The Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido in Venice is shut down
and awaiting renovation. The grand dame, built in 1900, is now surrounded by fence.
Walking around its cordoned off grounds means navigating a stretch of busy blacktop
and pulsing cars. The hotel closed in 2010, and a conversion into luxury condos
is in progress.
To visit this hotel was one of my geekier ambitions, as it
was a ruin that I could not explore but only peer at through occasional holes
in its barriers. It was important to me nonetheless, for the hotel was the
inspiration for Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, and also the setting
for Lucio Visconti’s film of the same book.
The des Bains might be considered on of those places “to
reflect on those who reflected” sites in Venice, a place where interpretations
and mirrors accumulate. The city is full of these locations, where famous
visitors and writers are collected from Goethe to Ruskin to Brodsky to Morris,
each offering their voices to the din of writerly echoes that permeate the
city.
I wanted to get a look at the hotel. I wanted to imagine Mann’s
main character, Composer Gustav von Aschenbach, on the front steps. I wanted to
imagine his obsession, the boy Tadzio, playing in the water of the Adriatic
(where, as it turns out, Lord Byron also bathed). Specifically, I wanted to navigate
yet another border between the world of literature and the real settings that
set them into motion, another place where fiction and non-fiction swirl like
eddies in a river, creating and re-creating each other as long as people continue
to read their testimonies.
My interest in Death and Venice came in a circuitous manner.
I had been obsessed for a long time with Charles Ray’s sculpture Boy with a Frog,
2009, which (at one time) had stood on the tip of the Punta della Dogana, or
the old customs house. Seeing sculpture’s image online, I remember thinking at
the time that it could only be the image of Tadzio, the boy at the center of Death
in Venice. I thought it might be fascinating to follow Ray and the
sculpture into the city, using that single point as way into the labyrinth to
see where the threads took me.
My project with Boy with a Frog, a ballooning manuscript
still waiting for me in my desk, is ongoing, but it appears the entry of Thomas
Mann into that tale has come back to me now. Death in Venice, after all,
is about a plague, about a sickness that surprises the composer Aschenbach
while his mind was distracted with other pursuits. But a few years ago,
thinking about Mann required that I hike the Pacific Palisades around his home
in Los Angeles exile, reading entries in his diary saying, “I got a haircut in
Westwood,” but now, I am thinking of des Bains.
That day on the Lido, I remember it being quite cold. Fall
weather draped the old hotel in the quick, deep shadows of a November afternoon.
On such a day, you have lunch, pay the check, and the sunlight seems already on
its way out for the night. Though you experience it daily in winter, each time
the shadows appear, it is hard to believe that they have arrived that quickly
and totally.
The façade of the art-nouveau hotel (the Italians call it
Liberty Style) was austere, and, though in great decline, it still had two art-deco
tourist banners installed from a bygone era. Either the posters were left over
from an attempt revival of the hotel, a push for more tourists, or it is a harbinger
of things to come, set out to convince condo buyers of the glamour of it all.
More than anything, des Bains reminded me of another chain
of hotel and literature obsessions, Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest
Hotel, itself a homage to the writer, Stefan Zweig. Replace the pink and
purples of The Budapest with des Bains yellow, and you can join me in the candy-coated
vision of the past that I was attempting that day on the Lido.
1900. I kept thinking of the year 1900, the breach of the
new century. The Ottoman Empire wasn’t the only sick man of Europe. All imperial
governments were rotting from the inside and collapsing, a crystalline network
of confused and overextended alliances that would eventually become World War I.
When Mann stayed here in 1911, it must have still had a certain amount of its
original new gleam, and in that shine, an erotic (albeit twisted in that eroticism
was aimed at a child) plague story took shape.
*
It was only a year earlier, in 1899, that a similarly styled
hotel was constructed in Aswan, Egypt: The Old Cataract Hotel, and but three
months ago, my wife and I had beers on its terrace, as its impossible, pyrotechnic
sunset was in process. We had gone because this hotel (even more than des
Baines) is the stuff of history, one of key sites in a city so packed with ancient
incident that you can feel the layers with every step. From the terrace, one
looks out at Elephantine Island, for ages considered the mythological spot
where the Nile bubbled up from the earth.
The Old Cataract is a colonial leftover and was actually
built by Thomas Cook. Just a partial registry of its former guests includes Howard
Carter, Tsar Nicholas II, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Princess
Diana, Queen Noor and Agatha Christie. It is brimming with what you would
imagine from the colonial era, including wicker ceiling fans and ironwork which
would not be out of place in a London Park. No, we were nowhere close to being in the financial position
to stay there.
I was not pursuing any literary figure in going to the Cataract.
Instead, my book that day was a history of Egypt and book of travel writing on
the Nile. I was writing in my journal about the morning we had spent at the
Temple of Philae and I was also trying to absorb the ancient Aramaic village
that we visited in the afternoon. While in Venice, I was trying to get a sense
of Death and Venice, but there was no work of this nature being done on
this particular day. Though I knew of Death on the Nile, I had not read
it.
However, I realize now that that day on the terrace was but
one day after I had heard the term Covid-19 for the first time on a boat on the
Nile. We had discussed it with a couple from Michigan and a couple from Sussex,
and we were all trying our best to take this rumor, something that we had just
heard about, and try to assure ourselves that it was not going to be that bad.
We were locked into that strange psychology of hoping for the best.
The newspapers, the websites, it was all starting to
accumulate, and our guide in Egypt was receiving reports from his agency about
the actions that they were considering taking, whether it was safe to be there.
I wasn’t thinking of Death in Venice, instead, without my knowing it, I was actually inhabiting scenes
from the book, passing around rumors and glossing over articles that would soon
be our entire world, would soon start to take lives at enormous levels.
By many accounts now, both on the boat and at the Cataract,
the virus was already circulating in Egypt and all over the world at that time.
It was present. It was with us, though we did not know it yet. We sat there in
in those wicker chairs, thinking about history, downing beers, in a hotel facing
out towards the Nile. The terrace was facing the same path of the sun from day to night, from
life to death, that guided every ritual of prophecy in Egypt for thousands of
years, and we could not see what was coming.
I was closer to Thomas Mann there than I ever was in Venice,
by way of the earth and life shifting silently underneath my feet. I just did not know it.