Death in Venice — Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of 5 · Review of Death in Venice

Several affairs of a worldly and literary nature detained the man eager to travel in Munich for about two weeks after that walk. At last he gave instructions that his country house be made ready for occupancy within four weeks, and on a day between the middle and end of May he took the night train to Trieste, where he remained only twenty-four hours and embarked for Pola the following morning. What he sought was the strange and unrelated, yet something that could be reached quickly, and so he took up residence on an Adriatic island, much praised for several years, lying not far from the Istrian coast, with a rural people in colourful rags, speaking in wildly foreign sounds, and with beautiful, broken reaches of cliff where the sea lay open. But rain and heavy air, a parochial hotel society sealed within its Austrian character, and the want of that tranquil, intimate relation to the sea which only a gentle sandy shore affords, displeased him and did not let him acquire the consciousness that he had found the place appointed for him; a pull within him, though it was not yet clear to him whither, made him restless; he studied shipping connections, looked searchingly about, and all at once, both surprisingly and as a matter of course, his destination stood before his eyes. If one wished to reach overnight the incomparable, the fantastically divergent, where did one go? Why, that was plain. What was he doing here? He had gone astray. It was there he had meant to travel. He did not delay in cancelling his mistaken stay. A week and a half after his arrival on the island, a swift motorboat carried him and his luggage in a hazy dawn across the waters back to the naval port, and there he went ashore only to cross at once, by a plank footbridge, onto the damp deck of a ship that lay under steam for Venice.

It was an elderly vessel of Italian nationality, obsolete, sooty, and sombre. In a cavernous, artificially lit booth within the ship, into which Aschenbach was urged immediately upon boarding by a hunchbacked and unclean sailor with grinning courtesy, a goat-bearded man with the physiognomy of an old-fashioned circus director sat behind a table, his hat askew upon his brow and a cigarette stub at the corner of his mouth; with a facile, grimacing air of business, he recorded the travellers' particulars and issued their tickets. “To Venice!” he repeated Aschenbach's request, stretching out his arm and thrusting the pen into the pulpy dregs of a tilted inkpot. “To Venice, first class! You are attended to, sir!” And he wrote large crow's-feet, scattered blue sand from a tin upon the writing, let it run off into an earthen bowl, folded the paper with yellow, bony fingers, and wrote again. “A happily chosen destination!” he chattered meanwhile. “Ah, Venice! A glorious city! A city of irresistible attraction to the cultivated man, on account of its history no less than its present charms!” The sleek rapidity of his movements and the empty talk with which he accompanied them had something stupefying and distracting about them, as though he feared the traveller might still waver in his resolve to go to Venice. He collected the fare in haste and, with a croupier's dexterity, dropped the balance upon the stained cloth covering the table. “I wish you good entertainment, sir!” he said with a theatrical bow. “It is my honour to convey you... Gentlemen!” he cried at once, arm raised, pretending that business was at its liveliest, although no one else was there awaiting service. Aschenbach returned to the deck.

With one arm resting on the rail, he regarded the idle people loitering on the quay to witness the ship's departure, and the passengers aboard. Those in second class, men and women, crouched on the forward deck, using chests and bundles for seats. A group of young men composed the travelling party of the first deck, commercial clerks from Pola, it seemed, who, in high spirits, had made up a party for an excursion to Italy. They made no little ado about themselves and their undertaking, chattered, laughed, enjoyed their own gesticulation with complacency, and, bending over the rail, called fluent mockery after comrades who, portfolios under their arms, were walking the harbour street on business and threatening the revellers with their canes. One, in a pale-yellow summer suit cut in an excessively fashionable style, a red necktie, and a Panama jauntily turned up, surpassed all the rest in merriment with his crowing voice. But Aschenbach had scarcely brought him into sharper focus when, with a kind of horror, he recognized that the youth was counterfeit. He was old; there could be no doubt. Wrinkles surrounded his eyes and mouth. The dull crimson of his cheeks was rouge, the brown hair under the gaily wound straw hat a wig; his neck was fallen and sinewy, his attached little moustache and the tuft on his chin were dyed, his yellow and complete set of teeth, which he displayed as he laughed, a cheap replacement, and his hands, with signet rings on both index fingers, were those of an old man. Shudderingly affected, Aschenbach watched him and his fellowship with the friends. Did they not know, not notice, that he was old, that he wore their foppish and colourful clothing without right, played at being one of them without right? Naturally and habitually, it seemed, they tolerated him in their midst, treated him as an equal, and returned his teasing nudges without revulsion. How was that possible? Aschenbach covered his brow with his hand and closed his eyes, which were hot because he had slept too little. It seemed to him that not everything was beginning in an altogether ordinary way, that a dreamlike estrangement, a deformation of the world into the bizarre, was beginning to spread about him—something perhaps to be checked if he darkened his face a little and looked around afresh. At that moment, however, the sensation of floating touched him, and looking up in unreasonable alarm he perceived that the heavy, sombre body of the ship was slowly detaching itself from the masonry shore. Inch by inch, under the forward and backward labouring of the engine, the strip of grimily iridescent water broadened between quay and ship's side; and after cumbersome manoeuvres the steamer turned its bowsprit toward the open sea. Aschenbach went over to starboard, where the hunchback had unfolded a deck-chair for him and a steward in a stained tailcoat asked his orders.

The sky was grey, the wind damp; harbour and islands had fallen behind, and all land rapidly vanished from the hazy field of vision. Flakes of coal dust, swollen with moisture, settled upon the washed deck, which would not dry. After only an hour an awning was stretched, for it had begun to rain.

