Death in Venice and Other Tales

  It was a song the solitary Aschenbach could never remember having heard before, an audacious novelty number, sung in incomprehensible dialect and topped by a chorus in which the entire ensemble laughed as hard as it could. Each time that part came round, lyrics as well as accompaniment ceased, leaving nothing but laughing, which was somehow organized yet still performed quite naturally, especially by the soloist with his great talent for imitation. With the artistic distance between himself and his patrons now restored, he had rediscovered his former insolence, and the simulated laughter he directed unabashedly up at the terrace was that of mockery. Even before the end of every articulated verse, he seemed to be struggling against an irresistible tickle. He sobbed, his voice wavered, he pressed hand to mouth and coiled his shoulders, and at the proper moment unconstrained laughter burst, escaped and howled forth so true to life that it became infectious and spread among the audience, so that the terrace as well was seized by a hilarity without object, feeding only on itself. This just seemed to make the soloist doubly boisterous. He bent his knees, slapped his thighs, held his sides and generally split a gut, no longer laughing, but screaming. He pointed his finger in the air as if there were nothing more comical than the laughing audience above, and in the end everyone in the garden and on the veranda was laughing, right down to the waiters, elevator boys and servants in the doorways.

  Aschenbach could no longer relax in his seat. He sat bolt upright as if about to commence some sort of defense or flight. But the laughter, the hospital smell wafting up to him and the beautiful boy’s proximity combined to mesmerize his head and senses in an unbreakable, unescapable dream spell. In the general bustle and confusion, he found the courage to glance over at Tadzio, and as he did, he could see that the beautiful boy, on returning his look, also kept a straight face, as if he were patterning his own behavior and expression after Aschenbach’s, as if the general merriment could have no power over him as long as the older man didn’t join in. This childlike and insinuating imitativeness had something so disarming, indeed overwhelming, about it that the gray-haired Aschenbach had to force himself not to bury his face in his hands. It also dawned on him that Tadzio’s habit of getting up and taking in air might actually be a kind of gasp, perhaps a constriction in the chest. “He’s sickly, he’s probably not long for the world,” Aschenbach thought again in that matter-of-fact way that is sometimes the strange product of emancipated intoxication and longing. And pure protective love, along with a certain extravagant satisfaction, filled his heart.

  In the meantime the Venetians had finished and were withdrawing. Applause followed them, and their leader did not neglect to embellish his exit with various little tricks. His bows and mockly blown kisses provoked further titters, and he intensified his efforts. His companions had already gone, but he pretended to back painfully into a lamppost, then limped away toward the front gate, doubled over in pantomime agony. There, all at once, he finally discarded the mask of the schlemiel, straightened, indeed snapped bolt upright, insolently stuck his tongue out at the guests on the terrace and then slipped back into darkness. The hotel guests dispersed. Tadzio had left the balustrade some time ago. Yet the solitary Aschenbach, to the dismay of the staff, remained seated at his table over his pomegranate drink. The night progressed; time disintegrated. In his parents’ house, years ago, there had been an hourglass. Suddenly he could see the fragile, symbolic little timepiece again as though it were standing in front of him. Silently and gradually, the rust-colored sand ran through the narrow aperture, and there where the sand in the upper glass was draining down, a tiny but torrential vortex had formed.

  The very next day, during the afternoon, the stubborn Aschenbach made another attempt at provoking the world at large, this time with complete success. Specifically, he paid a visit to the English travel agency located on the Piazza San Marco, where, after changing money at the counter, he assumed the expression of a mistrustful foreigner, posing his fateful question to the clerk who had waited on him. It was a cardigan-wearing Englishman, still young, with middle-parted hair and closely set eyes, who was surrounded by that air of solid fidelity that seems so alien and misplaced amidst the mischievous cleverness of the Mediterranean. “Nothing to be concerned about, sir,” he began. “Official policy, nothing serious. Such measures are often taken to prevent unhealthy effects from the heat and the sirocco . . .” But when he raised his blue eyes, he was met by a stare from the foreign tourist, a tired and rather sad stare with a trace of contempt, which was directed at his own lips. At this the Englishman blushed. “At least,” he said in a whisper, visibly agitated, “that’s the official explanation people here see fit to stick by. I can tell you, though, that there’s more to it than that.” And then, in his frank and easy language, he revealed the truth.

