Water - the arrival (condensed version of Hermann Broch the death of Virgil part I)

Water – the arrival

The imperial squadron was crossing the Adriatic heading for Brindisi and was close to its destination. There were seven boats the first and the last were battleships and the remaining 5 were luxury yachts the middle one contained Augustus and the one after Virgil.

Virgil was worried he was going to be seasick. He had not dared to move all day. He was lying in a bed which had been set up for him in the middle of the boat. As they drew near to the coast where the sea was calmer, his fear of being sick diminished.  But he started to cough because it was the evening and his evening fever was increasing.

He lay there, embarrassed at how helpless he was. He asked himself why he had obeyed Augustus and left Athens. In Athens he had hoped to finish the Aeneid whilst enjoying a life of poetic composition, meditation, and study.

He had thought that he would be healed through knowledge. And so why had he renounced that? He had not wanted to. It was as if irrefutable life forces had given him an order.

The forces of fate had always interfered. He had been born as a peasant and would have lived a simple life in a small village but a higher destiny did not allow that. It had driven him from his home into the loneliness of the human crowd and his distance from real life had simply got greater. He had only lived life at the margins and this drifting feeling was intensifying now that he was preparing to die.

He listened to the noises of the boat and of the other boats in the convoy. His fellow passengers were greedy guzzlers, impatient for the next meal and the waiters were rushed off their feet. The greed of the passengers made them behave badly but there was no point in his writing a poem about that. His role was to praise the world of his readers and not to portray reality. The Aeneid mixed together agreeable things with exhortations but the exhortations were ignored and the only things that people remembered were the agreeable things.

The other passengers were typical of the general public for whom he wrote. They behaved as if they had the right to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labour and they regarded poets as no different to the slaves who were rowing the ship. They were not all parasites although many were. Some of them had achieved great things previously but had become idle and arrogant during the voyage.

The slaves who were rowing paid no attention to him whereas the passengers said that they revered him, either because they were falsely pretending to appreciate poetry or because they wanted to flatter him because he was a friend of the emperor. He had nothing in common with them even though fate had placed him in their midst. They made him sick and he would actually have been sick had he not got close to land. He reassured himself that the manuscript of the poem was safely in a chest nearby. He was cold. Sometimes he wanted to look at the passengers to see what they were doing but it was better that he did not because he thought that looking back was in some way forbidden to him and so he just lay there.

They were approaching Brindisi. Troops were on parade in honour of the emperor because it was his birthday. He would be 43. The soldiers were cheering: it was curiously soothing, even dreamy. It was getting dark. He could make out olive trees on the shore and he longed to feel the leaves in his hand and also the branches. He turned the seal ring on a finger of his right hand, as was his habit.

His peasant hands were afraid that they might never again grasp a plough or scatter the seed. And so they had learned to grasp the intangible. This was vaguely connected with a fear of living in an incomprehensible universe and of a disintegration into a range of different lives which lacked any unity. It was only by unity that one could overcome the hopeless blindness of isolation. He had always felt that he was merely a lodger in the universe and he had wanted to feel at home.

The light was now flowing; his breath was flowing; the current in the sea was flowing; in short, there were many things flowing. His soul was having a flood-bath.  He had a presentiment of knowledge but it was a dim presentiment. A young slave was singing. As he listened to the song everything seemed to vanish and only the voice remained and it became more dominant. The serene voice seemed to offer guidance. If he could rescue a singularity from the flow of everything else it might become a timeless and permanent immensity: it would be nice to have a single moment which was like that forever.

The song came to an end. It was suddenly warm. There were a lot of other boats in the harbour and the channel was very narrow. Confusion reigned. Torches flickered on the decks of the boats and the windows of the houses around the harbour were illuminated through the darkness. The emperor’s boat went to the front and there was a lot of manoeuvring. There was a double line of soldiers with torches whose job was to keep the path clear for the people disembarking.

There were a lot of Italians waiting. As the imperial ship docked they gave a howl of joy. They were typical of the sort of people for whom Augustus had established the pax Romana. In order to maintain peace he had to ensure that the Italian people remained orderly and disciplined. To achieve this they had to believe in the gods and follow a religious morality. Augustus had to rely on the support of these people if he wanted to stay emperor and of course he did want to stay emperor.

