Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

  The waves beat against the concrete walls of the narrow canal that runs across the island to the Hotel Excelsior. There a motor omnibus stood waiting to take the returning guest straight to the Hôtel des Bains on the road above the rippling sea. The small, mustachioed manager in the frock coat came down the steps to greet him.

  He deplored the incident in his soft, wheedling way, calling it extremely awkward for him and the establishment, but unconditionally condoned Aschenbach’s decision to await the trunk there. His room had of course been occupied, but another, equally suitable, would be ready immediately. “Pas de chance, monsieur,” said the Swiss lift attendant with a smile as they rode up. And thus the fugitive was lodged once more, and in a room all but identical in situation and furnishing.

  Exhausted and benumbed by the strange morning’s turmoil, he distributed the contents of his bag about the room and settled into a reclining chair at the open window. The sea had turned a pale green, the air seemed thinner and purer, the beach with its boats and cabanas more colorful, though the sky was still gray. Aschenbach gazed out of the window, his hands folded in his lap, pleased to be back, but shaking his head in displeasure at his fickle nature, his ignorance of his own wishes. He sat thus for perhaps an hour in repose and idle reverie. At noon he spotted Tadzio in his striped linen outfit and red bow returning from the sea to the hotel through the beach gate and along the boardwalks. From his lofty vantage point Aschenbach recognized him immediately, even before getting a clear view of him, and was on the point of thinking something like: So you’re still here, too, Tadzio. But at that very moment he felt the casual greeting fade and vanish before the truth of his heart, he felt the rapture of his blood, the joy and agony of his soul, and acknowledged to himself that it was Tadzio who had made it so hard for him to leave.

  He sat there perfectly still, perfectly invisible on his lofty perch, gazing within himself. His features were keen, his eyebrows high, his lips drawn into a vigilant, inquisitively intelligent smile. Then he raised his head and with both arms, which had been hanging limply over the back of his chair, made a slow, rising, circular motion that brought the hands forward in such a way as to indicate an opening and spreading of the arms. It was a gesture of willingness, welcome, of calm acceptance.

  Four

  Day after day now the god with the flaming cheeks soared upward naked, driving his team of four fire-breathing horses through heaven’s acres, his yellow ringlets fluttering wild in the gale of the east wind. A silky white sheen overlay the expanse of slow-swelling Pontos. The sand fairly glowed. Beneath the quivering silvery blue of the ether, rust-colored canvas awnings jutted out before each cabana, and mornings were spent on the sharply outlined patch of shade they created. But evenings were lovely as well, the plants in the park exuding their balm, the heavenly bodies dancing their round, the soft sighs of the night-shrouded sea rising up, casting spells on the soul. Evenings like these bore the joyful promise of a new sunny day of loosely ordered leisure and ornamented with countless and closely packed prospects of pleasant encounters.

  The guest detained by so obliging a mishap was far from regarding the recovery of his property as grounds for a new departure. For two days he had had to make do without a few necessities and show up for meals in the main dining room in his traveling clothes. When the errant item was finally deposited in his room, he unpacked completely and filled the wardrobes and drawers with his belongings, resolved to remain for an as yet unspecified period and pleased to be able to spend his beach hours in a silk suit and appear again for dinner at his table in proper evening attire.

  The soothing regularity of this existence quickly cast a spell over him: he was charmed by the soft, resplendent benignancy of it all. What a place indeed, combining as it did the appeal of a refined southern seaside resort with a strange, wondrous city in intimate proximity! Aschenbach did not care for pleasure. Whenever and wherever he was called upon to let his hair down, take things easy, enjoy himself, he soon—especially in his younger years—felt restless and ill at ease and could not wait to return to his noble travail, the sober sanctuary of his daily routine. It was the only place that could enchant him, relax his will, make him happy. There were times when in the morning, gazing dreamily at the blue of the southern sea from under the awning of his cabana, or on a halcyon night, reclining on the cushion of the gondola taking him home to the Lido from Saint Mark’s Square beneath the vast, starry firmament—the colorful lights, the mellifluous strains of the serenade fading into the distance—he would recall his house in the mountains, scene of his summer labors, where clouds drifted low through the garden, violent storms blew out the evening house lights, and the ravens, which he fed, soared to the tops of the spruces. Then he would feel he had indeed been whisked off to the land of Elysium, to the ends of the earth, where man is granted a life of ease, where there is no snow nor yet winter, no tempest, no pouring rain, but only the cool gentle breath released by Oceanus, and the days flow past in blissful idleness, effortless, free of strife, and consecrated solely to the sun and its feasts.

