The Magic Mountain (30 page)

Frau Stöhr wiggled her shoulders and tittered into her napkin, poked an elbow in the ribs of both Joachim Ziemssen and silent Dr. Blumenkohl, gave a sly, intimate wink—all varied displays of her asinine smugness. In order to deceive the authorities, she was in the habit of putting her nightstand lamp out on her balcony each evening, then stealing away to amuse herself in the English quarter down in town. Meanwhile, her husband waited for her in Cannstatt. Nor was she the only patient who engaged in this practice.

“And indeed,” Settembrini continued, “you partook of these meringues in the company of a gentleman. And of whom? Of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest. I have been assured that he wears a corset, but good God, that is of little or no consequence here. I implore you, madam—where were you? There must be two of you! Or at the least, you fell asleep and while the earthly part of your nature held its solitary rest cure, the spiritual part was making merry in the company of Captain Miklosich over foamy meringues.”

Frau Stöhr wriggled and squirmed as if someone were tickling her. “One really cannot say whether one might not prefer it the other way around,” Settembrini said, “so that you could have enjoyed your meringues alone and taken your rest cure with Captain Miklosich.”

“Tee-hee-hee . . .”

“Have the ladies and gentlemen heard what happened the day before yesterday?” he asked out of the blue. “Someone was snatched away—by the Devil, or to be more accurate, his mother, an energetic lady. I rather liked her. It was young Schneermann, Anton Schneermann, who sat up there at the same table with Mademoiselle Kleefeld. As you see, his chair is empty. It will soon be occupied again, I’m not worried about that, but

Anton is gone on the wings of the storm, like a shot! before he knew what hit him. He had been here a year and a half—and was only sixteen himself. And another six months had just been added. And what happens? I don’t know who passed the word on, but at any rate Madame Schneermann got wind that her little son was leading a life
in Baccho et ceteris
. She shows up here quite unannounced, a matron three heads taller than I, white-haired and hot-tempered, doesn’t say a word, but gives our Herr Anton a few quick boxes on the ear, grabs him by the collar, and sets him on the train. ‘If he’s going to the dogs,’ says she, ‘he can just as well do it down below.’ And home they go.”

Everyone within earshot began to laugh, because Herr Settembrini had a droll way of telling stories. For all his mocking and criticizing of the social life of people up here, he kept up with the latest gossip. He knew the names and more or less the general circumstances of every new arrival; he could report that yesterday somebody or other had undergone a rib resection and had it on best authority that beginning in autumn no one with a temperature above 101.3 degrees would be admitted. The night before, or so he said, the little dog kept by Madame Kapatsoulias from Mytilene had sat on the emergency button on her nightstand, which resulted in considerable commotion and tumult, particularly since Madame Kapatsoulias was not alone, but in the company of Judge Düstmund from Friedrichshafen. Even Dr. Blumenkohl had to laugh at the story. Pretty Marusya almost choked on her orange-scented handkerchief, and Frau Stöhr began to shriek, holding both hands to her left breast.

But Lodovico Settembrini spoke, too, about himself and his origins when he was alone with the cousins—during walks or at the evening gatherings or after the noonday meal when a large majority of patients had already left the dining hall and the three gentlemen remained seated at one end of the table for a while as dining attendants cleared dishes and Hans Castorp smoked a Maria Mancini, which by the third week had regained some of its flavor. Cautious, attentive, puzzled, but willing to let himself be influenced, he listened to the Italian’s tales, which opened up a strange and very new world for him.

