And yet the solitary traveler felt he had a special claim on the secret and, though excluded, took a bizarre pleasure in approaching insiders with insidious questions and forcing them, pledged as they were to silence, to tell outright lies. One day at breakfast in the main dining room he confronted the manager, the light-footed little man in the French frock coat who would circulate among the diners, greeting them and ensuring that things were as they should be, and had stopped at Aschenbach’s table for a few words. Why is it, the guest asked casually, as if by the by, why in the world have they been disinfecting Venice all this time?
“It is a police precaution,” answered the hypocrite, “an official measure designed to forestall any situation injurious to the public health that might arise as a result of the sultry and unseasonably warm weather.”
“The police are to be commended,” Aschenbach replied, and after a brief exchange of meteorological observations the manager excused himself.
On that very day, in the evening, after dinner, it so happened that a small group of street singers from the city gave a performance in the front garden. The two men and two women stood by the iron post of an arc lamp, lifting their faces, white in the glare, to the large terrace, where the guests sat ready, over coffee and cold drinks, to submit to the exhibition of local color. The hotel staff—lift attendants, waiters, and office clerks—had come out to listen at the doors to the lobby. The Russian family, eager to enjoy everything to the hilt, had had wicker chairs moved down into the garden so as to be closer to the performers and sat there contentedly in a semicircle, their aged slave standing behind them in her turbanlike kerchief.
Mandolin, guitar, accordion, and squeaky fiddle soon came to life under the fingers of the beggar virtuosi. Instrumental pieces alternated with vocal numbers, one of which featured the younger of the women with her harsh rasp of a voice and the tenor’s sugary falsetto in a passionate love duet. But the true talent and leader of the ensemble was unequivocally the other man—the one with the guitar and a kind of baritone-buffo character—who, though he had no voice to speak of, was a gifted mime and possessed of remarkable comic energy. He often broke away from the group, his large instrument in tow, and made his way forward, where his highjinks were rewarded with laughter and encouragement. The Russians in their front-row seats took particular pleasure in so much southern vivacity and exhorted him, clapping and cheering, to ever bolder and brasher antics.
Aschenbach sat at the balustrade, occasionally cooling his lips with the mixture of grenadine and soda water sparkling ruby red before him in the glass. His nerves took in the vulgar tootle and soulful melodies with avidity, for passion dulls one’s sense of discrimination and yields in all seriousness to charms that sobriety would treat as a joke or reject with indignation. The sight of the prancing jester had twisted his features into a fixed, almost painful grimace. He sat on, indifferent, while inwardly he was thoroughly engrossed: a mere six paces away Tadzio was leaning on the stone parapet.
There he stood in the belted white suit he sometimes donned for dinner, inexorably, innately graceful—his left forearm on the parapet, his feet crossed, his right hand on his hip—looking down at the minstrels with an expression that was not so much a smile as an indication of aloof curiosity, of courteous acknowledgment. From time to time he drew himself up and, puffing out his chest, pulled the white blouse down through the leather belt with an elegant tug of both hands. But there were also times when—as the aging traveler noted triumphantly, his mind reeling, yet terrified as well—he turned his head over his left shoulder—now wavering and cautious, now fast and impetuous, as if to catch him off guard—to the place where his admirer was seated. Aschenbach did not meet Tadzio’s eye, because a humiliating anxiety compelled the errant lover to put an apprehensive curb on his glances. The women guarding Tadzio were seated at the rear of the terrace, and things had now reached the point where the lover needed to be concerned about standing out or arousing suspicion. Yes, several times now—on the beach, in the hotel lobby, in the Piazza San Marco—he had noted with a kind of numbness that they called Tadzio back when he came near him, that they were intent on keeping him at a distance, and he could only acknowledge it as a terrible insult which racked his pride in hitherto unknown torment, yet which his conscience could not gainsay.
