The Magic Mountain (112 page)

At the appointed hour, then, they met at the portal of the Berghof. While Hans Castorp, Ferge, and Wehsal stood waiting for the residents of the royal suite, they talked and petted the horses, whose black, moist, clumsy lips took the sugar they offered on the palms of their hands. The traveling companions appeared at the top of the open stairway only a little later. Peeperkorn, whose regal head seemed to have grown smaller, stood there in his long, rather worn ulster with Clavdia at his side; he now doffed his soft, round hat, and his lips formed an inaudible, general word of greeting. Then he exchanged handshakes with each of the three gentlemen, who had moved toward the couple as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Young man,” he said to Hans Castorp, laying his hand on the latter’s shoulder. “How are you doing, my son?”

“Splendid, thanks. And that is mutual, I hope?” came the response.

The sun shone, it was a beautiful, bright day; but it had been a good idea to put on spring overcoats—the drive would be cool, no doubt. Madame Chauchat was also wearing a belted coat of some warm, fuzzy, large-checked fabric, and had even thrown a little fur over her shoulders. The brim of her felt hat was pulled down on one side by an olive-colored veil she had tied under her chin, in an effect so charming that it was almost painful for all present—except Ferge, the only man who was not in love with her. His impartiality meant that when they took their places in a temporary arrangement—until the nonresidents would join them—he was assigned a spot on the backseat of the first landau, across from Mynheer and Madame, while Hans Castorp climbed aboard the second carriage with Ferdinand Wehsal, though not without having first spotted a wry smile on Clavdia’s face. The Malayan valet had joined them for the excursion; walking in his master’s wake, his slight figure had appeared bearing an ample basket, from under whose lid the necks of two bottles of wine jutted up, which he then stored under the backseat of the first carriage. The moment he took his seat beside the coachman and crossed his arms, the horses were given the sign and the carriages moved off down the loop of the driveway, brakes set.

Wehsal had also noticed Frau Chauchat’s smile, and with a display of rotting teeth, he mentioned it to his fellow excursionist. “Did you see,” he asked, “how she was making fun of you, because you had to ride alone with me? Yes, yes, that’s her way of adding insult to injury. Does it annoy and disgust you all that much to have to sit beside me?”

“Pull yourself together, Wehsal, and refrain from such ugly comments,” Hans Castorp rebuked him. “Women smile on all sorts of occasions, just to smile. It is pointless to worry about it every time. Why are you forever cringing and writhing? Like all of us, you have your good points and your bad. For example, you play the music of
Summer Night’s Dream
very prettily, and not everyone can do that. You must play it again soon.”

“Yes, there you sit offering me your condescending advice,” the wretched man replied, “and have no idea how much insult there is in your consolation, that you only humiliate me all the more with it. It’s easy for you to offer comfort from your high horse, because even if you look rather silly at the moment, at least you had your chance once, and were in seventh heaven, good God, and felt her arms around your neck—good God, just to think of it burns at my gut and tears at my heart—and, then, knowing full well all that was granted you, you look down on me in my wretched torment . . .”

“You don’t have a pretty way of expressing yourself, Wehsal. I find it really quite obnoxious—and I don’t think I need to disguise the fact from you, since you’ve accused me of insulting you. I suppose you mean it to be repulsive, too; you quite deliberately attempt to make yourself disgusting, forever cringing and writhing. Are you really so terribly in love with her?”

