“My hair needs shortening too.”
“Give me back the mirror, Virgil, lest the requests of your vanity increase beyond measure; it is true that your hair has not been treated by a court barber, but for my taste it seems unnecessary to cut it now.”
“The forelocks have to be shorn for the sacrifice; those are the regulations.”
“Is your fever mounting? or do you say this only as a concession to magic-medicine? if it helps, I am in agreement, for my treatments are not one-sided; I flatter myself that this is one of their assets … so you are welcome to have your hair cut for the so-called sacrifice, but in that case it is advisable to hurry a little.”
It was the tone with which one seems to comply to a child’s wishes, to coax it into obedience. However, it was all one, whether the idea of the sacrifice was absurd or not, there was nothing else left but to submit himself. And resistlessly he let them treat him according to the doctor’s orders. He was being lifted by skilled hands and carried to the commode and the doctor was watching over the process as if he were caring for a little child. “Now,” he heard them say, “now we would like to move you into the sun for a little while so that you can take your milk in complete relaxation.”
Thus, wrapped in blankets and sunshine, he sat there in the easy chair near the window and drank the warm milk in sips that ran into the darkness of his body in small waves of heat. The slave stood next to him, in readiness to relieve him of the bowl. But the slave’s eyes looked out of the window, stern, rejecting, yet submissive.
“Do you see the limping man?”
“No, Sir, I see no limping man.”
The room was now filled with activity; the flowers which had hung on the candelabrum limp and smelling sweetly of decay were cleared away, the candles renewed, the floor washed, the bed-sheets removed. The doctor, again armed with mirror and comb, drew nearer: “Which limping man?”
“The night-limper.”
Full of apprehension, searching for something palpable, came a further question: “Oh, do you mean Vulcan, do you mean him for whom your Aetna-song was intended?”
The apprehension was quite touching, the effort to understand almost comical: “Oh, forget the poem, Charondas; do not burden your memory with any of my poems, least of all with this early and unfinished product which, by rights, I should do over again.”
“You want to revise the Aetna-song and burn the Aeneid?” The apprehensive lack of understanding with which this was uttered became more and more comical. And yet it might prove worth while to take up the theme of the Aetna-song again in order that now, having more knowledge, more earnestness, more perception than formerly, one could spy on the limping smith in the demon-infested, iron depths of his smithy, blind from the glare of the underworld, nevertheless able, by virtue of this blindness—oh, the blindness of the singer—to see the splendor of the ultimate heights: Prometheus embodied in Vulcan—redemption in the form of calamity.
“No, Charondas, I only suggest that you forget both verses, the one as well as the other.”
Then it was again touching to see how the features of the physician lightened, because it had been possible to construct a bridge of understanding: “Oh, Virgil, though it may be the prerogative of the poet to demand the impossible, memory is not so easily stilled on order … oh, Virgil, all that Apollo once sang and Eurotas heard enraptured, all of this was sung by that one …”
“And the mountains bore the echo unto heaven” added a soft voice from an echoing distance, itself an echo, mirroring the vanished voice of the boy.
The sounds rose upward toward the echoing heaven and they were the sounds of the day, the sounds of diligence, the bustle of a thousand work-shops, a thousand households, a thousand stores, the fusing, swelling city-noises, merged and rife with all the smells of the city, rising from it to heaven, the floating rubble of day which harbored as little anxiety as did the cooing of doves or the chirping of sparrows with which it was mingled. The tile roofs, black striped or entirely black, were filmed in a thin, quivering layer of smoke, glints of copper and lead, glints of iron were to be seen here and there, shining under the rays of the now paler day-star, and in the glare of noon the heaven had become faded; without a cloud, its paler azure spread out over the flickering mid-day world.
