... Politics is a broad concept, it passes without a sharp division to the outskirts of ethical problems.
T. Mann, from correspondence. Italy.
The seashore flooded with bright sun, “covered with soft, fine sand, trimmed with foamy groves, close mountains stare at it.” It would seem that the Creator and nature made sure that in such a place it would be pleasant, cozy and joyful to rest. However, the narrator from T. Mann's novel "Mario and the Magician", which takes place in the resort town of Torre di Venere, says in the very first lines that irritation, tension ... hung in the air in this place. The holidaymakers immediately felt that "there was a lack of sincerity and ease in relations here."
In the dining room of the washing Grand Hotel, on the very first evening, the hero was denied a table that the children liked, since those cozy places were kept for “our clients”. Then the narrator's family was evicted from the hotel on the grounds that the Roman aristocrat, who lived in the next room, was frightened of whooping cough, which the children had recently been ill with. And although the hotel doctor confirmed "that the disease has passed and there is no reason to be afraid of it," the administrator nevertheless stated that foreigners "will have to vacate the rooms and move to the wing." And when the eight-year-old daughter “ran naked a few meters to the water, rinsed her bathing suit and came back”, her act, i.e. the act of her parents caused a terrible indignation of the locals. They perceived it as "ungratefulness and insulting disrespect for "Italy", as an outrage against national dignity.
What is the reason for such a stuffy moral climate in a nice resort town? The short story by T. Mann depicts that terrible time in the life of Italy. When the fascists came to power, who, first of all, planted national consciousness. The idea of national superiority captured the Italians. They “were easily offended, they were very fond of demonstrating their own dignity, it seemed completely inappropriate, there was a struggle of national flags, a dispute for authority and rank; not so much to calm the children, but to resolutely defend the main positions, utter loud words about the greatness and dignity of Italy. Even children were drawn into politics: "the beach was full of young patriots - an unnatural and very oppressive phenomenon."
And the most expressive manifestation of the corruption of people by fascist ideas was the session of the terrible magician Cipollo. This man, no doubt, was endowed by nature with the power to influence the psyche of others, to bewitch for a certain time, to manipulate people. He forced a polite young man to show his tongue to the public, respectable Madame Angiolieri meekly “flew after the seducer who dragged her along with him,” he forced several spectators to dance to the clapping of a whip. Cipollo enjoyed his power over people who, on his orders, carried out acts that humiliate their human dignity, renounced their "I". “The audience was waiting for some kind of depravity, they seemed to be drunk, as it happens late at night, they lost power over their feelings, the ability to critically assess the influence of this person and firmly resist him.” Only one person found the strength to resist the evil spells of Cipollo. The waiter Mario, recovering from hypnosis, under the influence of which he mistook the ugly wizard for his beloved Sylvester, shot Cipollo. “Terrible, fatal end. And yet he brought the liberation of Italy.
Thomas Mann, who was an eyewitness to the birth of fascism in Europe, warned mankind about the danger that hung over him in the 30s of the XX century. Nevertheless, this warning, unfortunately, did not lose its significance with the defeat of fascism. From time to time in different parts of the world there is a threat of totalitarianism. In the short story "Mario and the Wizard" the writer vividly showed the destructiveness of the division of mankind into superior and inferior races, the criminality of the power of a "strong" personality, which is based on the humiliation of other people. To resist the manifestations of totalitarianism can only be people with a high sense of self-worth, individuals who have not renounced their "I", and not a crowd of impersonal beings. In order for the people not to turn into a submissive herd, each person must take care of preserving his unique “I”, resist baseness, abuse of power, injustice, miserable sycophancy in everyday life.
It is painful to remember our stay in Toppo di Venere and the whole atmosphere there. From the very beginning, there was annoyance, excitement, agitation in the air, and in the end, this one. the story of the terrible Cipolla, in whose face, in a fatal and at the same time impressive way, all the specifically malignant of this mood seemed to have found its embodiment and menacingly thickened. The fact that our children were present at the terrible denouement (the denouement, as it seemed to us later, predetermined and, in fact, natural), was, of course, regrettable and impermissible, but we were misled by the hoax resorted to by this very unusual person. Thank God, the children did not understand when the acting ended and the drama began, and we did not lead them out of the happy delusion that it was all a game.
