They walked.
Because in Venice one walks, and one walks because otherwise one dissolves in the dampness of one’s thoughts.
The alleys were narrow, the stones warm, the light cut into strips. People stood in groups, held devices in front of their faces, took photos, filmed, documented. It was as if, down here where everything is image anyway, one had to prove all the more that one exists by pressing it into an image.
Hans Castorp saw the screens.
He saw the small faces in them, smoother than in reality, brighter, with bigger eyes, as if the technology itself had taken a barber and beautician into itself.
“Filters,” he said, without wanting to.
Gustav von A. did not look up.
“Mask,” he said.
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“Isn’t that… ridiculous?” he asked.
He did not mean it badly.
He meant it like Tonio: mocking out of tenderness.
Gustav von A. stopped briefly, in the middle of an alley, so that two female tourists had to dodge around him. He did not look annoyed, only absent.
“Ridiculous,” he said slowly, “is a word one uses in order not to say: It hurts.”
Hans Castorp was silent.
That was a sentence.
He could have written it down.
He did not.
They walked on.
In a shop window Hans Castorp saw masks.
Not the small, hygienic ones that one carries in pockets; real masks: golden, white, black, with feathers, with glitter, with long beaks that recall those plague doctors one sees in pictures when one imagines history as theater. Beak masks, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, are a particularly uncanny invention: They were meant to be protection, and they became a symbol. People stuffed herbs into them, they believed scent was a barrier; and in the end it was only a costume for helplessness.
Hans Castorp stopped.
He looked at a white mask, smooth, without expression, with two eyeholes. It was beautiful in its emptiness. It was also unedifying, because emptiness always contains the possibility of death.
“Look,” he said.
Gustav looked.
He did not flinch.
He only said:
“Here everything has already worn a mask once before.”
Hans Castorp thought of himself.
He thought of his name.
Of the name he said, and the name he was.
It is a strange thing, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader: One can laugh at the masks of others – and in doing so forget that one’s own mask is not made of papier-mâché but of biography.
They walked on.
The sign Gustav was looking for was not found as a sign. It was found as a recommendation.
At the entrance of a small house hung a little card, printed, discreet, with the hotel logo at the top: “Fripac-Medis Hair-Shave-Club – recommended by your concierge.”
Recommended.
Hans Castorp looked at Gustav.
Gustav did not look back.
He went inside.
