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Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
Death in Venice
by Thomas MannTranslated from the German 1912 editionby Martin C. Doege
<
mdoege@compuserve.com
>
Chapter I
Gustav Aschenbach, or
von
Aschenbach, as his official surname had been since his
fiftieth birthday, had taken another solitary walk from his apartment in Munich’s
Prinzregentenstraße on a spring afternoon of the year 19.., which had shownthe continent such a menacing grimace for a few months. Overexcited by the
dangerous and difficult work of that morning that demanded a maximum of caution,
discretion, of forcefulness and exactitude of will, the writer had been unable, even
after lunch, to stop the continued revolution of that innermost productive drive of
his, that
motus animi continuus
, which after Cicero is the heart of eloquence, and
had been thwarted trying to find that soothing slumber which he, in view of his
declining resistance, needed so dearly. Therefore he had gone outside soon after
tea, hoping that fresh air and exertion would regenerate him and reward him with
a productive evening.
It was early May, and, after some cold and wet weeks, a faux midsummerhad begun. The
Englische Garten
, although only slightly leafy, was humid asin August and had been teeming with carriages and strollers where it was closeto the city. At the
Aumeister
, where increasingly serene paths had led him, hehad surveyed the popular and lively
Wirtsgarten
, on the bounds of which some
cabs and carriages were parking, he had started his saunter home across the fields
outside of the park while the light was fading, and waited, since he felt exhausted
and a thunderstorm seemed imminent over F¨ohring, for the tram which was to
carry him in a straight line back to the city. He happened to find the station and
its surroundings completely deserted. Neither on the paved Ungererstraße, on
which the lonely-glistening rails stretched towards Schwabing, nor on the F¨ohringerChaussee a cart could be seen; nothing stirred behind the fences of the stonecutters,
2
where crosses, commemorative plates, and monuments for sale formed a second,uninhabited cemetery and the Byzantine edifice of the mortuary chapel on theother side of the street lay silent in the last light of the parting day. Its frontwall, decorated with Greek crosses and emblems in bright colors, furthermore
sports symmetrically aligned biblical inscriptions concerning the afterlife, such as:
“
THEY ENTER THE HOUSE OF GOD
” or “
THE ETERNAL LIGHT
MAY SHINE UPON THEM
”; and the waiter for a time had found a reasonable
entertainment in reading the phrases and letting his mind’s eye wander in their
iridescent mystery, when he, returning from his reverie, had noticed a man in the
portico, close to the apocalyptic beasts which guard the staircase, whose wholly
unusual appearance steered his thoughts into a completely different direction.
Whether he had emerged from inside of the hall through the bronze gates or had
approached undetected from outside remained an enigma. Aschenbach, without
giving particularly deep thought to the question, tended to assume the former.
Not very tall, thin, beardless and strikingly round-nosed, the man belonged to the
red-headed type and had its milk-like and freckled skin. Obviously he was notBavarian: the broad and straight-rimmed bast hat which covered his head gave
him the air of the foreign and far-traveled. Of course he wore the common kind of rucksack strapped on his shoulders, a yellowish suit of loden fabric, as it appeared,
a gray coat over the left underarm, which he had stemmed into his side, and in
the right hand a stick with an iron tip, which he had pushed diagonally into the
ground and on which he, feet crossed, leaned with his hip. With raised head, so
that on his scrawny neck which stuck out from his sport shirt the Adam’s apple
projected forcefully and well-defined, he looked into the distance, with colorless,
red-lashed eyes between which there were two vertical, definite furrows, which
strangely complemented his short and stubby nose. His demeanor—and perhaps
his elevated and elevating standpoint contributed to this impression—was that of
cool survey, audacious, even wild; because, be it that he was grimacing against
the brightness of the setting Sun or that it was a more permanent physiognomic
disfigurement, his lips seemed too short, the teeth were entirely uncovered, so that
they, quite long and bare to the gums, gleamed white between his lips.
Possibly Aschenbach had not exerted much discretion in his half-distracted and
half-inquisitive study of the foreigner; because suddenly he noticed the other one
returning his glances and in such a war-like fashion, so straight into the eye, soobviously determined to carry this to the extremes and to force the other one’s
gaze to retreat, that Aschenbach, slightly embarrassed, turned around and began
ambling along the fences, with the passing decision not to regard that person again.
He had forgotten him the very next minute. If it was the wayfarer-like air of the
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