Death in Venice — Chapter 4

Chapter 4 of 5 · Review of Death in Venice

Now, day after day, the god with burning cheeks, naked, drove his heat-breathing four-horse team through the spaces of heaven, and his yellow curls streamed in the easterly wind that burst forth with him. A whitish silken brilliance lay upon the reaches of the sluggishly heaving Pontus. The sand glowed. Beneath the silvery shimmer of the ether's blue, rust-coloured sailcloths were stretched before the beach cabins, and people spent the morning hours upon the sharply bounded patch of shadow they afforded. But exquisite too was the evening, when the plants in the park breathed balsamic scents, the constellations overhead paced their round dance, and the murmur of the sea under night, softly rising, addressed the soul. Such an evening bore within it the joyful assurance of another sunlit day, of leisure lightly ordered and adorned with numberless, closely clustered possibilities of lovely chance.

The guest whom so accommodating a mishap had detained here was far from seeing in the recovery of his property a reason to depart anew. For two days he had been obliged to endure some privation and to appear at meals in the great dining room wearing his travelling clothes. Then, when at last the errant load was set down again in his room, he unpacked thoroughly and filled wardrobe and drawers with his possessions, resolved to remain for a period that, for the present, had no foreseeable end, pleased that he could spend the hours on the beach in a silk suit and once more present himself at dinner, in proper evening dress, at his little table.

The pleasant regularity of this existence had already drawn him under its spell; the soft and lustrous mildness of such a way of life had quickly bewitched him. What a sojourn indeed, uniting the charms of a cultivated bathing life upon a southern shore with the intimate, ever-ready nearness of that strangely wondrous city! Aschenbach was not a lover of pleasure. Whenever and wherever there was occasion to celebrate, to rest, to make his days comfortable, before long—and particularly in his younger years this had been so—unease and distaste made him long to return to the lofty labour, the sacredly sober service of his daily life. This place alone enchanted him, relaxed his will, made him happy. Sometimes in the morning, dreaming beneath the shade cloth of his cabin over the blue of the southern sea, or perhaps on a mild night, leaning into the cushions of the gondola that carried him home to the Lido from St Mark's Square, where he had lingered long, under a sky of great stars—as the coloured lights, the melting notes of the serenade, receded—he remembered his country house in the mountains, the place of his summer striving, where clouds moved low through the garden, dreadful evening thunderstorms extinguished the light of the house, and the ravens he fed swung in the crowns of the firs. Then it would seem to him that he had been transported to Elysian country, to the limits of the earth, where the lightest life is granted to mankind, where there is neither snow nor winter, neither storm nor streaming rain, but Oceanus forever sends up a softly cooling breath, and the days pass in blessed leisure, effortless, without struggle, and wholly devoted to the sun and its festivals alone.

Aschenbach saw the boy Tadzio often, almost continually; the limited space and a routine imposed upon everyone ensured that, with brief interruptions, the beautiful boy was near him throughout the day. He saw him, encountered him everywhere: in the lower rooms of the hotel, on the cooling water journeys to the city and back, amid the splendour of the square itself, and often between these occasions upon paths and walkways, when chance did its additional part. But chiefly, and with the happiest regularity, the morning on the beach afforded him extended opportunity to dedicate devotion and study to the lovely apparition. Indeed, it was precisely this regulated happiness, this favour of circumstance breaking anew each day with steady regularity, that filled him with contentment and joy in life, that made the sojourn precious to him and allowed one sunny day, so agreeably prolonged, to follow another.

He rose early, as he otherwise might under the throbbing pressure to work, and reached the beach before most people, while the sun was still mild and the sea lay dazzling white in morning dreams. He greeted the guardian at the barrier with humane friendliness, greeted familiarly too the barefoot, white-bearded man who had prepared his place, stretched the brown shade cloth, and moved the cabin furniture out onto the platform, and he sat down. Three or four hours were then his, during which the sun climbed aloft and gained terrible power, during which the sea deepened further and further into blue, and during which he was permitted to see Tadzio.

