by Colm Toibin
“My only worry is that Italy is a place where people, I am told, walk in the streets at night. We have had enough of that. To this day, I can’t imagine what you do in the streets. I am going to make Heinrich promise to make sure you are in your bed early.”
* * *
As they made plans to travel south, Heinrich told him how much he had pleaded Thomas’s cause with their mother. He said that he had told her that he admired Thomas’s poetry. Thomas simply thanked him.
He liked the idea of traveling with someone whom he could not trust completely. It would encourage him, even more than usual, to share no secrets. They could discuss literature and even politics, perhaps music too, but, still alert to how much power Heinrich and their mother had over him, Thomas would remain wary of letting his brother find out anything that could be used against him in the future. He did not wish to return to fire insurance.
They went first to Naples, avoiding any Germans they saw, and then they traveled, using the mail coach, to Palestrina in the Sabine Hills east of Rome, situated above a valley, the roads lined with mulberry bushes, olive groves and vine garlands, the tilled fields divided into small holdings by stone walls. They settled in Casa Bernadini, where Heinrich had stayed before. It was a solid sober edifice on a sloping side street.
With a bedroom each, they shared a shaded, stone-floored living room, furnished with wicker chairs and horsehair sofas, where they had two desks installed so that they could work, like two hermits or two dutiful clerks, with their backs to each other.
The landlady, known to all as Nella, held court on the floor above, the large kitchen her headquarters. She informed the brothers that they had been preceded by a Russian aristocrat who had been visited by wandering spirits.
“I am glad,” she said, “that he took the spirits with him. Palestrina has its own spirits and we do not need visiting ones.”
While in Naples, Thomas had barely slept. His room was too hot, but also the sensations, as he strolled in the city during the day, were too strong. When, one morning, a young man followed him and his brother, he was aware how overdressed they were and formal, how much they stood out. The young man hissed at them in English first, but then, drawing closer, changed to German. He offered them girls. As the brothers ignored him and sought to get away from him, he came nearer still, held Thomas by the arm and whispered that he had girls, but not only girls. The tone was confidential and insinuating. The phrase “but not only girls” was clearly one he had used before.
When they had forced a way past him in the busy street, Heinrich nudged Thomas.
“It’s better after dark and also better to be alone. He’s just playing with us. Nothing ever happens during the day.”
Heinrich sounded casual, worldly, but Thomas was unsure that it was not mere bravado. He looked at the run-down buildings in the narrow streets and asked himself if there were rooms, shadowy, guarded spaces, in some of those houses where transactions might take place. As Thomas studied faces, including the faces of young men, many of them fresh and exquisitely alive with beauty, he wondered if they, or young men like them, made themselves available when night fell.
He saw himself going out alone, quietly passing Heinrich’s door. He pictured these streets at night, the waste, the fetid smell, the stray dogs, the sounds of voices from windows and doorways, perhaps figures standing at corners, watchful. He imagined how he might intimate to one of these men what it was he wanted.
“You look like a man with something on his mind,” Heinrich said as they walked into a large square with a church on one side.
“The smells are all new to me,” Thomas replied. “I was thinking of words I could use to describe them.”
The atmosphere they had encountered in Naples filled Thomas’s waking time and entered his dreams. Even as he worked on new stories in Palestrina, even as he could hear Heinrich’s pen scratching against the paper when he wrote at the other desk, what might have happened in Naples on one of those nights gave him energy. He imagined being led into a room with a yellowish glare from a lamp, some broken furniture, a faded rug on the floor. And then a solemn young man in a suit and tie opened the door and closed it quietly behind him, his hair shiny black, his eyes dark, the expression on his face purposeful. Without speaking, without paying Thomas the slightest attention, the young man began to undress.
Trying to put away these thoughts, making a deal with himself that when he finished an episode in the story he could let his mind wander back to that moment in the room, he started to write again, realizing that the flushed vitality he felt was making its way into the very scene he was composing. When Heinrich’s pen went silent, he found that he needed to go on writing so that the silence in the room would not be complete. Having finished the scene, he stood up noiselessly from his chair and, as he crossed the room, he saw Heinrich stealthily stuff some sheets of paper under a notebook.
Later, when Heinrich went out for a walk, Thomas lifted the notebook to find four or five pages beneath covered in drawings of naked women with enormous breasts. In some of the drawings he had included arms and legs, even hands and feet. In a few, the woman was holding a cigarette or a drink. But in all of them the breasts were large and bare, complete with carefully executed nipples.
How strange, he thought, that both of them, as they worked each day on their fiction, had something else on their minds, something that depended for its impact on the strength of their imaginations. He wondered if his father, as he made deals, as he visited the bank and sought to find partners for investments, had really been thinking all the time about more private matters that quickened his breath.
Often, when Heinrich was out walking, Thomas felt an urge to join him, but he knew that his brother’s need for solitude was even greater than his own, or his brother’s sense was more developed of how peculiar they would look, two young bachelor brothers out walking together.
