The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  YET in the night's breath all was mingled, the brawling of the feast and the stillness of the mountains and the glittering of the sea as well, the once and the now and again the once, one merging into the other, merged into one another—, would he be allowed to return to Andes once again? — Here lay Brundisium rich in roofs and lighted streets spread out under the bay-window to which he had let himself be brought and before which he now sat in the armchair, this was only Brun-disium and he listened out into the night, listened into the far-off once, there where it would have been good to die; no, he should not have come here, least of all to this well-furnished guest room bare of friendship. On the obliquely burning candelabrum candles, at one side of each, a notched ridge of wax was forming, drop upon drop quickly growing in thickness.

  "Sir . . ." The major-domo stood before him.

  "I desire nothing more."

  The major-domo pointed toward the boy: "Have we to accommodate your slave? It was not foreseen . . ."

  Certainly, the nuisance was right; it had not been foreseen.

  "Still if you wish him placed near you, oh Sir, it shall be our care to please you."

  "It is not necessary ... he will go into town."

  "Besides, this one here"—the major-domo indicated one of the group of slaves, "will stay over night in the next room at your bidding."

  "Good ... I hope not to need him."

  "Then may I retire . . ."

  "Do so."

  There was already too much preparation; impatiently with folded hands, impatiently turning the seal-ring, he waited until the cool zealot should have left the room with his staff, but when this happened, contrary to expectation, the slave designated by the major-domo, a man with an orientally thick nose in his stern lackey's face, instead of having gone with the others remained at the door as if he had been ordered to do so.

  "Send him away," the boy requested.

  The slave asked: "Do you wish to be waked at sunrise?"

  "At sunrise? why?" For a second it was as if the sun, in spite of the nightly hour, had not vanished from heaven, as if it were hidden in the westerly regions and for all that present, Helios outlasting the night, conquering the night, as powerful as the mother from whose womb he had issued.

  Nevertheless he must give an answer to the slave who awaited his decision: "You need not wake me; I will surely be awake . . ."

  One would have thought the man had not heard him, he stood there without moving. What could this mean? What did he want to suggest? was it as if for him who would not be called no new day would break? Here was night, motherly, peaceful night, soothing her breath, and soothing it was to imagine that she could endure forever; no, the slave was unwanted, just as unwanted as the prospect of being waked by him:

  "You may go to your rest . . ."

  "At last!" observed the boy when the slave had closed the door behind him.

  "At last, yes but. . . but you, little Leader . . . what are you still doing here? Have you a request to make of me? I will gladly grant it . . ."

  The little leader stood there with outspread legs, his round, lusty and, alas, it must be admitted, somewhat homely young peasant's face drooping a little, certainly a bit offended, awkward, with pouting underlip: "You want to send me away too . . ."

  "I have sent the others away, not you ... I am only asking you . . ."

  "You should not send me away . . ." The hoarse-soft young voice had a familiar sound, its peculiar peasant undertone almost like that of the homeland. The voice was like a reminder of a scarcely-rememberable bond, something compatible in an undiscoverably remote motherly once, a knowledge of which shone also in the boy's clear eyes.

  "I have no intention of getting rid of you, but I take it that you, like many others, hanker to go to Caesar's festival . . ."

  "The festival means nothing to me."

  "All boys like to go to the festival; you need not be ashamed of it, nor will my gratitude for your guidance be less on that account..."

  The boy, his hands behind him, twisted himself about: "I do not want to go to the festival."

  "At your age I certainly would have gone, and even today I would do so were I stronger, but if you go in my stead it will seem to me almost as if I were participating myself . . . drolly smuggled in in another form . . . look, here are flowers, make a wreath for yourself, perhaps you will find favor with Augustus."

  "I don't want to."

  "Too bad . . . what do you want then?"

  "To stay here with you."

  The picture of the festival hall into which the boy was to have been smuggled in order to appear before Augustus faded out: "You wish to stay with me . . ."

  "Forever."

  Everlasting night, domain in which the mother rules, the child fast asleep in immutability, lulled by darkness, from dark to dark, oh sweet permanence of the "forever."

  "Who is it that you are seeking?"

  "You."