Enclosed in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveller rested, and the hours slipped by him unperceived. It had ceased raining; the canvas roof was removed. The horizon made an unbroken circle. Beneath the broad dome of the sky the immense disc of the desolate sea extended all around; but in an empty, undivided space our senses lack even the measure of time, and we doze in the measureless. Strangely shadowy figures, the aged fop, the goat-beard from within the ship, passed through the resting man's mind with indeterminate gestures and confused words of dream, and he fell asleep.

At noon he was urged below to take his ordered meal in the corridor-like dining room, onto which the doors of the sleeping cabins opened, at the head of a long table at whose lower end the commercial clerks, including the old man, had been carousing with the cheerful captain since ten o'clock. It was a poor meal, and he finished it quickly. He was impelled into the open air to look at the sky: would it not brighten above Venice?

He had imagined nothing else than that it must, for the city had always received him in radiance. But sky and sea remained dull and leaden; from time to time a misty rain descended, and he resigned himself to reaching by water a different Venice from any he had encountered when approaching overland. He stood by the foremast, his gaze upon the distance, awaiting the land. He recalled the melancholically enthusiastic poet before whom the domes and bell towers of his dream had once risen from these floods; silently he repeated some of what had then become measured song out of reverence, happiness, and sorrow, and, moved without effort by emotion already given form, he tested his grave and weary heart to learn whether some renewing rapture and confusion, some late adventure of feeling, might perhaps still be reserved for the travelling idler.

Then the low coast emerged on the right, fishing boats enlivened the sea, the bathing island appeared; the steamer left it to port, glided at reduced speed through the narrow inlet named for it, and stopped altogether upon the lagoon, in sight of colourfully wretched dwellings, because the health-service barge had to be awaited.

An hour passed before it appeared. They had arrived and had not arrived; there was no haste, and yet one felt driven by impatience. The young men from Pola, patriotically attracted as well, perhaps, by the military horn signals sounding across the water from the vicinity of the public gardens, had come on deck and, exhilarated by Asti, raised cheers to the Bersaglieri drilling over there. But it was repellent to see the condition into which his false communion with youth had brought the dressed-up old man. His aged brain had been unable to withstand the wine as the robust young ones had; he was lamentably drunk. With a stupefied gaze, a cigarette between trembling fingers, he swayed upon the spot, laboriously maintaining his balance, pulled forward and backward by intoxication. Since he would have fallen at the first step, he did not venture to move; nevertheless he displayed a pitiable high-spiritedness, seized by the button anyone who approached him, slurred, winked, giggled, raised his ringed and wrinkled index finger in foolish raillery, and with the tip of his tongue licked the corners of his mouth in an abhorrently equivocal manner. Aschenbach watched him with darkened brows, and again a sense of dazedness came over him, as though the world displayed a slight but irresistible tendency to deform itself into the bizarre and grotesque; a feeling which circumstances, to be sure, prevented him from pursuing, since just then the engine resumed its pounding activity and the ship continued its passage, interrupted so near the goal, through the canal of San Marco. And so he saw it again, the most astonishing of landing places, that dazzling composition of fantastic architecture which the Republic presented to the reverent eyes of approaching mariners: the airy magnificence of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, the columns with lion and saint upon the shore, the fabled temple's sumptuously advancing flank, the vista toward gateway and giant clock; and as he looked, he reflected that to arrive in Venice by land, at the railway station, was to enter a palace through a back door, and that one ought to reach the most improbable of cities in no other way than he was now doing: by ship, across the high sea.

The engine stopped, gondolas crowded near, the gangway stairs were lowered, customs officials came aboard and discharged their duty perfunctorily; disembarkation could begin. Aschenbach made it understood that he wanted a gondola to convey him and his luggage to the landing stage of those little steamers that run between the city and the Lido, for he intended to lodge beside the sea. His plan was approved, his wish shouted down to the water, where the gondoliers quarrelled with one another in dialect. He was still prevented from descending, prevented by his trunk, which was just then being dragged and hauled with difficulty down the ladder-like stairs. Thus for several minutes he found himself unable to escape the importunities of the dreadful old man, whom drunkenness obscurely impelled to pay farewell honours to the stranger. “We wish you the happiest stay,” he bleated, scraping a bow. “We commend ourselves to your kind remembrance! Au revoir, excusez, and bon jour, Your Excellency!” His mouth watered, he screwed up his eyes, he licked the corners of his mouth, and the dyed tuft of beard at his old man's lip bristled upward. “Our compliments,” he slurred, with two fingertips at his mouth, “our compliments to the sweetheart, the dearest, the loveliest sweetheart...” And suddenly his false upper teeth dropped from his jaw onto his lower lip. Aschenbach was able to escape. “To the sweetheart, the fine sweetheart,” he heard behind him in cooing, hollow, impeded sounds as, holding to the rope railing, he climbed down the gangway.

Who has not had to master a fleeting shudder, a secret dread and oppression, when boarding a Venetian gondola for the first time, or after long disuse? The strange craft, come down wholly unchanged from ballad-haunted times and so peculiarly black—as among all things only coffins otherwise are—recalls silent and criminal adventures in a splashing night; it recalls still more death itself, the bier and sombre obsequies and the last, speechless journey. And has one observed that the seat of such a barque, this armchair lacquered coffin-black and upholstered in matt black, is the softest, most luxurious, most enervating seat in the world? Aschenbach became aware of it when he had settled at the gondolier's feet, opposite his luggage, which lay neatly gathered at the prow. The boatmen were still quarrelling, harshly, unintelligibly, with threatening gestures. But the special silence of the water-city seemed gently to receive their voices, disembody them, scatter them above the flood. It was warm here in the harbour. Touched tepidly by the breath of the sirocco, leaning among cushions upon the yielding element, the traveller closed his eyes in enjoyment of an indolence as unfamiliar as it was sweet. The passage will be short, he thought; if only it might last forever! In a gentle rocking he felt himself glide away from the press and babble of voices.