Their landlady had two such brothers herself, both edging towards infirmity, who lived together. They came some evenings and sat in the kitchen, or appeared on Sundays after mass. Thomas was aware how odd they seemed, even in familiar surroundings. They were neither married nor single. They bore each other a sort of mild dislike. One of them had been a lawyer and there was some mystery over his retirement from that profession. It was often referred to by his brother, who was immediately ordered to be silent by his sister, the landlady. One brother was superstitious but the other brother, the lawyer, disapproved. When the superstitious one slyly informed Thomas and Heinrich that a man was obliged to place his right hand on his testicles on seeing a priest, the lawyer insisted that there was no such obligation.
“In fact,” he said, “there is an obligation not to do any such thing. As there is an obligation to be rational. That is why we have minds.”
Thomas wondered if he and Heinrich were a paler version of this pair. Once they relaxed into middle age, he thought, the similarities would become more apparent. They remained together now, he presumed, because it was easier to ask their mother for more money if the request came from both of them, combined with anecdotes about their travels and serious references to their work.
Only once in that Italian sojourn did the Mann brothers have an argument. It began when Heinrich expressed an opinion that Thomas had never heard before: he insisted that the unification of Germany had been a mistake and had served only to further Prussian dominance.
“They seized control,” he said, “and all in the name of progress.”
For Thomas, German unification, which took place the very year of Heinrich’s birth and four years before he himself was born, was settled business. No one could dispute its value. It had evolved gradually as a project and then it made official something that was already clear. Germany was one nation. Germans spoke one language.
“You think Bavaria and Lübeck are part of the same nation?” Heinrich asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Germany, if I can use the word, contained two elements that were dire
ct opposites. One was all emotion, about the language, the people, the folktales, the forest, the primeval past. It was all ridiculous. But the other was about money and control and power. It used the language of dreams to mask pure greed and naked ambition. Prussian greed. Prussian naked ambition. It will end badly.”
“Will the unification of Italy end badly too?”
“No, just Germany. Prussia gained its hegemony by winning wars. It is controlled by the military. The Italian army is a joke. Try making a joke about the Prussian army.”
“Germany is a great modern nation.”
“You are talking nonsense. You often talk nonsense. You believe what you hear. You are a young poet who longs for lost love. But you are from a country that is interested in expansion, dominance. You must learn to think. You will never be a novelist unless you learn to think. Tolstoy could think. So could Balzac. It is a misfortune that you cannot think.”
Thomas stood up and left the room. Over the days that followed he tried to formulate an argument that would show that Heinrich was wrong. It struck him that Heinrich might have been trying out an argument and that he had not really meant what he had said. Perhaps he had been arguing for the sake of it. He had never heard him say anything like that before.
Palazzo Barberini, overlooking the town, was a vast barracks. Without telling Heinrich, Thomas slipped away to visit the Nile mosaic from the second century B.C. that the guidebook referred to. There was a woman at the door who expressed surprise when Thomas materialized; she informed him in a melancholy tone what time the building would be closing. She directed him to the mosaic, which was guarded by a desultory-looking young man in threadbare livery.
What fascinated Thomas was the sheer dullness of the color of the mosaic, which must have faded with time, how much gray and watery blue now prevailed, how the color of slate and mud had come to dominate.
The washed light over the Nile made him think of the docks at Lübeck, the clouds blown back by the wind, his father telling him that he could, if he wished, run from one bollard to the next, but he must avoid tripping on ropes and must not go too close to the water.
His father was with one of his clerks; they were talking about ships and cargo and schedules. Drops of rain came, causing the two men to inspect the sky and put out their hands to see if it really did mean to pour down on them.
Something came to him then. He saw the novel he had been thinking about in its entirety. For this book, he would re-create himself as an only child and make his mother a delicate, musical German heiress. He would make Aunt Elisabeth a mercurial heroine. The hero would not be a person, but the family firm itself. And the atmosphere of mercantile confidence in Lübeck would be the background, but the firm would be doomed, as the only son of the family would be doomed.
Just as the artist of the mosaic had imagined a liquid world washed by cloud and by light from water, he would remake Lübeck. He would enter his father’s spirit, and the spirits of his mother, his grandmother, his aunt. He would see all of them and chart the decline of their fortunes.
* * *
When they arrived back in Munich, Thomas began to map out the novel Buddenbrooks. Even though he saw Heinrich regularly, he told him little about the project, allowing him instead to see the stories he had been working on, which would soon be published in a book. But when he tried to concentrate solely on his work, he found Munich itself too distracting. He was taking too many walks, reading too many newspapers and literary journals and staying up too late. He needed to be in a place where the novel could take up all of his life and where there would be no temptation, at this early stage, to share its contents with anyone else.
