Death in Venice and Other Stories (26 page)

The guest so conveniently detained by mishap was not at all inclined to see the restoration of his possessions as a reason for resuming his departure. For two long days, he had endured no small privation and had been forced to wear his traveling clothes to meals in the large dining room. So when his misdirected baggage was finally deposited back in his room, he unpacked completely, filling the closet and bureau with his things, set for now on an unrestricted stay, content to be able again to pass the hours on the beach in his silk suit and appear for dinner at his small table in appropriate evening attire.

The comfortably constant rhythm of this existence had put him under its spell, and he was quickly captivated by the soft luxurious ease of his newfound way of life. And what a place it is that combines the charms of a
cultivated Southern European seaside resort with the constant proximity of such a strange and wonderful city! Aschenbach was no great fun lover. Whenever and wherever it was necessary to stop working, recover his peace of mind and take a few days off, restlessness and dissatisfaction would soon compel him to resume his noble toil and devoutly austere daily routine. This had been especially true of him as a young man. Venice alone had enchanted him, relaxed his ambition and made him feel happy. There were times when he thought back: in the morning, as he sat before his hut in the shadow of the awning dreaming off into the blue of the southern sea, or on mild nights under the great starry sky, as he leaned back into the cushions of the gondola ferrying him home after a long evening on the Piazza, the bright lights and fluid melodies of serenades receding behind him. He thought back to his country house in the mountains, the site of his annual summer battles. He remembered the low drifting of the clouds over the yard, the power outages in the house after violent evening thunderstorms and the flight of the ravens he fed into the tops of the pines. And it seemed to him in such moments that he had been transported to Elysium, to the very end of the earth, where mortal men were blessed with lives of utmost ease, where, instead of snow and winter, storms and pounding rain, Oceanus forever blew his gentle cooling breath and the days trickled away in blissful indolence, effortlessly, without struggle, entirely given over to the sun and its rituals.

Aschenbach saw the boy Tadzio frequently, almost constantly. A small radius of activity and commonly assigned routines preordained that, with only brief interruptions, the beautiful boy would be in his vicinity throughout the day. He saw, indeed met him everywhere: downstairs in the hotel, on the refreshing boat rides to the city and back, amidst the splendor of the Piazza, and often high and low and in between if he was lucky. Above all, however, it was mornings on the beach that provided him with regular opportunity to appreciate and study the fair vision. Indeed, it was exactly this happy arrangement—the
daily recreation of such favorable circumstances—that filled Aschenbach with joyful satisfaction and caused him to savor his stay as it stretched on and on so pleasantly, one sunny day after the next.

He would get up early, as though still driven by his compulsive work habits, and arrive at the beach before most of the others, when the sun was still mild and the sea dazzlingly white in morning dreams. He would amiably greet the attendant at the gate and would also exchange familiar hellos with the barefoot old-timer, who always had his spot well-prepared—brown awning unfurled, beach furniture removed and set up on deck—before settling into his chair. The next three or four hours would then be his, hours in which the sun climbed in the sky and took on a terrible intensity, in which the ocean turned a deeper and deeper blue and in which he was permitted to watch Tadzio.

He would see him approaching from the left along the edge of the sea. He would suddenly spy his back emerging from between the huts or sometimes he would discover, not without joyous alarm, that he had missed the boy's arrival, that he was already there and had already resumed, in the blue-and-white-striped swimsuit that had become his exclusive beach attire, his usual sun-and-sand activities—that delightfully trivial, idly restless life of play and relaxation, one long span of strolling, wading, digging, chasing, lying and swimming, watched over and summoned by the women on the deck, who kept shouting his name “Tadziu! Tadziu!” in falsetto and to whom he came running, gesturing with excitement, to tell of his adventures and show his various finds and catches: mussels, tiny sea horses, jellyfish, sideways scuttling crabs. Aschenbach didn't understand a single word of what he said, but however commonplace it might have been, the sounds were a lovely warm blur in his ear. The impenetrability of the foreign tongue turned the boy's speech to music, an irrepressible sun bathed him in luxuriant glow and the sublimely deep view of the sea provided a constant backdrop and background against which he appeared.