Torre is located about fifteen kilometers from Portaclemente, one of the most popular resorts on the Tyrrhenian Sea, elegant in a metropolitan way and crowded for most of the year, with a smart esplanade built up with hotels and shops along the sea, with motley cabins, flags of sand castles and tanned bodies, wide beach and noisy entertainment venues. Since the beach, bordered by a grove of pines, which the nearby mountains look down on, is covered along the entire coast with the same fine sand, comfortable and spacious, it is not surprising that a less noisy competitor soon arose a little further away. Torre di Venere, where, however, you will look around in vain in search of the tower to which the village owes its name, is, as it were, a branch of the neighboring large resort and for a number of years has been a paradise for the few, a haven for connoisseurs of nature, not vulgarized by the secular crowd. But, as is usual with such corners, the silence long ago had to retreat even further along the coast, to Marina Petriera and God knows where; light, as you know, seeks silence and drives it away, with ridiculous lust pouncing on it and imagining that it is able to combine with it and that where it is, it can also be; what can I say, even having spread his fair in her monastery, he is ready to believe that silence still remains.
Here is Torre, although it is still quieter and more modest than Portaclemente, it has already become fashionable among Italians and visitors from other countries.
The international resort is no longer traveled or not traveled to the same extent, which does not prevent it from being a noisy and crowded international resort; they go a little further away, in Torre, it is even more luxurious, and besides, it is cheaper, and the attractive force of these virtues remains unchanged, although the virtues themselves have disappeared. Torre has acquired a "Grand Hotel", countless boarding houses with pretensions and simpler ones have bred, so that the owners and tenants of villas and gardens in a pine grove above the sea can no longer boast of peace on the beach; in July-August, there is exactly the same picture as in Portaclement: the whole beach is teeming with humming, noisy, joyfully cackling bathers, whom the furious sun rips off the skin from their necks and shoulders in tatters; flat-bottomed, poisonously painted boats with children sway on the sparkling blue, and the sonorous names with which mothers, afraid to lose sight of them, call their children, saturate the air with hoarse anxiety; and to this add oysters, soft drinks, flowers, coral jewelry, cornetti al burre, who, stepping over the outstretched arms and legs of sunbathers, also offer their goods in southern guttural and unceremonious voices.
This is what the beach in Torre looked like when we arrived - colorful, you can’t say anything, but we still decided that we arrived too early. It was mid-August, the Italian season was still in full swing - not the best time for foreigners to appreciate the beauty of this place; What kind of after-dinner crowds in open-air cafes on the promenade along the sea, at least?
"Esquisito" where we sometimes went to sit and where we were served by Mario, the same Mario I'm going to talk about! It is difficult to find a free table, and orchestras - each, not wanting to reckon with others, plays his own! In addition, just after dinner, a public from Portaclemente arrives every day, for, of course, Torre is a favorite destination for country walks for restless vacationers of a large resort, and, due to the fault of fiats rushing back and forth, bushes of laurels and oleanders along the sides of the highway leading from there are covered, like snow, an inch of white dust—an outlandish yet hideous sight.
Indeed, one should go to Torre di Venere in September, when the general public is leaving and the resort is empty, or in May, before the sea warms up enough for a southerner to risk taking a dip in it. True, even in the off-season it is not empty there, but much less noisy and not so crowded with Italians. English, German, French speech prevails under the awnings of the cabins on the beach and in the dining rooms of boarding houses, while back in August, at least in the Grand Hotel, where we were forced to stay for lack of private addresses, such a dominance of the Florentines and Romans that the foreigner feels himself not only as an outsider, but as if he were a second-class guest.
We discovered this with some annoyance on the very first evening upon arrival, when we went down to dine in a restaurant and asked the head waiter to show us a free table. Actually, there was nothing to object to the table allotted to us, but we were captivated by the glazed veranda overlooking the sea, which, like the hall, was full, but where there were still empty seats and light bulbs under red lampshades were burning on the tables. Such festivity delighted our kids, and we, in the simplicity of our souls, declared that we preferred to eat on the veranda - thereby, as it turned out, revealing our complete ignorance, because it was explained to us with some embarrassment that this luxury was intended for “our clients”, “ ai nostri client!”. To our clients? So, to us. After all, we are not some kind of one-day butterflies, but guests who arrived for three weeks or a month, boarders. However, we did not want to insist on clarifying the difference between us and those clients who are entitled to eat under the light of red lights, and ate our pranzo at a modestly and casually lit table in the common room - a very mediocre dinner, an impersonal and tasteless hotel standard; the cuisine of the Eleonora boarding house, located some ten paces further from the sea, seemed to us incomparably better afterwards.
