Death in Venice and Other Stories (19 page)

The child prodigy is now finished, and a true storm begins to brew in the ballroom. Again and again he is compelled to emerge from behind the Chinese screen. The man with the shiny buttons drags over more floral arrangements, four laurel wreaths, a lyre of violets and a bouquet of roses. He doesn't have enough arms to hand over all the tributes to the child prodigy, so the impresario personally approaches the podium to help him. He hangs one of the laurel wreaths around Bibi's neck, affectionately tousles his dark hair, and suddenly, as if overwhelmed, bends down and gives the child prodigy a kiss, an audible kiss, directly on the lips. At that the storm swells into a true hurricane. This kiss traverses the ballroom like an electric shock, running through the crowd like a nervous shudder. The people are swept away by a crazed need for noise. Loud cheers mix with the wild clamor of hands. Several of Bibi's little comrades down below wave their handkerchiefs . . . But the critic thinks, of course there's a kiss from the impresario. A time-honored trick. Lord yes, if only I didn't see through the whole charade so clearly!

And then the child prodigy's concert comes to an end. It began at seven-thirty; at eight-thirty it's over. The platform is buried in wreaths; two small vases of flowers stand atop the lamp boards of the piano. Bibi's encore is his
rhapsodie grecque,
which eventually turns into the Greek national anthem, and his countrymen in attendance would be sorely tempted to sing along, if it weren't an elegant concert! They compensate with a mighty roar when it ends, a hot-blooded racket, a patriotic demonstration. Of course, thinks the aging critic, there had to be the national anthem. The whole thing is transferred to another level, with no means of exciting the audience left untried. I'll write that it isn't artistic. But maybe it is precisely artistic. What's an artist? A fool. Criticism is the highest pursuit. I'm not allowed to write that, though. The critic then departs in his mud-stained trousers.

After taking nine or ten bows the now red-faced child prodigy no longer ducks behind the Chinese screen, but proceeds directly to Mama and the impresario in the ballroom below. The people stand amidst the disarray of pushed-back chairs, applauding and surging forward to get a closer look at Bibi. Some also want to see the princess: two crowded circles form before the podium, one around the child prodigy, one around the princess, and it's impossible to tell which of the two is actually holding court. However, the lady-in-waiting, following orders, makes her way over to Bibi; she tugs gently at his silk jacket, smoothing it so that he is presentable, then leads him by the arm up to the princess and gravely signals for him to kiss Her Royal Majesty's hand. “How do you do it, child?” the princess asks. “Does it just appear in your head when you sit down?” — “
Oui, madame
,” Bibi answers. But to himself he thinks, oh, you stupid old princess . . . ! Then he turns around, bashfully, without the proper courtesies, and goes back to his family.

Outside by the coatrooms a crowd throngs. People are holding up their numbers, and furs, shawls and galoshes are passed over the tables into their outstretched arms. Somewhere the piano teacher is standing among acquaintances offering her opinion. “He's not very spontaneous,” she says loudly, glancing around . . .

In front of one of the large wall mirrors an elegant young lady allows her two brothers, both lieutenants, to help her on with her evening coat and fur-lined boots. She's fantastically beautiful with her steel blue eyes and clear, purebred face: a genuine young noblewoman. When she's finished, she waits for her brothers. “Don't stand so long in front of the mirror, Adolf!” she says with quiet irritation to one of them, who can't seem to part from the reflection of his handsome, simple-looking face. Well, that's rich. Lieutenant Adolf will nonetheless—by her gracious indulgence—be permitted to button up his greatcoat before the mirror! Then they leave, and outside in the street, where the arc lamps shimmer gloomily in the snow and fog, Lieutenant Adolf begins to assert himself, doing a little Sambo's dance against the cold atop the
solidly frozen snow, his collar turned up, his hands in his coat pockets.

A child! thinks the girl with the unstyled hair who, accompanied by a downcast young man, is walking along behind them, her arms swinging freely. An adorable child! What went on in there was a wondrous . . . And in a loud monotone voice she says, “We're all child prodigies, all of us who create.”

