Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

  He slept fitfully, the delightfully uniform days separated by brief, agreeably restless nights. True, he would retire early, because at nine, when Tadzio disappeared from the scene, the day seemed over to him, but at the first hint of dawn he would be awakened by a sweet panic, his heart would recall its adventure, and, finding it impossible to remain in bed, he would rise and, lightly clad against the morning chill, await the sunrise at the open window. This wondrous event would fill his soul, exalted yet from sleep, with great awe. Sky, earth, and sea still lay in the ghostly, glassy pallor of dawn; a fading star still hovered in the insubstantial heights. But a wind would waft in, a sprightly herald from abodes inaccessible to man, to say that Eos was rising from her husband’s side, and then came that first sweet blush of the remotest stretches of sky and sea, presaging the Creation’s reappearance to the senses. It was the goddess approaching, the seductress of youths, who had carried off Cleitus and Cephalus and, defying the envy of all Olympus, enjoyed the love of the beautiful Orion. At the edge of the world there was a strewing of roses, an ineffably beautiful shining and flowering, there were childlike clouds, transfigured, translucent, floating like attending amoretti in the rosy-blue haze, and a crimson radiance fell upon the sea, its rolling waves seeming to drive it forward, and golden spears flashed from below to the heavenly heights, the gleam turning to fire, soundlessly, the glow and heat and blazing flames billowing skyward with godlike potency, as the sacred steeds of her brother rose with grappling hooves over the planet. Illumined by the god’s splendor, Aschenbach, alone and awake, would shut his eyes and let his eyelids be kissed by the aura. Emotions from the past, early, delightful dolors of the heart swallowed up by the strict discipline of his life were now reappearing in the strangest of permutations—he recognized them with a perplexed and puzzled smile. He mused, he dreamed, his lips slowly shaping a name, and, still smiling, his face uplifted, his hands folded in his lap, he would doze off again in his armchair.

  Not only did the day begin with fiery festivities, however; it remained curiously feverish, metamorphosed by myth. Whence did it come, what was its source, the sudden breath of air that played so gently and tellingly about his temples and ears like an afflatus from on high? Clouds fleecy white dotted the sky like the gods’ own flocks out to pasture. A stiffer wind came up, and Poseidon’s steeds reared and shot forward; his bulls, too, the bulls of the blue-curled god, bellowed and charged, their horns lowered. Waves gamboled high like frisky goats amidst the rocks on the beach farther off. A world sacredly deformed and imbued with the spirit of Pan surrounded the spellbound observer, and his heart dreamed soothing fables. At times, as the sun sank behind Venice, he would sit on a bench in the park watching Tadzio, clad in white and with a bright-colored sash, play ball on the rolled gravel court, but seeing Hyacinth who, loved by two gods, was doomed to death. He could fairly feel Zephyr’s painful envy of his rival, who neglected his oracle, bow, and zither the better to sport with the beautiful youth; he could see the discus, flung out of cruel jealousy, striking the exquisite head; he, too, turned pale as he caught the buckled body, and the flower which sprang from that sweet blood bore the imprint of his undying plaint…

  There is nothing more curious or delicate than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who encounter and observe each other daily—nay, hourly—yet are constrained by convention or personal caprice to keep up the pretense of being strangers, indifferent, avoiding a nod or word. There is a feeling of malaise and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need for mutual knowledge and communication, and above all a sort of strained esteem. For a man loves and respects his fellow man only insofar as he is unable to assess him, and longing is a product of insufficient knowledge.

  Some kind of relationship and acquaintance was bound to develop between Aschenbach and young Tadzio, and the older man was thrilled to discover that his interest and attention did not go wholly unreciprocated. For example, what induced the beautiful boy, when appearing on the beach each morning, to shun the boardwalk behind the cabanas and saunter through the sand in front of them past Aschenbach’s residence—sometimes coming needlessly close to him, all but grazing his table or chair—on the way to the family cabana? Was this the result of the attraction, the fascination of a superior emotion on a tender and thoughtless object? Aschenbach looked forward daily to Tadzio’s entrance and at times pretended to be busy when it occurred and let the boy pass seemingly unnoticed. But at other times he looked up and their eyes would meet. They were both as grave as could be on such occasions. Nothing in the cultivated and dignified mien of the older man betrayed any agitation, yet there was a query, a pensive question in Tadzio’s eyes, a hesitation in his gait, and he looked down, then sweetly up again, and when he had passed, something in his bearing intimated that only good breeding kept him from looking back.

