IPA/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Midday on a Wednesday in Venice as the city goes into seclusion in response to the disastrous spread of the novel coronavirus within Italy, March 11, 2020
In October, my husband, Art, and I, along with a dear friend, Jean, took a very long-delayed vacation to Venice. We had planned and canceled this trip several times previously because of unexpected work deadlines and family obligations. Art and I had been to Venice on our honeymoon 35 years earlier, and the decaying peach and mango, with the occasional splash of faded turquoise, of the facades; the sound of footfalls on the cobbled streets and of wavelets lapping the stone walls of canals; as well as the play of light on the water at dusk had inhabited my dreams ever since. Although not particularly prone to morbid thoughts or to preparing “bucket lists,” we recognized that we, as well as Venice, were of a certain age, with “underlying conditions,” and we wanted to see it in all its glory one more time before we died.
On the long flight over the Atlantic and the Alps, I reread Death in Venice, Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella about a famous novelist in his fifties, Gustav von Aschenbach, suffering from writer’s block, who hesitates and then travels impulsively to Venice, where he becomes smitten with a beautiful 14-year-old boy, and soon succumbs to a cholera epidemic sweeping Venice. Mann’s story is about passion, desire, decay, and death.
While Aschenbach bears little obvious resemblance to any of the three of us, the reasoning for his reluctance to travel felt uncannily familiar: too much occupied by the duties imposed on him by his ego… too overburdened with the duty of production, too little interested in distracting himself to be a faithful lover of that gay outside world, he had contented himself wholly with that knowledge of the Earth’s surface that can be gained by anyone without having to abandon his circle … I noted this to be quite an accurate description of how Art and I have lived our culturally rich, but very local, lives. I chuckled to myself about how the internet had facilitated the realization of those instinctual proclivities even while jet travel had made the world ever smaller and more accessible.
The moment we landed in Venice and began our delightful week of unabashed touristing, whatever inchoate identification I had had with Aschenbach was largely forgotten. Only a few weeks before the arrival of the devastating and record-setting acqua alta and only months before COVID-19 roared into the Veneto, leaving a horrifying trail of what my medical training led me to call “morbidity and mortality,” Venice presented its most alluring, seductive, and benign face to us. Venice, apart from the ethnicity of the crowds of tourists, now mostly Chinese rather than German and British, looked much the same as it had decades ago.
The years had not altered the images that had continued to inhabit my memories and my dreams. The afternoon light reflecting off the palazzi along the Grand Canal, the Renaissance paintings, the stone churches, the sounds and even the smells, so disturbing to Aschenbach, were a feast for our senses. We wandered the streets, visited the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, lingered over the Bellinis, Titians, and Veroneses in the Accademia, and sat entranced, drinking perfectly roasted espresso, in a café in one of the small piazzas as a street musician played a Bach fugue on a glass harmonica. We felt that, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, Venice was not crumbling but was intact and still stood as a living testament to the endurance of a unique artistic and architectural sensibility.
Venice, as we know it, the timeless embodiment of grace, beauty, sensuality, decay, and fragility, may not survive the ravages of the rising waters and the emergence of the virus.
There were two, what seemed at the time minor, moments of ironic personal connection for me with the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, which came and went, hardly noted. On the evening of our arrival, as we were walking across the Piazza San Marco, pushing our way through the throngs of camera-laden tourists, my wallet was deftly removed from my handbag, much as Aschenbach had been scammed by the Charon-like rogue gondolier who conveyed him from his arrival at the train station to the Lido, answering his question about the fare with the enigmatic and sinister: “You will pay!” But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, my credit and bank cards were readily canceled with a brief online visit to Bank of America and I was left with no lingering unease or conscious anxious association to the final voyage across the Styx.
