Death in Venice — Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of 5 · Review of Death in Venice

In the fourth week of his stay on the Lido, Gustav von Aschenbach made several sinister observations concerning the world outside. First it seemed to him that, as the season advanced, attendance at his hotel was diminishing rather than increasing; and in particular that the German language around him was drying up and falling silent, until at table and on the beach his ear encountered nothing but foreign sounds. Then one day, in conversation at the hairdresser's, which he now visited often, he caught a word that made him pause. The man had mentioned a German family who had just departed after a brief stay, and added, chattering and flattering: "You are staying, sir; you have no fear of the evil." Aschenbach looked at him. "The evil?" he repeated. The chatterer fell silent, made a show of being busy, ignored the question; and when it was put more insistently, he declared that he knew nothing and tried, with embarrassed eloquence, to divert the conversation.

That was around noon. In the afternoon Aschenbach went to Venice beneath a windless sky and a punishing blaze of sun; for he was driven by the mania of following the Polish siblings, whom he had seen take the way to the steamer landing with their attendant. He did not find the idol at San Marco. But over tea, seated at his little round iron table on the shaded side of the square, he suddenly scented a peculiar aroma in the air, one which now seemed to him to have touched his senses for days without entering his awareness—a sweetish, medicinal smell that recalled misery and wounds and a suspicious cleanliness. Thoughtfully he tested and recognized it, finished his refreshment, and left the square on the side opposite the basilica. In the narrow streets the smell grew stronger. Printed notices were posted at the corners, through which the civic fathers warned the population, on account of certain disorders of the gastric system said to be commonplace in such weather, against eating oysters and shellfish, and also against the water of the canals. The euphemistic nature of the decree was plain. Groups of townspeople stood silently together on bridges and squares; and among them the stranger stood, sensing and brooding.

He asked a shopkeeper, who leaned in the doorway of his vaulted premises amid strings of coral and ornaments of false amethyst, for information about the baleful smell. The man surveyed him with heavy eyes and briskly roused himself. "A preventive measure, sir!" he answered, accompanying the words with gestures. "An order of the police, which one must approve. This weather weighs upon us; the sirocco is not conducive to health. In short, you understand—a perhaps excessive precaution..." Aschenbach thanked him and went on. Even on the steamer carrying him back to the Lido he could now detect the odour of the germ-killing agent.

On returning to the hotel, he went at once into the lobby, to the newspaper table, and searched through the papers. He found nothing in those printed in foreign languages. The papers from home recorded rumours, cited wavering figures, reproduced official denials and questioned their truth. Thus the departure of the German and Austrian contingent was explained. Members of the other nations evidently knew nothing, suspected nothing, and had not yet been alarmed. "Silence must be kept!" Aschenbach thought excitedly, flinging the journals back on the table. "It must be concealed!" Yet at the same time his heart filled with satisfaction at the adventure into which the outer world appeared ready to descend. For passion, like crime, is ill suited to the secure order and prosperity of everyday life; every loosening of the civic fabric, every confusion and visitation of the world, must be welcome to it, since it may vaguely hope to find some advantage there. Thus Aschenbach felt a dark contentment at the events officially cloaked in the dirty alleys of Venice—at this malignant secret of the city, which merged with his own most intimate secret, and whose preservation mattered deeply to him as well. For the lover feared nothing except that Tadzio might leave, and recognized, not without terror, that if this happened he would no longer know how to live.

Of late he was no longer content to owe the beautiful one's nearness and appearance to the routine of the day and to good fortune; he pursued him, he lay in wait for him. On Sundays, for example, the Poles never appeared on the beach; he guessed that they attended mass at San Marco, hurried there, and, passing from the furnace of the square into the golden twilight of the sanctuary, found the one he had missed bent over a prayer desk at the service. Then he stood at the rear, on a fissured mosaic floor, among a people kneeling, murmuring, crossing themselves, while the compact splendour of the eastern temple pressed luxuriantly upon his senses. At the front the heavily vested priest moved, officiated, and sang; incense welled upward and clouded the feeble flames of the altar candles, and with the dull-sweet sacrificial fragrance another seemed softly to mingle: the smell of the stricken city. Yet through vapour and glitter Aschenbach saw the beautiful boy at the front turn his head, search for him, and find him.

When the crowd then streamed through the open portals into the luminous square swarming with pigeons, the infatuated man concealed himself in the vestibule; he hid, he went on watch. He saw the Poles leave the church, saw the siblings take ceremonious leave of their mother and the mother turn toward the Piazzetta on her way home; he established that the beautiful boy, the conventual sisters, and the governess took the route to the right through the gate of the clock tower and into the Merceria, and after allowing them to gain a little ground, he followed them, followed furtively on their walk through Venice.

He had to stop when they lingered, had to flee into cookshops and courtyards to let them pass when they turned back; he lost them, searched for them, overheated and exhausted, across bridges and through filthy blind alleys, and endured minutes of mortal anguish when suddenly, in a narrow passage where escape was impossible, he saw them coming toward him. Yet one cannot say that he suffered. His head and heart were intoxicated, and his steps obeyed the instructions of the demon whose pleasure it is to trample human reason and dignity beneath his feet.

