by Thomas Mann
They moved along the walls as if at an exhibition, accompanied by the master of the house, who would now and then provide a title, but usually said nothing, displaying the proud apprehension of the artist, enjoying it all, letting his eyes rest on each work along with those of the strangers. The portrait of Clavdia Chauchat was hung in the living room, next to the window—Hans Castorp had spied it with one quick glance as he entered the room, although it bore only a very distant resemblance to her. He intentionally avoided the spot, keeping his companions pinned down in the dining room by pretending to admire a verdant view of the Sergi Valley with bluish glaciers in the background; well aware that he was in command, he first steered them into the Turkish smoking alcove, which he likewise gave a thorough examination amid much praise, and then surveyed the wall on the entrance side of the living room, sometimes urging Joachim to join him in his complimentary remarks. Finally he turned around and said with measured puzzlement, “Why, I know that face, don’t I?”
“Do you recognize her?” Behrens wanted to know.
“Certainly, I’m surely not mistaken. That’s the lady from the Good Russian table, the one with the French name . . .”
“Correct. Chauchat. I’m pleased you see the likeness.”
“The lady as she lives and breathes,” Hans Castorp lied, less out of cunning than out of an awareness that if everything had been as it should be, he ought not to have recognized the lady at all, any more than Joachim had recognized her on his own—dear old outfoxed Joachim, for whom a light now went on, the real light and not the false one Hans Castorp had lit for him.
“Ah, yes,” Joachim said softly and set about helping Hans Castorp study the painting. His cousin had certainly known how to recover damages for having been kept away from the gathering on the veranda.
It was a bust in half-profile—somewhat smaller than life-size, with the neck bared, a veil draped across the shoulders and breasts—set in a wide, black, beveled frame edged in gold nearest the canvas. Frau Chauchat looked ten years older than she was—as usually happens when amateurs try to capture character. There was too much red in the face, the nose was very badly drawn, the hair color was wrong, almost that of straw, the mouth was askew; the special fascination of her features had not been brought out, was not even apparent, but only coarsened by exaggeration. The whole thing was a rather botched job, the portrait only vaguely corresponding to the model. But Hans Castorp was not all that scrupulous about the issue of resemblance. The relationship between Frau Chauchat as a person and this piece of canvas was enough for him. The painting was intended to be a depiction of Frau Chauchat, she had sat as the model for it here in this apartment—that sufficed for him.
“As she lives and breathes,” he repeated.
“Don’t say that,” the director objected. “I did a clumsy job. I don’t flatter myself that I handled it all that well, although I suppose we had twenty sessions at least. How can one handle an outlandish face like that? At first you think it will be easy to capture it, what with the swing of those hyperborean cheekbones and those eyes that look like cracks in a muffin. Yes, there is something special about her. You get the details right, and bungle the larger effect. A regular puzzle box. Do you know her? It might be better not to have her sit, but to paint her from memory. You know her, then, do you?”
“Yes—no—only superficially, the way one knows people here.”
“Well, I know her more internally, subcutaneously, if you get my drift. From her blood pressure, tissue firmness, and lymph circulation, I pretty much know what’s what with her—and for good reason. The surface offers greater difficulties. Have you ever noticed the way she walks? Her face is just like her walk. She’s a slinker. Take her eyes, for example—I’m not talking about the color, although that’s tricky, too. I mean their placement, their shape. There’s a slit in the lid, or so you think, and it’s on a slant. But that only seems to be the case. The deceptive thing is the epicanthic fold, or a variation on it, that you find among certain races, an extra piece of skin that begins at the flat-bridged nose common among such people and falls like a pleat across the lid down to the inner corner of the eye. But if you pull the skin back taut toward the bridge, their eye is just like ours. A titillating little mystery, but not all that worthy; by light of day, the epicanthic fold turns out to be an atavistic abnormality.”
“So that’s how it works,” Hans Castorp said. “I didn’t know that, but it’s always interested me what makes their eyes look like that.”
“A mirage, a deception,” the director confirmed. “If you simply draw it slanted and slit, all is lost. You have to handle it the same way that nature does, create an illusion within the illusion, so to speak, and for that, of course, you need to know all about the epicanthic fold. Knowledge never hurts. Do you see the skin, the epidermis here? Is it lifelike, or not especially so, in your opinion?”
“Terribly,” Hans Castorp said, “terribly lifelike skin. I don’t think I’ve ever seen skin so well painted. It’s as if you can see the pores.” And he brushed the edge of his hand across the skin left exposed by her décolletage, which stood out very white against the exaggerated redness of the face, like a part of the body never exposed to light, evoking, whether intentionally or not, an even stronger sensation of nakedness—a rather crude effect in any case.
