The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  THE gang-planks wagged stiffly as the litter was carried over them in the measured even tread of the bearers; below the dark water splashed sluggishly, constrained between the heavy black ship-hulls and the heavy black side-walls of the dock, the heavy-flowing smooth element breathing itself out, exhaling refuse, garbage, vegetable-leaves and putrid melons, everything that stewed around down below, slack waves of a heavy sweetish death-exhalation, waves of putrifying life, the only one that can endure between these stones, living merely in the hope of a rebirth from its decay. So it appeared down there; here above, on the contrary, the flawlessly wrought, gilded and decorated litter-poles lay on the shoulders of beasts-of-burden in human form, humanly fed, humanly sleeping, humanly speaking, humanly thinking beasts-of-burden, and in the flawlessly wrought and carved litter-seat, the back and sides of which were spangled with stars of goldleaf, rested a flaw-infected invalid in whom decay was already lurking. This all made for extreme incongruity; in all of this the hidden evil sheltered itself, the obduracy of a circumstance that is more complete than the human being, although he himself is the one who builds the walls, who carves and hammers, who braids the lash and forges the chains. Impossible to shut oneself off from it, yes it was impossible to forget. And whatsoever man wished to forget came back in a fresh form of reality, there it was again, always returning as new eyes, new uproar, new stripes, new obduracy, new evil, each claiming place for itself, each cramping and forcing the other in fearful contact, yet most curiously and incongruously interwoven. As incongruous as the contact of things with each other was the passing of time also; the separate divisions of time no longer coordinated: never yet had the now been so definitely divorced from the then, a deeply-cut cleft bridgeable by no span had made of this now something independent, had unhesitatingly separated it from the time gone by, from the sea-journey and everything that had previously occurred, had removed him from the whole preceding life and yet, gently rocking in the litter, he could scarcely distinguish whether the voyage was still in progress or whether he was actually already on the land. He gazed over a sea of heads, he glided over a sea of heads, surrounded by a human surf, for the present, however, only at its edge, the first attempts to overcome this surging opposition having until now utterly failed. Here at the landing for the escort-ships the police regulations were of course less strict than yonder where Augustus was being received, and even should a few of the travelers have been lucky enough to break through with a hasty onslaught, in order to join the festival procession which was forming within the reservation to bring Caesar into the city and to the palace, for the litter-squad such a thing would have been simply impossible; the imperial servant who had been assigned to accompany the small escort as guide and so-to-speak guard was too aged, too portly, too effeminate, and also too easy-going to rouse himself for a vigorous pass, he was powerless and because he was powerless he had to content himself by complaining about the police who permitted this mob-crowding and who at least should have set aside a decent guard for him, and so finally one was pushed and pulled quite aimlessly about the square, temporarily motionless, wedged in a halted zig-zag, now here, now there, shoved on this side, jostled on that. The fact that the boy had come along proved to be an unhoped-for alleviation; he (and this was most curious), as though apprized from somewhere of the importance of the manuscript-chest, saw to it that its bearers always kept close to the litter, and while he, constantly near, the cloak thrown over his shoulders, allowed no separation to occur, he often winked up roguishly and reverentially with his clear light eyes. A brooding mugginess streamed against them from the house-fronts and through the streets, it came flooding in broad transverse tides, sundered again and again by the endless yelling and calling, by the humming and roaring of the mass-beast, and for all that stagnant; breath of the water, breath of the plants, breath of the city, a heavy reek from the stone-fenced, wedged-in life and its decaying specious vitality, humus of existence at the point of decay, ascending to the stone-cool stars with which the innermost shell of heaven, darkening to a deep and mellow black, began to be studded. From unrevealable depths life sprouts upward, insinuating itself through stone, already dying on this journey, dying and decaying and cooling in its ascent, evaporating itself even as it rises, but from unrevealable heights the immutable sinks downward, a sinking dark-luminating breath, conquering with its stone-cool touch, congealing to the stoniness of the depths, stoniness above and below as if stone were