Somewhere Tadzio and his family would then take a gondola, and Aschenbach, whom a projecting façade or a fountain had kept hidden while they embarked, would do the same shortly after they pushed away from shore. He spoke rapidly and under his breath when, with the promise of a generous gratuity, he instructed the oarsman to follow unobtrusively, at some distance, that gondola just then turning the corner; and a shiver passed over him when the fellow, with the roguish readiness of a casual procurer, assured him in the same tone that he would be served, that he would be served conscientiously.

And so, leaning into soft black cushions, he glided and swayed after the other black, beaked barque, to whose wake passion held him fast. At times it vanished from him: then he felt grief and disquiet. But his guide, as though well practised in commissions of this kind, always knew how, by cunning manoeuvres, swift traverses, and shortcuts, to bring the desired sight before his eyes again. The air was still and fragrant; the sun burned heavily through a haze that coloured the sky like slate. Water struck gurgling against wood and stone. The gondolier's call, half warning and half greeting, received an answer from far away in the silence of the labyrinth, by some strange accord. From small gardens set high above, clusters of white and purple blossom, smelling of almonds, hung over crumbling walls. Arabic window surrounds took shape in the murk. The marble steps of a church descended into the flood; a beggar crouched there, proclaiming his misery, holding out his hat and showing the whites of his eyes as if he were blind; an antiques dealer before his den invited the passing traveller to stay with servile gestures, in the hope of cheating him. This was Venice, the flattering and suspicious beauty—this city half fairy tale, half trap for foreigners, in whose putrid air art had once proliferated with sensual abundance, and which had given musicians tones that rock and seductively lull. It seemed to the adventurer that his eye drank such luxury, that his ear was courted by such melodies; he remembered too that the city was ill and concealed the fact from greed for profit, and he looked out still more unrestrainedly for the gondola floating ahead.

Thus the bewildered man knew and wanted nothing any longer but to pursue without respite the object that had set him aflame, to dream of him when he was absent, and, after the fashion of lovers, to address tender words to his mere shadow-image. Solitude, foreignness, and the happiness of a late and profound intoxication emboldened and persuaded him to permit himself even the strangest things without fear or blushes; as when, returning late at night from Venice, he had stopped on the first floor of the hotel at the beautiful boy's door, had leaned his forehead in utter drunkenness against the door hinge, and for a long while had been unable to tear himself away, at the risk of being caught and discovered in so demented a position.

Nevertheless there were moments of arrest and half-recovered sense. Down what paths! he would then think with consternation. Down what paths! Like every man whose native merits inspire an aristocratic interest in his descent, he was accustomed, amid the achievements and successes of his life, to remember his ancestors, to assure himself in imagination of their approval, their satisfaction, their grudging respect. He thought of them here and now as well, entangled in so inadmissible an experience, engaged in such exotic excesses of feeling; he recalled the disciplined sternness, the honourable manliness of their nature, and smiled in melancholy. What would they say? Yet indeed, what would they have said to his entire life, which had departed from theirs almost to the point of degeneration—to this life beneath the spell of art, about which he himself had once, in the civic spirit of his fathers, uttered such mocking insights of youth, and which in essence had so resembled theirs! He too had served, he too had trained himself under hard discipline; he too had been soldier and warrior, like many of them—for art was a war, a wearing struggle for which a man today did not long remain fit. A life of self-conquest and defiance, an austere, steadfast, abstinent life which he had shaped into the emblem of a delicate and contemporary heroism—he might well call it manly, might call it brave; and it seemed to him that the Eros who had mastered him was in some fashion peculiarly suited and partial to such a life. Had Eros not stood in especial honour among the bravest peoples? Was it not even said that through bravery he had flourished in their cities? Numerous heroes of ancient wars had willingly borne his yoke, for no humiliation imposed by the god was counted such; and deeds which, had they been done for other ends, would have been reviled as marks of cowardice—prostrations, oaths, urgent entreaties, and slavish conduct—brought the lover no disgrace, but rather won him praise.

Such was the cast of the infatuated man's thought; thus he sought to brace himself and preserve his dignity. Yet at the same time he constantly directed a searching and wilful attention toward the unclean proceedings in the interior of Venice, toward that adventure of the outer world which flowed darkly together with the adventure of his heart and nourished his passion with vague, lawless hopes. Obsessed with learning something new and certain about the condition or progress of the evil, he rummaged through the papers from home in the city's cafés, since for several days they had vanished from the reading table in the hotel lobby. Assertion and retraction alternated in them. The number of cases and deaths was said to amount to twenty, to forty, even to a hundred and more; immediately afterward every appearance of the epidemic, if not denied outright, was ascribed to entirely isolated cases imported from outside. Cautionary misgivings and protests against the dangerous game of the Italian authorities were interspersed among the reports. Certainty was not to be had.

Nevertheless the solitary man was conscious of a special title to share in the secret and, though shut out, found a bizarre satisfaction in approaching those who knew with entangling questions and forcing them, bound together as they were in silence, into an explicit lie. One day at breakfast in the great dining room he thus called the manager to account, that small man of quiet tread in a French frock coat who moved among the diners, greeting and supervising them, and who paused at Aschenbach's little table for a few words of conversation. Why was it, the guest asked with an easy and casual air, why in all the world had Venice for some time been undergoing disinfection?—"It is," the creeping fellow replied, "a measure of the police, intended dutifully and betimes to forestall any inconveniences or disturbances to the public health which might be produced by the brooding and exceptionally warm weather."—"The police are to be commended," Aschenbach replied; and after an exchange of meteorological observations the manager took his leave.

