Death in Venice and Other Tales

  “How so?” asked Aschenbach.

  The eloquent coiffeur washed the customer’s hair in two different liquids, one clear, one dark, and once more it was as black as it had been in his youth. The man then curled it with heated tongs into soft waves, took a step back and examined his work.

  “The only thing left,” he said, “would be to put a little color in your complexion.”

  And like the perfectionist who can never leave well enough alone, he scurried around, indefatigably, and fiddled with this and that. The comfortably reclining Aschenbach, incapable of defending himself, indeed suffused with sudden hope at what was transpiring, watched in the mirror as his brows grew starker and more evenly arched, as the shape of his eyes was elongated, their green enhanced with some faint liner, watched further down as a delicate, gently applied pink was awakened where his skin had turned leathery brown, as his ever pallid lips turned plump and raspberry red, and as the lines on his cheeks and mouth, the wrinkles around his eyes disappeared under skin cream and “Breath of Youth.” With his heart beating wildly, he beheld a young man in first bloom. The cosmetician finally declared himself satisfied, as people like that often do, by sycophantically thanking the person upon whom he had just waited. “A minor adjustment,” he said, touching Aschenbach’s skin for the last time. “Now, sir, you can safely fall in love.” The spellbound Aschenbach left, dreamily happy, a bit confused and timid. His tie was red; his wide-brimmed straw hat had a rainbow-colored band.

  A tepid storm wind had come up. The rain was infrequent and light, but the air hung humid, thick with odors of decay. Fluttering, clapping and whistling could be heard all around, and to the feverish Aschenbach under his makeup it seemed that an evil race of harpies was at work in the sky, fiendish sea birds who would ruin the condemned man’s last meal, leaving it half-chewed and soiled with dung. The humidity had robbed him of all appetite, and he couldn’t help but imagine that his food had been contaminated with infectious material.

  One afternoon while on the beautiful boy’s trail, Aschenbach penetrated deep into the internal maze of the ailing city. Although he had lost his bearings in the labyrinth of indistinguishable alleys, canals, bridges and city squares and wasn’t even sure in which direction he was headed, he was determined not to lose sight of his hotly pursued vision. Forced to proceed with humiliating caution, pressing up against walls and hiding behind the backs of pedestrians, he was unaware for quite some time of the fatigue, indeed exhaustion, that emotion and constant strain had wreaked upon his body and mind. Tadzio was walking to the rear of his family, letting the governess and his nunlike sisters proceed ahead in narrow passages, so that, strolling by himself, he could occasionally glance back over his shoulder with his peculiar twilight gray eyes to make sure his lover was still following. He saw him, and he didn’t betray him. Intoxicated by this realization, lured on by those eyes like a puppet on passion’s strings, the love-struck Aschenbach stole along in pursuit of his unseemly hope, only to find himself cheated in the end. The Polish family crossed a slightly arched bridge, the height of whose curvature obscured them from the view of their pursuer. Once on top of it himself, however, he could no longer spot them. He peered around in three directions, straight ahead and off to the sides along the narrow, dirty canal, but it was no use. Frustration and weakness finally made him abandon his search.

  His head was on fire, his body was covered in feverish sweat, the nape of his neck tingled, a no longer bearable thirst now tortured him, and he looked around for anything that would bring instantaneous relief. From a tiny vegetable stand he bought some fruit, strawberries, soft and overripe, which he ate as he walked. A small square, forgotten and seemingly accursed, opened up before him. He recognized it. It had been here, weeks ago, that he had decided upon his unrealized plan to leave. He collapsed on the steps of the cistern in the middle of this space, resting his head against its stone rim. All was silent, grass was growing between the cobblestones and garbage was strewn everywhere. Among the weather-beaten, unevenly tall surrounding houses, one stood out like a palace with its lion-flanked balconies and arched windows, behind which dwelt only emptiness. Located on the ground floor of another house was a pharmacy. Warm gusts carried over occasional smells of phenol.