We moved there in just three or four days, not even having yet properly settled down in the Grand Hotel - and not at all because of the veranda and red lights: the children, having immediately made friends with the waiters and messengers, without memory rejoicing at the sea, very soon and forgot to think about colorful bait. But with some of the regulars on the veranda, or rather with the hotel management who kowtowed before them, one of those conflicts immediately arose that could spoil the whole stay at the resort from the very beginning. Among the visitors was the Roman nobility, a certain Principe X with his family, the number of these gentlemen was in the neighborhood of ours, and the princess, a high society lady and at the same time a passionately loving mother, was frightened by the residual effects of whooping cough, which both of our little ones had suffered shortly before and were weak echoes of which still occasionally at night disturbed the usually imperturbable sleep of our youngest son. The essence of this disease is not very clear, which leaves room for all sorts of prejudices, and therefore we were not at all offended by our elegant neighbor because she shared the widespread opinion that whooping cough was contracted acoustically - in other words, she was simply afraid of a bad example for her children. . Womanly proud and reveling in her nobility, she turned to the management, after which the manager, dressed in an indispensable frock coat, hastened to inform us with great regret that in these circumstances our relocation to the hotel wing is absolutely necessary. In vain did we assure him that this childhood illness was in the last stage of attenuation, that it had actually been overcome and no longer posed any danger to others.
Novel essay T. Manna "Mario and the Wizard". German writer, Nobel Prize winner (1929), author of philosophical and intellectual novels, essays, short stories. In his work, the theme of art and the personality of the artist is visible. The popularity of T. Mann brings his first novel "Buddenbrooks" (1901), for which he will eventually be awarded the Nobel Prize. In the 40s, T. Mann created his best modern novels: The Magic Mountain, Lotta in Weimar, Doctor Faustus. The masterpiece of short stories is the work "Death in Venice". The writer raised the problems of the fight against totalitarianism, in his works he managed to convey the disturbing atmosphere of the pre-war situation in Europe; he believed that every person has the right to express his own "I", to preserve himself as a person. In the short story "Mario and the Magician" (1938), the writer showed through allegory how strong personalities try to manipulate the crowd, how the totalitarian regime distorts the personality.
Novel by Thomas Mann struck me. I understand that in the world of people, injustice, good and evil, honor and dishonor, death and a thirst for life have always lived and will live side by side. But when you see pictures of disdain for people so vividly, even mockery of them, undisguised contempt, you want to scream, resist, wake up the sleepy realm of the sleeping brains of those who do not want to see how they are openly and shamelessly zombified. In a small work, T. Mann, a German writer, humanist of the 20th century, managed to recreate the disturbing atmosphere of the pre-war era - before the start of World War II. Events take place in Italy. It was from this country that the spread of fascism began, this “brown plague” that people were sick with. And not only individuals, but also nations!
T. Mann in the novel "Mario and the Magician" shows a hypnotist who went on stage to entertain people. He has a silver whip hidden under his clothes. Are people really animals that they use a whip on them? But no one pays attention to this. A magician, a magician, a magician, a trickster - that's what interests and attracts people. They are waiting for entertainment and do not notice how they are losing themselves. The hypnotist discovers his complete power over the hall: some woman is already traveling around India, someone is dancing merrily, someone is writhing in unbearable pain - and all this is only because Cipollo ordered, ordered, wanted to. He leads people, takes away their own will from them.
And they laugh. Cipollo calls the waiter Mario on stage, this simple, sincere, bashful boy, and publicly penetrates the secret of his love. The magician forced the young man to imagine that in front of him was his beloved girl, Sylvester; and Mario, in deceitful happiness, kisses the ugly hunchback...
- A moment of bliss - the sound of a whip
- and Mario "awake, from him".
- And people laugh...
Everyone has fun, the spell of the hypnotist envelops people in a thick fog, who do not even think about what is happening. They are having fun. T. Mann described the performance of the magical virtuoso, the “master of entertainment” so vividly that one wants to run away from this evening so as not to see or hear how the “respected audience of Trre di Venere” admires “amazing” “stunning phenomena”. It's good that at least Mario didn't let himself be laughed at. “Already below, Mario suddenly turned around, raised his hand as he ran, and through the applause and laughter two short, deafening shots erupted.”
