Chapter 4

From now on Helios drove his scorching chariot across the sky on every day, with his yellow curls blowing in the simultaneous Easterly breeze. Whitish-silky shine lay on the slowly undulating Pontus. The sand was scalding. Beneath the silvery-twinkling blue of the ether rust-colored canvases were stretching before the huts, and in the sharply delineated shadow they afforded one spent the morning hours. But the evening was also exquisite, when the vegetation in the park was spreading a balsamic scent, the celestial bodies above were advancing on their circles and the murmuring of the wine-dark sea, softly approaching, communed with one's soul. An evening like that guaranteed another sunny day full of joyful idleness and ornate with countless occasions for happy accidents in close proximity.

The guest who had been held here by just such a happy accident did not see any reason at all to depart as soon as he got back his trunk. For two days he had to endure some privation and could not dress for dinner otherwise than in his travel suit. Then, when one day the lost luggage was deposited in front of his room, he filled all the closets and drawers with his possessions, determined to stay for an indeterminate amount of time, and overjoyed at being able to spend his hours at the beach wearing his silk suit and looking presentable at dinner.

The pleasant regularity of this life had cast its spell on him, the soft and glowing mildness of this conduct had filled him with amazement. What a stay indeed, which combined the attractions of a civilized seaside life on a Southern beach with the cozy closeness of the wonderfully wondrous city! Aschenbach did not love pleasure. Whenever there was a party, a time to rest, to spend one's days with one's delights, he soon grew restless — and this had been particularly so in younger years — and demanded back the labor and sober service of his everyday life. Only this place could relax him, sooth his will, make him happy. Sometimes in the morning, dozing under his canvas, or in a balmy night, leaning against the soft gondola cushions, being ferried from St Mark's under a starry sky back to the Lido — with the garish lights and melodious sounds of the serenade receding — he recalled his house in the mountains, the location of his summertime duty, where the clouds moved through the garden, touching the ground, terrible thunderstorms made the lights in the house go extinct, and the ravens, fed by him, landed on the branches of firs. Then it appeared to him he was in Elysium, at the bounds of Earth where an easy life is granted people, where there is no snow nor winter nor storm nor deluge but always the softly-cooling breath of Oceanus and the days take their course in blissful idleness, without effort, without struggle, and completely devoted to the Sun and its feasts.

Often, almost constantly, Aschenbach saw the boy Tadzio; a limited space, a different order to everyone's life effected it that the arresting one was close to him most of the day, with short interruptions. He saw and met him everywhere: in the ground-floor rooms of the hotel, on the refreshing boat trips to the city and back, in the marvel of the square, and frequently in between on streets and paths if luck contributed. But mainly and with gratifying regularity the mornings at the beach gave him ample opportunity to study the beautiful figure devoutly. This predictability of happiness, these daily-recurring fortunate circumstances made the stay dearer to him and let every day seem like a Sunday.

He had risen early, as normally when he felt the drive to work, and was at the beach before everyone else, when the Sun was still mild and the sea lay blindingly white in morning dreams. He jovially greeted the man at the gate, also greeted the barefoot old man who had prepared his hut for him, deployed the canvas, and moved the furniture out onto the platform, and seated himself. The next three or four hours were his, in which the Sun ascended and gained fearsome power, in which the blue of the ocean deepened, and in which he could lay eyes upon Tadzio.

He saw him arrive from the left, close to the seashore, saw him come out backwards from between the huts, and sometimes found to his surprise that he had completely missed his entry and that he was already there, in that blue-white bathing suit that was his only dress at the beach, and had resumed his usual frolicking on the sunny sand — that sweetly inane, idly vagrant life, which was play and rest, an ambling, wading, digging, catching, reclining, and swimming, guarded by the women on the platform, who with soprano voices called for him: "Tadziu! Tadziu!" and whom he joined with eager gesturing, to tell them what he had experienced, to show them what he had found and caught: mussels, sea horses, jellyfish and crayfish that walked sideways. Aschenbach did not understand a single word of what he said, and it might have been the most everyday matter, it was still just gibberish to him. That way the foreignness of the boy turned speech into music, a wanton Sun bathed him in a prodigal splendor, and the majestic view of the distant sea always served as a backdrop to his figure.

