Death in Venice and Other Stories (30 page)

That night he had a terrible dream—if that is the right word for an experience of body and soul that befell him in the depths of sleep as an absolutely autonomous sensory reality, but that did not permit him to see himself moving and existing in space, discrete from the dream events. Instead, his own soul was the setting. Events broke in on him from the outside, overcoming his resistance—a deep, mental resistance—with great violence; then they passed through him, leaving his entire self, his life's culture, devastated and destroyed.

Fear was the beginning, fear and desire and a horrified curiosity about what was about to transpire. Night had descended, and his senses were alert, for, from far away, came turbulence, turmoil, a terrible violent racket—
rustling, smashing and dull rumbling, shrill cheering, too, and a certain howl like a drawn-out
u
—all permeated and at times drowned out by the deep warbling of a gruesomely sweet, ruthlessly insistent flute, which mesmerized his very innards with its shamelessly cloying tone. Still he knew a phrase, albeit obscure, to describe what was approaching:
the Other God!
Smoky flames began to glow: he could make out mountainous land, similar to that around his country house. And in this refracted light, through the branches and the mossy boulders, something began to thrash and spin its way down from the wooded peak—humans, animals, a swarm, a raging herd. The slope was inundated with bodies, flames, tumult and frenzied circles of dance. Wailing women stumbled over clumsily long animal hides secured by belts and shook tambourines over each other's upturned, moaning heads, swung spark-laden torches and unsheathed daggers, carried fork-tongued snakes coiled around their waists and clutched at their breasts with both hands. Men—with horns above their brows, animal-hide loincloths and hairy skin—bowed their heads, exposed their necks, lifted their arms and thighs in the air, banged iron cymbals and furiously pounded drums, while smooth-skinned boys prodded goats with leaf-wound staffs, clinging to the animals' antlers and crying out with joy as they were dragged around in leaps. What's more, the revellers were all howling out that word with the soft consonants and the drawn-out
u
at the end, simultaneously sweet and wild, like nothing ever heard. It sounded first here, bellowed into the air as though by rutting stags, then there, a chorus of voices adopting it as a rowdy chant of triumph, inciting each other to dance and flail their limbs, never letting it fade. Meanwhile the low seductive sounds of the flute ran through and above it all. Was it not also trying to seduce him, the reluctant spectator, enticing him with shameless tenacity to join in the wanton festivity of utmost sacrifice? His revulsion was great, great, too, his fear, and he was sincerely determined to defend what was his to the last against the Other God, the enemy of his composed and dignified intellect. But the noise and the
howling kept increasing, amplified by the echoing mountainside, drowning out everything else, swelling into irresistible insanity. Odors assaulted his nose: the bitter stench of the goats, excrescent bodily scents, a whiff of something like stagnant waters, and, along with them, yet another familiar smell—that of wounds and rampant disease. His heart pounded to the drumbeats, his mind whirled, rage seized him, blindness, numbing lust, and his soul craved to join the dancing circle of the god. The obscene symbol, a giant piece of wood, was unveiled and raised, at which the revelers all began to howl their battle cry with greater abandon. Frothing at the mouth, they raged, clawing with lurid expressions and ravenous hands, laughing and moaning, stabbing each other with prods and licking the blood from each other's limbs. But now, with them, among them, was the dreaming Aschenbach. He had given himself over to the Other God. Yes, he was one of them as they attacked and slaughtered the animals, tearing them to dripping shreds and devouring the remains, and again, as free and open copulation in honor of the god began everywhere on the mossy ground. And his soul tasted descent's orgiastic fury.

The stricken Aschenbach awoke from this dream unnerved and shattered, delivered up helplessly to the demon. He no longer avoided the observant eyes of others; whether he exposed himself to their suspicions was now entirely irrelevant. In any case, they were taking flight, traveling on. Many of the changing huts now stood unoccupied, larger gaps had opened up between patrons in the dining room, and foreigners were a rare sight in the city. The truth seemed to have seeped out, and despite the dogged solidarity of the interested parties, panic could no longer be averted. Yet the lady with the pearl necklace stayed on with her family. Perhaps she didn't hear the rumors; perhaps she was too proud and fearless to budge. In any case Tadzio remained, and to Aschenbach in his rapture, it sometimes seemed as if departure and death might remove all other disturbing presences from their midst, leaving him alone on the island with the beautiful boy. Indeed, every morning by the sea, as
his eye dwelt with a hard, reckless, fixed stare on the object of his desire, or at sunset, as he ignobly followed that object through the alleys where the progress of the vile plague was being concealed, monstrosities began to seem propitious, moral law invalid.

