by Colm Toibin
It fascinated Thomas that Mahler was alive, still writing, imagining the sounds that would come from notation, working in the sure knowledge that his single-minded devotion to music would shortly be nothing. Some moment soon would witness his writing the very last note of his life. This moment was not determined by spirit, but simply by the beating of his heart.
* * *
When Heinrich came to visit, he told them that Carla’s death continued to haunt him. What had happened to his sister was with him as soon as he woke and was still lingering in his mind as he went to sleep. There was something so free about Carla’s spirit that even in death she would not rest. He had been to see their mother, and she too felt the presence of her daughter in the shadowy spaces of the house in Polling.
As Heinrich expressed his open grief, Thomas realized that after his sister’s death he had busied himself with writing. Sometimes he even managed to believe that her suicide had not even happened. He almost envied Heinrich his readiness to talk about Carla.
Heinrich when he spoke of the family was easier company than when he spoke of current events. He had become emphatically left-wing and internationalist in his views. In the newspapers, there were accounts of escalating tension between Germany and Russia and France and Britain. While Thomas believed that the other countries were, for nefarious reasons, forcing Germany to increase its military spending, Heinrich saw this as an example of Prussian expansionism. He seemed to be following a set of principles, applying them to each day’s news. Thomas found political discussions with his brother tedious.
But he had never witnessed Heinrich suffering before as he did now while talking of Carla’s suicide. His brother left long gaps between words, often beginning a phrase that he did not complete.
Katia signaled that she would be happy for them to join Heinrich when he returned to Rome, and Thomas agreed that they should spend a few weeks in Italy with him, seeing if company might console him. They could leave the children in Munich in the care of a governess and some servants, with Katia’s mother visiting. Rather than Rome or Naples, Thomas felt he would like to go to the Adriatic. The very word “Adriatic” offered him images of soft sunlight and warm seawater, especially as he contemplated it during a freezing lecture tour in Cologne and Frankfurt and other nearby cities that had become an annual event for him.
In May they booked a hotel on the island of Brioni off the coast of Istria and took the overnight train from Munich to Trieste and then a local train. Thomas liked the formal manners of the hotel staff, the heavy, old-fashioned furniture, the sense of custom and ceremony even on the small stony beach. The food was cooked in the Austrian style, and a reasonably fluent German was spoken by the waiters.
All three, however, developed a pronounced dislike of an archduchess who was staying at the hotel with her followers. When she came into the dining room, all the other guests were expected to rise and not sit down again until this archduchess was suitably seated. And no one was expected to leave the dining room until she did. And they had to stand up again as she departed.
“We are more important than she is,” Katia said, laughing.
“I am going to remain seated,” Heinrich insisted.
Her presence made them feel comfortable with one another. When Heinrich was formulating some fresh opinion about the need for Prussians to rid themselves of their irrational anxieties, they could discuss the archduchess and the unctuous way in which the restaurant manager approached her table and took her order, walking backwards with decorous care as he personally brought this order to the kitchen.
“I would like to see her in the water,” Katia said. “Water has a way of splashing on the mighty in a way that does them no favors.”
“That is how empires end,” Heinrich said, “a mad old bat being treated obsequiously in a provincial hotel. It will all be swept away.”
It was the dullness of the island, as much as the self-importance of the archduchess, that caused them in the end to want to leave the Dalmatian coast. They found that there was a steamer at Pola that would take them to Venice, where Thomas booked rooms at the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido.
On the day before they traveled, news came that Mahler had died. It was a headline in all the newspapers.
“Klaus, my brother,” Katia said, “was in love with him, and many of his friends were too.”
“Do you mean—?” Heinrich asked.
“Yes, I do. I am sure nothing ever happened, however. And Alma was always on the lookout.”
“I only met Alma once,” Heinrich said. “If I had married her, I would be dead too.”
“I remember how she ignored Mahler and that seemed to give him pleasure,” Thomas said.
“Those young men loved him,” Katia continued. “Klaus and his friends took bets on who would manage to kiss him first.”
“Kiss Mahler?” Thomas asked.
“My father, I think, prefers Bruckner,” Katia said. “But he loves Mahler’s songs. And one of the symphonies. I can’t think which one.”
“It couldn’t be the one I heard,” Heinrich said, “because it was so long it lasted from April into the New Year. I grew a long beard listening to it.”
“In our house, Mahler was much loved,” Katia said. “Even saying Mahler’s name gave my brother a funny kind of satisfaction. In every other way he is normal.”
“Your brother Klaus? Normal?” Thomas asked.
* * *
Thomas had never arrived in Venice by sea before. In the instant that he caught sight of the city in silhouette, he knew that this time he would write about it. In the same instant, it came to him what consolation he would get if he could bring Mahler to life in a story. He imagined him here, in this very spot, having shifted position on the boat to get a better view.
Thomas knew how he would describe Mahler: below middle height, with a head that looked rather too large for his almost delicate figure. He wore his hair brushed back. He had a lofty, rugged, knotty brow and a gaze that was always ready to move inwards.