Well now! thinks the old gentleman who has never gotten past “Three Hunters from Kurpfalz” and whose deformity is now concealed by a top hat. What do we have here? A kind of Pythia, it seems to me.

But the downcast young man, who understands her to the letter, nods slowly.

They then fall silent, and the girl with the unstyled hair stares ahead at the three aristocratic siblings. She despises them, but she stares after them until they have disappeared around the corner.

H
e got up from the desk, from his rickety little
escritoire
, got up as though at the end of his wits and crossed the room with his head hung to the corner stove, which was as tall and thin as a pillar. He put his hands to its tiles, but they had nearly gone cold, for it was long past midnight. So, without having found the small comfort he had sought, he leaned back against it, coughed, drew together the tails of his house robe, its faded lace ribbon dangling from the lapels, and arduously snorted a little air through his nose to clear the passages. As usual, he was congested.

It was a special, ominous kind of congestion that almost never cleared up entirely. His eyelids were swollen and the edges of his nostrils sore, and throughout his body and head this congestion weighed down like a heavy, painful drunkenness. Or was it the tiresome routine of being confined to his room that was responsible for his lethargy and heaviness of limb? The doctor had again imposed this fate upon him some weeks ago, and God only knew if he had been correct to do so. His incessant catarrh and the cramps in his chest and lower body may have necessitated such confinement, and for weeks now—whole weeks, that was the truth—Jena had been suffering bad weather: miserable, despicable weather, weather you could feel in every nerve, desolate, dark and cold, weather that set the December wind howling in the stovepipe, abandoned and godforsaken, sounding of nocturnal heath in storm and madness, as well as irremediable anguish of soul. But it was no good, this close
confinement, either for the thoughts or for the rhythm of the blood from which thoughts came . . .

The hexagonal room was sparse, sober and uncomfortable, with a whitewashed ceiling that trapped gentle wraiths of tobacco smoke, a tapestry of diagonal plaid against which oval-framed silhouettes hung, and four or five pieces of spindly furniture. It was lit by the two candles burning at the head of the manuscript atop the
escritoire
, and red curtains covered the upper frames of the windows, nothing more than little ship's flags of calico gathered up symmetrically on either side, but nonetheless red, a warm, rich red. He cherished them and would have bitterly regretted their absence, for they introduced the only hint of sumptuousness and sensuality into the unfeeling asceticism of the room . . .

He stood by the stove and directed a fleeting, strain-tormented squint over at the work from which he had fled, this burden, this weight, this stabbing of conscience, this sea to be swallowed, this terrible task that was his pride and his misery, his heaven and his damnation. It straggled along, it stumbled, it stopped—not again, not again! Surely the weather was at fault, or perhaps also the catarrh and his fatigue. Or was it the work itself? Or his work upon it? Was this a star-crossed conception, predestined to yield nothing but despair?

He had stood up in order to gain some objectivity, for spatial distance from the manuscript often gave him perspective, a more expansive view of the material, making it possible to take the appropriate measures. Indeed, there were instances when his feeling of relief at departing the arena of battle revitalized him. It was a more innocent form of revitalization than liquor or strong black coffee . . . His little cup was on the table. Could it help him overcome his block? No, no, no more! Not only the doctor, but a second, even greater authority had gently cautioned him against such things: it was none other than his counterpart over in Weimar, whom he loved with a rival's ardent enmity.
He
was wise.
He
knew both how to live and how to create, didn't abuse himself, treated himself with consideration . . .

Silence prevailed in the house. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind down the narrow
Schloßgaße
and the tapping of the rain being driven against the window. Everyone was asleep, the landlord and his family, Lotte and the children. And he stood lonely and awake by the cold stove, squinting with a tormented expression over at the work in which his own unhealthy perfectionism prevented him from believing . . . His white neck protruded starkly from his collar, and between the two tails of his house robe one could see his inwardly bowed legs. His red hair was brushed back from his delicate high forehead, exposing two pale-veined indentations at the temples, before falling in thin locks over his ears. At the base of his large Roman nose with its abrupt whitish tip, two thick, nearly connected eyebrows emerged, darker than the hair on his head, which made his sore, sunken eyes look as though they were tragically peering into the distance. Forced to breathe through his mouth, he held his thin lips continually parted, causing his cheeks, freckled and wan from stale indoor air, to slacken and sag . . .