And then, on the fourth day of our visit, Art was stricken with a gastric flu–like illness through which he soldiered on bravely, not wanting to miss any opportunities to see the sights or impede our enjoyment of this special vacation. But on the last afternoon, he had such GI discomfort and overwhelming fatigue that we abandoned our plans to visit the Ghetto and went back to the hotel early to rest. Not having eaten any rotten strawberries, as Aschenbach had, or indulged any worry that he might have contracted cholera, Art peacefully slept it off while Jean and I went out for dinner. But I wondered, fleetingly, whether the well-publicized ecological devastation of the city and its surrounds by the vast numbers of tourists who visit annually and the massive cruise ships dumping waste into the majestic Grand Canal might have polluted the drinking water, not with cholera vibrios but the more familiar 21st-century pathogens: E. coli or norovirus.
Aschenbach’s first day in Venice is marked by a profound sense of unease about the quality of the air he is breathing. He feels feverish, worries about the polluted and unwholesome atmosphere, and he decides to leave the city immediately. As we all remember, perhaps from high school English class, his coup de foudre for the beautiful young boy, Tadzio, causes him to change his mind again quickly and return to the hotel. But rumors of the presence of a mysterious malady, mentioned and then denied, hang in the fetid air, which is tainted with “a sickly sweet smell reminiscent of distress and wounds and suspicious cleanliness.” Notices begin to appear posted around the city suggesting that visitors avoid eating shellfish “due to certain gastric conditions to be expected in this season.” He notes that most of the other German tourists are beginning to leave the hotel. The local newspapers “reported rumors and fluctuating numbers, printed official announcements and questioned their veracity.” Fake news, Venetian style?
The disease that sickened and killed Aschenbach in Venice in 1911 was, like COVID-19, seen as a mysterious product of an exotic culture. The cholera vibrio had escaped its original oriental habitats due to increased world travel and globalization of trade and had begun to infect Europe through the Mediterranean and through that extraordinary portal, Venice, that had long been the link between East and West, Asia and Europe. Born in the sultry swamps of the Ganges delta, ascended with the mephitic odor of that unrestrained and unfit wasteland, that wilderness avoided by men, in the bamboo thickets of which the tiger is crouching, the epidemic had spread to Hindustan, to China, to Afghanistan and Persia and even to Moscow. But while Europe was fearing the specter might make its entrance over land, it had appeared in several Mediterranean ports, spread by Syrian traders, had arrived in Toulon, Malaga, Palermo, and Naples, also in Calabria and Apulia. The North seemed to have been spared. But in May of that year, the horrible vibrios were discovered in the emaciated and blackened bodies of a sailor and of a greengrocer. The deaths were kept secret. But after a week it had been ten, twenty or thirty victims, and in different quarters. An Austrian man had died in his hometown under unambiguous circumstances, after he had vacationed for a few days in Venice and so the first rumors of the malady appeared in German newspapers.
The disease that sickened and killed Gustav von Aschenbach in Venice in 1911 was, like COVID-19, seen as a mysterious product of an exotic culture.
As in the case of COVID-19, rumors abounded about the terrifying pathogenic organism, the cholera vibrio, in early 20th-century Venice. Public “messaging” was evasive. The extent of the danger was minimized. As always in epidemics, certain alien populations were accused of having imported the disease. In the case of the Venetian plague of cholera, it was Jews and Gypsies. Elsewhere in Europe and America, other populations were blamed, including Filipinos and South Asians. Thomas Mann and his wife had visited Venice during this time and survived. But Aschenbach died possibly due to contamination by the water in which his strawberries were washed. Venice survived that catastrophe and went on to enchant subsequent generations of tourists, college students, wanderers, and artists.
We in the U.S. were told on January 22 of COVID-19 that “we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine,” much like the postings about shellfish in Venice, a minor inconvenience. Today, the message from Donald Trump is more dire but no less boastful. But Venice, as we know it, the timeless embodiment of grace, beauty, sensuality, decay, and fragility, may not survive the ravages of the rising waters and the emergence of the novel virus.
We Americans have been warned by scientists, writers, and artists of the coming threats to our way of life for some time and, Trump’s statements to the contrary, we have been warned specifically about the likelihood of emergent pathogens that we could not contain or treat. It is not just Venetians who have awakened to a new reality. After COVID-19, America may look like a crumbling and decayed museum of modern culture, similar to Venice’s citywide museum of the Renaissance, which is sinking under the tides of time.