He saw him coming from the left along the edge of the sea, saw him emerge from behind among the cabins, or else would suddenly discover, not without a joyful start, that he had missed his arrival and that he was already there, already in the blue-and-white bathing costume that was now his sole attire on the beach, had already resumed his customary activity in sun and sand—this charmingly trivial, idly restless life that was play and repose, strolling, wading, digging, catching, reclining, and swimming, watched over and called to by the women on the platform, who sounded his name in shrill voices: “Tadziu! Tadziu!” and to whom he came running with eager gestures to tell them what had happened to him, to show them what he had found or caught: shells, sea horses, jellyfish, and sidling crabs. Aschenbach did not understand a word of what he said, and though it might have been the most commonplace thing, it was blurred euphony in his ear. Thus foreignness elevated the boy's speech into music, a wanton sun poured lavish brilliance over him, and the sublime depth of the sea was always the ground and background to his appearance.

Soon the observer knew every line and pose of this body, so exalted, so freely presenting itself; he greeted each already familiar beauty anew with joy, and found no end to admiration, to delicate sensual delight. The boy was called to greet a visitor paying his respects to the women by the cabin; he ran over, perhaps ran wet from the surf, tossed his curls, and as he offered his hand, resting upon one leg with the other foot set upon the tips of the toes, his body performed a charming turn and twist, gracefully tense, shy from courtesy, eager to please from aristocratic duty. He lay outstretched, the bathing towel wound around his chest, his delicately carved arm propped in the sand, his chin in the hollow of his hand; the one called “Jaschu” crouched beside him, seeking to please him; nothing was more enchanting than the smile in the eyes and on the lips with which the favoured one looked up at the lesser, serving boy. He stood at the edge of the sea, alone, apart from his people and quite near Aschenbach—upright, his hands clasped behind his neck, rocking slowly upon the balls of his feet and dreaming into the blue, while little incoming waves bathed his toes. His honey-coloured hair nestled in curls against his temples and nape; the sun lit the down along his upper spine; the fine delineation of his ribs, the symmetry of his chest showed through the close covering of his torso; his armpits were still smooth as a statue's, the hollows behind his knees shone, and their bluish veins made his body seem formed of some clearer substance. What discipline, what precision of thought found expression in this erect and youthfully perfect body! Yet the stern and pure will which, working darkly, had contrived to drive this divine work of sculpture into the light—was it not known and familiar to him, the artist? Did it not work in him too when, filled with deliberate passion, he released from the marble mass of language the slender form he had beheld in his mind and presented it to humanity as statue and mirror of spiritual beauty?

Statue and mirror! His eyes embraced the noble figure there at the blue's edge, and in soaring delight he believed that through this gaze he grasped beauty itself, form as a thought of God, the single and pure perfection that lives in the mind and of which a human image and likeness had here been lightly, charmingly raised for adoration. This was the intoxication; and without misgiving, indeed greedily, the aging artist welcomed it. His mind circled, his learning began to seethe, his memory cast up ancient thoughts passed down to him in youth and until now never animated by a fire of his own. Was it not written that the sun turns our attention away from intellectual toward sensuous things? It benumbs and bewitches, so it was said, understanding and memory, so that for pleasure the soul entirely forgets its true condition and clings in astonished admiration to the most beautiful among the sunlit objects: yes, it is then only with the aid of a body that the soul can still rise to higher contemplation. Amor, truly, did as mathematicians do when they show incapable children tangible images of pure forms: so too, in order to make the spiritual visible to us, the god was fond of employing the shape and colour of human youth, which he adorned with every reflected splendour of beauty as an instrument of recollection, and at the sight of which we would then ignite in pain and hope.

