instrument in his arms, to advance demonstratively toward the sloping terrace wall, where his machinations were rewarded with encouraging laughter. Particularly the Russians in their orchestra seats showed delight at such displays of Mediterranean inventiveness, bolstering his courage and self-confidence with applause and shouts, urging him on to make an even greater spectacle of himself.

  Aschenbach sat by the balustrade, wetting his lips now and then with a mix of pomegranate juice and soda, which sparkled before him amethyst red in its glass. His nerves lapped up the tooting and jangling, the vulgar pining melodies, for passion cripples taste, solemnly following the lure of pleasures that sobriety would either laugh at or reject altogether. His features were contorted by the trickster’s antics into a frozen, already painful smile. He sat there casually, but in the meantime extreme attentiveness had caused him to tense up inside. Six steps away Tadzio was leaning against the stone railing.

  He stood there in the white belted outfit he occasionally wore to dinner with all his inevitable and inalienable grace—his left forearm on the parapet, his feet crossed, his right hand on a supporting hip—watching the street minstrels below with barely a smile, at most an expression of distant curiosity and polite indulgence. Several times he stood up straight, puffed out his chest and drew his white smock down through the leather belt with an elegant motion of his arms. Moreover, several times, to the older man’s triumph and mental giddiness, not to mention horror, the boy turned his head, now shyly and cautiously, now suddenly and abruptly like a surprise attack, to stare over his left shoulder in the direction where his lover was seated. Their eyes never met, for an ignominious faintness of heart forced the errant Aschenbach to rein in his glances out of fear. Toward the back of the terrace sat the women who watched over Tadzio, and things had come so far that the love-struck Aschenbach had to worry about having become conspicuous and aroused suspicion. Indeed, on several occasions, on the beach, in the hotel lobby and at the Piazza San Marco, he had been forced to observe with a kind of paralyzed horror how they had summoned Tadzio from his vicinity and tried to keep the boy away from him. He couldn’t help but take this as a terrible insult, one that had made his pride writhe in previously unknown coils of agony and that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to dismiss.

  In the meantime, to his own accompaniment, the guitarist had commenced a solo number, which could be heard right then on every Italian street corner and which he knew how to deliver with the necessary histrionics. It was a song of multiple verses with the ensemble joining in to sing and play the other instruments at each chorus. Slight of build, his features haggard and emaciated, a shabby felt hat tilted back over his neck so that a round patch of red hair stuck out from under its brim, he stood apart from his companions atop the gravel courtyard in a posture of arrogant bravado, aiming his jests, which were sung in an insistent half-spoken voice to the twang of guitar strings, up at the terrace, the veins on his forehead throbbing all the while with creative exertion. There was little of Venice about him. Much more he seemed to belong to that family of Neapolitan comics, part pimps, part comedians, who are both brutal and daring, dangerous and entertaining. The song itself—from the sound of the words, merely silly—took on an ambiguous, even vaguely offensive quality thanks to the faces he made, the way he moved and his habit of winking suggestively and lewdly licking at the corner of his mouth with his tongue. A wiry neck protruded from the soft collar of the white tennis shirt he wore despite being otherwise dressed for the city, revealing a remarkably large Adam’s apple. His pale, snub-nosed face, whose clean-shaven features gave no clues as to his age, seemed to have been ploughed by constant grimacing and vice, and the grin on his rubbery lips oddly matched with the two deeply etched furrows that ran spitefully, imperiously, almost savagely between his reddish brows. Still, what really attracted the solitary Aschenbach’s intense interest was the realization that this dubious figure seemed to carry his own dubious atmosphere. Every time the chorus was repeated, the singer would grotesquely make the rounds, clowning and shaking hands. This led him directly under Aschenbach’s seat, and every time he arrived there, a cloud of strong phenol fumes wou
ld waft up from his clothes and body toward the terrace.

  After the last couplet, he began collecting money. He started with the Russians, who gave with visible generosity, then proceeded up the steps. For all the insolence of his act, on the terrace he behaved humbly. Bowing and scraping, he shuffled among the tables, his powerful teeth exposed by a smile of calculated servility that contrasted with the two furrows still stretching ominously between his red brows. The spectators observed this strange creature collecting his income with curiosity and not a little revulsion, carefully throwing coins into his felt hat with their fingertips so as not to touch it. No matter how amusing the performance, the abolition of the physical distance between the comedian and his genteel audience always causes a certain discomfort. The man sensed this and tried to avert offense by sniveling. He was approaching Aschenbach, with him the smell, about which none in the circle seemed to think twice.

  “Listen,” the solitary Aschenbach said in a hushed, almost mechanical voice. “Disinfectant is being spread everywhere in Venice. Why?” — The jester answered hoarsely. “On account of the authorities! That is the procedure in the heat and sirocco. The sirocco makes the air heavy. It is too much for the constitution . . .” He spoke as though amazed that anyone could ask such a question, demonstrating with a flat, outstretched hand the pressure brought by the sirocco. — “So there’s no affliction in Venice?” Aschenbach asked very softly between his teeth. — The clown’s muscular features grimaced with comic helplessness. “Affliction? What affliction? Is the sirocco an affliction? Or maybe the authorities are an affliction? You must be joking! Affliction? Heaven forbid! A preventative measure, you understand, an official precaution against the heavy air in this weather . . .” He demonstrated with his hand. “Very well,” Aschenbach said again in a clipped whisper as he dropped a coin of inordinate denomination into the man’s hat. Then he motioned with his eyes for him to move on. He obeyed, grinning and bowing repeatedly. But before he had even reached the stairs, two hotel managers grabbed him and subjected him to a whispered cross-examination, their faces pressed close to his. He shrugged, protested his innocence, swore he hadn’t said anything—all of it was clearly visible. When they let him go, he returned to the garden and, after briefly consulting with his companions under the arc lamp, stepped forward to play a final grateful encore.