In the meantime the guitarist had begun a solo to his own accompaniment, a multistanzaed ditty then the rage all over Italy, to which he brought a vivid, dramatic flair, and each time the refrain came round, the rest of the company chimed in with their voices and aggregate instruments. His build frail, his face gaunt and emaciated, a shabby felt hat pushed back over his neck and a shock of red hair gushing out from under the brim, he stood there on the gravel, apart from the others, in a pose of brazen bravado and, still strumming the strings, hurled his quips up to the terrace in a vigorous parlando, the veins bulging in his forehead from the strain. He seemed less the Venetian type than of the race of Neapolitan comedians: half pimp, half performer, brutal and brash, dangerous and entertaining. The lyrics of the song were merely silly, but in his rendition—what with the facial expressions and body movements he used, his suggestive winks, and the way he licked the corners of his mouth lasciviously—they became ambiguous, vaguely obscene. Protruding from the soft collar of his open shirt, which clashed with his otherwise formal attire, was a scrawny neck with a conspicuously large and naked-looking Adam’s apple. His pallid snub-nosed face, its beardless features giving no indication of his age, seemed lined with grimaces and vice, and the two furrows stretching defiantly, imperiously, almost savagely between his reddish brows contrasted oddly with the grin on his mobile mouth. What made the solitary traveler focus all his attention on him, however, was the realization that the suspicious character seemed to bring his own suspicious atmosphere with him: each time the refrain recurred, the singer set off on a grotesque march, making faces and waving, his path taking him directly under Aschenbach’s seat, and each time he made his round a strong smell of carbolic acid wafted its way up to the terrace from his clothes and body.
Once the ditty was over, he started collecting money. He began with the Russians—who, as all could see, gave willingly—and proceeded up the steps. He was as humble on the terrace as he had been saucy during the performance. Bowing and scraping, he skulked from table to table, a smile of arch servility baring his strong teeth, though the two furrows were still there, intimidating, between the red eyebrows. The guests observed the exotic creature with curiosity and a certain distaste as he took in his livelihood: they tossed coins into his hat with the tips of their fingers, careful not to touch it. Eliminating the physical distance between performer and genteel audience, pleasurable as it may be, always produces a certain discomfort. He sensed it and groveled his amends. He went up to Aschenbach, he and his odor, which no one else appeared to mind.
“Tell me,” said the solitary traveler in an almost mechanical undertone. “Venice is being disinfected. Why?”
“It’s the police,” the joker answered hoarsely, “the rules, sir. It’s the heat and the sirocco. The sirocco is oppressive. It’s bad for the health…” He spoke as if surprised one could pose such a question, and demonstrated the sirocco’s pressure with the flat of his hand.
“So there is no disease in Venice?” Aschenbach asked very softly between his teeth.
The jester’s muscular features settled into a grimace of comic helplessness. “Disease? Of what sort? Is the sirocco a disease? Or our police—are they a disease? You must be joking! A disease? How can you say such a thing? A preventative measure, can’t you see? A police order to combat the effects of the oppressive weather conditions…” And he gesticulated.
“Very well,” said Aschenbach, softly and tersely again, quickly dropping an unduly large coin into the hat. He then dismissed the man with his eyes. The man obeyed, grinning and bowing. But no sooner had he reached the steps than two hotel employees pounced upon him and started cross-examining him in whispers, their faces h
ard against his. He shrugged, reassuring them, swearing he had been discreet. Couldn’t they tell? Released, he went back to the garden and, after a brief consultation with his comrades under the arc lamp, stepped forward once more and sang a song of gratitude and farewell.
It was a song the solitary traveler could not recall having heard before, a brash popular number in an unintelligible dialect and with a refrain of laughter blared out at regular intervals by all four. Words and accompaniment both would then cease, giving way to a rhythmic laughter, patterned in its way, yet very natural-sounding, and made to seem especially lifelike by the talent of the soloist. The artistic distance between him and the distinguished guests having now been reestablished, all his impudence returned, and the artificial laughter he shamelessly aimed up at the terrace was a laughter of mockery. Each time he came to the end of the words in a stanza, he seemed to be battling against an uncontrollable urge: he would choke, his voice would falter, he would press his hand to his mouth and hunch his shoulders till at just the proper moment an unbridled laugh would break, burst, bellow out of him and with such verisimilitude that it had a contagious effect on the audience, causing an objectless, self-perpetuating hilarity to take hold on the terrace as well. This seemed only to redouble the singer’s exuberance. He bent his knees, slapped his thighs, clutched his sides, he nearly exploded, shrieking now rather than laughing; he pointed to the terrace, as if there were nothing more amusing than the people laughing up there, and before long everyone was laughing, everyone in the garden and on the verandah, including the waiters, lift attendants, and porters in the doorways.
