The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  THERE was, however, little cause for merriment; least of which came to be offered by this alley-gorge. Dark lay the shallow-stepped stairways peopled by sundry shades, especially by droves of children who despite the lateness of the hour chased upstairs and downstairs, shadowy bipeds who on closer inspection were mingled with quadrupeds, since goats were tethered more or less closely all along the walls; the windows without panes and mostly without shutters looked blackly into the gorge, black were the cellar-like, dark recesses of the basement-shops from which came bickerings for better bargains, bargains for the needs of the next few hours but scarcely for the next day, while nearby the tapping, rattling, tinkling, paltry and pitiable handicrafts, produced by shadows for shadows, sent out their meagre sounds, evidently requiring no light for their production, for just where the glimmer of an oil-wick or candle-stump dared to show itself, even there people crouched in the shadows. Daily life in its most wretched round of misery consummated itself here, independent of any outward circumstances, consummated itself almost timelessly as though the emperor's celebration were miles away from this alley, as though its inhabitants knew nothing of what took place in other parts of the city, and therefore the advent of the litter-squad created no astonishment but rather an unwelcome and even hostile disturbance. This began gnome-fashion, that is to say with the children, yes with the goats too, neither stepping aside and so becoming entangled between the legs of the porters, the quadrupeds bleating, the little bipeds screaming, breaking out of the shadowy corners and running back to hide in them; it began when they attempted, unsuccessfully of course because of his fierce resistance, to snatch the torch from the hand of the youthful guide, but all this would not have been the worst, and even though slowly, they still went forward—step by step they climbed the street of misery—, no, these vexations were not so bad, but the women, they were the worst, leaning out of the windows, their bosoms crushed against the sills, dangling snake-like their naked arms ending in lapping fingers, and though the abuse into which their gossip toppled as soon as the litter-squad was sighted was nothing but senseless carping, it was at the same time the carping of insanity, imposing as every insanity, lifted to the pitch of indictment, to the pitch of truth, being yet abuse. Here at this very spot where house after house discharged a beastly excremental stench from the opened door-mouths, here in this dilapidated dwelling-canal through which he was being borne in the high-held litter so that he could look into the squalid rooms, must look into them, here, met by the furious and senseless maledictions flung into his face by the women, met by the ailing whine of the inevitable sucklings bedded on rags and tatters, met by the smoke of pine-brands fastened to the fissured walls, met by the steamy aftermath of the stoves and their greasy, long-incrusted frying-pans, met by the horrid spectacle of half-clad mumbling gray-beards squatting about there in the black cave-dwellings, here despair began to overcome him, here among these verminous hovels, here amid utmost depravity and* most wretched decay, confronting the lowest earthly imprisonment, here in this precinct, malign with the racking of birth and the ravages of death, life's entrance and exit woven into closest kinship, one as grim with foreboding as the other, one as nameless as the other in the shadowy dream of timeless woe, here in the utter namelessness of darkness and lasciviousness, here for the first time he was compelled to shield his face, compelled to it by the carping jubilation of the women, compelled to deliberate blindness while he was being carried step by step over the stairs of Misery Street.—

  —: "You loafer, you litter-loafer!" "Thinks himself better than us, does he?" "Money-bags on the throne!" "If he had no money he'd soon walk!" "Lets himself be carried to work, faugh!" scolded the women—

  —: senseless the hail of insults that pattered upon him, senseless, senseless, senseless, nevertheless justified, nevertheless warning, nevertheless truth, insanity heightened to truth, and every aspersion tore a bit of presumptuousness from his soul until it became naked, as naked as the sucklings, as naked as the gray-beards on their rubbish, naked with darkness, naked with loss of memory, naked with guilt, immersed in the flooding nakedness of the indiscriminate—

  —: step after step they went through Misery Street, halting at every landing—

  —: flood of naked creaturekind extending over the breathing earth, extending forth under the breathing heaven with its constant changing from day to night, enclosed by the immutable shores of the millenniums, the naked herd-stream of life broadly advancing, filtering up from the humus of existence, constantly filtering back into it, the inevitable togetherness of all that has been created—