Thus thought the inspired man; thus was he capable of feeling. And from the rapture of the sea and the blaze of the sun a charming picture spun itself before him. It was the ancient plane tree not far from the walls of Athens—it was that sacred, shaded place, filled with the scent of cherry blossoms, adorned with votive images and pious offerings in honour of the nymphs and Achelous. Perfectly clear, the brook ran over smooth pebbles at the foot of the broad-branched tree; the crickets fiddled. But upon the gently sloping grass, where one could lie with the head held high, Two were reclining, sheltered here from the heat of the day: one older and one young, one ugly and one beautiful, the wise beside the lovable. And amid courtesies and witty, wooing jests, Socrates instructed Phaedrus in longing and virtue. He told him of the hot terror suffered by the man of feeling when his eye beholds a likeness of eternal beauty; told him of the desires of the uninitiated and base man, who cannot conceive beauty when he sees its image and is incapable of reverence; told him of the sacred fear that seizes the noble man when a godlike countenance, a perfect body, appears before him, how he then trembles, is beside himself, scarcely dares to look, and worships the one who possesses beauty, yes, would sacrifice to him as to an image of a god, if he did not fear appearing mad to mankind. For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone, is lovable and visible at once: it is—mark this well!—the only form of the spiritual that we can receive through the senses, can endure through the senses. Or what would become of us if the divine in other forms, if reason and virtue and truth, wished to appear to our senses? Should we not perish and burn with love, as Semele once did before Zeus? Thus beauty is the man of feeling's path to the spirit—only the path, only a means, little Phaedrus... And then the cunning wooer uttered the most subtle point: that the lover was more divine than the beloved, because in the former dwelt the god, but not in the latter—perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought ever conceived, from which springs all the roguery and most secret voluptuousness of longing. The writer's happiness is the thought capable of becoming wholly feeling, the feeling capable of becoming wholly thought. Such a pulsing thought, such an exact feeling, belonged and obeyed at that time to the solitary man: namely, that nature shudders with delight when the spirit bows in homage before beauty. He suddenly wished to write. Eros, it is said, loves idleness, and was created only for it. But at this point of the crisis, the excitement of the afflicted man was directed toward production. The occasion was almost immaterial. A question, an invitation to declare himself upon a certain great and burning problem of culture and taste, had gone out into the intellectual world and reached the traveller. The subject was familiar to him, had been lived by him; his appetite to make it shine in the light of his word became all at once irresistible. Moreover, his desire was to work in Tadzio's presence, while writing to take the boy's build as his model, to let his style follow the lines of this body that appeared divine to him, and to carry its beauty into the spiritual, as the eagle once carried the Trojan shepherd into the ether. Never had he felt the pleasure of the word more sweetly, never known so fully that Eros dwelt within the word, as during the dangerously exquisite hours in which, at his rough table beneath the shade cloth, before the face of his idol and with the music of his voice in his ear, he shaped his little treatise after Tadzio's beauty—that page and a half of exquisite prose whose purity, nobility, and vibrant tension of feeling would before long arouse the admiration of many. It is surely well that the world knows only the beautiful work, and not also its origins, not the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources from which inspiration flowed to the artist would often confuse and repel it, and thus annul the effects of excellence. Strange hours! Strangely enervating labour! Strangely generative intercourse of the spirit with a body! When Aschenbach put away his work and left the beach, he felt exhausted, indeed shattered, and it seemed to him that his conscience complained as after a debauch.

It was the next morning that, as he was about to leave the hotel, he noticed from the outside steps how Tadzio, already on his way to the sea—and alone—was just approaching the beach barrier. The wish, the simple thought, of using the opportunity to form a light, cheerful acquaintance with one who, unknowingly, had brought him so much elevation and agitation, to address him and take pleasure in his answer, his gaze, was obvious and pressed upon him. The beautiful boy was strolling, he could be overtaken, and Aschenbach quickened his steps. He reaches him on the plank walk behind the cabins; he means to place his hand upon his head, upon his shoulder, and some word, a friendly French phrase, hovers upon his lips: then he feels that his heart, perhaps from the rapid pace as well, is beating like a hammer, that, so short of breath, he will be able to speak only with strain and trembling; he hesitates, tries to master himself, suddenly fears that he has been walking close behind the beautiful boy too long, fears that he will notice, will look round in inquiry, makes one more attempt, fails, renounces it, and passes by with bowed head.