  The boy was mistaken. What we seek is submerged and we should not seek it as it mocks us by its very undiscoverability.

  "No, my little Leader, you have guided me but not sought me."

  "Your way is my way."

  "From where do you come?"

  "You embarked at Epirus."

  "And you came along with me?"

  A smile came as confirmation.

  "From Epirus, from Greece . . . yet yours is the speech of Mantua."

  Again the boy smiled: "It is your speech."

  "The speech of my mother."

  "Speech turns to song in your mouth."

  Song—, the song of the spheres singing itself, reaching out over every human realm: "Was it you who were singing on the boat?"

  "I was listening."

  Oh, motherly song of night, resounding through all nights, echoing from of yore, sought for again with the break of each new day: "I was about your age, yes, even a bit younger when I wrote my first strophes, nondescript, hotch-potch . . . yes, that's how it was then; I had to find myself . . . my mother was dead by that time, only the sound of her voice remained . . . once more, whom do you seek?"

  "I need not seek since you have done so."

  "So then, I still stand in your place although you would not go to the feast instead of me? And perhaps you write verses also, just as I have done?"

  Disavowing, protesting mirth appeared in the boy's familiar countenance; the freckles at the base of the nose were also a completely familiar sight.

  "Then you do not write verses ... I had already suspected that you were one of those who have it in mind to read their poems and dramas to me."

  The boy seemed not to have grasped this or perhaps he disregarded it: "Your path is poetry, your goal is beyond that of poetry."

  The goal lay beyond the darkness, lay beyond the domain of that maternally protected once; even though the boy talked of a goal, he knew nothing of it, he was too young to know, he had led the way but not for the goal's sake: "Be that as it may, you came to me because I am a poet... or did you not?"

  "You are Virgil."

  "I know that . . . besides which you screamed it clearly enough in the ears of the people down there at the harbor."

  "It didn't help much." The mirth in the youthful face became a twinkle, became a wrinkling of the nose, so that the freckles at the base drew into many tiny lines exposing white, regular, very strong teeth which shimmered in the candle light; it was the same mirth by which he had tried to clear a path down there on the plaza for the poet Virgil, and it was the same mirth that stemmed from a very remote past.

  Something or other constrained him to speak; constrained him to it even at the risk of the boy's failure to understand: "The name is like a garment which does not belong to us; we are naked beneath our name, nakeder than the child that the father has lifted from the ground in order to give him a name. And the more we imbue the name with being, the stranger it becomes to us, the more detached it becomes from us, the more forsaken we ourselves. The name we bear is borrowed, borrowed the bread we
eat, borrowed we ourselves, held naked into the unknown, and only he who puts off from him all borrowed furbelows, only he will glimpse the goal, he will be summoned to the goal so that he may ultimately join himself to his name."

  "You are Virgil."

  "I was once, perhaps I shall be again."

  "Not quite here but yet at hand," came like a corroboration from the boy's lips.

  It was comfort, to be sure only such comfort as a child has to give, and that was not sufficient comfort.

  "This is the house of borrowed names . . . why did you lead hither? It is merely a house for guests."

  The smile of compatibility appeared anew, childish, almost mischievous, and yet embedded in a very great, yea timeless intimacy: "I have come to you."

  And now, strange to say, this answer sufficed as though it were comfort enough, and it sufficed for the following question, even stranger if possible, strange in its very peremptoriness: "Have you come from Andes? Are you going toward Andes?" Actually he did not know whether he had spoken the question aloud, but he did know that he desired no answer, neither an affirmative nor a negative one, for it was not permissible for the boy to have come from Andes or not to have done so, the first possibility being all too alarming, the second all too absurd. No, there should be no answer and it was right that none followed ; however the desire to be permitted to keep the boy here was most intense, most intense the desire to breathe, to breathe toward tranquility, toward divination, ah, the desire was in itself divination. The candles burned obliquely in the gentle breeze that blew hither and thither like a cool, delicate yet intense yearning, drifting out of the night, flowing into the night. The silver lamp next to the couch swung gently to and fro on its long silver chain and outside the window the emanation of the city, ebbing and flowing above the roofs, was dissolved into purple, from purple-violet into dark blue and black, and then into the enigmatic and fluctuant.