earth's final reality—, and between such a stream and counterstream, between night and counternight, red-gleaming below, clear-flickering above, in this doubled nocturnality he swayed on his litter as if it were a bark, dipping into the wave-tips of the vegetal-animal, lifted up in the breath of the immutable coolness, borne forward to seas so enigmatic and unknown that it was like a homecoming, for wave upon wave of the great planes through which his keel had already furrowed, wave-planes of memory, wave-planes of seas, they had not become transparent, nothing in them had divulged itself to him, only the enigma remained, and filled with the enigma the past overflowed its shores and reached into the present, so that in the midst of the resinous torch-smoke, in the midst of the brooding city fumes, in the midst of the beastly, dark-breathed body-exudations, in the midst of the square and its strangeness, ineffaceably, unmistakably, he detected the breath of the seas and their immortal vastness; behind him lay the ships, those strange birds of the unknown, words of command still resounding here from over there are followed by the jerky grate-grit of a wooden reel, then a deep-toned singing cymbal-stroke that reverberates like a last echo of the day-star sinking into the sea, and beyond that is the wide-planed wind of the sea, is its million-folded, white-crowned restlessness, the smile of Poseidon in constant readiness to break into boisterous laughter should the god urge on his steeds; and beyond the sea, but at the same time surrounding it, are the sea-surfed lands, all of them that he had traversed, passing over their stones, over their humus, sharing in their vegetation, their humanity, their animal life, interwoven with them all, rendered powerless by so much that was unknown, unable to surmount it, interwoven and losing himself into happenings and objects, interwoven and losing himself into countries and their cities, how buried all this and yet how immediate, objects, countries, cities, how they all lay behind him, about him, within him, how entirely they were his own, sunnied over and deeply-shadowed, rustling and nocturnal, known and enigmatic, Athens and Mantua and Naples and Cremona and Milan and Brundisium, ah, and yes Andes—, everything came to him, everything was here, washed in the chaotic light from the landing-place, breathed on by the un-breathable, bawled at by the incomprehensible, assembled to a single unity in which the far-off easily became the near-at-hand, the near-at-hand became remote, permitting him who was balanced above it all and surrounded by savagery to come to an untroubled balanced-swaying awareness; the infernal a-stir before his very eyes and he knowing it, he knew simultaneously his own life, knew it to be carried by the stream and counter-stream of night in which past and future cross each other, he knew it here at this point of crossing in the fire-bathed, fire-ringed immediacy of the landing-place, between past and future, between sea and land, he himself in the center of the plaza as if someone had wanted to bring him to the center of his own being, to the cross-roads of his worlds, to the center of his world, compliant to fate. For all that it was only the harbor of Brundisium.

  But even had it been the center of the world there was no remaining here; more and more people streamed through the streets, their entrances into the square overarched by transparencies of fervent welcome, and the porters were crowded farther and farther from the center of the square, so that from this point there was really no other possibility of reaching the lane of soldiers and the procession of Augustus which had already been set in motion by a fanfare of trumpets, nor did the tumult become less now that the music had to be out-screamed, outyelled, outwhistled, and with the increasing tumult there was a simultaneous increase in the violence and heedlessness of the shoving and c
rowding that almost came to be a purpose and a diversion in itself, yet despite this violence it seemed as if the tranquility and ease of the balanced vigilance in which he was held had imparted itself to the whole plaza, as if a second illumination had joined itself to the first visible one without altering anything of its shadow-outdazzling glare, indeed rather intensifying it, revealing, however, a second interrelationship within the visible objective present, the dream-waking relationship of the far-off which is inherent in every nearness, even in the most tangible and obvious. And as if this easy-because-remote assurance of the second relationship had still to be demonstrated, the boy was suddenly found to be at the head of the escort without anyone being aware of how this had happened; swinging, as if in play, a torch which he must have snatched from the nearest at hand, he used it as a weapon to force a way through the crowd. "Make way for Virgil," he cried exuberantly into the very faces of the people. "Make way for your poet!" And though the people may