Death In Venice Read Online Free PDF

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 It was an ancient vessel of Italian registry, outdated, sooty, and drab.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