  —: "When you've croaked you'll stink like any other!" "Pall-bearers, let him fall, let the corpse fall!"—

  —: time-crests and time-hollows, oh, myriad creatures, having been carried over them by the aeons, still being carried over them constantly in the endless twilit stream of their totality, and not one of them but intended, but would continue to intend, to float forever as an eternal soul in infinity, floating freely in timeless freedom, sundered from the stream, released from the crowd, indisplaceable, no longer a creature, only a transparent flower, growing up, trailing up alone unto the stars, released and secluded, its heart trembling like a transparent blossom on the tendril no longer to be seen—

  —: borne through the vilifications of Misery Street, step by step—

  —: oh, everything tended toward this phantasmagoria of timelessness, and his life also, shot up from the chaotic humus of the nocturnal unnamed, grown aloft from the underbrush of mere creaturekind, trailed aloft in innumerable windings, attached here and there to what was pure and what was impure, to the perishable and the imperishable, to objects and possessions, to people, again and again to people, to words, to landscapes, this life which he continued to despise and continued to live, he had put it to ill use, he had misused it to exalt himself, to promote himself above himself, beyond all bounds, beyond all limits, as if there could be no downfall for him, as if he did not have to return into time, into earthly imprisonment, into creatureliness, as if no abyss gaped for him—

  —: "Suckling!" "Diaper-pisser!" "Cacker!" "You've been naughty and have to be carried home!" "You'll get a clyster and be put on the potty!" the derision rained down from the windows on every side—

  —: the street shrieked with the gibes of the women but there was no escape from them; progress was made but slowly, very slowly, step by step—

  —: yet was it really the voices of the women that shamed him with justified scorn and disclosed his fruitless delusion? was that which cried out here not stronger than the voices of earthly women, than the voices of the insane creatures of earth? oh, it was time itself that called down scorn upon him, the unalterable flood of time with its manifold voices, with the sucking strength inherent in time and time alone, time had embodied itself in the voices of the women so that his name should be expunged in their insults, and he, stripped of his name, stripped of his soul, stripped of his least song, stripped of the singing timelessness of his heart, would fall back into unutterable darkness and the humus of being, degraded to that bitterest shame which is the last remnant of an extinguished memory—

  —: knowing voices of time, knowing how impossible the escape from the clutches of fate! oh they knew that he also had been unable to escape the immutable, that there was a ship on which despite all delusion he had had to embark, and which had carried him back, oh, they knew of the stream of creature-kind which, nakedly between naked shores of primal clay, wearily follows its course, bearing no ship, bordered by no plant-life, transparent illusions both, nevertheless reality as fate, the invisible reality of illusion, and they knew that everyone, foreordained by fate, must plunge again into the stream and that he would not be able to distinguish the spot of his re-immersion from that where he had once fancied to emerge, because the return must bring to a close the cycle of fate—

  —: "We'll be fetching you soon, you tail, you hang-tail!" they shrieked—

  —: and still the voices o
f women deriding as if he had been a disobedient child who, after seeking a sham-freedom, now wanted to steal back home, nay more, who had to be brought back on devious and dangerous paths and therefore must be scolded for such evil ways; it was carping, but still the grave voices of mothers, imbued with the darkness of time, knowing that the cycle of fate encircled the abyss of nothingness, knowing of all the despairing, all the misled, all the exhausted ones who stumble unresistingly into the abyss of the middle as soon as they are prematurely forced to interrupt the journey—oh, was not each one so forced? had anyone ever really been permitted to pace out the cycle completely?—, and most anxiously the eternal mother-wish vibrated unspeakable within the angry chiding, the wish that each child might remain forever as naked as it had been born, nakedly imprisoned in its first enfoldment, embedded in the onflowing time of earth, embedded in the stream of creation, gently lifted out and as gently lost in it again, as it were without a fate—

