The Magic Mountain (81 page)

Leo Naphta came from a small town on the border between Galicia and Volhynia. His father, about whom he spoke with respect (apparently out of the sense that he had outgrown his origins sufficiently to be able to judge them kindly) had been the village
shohet
—a profession very different from that of a Christian butcher, who was a tradesman, a man of business. Not so Leo’s father. He held an office, a spiritual office. Having been examined in his godly skills by the rabbi, who then authorized him to slaughter acceptable animals according to the Law of Moses and the regulations of the Talmud, Elia Naphta was himself filled with a quiet religiosity; there had been something priestly about him and his blue eyes, which, as his son described them, had glittered like stars and radiated a solemnity recalling ancient times when the slaughtering of animals had indeed been the duty of priests. When Leo, or Leib as he was known in his childhood, had been allowed into a farmyard to watch his father fulfill his ritual office—with the help of his assistant, a powerful, athletic Jewish lad, next to whom slender Elia with his round, blond beard seemed all the more delicate and frail—and had seen him flourish the large butcher knife and cut deep into the neck vertebrae of the bound and hobbled, but fully conscious animal, had seen the assistant catch the spurting, steaming blood in basins that filled rapidly, the boy had watched the spectacle with the eyes of a child, which see through externals to essentials; indeed, the son of star-eyed Elia may have been particularly gifted in that regard. He knew that Christian butchers were obliged first to stun beasts with the blow of a club or an axe before they killed them, that this requirement was intended to prevent animals from being cruelly tortured; whereas his father, although much wiser and more delicate than those louts—and with eyes like stars, which not one of them had—proceeded according to the Law and administered the lethal cut while the creature was still fully conscious and then let it bleed until it buckled and fell dead. Leib was a mere boy, but he saw that the methods of those clumsy goyim, though excusably charitable, were also profane, that they did not honor sacred things in the same way his father’s solemn pitilessness did; and so for him the idea of piety became bound up with cruelty, just as the sight and smell of spurting blood was bound up in his mind with the idea of what is holy and spiritual. For he saw quite clearly that his father had not chosen his bloody profession out of the same brutal enjoyment that those Christian louts, or even his own Jewish assistant, took in their strength, but had done so, despite his delicate physique, for star-eyed, spiritual reasons.

Elia Naphta had in fact been a brooding introvert; he was not just a scholar of the Torah, but a critic of Scripture who discussed its contents with the rabbi and frequently argued with him. Throughout the district, he was thought of as someone special, and not just by those of his own creed, as someone who knew more than others—about religious matters in part, but also about other things that made him seem a little uncanny, or at the least, out of the ordinary. There was something unorthodox and sectarian about him, as if he were conversant with God, a
baalshem
or
zaddik
, a miracle man, particularly since, using only blood and spoken charms, he had once healed a woman with a loathsome skin condition and on another occasion had cured a boy of seizures. But this same aura of a somewhat perilous piety, in which the bloody odor of his profession played its role, had also been his undoing. During a pogrom, a panic of rage unleashed by the unexplained deaths of two Christian children, Elia had met a terrible end: he had been found hanging on the door of his own burning house, crucified to it with nails; and his wife, although bedridden with consumption, had fled the region with her children, little Leib and four others—all of them with arms raised, crying in loud lamentation.

