Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  The song led them, though not for long; the journey between the banks of the incoming canal was almost at an end, and the song expired in the general restlessness which developed on board as the inner bay of the harbor, its leaden mirror already gleaming darkly, opened out, revealing the city built around it in the form of a half-circle with its myriad lights shimmering in the twilight like a starry heaven. It was suddenly warm. The flotilla halted to let Caesar’s boat proceed to the head of the line, and now—and even this which happened under the soft immutability of the autumn sky should have been retained as an infinite unique occurrence—there began a careful maneuvering to pilot a way in safety between the boats, sailing-vessels, fishing-smacks, tartanes and merchantmen, anchored on every side; the farther one went the narrower became the channel, the more jammed the mass of ship-hulls, the denser the tangle of masts and rigging and furled sails, dead in their rigidity, living in their repose, a strange, dusky, knotted and confused network that lifted itself darkly from the shiny oily-dark surface of the water toward the unmoved evening brightness of the heavens, a black spiderweb of wood and hemp reflected spectrally in the waters beneath, flashing spectrally above from the wild flickering of the torches swung all about the decks with shouts of welcome, spectrally lit from the splendor of lights on the landing-place: in the rows of houses surrounding the harbor, window after window was illuminated even up to the attics, illuminated the osterias ranged one after the other under the colonnades; directly across the square there formed a double line of soldiers bearing torches, man after man in gleaming helmets, obviously there to keep an unobstructed thoroughfare from the landing-place into the city, the customs-stalls and custom-offices on the piers were lit by torches, the whole was a sparkling, gigantic space packed with human bodies, a sparkling gigantic reservoir of a waiting at once vast and vehement, filled with the rustling of a hundred thousand feet, slipping, sliding, treading, shuffling on the stone pavement, a seething giant arena, throbbing with the rise and fall of a black buzzing, with a roar of impatience that was suddenly hushed and held in abeyance as the imperial ship, propelled now by only a dozen oars, reached the quay with an easy turn at the designated place—awaited there by the city officials in the center of the torchlit, military quadrangles—and landed with scarcely a sound; in fact the moment had arrived which the brooding mass-beast had awaited to release its howl of joy, and now it broke loose, without pause, without end, victorious, violent, unbridled, fear-inspiring, magnificent, fawning, the mass worshiping itself in the person of the One.

  These were the masses for whom Caesar had lived, for whom the empire had been established, for whom Gaul was conquered, for whom the Parthians were besieged and Germany brought into battle, these were the masses for whom the great peace of Augustus had been made, who, to maintain this peace had to be brought again to civic discipline and order, to belief in the gods and to a humanly-divine morality. And these were the masses without whom no policy could be carried out and on whose support Augustus must rely if he wished to maintain himself, and naturally Augustus had no other wish. Yes and this was the people, the Roman people, whose spirit and honor he, Publius Vergilius Maro, he a real farmer’s son from Andes near Mantua, had not so much described as tried to glorify! To glorify and not describe, that had been the mistake, oh, and this represented the Italy of the Aeneid! Evil, a tide of evil, an immense wave of unspeakable, inexpressible, incomprehensible evil seethed in the reservoir of the plaza; fifty thousand, a hundred thousand mouths yelled the evil out of themselves, yelled it to one another without hearing it, without knowing it was evil, nevertheless willing to stifle it and outshout it in the infernal bellowing. What a birthday greeting! Was he the only one to realize it? Stone-weighted the earth, leaden-weighted the waters, a demonic crater of evil, ripped open by Vulcan himself, a howling crater on the border of Poseidon’s realm. Did not Augustus see that this was no birthday greeting, that it had quite other implications? A feeling of harassed sympathy arose in him, a compassion that pertained as much to Augustus as to the mass of humanity, to the ruler as well as to the ruled, and it was accompanied by a responsibility no less importunate, a truly unbearable one which he himself could not account for beyond knowing that it bore small resemblance to the burden which Caesar had taken upon himself, rather that it was a responsibility of quite another kind; for this seething, befuddled, unrecognized evil was beyond the reach of every governmental enterprise, beyond reach of every earthly force however great, beyond reach, perhaps, of the gods themselves, and no human outcry sufficed to overwhelm it except, it may be, that small voice of the soul, called song, which while it makes known the evil, announces also the awakening of salvation, knowledge-aware, knowledge-fraught, knowledge-persuading, the provenance of every true song. The responsibility of the singer to arouse, the responsibility which even yet he was powerless to bear and to fulfill—, oh, why had he not been allowed to proceed beyond intimation to actual knowledge from which alone healing could be awaited?! Why had fate forced him to return