How still, and stiller, it became around him! Nothing was to be heard but the plashing of the oar, the hollow striking of waves against the barque's prow, which rose steep and black above the water and was armed at the tip like a halberd—and a third thing, a speaking, a murmuring: the whisper of the gondolier, who talked to himself between his teeth, in bursts, in sounds pressed out by the labour of his arms. Aschenbach looked up and, with mild surprise, perceived that the lagoon was widening around him and that his passage was turned toward the open sea. It appeared, consequently, that he ought not to rest too completely, but must give some attention to the execution of his will.

“To the steamer landing, then!” he said, half turning backward. The murmuring ceased. He received no answer.

“To the steamer landing, then!” he repeated, turning fully around and looking up into the gondolier's face as the man stood behind him on the raised edge and towered against the pallid sky. He was a man of unpleasing, indeed brutal physiognomy, dressed in seaman's blue, belted with a yellow sash, and wearing recklessly askew upon his head a shapeless straw hat whose weave had begun to unravel. The formation of his face, his blond, curling moustache beneath the short, upturned nose, made him appear by no means of Italian stock. Although rather slight in bodily constitution, so that one would not have thought him particularly fitted to his calling, he wielded the oar with great energy, putting his whole body into every stroke. Several times the exertion drew back his lips and exposed his white teeth. His reddish brows contracted, he looked past his passenger and answered in a decided, almost coarse tone:

“You are going to the Lido.”

Aschenbach replied:

“Certainly. But I took the gondola only to have myself ferried to San Marco. I wish to use the vaporetto.”

“You cannot use the vaporetto, sir.”

“And why not?”

“Because the vaporetto does not carry luggage.”

That was correct; Aschenbach remembered. He was silent. But the man's brusque, overbearing manner, so contrary to local custom toward a foreigner, seemed intolerable. He said:

“That is my affair. Perhaps I intend to leave my luggage in storage. You will turn back.” The man remained silent. The oar plashed, the water struck dully against the bow. And the speaking and murmuring began again: the gondolier talked to himself between his teeth.

What was to be done? Alone upon the flood with this strangely insubordinate, uncannily resolute man, the traveller saw no means of enforcing his will. And how softly he might rest, provided he did not rebel! Had he not wished the passage to be long, to last forever? It was wisest to let things take their course, and above all it was most agreeable. A spell of inertia seemed to issue from his seat, from this low armchair upholstered in black, so gently rocked by the strokes of the self-willed gondolier at his back. The notion of having fallen into a criminal's hands brushed dreamily through Aschenbach's mind—without power to summon his thoughts to active defence. More vexing was the possibility that everything was designed for simple extortion. A kind of sense of duty or pride, the recollection, as it were, that this must be prevented, enabled him to pull himself together once more. He asked:

“What do you demand for the passage?”

And looking over him, the gondolier answered:

“You will pay.”

What had to be returned to this was settled. Aschenbach said mechanically:

“I shall pay nothing, absolutely nothing, if you take me where I do not wish to go.”

“You wish to go to the Lido.”

“But not with you.”

“I row you well.”

That is true, thought Aschenbach, and relaxed. That is true, you row me well. Even if you have designs upon my cash and send me from behind, with one stroke of the oar, into the house of Hades, you will have rowed me well. But nothing of the kind occurred. Company even appeared: a boat of musical highwaymen, men and women who sang to guitar and mandolin, pressed intrusively alongside the gondola, and filled the silence above the waters with their mercenary poetry for foreigners. Aschenbach threw money into the outstretched hat. Then they fell silent and moved away. And the gondolier's whisper became audible again as he talked to himself in bursts and broken phrases.

Thus they arrived, rocked by the wake of a steamer bound for the city. Two municipal officials, hands behind their backs and faces turned toward the lagoon, walked up and down the shore. At the landing Aschenbach left the gondola, assisted by that old man who is present with his boat hook at every landing place in Venice; and since he lacked smaller money, he crossed to the hotel beside the steamer pier in order to change some and reward the boatman as he saw fit. He is served in the hall, he returns, he finds his travelling effects on a cart at the quay, and gondola and gondolier have vanished.

“He has made off,” said the old man with the boat hook. “A bad man, a man without a licence, gracious sir. He is the only gondolier who possesses no licence. The others telephoned here. He saw that he was expected. Then he made off.”

Aschenbach shrugged.

“The gentleman travelled free,” said the old man and held out his hat. Aschenbach threw coins into it. He gave instructions that his luggage be brought to the bathing hotel and followed the cart through the avenue, the white-blossoming avenue which, with taverns, bazaars, and boarding houses on either side, runs across the island to the beach.

He entered the extensive hotel from the rear, by the garden terrace, and made his way through the great hall and vestibule to the office. Since he was announced, he was received with obliging readiness. A manager—a small, quiet, flatteringly courteous man with a black moustache and a French-cut frock coat—accompanied him in the lift to the second storey and showed him his room, a pleasant space furnished in cherrywood, decorated with strongly scented flowers, whose tall windows afforded a view of the open sea. After the employee had withdrawn, he stepped to one of them and, while behind him his luggage was brought in and arranged in the room, looked out upon the beach, sparsely peopled in the afternoon, and the sunless sea, which was at flood tide and sent low, elongated waves against the shore in calm, even rhythm.

