Death in Venice and Other Stories (27 page)

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 He had withdrawn ample money from his accounts.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. Sky, 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!”

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

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.

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.