  He sat there. The great master, the artist grown dignified, the author of “A True Wretch,” the writer who had dismissed everything vagabond and every gloomily plumbed depth in such exemplary pure form, the intellectual who had rejected sympathy with the abyss and disdained dissipation, the climber of such heights, the transcender of personal knowledge who had outgrown irony and accustomed himself to the amenities and obligations of mass public trust, the celebrity whose fame had been officially sanctioned, whose name had been ennobled and whose style served as the model by which schoolboys were taught to write—he sat there. He held his eyes shut, casting only the occasional short glance down to one side with an expression of scorn and embarrassment, while his slack, cosmetically enhanced smile formed isolated words taken from the strange dream logic produced in his half-conscious brain.

  “For beauty, Phaedrus—mark my words!—only beauty is both divine and visible to the human eye. Therefore it represents the path of the sensual man, young Phaedrus, the artist, to the sublime. Do you really think, dear boy, that he whose path to the sublime passes through the senses can ever attain wisdom and true dignity as a man? Or do you think that this is a dangerously enticing path, one of falsehood and sin, which necessarily leads us astray? I leave it up to you to decide. For you must know that we artists cannot follow the path of beauty without the accompaniment and guidance of Eros. Indeed, though we may be heroes in our own way, trained warriors, we are also like women, for passion is our inspiration, and our true longing must always remain a desire for love. That is our desire and shame. Do you see now that we artists can be neither wise nor dignified? That we necessarily go astray, that we can never be anything but disreputable soldiers of emotional fortune? Our mastery of style is nothing but a foolish little lie, our fame and glory a farce, the public’s faith in us a joke, the idea of educating youth or the masses with art a risky practice that should be outlawed. What use is a teacher born with a natural, incorrigible tendency toward the abyss? We may deny it and acquire dignity, but no matter which way we turn, it attracts us. We renounce all-unravelling intellect, for intellect, Phaedrus, possesses neither dignity nor rigor. It knows, understands, forgives, but without any fixed position or form. It lives in sympathetic attraction to the abyss—it is the abyss. This we ultimately reject, to strive from then on only for beauty, that is to say, for simplicity, greatness and renewed rigor, second unfettered innocence and form. But form and unfettered innocence, Phaedrus, lead to intoxication and lust. They may even lead the noble mind into some awful emotional sacrilege, which his own aesthetic rigor rejects as unspeakable. They lead to the abyss, they, too, to the abyss. This, I tell you, is where we artists are led, for we are incapable of soaring on high, only of running riot. And now I must go, Phaedrus. You stay here, and only when you see me no more, are you to go, too.”

  Several days later Gustav von Aschenbach, feeling sick, left the beach hotel later than usual in the morning. He had been forced to battle against definite, if only semiphysical, attacks of nausea, which were accompanied by an acute mounting anxiety, a feeling of hopelessness and futility impossible to pinpoint either to the world at large or to his own personal life. In the lobby he noticed a great many bags standing ready for departure. He asked a doorman who was traveling on and received as an answer the aristocratic Polish family name he had secretly been expecting. He took in the information without a flinch of his sunken features, curtly raising his chin as people do to acknowledge learning something they didn’t need to know, and added: “When?” The answer came: “After lunch.” He nodded and walked down to the sea.

  There, shop had been closed up. On the wide shallows separating the beach from the first stretch of sandbar, rippling shu
dders of water ran back out to sea. An autumnal, out-of-favor atmosphere seemed to have descended over this once so colorful and crowded, but now almost deserted resort, whose sand was no longer kept clean. A camera, apparently abandoned, stood on its tripod at the edge of the sea, its draped black cloth flapping in the breeze, which was cooler than before.