The observations and encounters of the solitary and silent are at once more blurred and more penetrating than those of the sociable; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a trace of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be disposed of with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of judgement occupy him unduly, deepen in silence, become significant, become experience, adventure, feeling. Solitude brings forth the original, the daring and disquietingly beautiful, the poem. But solitude also brings forth the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and forbidden.—Thus the apparitions of the journey here, the ghastly old fop with his babble about the sweetheart, the illicit gondolier cheated of his fare, still disturbed the traveller's mind. Without presenting difficulties to reason, without in fact supplying matter for thought, they were nonetheless profoundly strange in nature, as it seemed to him, and disturbing perhaps precisely through this contradiction. Between these reflections he greeted the sea with his eyes and felt pleasure in knowing Venice so easily within reach. At last he turned away, bathed his face, gave the chambermaid several directions for the completion of his comfort, and had the green-clad Swiss who operated the lift take him down to the ground floor.

He took his tea upon the terrace facing the sea, then descended and followed the promenade quay for a considerable distance in the direction of the Hotel Excelsior. When he returned, it seemed already time to change for dinner. He did so slowly and precisely, in his manner, since it was his habit to work while dressing; nevertheless he appeared a little early in the hall, where he found a large part of the hotel's guests assembled, strangers to one another and affecting mutual unconcern, yet united in expectation of the meal. He took a newspaper from the table, settled into a leather chair, and observed the company, which differed from that of his first sojourn in a manner pleasing to him.

A wide horizon opened, tolerantly embracing much. The subdued sounds of the great languages mingled. Evening dress, valid throughout the world, a uniform of civilization, outwardly gathered the varieties of the human into a respectable unity. One saw the dry, elongated face of the American, the many-membered Russian family, English ladies, German children with French nurses. The Slavic element seemed to predominate. Polish was being spoken close by.

It was a group of the half-grown and the barely grown, gathered around a wicker table under the care of a governess or companion: three young girls, seemingly between fifteen and seventeen, and a long-haired boy of perhaps fourteen. With astonishment Aschenbach observed that the boy was perfectly beautiful. His face—pale and gracefully reserved, encircled by honey-coloured hair, with the nose descending straight, the lovely mouth, the expression of gentle and divine gravity—recalled Greek sculpture from its noblest period; and with the purest perfection of form it possessed so singular and personal a charm that the beholder believed he had met nothing similarly successful either in nature or in the plastic arts. What further attracted notice was an evidently principled contrast between the educational viewpoints according to which the siblings appeared to be dressed and generally maintained. The three girls—of whom the eldest could pass for grown—were turned out with a harshness and chastity bordering on disfigurement. A uniformly conventual costume, slate-coloured, of moderate length, sober and deliberately unbecoming in cut, with white turnover collars as its only relief, suppressed and prevented every pleasing quality of figure. Hair smoothed and firmly pasted to the head made the faces appear nunlike, empty, and without expression. Surely it was a mother who ruled here, and she did not even contemplate applying to the boy the pedagogic severity that appeared obligatory to her in the girls' case. Softness and tenderness visibly determined his existence. They had taken care not to let scissors touch his beautiful hair; as on the Thorn-Puller, it curled onto the forehead, over the ears, and lower still into the nape. An English sailor suit, whose billowing sleeves narrowed below and closely enclosed the fine wrists of his still-childish but slender hands, lent the delicate figure, with its cords, bows, and embroidery, something rich and indulged. He sat in half-profile to the observer, one foot in a black patent shoe placed before the other, one elbow supported on the arm of his wicker chair, his cheek nestled against the closed hand, in a posture of easy decorum and wholly without the almost subordinate stiffness to which his female siblings seemed accustomed. Was he ailing? For the skin of his face stood out white as ivory against the golden darkness of the surrounding curls. Or was he simply a pampered, favoured child, sustained by partial and capricious love? Aschenbach was inclined to believe this. In nearly every artistic nature there is an innate, luxurious and treacherous tendency to acknowledge the injustice that creates beauty and to render sympathy and homage to aristocratic preference.

A waiter went about and announced in English that the meal was ready. Gradually the company disappeared through the glass door into the dining room. Latecomers arriving from the vestibule and the lifts passed by. Service had begun within, but the young Poles remained around their wicker table, and Aschenbach, comfortably held in his deep chair and with beauty, moreover, before his eyes, waited with them.

The governess, a small and corpulent demi-lady with a red face, at last gave the sign to rise. Her eyebrows raised, she pushed back her chair and bowed as a tall woman, dressed in grey and white and very richly adorned with pearls, entered the hall. This woman's bearing was cool and measured; the arrangement of her lightly powdered hair, as well as the cut of her dress, possessed that simplicity which determines taste wherever piety is regarded as a component of distinction. She might have been the wife of a senior German official. Something of fantastic extravagance came into her appearance solely through her jewellery, which was indeed nearly impossible to appraise and consisted of pendant earrings and a triple, very long strand of softly gleaming pearls the size of cherries.

The siblings had risen quickly. They bent to kiss their mother's hand; she looked over their heads with a reserved smile on her well-tended, though somewhat tired and sharp-nosed face, and addressed a few words in French to the governess. Then she walked toward the glass door. The siblings followed her: the girls in order of age, the governess after them, and last the boy. For some reason he turned before crossing the threshold, and as no one else remained in the hall, his peculiarly twilight-grey eyes met Aschenbach's, who, his newspaper on his knees, absorbed in contemplation, gazed after the group.

What he had seen had certainly not been remarkable in any single detail. They had not gone in to table before the mother, had waited for her, greeted her respectfully, and observed customary forms upon entering the dining room. Yet all this had presented itself so explicitly, with such an emphasis upon discipline, obligation, and self-respect, that Aschenbach felt strangely moved. He hesitated a few moments longer, then crossed into the dining room in his turn and allowed his little table to be shown him; with a brief stir of regret, he established that it was very far from that of the Polish family.

Tired and yet mentally stirred, during the protracted meal he entertained himself with abstract, indeed transcendent matters, reflected upon the mysterious union which the law-governed must enter with the individual for human beauty to arise, passed from there to general problems of form and art, and found at last that his thoughts and discoveries resembled certain apparently felicitous promptings of dreams which, to a sobered mind, prove wholly stale and useless. After dinner he lingered in the evening-scented park, smoking, sitting, walking about; retired early and passed the night in continuously deep sleep, though variously animated by dream-images.