Too late! he thought in that instant. Too late! Yet was it too late? This step which he had failed to take might very possibly have led to the good, the easy, the cheerful, to a salutary sobering. But the truth of the matter was probably that the aging man did not wish to be sobered, that the intoxication was too precious to him. Who can solve the nature and stamp of artistry! Who comprehends the deep instinctive fusion of discipline and licentiousness upon which it rests! For to be unable to desire salutary sobriety is licentiousness. Aschenbach was no longer disposed toward self-criticism; the taste and intellectual constitution of his years, self-respect, maturity, and late simplicity left him disinclined to dissect motives and decide whether it was from conscience or from wantonness and weakness that he had failed to carry out his intention. He was confused; he feared that someone, even if only the beach attendant, might have observed his pursuit, his defeat; he greatly feared the ridiculous. For the rest, he jested to himself about his comically sacred terror. “Stricken,” he thought, “stricken like a cock that lets its wings droop fearfully in battle. It is truly the god who at the sight of the lovable so breaks our courage and so utterly casts our proud spirit to the ground...” He played, he rhapsodized, and was far too proud to fear a feeling.

Already he no longer kept watch over the course of the leisure he had granted himself; the thought of returning home did not even touch him. He had ordered ample funds sent to him. His concern was directed solely toward the possible departure of the Polish family; yet by discreet means, through a casual inquiry of the hotel's coiffeur, he had learned that these persons had arrived only shortly before he himself had. The sun browned his face and hands, the stimulating breath of salt invigorated his capacity for feeling; and whereas he had formerly been accustomed to expend at once upon some work every refreshment bestowed by sleep, nourishment, or nature, he now allowed all the daily reinforcement brought him by sun, leisure, and sea air to be consumed, nobly and improvidently, in intoxication and emotion.

His sleep was fleeting; the exquisitely uniform days were divided by short nights full of happy unrest. He did indeed retire early, for at nine o'clock, when Tadzio had vanished from the scene, the day seemed over to him. But at the first grey of morning a tenderly penetrating alarm awoke him; his heart remembered its adventure, he could no longer bear the pillows, he rose, and lightly wrapped against the chill of the early hour, sat down at the open window to await the sunrise. The wondrous event filled his soul, consecrated by sleep, with devotion. Sky, earth, and sea still lay in the ghostly, glassy pallor of twilight; a fading star still swam in the immaterial. But a breath came, a winged message from inaccessible dwelling places, announcing that Eos was rising from her husband's side, and there occurred that first sweet flush of the farthest reaches of sky and sea by which creation's passage into sensuous form proclaims itself. The goddess drew near, the abductor of youths, who carried off Cleitus and Cephalus and, defying the envy of all the Olympians, enjoyed the love of beautiful Orion. At the rim of the world began a scattering of roses, an unspeakably lovely shining and blossoming; childlike clouds, transfigured and illumined through, hovered like serving cupids in the rosy, bluish haze; purple fell upon the sea, which seemed to swell and bear it forward; golden spears flashed upward from below to the height of heaven; brilliance became conflagration; silently, with divine overwhelming force, heat and ardour and blazing flames rolled upward, and the sacred steeds of her brother rose above the earth's circumference on racing hooves. Shone upon by the god's magnificence, the solitary watcher sat; he closed his eyes and let glory kiss his lids. Former feelings, early and exquisite torments of the heart that had died in the stern service of his life and now returned so strangely transformed—he recognized them with a bewildered, wondering smile. He mused, he dreamed, slowly his lips formed a name, and still smiling, his face turned upward and his hands folded in his lap, he fell asleep once more in his chair.

But the day that had begun with such fiery solemnity was, in its whole course, strangely exalted and mythically transformed. Whence came, whence arose, the breath that suddenly played about his temple and ear so gently and significantly, like a higher intimation? White feather-clouds stood in widespread hosts across the sky, like grazing herds of the gods. A stronger wind arose, and Poseidon's horses came running and rearing, or perhaps they were bulls belonging to the god of the blue-tinged locks, which charged with a roar and lowered their horns. Among the rocky rubble of the more distant shore, meanwhile, the waves leapt up like springing goats. A world holy in its disfigurement and teeming with the life of Pan enclosed the enchanted man, and his heart dreamed tender fables. More than once, as the sun sank behind Venice, he sat upon a bench in the park to watch Tadzio, dressed in white and girt with colour, amusing himself at ball on the rolled gravel court; and it was Hyacinthus whom he believed he saw, Hyacinthus who had to die because two gods loved him. Yes, he felt Zephyr's painful envy of the rival who forgot oracle, bow, and kithara so that he might play always with the beautiful youth; he saw the discus, guided by cruel jealousy, strike the lovely head; he too turned pale as he received the broken body, and the flower sprung from the sweet blood bore the inscription of his endless lament...

