Death of Virgil Read Online

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 consciousness, 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?

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 unbreathable, 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 crowding 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 oiljugs, 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.