  Tadzio, along with three or four remaining playmates, was running around to the right in front of his family’s hut. Aschenbach sat in a chair approximately halfway between the sea and the row of huts with a blanket over his knees and watched Tadzio one more time. The game was unsupervised (the women were apparently preparing for departure), seemed to have no rules and quickly got out of control. The strapping lad with the belted jumpsuit and the black pomaded hair called “Yashu,” enraged by some blinding sand thrown in his face, challenged Tadzio to a wrestling match. This soon ended with the beautiful but weaker combatant being pinned. Nevertheless, as though in this final hour the servile vassal had been transformed into a terrible brute who now sought revenge for his long subordination, the victorious “Yashu” refused to stop attacking his vanquished foe and instead kept one knee on his back, pressing his face into the sand. Tadzio, who was already out of breath from the fight, was near suffocation. His efforts to shake off the weight on top of him were convulsive, ceasing entirely for moments at a time, to return as mere twitching. Horrified, Aschenbach wanted to leap to the rescue, but just then the bully finally released his victim. Very pale, Tadzio got halfway up and sat motionless for several minutes, leaning on one arm, his hair mussed and his eyes glowering. Then he took to his feet and walked slowly off. His name was called, at first playfully, then apologetically and urgently, but he turned a deaf ear. The dark-haired boy, no doubt overcome with immediate regret at having gone too far, ran after him and tried to patch things up. A shoulder motioned for him to stay back. Tadzio walked diagonally down to the water. He was barefoot and wore his striped linen outfit with the red bow.

  At the water’s edge he paused, head down, to draw some shapes in the sand with his toes, then continued out into the shallows, which even at their deepest didn’t come up over his knee, leisurely making his way through them until he reached the sandbar. There he stood for a moment, his face turned toward the open sea, before walking slowly leftward over the long strip of narrow exposed land. Cut off from the beach by the wide stretch of water, cut off from his playmates by his own proud moodiness, he paced back and forth, an utterly isolated and disconnected figure with disheveled hair out there in the sea and the wind, against a backdrop of hazy infinity. Once more he paused to gaze into the distance. And suddenly, as if remembering something or following some other such impulse, he rotated his upper body, one hand on his hip, in an elegant twist from his basic position and looked back over his shoulder toward shore. There on the beach, the watching Aschenbach sat as he had sat once before, when those twilight gray eyes had first glanced back over that fateful threshold and met his own. His head, resting on the beach chair, had slowly turned to follow the boy’s movements as he paced in the distance. Now it lifted level with the boy’s gaze, before suddenly slumping down over his chest. His eyes rolled and his face took on the slack, sunken expression of deep slumber. It seemed to him, however, as if the pale and lovely shepherd of souls out there smiled at him, beckoning, as if he took his hand from his hip and pointed, indeed himself glided ahead, into the looming immensity, full of promise and portent. And as he had so often before, Aschenbach got up to follow.

  Minutes passed before help arrived for the man slumped over sideways in his chair. He was brought to his room. And that very same day a respectfully shaken world received the news of his death.

  Man and Dog: An Idyll

  HE COMES AROUND THE CORNER

  Whenever spring lives up to its lovely reputation, and the twittering of the birds has—thanks to my having ended the previous day at a proper juncture—sufficed to awaken me in time, I quite enjoy a half-an-hour stroll before breakfast. Not bothering with my hat, I start along the suburban lane by my house, sometimes continuing into the parks further out, in order to catch a few breaths of fresh morning air and to savor for a bit—before I’m spirited away by my work—the joys of the sheer earliness of hour. On my front steps I let out a whistle consisting of two notes, tonic and lower fourth, as in the beginning melody of the second movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. It is a signal, something like a two-syllable name set to music. The very next instant, as I continue toward the front gate, a sound can be heard in the distance, barely audible at first but quickly growing closer and more distinct, a delicate tinkling of the sort produced by a license medallion hitting the metal clasp of a dog collar. Glancing back, I see Baushan coming at full speed round the rear corner of the house straight for me, as though planning to run me over. His lower lip is retracted slightly in exertion, exposing two or three front teeth that gleam white and majestic in the early morning sun.