  For many years, Asiatic cholera had been both on the increase and on the move. Originating in the humid swamps of the Ganges delta, carried by the mephitic breath of that haughty and untameable primeval island jungle shunned by man, where the tiger crouches in his bamboo thicket, the epidemic had raged long and with unusual intensity throughout Hindustan, spreading east into China and west into Afghanistan and Persia. There, following the main caravan routes, it had brought its horrors as far as Astrakhan, even as far as Moscow. But while all of Europe watched with fearful eyes lest this specter continue its invasion by land, Syrian traders were already carrying it by sea. It appeared almost simultaneously in several Mediterranean ports, raising its head in Toulon and Málaga, showing its face in Palermo and Naples and digging in its heels throughout Calibri and Apulia. The northern half of the peninsula had been spared. But in mid-May of this year, the terrible vibrio bacilli had been discovered twice on the same day, in the emaciated, blackened corpses of a ship’s hand and a fruit-and-vegetable girl. Their cases were covered up. But within a week, there were ten, twenty, thirty of them, and worse still in various neighborhoods. A vacationer from provincial Austria who had spent several days in Venice died upon returning home, his symptoms unmistakable. That was why the first rumors of an outbreak in the Lagoon city had made their way into German newspapers. Venetian officials declared in response that health conditions in the city had never been better and ordered the most necessary precautionary measures. But apparently something in the food supply had been contaminated—vegetables, meat or milk—for, under the official silence of a cover-up, death had begun to eat its way out amidst the narrow alleyways. The premature summer heat, which raised the canal water to lukewarm temperatures, had proven especially conducive to spreading the disease, and it seemed as though the epidemic had in fact been reinvigorated, as if its bacteria had been made doubly tenacious and fertile. Instances of recovery were few. Eighty out of every hundred victims died, and indeed in terrible fashion, for the disease attacked with extreme ferocity, often in its most deadly form, known as the “dry type.” It left the body unable to evacuate the massive amounts of fluid sucked from the circulatory system, so that within a few hours, its victims became dehydrated, screaming in pain with cramps, and ultimately suffocated, their blood as thick as pitch. They could count themselves lucky if, as sometimes happened, they only felt slightly ill before the actual outbreak, lapsing into a coma from which they never or only very briefly awoke. By the beginning of June, the quarantine wards of the Ospedale Civile were quietly filling up, both orphanages had begun to run out of space, and traffic was becoming horrifically constant between the quay at the Fundamente Nuove and San Michele, the cemetery island. Nonetheless, fear about general detriment to the city, concern for the recently opened art exhibition in the public gardens and the serious losses facing hotels, shops and the whole diverse tourist trade, should people panic and word get out, had outweighed the city’s love of truth and respect for international treaties. The stubborn authorities were thus able to maintain their policies of silence and denial. Venice’s senior health official, a man of many years’ service, had resigned his post in indignation and had been quietly replaced by
a more easily manipulated person. The public knew about it, and the corruption of their leaders, along with the prevalent uncertainty of the emergency situation in which the string of deaths had placed the city, had decidedly weakened moral standards among the lower classes, encouraging their darker, antisocial impulses. This had led to intemperance, licentiousness and increasing contempt for law and order. An unusual number of drunks could be seen every evening; vicious riffraff, it was said, had made the streets unsafe at night; and there were a rash of muggings and even murders, for twice already it had turned out that supposed victims of the epidemic had actually been dispatched with poison by their own relatives. Moreover commercial vice had taken on obtrusive and excessive forms that was previously unknown in the area, being usually found only in the Italian South and the Orient.

