Death In Venice (3 page)

THREE

Several matters of a mundane and literary nature kept him in Munich for approximately a fortnight after that walk, eager though he was to be on his way, but at last he gave orders for his country house to be made ready for occupancy within four weeks, and on a day between mid and late May he set off by night train for Trieste, where he tarried only twenty-four hours, boarding the ship for Pola the next morning. What he sought was something exotic and distinctive yet of easy access, and so he stopped at an island in the Adriatic, not far from the coast of Istria, one that had acquired a following in recent years and featured colorful raggle-taggle rustics speaking an outlandish tongue and beautifully jagged cliffs facing the open sea. But rain, a heavy atmosphere, the provincial closed society of the Austrian hotel guests, and the lack of a peaceful, intimate rapport with the sea that only a soft, sandy beach can provide had soured him and kept him from feeling he had found his final destination. He was troubled by an impulse to go he knew not quite where, and he was studying the ships' timetables and looking hither and yon when all at once his goal, surprising yet at the same time self-evident, stared him in the face. Where did one go when one wished to travel overnight to a unique, fairy-tale-like location? Why, that was obvious. What was he doing here? He had come to the wrong place. That is where he should have gone. He lost no time in announcing his departure. A week and a half after his arrival on the island a swift motorboat bore him and his luggage across the misty morning water back to the naval base and he disembarked only to mount a gangplank leading to the damp deck of a steamer about to weigh anchor for Venice. It was an ancient vessel of Italian registry, outdated, sooty, and drab. In a cavelike, artificially lit inner cabin, into which Aschenbach was ushered immediately after embarking by a decorously grinning, hunchbacked, grubby-looking old salt, he saw a man with a goatee and a hat pulled over his forehead, a cigarette butt hanging out of his mouth, and the face of an old-time circus director sitting at a desk recording the passengers' particulars and issuing them tickets with the slick, easygoing gestures of his trade. "Venice!" he said, repeating Aschenbach's request as he stretched out his arm and thrust his pen into the viscous dregs of a tilted inkwell. "Venice, first class! Certainly, sir!" And he scribbled something in large spindly letters, sprinkled blue sand from a box over it, let the sand run into a clay bowl, folded the paper with his bony yellow fingers, and wrote some more "Kfine choice!" he chattered all the while. "Ah, Venice! A magnificent city! A city irresistible to the man of culture for both its history and its current charms" There was something numbing and distracting about the smooth rapidity of his movements and the empty prattle, as if he were worried the traveler would Waver in his resolve to go to Venice. He quickly took Aschenbach's money and dropped the change on the stained tablecloth with the dexterity of a croupier. "Enjoy your stay, sir!" he said with a theatrical bow. "It has been an honor to serve you." Then he cried, "Next!" raising his arm immediately, as if business were brisk, though there was no one left needing attention. Aschenbach went back on deck. With one arm propped on the railing he watched first the idlers loitering on the quay to watch the ship set sail, then the passengers on board. The second-class passengers, men and women both, were squatting on the forward deck, using their crates and bundles as rests. A group of young men on the upper deck, Pola shop assistants by the look of them, excited by the prospect of a jaunt to Italy, were making a great to-do about themselves and their venture, jabbering, laughing, indulging smugly in their gesticulations, and leaning over the railing to shout glib jeers at their friends, who were moving along the embankment, clutching their briefcases and shaking their canes menacingly at the holidaymakers. One of them, wearing an extravagantly cut pale-yellow summer suit, a red necktie, and a rakishly uptilted Panama hat, outdid the others in his raucous show of mirth. Once Aschenbach had had a closer look at him, however, he realized with something akin to horror that the man was no youth. He was old, there was no doubting it: he had wrinkles around his eyes and mouth; the matt crimson of his cheeks was rouge; the brown hair beneath the straw hat with its colorful banda toupee; the neck-scrawny, emaciated; the stuck-on mustache and imperial on his chin-dyed; the full complement of yellow teeth-a cheap denture; and the hands, with signet rings on both forefingers, those of an old man. A shudder ran