Mario killed the wizard. Some people don't understand why? And for the fact that Cipollo used him as some kind of thing, for the fact that the magician does not take into account human dignity, for the fact that everyone has the right to his own secret. Who allowed Cipollo to climb into a person's soul? Did he have a right to it?
At Literary Mario there was a prototype - a waiter, with whom such a trick was really performed on stage, but the real "hero of the day" did not suffer from this at all. The writer, however, was haunted by everything - he wanted to reach out to the minds and hearts of people, to open their eyes to the horrors that such a massive deception of people entails. The Italians were "hypnotized" by Mussolini, the Germans by Hitler, the Soviet people by Stalin, there are such "hypnotists" in our lives today. In all of them there was and is a symbolic whip, with which they lead the crowd.
But if we- free people and want to live in a democratic state, they must learn to live without coercion and without whips, to see people as equals, to respect each other. The meaning of Mario's rebellion is precisely in this, he seems to be saying: “People, come to your senses, since you are people!” With his shot, Mario knocks down the arrogance of "superhumans", wakes up the sleepy ones, encourages those who are still thinking to an active life position.
The hero of the novel tells about his stay in the Italian resort of Torre di Venere. “Anger, irritation, tension hung in the air from the very beginning, and in the end we were completely stunned by the adventure with the terrifying Chipolla, in whose face, it seemed, fatally and, finally, very humanly, the entire sinister spirit of the local moods was embodied and menacingly concentrated.”
Torre di Venere - a resort on the Tyrrhenian Sea; in july and august it is too noisy, bustling, crowded with vacationers, shuttles, swimwear, drinks, flowers, coral jewelry.
The narrator and his family arrived in this town in mid-August, at the height of the season. “How many people crowded in the evening in an open-air cafe on the embankment, at least in the same Esquisito, where we sometimes sat and where we were served by Mario, the same Mario, whom I will now talk about!”
The narrator's family has rented rooms at the Grand Hotel. But a few days later they had to move to another hotel, because it turned out that in August foreigners feel like people of the lower class among the refined Italian society. At first, the narrator's family was denied seats on the dining room veranda, as they are being held for our clients." And soon one of these clients, the princess, frightened of whooping cough, which the children of visitors had recently been ill with, complained to the hotel administration that they sometimes cough behind the wall. The administrator hastened to declare that visitors should move to the hotel wing; and here the opinion of a doctor who believed that there was no reason to be afraid of whooping cough did not even help. Such toadying of the administration outraged the narrator, and he and his family immediately left the hotel, moving to the Eleonora boarding house. Its mistress was signora Angiolieri, a former dresser and companion of the glorious Italian artist Eleonora Duse. “We were given a separate, pleasant accommodation ... the servants were attentive and affectionate, the cuisine was wonderful ... But still, we did not feel real joy. Maybe for that ridiculous act that forced us to change housing ... Personally, such skirmishes with ... naive abuse of power, injustice, pathetic sycophancy are very depressing to me.
The heat was terrible, and it occurred to the narrator that it was precisely such weather that intoxicated people, as if emptiness and disregard for everything was forming in the soul. The beach was dominated by "ordinary gray burghers", and even among the children there were too malicious and fastidious. The narrator was very surprised by the fact that the locals seemed to flaunt in front of each other, and especially in front of strangers, their ability to behave, flaunted an exaggerated sense of honor. And it soon became clear that this was how the idea of a nation was demonstrated. “... The beach was teeming with young patriots - an unnatural and very depressing phenomenon. ... The Italians were easily offended, too fond of demonstrating their own dignity, it seemed that the struggle of national flags, a dispute over authority and rank, arose quite inopportunely ... "
Against this background, another conflict occurred. The eight-year-old daughter of the narrator ran naked several meters to the water to wash her bathing suit of sand. The girl's act caused a terrible outrage in the Italian vacationers, they treated it as a challenge to public morality and even saw in this ingratitude and insulting disrespect for hospitable Italy. In the end, the narrator had to pay a fine, but "the adventure is worth such a contribution to the Italian state treasury."
Although the hero had the idea to go with Torre di Venere, he still stayed because he decided to see what would happen in the resort next and, perhaps, learn something. “So, we stayed and received a terrible reward for our endurance: we survived the ominously interesting appearance of Cipolli.”