  TO BREATHE, to rest, to wait, to keep silence. Drifting out of the night, flowing into the night, a stream of silence, and it endured a longish while before he broke it: "Come," he bade the boy to his side, "Come and sit next to me," and even when the boy had crouched near him, the silence continued, they remained embraced by silence, given over to the silent night. From far off came the raging, the raging noise of the crowd frantic to see, the raging uproar of the feast, the seething of sheer creatureliness, hellish, stolid, inevitable, tempting, lewd and irresistible, clamorous and yet satiated, blind and staring, the uproar of the trampling herd that in the shadowless phantom-light of brands and torches drove on toward the evil abyss of nothingness, almost past saving were there not even within the raging —and the longer one listened the more audible it became —, yes, were the song of silence not in it, contained in it from time immemorial, contained in it forever, the bell-tone of silence swelling to the brazen din of night and to the din of all human herds, softly singing the night of the herd, the herd heaving a sigh in its mighty slumber: deep below the humus of existence, murmurous with shadows, hidden in childhood, fate-delivered, untinged by lewdness, dwelt the night; from her sprang everything creaturely, saturated by the murmuring fluids of night, impregnated by sleep, made fruitful from the source of all fervor, from her sprang plant and animal and man, inexpressibly interwoven and grown into each other, overshadowing one another, for the curse of reversion was sheltered in the consolation of sleep and the gracious coverlet of being, a dream-nothingness, was spread over the actual nothingness.

  Oh, earthly life! The diaphanous world and the world of darkness inhaling and exhaling unceasingly, floating between the twin seductions of too much or too little shadow, the tides of the transient were held inexorably in check between the two poles where time ceased to exist, between the timelessness of the gods and the timelessness of the beast—, oh, in every vein of the earth-bound, in everything springing from the earth the night sprang upward, constantly changed to awakeness and awareness both within and without, shadowily projecting the formless into form, and floating between non-being and being, poised in this equilibrium, the world came to be light and shadow, came to be perceptible in its light-and-shadowhood. Ringing forever in the soul, softly at times, loudly at others yet never silenced, the bell-tone of night, the bell-tone of the herds sounded on, forever, too, the lion-roar of day sounded on, shattering in its light and revelation, the golden storm that engulfed the creaturely—, oh, human perception not yet become knowledge, no longer instinct, rising from the humus of existence, from the seed of sentience, rising out of the wisdom of the mothers, ascending into the deadly clarity of utter-light, of utter-life, ascending to the burning knowledge of the father, ascending to cool heights, oh human knowledge, unrooted, eternally in motion, neither in the depths nor on the heights but hovering forever over the starry threshold between night and day, a sigh and a breath in the interrealm of starry dusk, hovering between the life of the night-held herds and the death of light-flooded identification with Apollo, between silence and the word, the word that always returns into silence. In truth, nothing earthly might abandon sleep, and only he who never forgot the night within him was able to complete the cycle, to come home from the timelessness of the beginning to that of the end, beginning the orbit anew, himself a star in the constellation of time's orbit, arising from dusk and sinking into dusk, born and reborn nocturnally out of the night, received by day whose brightness has entered into the darkness, day, taking on the habit of night: yes, so had his nights ever been, all the nights of his life, all the nights through which he had wandered, the nights passed in wakefulness for fear of the unconsciousness that threatens from below the night, for fear of the unshadowed light from above, fearful of forsaking Pan, full of a fear that knows of the peril of twofold timelessness, yes, thus his nights bound to the threshold of the double farewell, nights of the obstinately enduring universal sleep, although people rioted on the squares, in the streets, in the taverns, blindly remaining the same in town after town from the very beginning, the sound of their tumult echoing here inaudibly from the reaches of time and therefore all the more keenly recognized, this too was sleep; although the mighty of the world were being toasted amid a surf of torches and music in hall after hall of feasting, smiled at by faces and more faces, courted by bodies and more bodies, they also smiling and courting, this too was sleep; although the bivouac fires were burning, not only before the castles but yonder too where there was war, at the frontiers, at the night-black rivers, and at the fringes of the night-murmuring forests beneath the rutilant roar of the attacking barbarians breaking out of the night, this too was sleep, sleep and more sleep, like that of the naked gray-beards who in stinking hovels sleep the last remnant of wakefulness out of themselves, like that of the sucklings who dreamlessly drowse away the misery of their birth into the sullen wakefulness of a future life, like that of the enslaved chain-gang in the ship's belly who lay stretched out like torpid reptiles on the benches and decks and coiled ropes, sleep and more sleep, herds and more herds, lifted out from the indiscriminateness of their ground-soil like the ranging mountains of the night at rest on the plains, set into the unchanging matrix, into the constant regression which is not quite timelessness but which reproduces it in every earthly night; yes these nights, so had they ever been, so they were still, and so this night also perhaps enduring forever, night on the tilted threshold of timelessness and time, of farewell and returning, of herd-solidarity and the loneliest utter-loneliness, of fear and salvation and he, thralled on the threshold, waiting night after night on the threshold, blinded by the twilight at the rim of night and by the dusk at the world's edge, knowing as he did the experience of sleep, he had been lifted into immutability, and as he was taking shape there he was hurled back and aloft into the sphere of verse, into the inter-realm of wisdom and poetry, into the dream that is beyond dream and touches on rebirth, the goal of our flight, the song.

