Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann
"Mario and the Magician" is a novella by Thomas Mann set in a seaside resort village in Italy, where a family becomes disenchanted with their vacation amid the bustling, sunburned crowds. The story takes a dramatic turn when they attend a performance by a manipulative magician named Cipolla, whose act combines illusion with a sinister element of humiliation. Cipolla, characterized by his grotesque appearance and charm, engages the audience in increasingly bizarre and unsettling feats, revealing his ability to manipulate and control those around him.
The central figure, Mario, a young waiter, becomes the focus of Cipolla's cruel antics, which culminate in an intense and shocking moment when Mario reacts violently against the magician. This climactic scene elicits a mix of horror and liberation from the audience. Mann’s story explores themes of power, exploitation, and the darker aspects of human nature, making it both a social commentary and a psychological exploration. The novella prompts readers to reflect on the dynamics of control and the impact of performance on individual identity and societal norms.
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Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann
First published: "Mario und der Zauberer," 1930 (English translation, 1930)
Type of plot: Symbolist
Time of work: About 1929
Locale: Torre di Venere, a fictional town in southern Italy
Principal Characters:
The narrator , a middle-aged German touristHis wife Their two young children , a boy and a girlCavaliere Cipolla , a traveling magician and illusionistMario , a waiter and café attendantSilvestra , Mario's girlfriend
The Story
Torre di Venere is a bustling but faintly decaying resort village on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It shares fine white sands and high pine groves with other beachside towns along the way. By the middle of August, it is awash in humanity; during the day hordes of sunburned vacationers of all ages, both sexes, and several nationalities converge at the water's edge. The narrator acknowledges his disappointment with these surroundings, which are no more auspicious than those of other southern Italian retreats. He and his wife are beset by redundant hotel and restaurant functionaries; a subtropical heat wave has set in. Their daughter is caught up in an unpleasant and slightly indecent incident when she adjusts her bathing suit at the seaside. For a brief time, their son is ill with what they fear may be whooping cough.
For a diversion, the narrator and his family decide to attend an evening performance by Cipolla, a traveling conjuror and prestidigitator whose reputation has preceded him. By nine o'clock, throngs of townspeople and tourists have gathered at a cinema hall built into a ruined castle. The audience is kept waiting for some time until, with calculated abruptness, the magician appears. Cipolla appraises them with small, hard eyes and clipped lips; he flashes his ragged, uneven, sawlike teeth. His hands, which are like long yellow claws, clutch a silver-handled riding crop. As he performs, he smokes cheap cigarettes and downs neat glasses of cognac. Bantering with the audience and slashing his whip through the air to make his points, the magician induces individual spectators to perform feats that they think impossible or initially refuse indignantly.
One youth extends his tongue to the farthest limits and then retracts it, hardly knowing what he has done afterward; another young man is drawn up and convulsed in a colicky spasm, and when he returns to an upright position he is unaware of his previous plight. Cipolla produces a slip of paper and then has members of the audience supply numbers; when he has added all of them—fifteen entries, yielding a sum of nearly one million—the magician shows the spectators that he had written down precisely that figure beforehand. He also demonstrates a series of card tricks, in which without looking he takes three cards from one deck and then, on all but a few occasions, is able to show that they are the same as those members of the audience have chosen at random from another deck.
The narrator comments that the magician's predilection is for harsh, mean-spirited challenges that subject the participants to physical and intellectual humiliation. As entertainment it is not entirely suitable for children. The magician styles himself Cavaliere, an honorific title often conferred for distinguished military service, and he wears the sash customarily given with this award. However, the Italian government has honored him only for his stage performances; he is oddly humpbacked and was exempted from wartime duty because of this deformity. Perhaps he is simply an illusionist, or a charlatan, but an unnaturally clever one.
After a painfully long intermission—of at least twenty minutes—Cipolla returns and seemingly mesmerizes other members of the audience. A woman is rendered briefly insensible to her husband's voice; one after another young men rise and dance to the magician's bidding, until he commands them to cease. Finally, Cipolla calls on Mario, a young man who is twenty years old, with heavy-lidded eyes and thick plain lips; by day he works unstintingly and without complaint as a waiter in a café, where he brings chocolates and biscuits to the guests. Disdainfully the hunchback inquires about Mario's work among the tourists and displays an uncanny knowledge of his female acquaintances. The magician discovers the name of the youth's beloved Silvestra and probes Mario's secret affection. As a final grotesque trick, the magician, in the girl's voice, asks Mario to kiss him, and when this is done the youth recoils in horror. The audience is still spellbound, and it is more than several moments before it hears two detonations: Mario has shot Cipolla with a homemade, short-barreled revolver and is scurrying away into the throng. Then the narrator can only describe summarily the collective sense of horror—but strangely also of liberation—felt by those looking on in the hall.