  Once, however, one evening, something different happened. The Polish boy and his sisters together with their governess had failed to come to dinner in the main dining room, as Aschenbach noted with alarm. After the meal, worried about their absence, he was pacing in evening dress and a straw hat in front of the hotel at the foot of the terrace when all at once he spied the nunlike sisters with their companion and, four steps behind them, Tadzio, emerging into the light of the arc lamps. They were obviously on their way from the vaporetto landing, having dined in the city for some reason. It must have been cool on the water: Tadzio was wearing a navy blue pea jacket with gold buttons and a matching cap. Sunshine and sea air did not tan him, and his skin had the same yellowish marble hue as at the outset, but today he looked paler than usual, whether because of the cool air or the bleaching effect of the lamps’ lunar light. His symmetrical eyebrows stood out more sharply; his eyes were a deep, dark shade. He was more beautiful than words can convey, and Aschenbach felt acutely, as he had often felt before, that language can only praise physical beauty, not reproduce it.

  He was unprepared for the precious apparition: it had come unexpectedly, and he had not had time to put on a calm, dignified expression. Joy, surprise, and admiration may thus have shown openly in his face when his eyes met those of the boy who had disappeared, and at that instant it happened: Tadzio smiled, smiled at him, with an effusive, intimate, charming, unabashed smile, his lips opening slowly. It was the smile of Narcissus bending over the water mirror, the deep, enchanted, protracted smile with which he stretched out his arms to the reflection of his own beauty, an ever so slightly contorted smile—contorted by the hopelessness of his endeavor to kiss the lovely lips of his shadow—and coquettish, inquisitive and mildly pained, beguiled and beguiling.

  The recipient of this smile hurried off with it as if it were a fatal gift. He was so shaken that he felt compelled to flee the light of the terrace and front garden and hastily sought the obscurity of the rear grounds. Oddly indignant and tender admonitions welled up inside him: “You mustn’t smile like that! One mustn’t smile like that at anyone, do you hear?” He flung himself on a bench, frantically inhaling the plants’ nocturnal fragrance. Then, leaning back, arms dangling, overwhelmed and shuddering repeatedly, he whispered the standard formula of longing—impossible here, absurd, perverse, ridiculous and sacred nonetheless, yes, still venerable even here: “I love you!”

  Five

  During the fourth week of his stay at the Lido, Gustav von Aschenbach observed some peculiar developments taking place in the world around him. First of all, it struck him that even as the season advanced, the number of guests at his hotel was falling rather than rising and, in particular, the use of German around him had so ebbed and waned that the only sounds reaching his ear at meals and on the beach were foreign. Then one day while conversing with the barber, whom he now patronized frequently, he gleaned a rather unsettling piece of news. Having mentioned a German family that had just departed after a short stay, he added in his chatty, unctuous manner, “But you are staying on, sir. You have no fear of the disease.” Aschenbach looked
at him. “The disease?” The prattler did not reply, acted busy, disregarded the question, and when it was put to him with more urgency he claimed to know nothing and attempted with embarrassed eloquence to change the subject.

  That was at noon. A few hours later, the dead calm and burning sun notwithstanding, Aschenbach went into Venice, driven by a mania to follow the Polish boy and his sisters, whom he had seen set off for the vaporetto landing with their companion. He did not find his idol at San Marco. However, while taking tea at his little round wrought-iron table on the shady side of the square, he suddenly whiffed an unusual aroma in the air, an aroma he now felt he had been inhaling for days without being conscious of it, a cloying medicinal smell redolent of squalor and sores and dubious hygiene. He sniffed again and after some thought identified it, then finished his tea and left the square at the end opposite the basilica. In that cramped space the smell grew stronger. The street corners were plastered with printed notices warning the population on behalf of the city fathers against eating oysters and mussels and using canal water because of certain gastric disorders that were only to be expected given the weather conditions. The euphemistic nature of the ordinance was clear. Groups of people clustered silently on bridges and in squares, the foreigner among them, sniffing and brooding.