  The Englishman told him the substance of all this. “You would do well,” he concluded, “to leave sooner rather than later. The imposition of a general quarantine cannot be more than a few days away.” — “I’m very grateful to you,” said Aschenbach and left the office.

  The Piazza San Marco lay in overcast humidity. Oblivious foreigners sat in the cafés or stood literally covered by pigeons in front of the cathedral, watching the swarming birds beat their wings and jostle each other to peck at the cupped hands offering corn seed. Feverish with excitement, triumphant in possession of the truth, but also with a disgusting taste on his tongue and an uncanny horror in his heart, the solitary Aschenbach paced up and down the tiles of that splendid square. He was considering an action of cleansing decency. This evening after dinner he would approach the lady with the pearls and deliver the speech he was already rehearsing: “Please permit a stranger to be of service, Madame, and pass along a piece of advice, a warning, about something which is being kept from you out of self-interest. Leave here at once with Tadzio and your daughters! Venice is in the throes of the plague.” Then, as a gesture of farewell, he could lay his hand on the head of that instrument of a scornful divinity and turn around and flee this miserable swamp himself. At the same time, however, he sensed how infinitely far he was from any genuine desire to take such a step. It would lead him back, restore him to himself, but when you’re beside yourself, the last thing you want is come to in this way. He recalled a white building adorned with inscriptions glinting in the twilight in whose radiant mysticism his mind’s eye had wandered about. He remembered the strange traveler who had awakened in him at his advanced age an errant youthful desire for distance and exotic surroundings. And the thought of returning home—of self-control, sobriety, labor and expertise—revolted him so deeply that his face took on a look of physical illness. “It’s to be kept quiet!” he whispered vehemently. “Then I’ll keep it quiet.” Consciousness of his shared knowledge, shared guilt, intoxicated him in precisely the way that small quantities of wine can intoxicate a tired mind. The image of the disease-stricken, decimated city suspended desolate in his imagination raised hopes that were incomprehensible, beyond all rational understanding, abominably sweet. What was the delicate happiness of which he had just now dreamt for an instant, measured against prospects like these? What good were art and virtue to him, he who enjoyed the prospects of chaos? He kept quiet and stayed on.

  That night he had a terrible dream—if that is the right word for an experience of body and soul that befell him in the depths of sleep as an absolutely autonomous sensory reality, but that did not permit him to see himself moving and existing in space, discrete from the dream events. Instead, his own soul was the setting. Events broke in on him from the outside, overcoming his resistance—a deep, mental resistance—with great violence; then they passed through him, leaving his entire self, his life’s culture, devastated and destroyed.