  —: "naked, that's what you are, just naked!"—

  —: unescapable the mother—, what had moved the young leader to choose this way? would he not fail? spell-bound under the maternal incantations as if it would never move again, the line stood still, halted in a terrible suspense, but soon released it went on again, climbing through Misery Street, step by step—

  —: was the maternal might of the voices still not ample enough to bind forever? were they so lacking, so deficient in knowledge that they had to set the spell-bound free again? oh, lack of the mother who, birth in herself, has no knowledge of re-birth, wants no knowledge, unable to grasp that birth to be valid implies rebirth, that birth like rebirth could never occur did not the nothing come into being along with both, did not the nothing remain eternally and irrevocably at their back for final procreation, aye, unable to grasp that only from this indissoluble connection of being and non-being, this runic bond heavy with silence, timelessness begins to ray forth in its essential greatness as the freedom of the human soul, the veritable song of its eternity, no phantasmagoria, no presumption, but rather as the irrecusable fate of the human being, the fearful glory of the human lot—

  —: oh, it was the divine destiny of man, it was that which was humanly perceptible in the destiny of the gods, it was their common unalterable fate again and again to be guided to the path of re-birth, it was their common ineradicable fated hope to be allowed to tread out the cycle once more in order that the future might become the past, and that every station on the path might encompass in itself the entire future and the entire past, arrested in the song of the unique present, bearing the moment of complete freedom, the moment of god-becoming, this time-free moment from which, nevertheless, the whole would be embraced as a single timeless memory—

  —: frenetic street of evil that would not end and perhaps that might not end until it should have given over its last insult and sin and curse, and more and more slowly, step by step, they paced it through—

  —: oh, unalterable human fate of the gods, forced to descend into the earthly prison, into wickedness, into sin, so that the cycle might complete itself first in mortality and close itself ever more narrowly about the inscrutability of the nothing, about the inscrutable main-spring of birth that would change some day to the motive of rebirth for all creation, as soon as gods and men should have completed their tasks—

  —: oh, unalterable fate-imposed duty of man, willingly to level the path for the god, the irreproachable path, the path of timeless rebirth, for the attainment of which men and gods are joined, set free of the mother—

  —: but here was Misery Street to be ascended step by step, and here was the frightfulness of malediction, the frightfulness of justifiable scorn, and he, spat upon from out the misery, blinded by misery, blinded by malediction, blinded by scorn, oh he, even with veiled head, must nevertheless hear it. Why had he been led here? did he have to be shown that he had not been permitted to close the cycle? that he had stretched the bow of his life further and further, beyond all measure, enlarging the nothingness of the middle instead of diminishing it? that he had removed himself with such sham-infinity, sham-timelessness, sham-seclusion, further and further from the goal of rebirth, that he had become increasingly in danger of crashing? was this, here and now, a warning? or even more, a threat? or was it in reality already the ultimate downfall? Mere sham-divinity, that had been the peak of his overstrained course, madly overstrained to exultation and intoxication, to the great experience of power and fame, overstrained by what he had dared to call his poetry and his knowledge, feigning that he needed only to retain all in order to capture the recollective power of a never-ending present, the never-ending constancy of holy childhood, which even now disclosed itself as a childish sham-holiness, an unchaste assumption of holiness, exposed to every sort of laughter, to the naked laughter of the womenfolk, to the laughter of the betrayed and unbetrayable mothers whose custody he had been too weak to escape, weakest in his childish play at being a god. Oh, nothing could be set against the nakedness of laughter, no counter-laughter could withstand derision, and nothing remained but to cover one's own nakedness, the nakedness of one's countenance, and with covered countenance he lay back in the litter, still veiled when despite all hindrances, shuffling along step by step, as it were against all expectation, they were finally discharged from the hellish alley-gorge, from the savage derision, and a quieter rocking of the litter betrayed the fact that they were again proceeding on an evener course.