As Thomas saw him now, the figure in his story was a writer rather than a composer, the author of a number of books that Thomas himself had thought of writing, such as a volume on Frederick the Great. He was a famous figure in his own country, and now he sought a rest from his work and indeed from his fame.
“Are you thinking about something?” Katia asked him.
“Yes, but I am not sure what it is.”
Once the engines stopped, gondolas pressed alongside, the landing stairs were let down, customs officials came on board and people began to go ashore. As they sat in their gondola, Thomas noted its somber, ceremonial style, as though it had been designed to take coffins rather than living people through the canals of Venice.
When they stood in the lobby of the hotel, Thomas remarked that it was good to be in a place free of the archduchess. Their rooms overlooked the beach, and the sea, now at full tide, was sending long, low waves with rhythmic beats onto the sand.
At dinner, they discovered themselves in a cosmopolitan world. A party of polite and subdued Americans sat at the table closest to them, and beyond them some English ladies, a Russian family, some Germans and Poles.
He observed the Polish mother, who was with her daughters, sending the waiter away, as there was one more member of the party still to come. Then they indicated to a boy, who had just come through the double doors, that he sit down quickly. He was late.
The boy crossed the dining room with quiet self-possession. He was blond, with curls that stretched almost to his shoulder. He wore an English sailor suit. He walked confidently towards the family table, bowing almost formally to his mother and sisters, taking a seat in Thomas’s clear eyeline.
Katia had noticed the boy as well, but Heinrich, Thomas thought, had not.
“I wish to see St. Mark’s Square,” Heinrich said, “as who does not? And then the Frari, and perhaps also San Rocco for the Tintorettos, and then there is a strange little room, like a small shop, that show
s Carpaccio. And that is all I want to see. The rest of the time I want to swim, think of nothing, look at the sea and the sky.”
Thomas noted the whiteness of the boy’s skin, the blueness of his eyes, his way of remaining still. When his mother addressed him, the boy nodded politely. He spoke to the waiter with seriousness and decorum. It was not merely his beauty that affected Thomas now, it was his way of holding himself, of being quiet without being sullen, of sitting with his family while staying apart from them. Thomas studied his composure, his self-assurance. When the boy caught his eye, Thomas looked down, determined that he would concern himself with plans for the next day and think no more about the boy.
In the morning, since the sky was blue, they decided that they would make full use of the facilities that the hotel provided on the beach. Thomas carried his notebook and a novel he thought he might read, and Katia also had a book. The staff made them comfortable under a sun umbrella, setting up a table and chair so that Thomas could write.
He had seen the boy again at breakfast; once more he arrived later than the other members of his family, as though this were a privilege that he demanded for himself. He walked with the same grace as the night before, moving lightly across the room. The boy charmed him all the more because he knew that he would get no chance to speak to him. All he could do was watch.
For the first hour, as he wrote, there was no sign of the boy or his family. When the boy finally came into view, he was bare-chested, announcing his arrival to a group of others playing on a sand heap, who shouted his name, two syllables whose exact sound Thomas could not make out.
The young people started to create a link between two sand heaps by using an old plank. He watched the boy carry it and, with the help of an older, stronger boy, put it in place. Then the two, having inspected their good work, walked away, their arms around each other.
When a hawker came with strawberries, Katia sent him away.
“They are not even washed,” she said.
Thomas had abandoned his writing and taken up the novel to read. He presumed that the boy and his friend had gone on some escapade and the boy would next be seen at lunch.
He dozed in the milky light that came from the sea and woke and read and dozed again until he heard Katia saying: “He has come back.”
Her voice was quiet enough, he thought, for Heinrich not to hear. When he sat up and looked at Katia, she was buried in her book, paying him no attention. But she was right. The boy was in the water up to his knees and then he started wading farther out. He began to swim until his mother and a woman who must have been a governess insisted that he come back to shore. Thomas saw him emerging from the water, with dripping locks. The longer and more intensely he watched, the more studiously Katia read. When they were alone later, they would not discuss it, he was sure, since there was nothing to say. Knowing that he did not have to hide his interest in the scene made him feel more at ease, as he shifted his chair so that he could see the boy drying himself under the careful supervision of his mother and the governess.
Even though the weather remained clement enough for the beach, Heinrich convinced them to accompany him to visit churches and galleries the following morning. As soon as the boat took off from the small landing pier, Thomas regretted his decision to come. He was leaving behind the life of the beach, so rich the day before.
When they approached the piazza, Venice appeared at its best. The lukewarm air of the sirocco breathed on him; he leaned back and closed his eyes. They would spend the morning looking at pictures, perhaps have lunch and then return to the Lido for the afternoon when the sun was softer.
He and Katia smiled as Heinrich went into a paroxysm of ecstasy in the Frari over Titian’s Virgin ascending into heaven. No novelist, Thomas thought, should like this painting. The central image, despite the sumptuous colors, was too unearthly, too unlikely. Having studied it for a while, he turned his attention to the faces of the shocked figures at the bottom of the picture rooted in ordinary life who had to witness this scene as he did.
