Death in Venice

Gus Tav asChenbaCh, or von Aschenbach, as he was now known—they gave him the official ‘von’ on his fiftieth birth- day—had embarked on a longish walk one spring afternoon, setting out from his flat in Munich’s Prinzregentenstraße. It was in the year 19… that for months had been casting menacing looks on our continent and its future. The hard and dangerous work of the morning had demanded so much of his willpower, had required delicacy, shrewdness, insight and accuracy in such a high degree, leaving him tense and irritable, that he, a writer, even after eating his lunch, hadn’t been able to switch off, deep inside himself, the engine of his productivity. What Cicero called the motus animi continuus, and which is the essence of persuasive public speech, continued to run. He hadn’t been able to unload this burden by taking the nap that, as his strength dwindled, he so much needed these days. Accordingly, soon after he’d drunk his tea he’d taken himself outdoors, in the hope that fresh air and movement would set him to rights and make possible a pleasant and profitable evening. It was the beginning of May, and after weeks of cold and wet weather one was led to believe, quite wrongly, that high summer had arrived. The English Garden, though the leaves were hardly out, was as airless as in August, and, situated close to the city, was full of vehicles and people out for a walk. At Aumeister’s, where ever more secluded paths led him, he’d stopped for a short time to gaze upon the animated, folkloric beer garden. It had been full of people. He saw the carriages and cabs parked outside, and then, from there, as the sun sank in the sky, he had begun to make his way home. He took the open meadow outside the park and, because he felt tired, and because there was a threat of thunder in the air over Föhring, he waited at the North Cemetery for the tram that would normally bring him directly back into town. By chance he found the stop and the area around it empty. There was no sign of public transport, neither along the cobbles of the Ungererstraße, where the solitary rails glided away in the direction of Schwabing, nor on the Föhringer Chausee. Behind the fenced-off stonemason’s workshops the crosses, commemorative gravestones and monuments for sale comprised a second graveyard, only one where no one lived. There was no sign of life, and the funeral parlour across the way, a build- ing in the Byzantine architectural style, also stood quiet, bathed in the light of the fading day. The front is decorated in a pale colour with Greek crosses and hieratic symbols. In addition it bears, in a symmetrical arrangement, gilded inscriptions that, picked out in the light, feature choice words relating to the life beyond. Like, for instance, ‘They go to rest in the house of The Lord’ or ‘May they bathe in eternal light’. Our friend waiting for his tram, was earnestly diverted for a few minutes as he registered these formula- tions and let his spiritual side be carried way by their resplendent mysticism, when he noticed, as he came back out of his daydreams, a man whose rather unusual appearance took his thoughts in quite a different direction. The man was standing in the portico, above the two apocalyptic creatures that guard the steps to the entrance. Whether he’d just now emerged from inside the hall, through the bronze door, or arrived unnoticed from somewhere else and somehow got up there was uncertain. Without pondering the question too deeply, Aschenbach inclined to the former view. Of medium height, thin and clean-shaven, what stood out about him was his coarse, blunt nose. He belonged to the red-haired type and had a milky skin covered in freckles. He was evidently not a native Bavarian, not by a long chalk. Take only the straw hat, with a broad, flat rim, that covered his head. It lent him the appearance of someone foreign, who had come from far off. It’s true he had a typical rucksack strapped to his shoulders, the kind everyone carries locally, and wore a yellowish, belted loden jacket and breeches, if that was the material; he had a grey cape over his lower left arm, in case of rain, and that arm remained buried in the softness of the fabric, while in the right he carried a shooting stick equipped with an iron tip, which he set at an angle to the ground. He had crossed his legs and perched his hips against the sling. His head was raised so that his Adam’s apple protruded nakedly out of his scrawny neck and his loose sports shirt. His colourless eyes had between them two emphatic vertical furrows strangely suited to his stumpy upturned nose. With their red eyelashes they stared sharply out into the distance. Possibly because he was standing on raised ground, his pose had something commanding and audacious about it, even wild; for, whether or not he was grimacing because he was blinded by the sinking sun, or it was a matter of some permanent physiognomic deformity, his lips seemed too short: they were fully drawn back from his teeth, with the effect that the latter, exposed right to the gums, flashed forth, long and white.

It’s perfectly possible that, in his half-distracted, half-inquisitive perusal of the stranger, Aschenbach hadn’t taken enough care, for he was suddenly aware that the other man was returning his gaze, what’s more in such a belligerent fashion, so directly into his face, so obviously minded to push things as far as they would go and force the other man to turn away, that Aschenbach did just that, embarrassedly, and set off walking along the edge of the fence, meanwhile resolved to pay the fellow no more attention. In the next minute he’d forgotten him. Yet whether the element of the nomad in the stranger’s appearance had lodged in his imagination or some other physical or spiritual influence had come into play, he was, to his complete surprise, suddenly aware of an unease, a sort of roving, unquiet feeling, like a young man’s thirst for distant parts, a sensation so vital, so new or at least so long unfamiliar and abandoned, that with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the ground he stood there stock-still, as if chained to the spot, and examined the nature of that emotional state and where it was headed. It was no more than travel fever; and yet it was as if an illness had befallen him, and so passionately and intensely did he feel it that he was in danger of losing his senses. For he saw, as if by way of an example of all the wonders and horrors this plentiful Earth has to offer, and which a great desire suddenly welled up to picture—he saw, as if his whole body had the power of seeing, a forbidding landscape, a tropical marshland under a stifling, leaden sky, humid, luxuriant and unhealthy, an unpopulated wilderness from the beginning of time, islands and water flowing with mud and detritus. Where the land was raised it was overgrown with leaves as thick as a man’s hand, and huge ferns, and fat, luscious, extravagant blossoms. It pushed forth the hairy stems of palms and other trees in fabulously distorted shapes, with roots that had grown away from their trunks and sunk themselves into the ground or into the water and created a picture of lost forests. On the stagnant dark-green water floated milk-white flowers the size of dishes; birds of an unknown species, with high shoulders and misshapen beaks, stood on tall legs in the morass and looked to the side without moving, while through the broad fields of reeds a sound went about, of whooshing, and rustling and clattering, as if a whole army in armour were passing; our friend the viewer of all this had the feeling that the lukewarm, mephitic breath of this overblown, degenerate wasteland, suspended unreally and monstrously between life and destruction, was blowing his way; between the knotty branches of a bamboo thicket he thought for a moment he saw the eyes of a tiger flare like a burst of phospho- rous—and felt his heart hammer with outrage and with a desire that puzzled him. Then the vision gave way; and with a shake of his head Aschenbach resumed his walk along the fences behind the stonemasons’ workshops.

