Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

  “To the vaporetto pier, I told you!” he said, half turning. The murmuring ceased, but no reply was forthcoming.

  “To the vaporetto pier, I said!” he repeated, turning all the way round and peering up into the face of the gondolier, who loomed behind him on his raised plank against the pallid sky. He had a disobliging, even brutal physiognomy and was dressed in navy blue, with a yellow sash wound round his waist and a shapeless straw hat that was beginning to unravel perched jauntily on his head. The cast of the face and the curly blond mustache under the small snub nose made him look anything but Italian. Though rather frailly built—one would not have thought him particularly suited to his trade—he handled the oar with great energy, putting his whole body into every stroke. From time to time, his lips drawn back by the strain, he bared a set of white teeth. Knitting his reddish eyebrows, he looked over his charge’s head and retorted in curt, almost churlish tones, “You are going to the Lido.”

  “I am,” Aschenbach parried, “but I hired the gondola to take me only as far as San Marco. I wish to transfer to the vaporetto.”

  “You cannot transfer to the vaporetto, sir.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because the vaporetto takes no luggage.”

  That was so, Aschenbach remembered. He said nothing, but the gruff, preemptory manner, so unlike the treatment foreigners usually receive from the natives, he found disagreeable.

  “That is my business,” he said. “Perhaps I wish to deposit my luggage there. You will turn back.”

  Silence. The oar plashed; the water thudded against the prow. Presently the muttering and murmuring commenced again: the gondolier was talking to himself between his teeth.

  What was he to do? Alone on the water with this oddly obstreperous, uncannily determined man, the traveler saw no way of imposing his will. Besides, what a nice rest he could have if he did not lose his temper! Had he not wished the trip to last longer, last forever? It was wisest to let things take their course; what is more, it was highly pleasant. A spellbinding indolence seemed to emanate from his seat, that low armchair upholstered in black, so gently rocked by the oar strokes of the self-willed gondolier behind him. The idea that he had fallen into the hands of a criminal drifted dreamily through Aschenbach’s mind, but it was powerless to stir him to active resistance. More upsetting was the possibility that it could all be put down to simple money grubbing. A sense of duty or pride, the recollection, as it were, that one might forestall such things, moved him to pull himself together, and he asked, “What do you charge for the trip?”

  Looking straight past him, the gondolier answered, “You will pay.”

  The response called for was clear. “I shall not pay a thing,” Aschenbach answered mechanically, “not a thing if you take me where I do not want to go.”

  “You want to go to the Lido.”

  “But not with you.”

  “I am rowing you well.”

  Fair enough, thought Aschenbach, relaxing. Fair enough. You are rowing me well. Even if you are after my purse and send me to the House of Hades with a bash of the oar from behind, you will have rowed me well.

  But nothing of the sort occurred. They even had company: a boatload of musical highwaymen, men and women both, singing to a guitar and a mandolin and sailing solicitously alongside the gondola, filling the stillness over the waters with their venal for-foreigners-only poetry. Aschenbach tossed some money into the hat they held out. They immediately fell silent and departed, whereupon he could hear the gondolier whispering again, carrying on his intermittent conversation with himself.

  And so they arrived, bobbing in the wake of a vaporetto bound for the city. Two municipal officials, their hands behind their backs, were pacing up and down the embankment, looking out over the lagoon. Aschenbach left the gondola at the landing stage, assisted by the old man with a grappling iron to be found at every landing stage in Venice, and, having run out of coins, crossed to the hotel opposite the pier to break a banknote and give the oarsman his just deserts. After being attended to in the lobby, he returned to find his belongings on a cart on the pier and the gondola and gondolier gone, nowhere to be seen.

  “He took off,” said the old man with the grappling iron. “A bad lot that man. He had no license, sir. The only gondolier without one. The others phoned over to us. He saw the officials waiting for him, so he took off.”

  Aschenbach shrugged.