  He comes from his house, there on the ground under the elevated veranda in the backyard, where, before my two-syllable whistle brought him so vividly to life, he was most probably taking a short nap after a night of varied activity. His house is equipped with a curtain made of coarse material and is strewn, which explains why one or two pieces of straw are to be found in Baushan’s somewhat sleep-tousled fur and sometimes in his paws. The sight always reminds me of a very accurately realized production of Schiller’s The Robbers I once saw, in which the old Count Moor climbed down from his tower of starvation with a piece of straw sticking up from between two of his poor toes. I wheel instinctively away from my attacker and adopt a posture of defense, for his seeming intent—to undercut my feet and make me fall—never fails to deceive. At the last second, though, just before the crash, he’s always able to put on the brakes and bring himself round with a great display of both physical and mental self-control. Then, without a sound (for he makes only sparing use of his rich, expressive voice), he commences a bewilderingly intricate salutary dance in circles around me. It consists of stamps, aerial leaps in which he curls up and then releases his coiled body like a spring, uncontrolled wags of not only the appointed expressive instrument for this sort of thing—his tail—but his whole body from the ribs down, and revolutions around his own axis. For some strange reason he endeavors to hide all these maneuvers from me by switching sides every time I turn to watch. No sooner do I bend down and extend a hand, though, than he leaps to my side, where he stands with his shoulder pressed against my shin. Leaning diagonally against me, he stands there as motionless as a pillar, his strong paws braced against the ground, his face turned up toward mine, staring upside down and from below into my eyes. And his utter immobility, as I pat his shoulder blades and mutter a few words of praise, radiates the same intense concentration and passion as his previous frenzy.

  He’s a short-haired German pointer, at least insofar as one isn’t too severe or strict with this classification. One has to take it with a grain of salt, since on close inspection and if one goes by the book, Baushan isn’t really a pointer at all. In the first place he’s probably a bit too small: he falls, let’s be clear about this, somewhat below average height for a game dog. Likewise, his front legs aren’t straight but have a slight outward bow, which also deviates somewhat from the purebred ideal. His hint of dewlap—i.e., the wrinkled skin around the neck that can give such a regal appearance—looks quite good on him. It, too, however, would be regarded as a flaw by unforgiving breeders, for with a true pointer, I’m told, the skin around the neck should stretch smoothly over the throat. Baushan’s color is quite handsome. His fur is basically reddish brown with black stripes, yet there’s also a lot of white mixed in. The latter especially predominates on his chest, his paws and his belly, while the entirety of his pug nose looks as if it had been dipped in black. Atop his broad head, as well as on his cool drooping ears, the black combines with the auburn in a lovely, velvetesque pattern, and he has a white cowlick, or knot, or tuft, that weaves it
self together on his chest and that projects out horizontally like the spike on an antique breastplate. The cowlick is one of his best features. Nonetheless, the somewhat random splendor of his fur color would likewise probably be deemed “invalid” by anyone who emphasizes breeding conventions over personal idiosyncrasy, for the classic pointer may be monochrome or variously spotted, but never striped. The definitive indication, however, that Baushan cannot be classified according to some rigid paradigm is the hair that hangs from the corners of his mouth and the underside of his muzzle, which one could, with at least a semblance of justification, call a Van Dyck, and which on first glance, both from a distance and closer up, is reminiscent of a pinscher or a schnauzer.

  Pointer or pinscher—he’s a fine, handsome animal, standing stiff and slanted against my knee, looking up at me with the profoundest devotion! His eye is particularly handsome, gentle and wise, if also perhaps a bit distended and glassy. Its iris is reddish brown, the same color as his fur, although, owing to the considerable dilation of the mirror black pupil, it actually only makes up a thin ring, drops of which seep out into and float upon the surrounding white of his eyeball. The expression on his face—that of carefully considered middle-class common sense—affirms the masculinity of his life ethos, which his body in turn manifests physically. His arched chest, with its ribs powerfully outlined against his smooth, supple skin, his inwardly drawn hips, his nerve-veined legs, his rugged but well-formed feet . . . they all bespeak steadfastness and robust integrity, peasant stock and hunting blood. Both the hunter and the game dog predominate in Baushan, and this, if you ask me, qualifies him as a pointer, even if he doesn’t owe his existence to some act of snobbish incest. That may well be the gist of the otherwise so confusing, logically disjointed words I address to him while I pat his shoulder.