The weather showed no greater favour the following day. A land wind was blowing. Beneath a pallid, overcast sky the sea lay in dull repose, shrivelled as it were, with a bare horizon close at hand and withdrawn so far from the beach that it left several rows of long sandbanks exposed. When Aschenbach opened his window, he thought he detected the putrid smell of the lagoon.

Discontent seized him. Already at this moment he thought of departure. Once, years ago, after two bright spring weeks here, this weather had visited him and so gravely impaired his health that he had been forced to leave Venice like a fugitive. Was not the feverish malaise of that time already returning, the pressure at his temples, the heaviness of the eyelids? To change his place of residence once again would be troublesome; but if the wind did not shift, he could not remain here. As a precaution he did not unpack completely. At nine he breakfasted in the buffet room reserved for that purpose between the hall and dining room.

The room was governed by the ceremonial silence that forms part of every great hotel's ambition. The serving waiters moved about on noiseless soles. The clatter of tea things, a half-whispered word, was all that could be heard. In one corner, diagonally opposite the door and two tables away from his own, Aschenbach noticed the Polish girls with their governess. Very upright, their ash-blond hair freshly smoothed and their eyes reddened, they sat in stiff dresses of blue linen with little white turn-down collars and cuffs, and passed one another a jar of preserves. They had nearly finished breakfast. The boy was absent.

Aschenbach smiled. Well, little Phaeacian! he thought. It seems that you, unlike these others, enjoy the privilege of sleeping as late as you please. And, suddenly cheered, he recited to himself the verse:

“Often they changed their adornment, and warm baths and rest.”

He breakfasted without haste, received from the porter, who entered the room with his braided cap in his hand, several items of mail that had followed him, and, smoking a cigarette, opened a few letters. Thus it came about that he was still there to witness the entrance of the late sleeper for whom they were waiting across the room.

He came through the glass door and crossed the silent room diagonally to his sisters' table. His gait, in the bearing of the upper body no less than in the movement of the knees and the placing of the white-shod foot, possessed an extraordinary grace; it was very light, at once delicate and proud, and further beautified by the childish modesty with which, twice on his way, turning his head toward the room, he raised and lowered his eyes. Smiling, with a softly spoken word in his tenderly blurred language, he took his place; and now especially, when he turned his exact profile toward the observer, Aschenbach was astonished anew, indeed startled, by the truly godlike beauty of this human child. Today the boy wore a light blouse suit of washable fabric striped blue and white, with a red silk bow at the breast and a simple white standing collar closing it at the neck. Yet upon this collar, which did not seem particularly elegant or well suited to the character of the costume, the blossom of the head rested in incomparable loveliness—the head of Eros, with the yellowish lustre of Parian marble, with fine, grave brows, the temple and ear softly darkened by the curls that sprang inward at right angles.

Good, good, thought Aschenbach, with that cool professional approval in which artists will sometimes clothe their delight, their rapture, before a masterpiece. And he thought further: Indeed, if sea and beach were not waiting for me, I should remain here as long as you remain! But he went nevertheless, went through the lobby amid the attentions of the staff, down the broad terrace and straight across the plank walkway to the section of beach reserved for hotel guests. He had the barefoot old man who, in canvas trousers, sailor blouse, and straw hat, performed the duties of bathing attendant below, show him his rented beach cabin; he had a table and chair carried out upon the sandy wooden platform and made himself comfortable in the reclining chair he had pulled farther toward the sea, into the wax-yellow sand.

The scene on the beach, this spectacle of civilization carelessly indulging the senses at the edge of the element, diverted and delighted him as much as ever anything had. The grey, shallow sea was already alive with wading children, swimmers, and brightly coloured figures lying on the sandbanks with arms folded beneath their heads. Others rowed little keel-less boats painted red and blue and laughingly capsized them. Before the long row of capanne, on whose platforms people sat as on small verandas, there was playful motion and indolently outstretched repose, visiting and chatter, careful morning elegance beside nakedness that enjoyed the liberties of the place with bold contentment. In front, upon the damp, firm sand, solitary figures promenaded in white bathing robes or loose, vividly coloured smocks. To the right, an elaborate sandcastle made by children was planted all round with little flags in the colours of every nation. Sellers of shells, cakes, and fruit knelt to spread out their wares. On the left, before one of the cabins that stood crosswise to the remaining row and to the sea, enclosing the beach on that side, a Russian family had made its camp: men with beards and large teeth, languid, flaccid women, a Baltic young lady who sat at an easel painting the sea amid cries of despair, two good-naturedly ugly children, an old maidservant in a headscarf with tenderly submissive, servile manners. They lived there in grateful enjoyment, tirelessly calling the names of the disobedient children at their play, jesting at length through the medium of a few Italian words with the humorous old man from whom they bought sweetmeats, kissing one another on the cheeks, and caring nothing for any observer of their human fellowship.