Virgil had not described these people so much as glorified them. This was a mistake since they were basically evil. He seemed to be the only one to realise that the people were evil. Augustus seemed to be unaware of how evil they were. He felt sympathy both for Augustus and for the Italians. He also thought that he was himself responsible in a different way to Augustus. This was because the evil in question was incurable by government intervention and was possibly beyond the reach of the gods themselves. The only thing that could counteract it was the small voice of the soul which was called song and which brings knowledge. If he had been allowed to carry on in Athens and achieve actual knowledge he could possibly have brought healing but fate had prevented that. He did not hate the Italians. It was simply that he was aware of their profound capacity for evil and their ability to turn into a mob and become anti-human and to reduce existence towards a mere thirst for selfish superficiality.

He could see with immediacy how savage they were. It was obvious as they continued to make a huge noise and wave their torches about. When the boat landed there was lots of running around on deck and he kept a tight grip on the chest which contained the manuscript of the Aeneid because he did not want to lose it. He thought he was about to die and in fact he almost wanted to die.  He would have welcomed death in that situation because it was so noisy. But he realised that he was not allowed to die at that point: he had to keep going because something significant in his life was approaching and he did not want to miss it. Augustus’s doctor was now at his side. He could smell the body odour of the medical team.

A boy was carrying his cloak. Porters were carrying the manuscript chest. He did not recognise the boy. Where had he come from? He was rather ugly and certainly not a slave or a waiter. He kept glancing at the litter in which Virgil was being carried. These people did not realise the extent to which death was interwoven with their eyes and faces.

There was a sense in which having sex was lying down to die. The fact that people now thought he was past having a sex life was a point in his favour. Therefore it was just as well that the boy with the cloak was not making eyes at him with a view to having sex.

There were lots of slaves on board the boat to take the luggage on shore. A little black Syrian slave said cheekily “come on down and see how it tastes to the likes of us” and somebody in response tried to lash him and only succeeded in lashing the next slave along much to that slave’s surprise. He was a redheaded and one-eyed Parthian. This outrageous episode was over very quickly. It was hard for Virgil not to interfere. It was difficult for him to imagine these two slaves as once being boys playing in the fields. This made Virgil reminisce about fields but then he went on to wonder what the point of life was and what was the point of remembering anything.

The litter containing Virgil was carried over the gang-planks. He could smell putrid melons. The litter was carried by beasts of burden in human form. There was an incongruity between the flawless litter and the invalid inside it.  

The passing of time was also an incongruity: the now had never been so definitely divorced from the then. The present was quite independent of the past although he could still not tell whether the sea voyage was still in progress or whether he was on land.

It was not possible for the group that contained Virgil to join the festival procession that would escort Augustus into the city. The servant in charge was old, fat and effeminate and also too easy going. He simply complained about the police who allowed the mob to crowd around and get in the way. Luckily, the boy with the cloak was still there, as were the porters with the manuscript chest, keeping close to the litter. The boy winked at him roguishly.

As the litter was carried forward, Virgil was aware of the smells of the city as well as of the smells of the sea. He thought of places he had known: Athens, Mantua, Naples, Cremona, Milan, Brindisi, and Andes. He felt as if he was at the centre of his being and the crossroads of his worlds. But he was still in the harbour area of Brindisi.

There was no question of staying put or for that matter catching up with Augustus. But the boy was now at the head of Virgil’s escort party holding a torch and forcing his way through the crowd. He was crying, “Make way for Virgil. Make way for your poet!” This did not always work. People responded with insults. But the boy managed to lead the party on although it was unclear where he was heading. Virgil noticed the faces of the crowd and their manifest lustfulness. He could smell the fish market and the fruit market. Then the boy led them into the district of the storage houses. Now the smell was of grain, oil, wine, and carpentry. This suggested the idea of unending peace, a peace for which he had longed and to which he had dedicated his poetry. Here, however the peace was subservient to greed and worldliness.

His yearning was mirrored in the carnal yearning of other people. Even if his yearning had turned to knowledge, it remained as a yearning. He kept his fingers interlocked and pressed the ring into his skin. He remembered his boyhood in Andes and his mother’s face. Her name Maja was summerlike. She kept the house quiet. He recalled his father, a potter who became a farmer by marrying into Maja’s family.

He breathed in the scent of the storage houses and started to cough. The escort moved forward leaving the fat servant in charge struggling to keep up. They were halted by the boy at the entrance to a lane of lodging houses. They all laughed when the boy bowed low and invited them to enter.

Children and goats filled the stairways of Misery Street. They greeted the litter’s arrival as a hostile disturbance and women hurled abuse. Virgil began to despair and covered his face. His soul felt naked. He wondered if it was time itself that was shaming him. He lay back and finally they were released from the hellishness as the litter moved on elsewhere.

