Hans Castorp’s room was high up.
Of course.
If you come from a highland, you also like to live upstairs in the south; it is a small habit of the gaze that cannot be untrained so easily. You want, even when you look at water, a distance. You want, if you are deserted, always a little distance.
The room was large, but not modern.
It was large because it was old, and age is a magnitude in this city. The furniture was heavy, the wood dark, the fabrics thick; the bed stood like an altar, and on the bed lay pillows whose number no longer indicated comfort, but an intention: You do not want to sleep here; you want to lie here. Sleep is function. Lying is style.
Hans Castorp set down the suitcase.
He stood still for a moment, listened.
And heard nothing.
Or more precisely: He heard something that was so constant that it seemed like nothing: the soft, regular gurgling of the water against the stones. It was not loud. It was not dramatic. It was the sound of time when it presents itself not as a clock, but as movement.
Hans Castorp went to the window.
Outside lay the lagoon.
It did not lie like a lake, not like a sea; it lay like a surface that does not know whether it wants to be solid or liquid. The water was green, not clear; it was a green that consists of depth and suspended matter, of algae, of light, of past. Boats glided far out, small black strokes. And above the water lay an air that shimmered; not hot as in the desert, but damp, heavy, like a cloth that you lay over your face.
Hans Castorp looked at the lagoon.
And then he looked at the ring.
Up in the Sonnenalp, he had learned to treat the ring as a priest: It delivers values, you confess. You check, you correct, you optimize. The ring up there, in the highland, had been an instrument of order.
Down here it was a foreign body.
For what did it mean to measure heart rate when the water itself was pulsing? What did it mean to count steps when you are in a city that consists only of steps – of bridges, of alleys, of detours? What did it mean to optimize sleep phases when the air itself is like a dream, sweet and heavy and unedifyingly seductive?
Hans Castorp did not take off the ring.
It was, as Dr. Porsche would have said, a task.
And in recent months Hans Castorp had learned to complete tasks.
He went to the small table that stood in the room and set his tins on it.
Yellow.
Green.
And the red of the hibiscus that he carried in the bottle.
It looked like a small, private altarpiece: three colors, three promises, three forms of control. He took the yellow powder, held it against the light, and it shone as if it wanted to say: I am sun. He took the green powder, and in its intense color it was almost obscene, as if it wanted to say: I am life in powdered form. He looked at the red, and red is, as you know, never just beautiful; red is blood, red is warning, red is feast.
He had to smile.
Not because he found it funny – although it was funny – but because he suddenly realized how much he had wrapped himself in his rituals like in blankets.
He gargled.
Yes.
He gargled in Venice.
He gargled before he drank because Dr. Porsche had recommended it, and recommendations, Gustav had said, are everywhere. He gargled and listened to the water outside, and it was as if the city were gargling along.
He drank.
Slowly.
And while he drank, he thought, with a clarity that was strange even to himself: Maybe this is not hygiene. Maybe this is magic.
For what is a ritual other than the attempt to persuade the world to comply?