  Flight, oh, flight! oh, dusk, the hour of poetry. For poetry was contemplative waiting in the twilight, poetry was the night-fo
reboding abyss, was lingering on the threshold, was at once participation and loneliness, was intermingling and the fear of intermingling, unwanton in intermingling, as unwanton as the dream of the slumbering herds and yet the fear of wantonness; oh, poetry was anticipation but not quite departure, yet it was an enduring farewell. He felt the shoulder of the crouching boy at his knee, barely touching it, he did not see the countenance but only sensed how it was sunk in its own, shadow, however, he saw the dark rumpled hair played on by the candlelight, and he recalled that terrible, joyful-joyless night on which impelled by fate, even then a lover and harassed, he had come to Plotia Hieria who crouched in wintry expectation, wintrily un-budded, and all he did was to read his verses to her—, it was the Eclogue of the Enchantress which had been completed at the wish and order of Asinius Pollio, the Eclogue which would never have turned out so successfully had not his thought of Plotia, his longing and lustfulness for a woman stood sponsor to it, in the writing of which he had been so successful only because he had known from the very start that he would never be allowed to leave the threshold and enter into the night of perfect union; ah, because the will-to-flee had been imposed on him from time out of mind, he was compelled to read the Eclogue to her, and fear as well as hope had been fulfilled, it became their farewell. And it had been the selfsame farewell that once again and on a grander scale had to be experienced later on by Aeneas when, forced by the enigmatic, unfathomably fateful course of poetry, bound for the irrevocable with his departing ships, he had forsaken Dido, forever forsworn from lying with her, from hunting with her, eternally divorced from her who had been his sweet shadow of reality, his sweet shadow of desire, divorced eternally from the night-cave of love beneath the thunders. Yes, Aeneas and he, he and Aeneas, they had fled in a real departure, not only in the lingering farewells of poetry, from whose interrealm they had escaped as if it had no worth for the living, even though it was also the realm of love—, whither was this flight tending? from what depth came this fear of Juno's motherly commands? Oh! love itself connoted sinking under the surface of night, sinking down to the nocturnal ground-soil on which the dream grows to timeliness, sinking under its own threshold to the primal source of the unformed and invisible, which always lay in wait to break out in storm and destruction: it was only the days which changed, time took its course only through days, and it was in movement that time could be beheld by the eye; the eye of night, however, was immovable, enormous, that eye wherein love reposed, and its depth, empty burning stark in the starlight, unchangeably unceasingly night after night throughout time renewing terrestrial timelessness in itself, creating and devouring the world from its deepest eye-pit, no longer beholding, being but the blinding lightning-cleft of nothingness, absorbed all eyes, the eyes of lovers, the eyes of the wakeful, the eyes of the dying, failing for love, failing in death, the human eye failing because it peered into timelessness.