  He went up to a shopkeeper leaning against the doorway of his arch amidst strings of coral and trinkets of imitation amethyst and asked what he knew about the disagreeable odor. The man looked him up and down with heavy eyes and promptly roused himself. “A precautionary measure, sir!” he answered, gesticulating. “A police injunction one can only condone. The atmosphere is oppressive; the sirocco is bad for the health. In short, you understand. Perhaps they are being overly cautious…”

  Aschenbach thanked him and went on. On the vaporetto taking him over to the Lido he now caught a smell of germicide.

  Back at the hotel, he headed straight for the newspaper table in the lobby and made a survey of what was available. He found nothing in the foreign-language papers. Those in his own language reported rumors, cited fluctuating figures, reproduced official denials, and questioned their veracity. That explained the departure of the German and Austrian element. Nationals of other countries evidently knew nothing, suspected nothing, and were not yet concerned. “Nothing is to be said about it!” thought Aschenbach anxiously, tossing the papers back on the table. “It is to be hushed up!” Yet at the same time his heart swelled with delight over the adventure the outside world was about to embark upon. For passion, like crime, is antithetical to the smooth operation and prosperity of day-to-day existence, and can only welcome every loosening of the fabric of society, every upheaval and disaster in the world, since it can vaguely hope to profit thereby. And so Aschenbach felt a morose satisfaction at the officially concealed goings-on in the dirty alleyways of Venice, that nasty secret which had merged with his own innermost secret and which he, too, was so intent on keeping: he was in love and concerned only that Tadzio might leave, and he realized not without horror that in the event he would not know what to make of his life.

  He had not been content of late to leave the possibility of seeing and being near the beautiful boy to chance or daily routine; he had pursued him, tracked him down. On Sundays, for instance, the Poles never came to the beach. Having surmised that they would be attending mass at San Marco, he would hurry there and, entering the golden dusk of the sanctuary from the square’s torrid heat, locate the boy he had so missed, his head bowed at worship over a prie-dieu. He would then stand at the back on the cracked mosaic floor amidst a host of people kneeling, murmuring, and crossing themselves, the massive splendor of the oriental temple weighing opulently on his senses. At the front the heavily bedizened priest walked to and fro, officiating and chanting, the incense billowing up and clouding the feeble flames of the altar tapers, and the sweet and stuffy sacrificial odor seemed to mingle with another: the odor of the diseased city. But through the haze and flicker Aschenbach would see the beautiful boy turn his head, seek him out, and sight him.

  Then, as the crowd poured through the opened portals into the radiant square teeming with pigeons, the beguiled traveler would lurk in the vestibule, hiding, lying in ambush. He would watch the Poles go out of the church, watch the siblings take ceremonious leave of their mother, who then set off for home in the direction of the Piazzetta. Having ascertained that the boy, his nunlike sisters, and their governess would turn right and proceed through the clock tower gateway into the Merceria, he gave them a head start and then followed them, followed them furtively on their stroll through Venice. He had to stop when they tarried, duck into food stalls and courtyards when they doubled back; he would lose them, pursue them, hot and exhausted, over bridges and along filthy culs-de-sac, and endure moments of mortal shame when seeing them suddenly come towards him in a narrow passageway from which there was no escape. Yet it cannot be said he was suffering: he was drunk in both head and heart, and his steps followed the dictates of the demon whose delight it is to trample human reason and dignity underfoot.

  At some point Tadzio and his entourage would take a gondola, and Aschenbach, concealed by a portico or fountain while they boarded, would follow suit once they had put off from shore. He would instruct the oarsman in an urgent undertone to shadow the gondola just rounding the corner, but unobtrusively and at a distance, promising him a handsome gratuity, and he shuddered when the man assured him, in the same tone and with a pander’s roguish solicitude, that he would be well served, well and properly.