Soon the onlooker knew every curve and pose of that sophisticated body that so freely exhibited itself, greeted again joyfully every already familiar pretty feature, and could find no end to his admiration and tender sensual pleasure. The boy was called to welcome a guest who was attending on the women at the hut; he came running thither, perhaps still dripping from the water, shook his curls, and, while extending his hand, standing on one leg while the other foot was on its toes, he had an appealing circular stance of the body, comely in a tense way, bashful because of his kindliness, eager to please out of aristocratic duty. He lay on the sand, his bath towel around his breast, his chin supported by his carefully chiseled arm; the one who was called "Jaschu" cowered next to him, cooing, and nothing could be more enchanting than the smile on eyes and lips with which the excellent one looked up at his inferior and servant. He stood at the shore, solitary and away from his people, very close to Aschenbach — erect, hands tied in his nape, slowly rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, and dreamed into the blue, while small waves were washing over his toes. His honey-colored locks caressed his temples and the nape, the Sun illuminated the fluff of his upper spine, the finely drawn rips, the symmetry of the breasts was accentuated by his tight-fitting bathing suit, his armpits were still bare as in a statue, the hollows of his knees were shining, and their blue maze of veins made the entire body seem to be fashioned from some translucent substance. What discipline, what precision of thought found their expression in this elongated and youthfully perfect form! The severe and pure will that, working behind the scenes, had been able to bring this divine sculpture into being — was is not known to him, the artist? Did it not also work within him, when he, filled with prudent passion, coaxed that slender shape from the marble of the language that he had seen in his mind and which he put up before the people as an example and mirror of intellectual beauty?

Example and mirror! His eyes embraced that noble figure at the bounds of the blue, and in enthusiastic rapture he believed to embrace beauty itself, form as a thought in the mind of God, the one and pure perfection living in the human spirit and of which a human image and analog was erected here for worship. That was intoxication; and without hesitation, even eagerly, the artist welcomed it. His mind was flying, his learning surged up, his memory revived ancient notions from his youth that he had been taught but never thought about himself. Was it not written that the Sun shifted our attention from the intellectual to the corporeal? It confused and enchanted, it was said, the mind and the memory, so that the soul forgot its own disposition out of sheer joy and with stunned admiration attached itself to the most appealing of the lit objects: that it was then only able to reach higher spheres while beholding a body. Eros mimicked mathematicians who showed dull children concrete models of abstract shapes: That way also the god liked to use the form and color of human youth to make the conceptual visible, decorating it with all the reflections of beauty whose sight made us burn with pain and hope. So ruminated the euphoric one; so were his feelings. And a delightful daydream out of the rumbling of the sea and the opulence of the Sun took shape before his eyes. It was the old plane-tree not far from the walls of Athens — that holy and shady place, filled with the scent of cherry trees, that was adorned with devotional images and pious gifts in honor of the nymphs and Achelous. A clear stream traversed smooth pebbles at the foot of the wide-branching tree; the crickets were chirping. On the soft-sloping grass two figures were reclining, protected from the heat of the day: an older and a younger one, one ugly and one winsome, the sage with the amiable. And with pleasantries and wittily wooing jests Socrates taught Phaedo about longing and virtue. He talked to him about the searing fright which is suffered by the one who beholds something that mirrors eternal beauty; talked to him about the cravings of the godless and evil one who cannot see the beauty behind its image and who is unable of reverence; talked about the holy terror that strikes the noble upon apparition of a perfect body before him, how he is shocked and does not dare to look at it, and how he would worship the one who is beautiful like a god if that did not make him look silly in the eyes of the others. Because only beauty, he added, is lovely and visible at the same time: it is, nota bene, the only way in which we can receive and bear the intellect. Or what would become of us when the divine in general, reason, virtue, and truth would be available like this to our senses? Would we not burn and die from love, like Semele before Zeus? Thus beauty is the way of the feeling one to reach the mind — only a way, a means, my little Phaedo. . . And then he landed his finest blow, the seasoned charmer: That the lover would be more divine than the beloved because God was in the former but not in the latter — perhaps the most tender and jocular notion ever conceived and the source of all waggishness and hidden wantonness of desire. The happiness of writers is the thought that can be entirely emotion and the emotion that can be entirely thought. Such a pulsing thought, such a precise emotion belonged to the solitary one then: namely that nature was shaken with delight when the mind paid homage to beauty. Suddenly he wanted to write. Eros loves idleness and is made for it, but in this stage of his condition the mind of the afflicted was set on production, the immediate cause was almost irrelevant. A question, an inspiration to make his position known about an important problem of culture and good taste had reached the traveler from the intellectual sphere. The subject was a familiar experience to him; his desire to see it take the glorious shape of words was unexpectedly irresistible. He wanted to work in the presence of Tadzio, to take the proportions of the boy as a template, to let his style flow like the curves of his body that seemed divine to him, to carry his beauty into the intellectual like the herder Ganymede had been lifted to the skies by the eagle-like Zeus. Never had the joy of words seemed sweeter to him, never had he been so conscious of Eros being in the words as in the dangerous and precious hours in which he, in full sight of his idol and under his canvas, worked on his little treatise — those one-and-a-half pages of exquisite prose, the honesty, nobility and emotional deepness of which caused it to be much admired within a short time. It is probably better that the world knows only the result, not the conditions under which it was achieved; because knowledge of the artist's sources of inspiration might bewilder them, drive them away and in that way nullify the effect of the excellent work. Strange hours! Strangely unnerving exertion! Strangely fertilizing intercourse between mind and body! When Aschenbach put aside his work and left the beach, he felt exhausted, shattered even, and it was as if his conscience was accusing him as if after a debauchery.