He appeared at the end of the season, an illusionist and conjurer, a master at entertaining the public.
The performance started at nine o'clock. But despite such a late start, the audience was in no hurry, and the hall filled up very slowly. Standing places mainly belonged to local fishermen - friends of the narrator's children. Also here was Mario, the waiter from the Cafe Esquisito.
Time passed, the wizard's performance dragged on, the narrator became nervous because the children needed to sleep, but it was too cruel to take them away from the entertainment that had not yet begun. But in the end the performance began and Cipolla appeared. “A man of indeterminate age ... with a sharply defined, haggard face, piercing eyes, a hard stool with a wrinkled mouth ... he was dressed in an elegant but bizarre evening suit. ... In Italy, perhaps, more than anywhere else, the spirit of the eighteenth century has been preserved, and with it the type of charlatan, fair jester, characteristic of that era ... Cipolla answered this historical typical with all his appearance ... "But the narrator noted that, despite this, there was no hint of clowning in the manners of the magician, on the contrary, he seemed stern, arrogant, even self-satisfied, although he was a cripple - a hunchback.
Standing at the ramp, Cipolla lit a cheap cigarette and began to stare at the audience. The audience answered him the same. One of the fishermen in the name of Giovanotto could not stand it and was the first to congratulate, although not very respectfully, Cipolla. For some reason, this offended, and the magician, looking intently at the guy, and also slamming the whip hidden under the cape, ordered Giovanotto to show the public his tongue, which he did. Confused by such a beginning of the performance, Cipolla explained to the public that he loves to be greeted seriously and respectfully, because in Rome he is considered a phenomenon, and he is not going to endure reproaches from persons slightly spoiled by the attention of the female half. Chipolla continued to mock the guy whom he apparently chose as his victim of this evening. But the audience liked the magician's speech, because here "speech rules for the measure of a person," and therefore Cipolla won the favor of the audience. He turned out to be very quick on the tongue, a clever entertainer.
The dodger began his speech with arithmetic exercises. It was a simple yet amazing game. Cipolla wrote something under a sheet of paper pinned on the board, then asked the audience to help him, and chose two hefty fishermen. Giving one of them chalk, Cipolla ordered to write down the numbers that he would name. But both said they couldn't write. Cipolla was offended and angry, he sent the ignoramuses to their places and said that in Italy everyone knows how to write and therefore, in his opinion, “these are bad jokes - to bring ... slander on themselves ... cast a shadow on our government and our country." In addition, Cipolla called Torre di Venere the worst corner of Italy, where darkness and ignorance reign. A certain young man rushed to defend his native city, exclaiming that they, although not scientists, were more honest, “than someone in the hall boasts of Rome so much, as if he had created it himself. Chipolla decided to teach the enemy a lesson. Having descended into the hall and holding a whip in his hand, he somehow especially looked into the eyes of the militant young man and began to talk about how he knew how badly the guy’s stomach hurt, that he wanted to writhe in pain, and therefore advised him to writhe so that it became a little easier. The young man, smiling bewilderedly, did what the magician said - he crouched all over, as if "a living embodiment of boundless pain." And Chipolla continued the arithmetic number. One of the spectators wrote two-digit, three-digit and four-digit numbers in a column on the board, which were called by other spectators. When the column began to add about fifteen numbers, Cipolla invited the public to add them to each other. And when the final amount, a five-digit number, was named, Cipolla raised a piece of paper on the blackboard and showed his inscription, which he had made earlier: the same number was written there. Thunderous applause broke out. "... I don't know what the audience actually thought... but on the whole it was clear that Cipolla selected people for himself and that the whole process of adding, under the pressure of his will, was directed towards a predetermined goal..."
Chipolla experimented with numbers for a while, and then moved on to card tricks. “He chose three cards from one deck without looking, hid them in the inside pocket of his coat, and then offered to anyone who wants to draw the same cards from the second deck. cards, - number I didn’t always succeed, sometimes only two cards matched ... ”One of the spectators wanted to draw cards, but choosing them at his own discretion, without any influence. To this, Cipolla remarked that the stronger the resistance to his influence, the greater the chance that the card would turn out to be exactly the one that the magician needed. And so it happened. “How much Chipolli was helped by natural talent, and how much mechanical trickery and sleight of hand, only the devil himself knew.” The audience took the performance with great interest. paid tribute to the skill of a magician.
