in search of the little sea lost 6

Groups in the red-grape-colored mantles

* to be continue

 

 

The two, Mr. Guaga and Tango left the sanatorium in a Autumn day,

one after another, one happy at his satisfactory recovery, the other

with his left chest still in illness. There was nobody any more

for Hagya to share killing time and dialogue with. Hagya felt solitary.

As you know, for Hagya to struggle against TB meant that he should

spend days and nights unlimitedly given to him ,doing nothing particular 

but to hang around his bed in no hope of getting back to 'down there'.

 

Anyway for Hagya books and music replaced the two men. There was

no other way for him but reading literary books and listening music. 

After he parted them, he put books near his pillow in bed. Most of them

were the literary ones interesting to him in his high school days

through  2 years of his universty period as a student studying politics .

Then his most favorites in the sanatorium were  a few as below:

Magic Mountain' byThomas Mann,

'Das sprake Zaratustra' by Nietsche,

'Rip Van Winkle' by Washington Irving ,

'Essay of Alia' by Charles Lamb, etc.

 

Magic Mountain new to Hagya strongly captivated him. On reading it,

he would to compare himself with Hanscastrop, the protagonist of the novel,

and Tango Park with a character in it named Setembrini ,tall and slender,

bright-spirited and talkative, and especially a lyoung lady in her twenties

called Carmen as her nickname with another signifcant character named

Clavdia Chauchat who led Hanscastrop into temptation. She had stayed

half a year in a ward next to Hagya's before the two, Mr. Guaga and

Tango Park came to hospital.

 

Hagya didnot open the novel without reading the phrase  below:

"When Castorp finds the patient who keeps irritating him by slamming doors

in the dining hall, he is surprised at her attractiveness and, above all,

by her slanted eyes, protruding cheek bones, and the delicate,

girlish hand that pats her hair:

 

 

Carmen in the real world, Hagya thought, was fascinating and free-spirited

enough for most men to be disturbed looking at her. During her 6-month stay

she had 2 men as her lovers at the same time, one of whom was Hagya .

she liked to invite the both together to her room ,with no mask on her mouth

sitting near Hagya, in disregard of the rumor that he was a rare case difficult

to get better not only by medication but also a surgical operation. sometimes

Hagya called at her room, but whenever he opened the door, he found the other,

guitar player there in her room. He was thought to play melodies for her. who

loved pop music, in particula, one of beatles', " I wanna hold your hand'.

 

Hagya was driven to have more and more a blind jealousy of her and

his rival, whom ,he imagined, she loved more than himself .

Then one day in the evening in summer, she knocked at the door

of his room and abruply came in saying, 'Now I have to say goodbye

to you. I am to leave here tomorrow." And to his surprise,

she whispered to him an unexpected and unbelievable suggestion:

"How about making a train trip together with me toward the east coast?

There is my mother's house by the seaside on the north."

"Really, are you sure?" 

"Sure"

"A down train is available that day?"

"Probably it will be not available.you had better to return the next day".

On that day he accompanied her there by seaside and was welcomed

by an old lady alone waiting for her daughter. The result was inevitably

that his illness in the convalescent stage turned as serious as before.

 

In  the novel Chauchat's effect on him was such that at one point

Hanscastrop could not muster up enough strengh to resist getting

intoxicated by something magic andr poisonous element in her

-a clear symbol of the decay she spreaded.

'Clavdia is like a scintillating and pungent car nivorous plant .

enticing her prey by dulling its sences rather than by striking out'

 As you know,The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence:

a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body .

Hans Castorp, a naive young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium

Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin, Joachim Ziemssen.

What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into months,

and then years, as Hans himself is diagnosed tubercular and dutifully takes

his place there. Hans positively revels in his status as one of the "horizontal":