No, it was a failure—it was all in vain! The army! The army would somehow have to be depicted! The army was the basis of everything! And it couldn't appear upon the stage—could one even conceive of the artistry gigantic enough to impress it upon the imagination? Moreover, the hero wasn't a hero at all; he was petty and cold! The basic conception was wrong, the language was wrong, and the whole thing was a dry, monotonous history lesson, diffuse, passionless, utterly unsuitable for the stage!

Very well, the game was up. A defeat. A misguided undertaking. A total bankruptcy. He felt the urge to write Körner and tell him, good old Körner, who believed in him, who subscribed with a child's faith to his genius. He would scoff, plead and rant—his friend. He would remind him of
Don Carlos
, which had also been born of doubt and hard work and revisions, and which had turned out, after all the torment, to be a thoroughly excellent work, a glorious achievement. But that was different. Back then he had still been the man to seize a
problem with a happy hand and wring victory from it. Misgivings and struggle? Oh certainly. And he had been sick, probably even more so than now: a starveling, a fugitive, an outsider to the world, oppressed and destitute as a man. But young, still young! Every time, no matter how bent and bowed, his spirit had snapped back, resilient, and after the hours of woe had come others of faith and inner triumph. Those hours came no longer, came hardly at all. A single night of kindled enthusiasm in which he could glimpse in sudden brilliant illumination what could be, if only he were always so blessed, had to be paid for with a week of darkness and paralysis. He was tired, only thirty-seven years old yet already at the end. His faith was no longer alive, his faith in the future, the guiding light in his misery. That was the desperate truth: the years of privation and nothingness, which he had seen as his years of trial and tribulation, had actually been quite rich and fruitful, and now that a little luck had come his way, now that he had escaped his life as a literary pirate into some legitimacy and bourgeois recognition, now that he had obtained an official position and been awarded various honors, now that he had a wife and children, now he was used up and exhausted. Defeated and deflated—that was all that was left.

He groaned, pressed his hands to his eyes and paced as if pursued throughout the room. That thought just now had been so terrible that he could not bear to remain on the spot where it had occurred to him. He sat in a chair along the wall, dangling his folded hands between his knees, and stared gloomily down at the floorboards.

Conscience . . . how loudly his conscience cried! He was a sinner. He had sinned against himself all these years, sinned against the delicate instrument that was his body. The extravagances of bold youth, the nights worked through and the days spent in the smoky indoors, wantonly intellectual, heedless of body, the stimulants he had used to spur himself on to his labor—all of them were now coming back, coming back to exact their revenge!

But if revenge
was
being exacted, then he would spite the gods who assigned blame, then imposed punishment. He had lived as he had to live: he had no time for being wise, for being prudent. Here, in the chest, whenever he breathed, coughed or yawned, this pain, always in the same spot, this tiny, diabolical, stabbing, piercing reminder that had never once subsided in the five years since Erfurt, when he had contracted the catarrh, that raging chest fever: what was it trying to tell him? Truthfully, he knew only too well what it meant—the doctor could say what he would. He had no time to compromise on strategic abstinence, to mend his ways and become economical. Whatever he wanted to do, he had to do it soon, today even, quickly . . . Mend his ways and live right? Why was it that precisely his sin, his inclination toward the harmful and ruinous seemed more ethical to him than any wisdom or cold-blooded discipline? Living right wasn't a matter of wisdom or discipline, or the contempt-bringing practice of good conscience, but rather struggle and despair, passion and pain!

