On the beach, the world was indeed simpler.
Sand is a primitive surface: it absorbs everything, and it retains nothing. It is the opposite of a logbook. And perhaps that was exactly what Gustav was looking for: a place that does not register.
The sea lay there, blue-green, and it was as if someone had set the color so that it calms. People lay on loungers, under umbrellas, and it was this strange bourgeois nakedness that is at once freedom and compulsion: you show the body, but only in the permitted forms, dapper, creamed, controlled.
Hans Castorp thought of Zieser.
“Measure what matters,” Zieser had said.
Here nothing was measured. And precisely that was, perhaps, the problem.
Gustav sat down, not on a lounger, but on a chair, as if he still needed the form.
He looked out.
Hans sat down next to him.
For a while they said nothing.
Then, at the edge of their field of vision, a figure passed by – an adult figure, young perhaps, but not childlike, with that natural elegance that is not conscious and for that very reason seems like something immoral. She wore simple clothing, but the way she walked had something of music: rhythm without effort.
Hans Castorp saw it.
He also saw how Gustav saw it.
And here, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, one must be careful. For Death in Venice is a text that has taught us how dangerous it is to confuse beauty with desire, and how quickly the moral abyss opens when one does not put aesthetics in its place. Hans Castorp was not Aschenbach, and Gustav von A. was that a little. But what Gustav felt here was not desire in the raw sense; it was something that often takes the place of desire in creative people: the veneration of form.
He whispered something.
Hans did not understand it.
“What?” he asked.
Gustav did not answer.
He kept looking, and Hans noticed how Gustav put his hand to his forehead, as if he wanted to protect himself – not from the sun, but from a thought.
Then it happened, without theatrics, without pathos.
Gustav exhaled.
It was no dramatic gasp, no collapse. It was as if someone let go of a thread.
His head sank forward a little.
Hans Castorp did not see it at first. He only saw that Gustav was still.
“Gustav?” he said.
Gustav did not answer.
Hans put his hand on his arm.
The arm was warm. Too warm.
“Gustav,” Hans said once more, and now there was a tone in his voice that he knew from the war without ever having spoken it: the tone that says that something can no longer be undone.
Gustav opened his eyes.
They were not clear.
They were not fearful either.
They were – and that was the monstrous thing – tired.
“It is…,” Gustav began, and the sentence got stuck, like a sentence that can no longer be written.
Hans leaned forward.
“Help,” he said, and the word was small.
A lifeguard came.
A man in uniformed casualness, trained, brown, dapper, as if rescue here were also a service. He knelt, he laid on hands, he said things that one says in such cases so that the bystanders have the feeling there is a protocol.
Hans Castorp saw all this as if through glass.
Then, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, he saw something he would never forget.
Not because it was so terrible, but because it was so inconspicuous.
A little fluid came out of Gustav’s mouth, as if the body wanted to get rid of something.
It was not much.
But it was red.
Not theatrically red, not literary.
A small, real red.
And it flowed, very slowly, over Gustav’s chin, fell onto the sand, and the sand absorbed it without comment.
Red water.
Red life.
Red indication.
Hans Castorp thought of hibiscus.
He thought of stollen powder that looks like snow.
He thought of lilies.
And he thought: This is the truth that needs no recommendation.
The lifeguard looked at Hans, briefly, professionally.
“Mi dispiace,” he said.
I am sorry.
And Hans Castorp, the man of feeling, sensed that this “mi dispiace” is the only morality the world has on offer.
Gustav von A. died.
Not in a great act.
Not with a sentence that can be quoted.
He died as people die: in a protocol that comes too late.
Hans Castorp sat there, and he noticed that his ring on his finger kept counting.
He counted steps.
He counted heartbeats.
He counted – and this is the comedy that leads to the edge of the abyss – he counted as if counting were a form of understanding.
The ring knew nothing.
And precisely for that reason something had happened.