Like any lover, Aschenbach wished to please and was bitterly afraid of rejection. He livened up his attire with youthful little touches, he wore jewelry and used cologne, he fussed over his appearance repeatedly during the day and always turned up at dinner well dressed, jittery and anxious. In the presence of that sweet youth that had so taken possession of him, he found his own body repugnant: the sight of his graying hair, his pinched features, plunged him into shame and despair. He felt he had to spruce up and restore his looks. He paid frequent visits to the gossipy hotel coiffeur.

With a hairdressing gown draped over him, he leaned back in the chair under the latter's soothing hands and stared at his reflection in a hand mirror, looking pained.

“Gray,” he said, scowling.

“A touch,” the man answered. “And where does the fault lie? A minor lapse, a neglect of external matters. Understandable, though hardly commendable, among persons of importance. Especially since they are precisely the ones who should be above little prejudices about what is natural and what is not. Some of these people and their moral objections to the art of cosmetics—if you extend the same logic to teeth, you see how offensive it is. Ultimately we are only as old as we feel in our hearts and minds. In certain cases keeping your hair gray actually involves more of a deception than the corrective some people see fit to scorn. A man in your position has a right to his natural hair color. Will you permit me simply to give you back what is yours?”

“How so?” asked Aschenbach.

The eloquent coiffeur washed the customer's hair in two different liquids, one clear, one dark, and once more it was as black as it had been in his youth. The man then curled it with heated tongs into soft waves, took a step back and examined his work.

“The only thing left,” he said, “would be to put a little color in your complexion.”

And like the perfectionist who can never leave well enough alone, he scurried around, indefatigably, and fiddled with this and that. The comfortably reclining Aschenbach, incapable of defending himself, indeed suffused with sudden hope at what was transpiring, watched in the mirror as his brows grew starker and more evenly arched, as the shape of his eyes was elongated, their green enhanced with some faint liner, watched further down as a delicate, gently applied pink was awakened where his skin had turned leathery brown, as his ever pallid lips turned plump and raspberry red, and as the lines on his cheeks and mouth, the wrinkles around his eyes disappeared under skin cream and “Breath of Youth.” With his heart beating wildly, he beheld a young man in first bloom. The cosmetician finally declared himself satisfied, as people like that often do, by sycophantically thanking the person upon whom he had just waited. “A minor adjustment,” he said, touching Aschenbach's skin for the last time. “Now, sir, you can safely fall in love.” The spellbound Aschenbach left, dreamily happy, a bit confused and timid. His tie was red; his wide-brimmed straw hat had a rainbow-colored band.

A tepid storm wind had come up. The rain was infrequent and light, but the air hung humid, thick with odors of decay. Fluttering, clapping and whistling could be heard all around, and to the feverish Aschenbach under his makeup it seemed that an evil race of harpies was at work in the sky, fiendish sea birds who would ruin the condemned man's last meal, leaving it half-chewed and soiled with dung. The humidity had robbed him of all appetite, and he couldn't help but imagine that his food had been contaminated with infectious material.