here?! Here there was nothing but death, death and more death! With terrified opened eyes he had raised himself up, now he fell back on his pallet, overcome by horror, by compassion, by helplessness, by weakness; it was not hate which he felt for the masses, neither disdain, nor repulsion, he wished as little as ever before to separate himself from the people or even to lift himself above them, but something new arose in him, something of which, despite all his concern with the people, he had never wanted to take cognizance, and irrespective of where he had been, whether in Naples, Rome, or even Athens, ample opportunity to do so had been given, something that here in Brundisium had unexpectedly obtruded itself, namely the awareness of the people’s profound capacity for evil in all its ramifications, their possibilities for human degradation in becoming a mob, and their reversion therewith to the anti-human, brought to pass by the hollowing out of existence, by turning existence toward a mere thirst for superficialities, its deep roots lost and cut away, so that nothing remained but the dangerous isolated life of self, a sad, sheer exteriority, pregnant with evil, pregnant with death, pregnant with a mysterious, infernal ending. Was this what fate had wished him to learn, so that he was forced back into the heterogeneous, into the cauldron of bitterly boiling worldly life? Was this a revenge for his former blindness? Never had he perceived the savagery of the masses with such immediacy; now he was forced to see it, to hear it, to experience it in the last fibres of his own being, blindness being a part of evil. Again and again sounded the joyless-jubilant shouts of self-suffocation, torches were swinging, commands resounded throughout the ship, a rope thrown from the shore flopped dully on the deck planks, and evil clamored, grief clamored, evil-bearing mystery clamored, enigmatic, yet exposed and present everywhere; amid the tramp of many hurrying feet he lay still, his hand clamped tightly to one of the handles of the leather manuscript-chest lest this be wrenched from him; yet, tired of the fever as from the coughing, tired of the journey, tired of the future, he conceived that the hour of arrival could easily become the hour of death, and it almost became a wish although, or because, he felt definitely that the time for it had not come, it almost became a wish, although, or because, it would have been a strangely wild, strangely noisy death, it did not appear unacceptable to him, in fact almost desirable; for forced to gaze into the fiery inferno, forced to hear it, his heart was compelled to the knowledge of that infernal smouldering of the subhuman.

  Now, tempting though it would have been to let himself be carried off on an ebbing consciousness, to escape in this way the noise, to shut himself off from the yelling mob, the volcanic, infernal yelling which flowed incessantly and heavily over the plaza as though it would never come to an end, such an escape was forbidden him, all the more as it might lead to death; for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all time; he clung to consciousnes
s, he clung to it with the strength of a man who feels the most significant thing of his life approaching and is full of anxiety lest he miss it, and consciousness kept awake by the awakened fear obeyed his will: nothing escaped his observation, neither the careful gestures and the careless comfort of the smooth-faced, young, and foppish assistant-surgeon, who at Augustus’ order was now at his side, nor the stolid, estranged faces of the porters who had brought a litter aboard to fetch him, the sick and strengthless man, as if he were some fragile and precious commodity; he took notice of all, he must retain all, he noticed the barred glances, the sullen growls by which the four men came to an understanding as they lifted the burden upon their shoulders, he noticed the terribly offensive, malign odor of their body-sweat, yet it did not escape his notice that his cloak which had been left behind was now carried after him by a rather childish-looking, dark-curled boy who in a swift pounce had snatched it up. To be sure the cloak was less important than the manuscript-chest, whose porters he bade keep close beside the litter, yet a small part of the vigilance, to which he felt constrained and despite all the nap-seducing attacks of fatigue constrained himself, might be devoted to the cloak; and now he wondered whence the boy, who seemed curiously known and familiar, might have emerged, since he had not come to his notice during the whole of the voyage: he was a somewhat homely, somewhat rustically awkward boy, certainly not one of the slaves, certainly not one of the waiters, and as he stood there at the railing, very boyish, the eyes bright in his brownish face, waiting, because of constant delays caused by the press of the crowd, he cast a furtive glance up to the litter from time to time, looking softly, roguishly and bashfully away when he felt himself observed. Play of eyes? Play of love? Should he, a sick man, be drawn again into the painful play of foolishly-lovely life, he a prostrate man be again drawn into the play of the erect? Oh, for all that they were erect, they did not know how deeply death was interwoven with their eyes and faces, they refused to know it, they desired only to continue the play of their seductions and entanglements, the fore-play of their kisses, foolish-lovely eye sunk in eye, and they did not know that all lying down for love was also by some token a lying down to death; but he who was unavoidably prostrate knew it, and he was almost ashamed that once he had been one of the erect, that once he himself—when was it? unreckoned ages past or just a few months back?