They went outside.
The sun struck them like a palm.
The air was still damp, but now it also smelled of Gustav: of perfume, of powder, of a sweet severity.
Gustav walked faster.
He did not walk hastily – he walked resolutely.
Hans Castorp walked beside him, and he felt something stir inside him that he does not like to admit: a mixture of mockery and pity, of tenderness and aversion. That is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the Tonio position: one loves the bourgeois pose and despises it at the same time, because one knows that one needs it, and because one knows that it lies.
“You look… proper,” said Hans Castorp finally.
Gustav looked at him.
“That is not funny,” he said.
Hans Castorp raised his hand, almost apologetically.
“I did not mean funny,” he said. “I meant…”
He searched for a word.
Words are, if one is strict, often the worst mask: they reveal that one does not know what one feels.
“…touching,” he said.
Gustav stopped.
He stopped as if he had to decide whether he wanted to be offended or grateful.
Then he said:
“Touching is the opposite of dignified.”
Hans Castorp nodded.
“That is what the dignified say,” he said.
Gustav laughed briefly.
It was not a cheerful laugh.
It was a laugh like a short cut.
They walked on.
At the end of an alley Hans Castorp saw another sign.
Small.
Unobtrusive.
Three languages.
“It is recommended…”
Hans Castorp stopped.
Gustav did not stop.
“What is recommended this time?” asked Hans Castorp.
Gustav did not turn around.
“That one does not eat raw seafood,” he said, as if he knew it by heart.
Hans Castorp went to the sign.
There it was.
Not dramatic.
Not apocalyptic.
Just the way hygiene warnings are phrased today: friendly, reasonable, as if it were about weather.
And precisely because of that, thought Hans Castorp, they seem like fate.
“Why?” he asked.
Gustav shrugged his shoulders.
“Because something is circulating,” he said.
Something circulating.
Venice is, if one is strict, a city of circulation: water in circulation, money in circulation, female and male tourists in circulation, smells in circulation. And now: illness in circulation. It fits.
Hans Castorp thought of the ring.
He thought: It measures circulation. Pulse. Blood flow. Vascular stiffness.
He thought: One can measure circulation.
One cannot stop it.
They went to the piazza.
They passed people who were eating ice cream.
They passed people who were photographing oysters.
They passed people who, spruced up, were photographing themselves in the sun, as if sun were proof that one is alive.
Hans Castorp saw the faces.
Many were masked, not with fabric, but with smiles.
Smiles are, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the most frequent masks in hotels and vacation spots. They say: I am fine, and no one may ask why.
They sat down in a café.
Gustav chose a table so that he could see the door.
Hans Castorp chose the chair at the edge, because he always chooses the edge.
Gustav pulled out the newspaper.
He again pretended to read.
Hans Castorp looked at him.
Gustav’s hair shone in the light.
It was too dark, very slightly.
Not so much that one notices it immediately; but enough that, when one looks, one senses: Something is not right here.
Hans Castorp looked at Gustav’s hands.
They were calm.
But the fingers drummed.
Very lightly.
A rhythm that was not music, but nerve.
“You are afraid,” said Hans Castorp.
Gustav raised his gaze.
“Of what?” he asked.
It was a real question.
That is what makes it so dangerous.
Hans Castorp wanted to say: of old age.
He wanted to say: of death.
He wanted to say: of beauty.
Instead he said:
“That it does not suffice for you.”
Gustav looked at him for a long time.
Then he said:
“It never suffices.”
And this sentence, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is perhaps the plainest and at the same time the most cheerless sentence about human existence: It never suffices.