All the same, Hans Castorp’s praise was justified. Where her tender, though hardly meager bosom lost itself under the bluish drape, its subdued shimmer of white seemed taken from nature. The bare skin had obviously been painted with feeling, and despite a certain aura of sweetness, the artist had been able to endow it with scientific reality and lifelike accuracy. He had used the grainy surface of the canvas under the oils to suggest its uneven texture, particularly where the collarbone delicately protruded. He had not failed to include a mole just where the breasts began, and between their soft swellings there was a hint of pale bluish veins. Under the beholder’s gaze, a barely perceptible shiver of sensitivity seemed to pass over this naked flesh—or to put it more boldly, you could imagine that you saw perspiration, the invisible vapors of life, rising from the flesh, that if you were to press your lips against the surface, you would smell a human body, not paint and varnish. We are simply describing Hans Castorp’s impressions—but although he was especially receptive to such impressions, it should be noted that in fact Frau Chauchat’s bared skin was by far the most remarkable piece of painting in the apartment.
His hands in his trouser pockets, Director Behrens rolled back and forth between the balls of his feet and his heels, regarding his work along with his visitors. “That pleases me, coming from a fellow artist,” he said. “It pleases me that you see it. It’s a good thing—certainly doesn’t hurt—if a man knows something about what’s what under the epidermis and can paint what cannot be seen. Or in other words, when a man’s relationship with nature is something different from the, let us say, purely lyrical. When, for example, he’s a part-time physician, physiologist, and anatomist with some intimate knowledge of life’s undergarments. It can work to his advantage. Say what you like, it is a certain plus. That human hide there is a matter of science. You can examine it under a microscope for organic accuracy. And you’ll see not just the horny and mucous layers of the outer skin, but along with them, the imagined reticular layer with its sebaceous glands, sweat glands, blood vessels, papillae. And beneath that is the layer of fat, the upholstery, you know—the foundation of fat cells that creates the gorgeous female form. And what a man thinks and imagines, that gets expressed, too. Those things flow into his hand and have their effect. It isn’t there and yet it is—and that makes for lifelikeness.”
The conversation stirred Hans Castorp’s blood—his brow was flushed, his eyes had an eager glint; he had so much to say that he did not know how he should begin to reply. First, he wanted to move the painting from the shadowy wall where it was hanging to some more favorable spot; second, he definitely wanted to develop what the director had said about the nature o
f skin, a topic in which he had an immense interest; but third, he wanted to try to express more general and philosophical ideas, which were also matters of high priority.
Laying both hands on the portrait to lift it off its hook, he began hastily by saying, “Yes indeed, yes indeed. Very good, that is important. What I want to say is . . . that is, you yourself said, Director Behrens, ‘when a man’s relationship with nature is something different.’ You said it’s good if there is something else besides the lyrical—I believe that was your word—or artistic relationship. In short, it helps to regard nature from another viewpoint, the medical viewpoint, for instance. That is terribly relevant—pardon me, sir—I mean, you are so colossally right about that, because we are not dealing with two totally different viewpoints and relationships, but, more precisely, with the same one in both instances, with mere variations on a theme. With shades of meaning, I mean, with modifications of the same general concern, of which artistic activity is merely one part, one form of expression, if I may put it that way. Yes, pardon me, I’m just taking the painting down, there’s absolutely no light here. I’ll move it over to the sofa there, you’ll see whether it doesn’t look quite different. I mean to say: what is medical science concerned with? I understand nothing about it, of course, but its main concern is with human beings. And jurisprudence, the making and executing of laws? With human beings as well. And philology, which is usually tied up with some pedagogic profession? And theology, the care of souls, the pastoral office? All of them with human beings. They are all merely shades of one and the same important, primary interest: that is, the interest in human beings. In a word, they are all humanistic professions. And if you want to study them, you first learn classical languages as the basis, do you not? As part of your formal training, as they say. You are wondering, perhaps, why I am speaking about all this, since I am merely a realist, a technician. But not long ago I was lying in my rest cure, and I thought: it’s really marvelous, a marvelous arrangement, the way every humanistic profession has the same formal basis, is grounded in the idea of form, of beautiful form, you know—which adds an extra nobility to it all, and emotion, too, in a way and . . . courtesy—so that interest in a given topic becomes something almost chivalrous. I mean—I’m most likely expressing myself very poorly, but one can see that matters of the intellect and beauty, or in other words, science and art, blend together because they have actually always been just one thing; so that artistic activity definitely belongs among the sciences, as a kind of fifth faculty if you like—is no less a humanistic profession, insofar as, to repeat myself, its main theme or concern is human beings. You must admit I’m right. Back when I was making youthful attempts at it, I painted only ships and water, but to my eye, portraiture will always be the most fascinating part of painting, because it has the human being as its subject. Which was why I asked right off whether you, sir, had done anything in that line. Wouldn’t it hang much, much better here?” Both Behrens and Joachim looked at him to see if he was not ashamed of himself for these impromptu babblings. But Hans Castorp was much too involved in his topic to feel any embarrassment. He held the painting against the wall behind the sofa and demanded they tell him if it was not considerably better lit there. At this moment, the maid entered with a tray of hot water, a spirit lamp, and coffee cups.
Pointing her in the direction of the smoking alcove, the director said, “Then your primary interest really ought to be more in sculpture. Yes, right, it does have more light there, of course—if you think it can tolerate that much . . . In sculpture, that is, because it deals in the purest, most exclusive form with human beings in general. But we mustn’t let our water boil away.”