—had participated in the lovely, blind and drowsy play of life; and the near-contempt which those enmeshed in play felt for him, since he was barred from it and lay there helpless, this contempt seemed to him almost like a commendation. For the truth of the eye was not in sweet blandishments, no, only through its own tears it came to seeing, only by sorrow it came to perception, only when filled with its own tears to the tears of the world, truth-filled by the obliterating moisture of all existence! Oh, only when awakening in tears did the earthly-death, in which the play-entangled discovered themselves and to which they clung, become changed to death-perceiving, all-perceiving life. And for this very reason it were better for the boy—whose features did he actually bear? those of a long bygone or a more recent past?—ah just for this reason it were better for him to turn away his eyes, for him not to wish to continue a play the diversions of which were inappropriate to the time; all too unseemly that glance which could smile over its own death-entanglement, all too unseemly that it was sent upward to the prostrated one who was unable, oh, who was unwilling to respond, all too unseemly the foolishness, the loveliness, the painfulness amid a hell of noise and fire, bristling with blind activity, helter-skelter with people, yet drained of humanity. Three gang-planks were swung from the ship to the pier, the one nearest the stern reserved for the passengers though by no means adequate for the crowd of people who had become suddenly impatient, the other two assigned to the debarkation of wares and luggage; while the slaves ordered for this task ran in a long snakeline, often joined together like dogs by neckrings and connecting chains, persons of every color with an humiliated look in their eyes, human beings who were scarcely human any longer, mere creatures set in motion and hounded, bodies in remnants of shirts or half-naked, shining with sweat in the raw glare of the torches, oh, terrible, oh, gruesome, while in this wise they ran aboard on the middle gang-plank and left again by the one nearest the bow, their bodies under the burden of chests, bags, and trunks bent almost to a rectangle, while all this happened, the stewards on duty, one of each stationed at the pier end of both gang-planks, swung their whips haphazardly over the passing bodies, beating automatically again and again in that senseless, no-longer-cruel cruelty of unlimited power, devoid of every real purpose, since without being goaded the men hurried as fast as their lungs permitted, scarcely knowing more how they were treated, no, no longer even ducking when the thong slashed down, but even grimacing at it; a little black Syrian whom the stroke caught just as he reached the deck, heedless of the stripes on his back, quite imperturbably adjusted the rags he had put under his neck-ring to protect his collarbones as much as possible, he merely grinned, grinned up to the lifted litter: “Come off your perch, King, come on down and see how it tastes to the likes of us!”—, a second lifting of the lash was the answer, but now the little man, this time on the alert, had jumped to one side, the connecting chain stretched suddenly and the stroke fell upon the shoulder of his chain-fellow who had been dragged forward by this jerk, a sturdy, red-haired Parthian with matted beard who, somewhat surprised, turned his head disclosing on the visible side of his face, amidst a discolored tangle of scars, (most likely he was a prisoner of war) a shot-out, torn-out or stabbed-out eye, red, bloody and staring, staring in spite of its blindness, actually surprised, for even before he was drawn forward by the advancing chain-rattling line, a lash, apparently because it came in one stroke, whistled again around his head and split his ear in a bleeding cut. All this lasted just the length of a short heart-beat, yet long enough to stop that heart-beat for a moment: it was outrageous to witness it and not make the slightest effort at interference, unable, perhaps even unwilling to interfere, it was outrageous still to want to retain this happening, and outrageous the memory into which even it must be inscribed for all time! The blind eye had gazed without remembrance, without remembrance the Syrian had grinned as if there were nothing but a desolated, desecrated present, as if, lacking a future, a past had never existed, no afterwards, therefore no aforetime, as if those two chained together had never been boys at play in the fields of youth, as if in their homeland there were no mountains or meadows, no flowers, not even a brook babbling on and on in the distant valley at eventide—, oh, it was painful to hang on his own memories, to nurse them, to cherish them! Oh, memories unforgettable, memories full of wheat-fields, full of forests, full of the crackling, rustling, cool-walled forests, full of the groves of youth, eye-intoxicated at morning, heart-intoxicated at evening, green quivering up and gray quivering down, oh knowledge of coming hither and going hence, pageant of memory! But the conquered, beaten, the conqueror, jubilant, the stony space where all this happens, the burning eye, the burning blindness—, for what undiscoverable existence was still worth while to keep oneself awake? what future was worth this unspeakable effort to remember? what was the hereafter toward which remembrance must go? was there in reality any such hereafter?