That same day, in the evening after dinner, a little band of street singers from the city made themselves heard in the hotel's front garden. Two men and two women, they stood beside the iron mast of an arc lamp and turned their white-lit faces upward toward the broad terrace, where the company of holiday-makers, over coffee and cooling drinks, permitted itself to be entertained by the popular performance. The hotel staff—lift boys, waiters, and office employees—appeared listening in the doorways to the lobby. The Russian family, eager and exacting in its enjoyment, had ordered cane chairs carried down into the garden in order to be nearer the performers, and sat there gratefully in a semicircle. Behind her employers, wearing a turban-like headcloth, stood their aged slave.

Mandolin, guitar, accordion, and a squealing violin were active beneath the hands of the virtuoso beggars. Instrumental developments alternated with vocal numbers; thus the younger woman, whose voice was sharp and quacking, joined the tenor with his sweet falsetto in a yearning love duet. But the other man, owner of the guitar and in character a kind of comic baritone, though almost without a voice, yet gifted in mime and possessed of remarkable comic energy, showed himself unmistakably to be the true talent and head of the company. Often, his large instrument in his arms, he detached himself from the others and advanced in performance toward the footlights, where his roguish pranks were rewarded with encouraging laughter. The Russians in particular, in their garden stalls, appeared delighted by so much southern mobility and urged him with applause and calls to reveal himself ever more boldly and confidently.

Aschenbach sat by the balustrade and from time to time cooled his lips with a mixture of pomegranate juice and soda which glittered ruby-red before him in the glass. His nerves eagerly absorbed the droning sounds, the vulgar and languishing melodies, for passion paralyses the discriminating sense and enters in all seriousness into enticements which sobriety would receive humorously or reject with impatience. The tumbles of the jester had contorted his features into a fixed and already painful smile. He sat at ease while an extreme attentiveness held his inward being taut, for six paces from him Tadzio leaned against the stone railing.

He stood there in the white belted suit which he sometimes wore for the principal meal, with an inescapable and innate grace, his left forearm on the balustrade, his feet crossed, his right hand at the hip that bore his weight, and looked down at the ballad singers with an expression that was scarcely a smile, only a remote curiosity, a courteous reception. At times he straightened and, expanding his chest, drew the white tunic down through the leather belt with a beautiful motion of both arms. But at other times—and the ageing man observed it with triumph, with a reeling of his reason and also with horror—he turned his head over his left shoulder toward his lover's place, slowly and cautiously, or else quickly and suddenly, as though taking him by surprise. He did not find the other's eyes, for a shameful anxiety compelled the bewildered man to keep his glances fearfully under control. At the rear of the terrace sat the women who guarded Tadzio, and matters had reached the point where the lover had to fear that he had become conspicuous and fallen under suspicion. Indeed, more than once, on the beach, in the hotel lobby, and on Piazza San Marco, he had been made to notice with a kind of paralysis that Tadzio was called away from his vicinity, that care was taken to keep the boy distant from him—and he had been obliged to read in this a dreadful insult, beneath which his pride writhed in unfamiliar torments, and which his conscience prevented him from disavowing.

Meanwhile the guitarist had begun a solo to his own accompaniment, a street hit of several stanzas which was just then flourishing throughout Italy, and at whose refrain his company joined in each time with song and every instrument; he knew how to deliver it in a vividly dramatic manner. Slightly built, his face too thin and wasted, he stood apart from his companions on the gravel, his shabby felt hat at the back of his head so that a roll of red hair swelled out beneath its brim, and with an air of brazen bravado hurled his jokes up at the terrace in emphatic chant over the clatter of the strings, while the veins of his forehead bulged with the effort of performance. He did not seem of Venetian stock, but rather of the breed of Neapolitan comedians, half procurer, half actor, brutal and audacious, dangerous and entertaining. His song, merely foolish in its words, acquired in his mouth, through his play of features, his bodily movements, his way of winking suggestively and letting his tongue play lubriciously at the corner of his lips, something ambiguous and indefinably offensive. From the soft collar of the sporting shirt which he wore with otherwise urban dress emerged his lean neck, with an Adam's apple conspicuously large and naked in appearance. His pale, blunt-nosed face, from whose beardless features it was difficult to infer his age, seemed furrowed by grimaces and vice; and the two lines which stood defiant, imperious, almost savage between his reddish eyebrows strangely suited the grin of his mobile mouth. What truly drew the solitary man's deep attention to him, however, was the observation that this dubious figure appeared to carry his own dubious atmosphere along with him. For every time the refrain began again, the singer, with antics and handshakes of greeting, undertook a grotesque circuit that led him directly beneath Aschenbach's place; and every time this happened, a gust of strong carbolic odour, proceeding from his clothes and body, drifted up to the terrace.

When the verse was over he began collecting money. He started with the Russians, who were seen to give readily, and then came up the steps. As brazen as he had been in performance, so humble did he show himself up here. Hunched like a cat, scraping backward bows, he crept among the tables, and a smile of treacherous servility laid bare his strong teeth, while the two furrows still stood menacing between his red brows. People examined the strange creature collecting his livelihood with curiosity and some disgust; with pinched fingertips they dropped coins into his felt hat and took care not to touch him. The abolition of physical distance between the comedian and the respectable, however great the entertainment, always produces a certain embarrassment. He felt it and sought to excuse himself by cringing. He came to Aschenbach, and with him came the smell about which no one nearby seemed to give a thought.

