Death in Venice and Other Stories (24 page)

The air there was dominated by the solemn quiet great hotels pride themselves on. The waiters tiptoed back and forth serving the guests, and nothing could be heard beyond a rattle of the teapot and a half-whispered word. In a corner, diagonally across from the door, two tables down from his own, Aschenbach spotted the Polish girls with their governess. Bolt upright, their ash blond hair freshly slicked back, they sat with bloodshot eyes in stiff blue linen frocks with tiny white turndown collars and cuffs and passed around a jar of preserves. They had almost finished their breakfast. The boy was nowhere to be seen.

Aschenbach smiled. So, my little Phaeacian. It seems you alone enjoy the privilege of sleeping in. And cheering up suddenly, he recited to himself the line: “. . . changes of dress, warm baths and repose.”

He ate a leisurely breakfast, took some forwarded mail from the porter, who deferentially entered the buffet room with braided cap in hand, and opened a couple
of letters while smoking a cigarette. As a result, he was there to witness the arrival of the late sleeper whom they awaited over in the corner.

The boy entered through the glass door and passed silently across the room to his sisters' table. In everything from the carriage of his upper body to the bend in his knees to the tread of his feet in their white shoes, his walk was extraordinarily graceful. It was quite light, delicate yet proud, and was made more beautiful still by the childlike modesty with which he twice batted his eyes and turned his head toward the dining room as he went along. Smiling, murmuring something half-audible in his softly liquid native tongue, he took his seat. At that moment the boy's full profile was facing in his direction, and the observing Aschenbach again marveled, indeed shuddered, at the truly godlike beauty of this mortal child. Today the boy was wearing a thin blue-and-white stitched-blend uniform with a red silk breast-knot finishing at the neck in a simple white standing collar. Though this collar did not set off the rest of the outfit with particular elegance, his head floated atop it with incomparably charming beauty, like a flower in bloom. It was the head of Eros, its skin the lustrous yellow of Parian marble, its eyebrows well defined and earnest, both temples and one ear gently silhouetted by a perpendicular ringlet of hair.

Well done, well done, Aschenbach thought with the calculated professional approval that artists often use to mask their rapturous delight in the presence of a masterwork. Furthermore he thought, if the sea and the beach weren't waiting outside, I'd stay here as long as you did. With that, however, he left the buffet room, passing through the parlor, where the staff offered their courtesies. He crossed the large terrace and descended the stairs to the planks laid down on the sand for hotel guests to reach the reserved section of the beach. Inside the entrance, a barefoot old man in linen pants, a sailor's shirt and a straw hat, who turned out to be the lifeguard, showed him to the changing hut that came with his room. The man set up a table and a reclining beach chair
on the hut's sandy wooden deck, and Aschenbach made himself comfortable, shoving the chair out onto the wax yellow sand to be nearer the sea.

The beach scene—the sight of human culture frolicking carefree at the edge of that great element—uplifted his spirits and entertained him as much as ever. The shallow gray ocean was already well populated with wading children, swimmers and assorted colorful figures lying on the sandbars, their heads resting upon their folded arms. Others rowed around in little keelless boats painted red and blue, laughing whenever they capsized. The extended row of
capanne
with their miniature decks, where people sat as though on tiny verandas, provided a backdrop to the playful activity and the lazy sprawling relaxation, the visitations and the chatter, the proper morning elegance alongside the naked flesh taking bold yet casual advantage of the local liberties. Further on, individuals in white bathrobes and billowing, brightly dyed beach shirts strolled over the packed damp sand. To the right, some children had built a multitiered sandcastle crowned by a circle of tiny flags bearing a complete set of international colors. Vendors selling mussels, baked goods and fruit knelt down and spread out their wares. To the left, a Russian family was camped out in front of one of the huts that had been arranged in a row, perpendicular to the others and to the sea, so as to form a boundary at that end of the beach. There were bearded men with enormous teeth, women grown soft with inactivity, a Baltic girl behind an easel who kept crying out in frustration as she tried to paint the ocean, two cheerfully homely children and an old servant in a bandana with the mild, compliant mannerisms of a serf. They inhabited the beach, gratefully enjoying it all, patiently calling out the names of their disobediently rambunctious offspring, using what Italian they knew to joke a bit with the amusing old man from whom they bought candy and kissing each other on the cheeks, and didn't seem to care if anyone was watching. It was a thoroughly human troupe.

