Death in Venice and Other Stories (20 page)

Nevertheless, never mind his counterpart. Where was the artist, the poet, who was
his
equal? Who created from nothingness, as he did, from his own heart? Was it not as music, as pure primeval being, that a poem was born in his soul, long before it ever borrowed likeness and costume from the world of appearances? History, world knowledge, passion: resources and pretexts, nothing more, for something that had little to do with them, that had its home in the Orphic depths. Words, concepts: mere keys for his artistic talent to play upon so as to sound a hidden chord . . . Did anyone know of this? They showered him with praise, these good people, for the strength of purpose with which he played this or that key. And his motto, his ultimate
pathos
, the great bell he used to beckon the highest battlements of the soul—it lured many . . . freedom . . . In truth, he understood both more and less by it than they did in their celebrations. Freedom—what did that mean? A modicum of middle-class dignity—surely not!—in the presence of princely thrones? Do you even allow yourselves to dream of all that a creative mind ventures to mean by the word? Freedom from what? What ultimately from? Perhaps even happiness, human happiness, this silken restraint, this fair and gentle obligation . . .

Happiness . . . His lips trembled; it was as if his gaze were shifting inward, and slowly he let his head sink into his hands . . . He was in the adjoining room. Bluish light was shining from the lamp, and the floral curtain veiled the window in silent folds. He stood beside the bed and bent down over that sweet head on its pillows . . . A strand of dark hair curled down over that cheek, which shone with the pale shimmer of pearls, and those childlike lips were parted in sleep . . . my wife. Beloved! Did you take note of my longing? Did you come to me to be
my happiness? That you are, rest easy! And sleep! Don't open your eyes in the long shadows of their sweet lashes just yet, don't let them stare at me as they sometimes do, so large and dark it seems you're questioning, seeking me. By God, by God, how I love you! It's just that occasionally I can't find my feelings because I'm often so very exhausted from suffering, from battling with that task assigned to me by my self. I can never be entirely yours or be wholly happy in you, for the sake of that which is my mission . . .

He kissed her, then tore himself away from the precious warmth of her sleep, took a look around and went back. The bell reminded him of how far along night was, but at the same time it was as if that bell were benevolently tolling the end to an hour of hardship. He took a deep breath, pressed his lips firmly together, then walked over and picked up his quill . . . No brooding! He was too deep to be permitted to brood. No descending into chaos, or at least no lingering there! To raise, instead, out of the chaos that is fullness whatever is ripe and ready for form and hold it up to the light. No brooding: get to work! Limit, delete, shape, get finished . . .

And eventually it was finished, that work of suffering. It may not have been any good, but it was finished. And now that it was finished—behold!—it was good after all. And from his soul, from Music and Idea, new works struggled forth, lyrical, shimmering creations in divine form that gave wondrous intimation of their own unfathomable place of birth, just as the shell contains the rushing of the sea from which it is fished.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

G
ustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach, as had been his legal name since his fiftieth birthday, had begun a long solitary walk from his apartment on Munich's
Prinzregentenstraße
during a spring afternoon in 19—, a year that had for months glared so menacingly at our European continent. Even after lunch, overstimulated by many morning hours of difficult work, full of pitfalls and especially now demanding the greatest caution, judiciousness, probing insistence and exactitude of will, the writer had been unable to put a halt to the relentlessly running machine within him—that “motus animi continuus” which for Cicero is the essence of eloquence—and had been denied the relief of the nap so increasingly necessary at some point each day with the progressive decline in his stamina. Therefore, not long after tea, he had sought the outdoors, hoping that a little fresh air and exercise might revive him and help him put his evening to worthwhile use.

It was the beginning of May and after weeks of damp and cold, a false summer had set in. Though the leaves were hardly out, the
Englischer Garten
had nonetheless felt late-summer sultry, and its city end had been teeming with carriages and strollers. In front of the Aumeister, where paths of increasing solitude had led him, Aschenbach had paused a short while to survey the crowded restaurant garden, which had a few idle brougham cabs and equipages at its edge. Then, with the
sun beginning to set, he had started home via the open field outside the park, stopping, on account of fatigue and storm clouds over Föhring, by the north cemetery to await the tram that would take him via the direct route back to the city.

As it happened, the tram stop and surrounding area were deserted. Neither on the paved
Ungererstraße,
with its train tracks stretching solitary and gleaming toward Schwabing, nor on the old
Föhringer Chaussee
was a single vehicle to be seen. Nothing stirred behind the fences of those stonemasons' yards where the crosses, headstones and other monuments on display make up a second, unoccupied graveyard. Across the way, the funeral chapel with its Byzantine architecture stood silently in the reflected light of the dying sun. To the fore, said chapel, which is decorated with Greek crosses and brightly colored hieratic ornamentation, bears symmetrically arranged inscriptions in gold lettering, selected biblical sayings concerning life in the afterworld, things like “They shall enter the house of God” or “May the Eternal Light suffuse them.” For some time the waiting Aschenbach had been deriving solemn pleasure in reading those formulae and allowing his mind's eye to wander about in their shimmering mysticism, when, awakened from his dreamy musings, he noticed a man in the portico, above the pair of apocalyptic beasts that guard the outside stairs, a man whose not entirely everyday appearance turned his thoughts in a completely new direction.