"Listen," said the solitary man in a subdued, almost mechanical voice. "Venice is being disinfected. Why?"—The entertainer answered hoarsely: "On account of the police! It is the regulation, sir, in such heat and with the sirocco. The sirocco oppresses us. It is not conducive to health..." He spoke as though astonished that such a thing could be asked, and demonstrated with an open hand how heavily the sirocco pressed.—"Then there is no evil in Venice?" Aschenbach asked very softly, between his teeth.—The jester's muscular features collapsed into a grimace of comic perplexity. "An evil? But what sort of evil? Is the sirocco an evil? Is our police perhaps an evil? You are pleased to jest! An evil! Why, indeed! A preventive measure, surely you understand! A police ordinance against the effects of the oppressive weather..." He gesticulated.—"Very well," Aschenbach said again, briefly and softly, and quickly let an indecently large coin fall into the hat. Then with his eyes he motioned the man away. Grinning and bowing, he obeyed; but he had not yet reached the stairs when two hotel employees pounced on him and, their faces close to his, subjected him to a whispered cross-examination. He shrugged, made assurances, swore that he had been discreet; it could be seen. Dismissed, he returned to the garden and, after a short conference with his companions beneath the arc lamp, stepped forward once more for a song of thanks and farewell.

It was a song the solitary man did not remember ever having heard, an impudent popular tune in an incomprehensible dialect and equipped with a laughing refrain, into which the band regularly entered at the top of their lungs. Here both the words and the instrumental accompaniment ceased, and nothing remained but laughter ordered somehow into rhythm yet handled with great naturalness, which the soloist in particular knew how to fashion, with great talent, into a most deceptive vitality. With the artistic distance between himself and the gentlefolk restored, he had recovered all his insolence, and his artificial laughter, shamelessly projected up at the terrace, was derisive laughter. Already toward the end of the articulated portion of the stanza he seemed to struggle with an irresistible tickle. He sobbed, his voice wavered, he pressed his hand to his mouth, he hunched his shoulders; and at the appointed moment the ungovernable laughter broke, howled, and burst from him with such truth that it proved infectious and communicated itself to the listeners, so that a cheerfulness without object, living only by itself, spread over the terrace as well. But this very thing appeared to double the singer's exuberance. He bent his knees, struck his thighs, held his sides, seemed about to split; he no longer laughed, he screamed; he pointed upward as if nothing were more comical than the laughing company above, and finally everyone in the garden and on the veranda was laughing, down to the waiters, lift boys, and house servants in the doorways.

Aschenbach was no longer reclining in his chair; he sat upright as if attempting resistance or flight. But the laughter, the hospital smell drifting upward, and the nearness of the beautiful boy wove themselves for him into a dream-spell which held his head and senses enclosed, unbreakable and inescapable. Amid the general movement and distraction he ventured to look across at Tadzio, and in doing so was permitted to observe that the beautiful boy, returning his look, remained grave as well, exactly as though he governed his behaviour and expression by those of the other, and as though the general mood could exert no power over him because that other withheld himself from it. This childlike and responsive compliance contained something so disarming, so overwhelming, that the grey-haired man could barely keep himself from hiding his face in his hands. It had also seemed to him that Tadzio's occasional straightening and deep breath signified a sigh, a constriction of the chest. "He is sickly; he will probably not grow old," he thought once again, with that objectivity into which intoxication and longing sometimes strangely emancipate themselves; and pure solicitude, joined to an extravagant satisfaction, filled his heart.

Meanwhile the Venetians had finished and were departing. Applause accompanied them, and their leader did not neglect to embellish his exit with jokes. His scraping bows and blown kisses were laughed at, and so he doubled them. When his companions were already outside, he still pretended to run painfully backward into a lamp-post and crept toward the gate apparently crooked with pain. There at last he suddenly cast off the mask of comic ill-fortune, straightened, indeed sprang elastically upright, insolently stuck out his tongue at the guests on the terrace, and slipped into the darkness. The company of bathers dispersed; Tadzio had long since left the balustrade. But the solitary man sat for a long time yet, to the waiters' surprise, at his little table beside the remains of his pomegranate drink. Night advanced; time disintegrated. Many years ago in his parents' house there had been an hourglass—suddenly he saw the fragile and significant little instrument again as if it stood before him. Soundlessly and finely the rust-red sand ran through the glass constriction, and as it diminished in the upper cavity, a small, tearing whirlpool had formed there.

By the very next afternoon the obstinate man took a further step in his trial of the outside world, and this time with all the success possible. From St Mark's Square he entered the English travel bureau situated there and, after changing some money at the counter, addressed his fatal question to the clerk serving him with the expression of a distrustful foreigner. The man was a wool-clad Briton, still young, with hair parted in the centre, close-set eyes, and that settled loyalty of nature which appears so foreign, so remarkable, in the knavishly agile south. He began: "No cause for concern, sir. A measure without serious significance. Such orders are frequently made to prevent the unhealthy effects of the heat and the sirocco..." But raising his blue eyes, he encountered the foreigner's gaze, a tired and somewhat sorrowful gaze directed at his lips with mild contempt. The Englishman reddened. "This," he continued in a lower voice and with some agitation, "is the official explanation upon which people here see fit to insist. I shall tell you that there is something else behind it." And then, in his honest and easy speech, he told the truth.