Then I shall stay, thought Aschenbach. Where could it be better? And with his hands folded in his lap, he allowed his eyes to lose themselves in the expanses of the sea, allowed his gaze to slip away, to blur, to break upon the monotonous haze of that spatial wilderness. He loved the sea for profound reasons: from the hard-working artist's longing for rest, his wish to hide from the exacting multiplicity of appearances upon the breast of the simple and immense; from a forbidden inclination, directly opposed to his task and therefore all the more seductive, toward the unarticulated, the measureless, the eternal, toward nothingness. To rest in the perfect is the longing of one who labours after excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection? But as he dreamed so deeply into the void, the horizontal line of the water's edge was suddenly intersected by a human figure; and when he recalled and gathered his gaze from the boundless distance, it was the beautiful boy, coming from the left and passing before him over the sand. He went barefoot, ready to wade, his slender legs bare above the knees, slowly, yet so lightly and proudly as though movement without shoes were entirely customary to him, and he looked toward the cabins that stood crosswise. No sooner, however, had he noticed the Russian family conducting its life there in grateful concord than a storm of angry contempt swept over his face. His brow darkened, his mouth lifted; from his lips toward one side ran an embittered pull that tore the cheek awry, and his brows were furrowed so heavily that beneath their pressure the eyes seemed sunken and spoke, malign and dark, the language of hatred from below. He looked at the ground, glanced back once more in menace, then made a violently dismissive movement with his shoulder and left the enemies behind him.

A kind of delicacy or alarm, something like respect and shame, caused Aschenbach to turn away as though he had seen nothing; for the grave chance witness of passion recoils from making use of his perceptions even before himself. Yet he was amused and shaken at once, which is to say: delighted. This childish fanaticism, directed against the most good-natured fragment of life—it placed the divinely insignificant within human relations; it made a precious work of nature, until then fit only to delight the eye, appear worthy of deeper concern; and it bestowed upon the adolescent figure, already significant through beauty, a political and historical ground against which he might be taken seriously beyond his years.

Still turned away, Aschenbach listened to the boy's voice, his clear, slightly feeble voice, with which, while yet some distance off, he tried to announce himself in greeting to the companions occupied around the sandcastle. They answered by calling his name, or some pet form of it, repeatedly toward him; and Aschenbach listened with a certain curiosity, unable to catch anything more definite than two melodious syllables such as “Adgio,” or, more frequently, “Adgiu,” with the final u prolonged in the call. He took pleasure in the sound, found its euphony fitting to its object, repeated it silently, and turned back, satisfied, to his letters and papers.

With his little travelling writing case upon his knees, he began to answer one or another item of correspondence with his fountain pen. But after only a quarter of an hour he found it regrettable to abandon in spirit a situation more worthy of enjoyment than any he knew, and to miss it through indifferent activity. He cast the writing things aside, returned to the sea, and before long, distracted by the voices of the young people at their structure of sand, turned his head comfortably to the right against the chair back to look again into the doings and whereabouts of the excellent Adgio.

His first glance found him; the red bow upon his breast could not be missed. Busy with others in laying an old plank as a bridge across the damp moat of the sandcastle, he called and nodded his instructions for the work. There were some ten companions with him, boys and girls of his own age and some younger, chattering across one another in tongues—Polish, French, and Balkan idioms too. But it was his name that sounded most often. Evidently he was sought after, courted, admired. One in particular, a Pole like himself, a sturdy lad called by something like “Jaschu,” with black, pomaded hair and a belted linen suit, seemed his closest vassal and friend. When, for the present, the work upon the sand structure was done, they walked along the beach with their arms about one another, and the one called “Jaschu” kissed the beautiful boy.

Aschenbach was tempted to shake a warning finger at him. “But you, Critobulus,” he thought with a smile, “I advise to travel for a year! For you will need at least that long to recover.” Then he breakfasted upon large, fully ripe strawberries bought from a vendor. It had grown very warm, although the sun was unable to penetrate the layer of haze across the sky. Lethargy bound the mind while the senses enjoyed the immense and narcotic entertainment of the sea's stillness. To guess, to investigate, what name it might be that sounded approximately like “Adgio” appeared to the grave man a suitable task and occupation, wholly sufficient to fill him. With the aid of a few Polish recollections he established that “Tadzio” must be meant, the abbreviation of “Tadeusz,” pronounced “Tadziu” in the vocative. Tadzio was bathing. Aschenbach, who had lost sight of him, discovered his head, his arm reaching forward to pull through the water, far out at sea; for the water was perhaps shallow a long way from shore. But already there seemed to be concern for him, already women's voices were calling after him from the cabins, again uttering that name which ruled the beach almost like a watchword, and which, with its soft consonants and its long-drawn final cry of u, possessed something at once sweet and wild: “Tadziu, Tadziu!” He obeyed, he ran through the flood, beating the reluctant water into foam with his legs, his head thrown back; and to see how the living figure, charming and austere before manhood, with dripping curls and beautiful as a tender god, came out of the depths of sky and sea and rose from and escaped the element—this sight inspired mythical conceptions; it was like a poet's lore of earliest times, of the origin of form and the birth of the gods. Aschenbach listened with closed eyes to this song sounding within him; and once again he thought it was good here and that he wished to remain.

Later Tadzio lay upon the sand, resting from his bath and wrapped in his white sheet, which passed beneath his right shoulder, his head pillowed upon his bare arm; and even when Aschenbach was not looking at him but reading several pages of his book, he almost never forgot that the other lay there and that it would cost no more than a slight turn of the head to the right to behold what was worthy of wonder. It almost seemed to him that he sat here to guard the resting boy—occupied with his own affairs, yet keeping constant watch over that noble human image to his right, not far from him. And a paternal favour, the moved devotion of one who, sacrificing himself, begets beauty in the spirit toward one who possesses beauty, filled and stirred his heart.

