by Thomas Mann
Thus he saw it again, that most awe-inspiring port, that dazzling arrangement of fantastic architecture with which the Republic has perennially greeted the reverent eyes of approaching seafarers: the easy majesty of the Palace of the Doges, the Bridge of Sighs, the pillars of the lion and saint by the Lagoon, the magnificent projected arm of the magical San Marco Basilica, the view beyond the gateway to the city and the giant clock. And he realized as he took this all in that arriving in Venice by land via the train station was like entering a palace through one of the back doors, that this most unlikely of cities should only be approached by ship, over high sea, as he was now doing.
The engine stopped, gondolas pulled alongside them, the gangway was let down, customs officials came on board and performed their duties, and at long last they were able to begin disembarking. Aschenbach let it be known he wished to hire a gondola to take him and his luggage to the landing of those small steam boats, or vaporetti, which shuttle between the city and the Lido, for he intended to take a room there on the ocean. His plans meet with approval, and someone shouts down to the water, where a number of gondoliers are quarrelling in dialect. Still, he is blocked from disembarking, blocked by his own luggage, which is being half dragged, half carried down the ladderlike gangway. Consequently, for some minutes, he finds himself unable to avoid the intimacies of the horrific old fop, who has been moved by some obscure drunken impulse to pay his courtesies to this complete stranger. “We hope you have a most pleasant stay,” he bleats, bowing and scraping. “We trust you won’t forget us! Au revoir, excusez, and bon jour, your Excellency!” Drooling, the old fop shuts his eyes and licks at the corners of his mouth, and the dyed imperial on his age-worn lower lip jerks upward. “Our best,” he babbles on, slurring his words and raising two fingertips to his mouth. “Give our best to your sweetheart, the sweetest, prettiest little sweetheart of them all.” Suddenly his upper denture falls out of his jaw onto his lower lip. At that point Aschenbach was able to escape. “Your sweetheart, your tender little sweetheart.” He could still hear the old man’s vapid, alcohol-impaired cooing over his shoulder as he climbed down the gangway, clinging tightly to the ropes.
Who among us would not have to suppress a momentary shudder, a second of unspoken anxious dread, upon first stepping or first restepping after years into a Venetian gondola? Unchanged since the days of yore and of that special black possessed by no other earthly objects save coffins, this extraordinary means of conveyance calls to mind furtive criminal adventures undertaken on soggy nights. Still more, it evokes death itself, the bier, the solemn rites and the final silent voyage. Has it been duly noted that the typical seating arrangement in such a gondola—its polish coffin and its upholstery matte black—is the softest, plushest, most sleep-inducing armchair in the entire world? This thought impressed itself upon Aschenbach as he settled back at the gondolier’s feet, facing his bags, which had been tidily arranged in the prow. The gondoliers were still quarrelling in their coarse, incomprehensible dialect, making hostile gestures all the while. The characteristic stillness of the watery city, however, seemed to envelop, disembody and scatter their voices over the tides. It was hot here in the harbor. Feeling the warm breath of the sirocco, leaning back into the cushions and floating atop that soft and forgiving element, the traveler closed his eyes to savor a moment of self-indulgence, as unfamiliar as it was sweet. This trip will not last long, he thought. If only it could last forever! Gently rocked by the water, he sensed himself gliding away from the crowd and the confusion of the voices.
How quiet it was growing around him! Nothing could be heard except the soft splash of the oar, the dull slap of the waves against the prow—which stuck up from the water, stiff, black and spiked like a halberd—and a third sound as well, a murmuring, a muttering: the hissing of the gondolier through his teeth. He was talking to himself in spasmodic phrases muted by his laboring arms. Aschenbach opened his eyes and was rather startled to find the Lagoon growing wider and the boat heading out toward the open sea. It seemed he couldn’t relax too much; some attention was required to ensure that his requests were indeed carried out.
“See here, to the vaporetto landing,” he said over his shoulder. The muttering ceased, but he received no answer.