For several years Indian cholera had displayed an increased tendency to spread and migrate. Generated in the warm marshes of the Ganges delta, rising with the mephitic breath of that luxuriant and unserviceable primeval wilderness of islands, shunned by men, in whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches, the epidemic had raged persistently and with unusual violence throughout Hindustan, had advanced eastward into China and westward into Afghanistan and Persia and, following the chief routes of caravan commerce, had borne its terrors as far as Astrakhan, even as far as Moscow. But while Europe trembled lest the spectre make its entrance from there overland, it had been carried across the sea by Syrian merchantmen and had appeared almost simultaneously in several Mediterranean ports; it had raised its head in Toulon and Malaga, shown its mask repeatedly in Palermo and Naples, and seemed unwilling to withdraw from all Calabria and Apulia. The north of the peninsula had been spared. Yet in the middle of May that year, on one and the same day in Venice, the dreadful vibrios were discovered in the wasted, blackish corpses of a deckhand and a woman who sold green produce. The cases were concealed. But after one week there were ten, there were twenty, thirty, and in different quarters. A man from an Austrian province, who had stayed a few days in Venice for pleasure, returned to his native town and died under unmistakable signs; and thus the first rumours of the lagoon city's affliction found their way into German newspapers. The authorities of Venice answered that the city's state of health had never been better, and adopted the most necessary measures of control. But foodstuffs had probably become infected—vegetables, meat, or milk—for, denied and disguised, death fed its way through the closeness of the alleys, and the prematurely arrived summer heat, which made the canal water lukewarm, was particularly favourable to its spread. Indeed, it seemed as if the epidemic had experienced a renewal of its powers, as though the tenacity and fertility of its agents had doubled. Cases of recovery were very rare; eighty of every hundred who contracted it died, and died in a terrible manner, for the evil appeared with extreme ferocity and frequently displayed that most dangerous form known as "the dry." In this form the body could not even expel the water secreted in masses from the blood vessels. Within a few hours the sick person withered and suffocated on blood grown thick as pitch, amid spasms and hoarse laments. Fortunate was he if, as sometimes occurred, the onset after a slight indisposition assumed the form of a deep faint from which he never, or scarcely ever, awoke. At the beginning of June the isolation barracks of the Ospedale civico silently filled; space began to run short in both orphanages; and a traffic of ghastly activity prevailed between the quay of the Fondamente Nuove and San Michele, the cemetery island. But fear of general injury, consideration for the picture exhibition recently opened in the public gardens and for the enormous losses that threatened the hotels, shops, and the whole manifold foreign-tourist trade in the event of panic and disrepute, proved mightier in the city than love of truth and respect for international agreements; it enabled the authorities stubbornly to maintain their policy of silence and denial. Venice's chief medical officer, a man of merit, had indignantly resigned his post and was discreetly replaced by a more compliant person. The people knew it; and the corruption of their superiors, together with the prevailing uncertainty and the state of emergency into which death stalking abroad had placed the city, produced a certain moral dissolution among the lower classes, an encouragement of furtive and antisocial impulses which declared itself in intemperance, shamelessness, and growing criminality. Contrary to custom, many drunken men were observed in the evenings; vicious rabble, it was said, made the streets unsafe at night; predatory assaults and even murders recurred, for it had already been proved twice that persons supposedly fallen victim to the epidemic had instead been dispatched with poison by their own relatives; and mercenary licentiousness assumed importunate and extravagant forms otherwise unknown here, at home only in the south of the country and in the Orient.

Of these matters the Englishman disclosed what was decisive. "You would do well," he concluded, "to travel today rather than tomorrow. The imposition of quarantine can hardly be delayed more than a few days."—"Thank you," Aschenbach said, and left the office.

The square lay in sunless sultriness. Ignorant foreigners sat before the cafés or stood in front of the church entirely covered with pigeons, watching the creatures swarm, beat their wings, thrust one another aside, and peck at the kernels of maize offered in cupped hands. In feverish agitation, triumphant in possession of the truth, a taste of disgust upon his tongue and a fantastic horror in his heart, the solitary man paced the flagstones of the splendid court. He considered a cleansing and decent act. That evening after dinner he might approach the pearl-adorned lady and speak to her in words he composed exactly: "Permit a stranger, madame, to serve you with advice, with a warning which self-interest withholds from you. Leave at once, with Tadzio and your daughters! Venice is infected." He might then place a farewell hand upon the head of the instrument of a mocking deity, turn away, and flee this swamp. Yet at the same time he felt infinitely far from seriously desiring such a step. It would lead him back, would restore him to himself; but a man beside himself detests nothing more than returning into himself. He remembered a white structure decorated with inscriptions glittering in the evening, in whose translucent mysticism his mind's eye had lost itself; then that strange figure of a traveller who had awakened in the ageing man a youth's wandering longing for distance and the unknown; and the thought of homecoming, of prudence, sobriety, toil, and mastery revolted him to such a degree that his face contorted into an expression of physical nausea. "Silence must be kept!" he whispered fiercely. And: "I shall keep silent!" Consciousness that he shared the knowledge, shared the guilt, intoxicated him as small quantities of wine intoxicate a tired brain. The image of the afflicted and neglected city, floating desolate before his mind, kindled in him hopes unspeakable, transcending reason, and of a monstrous sweetness. What was the tender happiness of which he had dreamed for a moment before, compared with these expectations? What value had art and virtue now for him beside the advantages of chaos? He kept silent and remained.