Thanks to Elia’s foresight, the family was not entirely penniless when they at last came to rest in a little town in Vorarlberg, where Frau Naphta found a job in a cotton mill, at which she worked as long as her strength allowed. The older children attended the local grammar school; although the intellectual offerings of this institution were sufficient for Leo’s brothers and sisters, that was anything but the case for him, the oldest. From his mother he had acquired incipient lung disease; from his father, however, in addition to a frail physique, he had inherited an exceptional mind—intellectual gifts that very early on were joined with haughtiness, vaunting ambition, and an aching desire for more elegant surroundings, a passionate need to move beyond the world of his origins. As a lad of fourteen or fifteen, he had obtained books and impatiently and unsystematically gone about educating himself outside of school and providing his mind with nourishment. He thought and said things that caused his sickly mother to tilt her head, raise her shoulders, and fling her emaciated hands in the air. By both his manner and answers in religion class, he attracted the attention of the district rabbi, a pious and learned man, who took him on as a private pupil, satisfying the boy’s love of formal knowledge with Hebrew and the classics and his passion for logic with mathematics—for all of which the man received very scant thanks. Over time it became clear that he had nursed a viper at his bosom. Just as things had once gone between Elia Naphta and his rabbi, so they went now—teacher and student did not get along, religious and philosophical friction increased, grew worse and worse. The honest old scholar suffered every abuse imaginable as a result of young Leo’s intellectual obstinacy, captiousness, skepticism, contrariness, and cutting dialectical logic. Moreover, Leo’s restive mind and sophistry soon showed a rebellious streak; he made the acquaintance of the son of a social-democratic member of the Reichsrat, and following the lead of this hero of the masses, had directed his mind along political paths, turning his passion for logic to the field of social criticism. The old Talmudic scholar was a loyal citizen, and Leo’s speeches made his hair stand on end—they marked the end of what little understanding existed between teacher and student. In short, there came a day—at just the same time that Leo’s mother, Rachel, lay dying—when the master threw Naphta out, and forbade the boy ever to enter his study again.

It was at that same period, immediately after his mother’s demise, that sixteen-year-old Leo made the acquaintance of Father Unterpertinger. He was sitting alone on a bench in the park atop a little hill known as Margaret’s Head, just west of town and with a view to the Ill River and the wide, serene Rhine valley—was sitting there lost in gloomy, bitter thought about his fate and his future, when a strolling member of the faculty of the Morning Star, the local boarding school run by the Society of Jesus, sat down next to him, laid his hat on the bench, crossed one leg over the other under his order’s cassock, and after reading awhile in his breviary struck up a conversation, which soon turned very lively and proved decisive for Leo’s further destiny. The Jesuit, a well-traveled man with cultured manners, a pedagogue by passion, a judge of men, a fisher of men, sat up and took notice at the first sardonic, clearly articulated answers the wretched young Jewish lad gave to his questions. A caustic, tormented spirituality drifted toward him in those words; probing deeper, he discovered both knowledge and a maliciously elegant mode of thought—all the more surprising, given the young man’s tattered exterior. They spoke about Marx, whose
Kapital
Leo Naphta had studied in a popular edition, and then moved on to Hegel, of whom, or about whom, he had also read enough to be able to offer a few striking comments. Whether due to his general bent for paradox or out of courtesy, he called Hegel a “Catholic” thinker; and in response to the priest’s smiling question about the basis for this comment, inasmuch as Hegel was actually the state philosopher of Prussia and generally considered a Protestant, Leo had replied: the very term “state philosopher” confirmed he was correct in pointing to Hegel’s Catholicity in the religious sense, if not, of course, in regard to Church dogmatics.
For
(and Naphta was particularly fond of that conjunction—in his mouth it gained something triumphantly inexorable, and his eyes would flash behind his glasses whenever he could insert it), for politics and Catholicism, as concepts, were psychologically related; they formed a single category embracing all objective, actual, active, actualizing reality, and as such stood in contradiction to pietist Protestantism, which had emerged out of mysticism. The political-pedagogic nature of Catholicism, he added, was apparent in the Jesuit order, which had always regarded education and statecraft as its domains. And he also mentioned Goethe, who, though rooted in pietism and most assuredly a Protestant, had also had a strong Catholic side, evident in his objectivism, his doctrine of the active life, and his defense of private confession—as a teacher he had been virtually a Jesuit.

Naphta may have made these remarks because he believed them, or because he found them witty, or simply because as a poor man he wanted to flatter his hearer and was well aware of how to help and how to harm himself—but the priest was less interested in the truth of his statements than in the general cleverness they revealed. As the conversation unfolded, Leo’s personal situation became clear, and the meeting ended with Unterpertinger’s request that Leo visit him at his school.

