THE END OF TIME. Ahasuerus, sitting on a rock, stares out at the distant horizon, across which two eagles are flying. He meditates, then dreams. The day draws slowly to a close.
AHASUERUS: And so I reach the end of time, for here lies the very threshold of eternity. The earth is deserted and forsaken; no other man breathes the air of life. I am the last; now I can die. Death! What a wonderful thought! For centuries upon centuries have I lived, weary and tormented, ever the wanderer, but behold, the centuries have come to an end, and with them, I, too, will die. Farewell, old nature! Blue sky, reborn clouds, roses of a single day and every day, everlasting waters, enemy earth who would not eat my bones, farewell! The wanderer will wander no more. God will forgive me, if he so wishes, but death consoles me. Jagged as my pain rises yonder mountain; the hunger of those passing eagles must be as desperate as my despair. Will ye, divine eagles, die too?
PROMETHEUS: All mankind must have died; the earth is bare of them.
AHASUERUS: And yet I hear a voice . . . A man’s voice? Merciless heavens, am I not the last? Here, he approaches. Who are you? In your wide eyes there is something of the mysterious light of the archangels of Israel; you are not a man . . .
PROMETHEUS: No.
AHASUERUS: Are you, then, one of the divine race?
PROMETHEUS: You said it, not I.
AHASUERUS: I do not know you, but what does that matter? You are not a man and so I can still die; for I am the last, and behind me I close the door of life.
PROMETHEUS: Life, like ancient Thebes, has a hundred doors. You close one, others will open. You say you are the last of your species? Another species will come, a better one, made not from the same clay, but from the same light. Yes, O last of mankind, the plebeian element will perish forever, and the elite will be what returns to reign over the earth. The times will be set right. Evil will end; the winds will no longer scatter the germs of death, nor the weeping and wailing of the oppressed, but only the song of everlasting love and the blessing of universal justice . . .
AHASUERUS: What do all these posthumous delights matter to the species that will die with me? Believe me, you who are immortal, to bones that rot in the earth, all the purple of Sidon is worthless. What you are telling me is even better than the world dreamed of by Campanella, in whose ideal city there was crime and sickness; yours excludes all moral and physical injuries. May the Lord hear you! But let me go now and die.
PROMETHEUS: Go, then, go. But why such haste to end your days?
AHASUERUS: It is the haste of a man who has lived for thousands of years. Yes, thousands of years. Even men who lived for only a few decades invented a term for that sense of weariness, tedium vitae, which they could never truly have known, not at least in all its vast and unyielding reality, because to acquire such a profound aversion to existence it is necessary to have walked, as I have, through every generation and through every ruin.
PROMETHEUS: Thousands of years?
AHASUERUS: My name is Ahasuerus. I was living in Jerusalem when they took Jesus Christ to be crucified. As he passed by my door, he stumbled under the weight of the cross he was carrying, and I drove him on, shouting at him not to stop, not to rest, but to go on up to the hill where he would be crucified . . . Then a voice from heaven told me that I would be condemned to wander ceaselessly until the end of time. So great was my sin, for I showed no pity for the man who was going to die. I didn’t even know why he must die. The Pharisees said the son of Mary had come to destroy the law, and that he must be killed; poor fool that I was, I wanted to show off my zeal, and that is what provoked my actions on that day. Later, as I made my way through all the ages and all the cities of the earth, how often did I see the same thing happen again and again! Whenever zeal entered a humble soul, it became something cruel or ridiculous. That was my unpardonable sin.
PROMETHEUS: A grievous sin indeed, but the punishment was generous. Other men read only one of life’s chapters; you have read the entire book. What does one chapter know of another chapter? Nothing. But he who has read every chapter connects them all together and draws conclusions. If some pages are melancholy, others are jovial and happy. After bitter tears comes laughter, out of death springs life, storks and swallows change climate without ever abandoning it entirely; thus is everything reconciled and restored. You saw this, not ten times, not a thousand times, but every time; you saw the magnificence of the earth healing the affliction of the soul, and the joy of the soul overcoming the desolation of things. Such is the alternating dance of nature, which gives its left hand to Job and its right hand to Sardanapalus.
AHASUERUS: What do you know about my life? Nothing; you know nothing of human life.
PROMETHEUS: I know nothing of human life? Don’t make me laugh! Come on, then, everlasting man, explain yourself! Tell me everything; you left Jerusalem . . .
AHASUERUS: I left Jerusalem. I began my pilgrimage through the ages. I traveled everywhere, encountered all races, beliefs, and tongues; I traveled in sunshine and in snow, among civilized peoples and barbarians, to islands and to continents; wherever mankind breathed, there breathed I. I never worked again. Work is a refuge, and I never again knew such a refuge. Every morning brought with it my daily coin . . . See? Here is the last one. Be gone with you, worthless thing! (He hurls the coin into the distance.) I did not work, only wandered, always, always, always wandering, day after day, year after year, down through all the years and all the centuries. Eternal justice knew what it was doing, for to eternity it added idleness. Each generation bequeathed me to the next. Languages that had died lay with my name embedded in their bones. With each passing age everything was forgotten; heroes vanished into myths, into a distant shade, and history slowly dissolved, retaining only two or three faint and far-off outlines. And in one way or another I saw it all. You spoke of chapters? Happy are those who read their lives in only one chapter. Those who departed at the birth of empires took with them an impression of their perpetuity; those who died when those empires were declining were buried with the hope of their restoration; but do you know what it is like to see the same thing over and over again, the same alternation of prosperity and desolation, desolation and prosperity, endless funerals and endless hallelujahs, sunrise after sunrise, sunset after sunset?