That night he had a terrible dream—if dream one may call an experience of body and spirit which befell him in the deepest sleep, with complete independence and sensuous immediacy, yet without his seeing himself moving and present in space apart from the events; rather, their theatre was his own soul, and from outside they broke into it, violently beating down his resistance—a profound and spiritual resistance—passed through him, and left his existence, left the culture of his life, ravaged and destroyed.

Fear was the beginning: fear and delight and a terrified curiosity about what was coming. Night reigned, and his senses listened; for from far away tumult and uproar approached, a compound of noises: rattling, crashing, and muffled thunder, shrill exultation besides, and a certain howl drawn out upon an oo sound, all of it pierced and horribly, sweetly overborne by a low, cooing, wickedly persistent flute-playing which enchanted the entrails with shameless importunity. But he knew a phrase, dark yet naming what came: "The foreign god!" A smoky glow flared dimly: then he recognized hill country like that around his summer house. And in torn light, from wooded heights, between tree trunks and mossy fragments of rock, it rolled and plunged whirling downward: human beings, animals, a swarm, a raging horde, flooding the slope with bodies, flames, tumult, and a reeling circular dance. Women, stumbling over fur garments too long for them and hanging from their belts, shook tambourines above heads thrown back in groans, swung scattering torches and naked daggers, gripped writhing snakes around the middle, or, screaming, carried their breasts in both hands. Men, horns above their brows, girt with pelts and shaggy of skin, bowed their necks and lifted arms and thighs, made brazen cymbals resound and beat furiously upon kettledrums, while smooth boys, carrying leafy rods, goaded he-goats, clung to their horns, and let themselves be dragged exultantly by their leaps. And the possessed howled the call, made of soft consonants with the oo drawn long at the end, sweet and savage together as none ever heard: here it sounded, bellowed into the air as if by stags, and there it was returned, many-voiced, in desolate triumph; with it they spurred one another to dance and fling their limbs, and never let it fall silent. But through all things penetrated and over all ruled the deep, alluring note of the flute. Did it not lure him too, the resisting witness, shamelessly persistent, toward the feast and the excess of the ultimate sacrifice? Great was his revulsion, great his fear, honest his will to defend his own to the last against the foreign one, the enemy of the collected and dignified spirit. But the noise, the howling, multiplied by the echoing mountainside, grew, gained the ascendant, swelled into transporting madness. Vapours pressed upon his senses: the acrid reek of goats, the scent of panting bodies, and a breath as of rotting waters, together with another, familiar smell: of wounds and circulating disease. His heart thundered with the kettledrums, his brain spun; fury took him, blindness and benumbing lust, and his soul desired to join the god's circling dance. The obscene symbol, gigantic, made of wood, was uncovered and raised; then they howled the watchword more unbridledly. Foam on their lips, they raged, incited one another with lewd gestures and soliciting hands, laughing and groaning—drove the pointed rods into one another's flesh and licked the blood from their limbs. But the dreamer was now with them, in them, and belonged to the foreign god. Yes, they were he himself when, tearing and killing, they flung themselves upon the animals and devoured steaming gobbets, when boundless coupling began on the churned mossy ground, in sacrifice to the god. And his soul tasted the lewdness and frenzy of annihilation.

From this dream the afflicted man awoke unnerved, shattered, and surrendered powerless to the demon. He no longer feared the watchful eyes of other people; whether he exposed himself to their suspicion did not trouble him. They too, after all, were fleeing, were departing; numerous beach huts stood empty, the occupied tables in the dining room showed larger gaps, and in the city one rarely saw a foreigner now. The truth seemed to have seeped through; despite the tenacious solidarity of those with an interest in concealment, panic could no longer be held at bay. But the pearl-adorned lady remained with her family, whether because the rumours did not reach her or because she was too proud and fearless to yield to them: Tadzio remained; and to the other, in his enthralment, it sometimes seemed that flight and death might remove every disturbing life from round about and leave him alone on this island with the beautiful boy—yes, when in the mornings beside the sea his gaze rested heavy, irresponsible, unwavering upon the desired one, when at falling day he followed him without dignity through alleys where the loathsome dying secretly went its rounds, then the monstrous appeared to him full of promise and the moral law null.

Like any lover, he wished to please and felt a bitter fear that it might not be possible. He added youthfully brightening details to his dress, put on jewels and used perfumes; several times a day he devoted much time to his toilet and came to table adorned, excited, and tense. In the face of the sweet youth that had bewitched him, his ageing body disgusted him; the sight of his grey hair and keen features plunged him into shame and hopelessness. He was driven to refresh and restore himself physically; he frequently visited the hotel's hairdresser.

Wrapped in the barber's gown, reclining in the chair beneath the chatterer's ministering hands, he regarded his reflection with a tormented eye.

"Grey," he said, his mouth distorted.