Soon the observant Aschenbach knew every line and pose of this so superior, uninhibited body, joyously welcoming each feature of its already familiar beauty anew and knowing no end for either his admiration or the gentle desire of his senses. A voice might summon the boy to greet a guest waiting upon the women at their hut. He would run by, perhaps wet from the sea, tossing his locks, and as he shook hands, he would rotate his body in a most charming way, in one graceful taut twist—one leg bearing his full weight, the other extending its toes—embarrassed at being so adorable, anxious to fulfill his aristocratic duty and please the visitor. Or he might lie outstretched, a beach towel wrapped around his chest, his finely sculpted arm braced in the sand, his hand cupping his chin. The one called “Yashu” would squat to the side, doting on him, and nothing could have been more enchanting than the chosen one, with a smile in his eyes and on his lips, looking up at his vassal, his servant. Or he might stand there at the edge of the sea, alone, away from his family, quite near Aschenbach, tall, slowly rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, his hands clasped behind his neck, dreaming off into the blue, while tiny in-rolling waves bathed his toes. His honey-colored hair curled in ringlets around his temples and neck, the down on his upper spine gleamed in the sun, the fine contours of his ribs and his even chest emerged through the thin wrapping around his torso, his armpits ran smooth as a statue's, the hollows of his knees glistened and, thanks to their bluish veins, his entire body appeared to be made of some more translucent material. What discipline, what precision of thought was expressed in this youthful body, stretched out in all its perfection! The strength and purity of that will, whose obscure activity had succeeded in realizing this divine sculpture—did not he, as artist, know it through and through? Was it not also at work within him, as he chipped away, full of sober passion, at the marble block of language to release that sleek form glimpsed in his imagination, which he then presented to his fellow man as a model and mirror of sublime beauty?

A model and mirror! His eyes took in the exquisite figure there at the edge of the blue, and in his mounting rapture he was convinced that, with this sight, he had apprehended beauty itself, form as divine thought, the one true, absolute perfection which resides in the realm of the sublime and whose representation and reflection in human form had been placed here, light and fair, to be worshipped. Such was his intoxication, and the aging artist invited it upon himself heedlessly, even greedily. His imagination went into labor, his learning came to a boil and his memory dredged up ancient thoughts that had been preserved since childhood but had never before been animated with any fire of their own. Was it not written somewhere that exposure to the sun turns the attention from intellectual to sensory perception? Accordingly, it numbs, indeed bewitches, reason and memory in such a way that the soul, overwhelmed by happiness, entirely forgets its actual state and clings in dumbstruck awe to that which is most beautiful amidst whatever is illuminated. In fact, it is only with the help of a bodily presence that the over-exposed soul can succeed in elevating itself to a higher level of contemplation. The god Amor, forsooth, was like those mathematicians who introduce slow pupils to abstract shapes via specific images. In order that we might know the sublime, he gladly availed himself of the form and hue of human youth, embellishing them with the reflected light of beauty into a kind of mnemonic device, the sight of which literally inflames us with anguish and hope.