During his speech Cipolla drank a lot of cognac and constantly fuels; this allegedly kept him in proper shape. After tricks with cards, the magician switched to a game of "clairvoyance": he found hidden things, uttered phrases that the audience thought ahead. He knew his audience well” and knew how to please them. Thus, Cipolla uttered the French phrase that was meant to him in Italian, only the last word, as if by force, in French.
Then he turned to Madame Anjoliere and "guessed" the woman's past, talking about her friendship with Eleonora Duse. This caused a real storm of applause from the audience. Intermission was announced soon after. The narrator, anticipating something unusual, wanted to leave the theater. But the children asked to wait until the end of the evening, and the hero's family remained. “... Our feelings for Cavalier Cipolli were extremely contradictory, but, if I am not mistaken, they were the same in all the spectators, but no one went home. Maybe we succumbed to the charms of this man ... that came from him even outside the program ... and paralyzed our resolve? With the same success it could be said that we stayed just out of curiosity. But in the end, the hero came to the conclusion that they were forced to wait until the end of the performance by that “tense, anxious, humiliating, depressing mood that is everywhere in Torre,” and Cipolla seemed the embodiment of the tension of the local atmosphere.
In addition, the narrator realized that Cipolla turned out to be the most powerful hypnotist of all that the hero had ever seen: "... the second part of the program was frankly devoted only to special exercises, demonstrating the depersonalization of a person and subjugating her to someone else's will ...". A glass of cognac and a whip with a claw-shaped handle, “an insulting symbol of power under which he defiantly set us all up and for which we did not dare to warmer feelings, were only capable of bewilderment and stubbornness of the conquered” helped the shtkarevs in his exercises. Chipolla brought one young man to a cataleptic state, and then, putting the body with the back of his head and legs on the backs of two chairs, he simply sat on it. The magician suggested to the elderly lady that he was traveling in India, and the woman spoke animatedly about her non-existent adventures. And the hunchback assured the tall, strong man that he could not raise his hand - and the man fought in vain for the lost freedom of movement, because it was "that paralysis of the will that takes away freedom."
No less impressive was the spectacle when, hypnotized, enchanted and stunned, Madame Anjoliere rushed through the mason, despite the pleas and cries of her husband to return, and it seemed that she was ready to follow him to the ends of the world. "... It was after this victory that his authority rose so much that he could make the audience dance, dance in the literal sense of the word." And soon several people were already dancing on the stage, to the sound of Cipolli's whip. The young man, who had already resisted the stucco, asked if the cavalier would be able to teach him to dance even against his will. In response, Cipolla began to clap his whip and repeat: “Dance!” The young man, as best he could, resisted the effect of the magician, writhed, trembled, but in the end convulsions overcame his body, and he danced, and Cipolla brought him to the stage in his puppets. “As far as I understood, the Roman lost because he stood in a position of complete denial. It can be seen that only reluctance is not enough to provide us with spiritual strength ... "
The fall of this young man became the main event of the play, and Cipolla reached the pinnacle of his triumph. After smoking another cigarette, he beckoned Mario with his index finger. He stepped onto the stage with an incredulous smile on his thick lips. He was a stocky fellow in his twenties, with short hair, a low forehead and heavy eyelids "above hazy gray eyes with a green and yellow tint." “We knew him as a person ... we saw him almost every day, and we liked his daydreaming and the way he sometimes thought and forgot about everything in the world, and then hurried to make amends with helpfulness. He behaved sedately, not gloomily, but not obsequiously ... "
When Mario approached Cipolli, he turned his face to the audience and measured him with a contemptuous, imperious and cheerful look. Then the magician noticed that the guy looked like he was thinking, and said that Mario was lamenting because of love. After this statement, Giovanotto laughed mockingly, and the offended Mario decided to run away from the stage, but Cipolla managed to detain him: “Wait, I promise you a miracle. I promise to convince you that you are fussing in vain. And the dodger began to talk about the beauty of Mario's beloved girl, whose name is Sylvestra, about how Mario's heart stops when he sees her. The hypnotist convinced the guy that his beloved Mario reciprocated and that now it was not Chipolla who was addressing him, but it was she - Sylvester. “It was disgusting to watch how the libertine preened, coquettishly led with crooked shoulders, let his swollen eyes go to his forehead and gritting his gapped teeth in a sweet smile.” But it was even harder to look at Mario, who, under the influence of a hypnotist, showed his most intimate feelings, his hopeless, "deceived passion" and whispered only one word: "Sylvester!" And then the hunchback ordered Mario to kiss himself. Fascinated, Mario leaned over and kissed Chipolla. A dead silence reigned in the hall, which was broken by the laughter of Giovanotto. But then the hunchback cracked his whip, and Mario woke up. “He stood with his eyes buried in emptiness, his whole body leaning back and pressing one or the other hand to his rotten lips ...” And then, to the applause of the audience, he rushed down the stairs. Cipolla shrugged his shoulders mockingly, but at that moment the guy suddenly turned around, raised his hand, and two short shots fired. “Chipolla grabbed a chair ... and in a moment he sank heavily on the chair, his head fell on his chest, and then he himself collapsed to the ground, and remained lying there - an motionless, disorderly heap of clothes and crooked bones.” A terrible commotion arose in the hall: some called the doctor and the police, others surrounded Mario and took away his gun. “Terrible, fatal end! But still, he brought liberation—that’s how I felt then, that’s how I feel now, and I can’t help it!”