"A little," the man replied. "The fault, that is, of a slight neglect, an indifference to outward matters which is understandable in persons of importance, but which one cannot praise without qualification, all the less because prejudices in questions of the natural or artificial are particularly ill suited to precisely such persons. If the moral severity of certain people toward the cosmetic art were logically extended to their teeth as well, they would cause no small offence. In the end, we are as old as our mind and heart feel, and in certain circumstances grey hair represents a more substantial untruth than the correction one has scorned would represent. In your case, sir, one has a right to one's natural hair colour. Will you permit me simply to give yours back to you?"

"How?" Aschenbach asked.

Thereupon the eloquent man washed the guest's hair with two kinds of water, one clear and one dark, and it was black as in his youth. Then he bent it with heated tongs into soft waves, stepped back, and inspected the treated head.

"There would now remain only," he said, "to freshen the complexion a little."

And like someone who cannot finish, cannot do enough, he passed with continually renewed activity from one manipulation to the next. Aschenbach, resting comfortably, incapable of resistance, indeed excited with hope by what was happening, saw in the glass his brows arch more decisively and evenly, the cut of his eyes grow longer, their lustre heightened by a light undershading of the lid; lower down, where the skin had been brown and leathery, he saw a delicate carmine awaken, softly applied; his lips, bloodless only a moment ago, swell raspberry-red; the furrows of his cheeks and mouth, the wrinkles of his eyes, vanish beneath cream and a breath of youth—with a pounding heart, he beheld a young man in bloom. At last the cosmetician was satisfied and, in the manner of such people, thanked the man he had served with creeping politeness. "A trifling assistance," he said, putting a final hand to Aschenbach's appearance. "Now sir may fall in love without misgiving." The captivated man went away, dream-happy, confused, and fearful. His necktie was red; his broad-brimmed straw hat was wound with a many-coloured ribbon.

A lukewarm storm wind had arisen; it rained seldom and scantily, but the air was humid, thick, and filled with vapours of decay. Flapping, clapping, and rushing surrounded the ear, and to the man fevering beneath his cosmetics it seemed that wind spirits of an evil race were at large in the air, malign sea-birds that rummaged and gnawed through the condemned man's meal and defiled it with filth. For the sultriness repelled appetite, and the notion pressed upon him that the food was poisoned with infectious matter.

One afternoon, upon the beautiful boy's tracks, Aschenbach had penetrated deep into the inward tangle of the sick city. His sense of direction failing, since the little streets, waterways, bridges, and squares of the labyrinth resembled one another too closely, no longer sure even of the points of the compass, he was wholly intent on not losing from sight the image he so ardently pursued; and compelled to a shameful wariness, pressed against walls and seeking cover behind people walking ahead of him, he remained for a long time unaware of the fatigue, the exhaustion which emotion and perpetual tension had inflicted upon his body and mind. Tadzio walked behind his people; in narrow places he usually allowed the guardian and the nun-like sisters to go first, and, strolling alone, would sometimes turn his head to assure himself over his shoulder, with a glance from his peculiarly twilight-grey eyes, of his lover's following. He saw him and did not betray him. Intoxicated by this knowledge, enticed forward by those eyes, guided by passion on the fool's tether, the lover stole after his improper hope—and finally found himself cheated nonetheless of its sight. The Poles had crossed a short arched bridge; the rise of its curve hid them from their follower, and when he reached the top in turn, he could no longer see them. He searched for them in three directions, straight ahead and to both sides along the narrow, dirty quay, in vain. Enervation and frailty at last forced him to abandon the search.

His head burned, his body was covered with sticky sweat, his neck trembled, an intolerable thirst tormented him; he looked about for any, for immediate refreshment. Outside a small greengrocer's he bought some fruit, strawberries, overripe and soft wares, and ate them as he went. A small square opened before him, deserted and seeming enchanted; he recognized it—this was where, weeks before, he had conceived his frustrated plan of escape. On the steps of the cistern in the middle of the place, he let himself sink down and leaned his head against the stone rim. It was silent; grass grew between the paving stones. Rubbish lay about. Among the weathered houses of irregular height surrounding the square, one appeared palatial, with pointed-arch windows behind which emptiness dwelt, and small balconies ornamented with lions. On the ground floor of another there was a pharmacy. Warm gusts of wind at times brought the smell of carbolic acid.

There he sat: the master, the artist who had attained dignity, the author of "The Wretch," who in such exemplarily pure form had renounced bohemianism and the turbid depths, withdrawn his sympathy from the abyss and repudiated the reprehensible; the man who had risen high, who, conqueror of his knowledge and grown beyond all irony, had accustomed himself to the obligations of public trust; he whose fame was official, whose name had been ennobled, and upon whose style boys were instructed to form their own—there he sat, his eyelids closed; only now and then a mocking and abashed glance slid sideways from beneath them and quickly concealed itself again, while his slack lips, cosmetically enhanced, shaped isolated words from what his half-slumbering brain brought forth in a strange logic of dreams.