I'll stay then, Aschenbach decided. Where could it be
better? And with his hands folded in his lap, his eyes drifted over the expanse of the sea, his gaze slipping away, blurring and ultimately disintegrating in the monotone haze of desolate space. He had a profoundly motivated love of the sea. As an artist, burdened by an artist's intense labors, he needed rest and longed to turn away from the taxing multiplicity of the external world, to bury his face in the breast of something simple and immense. At the same time, personally, he also felt a forbidden attraction—seductive precisely because it so directly contradicted his life's mission—toward everything unstructured, excessive and endless, an attraction to nothingness. Every overachiever's dream is the stasis of perfection. And is not nothingness a form of perfection? But as Aschenbach sat dreaming into the void, a human figure suddenly intersected with the horizontal of the shore's edge. When he withdrew his eyes from the limitless distance and refocused them, there to the left the beautiful young boy passed before him in the sand. His pants were rolled up to his knees for wading, and his thin legs were exposed. He walked by slowly, but with graceful pride, as though quite accustomed to going around barefoot, staring over at the perpendicular row of huts. Yet hardly had he noticed the Russian family gratefully and peaceably going about their business, than a storm cloud of angry contempt passed across his face. His expression darkened, he grimaced, his mouth tensed, his lips bitterly curled to one side so that a wrinkle ran through his cheek, and his brows furrowed deeply enough for his eyes to appear sunken beneath their weight. They were dark and malevolent, speaking the language of hatred. He looked at the ground, then glanced back again menacingly, before an emphatically dismissive gesture of rejection with his shoulders ended the matter, and he turned his back upon his enemies.

A sudden pang of delicacy or scandalization, something between respect and shame, caused Aschenbach to turn away as though he had seen nothing, for it goes against the grain of any mature person to exploit, even for private consumption, an accidentally observed
moment of passion. Nevertheless, Aschenbach was simultaneously heartened and surprised, that is to say, delighted. This childish extremism, which had been directed against such a good-natured embodiment of life, humanized the boy's divine impenetrability. It made an exquisite natural sculpture, which until now had been merely a feast for the eyes, suddenly seem worthy of a deeper interest. It gave this half-grown adolescent, already remarkable for his beauty, an external layer that allowed him to be taken more seriously than his years.

Eyes still averted, Aschenbach strained to discern the boy's voice, a bright but somewhat weak one, which was struggling to announce its owner's arrival from a distance. He greeted his playmates at work on the sandcastle, and they answered by repeatedly shouting his name, or some nickname. Aschenbach listened with special curiosity without being able to make out anything more distinct than two melodic syllables, “Adgio” or more often “Adgiu,” with a drawn-out
u
like a call at the end. He was happy about the sound of the name—he found that the pleasant vowels suited the object to which they referred—and repeated it to himself
sotto voce
. Then he returned, satisfied, to his letters and papers.

With his portable escritoire on his knees, he took up his fountain pen and started to work on some odds and ends of correspondence. However, after only fifteen minutes, he felt it was a shame to squander his present situation, the most enjoyable one he knew, mentally abandoning it in favor of some insignificant activity. He tossed his materials aside and returned his attention to the sea. Before long, distracted by the young voices from the sandcastle, he had inclined his head to the right, resting it comfortably on the back of his beach chair in order to investigate once more the various pursuits of the excellent Adgio.