Such were the enraptured Aschenbach's thoughts; such were the feelings of which he had become capable. A charming scene materialized before him that was put together from the rushing sea and glittering sunlight. It was the ancient plane tree, not far from the walls of Athens—that place of holy shadows and scents of
agnus castus
, adorned by sacred statues and pious tributes in honor of the waters of the Achelous and its nymphs. The river ran crystal clear over the smooth pebbles at the foot of the broad tree. Crickets chirped. On the meadow, which sloped gently so as to allow both the
body to recline and the head to be held upright, two people were taking shelter from the midday heat: one older and the other young, one ugly and the other beautiful, the wise man with the adorable boy. Paying compliments all the while, couching his overtures in witty remarks, Socrates instructed Phaedrus as to the nature of desire and virtue. He told him of the searing panic of the passionate soul upon glimpsing a likeness of eternal beauty, told him of the envy felt by the profane, base soul, unable to conceive of beauty even while viewing its image and thus incapable of awe, told him of the divine terror of the noble soul before the sight of a godlike countenance or a perfect body—told him how that soul starts to tremble and lose composure, hardly daring to look, yet reveres the individual who possesses beauty almost to the point of offering up sacrifices, as though to an idol, were it not for the fear of appearing foolish before other men. For beauty, good Phaedrus, and beauty alone is both visible to the human eye and worthy of adoration: it is—mark my words!—the only form of the sublime that our senses can both perceive and endure. What would become of us if other divine ideals, if reason and virtue and truth, were to reveal themselves to our senses? Would we not perish, burn up with love just as Semele once did before Zeus? Beauty is thus the path of the passionate toward divine spirit—yet only the path, only a means, young Phaedrus. . . . Then he made his subtlest pronouncement, that sly suitor, namely that the lover is more blessed than the beloved because God resides in the former, not the latter—probably the most tender and mocking of thoughts that has ever been conceived and one that still spawns all the mischievous and most secret lusting of the human heart.

The writer's greatest joy is thought become feeling, feeling become thought. At this moment, just such a pulsating thought, just such a precise feeling was in the solitary writer's power and possession, namely, that nature itself shudders with delight whenever the human mind bows to honor beauty. He suddenly longed to write. The god Eros may love idle hands, as it's said. He may even
exist especially for them. Nonetheless, the restlessness of the haunted Aschenbach in this his moment of crisis ran toward productivity. It was almost inconsequential what the occasion was. A call had gone out into the educated world for closely scrutinized debate on a certain great burning question of culture and taste and had caught up with the traveling writer. He knew the subject—he had indeed experienced it firsthand—and all of a sudden his craving to illuminate it in the light of his own words was irresistible. In fact, what he longed for was to work on it in Tadzio's presence, to use the boy's appearance as a model while writing, to let his style follow the contours of this body which seemed to be so divine, transporting its physical beauty into the realm of the sublime imagination as the mythical eagle had once transported the Trojan shepherd into the ether. Never had he known the desire for language to be more sweet, never had he been so certain that the god of love resided in the written word, as during the perilously delicious hours at his makeshift desk under the awning, in full view of his sacred image, the music of the boy's voice in his ears. He crafted his short essay on Tadzio's beauty, that page and a half of exquisite prose whose unalloyed purity, nobility and soaring emotional tautness were soon to win widespread admiration. It's a good thing the world knows only the finished work and not its origins or the circumstances of its creation, for knowing the sources from which inspiration comes to the artist would only create confusion and mistrust, thereby robbing excellence of its effect. What extraordinary hours! What extraordinarily nerve-racking labor! What exceptionally fertile intercourse between the mind and one individual body! As Aschenbach put away his work and left the beach, he felt exhausted, indeed shattered, as though from stirrings of conscience after a bout of excess.

It was on the following morning when, in the process of leaving the hotel, he noticed from atop the front steps that the already ocean-bound Tadzio was approaching—alone—the gate that led to the beach. He was seized by a wish, an ever so simple plan. He could exploit the
opportunity and establish easy, friendly contact with the unwitting cause of his great inner uprising and turmoil. He could address the boy, then bask in the attention when he responded. The beautiful boy was ambling along, he was slow enough to be overtaken, and Aschenbach hurried his steps. He catches up with him on the wooden stairs to the rear of the huts, he's determined to lay a hand on the boy's head or clap him on the shoulders and say something; an amiable French phrase is on the tip of his tongue. But then he feels his heart beating like a hammer—perhaps this is also due to the physical exertion—and senses how panting and tremulous his voice will sound with him breathing so heavily. He hesitates, tries to regain composure and suddenly fears that he has trailed the boy for too long, that something will attract his attention and make him turn around. He begins another approach and breaks it off, before finally giving up and walking past his quarry with his head down.