  Aschenbach saw much of the boy Tadzio, saw him almost continually, the narrow confines and common activities making it only natural that the beautiful creature should be close to him throughout the day with only brief interruptions. He saw him, met him everywhere: in the downstairs rooms of the hotel, on the refreshing boat rides into town and back, in the splendor of the square itself, and at various odd times and places dependent on the whims of chance. Chiefly, however, and with a most felicitous regularity, it was mornings on the beach that afforded him extended opportunities for the study and reverence of the fair vision. Yes, it was the daily assurance of good fortune, the periodic recurrence of favorable circumstances that so filled him with contentment and joie de vivre, that made the place so precious to him and strung each sunny day so obligingly to the others.

  He would rise early—as was his wont when under the unrelenting pressure of his work—and was one of the first on the beach, when the sun was still mild and the sea a dazzling white, still dreaming. He would greet the gate attendant amiably and nod another friendly greeting to the barefoot graybeard who readied his place for him—pulled out the brown awning and moved the furniture out of the cabana—whereupon he settled in. He then had three or four hours during which the sun climbed to its zenith and grew to a frightening intensity, during which the sea turned a deeper and deeper blue, and during which he could watch Tadzio.

  He would see him coming, from the left, along the shore, see him emerge from between cabanas, or he might suddenly realize—not without a pleasant shock—that he had missed his arrival, that he was already there, already in the blue-and-white bathing costume that was now his sole beach attire, and that he had resumed his customary sun-and-sand activities—the charmingly frivolous, idly bustling existence that with its ambling, wading, digging, grabbing, lolling, and swimming was both play and rest—overseen by the women on the platform calling “Tadziu! Tadziu!” to him in their high-pitched voices, and he would run up to them, gesturing animatedly, and tell them what he had been doing, show them what he had found or caught: mussels, sea horses, jellyfish, crabs that go sideways. Aschenbach understood not a word of what he said, yet humdrum as it might be it was mellifluent harmony to his ear. Thus the foreignness of the boy’s speech transformed it into music, the exuberant sun poured its copious rays over him, and the sea and its sublime depths provided a constant foil and backdrop for his presence.

  Soon the observer knew every line and pose of that body so noble, so freely exposed, joyfully welcoming anew each already familiar aspect of his beauty, and his wonderment and delicate sensual delight knew no bounds. Summoned to greet a guest paying his respects to the ladies at the cabana, the boy would run up out of the water—dripping wet perhaps, tossing back his curls—hold out his hand and—one foot planted on the ground, the other on tiptoe—execute a charming twist and turn of the body, gracefully restless, graciously diffident, and obliging from a sense of noble
sse oblige. He would lie full length with his towel wrapped round his chest, a delicately chiseled arm resting in the sand, a hand cupping the chin, while the boy addressed as Jasiu squatted at his side, playing up to him, and there could be nothing more tantalizing than the smiling eyes and lips of the chosen one looking up at his inferior, his servant. He would stand at the edge of the sea, alone, removed from his family, quite near Aschenbach, erect, his hands clasped behind his neck, slowly rocking on the balls of his feet, staring out into the blue in reverie, while little waves rolled up and bathed his toes. The honey-colored hair fell gracefully in ringlets at the temples and the back of the neck, the sun glimmered in the down of the upper spine, the fine delineation of the ribs and symmetry of the chest stood out through the torso’s scanty cover, the armpits were still as smooth as a statue’s, the hollows of the knees glistened, and their bluish veins made the body look translucent. What discipline, what precision of thought was conveyed by that tall, youthfully perfect physique! Yet the austere and pure will laboring in obscurity to bring the godlike statue to light—was it not known to him, familiar to him as an artist? Was it not at work in him when, chiseling with sober passion at the marble block of language, he released the slender form he had beheld in his mind and would present to the world as an effigy and mirror of spiritual beauty?