He located him at once—it was impossible to miss the red knot on his chest. Busy with some others laying down an old plank for a bridge across the castle's damp moat, he called out instructions, nodding his head now and then. In addition to him, there were about ten other
children, boys and girls, his own age and younger, who jabbered in tongues, mixing Polish, French and even Balkan languages. His name, however, was the one that was heard most often. Obviously he was coveted, courted, admired. One boy in particular, a fellow Pole called something like “Yashu,” seemed to be his highest vassal and closest friend: he was a strapping young lad with black pomaded hair in a linen jumpsuit. When work on the sandcastle had been temporarily completed, they walked arm in arm the length of the beach, with the one called “Yashu” kissing his beautiful friend.

Aschenbach was sorely tempted to shake a finger at him. “And you, Critobulos,” he thought with a smile, “spend a year traveling. You'll need at least that long to recover.” And then he ate a second breakfast, some large, perfectly ripe strawberries bought from a vendor. It had grown very hot, though the sun had never managed to break through the thin layer of mist in the sky. Laziness overcame his mind as his senses reveled in the vast, hypnotic spectacle of the sea. To guess or otherwise ascertain the Christian name corresponding to “Adgio” seemed like a perfectly appropriate and satisfying way for this serious man to spend his time. Thanks to some recollections about the Polish language, he succeeded in determining that the name had to be “Tadzio,” a shortened form of “Tadeusz” inflected to “Tadziu” as a form of address.

Tadzio was swimming. Aschenbach, who had lost sight of him, spotted his head, then his arm, one hand waving with a paddling motion, far out in the water. The sea obviously remained shallow for some distance. Nonetheless, there was already concern for his safety, already women's voices were calling out to him from the huts, repeatedly crying out that name, whose soft consonants and final drawn-out
u
dominated the beach almost like a battle cry, possessing something both sweet and wild: “Tadziu! Tadziu!” He turned and ran back against the current, his head thrown back, his legs beating the resisting water to foam. And to watch this mortal figure, boyishly fair yet precociously dour, emerge sprinting from
the element with dripping locks, beautiful, like a tender young god born of the depths of air and sea—the sight conjured up mythic images. It was like something from a poetic saga about the dawn of time, when the universe was originally given form and the gods were born. Aschenbach shut his eyes and listened to the song playing within him, and once more he thought that it was good where he was and that he wanted to stay.

Later on, Tadzio lay in the sand resting from his swim, a white towel drawn under his right shoulder, his head on his bare arm. Even when Aschenbach stopped staring at him to read a few pages of his book, he hardly ever forgot that the boy was lying there, that it only cost him a slight rightward turn of the head to glimpse that sight which was so worthy of admiration. He could almost imagine himself sitting there for the resting boy's protection, busy with his own matters, yet ever watchful over the fine visual representation of humankind to his right, not far from him. And his heart was filled and moved by a kind of paternal pride, by the sentimental affection of the self-sacrificing creative mind that produces beauty toward someone who simply possesses it.

After twelve he left the beach, returned to the hotel and took the elevator up to his room. Inside, he stood before the mirror for some time gazing at his gray hair, at his weary and drawn face. He was thinking just then about his fame, about the people who recognized him on the street and stared with reverent awe, out of respect for his unerring, gracefully polished skill with words. He recalled every bit of worldly success he could muster and even reminisced about being awarded the title of nobility. He then went down to the dining room and ate lunch at his small table. Getting into the elevator after the meal, Aschenbach was pushed to the back of the suspended little cubicle by a crowd of young people, who had also just finished eating. Tadzio was among them. He was standing quite close to Aschenbach, closer than ever before, so that the latter, looking for the first time from a vantage other than that of picturesque distance, could see and observe him precisely, in
human detail. Someone spoke to the boy as they reached the second floor, and although he was already getting off, he responded with an indescribably charming smile, stepping out backwards from the elevator and batting his eyes. Beauty makes bashful, Aschenbach thought, probing the question of why that should be the case. On the other hand, he had also noticed that Tadzio did not have the best of teeth: they were rather jagged and pale, lacking healthy luster and of that peculiar brittle translucence common among anemics. He's quite delicate, even sickly, thought Aschenbach. He's probably not long for this world. And he refused to analyze a certain feeling of satisfaction, or reassurance, which accompanied this thought.