And so Naphta was permitted to enter within the walls of the Stella Matutina, whose challenging academic and social atmosphere had long been an object of his own intellectual longings and appetites; what was more, this turn of events had given him a new teacher and patron far more capable than his previous one of appreciating and fostering his character, a master whose value lay in his cool cosmopolitanism, and it was the lad’s greatest desire to enter such circles. Like many gifted Jews, Naphta was by instinct both a revolutionary and an aristocrat—a socialist, yet obsessed with the dream of participating in a proud, elegant, exclusive, closely circumscribed world. The first statement that the presence of a Catholic theologian had elicited from him, even though a purely analytical comparison, had been a declaration of love for the Roman church, which he saw as an elegant and yet spiritual power—that is, anti-worldly, anti-material, and thus revolutionary. And his homage was genuine, rooted deep within his nature; for, as he himself explained, Judaism—thanks to its earthy, practical character, its socialism, its political spirituality—was far nearer to the Catholic sphere, was incomparably more closely related to it, than to the self-absorption and mystical subjectivity of Protestantism; this meant that it was decidedly less intellectually disruptive for a Jew to convert to the Roman church than for a Protestant to do so.

Having quarreled with the shepherd of his original religious community, orphaned and abandoned, yet filled with a longing for life’s purer air, for a form of existence to which his talents entitled him, and having long since reached the age of legal consent, Naphta was so impatient to convert that his “discoverer” was spared any effort to win this soul—or better, this unconventional mind—for the world of his own religious confession. The priest saw to it that, even before his baptism, the lad was given temporary shelter and spiritual nourishment at the Stella. Leo moved in—but only after first abandoning, with the cool callousness of an intellectual aristocrat, his younger brothers and sisters to charity and a fate suited to their lesser talents.

The grounds of the institution were as extensive as the buildings themselves, which provided space for four hundred pupils. The complex included forests and meadows, a half-dozen athletic fields, agricultural buildings, including stalls for hundreds of cows. The institution was a boarding school, a model farm, an academy of higher learning, and a temple for the muses—for there were constant theatrical and musical performances. Life was both stylish and monastic. The discipline and elegance, the hushed serenity and intellectual challenge, the well-ordered and well-tended life, the precise yet richly varied schedule—it all spoke to Leo’s profoundest instincts. He was beyond happy. He took his excellent meals in a huge refectory, where the rule of silence reigned—which was also the case in the corridors—and where a young prefect sat at his lectern in the middle of the room, high above the diners, and read to them. Leo showed a burning zeal for his studies and, despite a weakness of the chest, mustered all his strength to hold his own at games and sports. The devotion with which he listened to daily morning mass and worshiped at the solemn Sunday service could only delight his priestly pedagogues. His social deportment was no less satisfactory. On holiday afternoons, after partaking of cake and wine, he and his fellow students—in gray-and-green uniforms with stiff collars, striped trousers, and caps—went for a walk in closed formation.

He was grateful beyond bounds for the respect shown his origins, his infant Christian faith, his personal status in general. No one seemed to realize that he lived and studied free of charge. The rules of the institution diverted the attention of his classmates from the fact that he had no family, no home. The receipt of all packages of food and sweets was expressly forbidden, and if something did arrive, it was distributed evenly among them all. The cosmopolitanism of the Stella prevented his racial traits from being noticed. There were other young foreigners—Portuguese South Americans, who looked more “Jewish” than he, and so the very term lost meaning. The Ethiopian prince who had been admitted at the same time as Naphta was a very elegant-looking Moor with woolly hair.

In his rhetoric year, Leo let it be known that he wished to study theology and, if he should be found worthy, to join the order. The result was that his scholarship was transferred from the “second tier,” with its more modest board and room, to the “first tier,” where meals were served by waiters, and the neighbors on each side of his cubicle were a Silesian count von Harbuval and Chamaré and a marquis di Rangoni-Santacroce from Modena. He graduated with honors and, true to his resolve, exchanged the life of a boarding-school pupil for that of a novice in nearby Tisis—a life of service and humility, of silent subordination and religious training, from which he wrested intellectual pleasures congruent with his earlier wild fantasies.