Should he worry the doctor once again by asking after the star which had vanished into the invisible transparency? Unlosable, even if not to be espied the star drew on toward the east; it traveled the width of the sky, yet at the same time passing through a region beyond the sky’s last dome, submerged in that oceanic mirror in whose abysmal depths the echo of skies and more skies were assembled forever. A drifting star binding the spheres together. Undiscoverable, light’s radiant roots were reaching down through every language, undiscoverable, the branchings of vision were groping up through every language, yet with this piercing ray penetrating man more and more infinitely, he must return with his eyes and more than his eyes, to his profoundest depths in order to reach the oceanic abyss of echo from which his image will be flashed back to heaven, aye, farther than to heaven, to the eye of the god. Was his labor, which he pursued bent toward the ground, and which he must pursue in humility, already an espial of the depths, was it that searching care which willed to find the higher image? did man with his earth-bent labors reach unto the endless depths lying beneath those of the underworld, which are at once those of the highest heaven? or must he wait until the god pierce him mortally with light’s ultimate ray, the death-dealing ultimate, the god himself entering him, so that with his echo in man, man might be taken back into his divine being, sinking upward over the majestic steps of the aeons, sinking upward to the opened spaces? Oh, where had the star wandered, the star which showed the way?
Tucked into the arm-chair he blinked up into the colorless flicker, he did it cautiously as though it were something forbidden. And in this blinking, painful yet compelling, in this blinking, at once passive and active, there emerged, strangely distorted and yet sharply contoured,—was it here? was it there?—an image such as had appeared in the mirror, repelling, many-layered, a palimpsest of a face, despite that not a completed face, the refraction of a reflection, rising like a shadow on the deepest surface of the mirror, on the remotest depths of its abyss. Verily, it had not been carried thither over the steps of the aeons, far rather it seemed to have slunk in through the smallest, meanest door in the background, squinting up like a bad conscience, ah, truly not beaming up.
Then the slave, having relieved him of the bowl and disposed of it, remarked: “Sir, protect your eyes, the sun is strong.”
“Leave that to me,” he was reproved by the doctor who turned thereupon to the group of his assistants: “Has the vinegar-water been warmed yet?”
“Certainly, Master,” came the reply from the darkness of the chamber.
And so at a nod from the master he was being carried back again into the shadows and put to bed on the couch. But his glance remained fixed on the patch of sky in the window-frame, so irresistibly attracted by the brightness that the accompanying words came to him without effort: “He who gazes aloft toward the heaven of day from the depths of a well-pit sees it as dark, and he is able to see the stars in it.”
Immediately the doctor was at his side: “Have you some trouble with your eye-sight, Virgil? you need not be uneasy about it, that is not unusual …”
“No, I have no difficulty in seeing.” How blind this court-physician must be not to know that one who is in blindness, awaiting a superior blindness, can have no eye trouble.
“You said something about stars.”
“Stars? oh yes … I should like to see them once more.”
“You shall see them still many times … I vouch for that, I, Charondas from Kos.”
“Ah, really, Charondas? the desire of a patient could hardly go beyond that.”
“Oh, do not be so very modest, I can promise you still more than that with an easy conscience … as, for instance, that in a few days, yes, I
might almost say in a few hours, you will feel entirely well, for after a crisis such as you seem to have passed through last night, and evidently in a most violent fashion, it is customary for a most tempestuous recovery to set in … actually we doctors cannot ask for anything better than such a crisis, and in my judgment—which however is not shared by the whole profession, and which, though I am not annoyed by it, has earned me the reputation of an outsider—it is absolutely advisable under certain circumstances to bring about such a crisis by artificial means …”
“I already feel entirely well.”
“So much the better, so much the better, my Virgil.”
Yes, he felt perfectly well; stretched out naked on the bed, his back supported by a few pillows which had been placed under him to retard his coughing, he was first being carefully washed with tepid vinegar and then gently dried with heated towels, and the longer this mild alternating game lasted the more he felt the fevered weariness vanishing from his body; he let his head fall backward over the edge of the pillow to present his chin and throat to the razors of the barbers working about his head, and this letting go came to be a gentle alleviation, became so as much with the soft, sure gliding of the razor over his stretched skin, as with the removal of the heating stubble of his beard, and with the rapid succession of hot and cold compresses which were applied afterwards to his cleanshaven face, this being more than an alleviation, even a pleasant stimulation. However, when this was done, and the barber wanted to attend to his hair he interrupted him: “First shorten the hair on my forehead.”
“Just as you please, Sir.”
