Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  “I know many …”

  “Does this belong to your dictation?” asked Lucius.

  “I know many …” No, no one was recognizable any longer, just a single one, and this was astonishing, for the parting from Octavian had been painful and final, the parting could not be repeated, and, contrary to all mutual understanding, Octavian was here again; he stood near the candelabrum, apart from the shadowy swarm, and though he himself was invisible, his dark eyes glanced toward the slave, giving him leave to speak.

  “Speak,” directed the slave, “give your permission.”

  Thereupon the order, which in reality was nothing of the sort, was given by Caesar: “I permit you, Virgil, to dispossess the heirs of your first will in favor of your slaves.”

  “So shall it be; I will provide for the slaves but along with that I must settle the question of the Aeneid and its publication.”

  “I shall take care of the poem.”

  “That is not enough for me.”

  “Don’t you recognize me, Virgil?”

  And the boy said: “Look at the rising star, the star of Aeneas, the star that is Caesar’s, the one that is blessing the harvests, gladdening the fields with full grain and enpurpling the grapes in the vineyards.”

  “I see,” said Lucius, “you want to make stipulations for the publication of the Aeneid … What is still lacking in this respect?”

  The boy had lied: There was no star to be seen, least of all that which had been promised to shine in the future ripeness of time, the star of meeting where all cognition and recognition were surrendered, the great revealing mystery which brought the empty stream of time to a standstill by fulfilling it; brought to a new beginning the stream, which could not be stayed,—no, the boy had lied, nothing was to be seen of it, still nothing.

  “Not quite here, but yet at hand!” Who had said this? the boy, or the slave? Both of them were looking toward the east, joined in a new concord by their eastward glancing; and the star would rise on the eastern firmament.

  “The Julian star shines westward,” spoke out of Caesar’s invisibility, “and you, Virgil, will no longer see it … will your hatred never subside?”

  “The Aeneid is lovingly dedicated to Caesar, but the new star ranks still higher.”

  Caesar answered no more; in silence his voice sank back into the invisible.

  “The Aeneid …” Plotius puffed a little and ran his hands through the gray wreath of his hair—, “yes, the Aeneid, the Julian star will shine through it forever.”

  “If I am not mistaken, the dedication of the Aeneid to Caesar should be included in the will,” said Lucius, and dipped the pen in the ink-well, his face attentive, and waiting for further instructions. He waited, however, in vain. For that was no ink-well in which he held the pen, instead it was the fish-pond in front of the house in Andes, and he was sitting at no ordinary table, since the whole country-seat at Andes was suddenly erected upon it, the estate that from now on would belong to Proculus, and behind it, like a counterfeit in miniature, was the mausoleum, a prison built of leaden blocks, while the waves of the Posilipo crossed, shimmering, the waves of the pond; yes, Lucius was dipping his pen in the pond, soft water-circles were lightly spreading from the place he dipped towards the pond’s borders around which the geese and ducks were quacking, doves were cooing on the roosts of the dovecotes; the table, moreover, was surrounded by innumerable people who were waiting for the will; it was understandable that Cebes who was to live on the farm was among them, but on the other hand it was scarcely permissible for Alexis to be hanging around, and to come strolling hither over the double bend of the entrance-path. This gathering for the will was unseemly, and it was with greatest unwillingness that these people let themselves be dispersed by the slave; it took some time before they had all been banished into invisibility, and for the table to stand clear in front of Lucius. “I am ready, Virgil,” he announced again, “I am waiting for you …”

  It was not so simple quickly to find one’s way back again, and actually Lucius should have known this: “Presently, Lucius …”

  “Take your time … we are in no hurry,” said Plotius.

  “Listen, my friends, before we begin … do you recollect the words of Augustus…?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Well, Caesar is familiar with my first will and I feel it is only proper that you, who are assisting me, should know about it too …”

  “We are not alone …” broke in Lucius, and pointed to the slave.

  “The slave? yes, I perceive him …”

  Perceiving and perceived—, it was an encounter lasting forever, it was enchainment forever, eternal, simultaneously within and without, an enchainment to him who bore the chain.

  “Did you not intend to dismiss the slave before, on account of the will?”

  It was odd that Lucius dared to utter this, and it lacked reverence, but nothing came of it; the slave left the room with an unmoved countenance, remaining there at the same time as if having doubled.

  Plotius folded his hands with thumbs crossed over his abdomen; “Well, now we are by ourselves.”

  Quite scornfully and contemptuously, he was rebuffed by Plotia: “Why do you want to be by yourselves? Love needs to be alone; but here you are speaking of money.”

  “Not my money, no longer my money …” It hurt that Plotia could speak thus, for, far away as she was, she must know that never had there been a question of money or property.

  “It was your own money that you willed away, and it is your own that you are now willing,” objected Plotius, “for you to say anything else is humbug.”

  Luckily this could be answered without exposing Plotia: “I have received my money through the grace and goodness of my friends, and it is only right and reasonable for me to return it to them … consequently, I still harbor some doubts as to whether I am justified in providing as liberally as I did in my first will for my brother Proculus to whom, because of his kindness and straightforwardness, I am quite partial.”