“To the vaporetto landing, I said!” he reiterated, turning fully around and staring up into the face of the gondolier, who towered behind him imposingly against the pale sky on his raised plank. The man cut an unforgiving, even brutal figure. He was dressed in sailor’s blues, with a yellow sash for a belt and a fraying straw hat of no particular style cocked insolently on his head. His face, with its curled blond mustache under a faintly upturned nose, made him look very un-Italian. Though comparatively slight of stature, so that he might have been considered ill-suited for his career, he rowed with great energy, putting his whole body into every stroke. Once or twice, the exertion made him grimace, exposing his white teeth. Wrinkling his reddish eyebrows, he peered over his passenger’s head into the distance and answered in a firm, almost rude tone:
“You go to the Lido.”
Aschenbach responded:
“Yes indeed. But I only hired the gondola to take me over to San Marco. I wish to take the vaporetto.”
“You cannot take the vaporetto, sir.”
“And why not?”
“Because the vaporetto does not allow luggage.”
That was true, as Aschenbach now recalled. He fell silent. Nonetheless, the brusque arrogance the man displayed toward his foreign guest, so unlike Italy, struck him as intolerable. He said:
“That’s my affair. Perhaps I want to store my luggage. You’ll turn around immediately.”
Silence ensued. The oar splashed, and the water lapped dully against the prow. And the murmuring and muttering began again: the gondolier had resumed talking to himself through his teeth.
What was there to do? Alone, swept along by the current with this oddly insubordinate, eerily determined man, the traveler could see no way to enforce his will. And anyway, how very comfortable he could make himself, so long as he didn’t cause a fuss! Hadn’t he wished that the trip would take longer, that it would go on forever? It was wisest and, more to the point, most agreeable to let things take their course. A spell of lethargy seemed to emanate from his seat, from this low-slung, black-upholstered armchair that was gently rocked by the oar strokes of the all-powerful gondolier behind him. The idea of having fallen into criminal hands flashed through Aschenbach’s mind like a dream but was incapable of rousing his conscious mind to any act of self-defense. The more irritating possibility was that it was all just an attempt at petty extortion. Some feeling related to duty or pride—akin to the suddenly remembered necessity of taking heed, lest one or the other flare up—allowed Aschenbach to gather himself once more. He asked:
“What do you charge for the trip?”
Staring into the distance above his head, the gondolier answered:
“You will pay.”
His response was prescribed. Aschenbach said mechanically:
“I’ll pay nothing, nothing at all, if you insist upon taking me where I don’t want to go.”
“You go to the Lido.”
“But not with you.”
“I take you well.”
That’s the truth, thought Aschenbach, giving up. You are taking me well, no doubt about that. You may just be out for the money I’m carrying, you may clobber me from behind with your oar and send me to Pluto’s dark domain, but you’ll have taken me well.
Only nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, they even had company, a boatload of musical pirates, both men and women, singing to guitar and mandolin. They pushed their way hard alongside the gondola and shattered the silence on the water with profit-hungry tourist lyrics. Aschenbach threw some money into their outstretched hat, and they ceased playing immediately and moved off. Once again the gondolier could be heard, talking to himself in spasmodic,
panting breaths.
Thus, after a time, they arrived, bobbing in the wake of a city-bound steamship. Two municipal policemen paced along the banks with their hands behind their backs and their faces toward the Lagoon. Aschenbach got out of the gondola, assisted by that old man with a hook you find on every boat landing in Venice, and, seeing that he had only large bills, walked over to the adjacent hotel to get change in order to pay the gondolier what he felt he owed. He does this in the lobby, returns and finds his luggage loaded onto a cart on the quay. Gondola and gondolier have vanished.
“He cleared out,” said the old man with the boat hook. “A bad man, a man without a license, good sir. He is the only gondolier with no license. The others phoned over. He saw that he was expected. So he cleared out.”
Aschenbach shrugged.