  Fear was the beginning, fear and desire and a horrified curiosity about what was about to transpire. Night had descended, and his senses were alert, for, from far away, came turbulence, turmoil, a terrible violent racket—rustling, smashing and dull rumbling, shrill cheering, too, and a certain howl like a drawn-out u—all permeated and at times drowned out by the deep warbling of a gruesomely sweet, ruthlessly insistent flute, which mesmerized his very innards with its shamelessly cloying tone. Still he knew a phrase, albeit obscure, to describe what was approaching: the Other God! Smoky flames began to glow: he could make out mountainous land, similar to that around his country house. And in this refracted light, through the branches and the mossy boulders, something began to thrash and spin its way down from the wooded peak—humans, animals, a swarm, a raging herd. The slope was inundated with bodies, flames, tumult and frenzied circles of dance. Wailing women stumbled over clumsily long animal hides secured by belts and shook tambourines over each other’s upturned, moaning heads, swung spark-laden torches and unsheathed daggers, carried fork-tongued snakes coiled around their waists and clutched at their breasts with both hands. Men—with horns above their brows, animal-hide loincloths and hairy skin—bowed their heads, exposed their necks, lifted their arms and thighs in the air, banged iron cymbals and furiously pounded drums, while smooth-skinned boys prodded goats with leaf-wound staffs, clinging to the animals’ antlers and crying out with joy as they were dragged around in leaps. What’s more, the revellers were all howling out that word with the soft consonants and the drawn-out u at the end, simultaneously sweet and wild, like nothing ever heard. It sounded first here, bellowed into the air as though by rutting stags, then there, a chorus of voices adopting it as a rowdy chant of triumph, inciting each other to dance and flail their limbs, never letting it fade. Meanwhile the low seductive sounds of the flute ran through and above it all. Was it not also trying to seduce him, the reluctant spectator, enticing him with shameless tenacity to join in the wanton festivity of utmost sacrifice? His revulsion was great, great, too, his fear, and he was sincerely determined to defend what was his to the last against the Other God, the enemy of his composed and dignified intellect. But the noise and the howling kept increasing, amplified by the echoing mountainside, drowning out everything else, swelling into irresistible insanity. Odors assaulted his nose: the bitter stench of the goats, excrescent bodily scents, a whiff of something like stagnant waters, and, along with them, yet another familiar smell—that of wounds and rampant disease. His heart pounded to the drumbeats, his mind whirled, rage seized him, blindness, numbing lust, and his soul craved to join the dancing circle of the god. The obscene symbol, a giant piece of wood, was unveiled and raised, at which the revelers all began to howl their battle cry with greater abandon. Frothing at the mouth, they raged, clawing with lurid expressions and ravenous hands, laughing and moaning, stabbing each other with prods and licking the blood from each other’s limbs. But now, with them, among them, was the dreaming Aschenbach. He had given himself over to the Other God. Yes, he was one of them as they attacked and slaughtered the animals, tearing them to dripping shreds and devouring the remains, and again, as free and open copulation in honor of the god began everywhere on the mossy ground. And his soul tasted descent’s orgiastic fury.

  The stricken Aschenbach awoke from this dream unnerved and shattered, delivered up helplessly to the demon. He no longer avoided the observant eyes of others; whether he exposed himself to their suspicions was now entirely irrelevant. In any case, they were taking flight, traveling on. Many of the changing huts now stood unoccupied, larger gaps had opened up between patrons in the dining room, and foreigners were a rare sight in the city. The truth seemed to have seeped out, and despite the dogged solidarity of the interested parties, panic could no longer be averted. Yet the lady with the pearl necklace stayed on with her family. Perhaps she didn’t hear the rumors; perhaps she was too proud and fearless to budge. In any case Tadzio remained, and to Aschenbach in his rapture, it sometimes seemed as if departure and death might remove all other disturbing presences from their midst, leaving him alone on the island with the beautiful boy. Indeed, every morning by the sea, as his eye dwelt with a hard, reckless, fixed stare on the object of his desire, or at su
nset, as he ignobly followed that object through the alleys where the progress of the vile plague was being concealed, monstrosities began to seem propitious, moral law invalid.

  Like any lover, Aschenbach wished to please and was bitterly afraid of rejection. He livened up his attire with youthful little touches, he wore jewelry and used cologne, he fussed over his appearance repeatedly during the day and always turned up at dinner well dressed, jittery and anxious. In the presence of that sweet youth that had so taken possession of him, he found his own body repugnant: the sight of his graying hair, his pinched features, plunged him into shame and despair. He felt he had to spruce up and restore his looks. He paid frequent visits to the gossipy hotel coiffeur.

  With a hairdressing gown draped over him, he leaned back in the chair under the latter’s soothing hands and stared at his reflection in a hand mirror, looking pained.

  “Gray,” he said, scowling.

  “A touch,” the man answered. “And where does the fault lie? A minor lapse, a neglect of external matters. Understandable, though hardly commendable, among persons of importance. Especially since they are precisely the ones who should be above little prejudices about what is natural and what is not. Some of these people and their moral objections to the art of cosmetics—if you extend the same logic to teeth, you see how offensive it is. Ultimately we are only as old as we feel in our hearts and minds. In certain cases keeping your hair gray actually involves more of a deception than the corrective some people see fit to scorn. A man in your position has a right to his natural hair color. Will you permit me simply to give you back what is yours?”