  Effigy and mirror! His eyes embraced the noble figure standing there at the edge of the blue, and in a rush of ecstasy he believed that his eyes gazed upon beauty itself, form as divine thought, the sole and pure perfection that dwells in the mind and whose human likeness and representation, lithe and lovely, was here displayed for veneration. This was intoxication, and the aging artist welcomed it unquestioningly, indeed, avidly. His mind was in a whirl, his cultural convictions in ferment; his memory cast up ancient thoughts passed on to him in his youth though never yet animated by his own fire. Was it not common knowledge that the sun diverts our attention from the intellectual to the sensual? It be-numbs and bewitches both reason and memory such that the soul in its elation quite forgets its true nature and clings with rapt delight to the fairest of sun-drenched objects, nay, only with the aid of the corporeal can it ascend to more lofty considerations. Cupid truly did as mathematicians do when they show concrete images of pure forms to incompetent pupils: he made the mental visible to us by using the shape and coloration of human youths and turned them into memory’s tool by adorning them with all the luster of beauty and kindling pain and hope in us at the sight of them.

  Such were the thoughts of Aschenbach the enthusiast, such the feelings of which he was capable. And from the surge of the sea and the glow of the sun there emerged a beguiling tableau. It was of the old plane tree not far from the walls of Athens, that place of sacred shade fragrant with chaste-tree blossoms and decorated with votive images and pious offerings in honor of the nymphs and Achelous, a crystal clear brook flowing over smooth pebbles past the foot of the great spreading tree, past crickets fiddling. On the grass, its mild slope propping up their heads, two men lay sheltering from the day’s torrid heat: one elderly, one young; one ugly, one beautiful; the wise beside the desirable. And with compliments and witty, wheedling pleasantries Socrates instructed Phaedrus in the nature of longing and virtue. He spoke to him of the intense trepidation the man of feeling experiences when his eye beholds a representation of eternal beauty; he spoke to him of the desires of the base and impious man who cannot acknowledge beauty when he sees its likeness and is incapable of reverence; he spoke of the holy terror that seizes the noble man when a godlike countenance or perfect body appears before him, how he trembles and loses control and can hardly bring himself to look, yet respects it and would even make sacrifices unto it as he might unto a graven image were he not fearful of seeming foolish in the eyes of men. For beauty, my dear Phaedrus, and beauty alone is at once desirable and visible: it is, mark my words, the only form of the spiritual we can receive through our senses and tolerate thereby. Think what would become of us were the godhead or reason and virtue and truth to appear before our eyes! Should we not perish in the flames of love, as did Semele beholding Zeus? Hence beauty is the path the man of feeling takes to the spiritual, though merely the path, dear young Phaedrus, a means and no more…And then he made his most astute pronouncement, the crafty wooer, namely, that the lover is more divine than the beloved, because the god dwells in the former, not the latter, which is perhaps the most delicate, most derisive thought ever thought by man and the source of all the roguery and deep-seated lust in longing.