  “Of course that is just flim-flam.”

  “Time-honored custom and the prosperity of the state demand that fortunes be kept within the family, there to be cherished and husbanded,” said Lucius with a grin.

  “To speak seriously,” said Plotius, settling the matter, “you may and you should do as you deem best in disposing of your estate; for whatever you may have won, you have finally to thank yourself and your achievements.”

  “My achievement bears no relation to the prosperity that has flowed to me through my friends, and that is why my first deposition is that my Roman house on the Esquiline as well as my house in Naples should fall back to Caesar, whereas my Campagna estates should be restored to Maecenas … Furthermore, I ask Augustus to allow Alexis, who for years now has lived in the house on the Esquiline, to stay on there, and I ask the same favor of Proculus for Cebes, for whom country life has always been beneficial and even necessary because of his poor health, and his poetry, and so I want to secure permanent hospitality for him in Andes … the best solution would be to let him help a little in cultivating the grounds there …”

  “Do these two get nothing else?”

  “But yes … It is no secret to anyone, least of all to both of you, that my assets in currency are far in excess of my needs, and I dare say have increased to several millions, much against my wish, however much in accord with that of my friends, … well, from this fortune Cebes and Alexis are to receive each a legacy of a hundred thousand sesterces, just as I have set forth some other small legacies that I need not enumerate here, and to these will be added a few more for my slaves …”

  “All as it should be,” agreed Plotius, “moreover, many of your decisions will be changed in the course of the next years, as, for all your alleged contempt of money, you are still a peasant, convinced like every peasant in the depths of his heart that the gods are often quite disposed to bestow their blessings by way of gold; accordingly your property is bound to grow still greater
…”

  “We shall not go on arguing this matter now, Plotius … but whatever may be, or will be, after the deduction of these legacies I want half of my current funds to go to Proculus, a quarter to Augustus, and the remaining quarter to be divided equally between you, Lucius and Maecenas … so that is the general picture.”

  The back of Plotius’ neck, his bald-spot and his face were suffused with a dark, purply red, and Lucius threw up both his hands: “What has gotten into you, Virgil! we are your friends, not your heirs!”

  “You yourselves have given me leave to dispose of my property as I deem best.”

  A limping man with an upraised stick came threateningly nearer to the bed: “Whoever has money gets more; and who has none, gets none!” he shouted, and had the slave not disarmed him so that, still shouting, he had to withdraw again into nothingness, without doubt he would have started a fight.

  “Yes, I am forgetting that I want to add to the legacies another of twenty-thousand sesterces to feed the people of Brundisium.”

  “You may as well add my portion to it at once,” muttered Plotius, wiping his eyes.

  “What you are to receive can in no way measure up to what I have received from you.”

  The mobile actor’s face of Lucius Varius became ironic: “Virgil, will you assert that you have ever seen much of my money …?”

  “And will you maintain that you did not precede me in epic poetry? that I have not learned an enormous amount from you? Well, Lucius? Can this be repaid with money at all? it is just lucky that you are never in funds and always need something, for in this way the legacy is not entirely useless …”

  The flush had not faded from the face of Plotius; now his heavy jowls were taut with scornful resentment: “You are not indebted to me for any of your verses, and I am blessed with enough riches to be able to renounce your money …”

  “Oh, Plotius, shall I let you stand back for Lucius, this giddy person?! For thirty years you have been my friends, and you have advanced me no less than he, with all his verses; I do not want to speak of what I have had from you in money’s worth … you are my oldest friends, you have always been united, and so it must be with this inheritance, and you will accept it, you have to accept it, because I ask you to do so.”

  “I am your oldest friend,” objected the boy.

  “Incidentally, you too are a peasant, Plotius, and so it follows that everything you said about me must hold good for you as well …” ah, gradually speech became quite painful—, “but I wouldn’t like my friends to be reminded of me only by cyphers … in my apartments at Rome and Naples you will find some furniture and my personal belongings … and my friends, that means you Plotius and you Lucius, but Horace and Propertius likewise … my friends are to take from them any objects, especially books, that please them and that might help to keep me in memory … what remains shall be given to Cebes and Alexis … my seal-ring …”

  Plotius struck his lusty thigh with a clenched fist; “Now that’s enough … what else are you going to fling at us …?”

  The visible world moved off further and further, and Plotius’ blustering, loud though it was, came out of a haze; it would have been good to have done with everything, but there was still so much, so very much to say: “… from you I ask still another service in return.”

  “And do you not ask anything of me? are you dismissing me offhand?” asked Lysanias plaintively.

  “Lysanias …”

  “Tell us at last where that boy is hiding …”

  Yes, where was he hidden? but Plotius himself was not much more visible or audible than Lysanias, suddenly he too was hiding within the unreachable, and that was as though behind a thick pane of glass that became more and more cloudy, as though turning into a leaden wall.

  “Shall we seek him for you, perhaps?” joked Lucius. “Is that what you want of us?”

  “I do not know …”

  “I am standing in front of you, Virgil; I, Lysanias, stand in front of you and you have only to stretch out your hand, oh, that you might take mine!”