“That’s very true, about sculpture,” Hans Castorp said as they moved away; and forgetting to rehang the painting or even to set it aside, he carried it with him, trailing it behind him into the adjoining area. “Certainly the humanist element is revealed most clearly in a Greek Venus or some athlete. When you stop and consider, it is, after all, the true, genuine humanist form of art.”
“Well, as far as little Chauchat goes,” the director remarked, “she’s probably more an object for painting. I’m afraid Phidias or that other fellow whose name ends in that Hebrew-sounding way would have wrinkled up their noses at her sort of physiognomy. What are you doing there? Dragging my daubings around with you?”
“Yes, thanks, I’ll just put it here against the leg of my chair—it’s fine there for the moment. The Greek sculptors were not very interested in the head, it was more a matter of the body; perhaps that was the real humanistic element in fact. And the female form, that’s actually fat, did you say?”
“It’s fat,” the director said with finality as he closed a cupboard from which he had extracted the utensils for brewing coffee: a cylindrical Turkish mill, a long-handled pot, a divided bowl for sugar and ground coffee—all of brass. “Palmitin, stearin, olein,” he said, shaking coffee beans from a tin box into the mill as he began to turn the crank. “As you gentlemen can see, I make it all myself, from scratch. It tastes twice as good. . . . What did you think it was? Ambrosia, perhaps?”
“No, I already knew it on my own. It’s just strange to hear it,” Hans Castorp said.
They were seated in one corner, between the door and window, in front of a low bamboo table that held a brass tray with Oriental designs, on which the coffee apparatus had been set in the midst of various smoking utensils—Joachim beside Behrens on an ottoman furnished with an abundance of silk pillows, Hans Castorp in a club chair on rollers, against which he had leaned Frau Chauchat’s portrait. A bright carpet lay at their feet. The director spooned coffee and sugar into the long-handled pot, poured water over them, and let the liquid come to a boil over the spirit lamp. It foamed up brown in the little onion-pattern cups. When they took a sip, it proved as strong as it was sweet.
“Your form is, too,” Behrens said. “Your sculptural outline, if one can speak of it that way, is fat, too, of course, if not to the same extent as a woman’s. For our sort, fat normally is only a twentieth of total body weight; a sixteenth for women. Without our subcutaneous cell structure we’d all end up looking like some sort of wrinkly fungus. The fat disappears with age, of course, resulting in the unaesthetic sags we all know so well. The fat is thickest around the female breast and abdomen, the upper thighs—in short, everywhere you find a little something of interest for your hand and heart. And the soles of the feet, they’re both fat and ticklish.”
Hans Castorp rolled the cylindrical coffee mill between his palms. Like all the furnishings in the room, its origin was probably more Indian or Persian than Turkish—certainly the style of its brass engraving, the surface pattern shiny against the dull background, suggested as much. Hans Castorp studied the design, without making much of it at first. When he suddenly did make something of it, he blushed.
“Yes, that’s a tool for single gentlemen,” Behrens said. “That’s why I keep it locked up, you know. It might ruin my little kitchen fay’s eyes. You’ll suffer no further harm, I’m sure. It was presented to me as a gift by a patient, an Egyptian princess, who honored us with her presence for one brief year. You see, the pattern is repeated on each of the items. Droll, eh?”
“It’s quite remarkable,” Hans Castorp replied. “No, no, it doesn’t bother me, of course. One can even view it in dead earnest if one likes—although, after all, it’s not exactly appropriate on a coffee service. The ancients are said to have decorated their coffins with things like this on occasion. The obscene and the sacred were more or less one and the same for them.”
“Well, as far as the princess goes,” Behrens said, “she was, I think, given more to the former. I also have some very lovely cigarettes she gave me, extra-fine quality, the sort you bring out on tip-top occasions.” And he fetched a bright green box from the cupboard to offer them one. Joachim declined with a click of his heels. Hans Castorp helped himself and smoked the unusually large, wide cigarette, imprinted with a golden sphinx—and it was ind
eed wonderful.
“If you would be so kind, Director Behrens,” he requested, “do tell us something more about skin.” He had picked up Frau Chauchat’s portrait again, balancing it on one knee. Leaning back in his chair, the cigarette between his lips, he regarded it now. “Not specifically about the fatty layer—we’ve learned what that’s about. But about human skin in general, since you’re so good at painting it.”
“About skin? Are you interested in physiology?”
“Very much. Yes, I’ve always taken a great deal of interest in it. The human body—I’ve always had a singular fondness for it. Sometimes I’ve asked myself if I shouldn’t have become a doctor. In a certain sense, I think, I would not have done badly at it. Because if a man is interested in the body, he is also interested in illness—particularly in that—isn’t he? Not that it means all that much, by the way. I could have become any number of things. I could have become a clergyman, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sometimes I’ve had the fleeting impression that I would actually have been in my element there.”
“But then why did you become an engineer?”
“Purely by chance. External circumstances tipped the scale more or less.”