  Nothing gladdens a writer more than a thought that can become pure feeling and a feeling that can become pure thought. Just such a pulsating thought, just such a precise feeling was then in the possession and service of the solitary traveler: nature trembles with bliss when the mind bows in homage to beauty. He suddenly desired to write. Eros, we are told, loves indolence, and for indolence was he created. But at this point in his crisis the stricken man was aroused to production. The stimulus scarcely mattered. A query, a challenge to make one’s views known on a certain major, burning issue of taste and culture had gone out to the intellectual world and caught up with him on his travels. It was something he was familiar with, something he knew from experience, and the desire to make it shine in the light of his words was suddenly irresistible. What is more, he longed to work in Tadzio’s presence, to model his writing on the boy’s physique, to let his style follow the lines of that body, which he saw as godlike, and bear its beauty to the realm of the intellect, as the eagle had once borne the Trojan shepherd to the ether. Never had he experienced the pleasure of the word to be sweeter, never had he known with such certitude that Eros is in the word than during those dangerously delightful hours when, seated at his rough table under the awning, in full view of his idol, the music of his voice in his ears, he formulated that little essay—a page and a half of sublime prose based on Tadzio’s beauty—the purity, nobility, and quivering emotional tension of which would soon win the admiration of many. It is surely as well that the world knows only a beautiful work itself and not its origins, the conditions under which it comes into being, for if people had knowledge of the sources from which the artist derives his inspiration they would oftentimes be confused and alarmed and thus vitiate the effects the artist had achieved. How strange those hours were! How oddly enervating the effort! How curiously fruitful the intercourse of mind with body! When Aschenbach put away his work and quit the beach, he felt exhausted and, yes, spent, as if his conscience were reproaching him after a debauch.

  The following morning he was going down the front steps, about to leave the hotel, when he spied Tadzio—alone—nearing the beach gate on his way to the sea. The desire, the mere thought of taking the opportunity to make the casual, offhand acquaintance of the beautiful boy who had unknowingly so elated and moved him, to address him and take pleasure in his response and the look in his eyes—nothing could be more natural, more obvious. The boy was ambling slowly—he could easily be overtaken—and Aschenbach merely accelerated his pace. He caught up to him on the boardwalk in back of the cabanas and was on the point of laying his hand on his head or shoulder—a phrase, some friendly words in French on his lips—when he felt his heart hammering wildly, from the quick pace perhaps, and he was so breathless that his voice would have been hoarse and strained had he tried to speak. He paused and struggled to get hold of himself, but suddenly feared he had been walking too long just behind the boy, feared the boy would notice, turn and look at him questioningly, so he had one more go at it, failed, surrendered, and walked past with downcast eyes.

  Too late! he thought at that moment. Too late! But was it too late? The step he had failed to take might well have led to something joyous, untroubled, and good, to a salutary sobriety. But it is more likely that the aging man had no desire for sobriety, that he was too taken with his intoxication. Who can unravel the essence, the stamp of the artistic temperament! Who can grasp the deep, instinctual fusion of discipline and dissipation on which it rests! For t
he inability to desire salutary sobriety is tantamount to dissipation. Aschenbach was no longer inclined to self-criticism: taste, the state of mind that came with his years, self-respect, maturity, and a late-won simplicity made him reluctant to analyze motives and determine whether the failure to carry out his intention was due to conscience or to laxity and weakness. He was confused: he feared that someone, if only the bathing attendant, had witnessed his haste and his defeat, and very much feared looking ridiculous. Then again, he made fun of himself for his comically exalted fear. “Daunted,” he thought, “daunted like a gamecock drooping its wings in battle. This is surely the god who at the sight of something desirable so breaks our spirit, so utterly dashes our sense of pride against the ground…” It was enjoyable, waxing thus rhapsodic, and he was far too arrogant to fear an emotion.

  He had ceased keeping track of the time he allotted himself for leisure and gave no thought whatever to going home. He had had ample funds transferred here. His sole concern was that the Polish family would leave, but he learned surreptitiously, by inquiring casually of the hotel barber, that their arrival had barely predated his own. The sun was tanning his face and hands, the bracing salt air was making him more susceptible to emotion, and whereas he had been in the habit of applying any fortification afforded him by sleep, nourishment, or nature immediately to his work, he now allowed the daily invigoration coming from sun, leisure, and sea breezes to dissipate in magnanimously improvident euphoria and sentiment.