"For beauty, Phaidros—mark this well! Beauty alone is divine and visible at once, and so it is the path of the sensuous, is, little Phaidros, the artist's path to spirit. But do you now believe, my dear one, that he for whom the path to the spiritual passes through the senses can ever attain wisdom and true manly dignity? Or do you believe instead (I leave the choice to you) that this is a perilously lovely path, truly a path of error and sin, which of necessity leads astray? For you must know that we poets cannot take the path of beauty without Eros joining us and setting himself up as our guide; yes, though we may be heroes in our fashion and disciplined warriors, we are like women, for passion is our exaltation, and our longing must remain love—that is our delight and our shame. Do you see now that we poets can be neither wise nor dignified? That we must of necessity go astray, must of necessity remain dissolute and adventurers of feeling? The masterly composure of our style is falsehood and folly, our fame and honourable estate a farce, the multitude's trust in us supremely ridiculous; the education of the people and the young through art is a hazardous undertaking which ought to be prohibited. For how should one be fit to educate when an incorrigible and natural inclination toward the abyss is inborn in him? We might well wish to disown it and acquire dignity, but however we turn, it draws us. Thus we renounce, for example, dissolving knowledge, for knowledge, Phaidros, possesses neither dignity nor rigour: it knows, understands, forgives, without bearing or form; it has sympathy with the abyss, it is the abyss. This, then, we reject with resolve, and henceforth our striving belongs to beauty alone, which is to say simplicity, greatness, and a new rigour, a second innocence and form. But form and innocence, Phaidros, lead to intoxication and desire, perhaps lead the noble man to a horrible crime of feeling which his own beautiful rigour rejects as infamous; they lead to the abyss—they too lead to the abyss. Us poets, I say, they lead there, for we are incapable of soaring; we are capable only of excess. And now I shall go, Phaidros; remain here, and only when you no longer see me shall you go as well."

* * * * *

Several days later Gustav von Aschenbach, feeling unwell, left the bathing hotel at a later hour of the morning than usual. He had to contend with certain attacks of dizziness that were only half physical, accompanied by a violently mounting anxiety and helplessness, a feeling that there was neither way out nor prospect, though it remained unclear whether this referred to the outer world or to his own existence. In the lobby he noticed a large quantity of luggage lying ready for transport, asked a doorman who it was that was leaving, and received in answer the Polish noble name he had secretly expected. He received it without any alteration of his decayed features, with that brief lift of the head by which one casually takes notice of something one had no need to know, and asked further: "When?" He was answered: "After lunch." He nodded and went to the sea.

It was inhospitable there. Across the broad, shallow water separating the beach from the first extended sandbank, curling shudders ran from the foreground toward the distance. An air of autumn, of being past its time, seemed to lie over the resort once so colourfully alive and now almost deserted, whose sand was no longer kept clean. A camera, apparently ownerless, stood on its three-legged tripod at the edge of the sea, and a black cloth spread over it flapped and snapped in the cooler wind.

Tadzio, with three or four playmates who remained to him, was moving about on the right before his family's cabin; and Aschenbach, a blanket over his knees, resting in his deck chair approximately midway between the sea and the row of beach huts, watched him once more. The play, unsupervised because the women were perhaps occupied with preparations for departure, appeared without rules and degenerated. The stocky boy in the belted suit with black, pomaded hair, who was called "Jaschu," provoked and blinded by a handful of sand thrown in his face, forced Tadzio into a wrestling match which quickly ended with the fall of the weaker beauty. But as though, in the hour of farewell, the inferior's subservient feeling turned into cruel brutality and sought revenge for a long servitude, the victor did not release the defeated boy even then, but, kneeling on his back, pressed his face into the sand so persistently that Tadzio, already breathless from the fight, was in danger of suffocating. His attempts to shake off the weight were convulsive; for moments they ceased altogether and returned only as a twitching. Appalled, Aschenbach was about to spring up in rescue when the violent boy finally released his victim. Very pale, Tadzio raised himself halfway and sat motionless for several minutes, propped on one arm, his hair disordered and his eyes darkening. Then he stood up fully and slowly moved away. They called him, at first cheerfully, then anxiously and pleadingly; he did not hear. The dark-haired boy, whom remorse for his excess may at once have seized, caught up with him and sought reconciliation. A movement of the shoulder rebuffed him. Tadzio walked obliquely down toward the water. He was barefoot and wore his striped linen suit with a red bow.

He lingered at the edge of the flood, his head lowered as he traced figures in the damp sand with the tip of one foot, then entered the shallow inshore water, which at its deepest did not yet wet his knees, crossed it with an easy advance, and reached the sandbank. There he stood for a moment, his face turned toward the open distance, and then began slowly to pace to the left along the long and narrow stretch of exposed ground. Separated from the mainland by broad waters, separated from his companions by a proud caprice, he walked out there in the sea, in the wind, before the mistily boundless, an utterly isolated and unconnected apparition, his hair fluttering. Once again he stopped to gaze outward. And suddenly, as if under the force of a memory, an impulse, he turned his upper body, one hand at his hip, with a beautiful turn out of his original stance, and looked over his shoulder toward the shore. The watcher there sat as he had once sat when, first sent back from that threshold, this twilight-grey gaze had met his own. His head had slowly followed against the back of the chair the movement of the figure pacing outside; now it lifted as though to meet the gaze, and sank upon his breast, so that his eyes looked upward from below, while his face showed the lax, inwardly absorbed expression of deep slumber. Yet it seemed to him that the pale and lovely guide of souls out there smiled at him and beckoned; that, releasing his hand from his hip, he pointed outward, floated ahead into the promising and monstrous immensity. And, as so often, he set out to follow him.

Minutes passed before people hurried to the aid of the man who had sunk sideways in his chair. He was carried to his room. And that same day the world received the news of his death with reverent shock.