Pain . . . What a horizon this word opened in his chest! He stretched, arms folded, and from under the reddish, almost connecting eyebrows, his gaze came to life in gorgeous lament. He was not yet wretched, not utterly at least, as long as it was possible to name his wretchedness in proud and noble words. One thing was needed: the spirit to give his life great and beautiful names. Not to blame his suffering on smoke-filled rooms and constipation! To be strong enough for healthy
pathos
, to see, to feel something beyond the physical world! To be naive in this one respect, while knowing in all others! To have faith, have faith in pain . . . And he did indeed have faith in pain, a deep, personal faith according to which nothing born of pain could be either useless or inferior. His glance flitted over to the manuscript, and his arms folded more tightly across his chest . . . Talent—was talent not itself pain? And if
that
there, that star-crossed project, caused him to suffer, was it not just as well, was it not almost a positive sign? Nothing had ever just poured out, and his mistrust would first commence in earnest if
it did. Words only ever poured out of amateurs and dilettantes, the easily satisfied and the uninformed, those who didn't live under the strain and discipline of talent. For talent, ladies and gentlemen way back there in the cheap seats, talent isn't something light and trifling. It's not just pure, unadulterated ability. It is, at root,
need
, a critical awareness of the ideal that could be, a discontent that creates and hones its ability only in anguish. And for the greatest and most discontent, talent itself is the sharpest scourge . . . No complaining! No boasting! To think deferentially, patiently about what one bore! And if not a single day or hour of the week was free of suffering—what of it? To think little of the loads and labors, the demands, troubles and strains, to see them as
minor
—that was the essence of greatness!

He stood up, took out his snuffbox and inhaled greedily, then put his hands behind his back and paced so demonstratively through the room that the flames of the candles flickered in the draft . . . Greatness! Distinction! World success and the immortality of one's name! What was all the happiness of the forever unknown compared to this great goal? To be known—known and loved by the peoples of the world! Go ahead, talk of the addictive demands of the ego, you who know not the sweetness of this dream and compulsion! Such demands are common to all extraordinary talent, insofar as it suffers. Just you wait and see, talent says, those of you without a life's mission, those of you who have it so much easier on earth! And ambition, too, speaks: is my suffering to have been in vain? It must ensure my greatness!

His nostrils flared beneath his large nose; his eyes glowered and swept the room. His right hand was jammed deep in the lapel of his house robe, while his left dangled down, clenched. A fleeting redness had come over his haggard cheeks, pelted up like the tan of leather by the embers of his artistic ego, by that passion of self that burned unquenchably in the depths of his being. He knew it well, the secret intoxication of this love. Occasionally he only needed observe his hand in order to be suffused with enthusiastic affection for himself, in the
service of which he vowed to employ those weapons of talent and art at his disposal. This was allowed, for there was nothing ignoble about it. Deeper still than egotism, there existed an awareness of being in the service of something greater, of consuming and sacrificing himself, admittedly out of necessity, not virtue, but selflessly nonetheless. And this was his most jealously defended point: that no one should be greater than he was without suffering more deeply for such lofty heights.

No one! . . . He stood still, his hand over his eyes, his upper body partially turned, evasively, as though trying to escape. Already he felt a certain unavoidable thought sting his heart, the thought of him, his counterpart, that bright, sure-handed, sensuous, divinely naive one,
that man
there in Weimar, whom he loved with a rival's ardent enmity . . . And again, as always, in profound agitation, in haste and zeal, he felt the beginning of that internal labor which followed from this thought: the assertion of his autonomous existence and artistic identity, separate from that of his counterpart . . . Was he then the greater? In what respect? Why? Would it be a Pyrrhic victory, if he triumphed? Would it make a tragic scene, if he succumbed in the end? A god, perhaps—a hero, he was not. It was easier, too, to be a god than a hero! — Easier . . . His counterpart had it easier! A wise and happy hand to distinguish knowledge from creativity might well make one cheerful and invulnerable and prodigious. But if creativity was divine, then knowledge was heroic, and that man who created knowingly was both: a god and a hero!

The will to hardship . . . Did anyone suspect how much discipline and self-control a single sentence, a single rigorous thought cost him? For ultimately he was ignorant and ill-educated: an obscure romantic dreamer. It was harder to write a single one of his
Philosophical Letters
than to construct the best of scenes. Was therefore the former not also perhaps the loftier? From the first rhythmic demand of inner art for material, subject matter, the possibility of effusion, to the thought, the image, the word, the line—what a battle! What a path
of suffering! Miracles of longing, such were his works, longing for form, shape, limit, embodiment, the distant longing for the bright, clear world of his counterpart, who simply called the sunlit objects of that world by name, without mediation, speaking directly with the mouth of God.