Chapter 1

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 Prinzregentenstrafie on a spring afternoon of the year 19.., which had shown the 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 midsummer had begun. The Englische Garten, although only slightly leafy, was humid as in August and had been teeming with carriages and strollers where it was close to the city. At the Aumeister, where increasingly serene paths had led him, he had 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 Fohring, 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 Ungererstrafie, on which the lonely-glistening rails stretched towards Schwabing, nor on the Fohringer Chaussee a cart could be seen; nothing stirred behind the fences of the stonecutters, where crosses, commemorative plates, and monuments for sale formed a second, uninhabited cemetery and the Byzantine edifice of the mortuary chapel on the other side of the street lay silent in the last light of the parting day. Its front wall, 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 not Bavarian: 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, so obviously 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 foreigner working on his imagination or some other corporeal or mental influence that caused it: a strange distention of his soul unexpectedly made itself known, a sort of roving unrest, a juvenile thirst for the distant, a feeling, so novel and yet so long-forgotten that he, hands on his back and his eyes fixed at the ground, stood transfixed to probe that emotion and its nature and aim. It was wanderlust, nothing more; but verily coming in the form of a fit and ardently intensified, even to the point of an illusion. Because he saw, as a sample of of all those wonders and horrors of the diversity on Earth which his desire was suddenly able to imagine, an enormous landscape, a tropical swamp under a moist and heavy sky, wet, lush, and unhealthy, a primordial wilderness of islands and mud-bearing backwaters that men avoid. The shallow islands, the soil of which was covered with leafs as thick as hands, with enormous ferns, with juicy, macerated and wonderfully flowering plants, ejected upwards hairy palm trunks, and strangely formless trees, whose roots sprung from the trunks and connected to the water or the ground through the air, formed disorienting arrangements. On the brackish, glaucously reflecting stream milk-white, bowl-sized flowers were floating; high shouldered birds of all kinds with shapeless beaks were standing on tall legs in the shallow water and looked askance unmoving, while through vast reed fields there sounded a clattering grinding and whirring, as if by soldiers in their armaments; the onlooker thought he felt the tepid and mephitic odor of that unrestrained and unfit wasteland, which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay, between the knotty trunks of a bamboo thicket he for a moment believed to perceive the phosphorescent eyes of the tiger — and felt his heart beating with horror and mysterious yearning. Finally the hallucination vanished, and Aschenbach, shaking his head, resumed his promenade along the fences of the stonecutters.

He had, as far as he had possessed the means to enjoy the benefits of sojourn to far-off countries, regarded travel as a hygienic necessity, which had to be observed against will and inclination. Too much occupied with the duties imposed by his ego and the European soul, too overburdened with the duty of production, too little interested in distracting himself to be a faithful lover of that gay outside world, he had contended himself wholly with that knowledge of the Earth's surface that can be gained by anyone without ever having to abandon his circle and was never even tempted to leave Europe. The more so since his life was approaching its conclusion, since his artist's fright of not being able to finish his work, that fret that his time had run out, could no longer be called purely a delusion, so that his life had mostly been limited to the beautiful city, which had become a home to him, and the spartan country house, which he had erected in the mountains and where he spent rain-soaked summers.

Also that which had of late so suddenly touched him was soon tempered and corrected by the reason and restraint that he had exercised from his younger years on. He had intended to continue the work for which he lived up a certain point before he moved to the country and the thought of an aimless wandering around the world, which would cost him several months of time allotted for his work, seemed too carefree and at odds with his plans, it was not to be considered in earnest. And yet he was quite aware what was the cause of that affliction. It was a desire to flee, he had to admit to himself, this yearning for the distant and the novel, this desire for liberty, for being free of burden, for being able to forget — the desire to escape his work, the commonplace location of a rigorous, frigid, and ardent duty. Although he loved it and also almost the unnerving, daily-repeating struggle between his tenacious and proud, so often tested willpower and that growing weariness, of which nobody was allowed to know and which was not allowed to betray the product by any sign of impotence or defeat. But it seemed reasonable not to overdo it and not to suffocate such a lively desire hardheadedly. He thought of his work, thought of the point at which he had to terminate his effort today, just like yesterday, and which seemed to yield neither to patient care nor a decisive blow. He inspected it again, tried to break or dissolve the stoppage but aborted his attack with a feeling of disgust. These were no insurmountable hindrances, what immobilized him were the scruples of listlessness, which masqueraded as an insatiable discontent. Discontent had already been considered by the adolescent as the character and innermost nature of genius and he had sought to restrain his emotions because he had realized that they are too easily contented with approximations and half-hearted perfection. Was that repressed sentiment now avenging itself by leaving him, by refusing to carry his art and by taking away all his delight with form and meaning? Not that he produced bad art: That was one of the advantages of his age, that he could be sure of his mastery in every moment. But he himself, while his nation honored it, was unable to enjoy it and it seemed to him as if his work lacked those characteristics of fiery inventiveness which, as creations of joy, contribute more to the pleasure of the readership than some inner meaning. He was afraid of the summer in the countryside, alone in that little house with the maidservant who prepared the food for him and the manservant who served it; he feared the familiar sight of the mountains and steep cliffs that would surround his listless dullness. And so there was a need for something different, some living without a set plan, some fresh air from remote places, an infusion of fresh blood to make the summer more tolerable and productive. So travel it would be — he was content with himself. Not that far, certainly not to the tigers. A night in the sleeping car and a siesta of three or four weeks in one of the usual places for holidays in the lovely South. . .

So he thought to himself while the noise of the electric tram approached along the UngererstraBe and when he got in he decided to spend the evening with the study of maps and schedules. On the platform it occurred to him to look for the man with the bast hat, his comrade during that rather fateful stay. But the man's whereabouts remained unknown, as he was neither to be found in his former location, nor at the next station, nor in the car.