After midday he left the beach, returned to the hotel, and had the lift carry him up to his room. There he lingered for some time before the mirror, contemplating his grey hair, his weary, sharply cut face. At that moment he thought of his fame and of how many people in the streets recognized him and regarded him with reverence, for the sake of his word, sure of its mark and crowned with grace—summoned to mind every outward success of his talent that he could recall, and even remembered his ennoblement. He then went down to the dining room for luncheon and ate at his little table. When, after the meal, he entered the lift, young people who had likewise come from luncheon pressed after him into the suspended chamber, and Tadzio too stepped inside. He stood quite close to Aschenbach, for the first time so close that the latter perceived and recognized him not at the pictorial distance but precisely, in the details of his humanity. Someone addressed the boy, and while he answered with an indescribably lovely smile, he stepped out again already, on the first floor, backwards, his eyes cast down. Beauty makes one shy, thought Aschenbach, and pondered very intently why. He had noticed, however, that Tadzio's teeth were not altogether pleasing: somewhat jagged and pale, without the enamel of health and of a peculiarly brittle translucence such as one sometimes sees in those afflicted by chlorosis. He is very delicate, he is sickly, thought Aschenbach. He will probably not grow old. And he declined to account to himself for a feeling of satisfaction or reassurance that accompanied the thought.

He spent two hours in his room and in the afternoon travelled by vaporetto across the foul-smelling lagoon to Venice. He disembarked at San Marco, took tea in the square, and then, according to his schedule here, set out upon a walk through the streets. Yet it was this excursion that brought about a complete reversal of his mood and his decisions.

A repellent sultriness lay in the lanes; the air was so thick that the smells pouring from homes, shops, and cookhouses—oily vapour, clouds of perfume, and many others—stood in banks without dispersing. Cigarette smoke hung where it was and escaped only slowly. The human press in the narrow spaces molested the walker instead of diverting him. The longer he went on, the more tormentingly he was seized by that odious condition which sea air together with the sirocco can produce, and which is agitation and enervation at once. A distressing sweat broke from him. His eyes failed in their service, his chest was oppressed, he felt feverish, and blood pounded in his head. He fled the crowded commercial lanes, crossed bridges into the passages of the poor; there beggars importuned him, and the vile exhalations from the canals made every breath repellent. Resting at the edge of a well in a quiet square, one of those places of forgotten and enchanted charm found in the heart of Venice, he dried his brow and understood that he must leave.

For the second time, and now conclusively, it had been proved that in this weather the city was exceedingly harmful to him. Obstinate endurance appeared irrational; the prospect of a change in the wind wholly uncertain. To return home already was out of the question. Neither his summer nor his winter quarters were ready to receive him. But sea and beach were not to be found only here, and elsewhere they came without the evil addition of the lagoon and its fever-laden vapours. He recalled a small seaside resort not far from Trieste of which someone had spoken highly to him. Why not go there? And without delay, so that this further change of residence might still be worthwhile. He declared himself resolved and rose. At the nearest gondola station he hired a craft and had himself conveyed to San Marco through the murky labyrinth of canals, beneath delicate marble balconies flanked by sculpted lions, around slimy corners of masonry, past mournful palace fronts that reflected large company signs in the refuse-rocked water. He had difficulty reaching his destination, for the gondolier, who was in league with lace factories and glassworks, tried at every turn to put him ashore for inspection and purchase; and whenever the bizarre passage through Venice began to exert its enchantment, the cutpurse commercial spirit of the fallen queen did its part to sober the mind again in displeasure.

Back at the hotel, before dinner he informed the office that unforeseen circumstances compelled him to depart early the next morning. Regret was expressed; his account was settled. He dined and spent the mild evening reading newspapers in a rocking chair on the rear terrace. Before retiring, he prepared his luggage completely for departure.

He did not sleep particularly well, for the renewed departure before him made him uneasy. When he opened the windows in the morning, the sky was overcast as before, but the air seemed fresher, and—his regret had already begun. Had not this notice of departure been hasty and mistaken, the act of a sickly state whose judgement carried no weight? Had he held it back a little, had he, without losing heart so quickly, put adaptation to the Venetian air to the test or waited upon an improvement in the weather, then instead of haste and burden a morning on the beach like yesterday's would now have lain before him. Too late. He must now continue to want what he had wanted yesterday. He dressed and at eight o'clock took the lift down to the ground floor for breakfast.

When he entered, the buffet room was still empty of guests. A few arrived while he sat waiting for what he had ordered. With the teacup at his lips, he saw the Polish girls and their companion appear; austere and fresh from the morning, with reddened eyes, they walked to their table in the window corner. Immediately afterward the porter approached him, cap in hand, and urged him to leave. The motorcar stood ready to take him and other travellers to the Hotel Excelsior, whence the launch would convey the party through the company's private canal to the railway station. Time was pressing. —Aschenbach found that it was doing nothing of the kind. More than an hour remained before his train's departure. He was annoyed by the hotel custom of removing departing guests from the premises too early and made it known to the porter that he wished to breakfast in peace. The man withdrew reluctantly, only to reappear five minutes later. It was impossible for the car to wait any longer. Then it might go and take his trunk with it, Aschenbach replied irritably. He himself would use the public steamer at the proper time and asked to be left to concern himself with his own conveyance. The employee bowed. Glad to have repelled the tiresome admonitions, Aschenbach finished his light meal without haste, and even had the waiter bring him the daily papers. Time had grown quite short when he rose. It happened that at that same moment Tadzio entered through the glass door.

On his way to his family's table, he crossed the path of the departing man, modestly lowered his eyes before the grey-haired, high-browed figure, then at once, in his lovely fashion, raised them softly and fully to him, and was gone. Farewell, Tadzio! thought Aschenbach. I saw you only briefly. And, contrary to his custom, actually forming the thought with his lips and murmuring it aloud, he added: May you be blessed! —He then set about his departure, distributed gratuities, was seen off by the small, quiet manager in his French frock coat, and left the hotel on foot as he had come, followed by the house servant carrying his hand luggage, to cross the island by the avenue blossoming white and reach the steamer pier. He reaches it, he takes his seat—and what followed was a journey of suffering, mournful, down through every depth of regret.