The scissors clicked coolly about his forehead, they passed coolly with short, clicking cuts toward the temples, and besides this they clicked in mid air, because the hairdresser let them open and close with the tremolo of a virtuoso after each snap, and, as the aesthetic sense of the hair artist demanded symmetry, the crown and back of the head had to be trimmed before they could begin washing with an emulsion of oil and alkalines, culminating in oft-repeated rinsings with cool water, for which purpose a suitably shaped wash-basin had been slipped under his neck. And while this careful sequence was being followed out, the medical assistant busied himself with a careful and skillful massaging of his limbs, beginning with his toes.
The head-washing was at an end, and the hairdresser asked: “Lily, rose or mignonette-scented pomade, Sir, or do you prefer amber?”
“None of them; comb my hair, but do not use any pomade.”
“ ‘That woman smells good who smells of nothing,’ said Cicero,” remarked the Doctor, “although he said many blasphemous things in which he himself did not believe, and mignonette would be quite wholesome for you; mignonette has a soothing effect.”
“Just the same, Charondas, I should rather not have it.”
Outside the sparrows twittered, and a blue-gray, swelling dove walked along the window-sill, cooing and nodding in the radiance of the light-shedding heaven, opening up from the very core to the opened heavenly light.
The doctor laughed: “If I had forbidden you to have cream you would certainly have demanded it; patients of your kind are no novelty for us, one has to know how to cope with you, and to speak frankly, I have had plenty and more than plenty of opportunity to learn how … you see I am a person who explains his tricks in advance so as to win in the end; incidentally you may have your way this time, for what you need fundamentally is not a soothing but rather a reviving of your animal spirits; and I am wondering whether to let you drink a good strong aphrodisiac—yes, joking aside, I would almost recommend it in your case, considering that our courage to live, our desire to live, our animal spirits are animated, if not entirely, still very strongly and, I may say, more strongly than we wish or know, from the lower centers of our organism, from these often quite enjoyable lower centers, to which we doctors must assign a rather important role in the urge to recovery … but you probably know this as well as I, and I only wanted to say that a little more of the will to live and be healthy would do you no harm …”
“I have no need of an aphrodisiac to strengthen my will to live, it is, I believe, quite strong enough in itself … I love life intensely …”
“Do you lack for reciprocal love? if so, you do not quite love enough!”
“I am not complaining, Charondas.”
No, the will to live was in no need of an aphrodisiac; he who lies down to love closes his eyes, they are closed for him, even as for one who lies down to die, by a strange, familiar hand, but he who would live, standing up to life, holds his eyes wide open to the sky, to the opened light of heaven from which all desire and will to live is born: oh, to be allowed to see azure sky again and yet again, to see it tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, for many a year, and not have to lie here with broken-closed eyes, laid out with a clay-brown, stiffened countenance, while outside stretched the bright arc of the azure sky that could no longer be seen, filled with the cooing of doves that had become inaudible. So had that day been, bright and blue, so had that day been on which his father had lain on his bier. Oh, to be allowed to live!
The hairdresser came equipped with a mirror to let his finished handiwork be admired: “Are you satisfied with the cut, Sir?”
“Entirely so … I have confidence in you without further examination.”
“You look splendid now,” commended the physician, Charondas, evidently highly pleased, tapping his fleshy left palm with three fingers of his right hand by way of applause, “most splendid, and I hope you feel much refreshed as well: for there is no better means of revitalizing the secretions and the pulse than by such a thoroughly careful and workmanlike kneading of the entire body; by rights you should already feel the wholesome effects, indeed I can already discern it!”