He was aware of being surrounded by crowds of people. They were catching up with the imperial party. Intense light forced his eyes open and soon they were in front of the imperial palace in the centre of a plaza thronged with torch-carrying fanatics. People called for wine. Someone said that money would be distributed. The fog made him choke and he wanted to go back to the boat. The boy smiled and this cheered him up. The litter pressed forward meeting some resistance. He identified with Anchises carried on his son’s shoulders as they neared the palace.

A police cordon surrounded the palace. Behind them the Praetorian cohort were camping. At the entrance, the cordon had been disbanded to allow Augustus entry and now the mob were surging forwards. The servant in charge of the litter party managed to get them admitted to the annoyance of the less successful. Once inside the courtyard he felt relief. A major-domo checked his name on a list. Virgil found it almost offensive to have to confirm his identity, which he did angrily.  But his anger abated when they arrived in the garden court in front of the megaron set aside as a guest room. The porters were dismissed. The slaves from the megaron took the cloak from the boy, who made no motion to go away. Virgil afraid of being alone explained that the boy was his scribe. He then called to the boy to help him. He struggled to climb the stairs and had to be carried upstairs by two slaves. His room was on the third floor in the south wing. His manuscript chest was placed near the bed. It was a comfortable room but he felt bitter towards Augustus. He did not trust him in spite of his achievements. His friendship was a calculating one. Why had he insisted on bringing Virgil back to Italy? He could hear the noises of the imperial feast in the distance.

Virgil sat in an armchair at the bay window overlooking the city and listening into the night. The major-domo asked if they had to accommodate his slave, pointing towards the boy. “It is not necessary. He will go into town”, replied Virgil.

The major-domo said that a slave would stay over night in the next room and then departed. The designated slave had a thick nose and a lackey’s face. He stayed behind. “Do you wish to be woken at sunrise?” he asked. “You need not wake me; I will surely be awake.”

When this slave had gone Virgil talked to the boy, who said that he wanted to stay with Virgil forever. He had followed him from Greece. Virgil felt an intense desire to keep the boy with him.

He got him to sit nearby. They were embraced by silence although in the distance were the noises of the party.

Oh, earthly life! Transient tides were held between the timelessness of the gods and the timelessness of the beast. Night rang a bell in the soul continuously and day kept up a lion’s roar and provided a revelatory light.

Human beings have perception which is not yet knowledge but is more than instinct. They have risen from the wisdom of the mothers, heading towards the burning knowledge of the father. This knowledge hovers permanently between silence and the word (identification with Apollo).

A man travels from the timelessness of the beginning to the timelessness of the end but he can complete the cycle and begin the orbit again only if he remembers the night within him.

He is a star in time’s orbit. He arises from dusk and sinks into dusk.

Virgil spent his nights awake afraid both of the unconsciousness that threatens from below the night and of the light from above. He fears to forsake Pan.

Meanwhile other people slept. People rioted and had feasts and these were a form of sleep. Barbarians fought wars at the frontiers and this too was sleep. Naked old men were asleep in stinking hovels as were the newly born. Slaves slept in chains in the belly of the ship and herds slumbered on the plains.

Virgil was waiting each night on the threshold and after being lifted into immutability he was hurled back into the sphere of verse. Poetry was both intermingling and the fear of intermingling.

He felt the boy’s shoulder at his knee. He saw his hair in the candlelight. He remembered the night he had come to Plotia Hieria for an assignation. All he did was to read her the Eclogue of the Enchantress written at the wish of Asinius Pollio.  His lusting for Plotia had improved the poem as had his knowledge that he would never be allowed to leave the threshold. His reading the poem became their farewell. This was the same farewell that Aeneas experienced when forced to forsake Dido. Both Virgil and Aeneas had run away. But where to?

After a while, the candles became encrusted. The gnats hummed around them. The wall fountain continued to drizzle. The amorini on the wall-frieze played without moving and seemed to merge into the silence of the night. The sleep of the herds was pregnant with evil.

Virgil wondered whether the boy had been sent by fate. He wanted to cuddle him. The boy did not yet realise what he, Virgil, an old man had come to know, namely that when we are dying we will depart and not return. He did not want to know the boy’s name. He just wanted him to wait with him. He held his hands tightly clasped. The thumb of the left hand touched the stone of the ring. He felt the warmth of the boy’s shoulder close to his knee. He longed to stroke his hair, but he did not. He said, “It is too late.” The boy looked enquiringly at him. He brought his face near to the boy’s and said “Yes, it is late … go to the festival.” He suddenly felt too old. He pushed the boy towards the door. When the boy had gone he had a coughing fit and collapsed on his bed. He felt the winged genius engraved into the polished carnelian of the ring-stone. Slowly he began to breathe silently.