“Horribly,” Wehsal answered, shaking his head. “I can’t tell you what I’ve had to endure—thirsting, craving for her. If only I could say it would kill me, but a man can’t live with it or die from it. While she was gone, things began to get a little better, I was gradually forgetting her. But since she has returned and I see her every day, it’s so bad sometimes that I bite my arm and flail my hands in the air and don’t know what to do. It’s a craving that shouldn’t even exist, and yet you can’t wish it didn’t exist. Once it has hold of you, you can’t wish it away, because you’d have to wish your life away, it’s so bound up with it, and you can’t do that—what good would dying do? Afterward—with pleasure. In her arms—only too gladly. But before? That’s nonsense, because life is desire, and desire is life, and life can’t be its own enemy. That is the damned hole I’m boxed into. And although I say ‘damned,’ it’s just a turn of phrase; it’s as if I were someone else—it can’t apply to me. There are so many different tortures, Castorp, and if a man is subjected to one torture, all he wants is for it to end, that is his one and only goal. But you can be rid of the torture of fleshly desire by only one means, and under one condition—by its being satisfied. Otherwise—no, not for any price! It is an instrument of torture, and if it hasn’t got hold of you, then you don’t bother with it, but whoever it does get hold of soon gets to know our Lord Jesus Christ and the tears roll down his cheeks. Good God in heaven, what an instrument, what a piece of business it is. Flesh desires flesh, simply because it is not your own, but belongs to another soul—how strange and yet, when viewed in the right light, how unpretentious, how unabashedly benign. You could almost say: if that’s all it wants, then in God’s name, let it have it. What is it I want, Castorp? Do I want to murder her? Do I want to spill her blood? I just want to fondle her! Castorp, dear Castorp, forgive me for whimpering like this, but for God’s sake she could comply with my wishes. And there’s something higher, loftier about it, too. I’m not a beast, I’m a human being, too, after all. The desire of the flesh wanders here and there, it is not bound, not fixed, which is why we call it bestial. But once it is fixed on a given human being with a face, why then our mouths speak of love. You don’t desire just her torso and the fleshly shell of her body; in fact, if her face were fashioned just a little differently, why, it’s quite possible you wouldn’t even want her whole body at all. Which only proves that I love her soul, and that I love her with my soul. Because to love the face is to love the soul.”

“What is wrong with you, Wehsal? You’re beside yourself, going on here in a vein that, God knows, is . . .”

“But that’s just it, that’s my misfortune,” the poor wretch went on, “that she has a soul, that she is a human being made up of body and soul.

Because her soul wants nothing to do with my soul, and so her body wants nothing to do with mine. Oh, what rotten, beastly luck! And that is why my desires are condemned to disgrace, and my body can only writhe forever. Why doesn’t she, body and soul, want to have anything to do with me, Castorp? And why is my desire for her such a horror? Am I not a man? Is a repulsive man not a man? I am a man to the nth degree, I swear it. I would outdo anything she has ever known if she would only admit me to the realm of bliss, open those arms whose beauty, like the beauty of her face, comes from her soul. I would inflict all the lusts of the world on her, Castorp, if it were merely a matter of bodies and not of faces, as well, if it were not for her cursed soul, which wants nothing to do with me, but without which I would not even desire her body—that’s the devil’s own hole I’m boxed into, damned to writhe there forever.”

“Shh, Wehsal! Not so loud! The driver can understand you. He’s not moving his head on purpose, but I can tell from his back that he’s listening.”

“He is listening and he understands—there you have it, Castorp! There you have the instrument, the piece of business in its full and unique character. If I were talking about metempsychosis or about . . . hydrostatics, he wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t have the vaguest, wouldn’t even be interested. Because those aren’t popular subjects. But the highest, final, and most horribly private piece of business, the business of the flesh and the soul—why, it’s the most popular subject of all, and everyone understands it and can make fun of someone whom it has got hold of and whose days are tortured by desire and whose nights are the hell of disgrace. Castorp, dear Castorp, let me whimper a little—you don’t know the nights I have. I dream of her every night—ah, what don’t I dream about her! I can feel the burning in my throat and gut, just thinking about it. And it always ends with her slapping me, right across the face, sometimes even spitting, too—with her soul-filled face contorted in disgust, she spits at me. And then I wake up, bathed in sweat and shame and desire.”

“Well, Wehsal, let’s just be quiet for a while and resolve to say nothing until we’ve arrived at the grocer’s and the others join us. That is my suggestion, those are my instructions. I don’t wish to offend you, and I admit that you are caught up in an awful mess. But there was a story they used to tell at home about a girl whose punishment was that every time she opened her mouth, snakes and toads came out, snakes and toads with every word. The book didn’t say what she did about it, but I’ve always assumed she probably ended up keeping her mouth shut.”

“But it’s an undeniable human urge,” Wehsal said piteously, “a human necessity, dear Castorp, to speak, to ease your mind when you’re in a mess like I’m in.”

“It is even a human
right
, Wehsal, if you like. But in my opinion, under certain circumstances, there are rights one does not exercise for good reason.”