“The gentleman has gotten a free ride,” the old man said, holding out his hat. Aschenbach threw some coins in. He instructed the man to take his luggage to the beach hotel, then followed the cart down the avenue, that white-blossomed avenue lined on both sides with taverns, bazaars and pensioni that runs straight across the island to the beach.
He entered the grandiose hotel through the garden terrace in the back, passing through the main parlor and lobby into the reception office. He had reserved his quarters in advance, so registration was quick, a mere formality. One of the managers—a small, soft-spoken, sycophantically polite man with a dark mustache and a French frock coat—accompanied him in the elevator up to the third floor and showed him to his room, a pleasant place furnished in cherrywood and enlivened by strongly scented flowers. Its tall windows overlooked the open sea. He walked over to one of them after the manager had withdrawn and, with his back to the room where the luggage was being delivered and arranged, stared down at the largely deserted afternoon beach and the sunless sea at high tide, whose long, low-breaking waves lapped peacefully and regularly against the shore.
The observations and chance encounters of the solitary and silent are more blurred, yet at the same time more probing than those of social beings. Their thoughts are deeper and weirder, and never without a tinge of sorrow. Images and perceptions that might otherwise be easily dispensed with by a glance, a laugh or an exchange of opinion excessively occupy the lone individual, gaining depth in silence, taking on meaning, becoming personal experience, adventure and emotion. Solitude yields the original, the boldly and shockingly beautiful, the poem. Yet solitude also yields the perverse and disproportionate, the ridiculous and the beyond-the-pale. Thus the attending apparitions of his arrival in Venice, the horrible old fop babbling about his sweetheart and the pariah gondolier cheated of his pay, still weighed upon the traveler’s spirits. Without being difficult to account for or providing any real food for thought, these events were nonetheless, it seemed to him, deeply strange and—precisely in the contradiction—unsettling. At the same time, his eyes welcomed the sea, and his heart lifted with the knowledge that Venice was so nearby and easily accessible. Finally, he turned away from the window, washed his face, left detailed instructions for the maid as to how to make his room most comfortable and ordered the Swiss elevator boy in the green uniform to take him to the ground floor.
He drank his tea on the seaside terrace, then went down to the promenade and followed the waterfront a good stretch in the direction of the Hotel Excelsior. When he returned, it already seemed time to get dressed for dinner. He did this slowly and deliberately, as always, for it was his habit to work while making himself ready. Nevertheless, he still arrived a bit early in the parlor, where he found a considerable number of other hotel guests assembled, unacquainted with one another and affecting mutual indifference, yet united by their common anticipation of dinner. He picked up a newspaper from the reading table, sank back into a leather armchair and observed the company, which differed from that of the earlier hotel in one particularly pleasant respect.
A broad horizon spread before him, tolerantly encompassing great diversity. Muffled sounds from all the major languages mingled with one another in the air. Evening attire, recognized the world over as the official uniform of civilized society, lent a properly homogenous exterior to the spectrum of variations on the human form. The long dry face of the American, the extended Russian family, typically English ladies and German children with French nannies were all represented, but the Slavic contingent seemed to predominate. Polish was being spoken in his immediate vicinity.