He went to Rome, where he started to write the book in earnest. Knowing no one in the city gave him freedom. There must have been a place where young literary men gathered, but he did not try to find it. He moved the table in his small room to the window. He made a rule that if he wrote for half an hour, he could then lie on the narrow bed for ten minutes. He started work each day as soon as he woke.
The Lübeck he remembered came in disparate images, almost fragments. It was like something that had shattered and his memory held only shards. When he embarked on each scene he created a world that connected and was complete. It made him feel that he could rescue what had ended. The lives of the Manns in Lübeck would soon be forgotten, but if he could make this book succeed, a book that was growing longer than anything he had planned, the lives of the Buddenbrook family would matter in the future.
By the time he returned to Munich, he had completed the early chapters of the book.
Since Heinrich and Thomas had been published, they could, if they chose, join their colleagues in any of the literary cafés in Munich. As they moved from one café to another, they were recognized and sought out. Gradually, Thomas found himself sitting at the very tables in the very company that only a year earlier he had watched from afar.
Soon he found a part-time job on a magazine that allowed him to rent a small flat of his own. As often as he could, he worked late into the night on his book. On one of those evenings when he was almost twenty-three, when the novel was almost halfway done, he joined a group at a table that included two young men whom he did not know. He was interested in them because they were brothers who did not appear uneasy in each other’s presence. They spoke to each other warmly as though they were friends or colleagues. They were Paul Ehrenberg and his brother Carl, both musicians, Carl studying at Cologne and Paul, who also studied painting, at Munich.
Thomas was amused at how naturally they both moved in and out of a sort of folksy way of speaking. Everything about them was whimsical. They had been brought up in Dresden, and they spoke to each other in imitation of some ancient burgher of that city, or some farmer from the surrounding countryside who had come into the city with pigs and a cartload of produce for the market. He tried to imagine himself and Heinrich imitating the people of Lübeck, but he did not think it was something that would amuse Heinrich.
As he got to know Paul, he made the mistake of introducing him to his family, to find that Paul harbored amorous thoughts about his sister Lula, and that his mother wished Paul to be a regular caller.
Sometimes the conversation between Thomas and Paul could be frank, as they agreed that male sexuality was complex and could take many turns. It was tacitly acknowledged that they shared certain feelings. So when they spoke of avoiding loose women or women of the street and expressed an interest instead in high-class ladies, Thomas understood that, since high-class ladies were not easily obtainable, this was a code for something else.
They began to meet alone in the cafés less frequented by their literary and artistic friends and to find a table at the back of the establishment rather than sit in the glare of the front window. They did not feel compelled to speak. They could each look into the distance, live with unspoken thoughts, and then catch each other’s eye and let the gaze linger.
Paul was the only one whom Thomas told about the novel. It started as a joke when he let Paul know just how many pages he had completed, with no end in sight.
“No one will read it,” he said. “No one will publish it.”
“Why don’t you shorten it?” Paul asked.
“It needs every scene. It is the story of decline. In order to make the decline matter I have to show the family at their most confident.”
He had to try not to be too earnest about the book, content to play the part of the self-indulgent writer in attic quarters producing a book with a mixture of wild ambition and supreme lack of caution. He understood that Paul knew he was serious, but Paul also found his efforts to return to a discussion of his work-in-progress tedious.
One evening, it was clear that Paul did not know how to react to revelations about his novel.
“I killed myself in the novel today,” Thomas said. “It began last night. I will read it over and make some changes, but it is done. I found the details in a medical textbook.”
“Will everyone know
it is you?”
“Yes. I am the boy Hanno and he has died of typhoid.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“The family cannot go on. He is the last of the family.”
“There is no one left?”
“Just his mother.”
Paul became silent and seemed uncomfortable. Thomas realized that he would soon tire of the subject.
“I had come to love him,” he went on, “his delicacy, his way of playing music, his solitude, his suffering. All these elements of him I knew, because they were elements of me. I felt a strange control over him and I wanted not to let him live, as though I had found a way of overseeing my own death, directing it sentence by sentence, living it as if it were something sensual.”
“Sensual?”
“That is what I felt when I wrote it.”
* * *
Since Paul knew how much these meetings meant to Thomas as he came to the end of his novel, he started to tease him by changing plans at short notice or by dropping a note around to Thomas’s apartment to cancel a tryst. Paul was the one with the power. Sometimes he pulled Thomas close to him, and then, without warning, he let the rope slacken.
On the day Thomas got news that the novel would be published in two volumes, he needed to find Paul to tell him. He tried his home address first and left a note there, and then at Paul’s studio. He went to the various cafés, but it was too early. Finally, after supper, he located Paul. He was surrounded by fellow artists. When Thomas, having sat down with them, tried to talk to him, Paul did not respond, but joined in the laughter at the expense of some professor who lectured on light and shade.
“For shade, you must mix the gray and the brown and then add some blue,” Paul said, doing an imitation of an old man. “But the mix must be the right mix. The wrong mix will get the wrong shade.”