It was unclear whether he had just emerged from inside the chapel through the bronze door or whether suddenly, out of nowhere, he had climbed up there from the outside. Without being especially absorbed by the question, Aschenbach was inclined toward the former. Of moderate height, skinny, unwhiskered and possessing a remarkably snub nose, the man was one of those redheads with milky-white, freckled skin. To judge from external details, he was not of Old Bavarian stock: the wide, straight-brimmed raffia hat on his head, at least, made his appearance seem alien and faraway.
Nonetheless, he was wearing the indigenous rucksack around his shoulders and a yellowish belted suit of what seemed to be loden, with a gray overcoat slung over his left forearm, which he held tightly pressed just below the ribs, and a metal-tipped cane in his right hand, against whose handle he leaned, feet crossed, with his hip. Head held high, so that his Adam's apple emerged stark and bare from the wiry neck protruding from his loose tennis shirt, he peered with sharp, colorless eyes under red lashes out into the distance. Between them, there were two vigorous, perpendicular furrows that matched oddly with his short, upturned nose. Standing there like that—perhaps being elevated contributed to this impression—he had the imperious bearing of someone gazing down from on high, bold or even savage. Whether because he had to squint against the blinding effects of the setting sun or because his features were permanently distended, his lips seemed not to reach far enough down. Indeed they were so completely retracted from his teeth that the latter, bared to the gums, flashed out long and white.

It could have been that, in taking stock of this alien figure in his half-distracted, half-inquisitive way, Aschenbach had overstepped the bounds of polite restraint. He suddenly became aware of the man staring back at him, so militantly, so directly and so obviously intent upon escalating the matter and forcing the opponent to avert
his
eyes, that he turned away, smarting, and began to walk along the fences, resolving as he did to take no further notice of the fellow. A minute later he had forgotten him. Nonetheless, be it that the traveler-like aspects of the alien figure's appearance had worked upon his imagination, or that some other physical or mental influence was at play, he suddenly became conscious, to his surprise, of a strange expansion within him, a kind of roving unease, a youthful thirst for distance. This was so vital and new—or at least so long ago outgrown and forgotten—that he stopped in his tracks with his head down and his hands behind his back to ponder what this sensation was and where it was heading.

It was the desire to get away, nothing more, though it veritably attacked him in the form of a visual longing, a near hallucination. Craving had gained the power of sight, and his imagination, which had still not calmed down after his hours of hard work, was creating for itself a single emblematic scene, laboring to picture all the wonders and terrors of the multifarious world at one and the same time. He saw . . . saw a landscape, a tropical swamp under a sky thick with vapor, damp, lush and monstrous, a kind of primeval wilderness of islands, bogs and sediment-carrying channels . . . saw hairy trunks of palm trees pushing up near and far from fecund tangles of fern and beds of oily, swollen, outlandishly blooming flora . . . saw bizarrely deformed trees with roots growing down through the air into the earth, into the green shadows reflected in sluggish floodwaters where, between floating, milky-white flowers the size of plates, birds of some alien species stood in the shadows with hunched shoulders and clumsily shaped beaks and stared immovably off to one side . . . saw through the knotted shoots of a bamboo thicket the glint from the eyes of a crouching tiger . . . and felt his heart pound with horror and inexplicable longing. Then the tiger vision dissolved, and, shaking his head, Aschenbach resumed his deliberate walking along the stonemasons' fences.

He had, at least since gaining the means to enjoy the advantages of global travel whenever he wanted, always considered vacationing to be nothing other than a health measure, which had to be taken now and again, contrary to his own sensibilities and inclinations. Too occupied by the tasks set for him by his own ego and the European soul, too burdened with a sense of duty toward his output, too contemptuous of distraction to ever qualify as much of an enthusiast for the colorful world around him, he had been entirely content to have viewed that much of the earth's surface which anyone can experience without departing the immediate circle around his homeland. He had never even been tempted to leave Europe. Now that his life had begun its slow ebb, his
artist's fear of not finishing everything—this special anxiety that the clock might run out before he'd completed his appointed part and given his all—had become impossible to dismiss as a mere humbug. Thus Aschenbach had restricted his existence almost exclusively to the lovely city that had become his home and to the country house that he had built for himself in the rugged mountains, where he spent the rainy summer.