have stepped aside only because someone belonging to Caesar was being carried past, or because the fever-bright eyes in the yellow-dark face of the invalid looked ghastly to them, it was thanks to the small leader that their attention had been aroused, thus making an advance somehow or other possible. Certainly congestions occurred against which neither the mischievous nonchalance of the young cloak-bearer nor his torch-brandishing were effective, and against this deadlock the ghastly appearance of the sick man was of no avail; on the contrary it intensified what was at first only an indifferent avoidance of the uncanny sight into an outspoken repugnance, into a half-shy, half-offensive whisper that grew to have an almost threatening temper, for which a wag, as jolly as he was spiteful, found the right expression in the cry: "Caesar, his Enchanter!" "You're right, you blockhead," cried the youth in answer, "such an enchanter you surely have never seen in your whole stupid life; our greatest and the greatest of all enchanters, that he is!" Several hands flew up, with fingers spread to ward off the evil eye and a white-powdered whore, her blond wig askew, screamed toward the litter: "Give me a love-charm!"—"Yes, between the legs and potently" added in an aping falsetto a ganderish, sunburnt lout with tattooed arms, apparently a sailor, seizing the amorously-thrilled squealer from behind with both hands, "Dat kinda charm you'll get from me, good and gladly delivered, you shall have it!"—"Make way for the Enchanter, make way there!" commanded the youth, pushing the gander sharply aside with his elbows, and with quick decision making a rather unexpected right turn toward the outskirts of the square; the porters with the manuscript-chest followed willingly, somewhat less willingly the guardian servant, the litter and the remaining slaves followed on as if they were all towed by invisible chains behind the boy. Whither was the youth leading them? from what remoteness, from what depth of memory had he emerged? from what past, from which future, by what mysterious necessity was he impelled? and from which past to which future secret was he himself being borne? was there only a permanent balancing in an immeasurable present? All about him were the gulp-muzzles, the shout-muzzles, the sing-muzzles, the gape-muzzles, the opened muzzles in the closed faces, all of them were opened, torn apart, beset with teeth behind red, brown, or pallid lips, armed with tongues; and looking down on the mossy-woolly round heads of the slave-porters, looking sidewise at their jaws and the pimpled skin of their cheeks, he had knowledge of the blood that pulsed in them, of the spittle they had to swallow, he knew of the thoughts in these preposterous, clumsy, intractable foddered-and-muscled machines, knowing the thoughts that were almost lost, yet eternally unlosable, which frail and apathetic, transparent and dark, trickling drop by drop, were falling and evaporating, the drops of the soul; he knew of the yearning that is not silenced even in the pang of the most bestial heat and carnality, innate in all of them, in the gander and in his whore as well, the inexterminable longing of mankind that never allows itself to be destroyed, that at most lets itself be altered to malice and enmity, continuing to be longing. Removed, yet unspeakably near, balanced by awareness, still involved with all sluggishness, he could perceive the stolidity of the sperm-spraying, sperm-imbibing, faceless bodies, their swelling and hardening members, he saw and heard the secretiveness, the chance lustfulness of their approaches, the wild besotted grappling jubilation of their union and the fatuously-wise droop of their senility, and it was almost as if all of this, this complete knowledge, were conveyed to him through his nose, breathed in with the narcotic fumes in which the audible and visible were imbedded, inhaled with the manifold exudations of the human-beast and its daily scraped-together, daily masticated fodder; but meanwhile they had finally battled a way between the bodies, and the crowd, like the thinning lights on the border of the square, became sparse at last, losing itself in the darkness and disappearing, and the odor of it, although it still smouldered on, was replaced by the slimy, foully-glistening stench of the fish-market stalls that hedged the harbor here, quietly deserted at this evening hour. Sweetish but none the less foul, the smell of the fruit-market annexed itself, full of fermentation, the odor of rosy grapes, wax-yellow plums, earth-dark figs, golden apples being indistinguishable, indistinguishable through their common decay, and the stone squares of the pavement gleamed damply from being trodden on and besmeared with slime; very far behind now lay the center of the plaza, very far the ships at the dock, very far the sea, very far, though not entirely lost: the human howling there was only a distant murmur, and of the music of the fanfare there was nothing more to be heard.