Nothing is stranger or more delicate than the relation between people who know each other only by sight—who meet and observe each other daily, indeed hourly, and yet are compelled, by the coercion of custom or a whim of their own, to maintain without greeting or speech the appearance of indifferent strangeness. Between them there is unrest and overexcited curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied need for knowledge and exchange unnaturally suppressed, and in particular a kind of tense regard. For one human being loves and respects another only so long as he remains unable to judge him, and longing is a product of defective knowledge.

Some relation and acquaintance was necessarily bound to develop between Aschenbach and the young Tadzio, and with penetrating joy the elder man could establish that his interest and attention did not go wholly unreturned. What, for instance, moved the beautiful boy, whenever he appeared on the beach in the morning, never again to use the plank walk at the rear of the cabins, but from then on only the forward path through the sand, past Aschenbach's station, sometimes unnecessarily close to him, almost brushing his table, his chair, as he strolled to his family's cabin? Was this how the attraction, the fascination of a dominant feeling acted upon its delicate, unthinking object? Aschenbach waited daily for Tadzio to appear, and sometimes he pretended to be occupied when it happened, letting the beautiful boy pass as though unnoticed. At other times, however, he looked up, and their eyes met. Both were profoundly grave when that occurred. In the cultivated and dignified expression of the elder man nothing betrayed inward emotion; but in Tadzio's eyes there was searching, a thoughtful question; hesitation entered his gait, he looked at the ground, looked up again with charm, and once he had passed, something in his bearing seemed to express that only his upbringing prevented him from turning around.

Once, however, on an evening, it happened differently. The Polish siblings and their governess had been absent from the principal meal in the great hall—with concern Aschenbach had noticed it. After dinner, very uneasy about their whereabouts, he was walking in evening dress and a straw hat before the hotel, at the foot of the terrace, when he suddenly saw the nun-like sisters with the governess, and four paces behind them Tadzio, emerge in the light of the arc lamps. Evidently they had come from the steamer pier after dining in the city for some reason. It had probably been cool upon the water; Tadzio wore a dark-blue sailor overcoat with gold buttons and the matching cap upon his head. Sun and sea air did not burn him; his skin had remained marble-yellowish as at the beginning, though today he seemed paler than usual, whether from the coolness or from the bleaching moonlight of the lamps. His even brows stood out more sharply, his eyes darkened deep. He was more beautiful than could be said, and Aschenbach felt with pain, as he so often had, that the word can only praise sensuous beauty, not reproduce it.

He had not expected the precious apparition; it came unforeseen, and he had had no time to secure his features in repose and dignity. Joy, surprise, admiration must have shown openly upon them when his gaze encountered that of the one he had missed—and in that second it happened that Tadzio smiled: smiled at him, eloquently, familiarly, charmingly and without concealment, with lips that opened only slowly as he smiled. It was the smile of Narcissus bending over the reflecting water, that deep, enchanted, drawn smile with which he stretches his arms toward the reflection of his own beauty—a smile very slightly contorted, contorted by the hopelessness of his effort to kiss the lovely lips of his shadow, coquettish, curious, and softly tormented, infatuated and infatuating.

The man who had received this smile hurried away with it as with a fatal gift. He was shaken so deeply that he was forced to flee the light of the terrace and front garden and to seek with hasty steps the darkness of the park behind. Strange admonitions, indignant and tender, forced themselves from him: “You must not smile like that! Listen, one must not smile at anyone like that!” He flung himself upon a bench and, beside himself, breathed the nocturnal fragrance of the plants. And leaning back, his arms hanging, overwhelmed and repeatedly traversed by shudders, he whispered the familiar formula of longing—impossible here, absurd, depraved, ridiculous, yet sacred, venerable even here: “I love you!”