Thomas Mann
Mario and the Wizard
It is painful to remember our stay in Toppo di Venere and the whole atmosphere there. From the very beginning, there was annoyance, excitement, agitation in the air, and in the end, this one. the story of the terrible Cipolla, in whose face, in a fatal and at the same time impressive way, all the specifically malignant of this mood seemed to have found its embodiment and menacingly thickened. The fact that our children were present at the terrible denouement (the denouement, as it seemed to us later, predetermined and, in fact, natural), was, of course, regrettable and impermissible, but we were misled by the hoax resorted to by this very unusual person. Thank God, the children did not understand when the acting ended and the drama began, and we did not lead them out of the happy delusion that it was all a game.
Torre is located about fifteen kilometers from Portaclemente, one of the most popular resorts on the Tyrrhenian Sea, elegant in a metropolitan way and crowded for most of the year, with a smart esplanade built up with hotels and shops along the sea, with motley cabins, flags of sand castles and tanned bodies, wide beach and noisy entertainment venues. Since the beach, bordered by a grove of pines, which the nearby mountains look down on, is covered along the entire coast with the same fine sand, comfortable and spacious, it is not surprising that a less noisy competitor soon arose a little further away. Torre di Venere, where, however, you will look around in vain in search of the tower to which the village owes its name, is, as it were, a branch of the neighboring large resort and for a number of years has been a paradise for the few, a haven for connoisseurs of nature, not vulgarized by the secular crowd. But, as is usual with such corners, the silence long ago had to retreat even further along the coast, to Marina Petriera and God knows where; light, as you know, seeks silence and drives it away, with ridiculous lust pouncing on it and imagining that it is able to combine with it and that where it is, it can also be; what can I say, even having spread his fair in her monastery, he is ready to believe that silence still remains.
Here is Torre, although it is still quieter and more modest than Portaclemente, it has already become fashionable among Italians and visitors from other countries.
The international resort is no longer traveled or not traveled to the same extent, which does not prevent it from being a noisy and crowded international resort; they go a little further away, in Torre, it is even more luxurious, and besides, it is cheaper, and the attractive force of these virtues remains unchanged, although the virtues themselves have disappeared. Torre has acquired a "Grand Hotel", countless boarding houses with pretensions and simpler ones have bred, so that the owners and tenants of villas and gardens in a pine grove above the sea can no longer boast of peace on the beach; in July-August, there is exactly the same picture as in Portaclement: the whole beach is teeming with humming, noisy, joyfully cackling bathers, whom the furious sun rips off the skin from their necks and shoulders in tatters; flat-bottomed, poisonously painted boats with children sway on the sparkling blue, and the sonorous names with which mothers, afraid to lose sight of them, call their children, saturate the air with hoarse anxiety; and to this add oysters, soft drinks, flowers, coral jewelry, cornetti al burre, who, stepping over the outstretched arms and legs of sunbathers, also offer their goods in southern guttural and unceremonious voices.
This is what the beach in Torre looked like when we arrived - colorful, you can’t say anything, but we still decided that we arrived too early. It was mid-August, the Italian season was still in full swing - not the best time for foreigners to appreciate the beauty of this place; What kind of after-dinner crowds in open-air cafes on the promenade along the sea, at least?