  “You got a free ride, sir,” the old man said, holding his hat out. Aschenbach tossed some coins into it. He gave instructions for his luggage to be taken to the Hôtel des Bains and followed the cart along the avenue, the white-blossoming tree-lined avenue which, flanked by taverns, bazaars, and boardinghouses, ran straight across the island to the beach.

  He entered the spacious hotel from the back, the garden terrace, and made his way through the spacious lobby and vestibule to the office. Since he was expected, he was received with assiduous deference. The manager, a short, quiet, obsequiously courteous man sporting a black mustache and a frock coat of French cut, rode up to the second floor with him and showed him to his room, a pleasant place furnished with cherry-wood furniture and decorated with strongly scented flowers, its high windows offering a view of the open sea. He walked up to one of them after the manager had withdrawn, and while his luggage was being brought in and set down behind him he gazed out at the beach, which was all but devoid of people, it being afternoon, and the sunless sea, which at high tide was sending long, low waves against the shore in a calm, regular cadence.

  The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden. Accordingly, the figures encountered on the journey—the repulsive old fop with his “sweetheart” drivel, the outlaw gondolier defrauded of his fee—still rankled in the traveler’s mind. Though neither difficult to explain rationally nor even thought-provoking, they were utterly outlandish—or so he found them—and unsettling precisely because of this paradox. For the moment, however, he greeted the sea with his eyes, delighted that Venice was so near and easy of access, and at length he turned, washed his face, gave the chambermaid instructions for seeing to his comfort, and had himself conveyed by the green-clad Swiss lift attendant to the ground floor.

  He took his tea on the seaside terrace, then went down and walked a good distance along the promenade in the direction of the Hotel Excelsior. Upon his return he thought it time to change for dinner. He did so in his usual slow and deliberate manner, for he was accustomed to work while attending to his toilet, yet he reached the lobby a bit too early, finding a goodly number of the guests, strangers to one another, feigning mutual indifference as they waited together for the meal. He picked up a newspaper from the table, settled into a leather armchair, and cast an eye over the company, which differed favorably from that of his previous hotel.

  A broad, tolerant, all-encompassing horizon opened before him. Sounds of the major languages mingled in muted tones. Internationally recognized evening dress, that uniform of civilization, made of the diversity a semblance of homogeneous decency. He saw the dry, long face of an American, a large Russian clan, English ladies, and German children with French nurses. The Slav element seemed to prevail. Polish was being spoken in his immediate vicinity.

  It came from a group of young people of various ages seated around a wicker table under the supervision of a governess or female companion: three girls, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen from the looks of them, and a long-haired boy of about fourteen. Aschenbach noted with astonishment that the boy was of a consummate beauty:
his face—pale and charmingly reticent, ringed by honey-colored hair, with a straight nose, lovely mouth, and an expression of gravity sweet and divine—recalled Greek statuary of the noblest period, yet its purest formal perfection notwithstanding it conveyed a unique personal charm such that whoever might gaze upon it would believe he had never beheld anything so accomplished, be it in nature or in art. Also striking were the clear and fundamental differences in the approach to child rearing that appeared to govern the dress and general behavior of the siblings. The attire of the three girls, the eldest of whom could be considered grown up, was austere and chaste to the point of defacement: their identical habitlike, slate-colored, knee-length dresses, sober and deliberately unbecoming in cut and brightened only by white turndown collars, suppressed and nullified any grace they might have had. Their hair, plastered down smoothly over their heads, made their faces as vacant and inexpressive as a nun’s. Surely a mother was at work here, and one who had no intention of applying to the boy the strict pedagogical principles she deemed appropriate to the girls. In his life, softness and tenderness clearly held sway. His fair hair had been spared the shears: as in Boy with Thorn it curled down over his forehead and ears and still lower onto his neck. The English sailor’s suit—with its puffy sleeves narrowing to tight circles around the dainty wrists of the still childlike but slender hands and its braiding, bows, and embroideries—gave his delicate figure a rich and pampered appearance. He sat half facing his observer with one black patent leather shoe in front of the other, an elbow propped on the arm of his wicker chair, and a cheek resting against the closed hand in an attitude of nonchalant propriety and completely devoid of the all but servile rigidity to which his female siblings seemed accustomed. Was he ailing? His complexion stood out white as ivory against the darker gold of the surrounding curls. Or was he merely the coddled favorite, the object of a biased and volatile love? Aschenbach inclined towards the latter. Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

