It is disheartening, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, how much the human being – this so talkative, so concept-hungry animal – lets itself be calmed by circles. One draws them in exercise books to practice order; one puts them into programs to simulate progress; one hangs them as chandeliers in halls so that the light not only shines but is also formal; one lays them in the water as a lifebuoy, as a promise that even the abyss, once it is there, at least has an edge to grip. And one wears them on the finger, as jewelry, as seal, as eye – as a small, discreet circle that at the same time says: I belong. And: I will be counted.
The circle is the friendliest geometry because it knows no direction. It is, if you will, the form of staying.
And yet – and that is its malice – it is also the form of returning. For whoever runs in a circle does not move forward; he only comes back to the beginning, only a little more tired, only a little more experienced, only a little closer to that end which he so gladly calls “goal” so as not to have to say “death”.
Hans Castorp knew this without knowing it. He was not the man who drew circles; he was the man who moved within them. And precisely for that reason, when he awoke in Venice on these days, he had to have, for a brief moment – only one, but it was sharp enough – the feeling that he had arrived at a point where the circles that had carried him were beginning to close.
He woke up early.
Not because he was well rested – sleep is, as we know, no longer a quality but a metric – but because the air in his room was already warm, warm in a way that does not comfort but clings. The light did not fall fresh, not Nordic, not mountain-clear through the curtains, but it crept, yellowish, soft and at the same time dishearteningly greedy, over the furniture, as if it wanted to possess everything it touched. Outside one could hear water.
Not the well-behaved water of a basin that one decorates with balls in a wellness resort; not the orderly water of a pool in which the bubbles have the function of providing amusement. But this other water that has no function except to be: it struck against stone, gurgled, rubbed, pulled, as if it knew that stone and human were indifferent to it.
Hans Castorp reached – reflexively, as one reaches for the pulse when one has grown used to the idea that the pulse can be a message – for his hand.
The ring was there.
It did not glow. It is not one of those products that scream. It is, like all truly powerful things, discreet. It showed him numbers.
6:41.
17%.
Some curve, some circle that was blue somewhere, green somewhere, somewhere – depending on how one sets the thresholds. Hans Castorp saw it, and he felt – and that was new – that he no longer wanted to believe it.
He got up, went to the window, pushed the curtain aside.
Venice lay there.
It is disheartening, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, how much one knows Venice in advance before one sees it. One knows it from pictures, from sentences, from music, from that bourgeois education that teaches us cities like poems. And then one stands there and realizes: the familiar is only the mask, and behind it is something that cannot be quoted because it smells.
It smelled of salt and of old things. Of algae, of diesel, of a sweet, barely perceptible scent of decay that does not shock but enters itself, like a quiet entry in a log file. And amid all this – and that was the first sting – there was something chemical, something that does not come from nature but from order: a disinfectant smell, as if someone had tried to save this city built of water with hygiene.
Hans Castorp thought of Dr. Porsche.
He thought of “hygiene” as morality.
And he thought, without being surprised, of hibiscus.
For on the small table stood, like a ridiculous household altar that had traveled with him, his glass with the tea he had prepared the previous evening – not quite boiling water, hibiscus blossoms, white tea. He had done it because ritual, as Dr. Porsche had said, turns burden into form. He had done it because he could not bear to be in a city that makes time out of water without his time rituals.
He lifted the glass.
The color was deep red.
Deep red, as Dr. Porsche had announced it, as if he had not been speaking of tea but of fate.
Hans Castorp held the glass against the light.
The red shone as if it were healthy. As if red here were proof of vitality, not a warning signal.
And then he heard voices below, in the alley.
Not loud, but with that particular agitation that people get when they know something that officially must not be known. Venice, Hans Castorp realized, was in these days not only a city of masks; it was also a city of rumors.
“Si consiglia…”, he heard.
One recommends.
The word recommendation had accompanied him since the Sonnenalp like a shadow. Recommendation: the gentlest command. Recommendation: the polite violence. Recommendation: modernity in a single word.
He got dressed, slowly, mechanically, in that way one dresses when one wants to leave and stay at the same time.
For that is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the real sickness of such places: they make staying beautiful, and thereby leaving becomes moral.