Settembrini spoke about his grandfather, who had been a lawyer in Milan, but above all a great patriot, playing a considerable role as a political agitator, orator, and contributor to various periodicals—he, too, a naysayer like his grandson, though one who went about it all in grander, bolder style. For whereas Lodovico, as he himself reported with bitterness, found himself restricted to deriding life and manners at the International Sanatorium Berghof, to offering his sardonic criticism and protesting in the name of beautiful, vigorous humanity, his grandfather had given governments trouble, had conspired against Austria and the Holy Alliance, which in those days held his dismembered fatherland in the grip of darkest bondage, and had been a zealous member of certain secret societies that had spread throughout Italy—a Carbonaro, as Settembrini suddenly declared, lowering his voice, as if it were still dangerous even now to speak the word. In short—at least as he was presented to the cousins in the tales of his grandson—this Giuseppe Settembrini was a shadowy, passionate, and incendiary figure, a ringleader of conspiracy; and despite the polite pains they took to show their respect, they did not quite succeed in banishing from their faces an expression of apprehension and aversion, indeed of outright disgust. True, things were different then—the stories they heard now were from long ago, almost a century past; it was history, and from history, at least ancient history, they had learned in theory about the type of person presented here—a man of courage, uncompromising in his hatred of tyrants and consumed by the fire of liberty—though they had never thought they would come into such direct human contact with one. And then, too, this grandfather’s seditious conspiracy, or so they were told, had been bound up with the love of his fatherland, which he hoped to see free and united—indeed, his subversive activities were the fruit and outcome of that honorable affection; and however strange this mixture of rebellion and patriotism might seem to both cousins (accustomed as they were to equating patriotic feelings with preservation of the established order), they did have to admit in private that as things had stood back then, rebellion might very well have been commensurate with civic virtue and sober loyalty with idle unconcern about matters of public order.

But Settembrini’s grandfather had been not only an Italian patriot, but also a fellow citizen and brother-in-arms with all peoples thirsting for freedom. For after the failure of a certain plot to overthrow the state in Turin, in which he had been involved both in word and deed, he very narrowly escaped Prince Metternich’s hirelings and spent the years of his banishment fighting and bleeding for a constitution in Spain and the independence of the Hellenic peoples. It was in Greece that Settembrini’s father had first seen the light of the world—which probably explained why he was such a great humanist and lover of classical antiquity—born, by the way, of a mother with German blood, a girl whom Giuseppe had married in Switzerland and taken along with him throughout the course of his adventures. Later, after ten years of exile, he was able to return to his native land and work as a lawyer in Milan, but that in no way prevented him from continuing to call—with voice and pen, in verse and prose—for the freedom and unity of his country, to draft revolutionary programs with passionate autocratic élan and to proclaim in a lucid style that liberated peoples must unite and forge their universal happiness. Grandson Settembrini mentioned one detail that made a special impression on young Hans Castorp: Grandfather Giuseppe had worn only black when appearing among his fellow citizens, because, as he said, he was in mourning for Italy, his fatherland, which languished in misery and bondage. As had been the case with several items in the story, this piece of information reminded Hans Castorp of his own grandfather, who likewise had worn black all the years his grandson had known him, although for reasons profoundly different from those of this grandfather here; Hans Castorp thought now of those old-fashioned clothes, the makeshift adaptation by which Hans Lorenz Castorp’s true nature, belonging to a time long past, had indicated its dislike of the present, until in death he had solemnly returned to the form appropriate to him—in Spanish ruff. Those had indeed been two spectacularly different grandfathers! And as Hans Castorp thought about it, he closed his eyes tight and shook his head cautiously, which could just as easily have been taken as an expression of admiration for Giuseppe Settembrini as of dismay and rejection. And he honestly did attempt not to judge what was alien to him, but simply to define and compare. He was back in the “den” and saw Hans Lorenz’s narrow head bent down over the pale golden circle of the baptismal bowl, that abiding, mutable heirloom; and he saw him round his lips to form the syllable “great,” that pious, somber sound that reminded you of places where as you walked you fell into a reverential, forward rocking motion. And he saw Giuseppe Settembrini—the tricolor in one hand, a swinging saber in the other, black eyes turned heavenward to seal his vow—at the head of a troop of revolutionaries storming the phalanx of despotism. Each had his beauty and honor, he thought, trying all the harder to be fair because he knew his own personal or partly personal biases. Grandfather Settembrini had struggled for political rights—but his own grandfather, or at least his ancestors, had originally possessed all those rights, which over the course of four centuries the rabble had wrested from them by force and slogans. And so they had both worn black, the grandfather in the North and the one in the South, and both for the purpose of drawing a strict line between themselves and the evil present. But the one had done so to show his reverence for the past and to honor death, to which his whole being already belonged; the other, in contrast, had done so out of rebellion and a belief in irreverent progress. “Yes, those were two worlds, two opposing points of the compass,” Hans Castorp thought, and as Herr Settembrini went on talking, he stood there halfway between them, so to speak, casting a critical eye first on the one and then the other; and it seemed to him that he had experienced all this once before. He remembered a lonely boat ride on a lake in Holstein several years before—in late summer, at twilight. It had been around seven o’clock, the sun had set, an almost full moon had already risen above the wooded shore to the east. And for ten minutes, while Hans Castorp rowed across the still water, it all became a baffling, dreamlike scene. Bright daylight reigned in the west—glassy, cool, definitive light; but if he turned his head, he found himself gazing into utterly magical moonlit night draped in a web of mist. This strange condition was held in balance for almost a quarter of an hour before it tipped in favor of night and the moon, and all the while Hans Castorp’s dazzled and bewildered eyes moved in serene amazement between one landscape and luminary and the other, from day to night and out of night back into day. It all came back to him now.