Whatever it was that had come over him so suddenly at this late stage, it too was quickly moderated and corrected by reason and by the self-discipline that he had practiced from youth on. He had intended to reach a certain point in the work for which he currently lived before resettling to the country, and the thought of tramping halfway around the world seemed all too carefree and disruptive of his plans. It would take him away from his work for months and was therefore beyond serious consideration. Still, he knew only too well why this temptation had arisen so suddenly out of nowhere—he had to be honest with himself. The urge to flee was what this was, this yearning for distant lands and new sights, this desire for liberation, forgetting and relief from burden, the urge to get away from his great work, from the day-to-day stations of his rigid, cold, passionate duty. He loved his duty. There was no doubt about that. He could even almost bring himself to love the emotionally exhausting, daily renewed battle between his tenacious, proud, so often tested will and this growing fatigue, which no one could be allowed to suspect and which the finished product could not be permitted to betray in any way, not even through the slightest sign of inadequacy or relaxed concentration. Nonetheless, it was only sensible not to span the bow too tightly—he didn't want to be obstinate and suppress a need that had emerged in such vivid form. He thought about what he was working on, thought about the point at which he'd been forced to break off, today the same as yesterday, the point which still seemed unwilling to yield either to patient cultivation or to a sudden stroke of genius. He tested it once more, tried to break through or somehow unravel the
resistance, before giving up with a shudder of aversion. There was nothing extraordinarily difficult here. What paralyzed him were his scruples about not wanting what he should, which manifested itself in a no longer appeasable fastidiousness. Even as a young man, he had valued fastidiousness as the essence and innermost core of talent, and its demands were the reason he had reined in and cooled off his emotions, for he knew that emotions tend to be satisfied with happy approximates and half-realized success. Could it be that his subjugated feelings were now exacting their revenge by abandoning him, refusing as of today to pick up his art and carry it aloft, taking away all his desire, all his delight in form and expression? Not that he was producing bad work: one advantage of his years at least was that he could rest absolutely assured of his own expertise, confident in it at every moment. Yet while the nation honored him for his talent, this talent no longer gave him any happiness. As far as he could see, what his present work lacked were those characteristic signs of an incendiary, playful spirit which, more than any intrinsic content, being the product of joy itself—a much greater blessing—creates joy in the appreciative audience. He dreaded the summer in the country, alone in that small house with the maid who cooked his food and the servant who brought it to him. He dreaded the familiar faces of the mountain peaks and cliffs that would once more surround him as he worked, dissatisfied and slow. A sudden switch was needed—happy-go-lucky living, idle days, exotic air and an infusion of new blood—so that he might bear his summer and so that his summer might bear fruit. Very well, he'd go away somewhere—he'd thought long enough. No such great distance, not all the way to the tigers. One night in a sleeper car and a three- or four-week siesta at some international vacation spot on the romantic Mediterranean . . .

Such were his thoughts as the noise from the tram on its wire advanced up
Ungererstraße
, and upon getting in, he decided to devote that evening to the study of maps and train schedules. On the tram steps, it occurred to
him to look around for the man in the raffia hat, his companion during what had certainly been a most momentous wait. The man's whereabouts, however, remained a mystery, for he was to be found neither in his previous location nor anywhere on the platform nor within the streetcar itself.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

The author of that lucid and majestic prose epic based on the life of Frederick the Great, the patient artist and painstaking weaver of that densely populated novelistic tapestry known as
Maya
, which managed to subordinate so many individual human destinies to a single basic pattern, the creator of that powerful narrative which bears the title “A True Wretch” and which showed an entire grateful generation of youth the possibility for moral resolution more profound than any intellectual knowledge, and finally (to complete the short catalogue of his mature works) the author of that passionately argued treatise “Mind and Art,” whose analytic force and dialectic eloquence had led serious critics to place it on par with Schiller's great meditation “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”—Gustav Aschenbach was born the son of a ranking district court official in L., a county seat in provincial Silesia. His ancestors had been military officers, judges and bureaucratic functionaries, men who had dedicated their strict, respectably austere lives to the service of crown and state. More inwardly directed spirituality had manifested itself within the family ranks but once, in the person of a preacher; more sensual, passionate blood had been introduced during the previous generation, by the writer's mother, the daughter of a Bohemian
Kapellmeister
. The foreign traits in his appearance came from her. It was the marriage of the servant's sober devotion to duty with darker, more fiery impulses that had allowed an artist—this
particular
artist—to develop.

With the whole of his existence attuned to fame,
Aschenbach had proven to be, if not genuinely precocious, then—thanks to a decisiveness and personal pregnance of tone—without doubt precociously mature and clever enough for the public eye. He had made a name for himself while still practically an academy boy. In the ten years that followed, he had learned how to make public appearances from behind his desk, how to manage his fame, how to seem gracious and distinguished in letters that had by necessity—for the demands are numerous on the time of the successful and the respected—to be kept short. By the time he was forty, exhausted by the strain and vicissitudes of his actual work, he was obliged to deal on a daily basis with correspondence postmarked from every corner of the globe.