One afternoon while on the beautiful boy's trail, Aschenbach penetrated deep into the internal maze of the ailing city. Although he had lost his bearings in the labyrinth of indistinguishable alleys, canals, bridges and city squares and wasn't even sure in which direction he was headed, he was determined not to lose sight of his
hotly pursued vision. Forced to proceed with humiliating caution, pressing up against walls and hiding behind the backs of pedestrians, he was unaware for quite some time of the fatigue, indeed exhaustion, that emotion and constant strain had wreaked upon his body and mind. Tadzio was walking to the rear of his family, letting the governess and his nunlike sisters proceed ahead in narrow passages, so that, strolling by himself, he could occasionally glance back over his shoulder with his peculiar twilight gray eyes to make sure his lover was still following. He saw him, and he didn't betray him. Intoxicated by this realization, lured on by those eyes like a puppet on passion's strings, the love-struck Aschenbach stole along in pursuit of his unseemly hope, only to find himself cheated in the end. The Polish family crossed a slightly arched bridge, the height of whose curvature obscured them from the view of their pursuer. Once on top of it himself, however, he could no longer spot them. He peered around in three directions, straight ahead and off to the sides along the narrow, dirty canal, but it was no use. Frustration and weakness finally made him abandon his search.

His head was on fire, his body was covered in feverish sweat, the nape of his neck tingled, a no longer bearable thirst now tortured him, and he looked around for anything that would bring instantaneous relief. From a tiny vegetable stand he bought some fruit, strawberries, soft and overripe, which he ate as he walked. A small square, forgotten and seemingly accursed, opened up before him. He recognized it. It had been here, weeks ago, that he had decided upon his unrealized plan to leave. He collapsed on the steps of the cistern in the middle of this space, resting his head against its stone rim. All was silent, grass was growing between the cobblestones and garbage was strewn everywhere. Among the weather-beaten, unevenly tall surrounding houses, one stood out like a palace with its lion-flanked balconies and arched windows, behind which dwelt only emptiness. Located on the ground floor of another house was a pharmacy. Warm gusts carried over occasional smells of phenol.

He sat there. The great master, the artist grown dignified, the author of “A True Wretch,” the writer who had dismissed everything vagabond and every gloomily plumbed depth in such exemplary pure form, the intellectual who had rejected sympathy with the abyss and disdained dissipation, the climber of such heights, the transcender of personal knowledge who had outgrown irony and accustomed himself to the amenities and obligations of mass public trust, the celebrity whose fame had been officially sanctioned, whose name had been ennobled and whose style served as the model by which schoolboys were taught to write—he sat there. He held his eyes shut, casting only the occasional short glance down to one side with an expression of scorn and embarrassment, while his slack, cosmetically enhanced smile formed isolated words taken from the strange dream logic produced in his half-conscious brain.

“For beauty, Phaedrus—mark my words!—only beauty is both divine and visible to the human eye. Therefore it represents the path of the sensual man, young Phaedrus, the artist, to the sublime. Do you really think, dear boy, that he whose path to the sublime passes through the senses can ever attain wisdom and true dignity as a man? Or do you think that this is a dangerously enticing path, one of falsehood and sin, which necessarily leads us astray? I leave it up to you to decide. For you must know that we artists cannot follow the path of beauty without the accompaniment and guidance of Eros. Indeed, though we may be heroes in our own way, trained warriors, we are also like women, for passion is our inspiration, and our true longing must always remain a desire for love. That is our desire and shame. Do you see now that we artists can be neither wise nor dignified? That we necessarily go astray, that we can never be anything but disreputable soldiers of emotional fortune? Our mastery of style is nothing but a foolish little lie, our fame and glory a farce, the public's faith in us a joke, the idea of educating youth or the masses with art a risky practice that should be outlawed. What use is a teacher born with a natural, incorrigible tendency
toward the abyss? We may deny it and acquire dignity, but no matter which way we turn, it attracts us. We renounce all-unravelling intellect, for intellect, Phaedrus, possesses neither dignity nor rigor. It knows, understands, forgives, but without any fixed position or form. It lives in sympathetic attraction to the abyss—it
is
the abyss. This we ultimately reject, to strive from then on only for beauty, that is to say, for simplicity, greatness and renewed rigor, second unfettered innocence and form. But form and unfettered innocence, Phaedrus, lead to intoxication and lust. They may even lead the noble mind into some awful emotional sacrilege, which his own aesthetic rigor rejects as unspeakable. They lead to the abyss, they, too, to the abyss. This, I tell you, is where we artists are led, for we are incapable of soaring on high, only of running riot. And now I must go, Phaedrus. You stay here, and only when you see me no more, are you to go, too.”