He had the means at his disposal to criss-cross the world when- ever he wished. He’d been in a position to enjoy the advantages thereof for some time. Yet he regarded travel as nothing other than a hygienic necessity, one that, contrary to sense and inclination, every now and again had to be observed. Too busy with the tasks which his ego and the European soul imposed upon him, too burdened with the duty to produce good work, too disinclined simply to amuse himself—the focus of his work disqualified him from simply admiring the colourful goings-on of the world around him—he had entirely contented himself with the thought that these days anyone can profit from the surface of the Earth without straying far from his familiar domain. He was never even tempted to leave Europe; all the more as his years slowly advanced. He had this his fear, the fear of an artist, not to be able to finish what he had begun. He worried that his time was running out, before he had done what he needed to and had given fully of himself; and since it was no longer possible to dismiss this as a whim, to wave it away, his outward life had concentrated itself almost exclusively on the lovely town that had become his home; or restricted itself to the very basic house he had built in the mountains and where he spent the rainy summer. Even when, as now, whatever it was gripped him so suddenly and so late, it was very quickly tempered and set to rights by reason and by a self-discipline he had observed since he was young. He had intended to get to a certain point in his work—the work for which he lived—before he moved to the countryside, and the idea of drifting around the world, which would take him away from his desk for months, seemed all too vague and contrary to his plans; it couldn’t come seriously into question. And yet he knew perfectly well the reason why the temptation had come out of nowhere. It was the urge to flee, as he admitted to himself, this longing for something far away and new, this craving to be liberated, to be free of his burdens and to seek oblivio—the urge to get away from his work, to abandon the rigid, cold and passionate dutifulness that was his routine. Of course he loved to follow where duty led, he even loved, almost, the enervating struggle which returned every day between the resilience and pride of his will, a struggle that was so often put to the test, and his growing fatigue. No one should know about that. It should have no effect on his output, disclose no sign of powers in decline, give no sign of weakness. And yet it seemed reasonable not to put himself too much to a test and not wilfully to stifle a need which had emerged so forcefully. He thought of all he had to do, thought of the place where he felt compelled to break off today, as he had broken off yesterday, and of how it seemed that now, whether he attended to it with patience and attentiveness or dismissed it with a wave of the hand, the work would not line up as he wanted it to do. He looked over it again, tried to overcome his inhibition, or to dissolve it, and then with a shudder of disgust abandoned the attempt. It was not a matter of exceptional difficulty, but rather what hindered him were the scruples of an unwillingness which showed itself in the form of a dissatisfaction he could no longer stem. Of course he’d known dissatisfaction to be the essence of his talent, to be its inmost nature, since he was a youth. It was why he had reined in and dampened his emotions, because he knew that they were inclined to make do with happy approximations and something less than perfection. Was it now the subservient realm of feeling that was seeking its revenge against him, by way of refusing to give his art wings, refusing to body it forth, and taking away his every joy, his every pleasure in Form and expression? It wasn’t that he was producing bad material: this at least was the advantage of his years, that at any moment he was calm and certain of his capacity as a master. But he himself, while the nation honoured his work, was not happy with it, and it seemed to him that, more than any inner content, a weightier concern, it lacked the playfulness and the blaze of mastery that, as work created in joy, also delivers joy to an appreciative public. He feared his summer in the country, alone in his little house with the maid who cooked for him and the servant who brought his meals up to him; feared the familiar views of the mountain tops and slopes that would once again sur- round him in his dissatisfaction and torpor. He had to switch to something new, along the lines of a more spontaneous existence, a fresh breeze from somewhere exotic, an injection of new blood, he should be ready to grasp the nettle, to make the summer bearable and productive. He would travel then—he was content with that. It didn’t need to be far; hardly all the way to the tigers. One night in the sleeper train, then, and a break of three, maybe four weeks in some resort in the south, which he always loved, in the kind of place that everyone chose for a holiday.



These were his thoughts as the sound of the electric tram approaching along the Ungererstraße reached him, and, as he got in, he resolved to devote the evening to the study of tourist plans and timetables. On the platform it occurred to him to look around for the fellow in the straw hat, his companion in what turned out to be an afternoon with consequences. But he couldn’t establish his presence, not at the stop they had left behind, nor at the next stop, nor inside the tram.