Aschenbach was no longer reclining in his chair; he sat upright as if to ward off an attack or take flight. But the laughter, the hospital odor wafting up to him, and the proximity of the beautiful boy coalesced in a trancelike spell that, indissoluble and inexorable, held his head, his mind in thrall. In the general commotion and confusion he ventured a glance in Tadzio’s direction and, as he did so, noticed that when returning the glance the boy was equally grave, as if he were modeling his conduct and facial expression on Aschenbach’s and the general mood had no hold upon him because Aschenbach remained aloof from it. There was something at once disarming and overwhelming in this telling, childlike obedience; it was all the elderly man could do to keep from burying his face in his hands. He also had the feeling that Tadzio’s tendency to pull himself up and take deep breaths was the sign of a constricted chest. “He is sickly and has probably not long to live,” he thought with the objectivity that strangely enough breaks free on occasion from intoxication and longing, and his heart swelled with pure concern and a concomitant profligate satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the Venetians had finished their performance and were making their retreat. They were accompanied by applause, and their leader did not fail to enhance his exit with a few pranks. His low bows and the kisses he blew provoked such laughter that he redoubled his efforts. Even after his comrades were outside, he pretended to have injured himself by running backwards into a lamppost, and staggered to the gate doubled up as if in agony. There at last he tore off the mask of the comic underdog, stood up straight, indeed, sprang lithely to attention, then stuck his tongue out brazenly at the guests on the terrace and slipped off into the darkness.
The guests dispersed and Tadzio had long since abandoned the balustrade, yet to the displeasure of the waiters the solitary traveler sat on at his table with the remainder of the grenadine. Night proceeded; time dissolved. There had been an hourglass in his parents’ house many years before, and all at once he could see the fragile yet momentous little device as if it were standing before him. The rust-colored sand would run soundless and fine through the narrow glass neck, and when the upper bulb was nearly empty a small raging whirlpool would form there.
In the afternoon of the very next day the ever obstinate traveler took another step in his investigation of the outside world, and this time with the utmost success: he went into the British travel agency located just off Saint Mark’s Square and, after changing some money at the cash desk, assumed the expression of a suspicious foreigner and asked his awkward question of the clerk who had waited on him. The clerk was an Englishman in a tweed suit, still young, with hair parted down the middle, close-set eyes, and that sober trustworthiness so alien to and unusual in the spry and roguish South. “No cause for alarm, sir,” he began. “A routine measure, nothing serious. They often issue such orders to forestall the deleterious effects of the heat and the sirocco…” But when his blue eyes met the stranger’s weary, somewhat mournful gaze directed at his lips with mild contempt, the Englishman blushed. “That,” he went on in a low voice and with a certain animation, “is the official explanation, which one finds it expedient to accept here. But I can tell you that there is more to it than meets the eye.” And then in his honest, genial way he told Aschenbach the truth.
For several years now Indian cholera had displayed a growing tendency to spread and migrate. Emanating from the humid marshes of the Ganges Delta, rising with the mephitic exhalations of that lush, uninhabitable, primordial island jungle shunned by man, where tigers crouch in bamboo thickets, the epidemic had long raged with unwonted virulence through Hindustan, then moved eastward to China, westward to Afghanistan and Persia, and, following the main caravan routes, borne its horrors as far as Astrakhan and even Moscow. But while Europe quaked at the thought of the specter invading from there by land, it had been transported by sea in the ships of Syrian merchants and shown up in several Mediterranean ports simultaneously: it had raised its head in Toulon and Málaga, donned its mask repeatedly in Palermo and Naples, and seemed to have taken up permanent residence throughout Calabria and Apulia. The northern part of the peninsula had been spared. Then in mid-May of this year, on one and the same day, the dread vibrios had been discovered in the blackened, wasted corpses of a ship’s boy and a grocer woman in Venice. The cases were kept secret. Within a week, however, there were ten of them, then twenty, thirty, and in different districts to boot. A man from a provincial town in Austria, returning home from a few days’ holiday in Venice, died with unmistakable symptoms, and the first rumors of an outbreak in the city on the lagoon made their way into the German press. The Venetian authorities issued a statement to the effect that health conditions had never been better, then took the most essential