through Aschenbach as he watched him and his interplay with his friends. Did they not know, could they not see that he was old, that he had no right to be wearing their foppish, gaudy clothes, no right to be carrying on as if he were one of them? They seemed to be used to him and take him for granted, tolerating his presence and treating him as an equal, returning his pokes in the ribs without malice. How could they? Aschenbach laid his hand on his forehead and shut his eyes: they felt hot for want of sleep. He had the impression that something was not quite normal, that a dreamlike disaffection, a warping of the world into something alien was about to take hold and that by covering his face for a spell and then taking a fresh look at things he might stave it off just then, however, he felt a floating sensation and, looking up panic-stricken, realized that the heavy, dingy bulk of the ship was slowly casting off from the stone jetty. As the engine shifted forward and back, the strip of filthy, shimmering water between the jetty and the ship's hull increased inch by inch, and after some clumsy maneuvering the steamer aimed its bowsprit at the open sea. Aschenbach crossed to the starboard side, where the hunchback had set up a deck chair for him and a steward in a stained frock coat inquired whether he could do anything for him. The sky was gray, the wind humid. Harbor and islands left behind, all land soon disappeared from sight in the haze. Flakes of coal dust, bloated with moisture, settled on the swabbed deck, which refused to dry. Before an hour was up, a sailcloth awning was spread out: it had started to rain. Wrapped in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveler took his ease, the hours slipping by unnoticed. The rain had ceased; the awning been taken down. The hori- zon was now visible in its entirety. The vast disk of the barren sea stretched out beneath the turbid dome of the sky. But in empty, unarticulated space our senses lose the capacity to articulate time as well, and we sink into the immeasurable. Strange, shadowy figures-the superannuated dandy, the goateed purser from deep in the hold-passed through his quiescent mind with vague gestures and jumbled dreamlike utterances, and he fell asleep. At noon he was urged to partake of a collation below in the dining salon, which was nothing so much as a corridor lined with cabin doors and where at the other end of the long table-he sat at its head-the shop assistants, the old man included, had been tippling with the jovial captain since ten o'clock. The meal was wretched, and he finished it off quickly: he felt the need for fresh air, for a look at the sky. Surely it would clear over Venice Not that he thought it would not, for the city had always received him in all its glory. Yet both sky and sea remained turbid and leaden, a misty rain falling from time to time, and he resigned himself to finding a different Venice by sea from the one he was accustomed to find when taking an overland route. He stood at the foremast, gazing into the distance, watching for land. He thought of the pensive yet ardent poet for whom the cupolas and bell towers of his dreams had once risen from these waves, repeated to himself the words he had fashioned out of reverence, joy, and mourning into measured song, and, readily stirred by a sentiment already shaped, probed his earnest, weary heart to see whether a new ardor and upheaval, a belated adventure of the emotions might yet await the idle traveler. Then, to the right, the flat coastline hove in sight, the sea came alive with fishing boats, and the island with its swimming baths appeared. The steamer put the island on its port side and glided at reduced speed through the narrow channel that bore its name, coming to a halt in the lagoon opposite some colorfully dilapidated dwellings, there to await the launch of the health authorities. It took the launch an hour to appear. The ship had arrived, yet it had not. There was no hurry, yet the pas- sengers were impatient. The young men from Pola, their patriotism stimulated by the military bugle calls crossing the water from the vicinity of the Public Gardens, had come on deck and, full of Asti-induced ebullience, were cheering on the bersaglierl drilling there. But it was repugnant to behold the state to which the spruced-up fossil had been reduced by his spurious coalition with the young. His brain was too old to withstand the wine as his youthfully resilient companions had done: he was miserably drunk. Eyes glazed over, a cigarette between his trembling fingers, he swayed back and forth in his inebriation, laboriously keeping his balance. Since he would have fallen at the first step, he did not dare move, yet he displayed a pitiful exuberance, buttonholing everyone who came up to