And so, following Hans Castorp’s instructions, they said no more; but the carriages quickly reached the grocer’s little house entwined with wild grape, where they did not have to wait a moment. Naphta and Settembrini were already out on the street, the latter in his frayed beaver-trimmed jacket, the former in a spring overcoat, a quilted yellowish-white garment a dandy might wear. While waves and greetings were exchanged, the carriages were turned around, and the gentlemen climbed aboard. Naphta took the fourth seat in the first landau, next to Ferge; and Settembrini—in a splendid mood, bubbling over with lucid, witty remarks—joined Hans Castorp and Wehsal, who gave up his place on the backseat, which Herr Settembrini knew exactly how to use, assuming the careless pose of a gentleman of leisure out for a spin.

He praised the pleasures of riding, the way the body was moved along in comfortable repose past constantly changing scenery; he assumed an obliging, fatherly tone with Hans Castorp and even patted poor Wehsal’s cheek, urging him to lose himself and his unattractive ego in admiration of this bright, shining world, to which he pointed in a broad gesture of his right hand, inside its shabby leather glove.

The drive was perfect. The horses, all four of them, were spirited, sturdy, smooth, and well fed, each with a blaze on its forehead, and their hooves banged out a steady rhythm against the road, a good surface, still without any dust. Here and there along its shoulders were piles of rock with grass and flowers sprouting from the cracks; telegraph poles hurried past and were left behind; mountain forests rose up; gentle curves loomed ahead and were taken, each arousing new expeditionary curiosity; and always in the sunny distance was a hint of mountains, some still snowcapped. They had left their own familiar valley behind, and the absence of everyday scenes refreshed them. Soon they stopped at the edge of a wood—they would have to continue their excursion from here on foot if they were to reach their goal, a goal with which they had been in contact for some time now. Without their even having realized it, their ears had picked it up, very tenuous at the start, but steadily increasing. They all heard the distant sound now that the carriages had stopped: a soft hiss, that at times slipped below the threshold of hearing, a trembling surge, to which each called the other’s attention as they stood there rooted in place.

“It sounds timid enough now,” Settembrini said, who had been here several times. “But once you’re there, it is brutal at this time of year. Just be prepared—you won’t be able to hear yourself think.”

And so they headed into the woods, along a path of wet pine needles: at the head, Pieter Peeperkorn, his soft black hat pulled down over his brow, supported on the arm of his companion and lurching slightly with every step; directly behind them, Hans Castorp, bareheaded, like all the other gentlemen, hands in his pockets, head tilted to one side, whistling softly, looking about; then Naphta and Settembrini, then Ferge and Wehsal; and finally the solitary Malayan, the picnic basket on his arm. They spoke about the woods.

These woods were not like others, but offered views that were peculiarly picturesque, indeed exotic, eerie in fact. The woods teemed with a kind of mossy lichen, were laden with it, draped and wrapped in it; long, dingy, matted parasitic beards dangled from branches already cushioned and webbed with it. Hardly any needles were visible, just curtains of moss—a ponderous, bizarre, disfigured landscape cast under a sickly spell. These woods were not doing well, they were ill with this rank lichen that threatened to suffocate them. It was an impression they all shared as their little procession moved forward along the needle-strewn path, the sound of their goal growing louder in their ears as they neared it: a bumping and hissing, a gradually increasing rumble that promised to fulfill Settembrini’s prediction.

A turn in the path revealed a bridge, a rocky forest ravine, and a waterfall leaping down it; as all this came into view, the audible effects reached their zenith—it was the pandemonium of hell. Masses of water plunged some twenty or twenty-five feet in a single vertical cascade of a width equally impressive, and then shot on ahead over boulders. Water plunged in a maddening cacophony of every conceivable noise and tone: thunders and hisses, howlings, boomings, tattoos, cracks, rattles, throbbings, and chimings—you truly could not hear yourself think. Scrambling over the slippery rocks, the visitors moved closer now, and stood there wet with spray, wrapped in misty vapor, their ears crammed and sated with noise; they exchanged glances and intimidated smiles; they shook their heads and watched the spectacle, this continuous catastrophe of hurling foam, with its deafening, insane, extravagant roar that frightened and confused them, baffled their ears. They thought they could hear—from behind, from above, from every side—menacing, threatening trumpet calls and brutal male voices.