  A waiter made the rounds, announcing in English that dinner was served, and the guests gradually disappeared through the glass door. Latecomers straggled past from the vestibule and lifts. Service had begun in the dining room, but the young Poles lingered at their wicker table, and Aschenbach, comfortably ensconced in his deep armchair and admiring the beauty before his eyes besides, waited with them.

  The governess—a short, corpulent, red-faced woman of not quite gentle birth—signaled them at last to rise. Arching her brows, she pushed her chair back and bowed when a tall woman dressed in grayish white and richly adorned with pearls entered the lobby. The woman’s demeanor was cool and dignified; the look of her lightly powdered coiffure and the cut of her dress displayed the simplicity that prescribes taste wherever piety is deemed an attribute of aristocracy. She could have been the wife of a high-ranking German official. The only aspect of her appearance evincing a certain fanciful sense of luxury was the jewelry, which was in fact nearly worthless and consisted of earrings plus a very long triple strand of gently shimmering pearls the size of cherries.

  The siblings had risen quickly. They bent to kiss the hand of their mother, who, a reserved smile on her well-preserved yet somewhat weary and pointy-nosed face, looked past their heads and addressed a few words in French to the governess. Then she went over to the glass door. The children followed, the girls in order of age, the governess, and finally the boy. For some reason he looked back before crossing the threshold, and since there was no one else left in the lobby, his eyes, of an unusual twilight gray, met those of Aschenbach, who, his paper in his lap, was absorbed in watching the group make its exit.

  There was certainly nothing the least bit remarkable about what he had seen. The children had not gone in before their mother; they had waited for her, greeted her deferentially, and observed the customary formalities when entering the dining room. Yet it had all been done so deliberately, with such concern for discipline, duty, and self-esteem that Aschenbach felt strangely moved. He hesitated a few moments more, then he too made his way to the dining room and was shown to his table, which, he noted with a brief stir of regret, was at some remove from that of the Polish family.

  Tired yet mentally alert, he whiled away the lengthy meal pondering abstract, even transcendental matters such as the mysterious connection that must be established between the generic and the particular to produce human beauty and moving on to general problems of form and art only to conclude that his thoughts and discoveries resembled certain seemingly felicitous revelations that come to us in dreams and after sober consideration prove perfectly inane and worthless. He lingered after dinner—sitting and smoking, strolling through the hotel grounds enjoying the evening fragrance—then retired early and spent the night in a deep sleep, unbroken, yet animated by a number of dreams.

  The weather had not improved the next morning. The wind came from the land. The sea was dull and calm, shrunken almost, under a pale, overcast sky, the horizon blandly close; the sea had retreated so far from the beach that it left several rows of long sandbanks exposed. Opening his window, Aschenbach thought he could smell the foul stench of the lagoon.

  A sudden despondency came over him. He considered leaving then and there. Once, years before, after weeks of a beautiful spring, he had been visited by this sort of weather and it so affected his health he had been obliged to flee. Was not the same listless fever setting in? The pressure in the temples, the heavy eyelids? Changing hotels again would be a nuisance, but if the wind failed to shift he could not possibly remain here. To be on the safe side, he did not unpack everything. At nine he went to breakfast in the specially designated buffet between the lobby and the dining room.