precautions against the disease. But some food must have been contaminated—vegetables, meat, or milk—because, denied or concealed as it was, death ate a path through the narrow streets, and the premature summer heat, which had warmed the water in the canals, was particularly conducive to its spread. The epidemic even seemed to be undergoing a revitalization; the tenacity and fertility of its pathogens appeared to have redoubled. Recovery was rare: eighty out of a hundred of those infected died, and died a horrible death, because the disease would strike with the utmost ferocity, often taking its most dangerous form, the “dry” form, as it was called. In such cases the body was unable to expel the massive amounts of water secreted by the blood vessels, and within a few hours the patient would shrivel up and choke—convulsed and groaning hoarsely—on his own blood, now thick as pitch. He was fortunate if, as occasionally happened, after a slight indisposition he fell into a deep coma, from which he seldom if ever awoke. By early June the isolation wards of the Ospedale Civile had quietly begun to fill up; room in the two orphanages became scarce, and there was an eerily brisk traffic between the quay of the Fondamente Nuove and San Michele, the cemetery island. But fear of the overall damage that would be done—concern over the recently opened art exhibition in the Public Gardens and the tremendous losses with which the hotels, the shops, the entire, multifaceted tourist trade would be threatened in case of panic and loss of confidence—proved stronger in the city than the love of truth and respect for international covenants: it made the authorities stick stubbornly to their policy of secrecy and denial. The chief medical officer of Venice, a man of outstanding merit, had resigned from his post in high dudgeon and been quietly replac
ed by a more pliable individual. The populace knew all this, and corruption in high places together with the prevailing insecurity and the state of emergency into which death stalking the streets had plunged the city led to a certain degeneracy among the lower classes, the encouragement of dark, antisocial impulses that made itself felt in self-indulgence, debauchery, and growing criminality. There was an unusually high number of drunkards abroad in the evening; vicious bands of rabble were said to make the streets unsafe at night; muggings were not uncommon and even murders, for it had been shown that on two occasions people who had allegedly fallen victim to the epidemic had in fact been done in, poisoned, by their relatives; and prostitution now assumed blatant and dissolute forms hitherto unknown here, at home only in the south of the country and the Orient.
After thus summarizing the main points, the Englishman concluded, “You would do well to leave, and today rather than tomorrow. The imposition of a quarantine is imminent.”
“Thank you,” said Aschenbach, and left the office.
The square lay in sunless swelter. Unsuspecting foreigners sat in cafés or stood covered with pigeons in front of the church, watching the birds swarm, beat their wings, or push one another out of the way to peck at the grains of maize they held out in the palms of their hands. Feverish with agitation, triumphant in his possession of the truth, a repulsive taste in his mouth, and fantastic horror in his heart, the solitary traveler paced up and down the flagstones of the magnificent square. He was trying to come up with a decent and purificatory mode of action. After dinner that evening he could go over to the woman in pearls and deliver the speech he was now formulating: “Permit me, Madam, stranger that I am, to give you a piece of advice, a warning withheld from you by self-serving interests. You must leave, leave immediately, with Tadzio and your daughters! Venice is infested.” He might then lay a farewell hand on the head of that taunting deity’s agent, turn on his heel, and flee the quagmire. Yet at the same time he felt infinitely far from seriously wishing to take such a step. It would lead him back, restore him to himself, but there is nothing so distasteful as being restored to oneself when one is beside oneself. He recalled a white structure adorned with inscriptions glistening in the evening light and beckoning his mind’s eye to lose itself in their pellucid mysticism, then the curious figure of the wayfarer who had aroused a youthful longing for travel and strange, faraway places in an aging man, and the thought of returning home, of coming to his senses, sobering up, resuming his drudgery and craft was so abhorrent to him that his face twisted into an expression of physical revulsion. “Nothing is to be said about it!” he whispered wildly. And added, “I shall say nothing.” The consciousness of his collusion, his share of guilt intoxicated him as small quantities of wine intoxicate the weary brain. The image of the infested and abandoned city throbbing wildly in his mind kindled hopes unfathomable, beyond reason, and outrageously sweet. What was that serene happiness he had dreamed of a moment before compared with such expectations? What were art and virtue to him given the advantages of chaos? He said nothing and stayed on.