  With great assurance, as if accurately acquainted with the neighborhood, the boy had steered his followers through the confusion of stalls and finally entered the district of the storage houses and dockyards which with dim, unlit buildings adjoined the market-place, in the darkness more to be surmised than seen, and extended along for a considerable distance. Again the odors changed; one could smell the whole produce of the country, one could smell the huge masses of comestibles that were stored here, stored for barter within the empire but destined, either here or there after much buying and selling, to be slagged through these human bodies and their serpentine intestines, one could smell the dry sweetness of the grain, stacks of which reared up in front of the darkened silos waiting to be shoveled within, one could smell the dusty dryness of the corn-sacks, the wheat-sacks, the barley-sacks, the spelt-sacks, one could smell the sourish mellowness of the oil-tuns, the oil-jugs, the oil-casks and also the biting acridity of the wine stores that stretched along the docks, one could smell the carpenter shops, the mass of oak timber, the wood of which never dies, piled somewhere in the darkness, one could smell its bark no less than the pliant resistance of its marrow, one could smell the hewn blocks in which the axe still clove, as it was left behind by the workman at the end of his labor, and besides the smell of the new well-planed deck-boards, the shavings and sawdust one could smell the weariness of the battered, greenish-white slimy mouldering barnacled old ship lumber that waited in great heaps to be burned. The orbit of productivity. Unending peace breathed from the scent-laden close of labor, the peace of a producing country, the peace of fields, of vineyards, of forests, of olive groves, the bucolic peace from which he himself a peasant's son had emerged, the peace of his constant nostalgia and of his earth-bound, earth-bent, always earthly longing, the peace to which his song had been dedicated since days of yore, oh the peace of his longing, unattainable; and as if this lack of attainment reflected itself here, as if everywhere it must come to be the image of his very selfhood, this peace was constrained here between stones, subserviated and misused for ambition, for gain, for bribery, for headlong greed, for worldliness, for servitude, for discord. Within and without are identical, are image and counter-image, but still not the integration which is knowledge. It was himself he found everywhere, and if he had to retain everything and was enabled to retain all, if he succeeded in laying hold on the world-multiplicity to which he was pledged, to which he was driven, given over to it in a daydream, belonging to it without effort, effortlessly possessing it, this was so because the multiplicity
had been his from the very beginning; indeed before all espial, before all hearkening, before all sensibility, it had been his own because recollection and retention are never other than the innate self, self-remembered, and the self-remembered time when he must have drunk the wine, fingered the wood, tasted the oil, even before oil, wine or wood existed, when he must have recognized the unknown, because the profusion of faces or non-faces, together with their ardor, their greed, their carnality, their covetous coldness, with their animal-physical being, but also with their immense nocturnal yearning, because taken all together, whether he had ever seen them or not, whether they had ever lived or not, were all embodied in him from his primordial origins as the chaotic primal humus of his very existence, as his own carnality, his own ardor, his own greed, his own facelessness, but also as his own yearning: and even had this yearning changed in the course of his earthly wanderings, turned to knowledge, so much so that having become more and more painful it could scarcely now be called yearning, or even a yearning for yearning, and if all this transformation had been predestined by fate from the beginning in the form of expulsion or seclusion, the first bearing evil, the second bringing salvation, but both scarcely endurable for a human creature, the yearning still remained, inborn, imperishable, imperishably the primal humus of being, the groundwork of cognition and recognition which nourishes memory and to which memory returns, a refuge from fortune and misfortune, a refuge from the unbearable; almost physical this last yearning, which always and forever vibrated in every effort to attain the deeps of memory, however ripe with knowledge that memory might be. Verily it was a physical yearning and unquenchable. He kept his fingers tightly interlocked, he was conscious of the ring pressing into his skin and his tendons, he was conscious of the rocky bones of his hands, he was conscious of his blood and the memory-deeps of his body, the shadowy deeps of the far-off past united to the immediate present, to the illumination of the present immediacy and the present