"Esquisito" where we sometimes went to sit and where we were served by Mario, the same Mario I'm going to talk about! It is difficult to find a free table, and orchestras - each, not wanting to reckon with others, plays his own! In addition, just after dinner, a public from Portaclemente arrives every day, for, of course, Torre is a favorite destination for country walks for restless vacationers of a large resort, and, due to the fault of fiats rushing back and forth, bushes of laurels and oleanders along the sides of the highway leading from there are covered, like snow, an inch of white dust—an outlandish yet hideous sight.
Indeed, one should go to Torre di Venere in September, when the general public is leaving and the resort is empty, or in May, before the sea warms up enough for a southerner to risk taking a dip in it. True, even in the off-season it is not empty there, but much less noisy and not so crowded with Italians. English, German, French speech prevails under the awnings of the cabins on the beach and in the dining rooms of boarding houses, while back in August, at least in the Grand Hotel, where we were forced to stay for lack of private addresses, such a dominance of the Florentines and Romans that the foreigner feels himself not only as an outsider, but as if he were a second-class guest.
We discovered this with some annoyance on the very first evening upon arrival, when we went down to dine in a restaurant and asked the head waiter to show us a free table. Actually, there was nothing to object to the table allotted to us, but we were captivated by the glazed veranda overlooking the sea, which, like the hall, was full, but where there were still empty seats and light bulbs under red lampshades were burning on the tables. Such festivity delighted our kids, and we, in the simplicity of our souls, declared that we preferred to eat on the veranda - thereby, as it turned out, revealing our complete ignorance, because it was explained to us with some embarrassment that this luxury was intended for “our clients”, “ ai nostri client!”. To our clients? So, to us. After all, we are not some kind of one-day butterflies, but guests who arrived for three weeks or a month, boarders. However, we did not want to insist on clarifying the difference between us and those clients who are entitled to eat under the light of red lights, and ate our pranzo at a modestly and casually lit table in the common room - a very mediocre dinner, an impersonal and tasteless hotel standard; the cuisine of the Eleonora boarding house, located some ten paces further from the sea, seemed to us incomparably better afterwards.
We moved there in just three or four days, not even having yet properly settled down in the Grand Hotel - and not at all because of the veranda and red lights: the children, having immediately made friends with the waiters and messengers, without memory rejoicing at the sea, very soon and forgot to think about colorful bait. But with some of the regulars on the veranda, or rather with the hotel management who kowtowed before them, one of those conflicts immediately arose that could spoil the whole stay at the resort from the very beginning. Among the visitors was the Roman nobility, a certain Principe X with his family, the number of these gentlemen was in the neighborhood of ours, and the princess, a high society lady and at the same time a passionately loving mother, was frightened by the residual effects of whooping cough, which both of our little ones had suffered shortly before and were weak echoes of which still occasionally at night disturbed the usually imperturbable sleep of our youngest son. The essence of this disease is not very clear, which leaves room for all sorts of prejudices, and therefore we were not at all offended by our elegant neighbor because she shared the widespread opinion that whooping cough was contracted acoustically - in other words, she was simply afraid of a bad example for her children. . Womanly proud and reveling in her nobility, she turned to the management, after which the manager, dressed in an indispensable frock coat, hastened to inform us with great regret that in these circumstances our relocation to the hotel wing is absolutely necessary. In vain did we assure him that this childhood illness was in the last stage of attenuation, that it had actually been overcome and no longer posed any danger to others.
The only concession to us was to be allowed to bring the case to the court of medicine, the hotel doctor - and only he, and not some one invited by us - could be called to resolve the issue. We agreed to this condition, because we had no doubt that in this way the princess would calm down, and we would not have to move. A doctor comes, he turns out to be an honest and worthy servant of science. He examines the baby, finds that he is perfectly healthy, and denies any danger. We believe we have the right to consider the matter settled, when suddenly the manager declares that, despite the doctor's conclusion, we must vacate the room and move to the wing.
Such servility infuriated us. It is unlikely that the perfidious stubbornness with which we encountered came from the princess herself. Most likely, the obsequious manager simply did not dare to report the doctor's conclusion to her. Be that as it may, we informed him that we preferred to leave altogether, and immediately, and began to pack. We were able to do this with a light heart, because in the meantime we managed to pass by the Eleonora boarding house, which immediately attracted us with its affably family appearance, and made the acquaintance of its hostess, Signora Angiolieri, who made a most favorable impression on us.