It was on the following morning that he, just leaving the hotel, saw Tadzio already on his way to the ocean — alone. The wish to use this opportunity to meet and talk to the unknowing source of his emotional turmoil and inspiration, to enjoy his gaze and his replies seemed rather obvious. The beautiful one ambled leisurely, he could be overtaken and Aschenbach sped up his pace. He reaches him on the boardwalk behind the huts, he wants to place his hand upon his crown or shoulder and address him with a little phrase in French perhaps: there he feels that his heart is beating in his throat, maybe because of the brisk walking, that he is so out of breath that he will only be able to talk in a quivering voice; he hesitates, he tries to calm himself, suddenly he fears he has been walking behind him for too long, is afraid of him taking notice of that, tries a second time, fails, abstains, and passes with a lowered head.

Too late! he thought in that moment. Too late! But was it really too late? That step that he did not take might have led to good, light and happy things, might have cured him. Alone it seemed he did not want to be healed, that the intoxication was too dear to him. Who can make sense of the inward and outward manifestations of artists? Who can understand the deeply bonded alloy of order and intemperance that is its foundation? Because to refuse the sobering reality is intemperance. Aschenbach was no longer in a mood for being self-critical; the taste and mental state of his years, self-respect, maturity and late simplicity kept him from analyzing his motives and from deciding if he did not act because of his conscience or because of weakness. He was confused, he feared somebody might have witnessed his attack and subsequent defeat, he was afraid of ridicule.

Otherwise he jested to himself about his comically holy terror. "Aghast like a cockwho lets his wings hang limply in a fight," he thought. "That is truly a strange godwho breaks our will and subdues our desire like that in the face of the amiable. . . "He played, raved, and was much to proud to be afraid of a feeling.

He finally stopped keeping track of the the grace period he had allowed himself; the thought of returning home did not even occur to him. He had obtained plenty of money through his writing. Only the possible departure of the Polish family concerned him; but he had learned en passant from the barber of the hotel that they had arrived immediately before himself. The Sun tanned his hands and face, the stimulating salty breeze strengthened him for emotions and whereas he usually spent all the refreshment given to him by slumber, food, and nature on his work, he now let all that which the Sun, idleness, and the marine air afforded him suffuse generously in intoxication and emotion.

His sleep was short; the deliriously uniform days were separated by brief nights of happy listlessness. He went to bed early, since the day seemed finished to him as soon as Tadzio had disappeared at around nine o'clock. But in the beginning dawn a tenderly penetrating fright awoke him, his heart remembered his adventure, he had to get up and so he did, and lightly clothed against the morning coolness he seated himself at the open window to expect the rising Sun. That wondrous event filled his soul, consecrated by the sleep, with devotion. The sky, the earth and the ocean were still lying in glassy paleness; a lone star was still twinkling in the nothingness. But a wind from forbidden distant places arose, for Eos to get up from the side of her husband and that first and sweet blush of the most remote parts of the sea and the skies happened, which portended the manifestation of creation. The boy-abducting goddess approached, who had robbed Cleitos and Cephalos and who had enjoyed the love of the handsome Orion, defying the other Olympians. A scattering of roses commenced at the bounds of the world, an unspeakably charming blossoming, infant clouds, blurry and translucent, were hovering like amoretti in the air in rosy-bluish scent, purple fell onto the sea which seemed to wash it ashore in undulations, golden spears came flying into the lofty sky, the brilliance became a burning, silently, with divine force the fervent flames ascended and with flying hoofs the brother's horse moved above Earth's circle. Blinded by the god's splendor the lonely one sat, he closed his eyes and let his eyelids be kissed by the Sun. Ancient feelings, early and delightful needs of his heart that had withered in the austere duty of his life and now returned miraculously transformed — he recognized them with a confused and bewildered smile. He was absorbed in thought and reverie, slowly his lips formed a name and still smiling and with his face turned upwards and his hands folded in his lap, he fell asleep in his chair again.