Given the kind of life lawyer Settembrini had led and all his extensive activities, he could not have been a great scholar of the law, or so Hans Castorp thought. But the universal principle of the law had inspired him from infancy on, or so his grandson would have them believe; and although Hans Castorp was not feeling all that clearheaded as his organism strained to deal with one of the Berghof’s six-course meals, he struggled to understand what Settembrini might mean by calling this principle “the source of freedom and progress.” As for the latter concept, until now Hans Castorp had understood it as something like the improvement of hoists and cranes during the nineteenth century; and he discovered that Herr Settembrini had no low opinion himself of such things, nor had his grandfather for that matter. Indeed, the Italian paid high tribute to his listeners’ fatherland for two inventions: gunpowder, which had turned feudalism’s suits of armor into junk, and the printing press, which had made possible the democratic propagation of ideas, or rather, the propagation of democratic ideas. And so in that regard, and insofar as the past was concerned, he had praise for Germany, although to be fair he thought his own nation should be given the palm for having unfurled the banner of enlightenment, culture, and freedom while other nations had still lain sleeping in superstition and bondage. But although he paid due honor to technology and transportation, Hans Castorp’s own field of labor—as he had, for instance, on that first day beside the bench up on the slope—he seemed to do so not for the sake of those forces themselves, but rather for their significance in helping humankind reach moral perfection, for, as he explained, he happily ascribed such significance to them. As technology brought nature increasingly under its control, he said, by creating new lines of communication—developing networks of roads and telegraph lines—and by triumphing over climatic conditions, it was also proving to be the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations. The human race had come out of darkness, fear, and hate, but now it was moving forward and upward along a shining road toward a final state of understanding, inner illumination, goodness, and happiness—and technology was the most useful vehicle for traveling that road. But as he spoke, he brought together, in a
single
breath, categories that until now Hans Castorp had been accustomed to think of as widely divergent. “Technology and morality,” he said. And then he actually spoke about the Savior of the Christians, who had first revealed the principle of equality and brotherhood; the propagation of that same principle had been considerably advanced by the printing press, and finally the great French Revolution had raised it to the status of law. But in fact, it all sounded most decidedly confused to Hans Castorp, though for reasons not quite apparent to him and despite Herr Settembrini’s having put it in clear and taut words. Once, only once, just at the beginning of the prime of his life, the Italian said, had his grandfather rejoiced with all his heart—in the days of the July Revolution in Paris. He had publicly proclaimed that all men would one day place those three days in Paris alongside the six days of Creation. And at that a flabbergasted Hans Castorp could not help banging his hand on the table. For someone to place three days in the summer of 1830, during which the Parisians had written a new constitution for themselves, alongside the six in which the Lord God had divided the waters of the firmament and created great lights in the heavens and the flowers, trees, fish, birds, and life itself—that really seemed a bit much. And afterward, when he was alone with his cousin Joachim, he expressly let it be known that he found it more than a bit much, indeed absolutely offensive.