clarity, and he called to mind his boyhood in Andes, he called to mind the house, the stables, the granaries, the trees, he called to mind the clear eyes in that sunburnt face always on the point of laughter, the face of his mother, she of the dark curls,—oh, she was called Maja, and no name was more summerlike, none existed which could have suited her better—, he called to mind how she busied herself in the house and warmed it with her joyous labor, serene in her tireless activity even when, being constantly called for some little service by grandfather who sat in the atrium, she had to keep on hushing him and his furious blood-curdling outcries, the appeasement-craving outcries that never failed to start up at any opportunity, but especially when prices of live-stock and grain were in question and he, the white-haired Magus Polla, half-generous, half-niggardly, believed himself cheated by the tradesmen, whether buying or selling; oh how intense the memory of those outcries, how soothing the memory of the quietude that his mother restored to the house with an almost mischievous joy; and he recalled his father, enabled to become a proper farmer only through his marriage, whose former profession of potter the son had deemed inferior, although it had been most pleasant to hear the nightly tales of the work on the bellied wine-jars and nobly turned oil jugs which his father had formed from clay, tales of the shaping thumb, of the spatula and the buzzing potter's disk, of the glazer's art, charming tales interrupted by many a potter's song. Oh, faces of a time remaining throughout time, oh face of the mother, remembered as a youthful face, then becoming more indistinct and significant, so that in death and already beyond physiognomy, it had almost come to resemble an unchanging landscape; oh face of the father, at first unrememhered, then growing further toward a living humanity, a nearer likeness, until in death it had come to be the human face divine, modeled of hard, stiff brown clay, kind and firm in its farewell smile, unforgettable. Oh, nothing ripens to reality that is not rooted in memory, nothing can be grasped in the human being that has not been bestowed on him from the very beginning, overshadowed by the faces of his youth. For the soul stands forever at her source, stands true to the grandeur of her awakening, and to her the end itself possesses the dignity of the beginning; no song becomes lost that has ever plucked the strings of her lyre, and exposed in ever-renewed readiness, she preserves herself through every single tone in which she ever resounded. Imperishable the song, ever returning, here too it was again at hand; and he drew in the air to catch the cool scent of the earthen jars and piled-up tuns, which occasionally streamed, sombre and volatile, from the opened shed-doors, in order to breathe it into his sore lungs. Afterwards, of course, he had to cough as though he had done something insalubrious or illicit. The hob-nailed boots of the porters trotted along, clattering on the stone walks, grating on the gravel; the torch of the young guide, who swung round now and then to smile up at the litter, glimmered and glowed ahead; now they were thoroughly on the march and progressed quickly, too quickly for the aged servitor, grown gray and corpulent in the lenient service of the court, who waddled behind, sighing audibly; the mass of storage and silo roofs of various forms, some pointed, some flat, some slightly sloping, towered toward the star-dense but not entirely darkened heavens, cranes and poles cast threatening shadows under the passing of lights, one came upon carts both empty and laden, a couple of rats crossed the path, a moth lost itself on the back of the litter and remained clinging there, again lassitude and sleepiness made themselves known, the moth had six legs and many if not innumerable ones the porters to whom the litter, to whom he himself, together with the moth, had been entrusted as fine and fragile cargo; he was seized with the desire to turn round—ah, perhaps it was still possible to take count of the slave-porters and their legs—, but before he could put this into action, they had reached a narrow passage between two sheds and immediately afterwards and most unexpectedly they were again in front of the city houses, pausing at the entrance to a rather steep, very narrow, very weather-beaten, very wash-behung, ascending lane of lodging houses; as a matter of fact, they had come to a standstill because the boy had halted the porters,—yes, there were really four of them now as there had been before—, who otherwise, it seems, would have trotted on, and the very suddenness of this interruption together with the unexpected outlook produced the effect of a joyful recognition, produced so surprising and startling an effect that all of them together, master and servant and slave, laughed aloud, all the more when the boy, fired by their laughter, bowed low and pointing the way with a proud gesture, invited them to enter the alley-gorge.