He knew, as they walked back towards the Grand Canal, that Heinrich would be inspired to make some large statement about Europe or history or religion. He was not in any mood for this, but he did not want to disturb the cordial relationship he was enjoying with his brother this morning.
“Can you imagine being alive at the time of the Crucifixion?” Heinrich asked.
Thomas glanced at him gravely as if he were now contemplating this question.
“It seems to me that nothing will happen in the world again,” Heinrich continued, raising his voice so that he could be heard against the busy morning sounds in the narrow streets. “I mean, there will be local wars and threats of wars and then treaties and agreements. And there will be trade. Ships will be bigger and speedier. Roads will be better. More tunnels will be cut through mountains and better bridges will be built. But there will be no cataclysms, no more visits by the gods. Eternity will be bourgeois.”
Thomas smiled and nodded and Katia said that she liked both Titian and Tintoretto even though the guidebook stated that they did not like each other.
They entered the dark space to look at the Carpaccios and it pleased Thomas that no one could see him, no one could discover what his response to these paintings was. He stepped away from Katia and Heinrich. It surprised him how suddenly and precisely Mahler edged into his mind. For a second, it came to him that he himself could be Mahler here in this dimly lit gallery. It was a strange and fanciful idea: to dream that Mahler were present, moving from picture to picture, savoring the scenes.
On the steamer from Pola, when he had imagined a story in which Mahler would figure, the protagonist was to be a lonely man rather than a husband and father. Thomas had toyed with the possibility of reducing all the grand ideas his protagonist had lived with and written about to one idea, or one experience, or one disappointment. It was as if he could take what Heinrich had just been expounding in the street and test it against some pressing, dark emotion. But he had not until now connected this idea with what he himself had been experiencing on the beach and in the hotel dining room.
His figure, whether Mahler or Heinrich or himself, had come to Venice and been confronted by beauty and been animated by desire. Thomas considered making the object of desire a young girl, but immediately, he thought, he would be working in the realm of what was natural and undramatic, especially if he made the girl older. No, he thought, it would have to be a boy. And the story would have to suggest that the desire was sexual, but it would also, of course, be distant and impossible. The gaze of the older man would be all the more fierce because nothing else could happen. The encounter would change the protagonist’s life all the more because it would be fleeting and would lead nowhere. It could never be socialized or domesticated or made acceptable to the world. It would break through the gates of a soul that had once believed itself impregnable.
When Heinrich went to the bank to change money, the bank teller warned him not to think of going south, as he had planned to do, since there were rumors of cholera in Naples. The instant this was said, Thomas knew that he would integrate it into his story. He would have rumors of cholera in Venice itself, and the Lido, with the guests in the hotel slowly thinning out. He would mix the desire of the older man with a sense of disease, decay.
In the morning, at breakfast, the Polish table was empty, as it had been the night before. When he found a quiet moment, Thomas asked one of the young men at the concierge’s desk if the Polish family had departed. He informed Thomas that the Polish family were still guests at the hotel.
At lunchtime the mother and the daughters arrived in the dining room. Katia and Heinrich were discussing something that Heinrich had read in the morning paper while Thomas kept his eyes on the door. Several times it opened only to reveal a waiter. And then he presented himself, the boy, wearing his sailor suit, moving unapologetically across the room, stopping before he took his seat, acknowledging Thomas for one small second, briefly smiling
, and devoting himself to ordering his lunch.
On the beach in the afternoon, Thomas went over the story he now planned to write. Since Heinrich’s luggage had been lost, he would incorporate that into the story, making it a reason why his protagonist would delay his departure, even if the real reason was so that he could spend more time in the same ambit as the boy. He thought of the strawberries they had been offered; that moment too could be included in the story.
The emotion his character felt at the sight of such physical perfection would become more overwrought as the days went by. Aschenbach, his protagonist, saw the boy constantly, even in Piazza San Marco, when he crossed the lagoon. Noticing that the family had begun to arrive earlier for breakfast so that its members could benefit from more time on the beach, he took his own breakfast early and tried to be on the beach before them.
Aschenbach, in the story, was alone, a man who had married once and been bereaved early in life, a man with one daughter, to whom he was not close. His Aschenbach was humorless in a way that was expected of a writer. His irony he kept for moments in philosophy and history; he did not allow it to be directed inwards. And he had no defenses against the vision of overpowering beauty that appeared before him in a blue-and-white bathing suit every morning under the brilliant Adriatic light. The boy’s very outline against the horizon captivated him. His foreign speech, of which Aschenbach could understand not a word, excited him. What he waited for most were the moments of repose, when, for example, the boy would stand erect at the water’s edge, alone, removed from his family, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, daydreaming into blue space.
By the time he and Katia and Heinrich were preparing to leave, having been told that there was now a risk of cholera in Venice, Thomas had the story in outline. He knew that if he spoke about it to Katia, she would look at him quizzically, suggesting that he was using a preoccupation with a story as an alibi for what he was really thinking about.