Outside the starless, opened brightness of heavenly blue was extending; oh, to be allowed to see it forever! even at the cost of enduring illness and fatigue! Oh, to be allowed to see! How was it that the garrulous physician, Charondas, could still expect an answer? All the same he had told the truth, for there really was some refreshment to be felt, even if it was only a kind of refreshed fatigue. It was like a release from fear. The tired limbs were refreshed, fear-freed of their separate existence, even though under the kneading grips they had become more aware, if that were possible; they had dropped off their ancient fear, as if it were no longer an experience, rather only the knowledge of one, something that had happened only in a spectacle, but was no longer in his own body. Withal this spectacle was again none other than the body itself, yes, the body was spectacle and mirror simultaneously, taking in not only the occurrence but the knowledge of it as well, so that it could be delivered of fear and yet remain in immediate physical proximity, unbroken, as a new, a physical awareness, unbroken, no matter how he, the one no longer aware, might lose or be losing himself in any un-nearness whatsoever; all was becoming soft, the world pulsed softly, inside and outside pulsing, the tides of day and night pulsing, as well as the great, gently-impetuous harmonic order of life, upon whose foundation even the tides flow into one another and are silenced; the bell-tone of night merged with the sunny storm of day, softly the breathing pulsed, and softly-quietly the breath passed into the rising and falling breast, relaxed and helped by the kneading strokes of a strange, invisible, soft hand; from suffering delivered, with suffering endowed, from awareness delivered, with awareness endowed, this was a re-experiencing of the physical being, enmeshed in a noiselessness which made it seem that of a spectacle seen in reflection—smooth and mute, as though transpiring in a mirror; the bustling went on everywhere in the room, directed by the now noiseless voice of the physician; noiselessly the slaves scurried in and out, strangely featherlight; a basket filled with linen had been brought in, and fresh bedclothes lay suddenly under the weightless, uplifted body, a fresh tunic enwrapped him; fresh flowers wreathed the candelabrum, and their scent mingled with the scent of vinegar, skimming along moist and serene, a trickling fragrance borne from the moist drizzle of the wall-fountain, t
he murmuring, falling drops of the soul. Strange that there was security, strange the way it unfolded. To be sure, his body on which such care had been lavished was the body of disintegration, but some knowledge of himself as a mirrored spectacle allowed him to preserve his contour, a loose and floating figure sheltered and floating between past and future, peacefully at one with both, itself a mirror, itself peace, airily identified with the present, held arrested on the breath, gazing at the open sky. And, moreover, it was as if all of this, everything that was happening here, all this fostering that was going on so noiselessly and swiftly, consisted only of an empty transparency, as though by this means alone a bright, airy, and trumpery structure of supports had been set up, a framework that no longer had to support anything except lightness itself, yes, it seemed as if there had been an exaggerated and almost ghostly expenditure that aimed only at producing a shelter for something which could no longer be sheltered, nothing that such sheltering could enfold, for what at most might be something very indistinct, very evanescent, perhaps the reflected image of a nonentity; but beyond that it seemed as if this mirrored blur and dissolution, as if this almost intangible, abandoned thing were, in spite of abandoning itself, still to be saved from disintegration and retained in itself at the last moment, saved, as though by a miracle, just as it strove to become separate; and it almost seemed as if it had received form and stature out of an awareness which, though it was only a reflected awareness, was still possessed of enough earthly strength to take the most transparent elusiveness into its sheltering care and, by virtue of this very sheltering, to transform it once more to reality; for even in its furthest reflection the deed of loving service had the power to establish reality; and even when, as in this case, it was manifested as a playful reflection, as a pretense of healing that was no longer healing, playfully approaching the portal of death, it was still the invisible substance of the world which creatively transformed knowing to knowledge, the sheltering into the sheltered, creating the enfolded by the strength of the enfolding; oh, so transformed, so brought back to earthly creation that this created world—permeated by a strange sort of accuracy, determined as much by the extraordinary as by the commonplace—became a reflection of this very self, that was at the same time a reflection of the human being, a reflection of the inner and outer selves. Was this still his own body that he felt? or was it rather the reflection of his body, or perhaps merely the reflection of his sensibility? In what lay the reality of this peaceful existence which surrounded him and which was himself? There was no answer to be imparted and none was imparted; but even the not-imparted answer was a constituent of this concord, as was everything that surrounded him, corporeal and incorporeal in a single breath, in a single pulse-beat, floating between original and semblance, touching neither one nor the other, but rather a symbol of both; floating between things remembered and things that could be seen, their common mirror, and peacefully reconciled to both, the ethereal present; and in the depth of the mirror, in the depth of the peace, deeply sunk into the present and into reality, shimmered the star on the far-dark ground of day’s brightness.
Death of Virgil Page 30