  It required an endless time to lift one’s hand; it did not want to obey one at all, and then it grasped into emptiness, into blindness, into utter blindness.

  “Every eye, I replace every torn-out eye,” said the doctor, “look in my mirror and you will again begin to see.”

  “I do not know it any more …”

  Could these be words? what was it that had suddenly fallen into nothingness? was it these words or something quite different? Just a moment ago it had been intelligible, and certainly one’s own speech, and all at once the words were no longer here, having glided off into nothingness, an alien mumbling, lost in the voice-thicket, imprisoned in ice and fire.

  But the limping one was again on the spot, and with him an enormous train of shadow-shapes, a procession so long that one life would not have sufficed to figure out this multitude; verily, a whole city was coming along, no, rather many cities, all the cities of the world, their steps shuffled over the stony floor and a fat hag shouted: “Go home now, march on, go home!”

  “Go on,” ordered the limping one, “go on, you, taking yourself for a poet or something extraordinary; go on, you belong to us …”

  “Along with him who has forgotten how to walk and has to be carried,” the fat female followed up the command, to make it more effective.

  A roar of laughter from the rest of the women accompanied this speech, and their outstretched fingers pointed lewdly, yet not in actual lewdness, toward the street of misery into which the procession now turned. The way led down the steps, the end of the alley was not to be sighted because it went down so far, but there, amid the band of children who, scrambling between the goats, the lions, and the horses, raced up and down the steps, there was Lysanias, gaily armed with his torch—it was an extinguished, cold, and sooty stump of a torch that he held in his hand—squabbling with the others as if nothing beyond such play existed.

  “So you have brought me back anyway, Lysanias, although you have never admitted it.”

  And behold, Lysanias offered no reply; he gazed up as though confronted by a stranger, only to turn back immediately to his play.

  The descent continued, step by step.

  Plotius, however, who was also seated on the litter, his stout legs dangling, said warily: “Back? oh, indeed, we are taking you back into life.”

  “Come away from here,” said Plotia, “it smells bad here, dreadful.”

  Yes, it reeked; each single door-gap yawning in the mouldy walls exhaled overpowering excremental fumes from the body of the house, and the dying gray-beards reeked in their blackened prison-cells. Augustus lay there too, whimpering.

  Step by step the descent continued, haltingly, but not to be halted.

  There were masses and masses of people, greedy for metaphors, greedy for victory. And there in their midst, in the midst of these pushing and crowding people, in the midst of turmoil Lucius sat writing; he sat there entirely given over to his task, writing down everything, everything that occurred inside or outside, and continuing to write he lifted his head: “What is it that we are to do for you, Virgil? What was it that you asked for?”

  “Take down everything, everything …”

  “Your will?”

  “You need no will,”—Plotius’ voice darted over, hard and thin like a gnat, only to waver off like a dragon-fly—, “oh, you need no will for you will live on forever, forever living with me.” A little black Syrian, a broken chain hanging from his neck-ring—where had his one-eyed fellow remained?—came leaping up the steps, slipping between the sundry figures, crying out the while: “The golden age has begun … what was on top is now at the bottom; what was below is above … he who has remembered must now forget; he who has forgotten may now remember … down with you, down with you, you overgrown piggling … past and future are one, forever, forever, forever!”

  Meanwhile the crowd had become more and more dense. But that the litter floating above it had bee
n forced to stop was a surprise, and beyond that, a surprising glimmer of hope, the more as hope was indubitably strengthened by the doctor’s behavior; for despite his corpulence he moved lightly and fleetly through the conglomerate human mass, taking with a quick sleight-of-hand the money which the ailing held out to him, and his smiling lips with the instant quickness of a mirror, offered the recompense: “You have recovered … and so have you there … yes, you have also recovered … and you over yonder have gotten well again, too … you have recovered, all of you, all of you … terrible is death, but you are all well again …”

  “Terrible is life,” said the slave who, although he had not changed his shape, must evidently be standing by himself on a very elevated spot, for he was looking down upon the litter.

  Now Augustus lifted himself from his ragged couch; he staggered with uncertain tread, on his neck-ring bobbed—as though he were the missing erstwhile mate of the little Syrian—the end of a chain, of silver it is true, and his speech came, uncertain and tremulous: “Come Virgil, come with me, lie there with me on my couch, for we must go back; we must keep on going back, we must reach beyond the first forefathers; we must return into the mass that sustained us, we must go back into the humus of the beginning …”

  “Away with you …!” ordered the slave.

  Thereupon everything was wiped out, and even Caesar, hastening to become dwarfed, shriveled to nothing; the human likenesses dwindled away to mere shadows of puppets whose wires had suddenly been cut, indeed, it was like the abrupt severance of every worldly filament, a general collapse within and without simultaneously, just beginning or reaching its peak—one didn’t know which because of the speed with which it occurred—came about as one sank back once more into the pillows of the bed-boat, which had immediately resumed its placid journey: truly, one felt a sense of release, both inwardly and outwardly, like the relaxation of a clutching hand, a hand that had once been a brazen fist and that now, quietly-quieting, had turned into soft repose.