A group of young people, halfway into and just shy of adulthood, stood assembled around a small wicker table under the watchful eye of a tutor or governess: there were three young girls who appeared to be between fifteen and seventeen and a long-haired boy of around fourteen. To his astonishment Aschenbach realized that the boy was absolutely beautiful. Pale and elegantly reserved, with ringlets of honey-colored hair, a straight sloping nose, a lovely mouth and an expression of divinely blessed solemnity, his face called to mind Greek sculptures of the best period. And to complement this physical perfection, he possessed such a unique aura of personal charm that the gazing Aschenbach couldn’t recall having ever encountered anything, in either nature or art, so flawlessly realized. What also struck him was an obviously fundamental contrast in the pedagogical philosophy governing how the siblings were dressed and reared. The outfits of the three girls, the oldest of whom could have passed for an adult, were so austere and chaste as to distort their appearance. The same slate gray, cloistral uniform, cut gravely below the calf, intentionally unflattering of design, with a white turned-down collar as its sole bright spot, suppressed and negated any hint of attractiveness in the girls’ figures. Their hair, slicked back flat against their skulls, gave their faces the empty, taciturn look of nuns. One thing was clear: it was a mother who laid down the rules here, one who wouldn’t have dreamt of treating her son with the same pedagogic strictness deemed appropriate for the girls. His existence was one of visible softness and gentility. Care had been taken that scissors not touch his beautiful head of hair; like that of Il Spinaro, it curled in ringlets over his forehead and ears and down the back of his neck. His English sailor’s suit with its lanyards, stitching and embroidery—its puffy sleeves tapered down to fit tightly around the fine wrists of his still childlike yet slender hands—made his delicate figure seem somewhat rich and spoiled. He sat in semiprofile across from the observing Aschenbach, one patent-leather-clad foot before the other, his elbow propped on the armrest of the wicker chair, cheek glued to a closed hand. It was a posture of relaxed dignity without a trace of the almost subservient stiffness to which his female siblings seemed accustomed. Did he suffer from something? The skin on his face gleamed white as ivory against the golden shadows of the surrounding locks. Or was he simply a pampered darling, indulged by a capricious love showing its favoritism? Aschenbach was inclined toward the latter. Almost every artistic nature is born with a revealing connoisseurial tendency that appreciates injustice so long as it results in beauty and that applauds, even worships, aristocratic privilege.
A waiter made the rounds and announced in English that dinner was served. Gradually the company moved through the glass door into the dining room. Late arrivals hurried past, emerging from the lobby and the elevators. Inside, dinner was already being laid out, but the young Poles remained seated around the little wicker table. Aschenbach waited with them, comfortably ensconced in his deep chair, beauty before his eyes.
Finally the governess—a small, corpulent, red-faced lady of mixed family—signalled for the party to get up. Brows arched, she pushed her chair back and bowed as a tall woman wearing a light gray evening gown and a rich set of pearls entered the parlor. The woman’s manner was cool and measured, her lightly powdered hair arranged and her gown designed with that simplicity of fashion to be found wherever piety represents an essential component of nobility. In Germany she could have been the wife of an important governmental officer. The only element of the extraordinary or the luxurious in her appearance was her jewelry, a pair of dangling
earrings and three very long strands of gently shimmering pearls, as big as cherries, all of which were literally priceless.
The children were on their feet at once. They bent and kissed their mother’s hand, while she stared off over their heads with a reserved smile on her well-kept but nonetheless somewhat weary and drawn face. She addressed a few words in French to the governess, then approached the glass door. The children followed her: first the girls in order of age, then the governess, then finally the boy. For some reason he looked back as he crossed the threshold, so that, since no one else was waiting in the parlor, his peculiar twilight gray eyes met those of Aschenbach, who had let his newspaper sink to his knee and, enraptured, was staring at the group.
As far as the details were concerned, there was nothing particularly remarkable about what he had witnessed. One doesn’t sit down at table before mother has arrived; one waits for her, greeting her respectfully before going to dine, in observance of correct etiquette. Yet the whole ceremony had been performed so decisively, with such a strong accent of good breeding, devotion to duty and self-respect, that Aschenbach found it strangely arresting. He lingered a few moments longer. Then he, too, entered the dining room and was shown to his table, which, he noticed with a fleeting pang of regret, was quite far from the one where the Polish family was seated.
Fatigued, yet with fired imagination, he entertained himself during the tedious dinner with abstract, even transcendental thoughts. He contemplated the mysterious bond that must be concluded between the individual exception and the rule if human beauty is to arise, before proceeding on to general questions of form and art. But he discovered in the end that his thoughts and inspirations were like the intimations of a dream, which always seem inspired at the time but prove utterly shallow and useless to the waking mind. After dinner he passed some time smoking in a chair, then wandered around in the evening scents of the garden. He retired early and slept deeply throughout the night, although his sleep was animated by various dream images.