him, jabbering, winking, sniggering, lifting a wrinkled, ringed finger as a part of some fatuous teasing, and licking the corners of his mouth with the tip of his tongue in a revoltingly suggestive manner. Aschenbach watched him with a frown, and once more a feeling of numbness came over him, as if the world were moving ever so slightly yet intractably towards a strange and grotesque warping, a feeling which circum- stances kept him from indulging in, however, because at that moment the pounding of the engine started up again and the ship, interrupted so near its destination, resumed its course through the San Marco Canal. And so he saw it once again, that most astounding of landing sites, that stunning composition of fantastic architecture offered up by the Republic to the reverent gaze of approaching seafarers, the ethereal splendor of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, the waterside columns with lion and saint, the majestically projecting flank of the fairy-tale basilica, and the view beyond of the gateway and giant clock, and taking it all in he mused that arriving in Venice by land, at the railway station, was tantamount to entering a palace by the back door and that one should approach this most improbable of cities only as he had now done by ship, over the seas. The engine stopped, gondolas pressed alongside, the gangplank was lowered, and customs officials came aboard and discharged their duties perfunctorily: disembarkation could proceed. Aschenbach let it be known that he wished to have a gondola convey him and his luggage to the pier of those vaporetti that ply between the city and the Lido, for he intended to take up residence by the sea. His plan was approved, his request shouted to the water below, where the gondoliers were squabbling in dialect. He was held back from leaving, held back by his trunk, which had to be laboriously dragged to and tugged down the ladderlike steps. He was thus unable to elude the importunities of the ghastly old man, who felt impelled by some obscure drunken urge to officiate over the stranger's departure. "We wish you a most pleasant stay," he bleated, bowing and scraping. "We hope you remember us. Au revoir, excusez, and bonj our, Your Excellency!" He drooled, he squinted, he licked the corners of his mouth, and the dyed imperial on his old man's chin jutted into the air. "Our compliments," he babbled on, placing two fingers to his lips, "to your sweetheart, your sweet, your most beautiful sweet-heart. And suddenly the upper denture slipped out of his jaw over the lower lip. Aschenbach managed to escape. "Your sweetheart, your lovely sweetheart," came the cooing, hollow, garbled words behind him as he made his way down the gangplank, clutching the rope railing. 'Who has not battled a fleeting shudder, a secret dread and anxiety upon boarding a Venetian gondola for the first time or after a prolonged absence? That strange conveyance, coming down to us unaltered from the days of the ballads and so distinctively black, black as only coffins can be-it conjures up hush-hush criminal adventures in the rippling night and, even more, death itself: the bier, the obscure obsequies, the final, silent journey. And has anyone observed that the seat in such a boat, that armchair lacquered coffin-black with its dull black upholstery, is the softest, most soothing, most voluptuous seat in the world? Aschenbach grew aware of this after settling down at the gondolier's feet opposite his luggage, which lay neatly assembled in the prow. The rowers were still squabbling, raucous and unintelligible, gesturing menacingly, but the strange silence of this city of water seemed to absorb their voices gently, disembody them, and scatter them over the sea. It was warm here in the harbor. Lulled by the tepid breath of the sirocco, lolling on the cushions over the pliant element, the traveler closed his eyes and yielded to a lassitude as unwonted as it was sweet. "The ride will be brief," he thought. "Could it but last forever." Rocking tranquilly, he felt himself drift away from the throng and the jumble of voices. How calm and yet calmer his surroundings became! There was nothing to be heard but the plash of the oar and the hollow thump of the waves against the prow, which rose up over the water, steep and black and reinforced at the tip like a halberd, and yet a third sound, a mutter, a murmur, the whisper of the gondolier talking to himself through clenched teeth, in fits and starts, the sounds extracted by the effort of his arms. Aschenbach glanced up and noted not without consternation that the lagoon was widening about him and the gondola making for the open sea. Clearly he could not relax all that much; he would have to see to the execution of his wishes. "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