They arrived at a hotel.
It was – how could it be otherwise – a hotel that did not simply want to be a hotel, but a stage set of fate. Gustav von A. had chosen it that way without saying so; and Hans Castorp, who had lived long enough in a house that presents itself as a school of life, recognized this kind of choice at once: You do not take just any place. You take a place that is already narrated, so that you can lay yourself into it like into a preformed bed.
The hotel was not directly on the Canal Grande, but a little apart, on the edge, where one does not see the water only as traffic, but as surface: the lagoon. You reached it by small paths, over bridges, through narrow alleys in which the air could suddenly become cool because no ray of sun finds its way in; and then warm again, because the stones hold the heat like a memory. Other people carried the luggage. Hans Castorp noticed it, and it briefly embarrassed him – not morally, but physiologically. For he was in top form; he could have carried it. But one lets others carry when one pays. That is the bourgeois truth.
The lobby of the hotel was dark, although it was daytime.
It was not dark for lack of light, but dark on purpose. Darkness, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is in such houses not absence, but luxury. One must be able to afford to dim the light. It smelled of wax, of polish, of an old perfume that had settled into fabrics and no longer goes away because it has become part of the furnishings. It smelled, very faintly, of disinfectant – and this small modern element, this thin chemical thread in the fabric of scents, was perhaps the eeriest thing, because it showed that even the past today is being sanitized.
A chandelier hung above the lobby.
Of course.
It was different from the chandelier of the Sonnenalp; it was not ring-shaped and not demonstratively modern. It was a crystal structure, old, heavy, with drops that hung like frozen tears; and yet, in its function, it was the same: light from above, gaze from above, a kind of silent eye that sees everything and at the same time pretends to be only decoration.
Hans Castorp looked up.
The ring on his finger gleamed.
Suddenly he felt how these two circles – the ring and the chandelier – related to each other, as if they had made an appointment: the ring in small, the chandelier in large; control on the body, control in the room. And he thought, with that quiet ironic weariness that had by now become familiar to him: One does not get out of the eye once one is in it. One takes it along. One takes it along to the South.
At the counter stood a person who smiled.
They did not smile like Kautsonik. Kautsonik had never smiled in order to sell; his smile was archive, thin and dry. This person smiled in order to receive, and reception is in the hotel the first form of taking possession. The person behind the counter spoke several languages without one noticing; they glided from Italian into English, into German, as the water glided from color to color.
Gustav von A. said his name.
Hans Castorp said his.
Or he said the name he wore.
The person behind the counter wrote.
The sound of the pen – for it was, astonishingly, a pen, not a tablet – scratched briefly, and Hans Castorp felt a memory rise into his hand: the man in black with the glass helmet who had written names on New Year’s Eve; the little wooden stick with which one can write when one is prepared for it to smudge. Here nothing smudged. Here things were entered.
“Joy to him who comes,” Kautsonik would have said.
Here they said: “Benvenuti.”
It was the same.
And not the same.