It was the familiar journey across the lagoon, past San Marco and up the Grand Canal. Aschenbach sat upon the curved bench at the bow, his arm resting on the rail, his hand shading his eyes. The public gardens fell behind; the Piazzetta opened once more in princely grace and was abandoned; the grand procession of palaces came on, and when the waterway turned, the Rialto's magnificently taut arch of marble appeared. The departing man looked, and his breast was torn. The atmosphere of the city, that faintly putrid smell of sea and marsh from which he had felt so driven to flee—he now inhaled it in deep draughts of tender pain. Was it possible that he had not known, had not considered, how deeply his heart was attached to all this? What had been this morning a half-regret, a quiet doubt concerning the rightness of his action, now became grief, became true pain, a distress of the soul so bitter that it brought tears to his eyes several times, and of which he told himself he could not possibly have foreseen it. What he felt to be so difficult to bear, indeed at times altogether intolerable, was plainly the thought that he should never see Venice again, that this was a farewell for ever. For since it had become evident a second time that the city made him ill, since he had been forced a second time to leave it abruptly, henceforth he must regard it as a place impossible and forbidden to him, one to which he was unequal and which it would be senseless to revisit. Yes, he felt that if he departed now, shame and defiance must prevent him ever seeing the beloved city again, before which his body had failed him twice; and this dispute between the soul's inclination and the body's capacity suddenly appeared so grave and important to the aging man, the physical defeat so ignominious and so necessary to avert at any cost, that he could not comprehend the frivolous submission with which, yesterday, without serious struggle, he had decided to endure and acknowledge it.

Meanwhile the steamer approaches the station, and pain and helplessness mount to confusion. Departure seems impossible to the tormented man, and return no less so. Thus wholly torn, he enters the station. It is very late; he has not an instant to lose if he means to catch the train. He means to and does not. But time presses, lashes him onward; he hurries to obtain his ticket and looks about in the tumult of the hall for the hotel company's official stationed here. The man appears and reports that the large trunk has been checked. Already checked? Yes, all in order—to Como. To Como? And from a hurried exchange, from angry questions and disconcerted answers, it emerges that the trunk, while still at the luggage-forwarding office of the Hotel Excelsior, was sent together with other, unfamiliar baggage in an entirely wrong direction.

Aschenbach had difficulty preserving the expression that alone would have been intelligible under the circumstances. An adventurous joy, an incredible gaiety shook his breast from within, almost convulsively. The employee dashed away in the hope that he might still stop the trunk and returned, as was to be expected, without having accomplished anything. At this Aschenbach declared that he did not wish to travel without his luggage, but had resolved to turn back and await the piece's return at the beach hotel. Was the company's launch at the station? The man swore that it lay just outside the door. In a torrent of Italian he induced the clerk at the counter to take back the purchased ticket; he vowed that telegrams would be sent, that nothing should be spared or neglected to recover the trunk promptly; and thus the strange thing came to pass that the traveller, twenty minutes after arriving at the station, saw himself once more upon the Grand Canal, on his way back to the Lido.

A wonderfully incredible, shameful, comically dreamlike adventure: places from which one had just taken leave for ever in deepest melancholy, turned about and hurled back by fate, to be seen again within the same hour! With foam before its bow, manoeuvring drolly and nimbly between gondolas and steamers, the little urgent craft shot toward its destination, while its passenger concealed beneath a mask of irritated resignation the anxious, high-spirited excitement of a runaway boy. Still, from time to time, his breast was stirred by laughter over this mishap, which, he told himself, could not have visited even a child of fortune more obligingly. Explanations had to be made, astonished faces endured—then, he told himself, all would be well again; then a calamity would have been averted, a grave error set right, and everything he had believed left behind opened before him once more, was his again for as long as he pleased... Besides, was the swift journey deceiving him, or, to crown it all, was the wind now truly coming from the sea after all?

The waves struck the concrete walls of the narrow canal cut through the island to the Hotel Excelsior. A motor omnibus awaited the returning man there and carried him along a straight road above the rippled sea to the beach hotel. The small manager with the curled moustache, in his curved-skirted frock coat, descended the outside steps to greet him.

In softly flattering tones he deplored the incident, called it extremely embarrassing for himself and the establishment, yet warmly approved Aschenbach's decision to await his luggage here. His room, to be sure, had been let, but another, no worse, was immediately available. “Pas de chance, monsieur,” the Swiss lift attendant said with a smile as they glided upward. And so the fugitive was installed once more, in a room almost perfectly resembling the former one in position and appointments.

Weary and dazed by the whirl of this strange morning, he distributed the contents of his hand case around the room and settled into an armchair by the open window. The sea had taken on a pale green colour, the air seemed thinner and purer, the beach with its cabins and boats more colourful, although the sky was still grey. Aschenbach looked out, his hands folded in his lap, content to be here again, yet shaking his head in dissatisfaction at his irresolution, his ignorance of his own desires. Thus he sat for perhaps an hour, resting and dreaming without thought. Around midday he caught sight of Tadzio, in his striped linen suit with the red bow, returning from the sea through the beach barrier and along the plank walks toward the hotel. From his height Aschenbach recognized him at once, before actually fixing his eyes upon him, and wanted to think something like: “Look, Tadzio, there you are again too!” But in the same instant he felt the casual greeting collapse and fall silent before the truth of his heart—felt the ardour of his blood, the joy and pain of his soul, and understood that it was for Tadzio's sake that farewell had become so difficult for him.

He sat perfectly still, wholly unseen in his high place, and looked within himself. His features had awakened, his brows rose, an attentive, curious, keen-witted smile stretched his mouth. Then he raised his head and, with both arms hanging slack over the sides of the chair, described a slowly turning and lifting motion, rotating his palms forward as though to suggest the opening and spreading of the arms. It was a gesture ready with welcome, serenely receptive.