  Thus would he rock and glide along, reclining on soft, black cushions, behind the other black, beaked craft, to which he was chained by his infatuation. At times it disappeared from view and he grew anxious and distressed. But his guide, as if well versed in such commissions, always managed to bring the coveted object back in sight by some clever maneuver—a shortcut or fleet crisscross. The air was still and noxious; the sun burned intensely through the haze, which colored the sky a slate gray. Gurgling water lapped against wood and stone. The gondolier’s call—half warning, half greeting—was answered from afar, from the silence of the labyrinth, by some curious accord. Clusters of blossoms—white and purple, redolent of almonds—hung down over crumbling walls from the small gardens overhead. Moorish window frames stood out in the murk. The marble steps of a church descended into the water, where a beggar, in affirmation of his indigence, squatted with his hat out and showed the whites of his eyes as if he were blind. An antique dealer posted outside his lair beckoned the passerby ingratiatingly in the hope of fleecing him. Such was Venice, the wheedling, shady beauty, a city half fairy tale, half tourist trap, in whose foul air the arts had once flourished luxuriantly and which had inspired musicians with undulating, lullingly licentious harmonies. The adventurer felt his eyes drinking in its voluptuousness, his ears being wooed by its melodies; he recalled, too, that the city was diseased and was concealing it out of cupidity, and the look with which he peered out after the gondola floating ahead of him grew more wanton.

  Thus the addled traveler could no longer think or care about anything but pursuing unrelentingly the object that had so inflamed him, dreaming of him in his absence, and, as is the lover’s wont, speaking tender words to his mere shadow. Loneliness, the foreign environment, and the joy of a belated and profound exhilaration prompted him, persuaded him to indulge without shame or remorse in the most distasteful behavior, as when returning from Venice late one evening he had paused at the beautiful boy’s door on the second floor of the hotel and pressed his forehead against the hinge in drunken rapture, unable to tear himself away even at the risk of being discovered and caught.

  Yet he still had moments of pause and near lucidity. Where is this taking me? he would think then with alarm. Where is this taking me? Like any man whose natural gifts aroused an aristocratic interest in his ancestry, he habitually called to mind his forebears during his periods of achievement and success, assuring himself of their approval, gratification, and ineluctable esteem. He t
hought of them again here and now—enmeshed as he was in so illicit an experience, involved in such exotic extravagances of emotion—thought of their imposing fortitude, their upstanding manliness of character and gave a dour smile. What would they say? But what for that matter would they have said about his life as a whole, a life diverging from theirs to the point of degeneracy, lived under the spell of art, a life about which he himself, in line with the bourgeois disposition of those forefathers, had made mocking pronouncements as a young man, yet which basically so resembled their own! He too had served; he too, like so many of them, had been soldier and warrior, for art was war, a grueling struggle that people these days were not up to for long. A life of self-domination, of “despites,” a grim, dogged, abstemious life he had shaped into the emblem of a frail heroism for the times—might he not call it manly, might he not call it brave? Besides, he had the feeling that the eros which had taken possession of him was in a way singularly appropriate and suited to such a life. Had it not been held in particular esteem amongst the bravest of nations? Indeed, was it not said to have flourished in their cities as a consequence of bravery? Countless warrior heroes in older times had willingly borne its yoke, for no action imposed by a god could be deemed humiliating, and actions that might otherwise have been condemned as signs of cowardice—genuflections, oaths, importunate supplications, and servile behavior—such actions were accounted no shame to a lover but rather earned him praise.

  Thus did the man’s infatuation determine his way of thinking; thus did he seek to defend himself and preserve his dignity. Yet at the same time he kept paying willful, obstinate attention to the unsavory events in the depths of Venice, the adventure of the outer world that merged darkly with the adventure of his heart and fed his passion with vague, illicit hopes. Obsessed with the need to obtain new and reliable information on the status and progress of the disease, he riffled through the German papers in the cafés, the ones on the hotel newspaper table having disappeared for several days. They were all assertions and retractions: they would report twenty, forty, even a hundred or more deaths and instances of the disease, after which the existence of an epidemic was if not flatly denied then reduced to totally isolated cases introduced from outside. There was also a scattering of admonitions and protests against the dangerous game being played by the Italian authorities. Certainty was out of the question.