  The ceremonious silence on which grand hotels pride themselves prevailed. The waiters moved about the room noiselessly, on tiptoe. The clatter of tea things and a half-whispered word were the only sounds audible. In a corner diagonally opposite the door and two tables removed from his own, Aschenbach saw the Polish girls with their governess. Their ash-blond hair freshly plastered down, their eyes red, they sat perfectly erect in their stiff blue-linen dress with the small white turndown collars and cuffs, passing a jar of preserves round the table. The boy was absent.

  Aschenbach smiled. Well, well, little Phaeacian! he thought. You seem to be the only one privileged to sleep his fill. And brightening suddenly, he recited the following line to himself: “Oft did they change their garments and bathe in warm water, reclining.”

  He took a leisurely breakfast, was given some forwarded mail by the porter—who had entered the room, braided cap in hand—then smoked a cigarette and opened one or two of the letters. And so it transpired that he was present for the entrance of the slug-abed awaited in the corner.

  He came through the glass door and walked straight across the quiet room to his sisters’ table. His gait was extraordinarily graceful both in the way he held his upper torso and in the way he moved his knees and white-shod feet; it was a very light gait, at once delicate and proud, and embellished by the childlike modesty with which, twice on his way across the room, he turned his head and raised, then lowered his eyes. Smiling and murmuring a word in his soft, fuzzy language, he took his seat, and now, especially as he had turned his full profile to the observer, the latter was once more amazed, indeed, startled by the truly godlike beauty of this mortal being. Today the boy was wearing a lightweight, washable outfit with a blue-and-white-striped middy blouse that had a red silk bow at the chest and a plain white stand-up collar. The collar, though none too elegant a match for the rest of the outfit, showed off the boy’s fair, blossoming head in its consummate charm, the head of an Eros with the creamy glaze of Parian marble, eyebrows serious and finely traced, temples and ear covered darkly and softly at right angles by encroaching ringlets.

  Good, good, thought Aschenbach with that cool, professional approval in which artists encountering
a masterpiece sometimes shroud their delight, their excitement. Truth to tell, he went on thinking, were sea and shore not awaiting me, I should stay here as long as you! But he did leave, greeted by the staff as he passed through the lobby, then descending the large terrace and proceeding straight along the boardwalk to the beach partitioned off for the hotel guests. He was shown to his rented cabana by the barefoot old man in linen trousers, sailor’s tunic, and straw hat serving there as bathing attendant, had his table and chair set up on a sandy wooden platform, and made himself comfortable in the chaise longue he had drawn onto the wax-yellow sand closer to the water.

  The view of the beach, the spectacle of civilization indulging in carefree sensuality on the brink of the watery element, entertained and pleased him as rarely before. The flat gray sea was already alive with wading children, swimmers, and colorful figures lying on sandbars, their arms crossed under their heads. Others were rowing small keelless boats painted red and blue, laughing as they capsized. The long row of cabanas, which had platforms like miniature verandahs for people to sit on, was a scene of animated activity and idly protracted repose, visits and chatter, meticulous matitudinal elegance alongside a nakedness unabashedly enjoying the freedoms of the place. Further out on the moist, firm sand there were individuals strolling in white bathing robes or loose, brightly colored frocks. On the right, an intricate sand castle built by children was bedecked with small flags in the colors of all nations; vendors hawked mussels, pastries, and fruit, kneeling before their wares. On the left, in front of one of the cabanas set at right angles to the others and to the sea and thus closing off that side of the beach, a Russian family had set up camp—men with beards and big teeth; listless, submissive women; a Baltic spinster seated at an easel and emitting cries of despair as she painted the sea; two ugly, good-natured children; and an old nanny in a kerchief, with the gentle, servile manner of a slave. They were cheerful and having great fun, tirelessly shouting the names of the romping, unruly children, using the few Italian words at their disposal to joke with the amusing old man from whom they bought sweets, kissing one another on the cheeks, and caring never a whit whether their very human esprit de corps was being observed.