But the day which had begun so fiery and festal was strangely elevated and mythically metamorphosed in its entirety. Whence came that sudden breath which so softly caressed temple and ear like a divine whisper? Fluffy white clouds were standing in troops in the sky, like grazing herds of the gods. The current of air became stronger and Poseidon's horses where galloping along, also bulls belonging to the god, lowering their horns with a roar. Between the boulders of the more distant beach the waves jumped up like goats. A divinely disfigured world full of Pan's creatures surrounded the elated one, and his heart dreamed of tender fables. Several times, when the Sun set behind Venice, he sat on a bench in the park to watch Tadzio who, dressed in white and girded gaily, was playing ball on the flattened gravel court and it was Hyacinth he deemed to see who had to die because two gods fell in love with him. Yes, he felt Zephyr's painful jealousy of his rival Apollo, who neglected the Delphi oracle, the bow, and the cithara to play instead with his beloved; he saw the horrid discus hit the lovely head, he caught, turning pale as him, the limp body and the flower, sprung from that sweet blood, bore the inscription of his endless wail. . .

Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.

Some kind of relationship or acquaintance had to come about between Aschenbach and Tadzio by necessity, and with penetrating joy the older one realized that concern and attention were not left entirely unanswered. What caused the beautiful lad, for example, to always enter the beach along Aschenbach's hut, across the sand and sometimes unnecessarily close to him, almost touching his table and chair, instead of taking the boardwalk behind the huts? Was this effected by the magnetism and fascination of a superior emotion on its tender and thoughtless object? Daily Aschenbach expected Tadzio's entry and sometimes he pretended to be occupied with something else when it happened and let him pass by apparently without taking notice. But at other times their gazes met. They were always deeply serious when that took place. Nothing in the educated and dignified expression of the older one betrayed an inner motion; but in Tadzio's eyes there was an inquiry, a pensive questioning, he hesitated in his walk, cast down his eyes, looked up again in a lovely way, and when he had passed, something in his attitude suggested that only good manners were keeping him from turning around.

But one evening it occurred differently. The Polish children with their governess had been absent during dinner in the large hall — Aschenbach had registered it with consternation. He took a walk after the meal, anxious about their whereabouts, in his dinner jacket and straw hat, at the foot of the terrace, when suddenly the nunlike sisters with the governess and four steps behind them Tadzio appeared in the light of the arc lights. Obviously they were coming from the steamship landing, after they had dined in the city for some reason. It had been chilly on the water; Tadzio was wearing a dark blue sailor's overcoat with golden buttons and an associated cap on his head. The Sun and the marine air did not burn him, his skin had stayed marble-like yellowish as in the beginning; but he seemed more pale than usual, be it because of the cold or because of the blanching moonlight of the lamps. His symmetrical brows looked more defined, his eyes very dark. He was more beautiful than can be expressed in words and Aschenbach again felt pain about the inability of words to truly describe beauty instead of just praising it.

He had not recognized the dear figure, it came unexpectedly, so he did not have time to take on an expression of calm and dignity. Joy, surprise, admiration could be read in it when his gaze met that of the missing one — and in that second it happened that Tadzio smiled: smiled at him, familiarly, lovely, and openly, with lips that only slowly parted during the smile. It was the smile of Narcissus who bends above the reflecting water, that deep, enchanting, protracted smile, with which he extends his arms towards the mirror image of his own beauty — a slightly distorted smile, distorted from the hopelessness of his longing to kiss the pretty lips of his shadow, flirtatious, curious and somewhat tormented, infatuating and infatuated.

The addressee of that smile ran away with it as if with a calamitous gift. He was so moved that he was forced to flee the light of the terrace and the front garden and briskly made for the park on the rear side. Oddly indignant and affectionate admonitions escaped him: "You must never smile like that! Listen, you must never smile like that at anyonel" He threw himself onto a bench, frantically inhaling the nightly fragrance of the flora. And leaning back, with hanging arms, overcome and shivering, he whispered the formula of yearning — impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous, and yet sacred and venerable even in this case: "I love you!"