PROMETHEUS: But you did not suffer, I believe, and it is at least something not to have suffered.
AHASUERUS: Yes, but I saw other men suffer, and, toward the end, cries of joy had much the same effect on me as the ramblings of a madman. Calamities of flesh and blood, endless conflicts; I saw everything pass before my eyes, to the point where night has made me lose my taste for day, and I can no longer distinguish flowers from weeds. To my weary retina everything looks the same.
PROMETHEUS: But nothing harmed you personally; it was I who, for time immemorial, suffered the effects of divine wrath.
AHASUERUS: You?
PROMETHEUS: I am Prometheus.
AHASUERUS: You are Prometheus?
PROMETHEUS: And what was my crime? From mud and water I made the first men, and then, out of compassion, I stole for them the fire of heaven. That was my crime. Jupiter, who reigned over Olympus at the time, condemned me to the cruelest of tortures. Come, climb up upon this rock with me.
AHASUERUS: This is a fable you are telling me. I know this Hellenistic dream.
PROMETHEUS: Old man of little faith! Come and see these chains that bind me; an excessive punishment, given that no crime was committed, but proud divinity is a terrible thing. Anyway, look, here they are . . .
AHASUERUS: You mean that Time, which corrodes everything, did not want these chains?
PROMETHEUS: They were the work of divine hands: Vulcan forged them. Two messengers from heaven came and chained me to the rock, and an eagle, like that one over there flying across the horizon, pecked at my liver, without ever consuming it entirely. This I endured for countless ages. You cannot imagine the agony.
AHASUERUS: Is this a trick? You really are Prometheus? So it was not some dream concocted by the ancient imagination?
PROMETHEUS: Look at me; touch these hands. See if I exist.
AHASUERUS: So Moses lied to me. You, Prometheus, you created the first men?
PROMETHEUS: That was my crime.
AHASUERUS: Yes, it was your crime, you artificer of hell; it was a crime for which there is no possible atonement. Here you should have remained for all time, chained and being endlessly devoured; you who are the source of all the evils that afflict me. I lacked pity, it is true, but you, who brought me into existence, you, perverse divinity, were the original cause of everything.
PROMETHEUS: Your impending death clouds your reason.
AHASUERUS: Yes, it really is you; you have the Olympian forehead of a strong and handsome Titan: it really is you . . . Are these your chains? I see no sign of your tears.
PROMETHEUS: I shed them for your race.
AHASUERUS: It shed many more on account of you.
PROMETHEUS: Listen to me, O last of your ungrateful line!
AHASUERUS: What do I want with your words? I want to hear your groans, you perverse divinity. Here are your chains. See how I lift them up? Hear the clanking of the irons? Who unchained you?
PROMETHEUS: Hercules.
AHASUERUS: Hercules . . . Let us see if he performs the same service now that you will once again be chained.
PROMETHEUS: You must be mad.
AHASUERUS: Heaven gave you your first punishment; now earth will give you your second and last. Not even Hercules will be able to break these irons again. See how I shake them about in the air like feathers; for I represent the strength of millennia of despair. All of humanity is within me. Before I fall into the abyss, I will write the world’s epitaph on this rock. I will summon the eagle and it will come; I will tell it that, on departing this life, the very last man is leaving it a gift from the gods.
PROMETHEUS: Poor ignorant man; you are refusing a throne! No, you cannot refuse it.
AHASUERUS: Now you are the madman. Come on, kneel. Let me bind your arms. Yes, like that, don’t resist. Breathe, breathe deeply. Now your legs . . .
PROMETHEUS: Go on, go on! These are earthly passions that turn against me, but I am not a man and know nothing of ingratitude. You will not change one letter of your fate; it will be fulfilled in its entirety. You will be the new Hercules. I, who proclaimed the glory of the first one, also proclaim yours; and you will be no less generous than he.
AHASUERUS: Are you mad?
PROMETHEUS: The truth men do not know is the madness of whoever proclaims it. Go on, finish it!
AHASUERUS: Glory never pays for anything, and then it dies.
PROMETHEUS: This glory will never die. Go on, finish what you’re doing; teach the sharp beak of the eagle how to devour my entrails, but listen . . . No, don’t listen; you cannot understand me.
AHASUERUS: No, speak, speak.
PROMETHEUS: The passing world cannot understand the eternal, but you will be the link between the two.
AHASUERUS: Tell me everything, I’m listening.
PROMETHEUS: I will tell you nothing. Go on, tighten the chains on my wrists so that I cannot escape, so that you will find me here when you return. You want me to tell you everything? I have already told you that a new race will inhabit the earth, made from the finest spirits of the extinct race; the multitude of others will perish. A noble family, lucid and powerful, it will be the perfect blend of the divine and the human. A new era will be born, but between that old era and this a link is needed, and that link is you.
AHASUERUS: Me?
PROMETHEUS: Yes, you, the chosen one, the king. Yes, indeed, Ahasuerus, you shall be king. The wanderer shall find rest. He who was scorned by men shall govern them.
AHASUERUS: Cunning Titan, you wish to deceive me. Me, a king?
PROMETHEUS: Yes, you. Who else could it be? The new world needs something from the old world, and no one can explain those two worlds better than you. Thus there will be no break between the two humanities. From the imperfect will come the perfect, and your mouth will tell it of its origins. You will tell the new mankind of all the good and evil of the old. You will spring to life once again like the tree whose dead leaves have been removed to reveal only the lush green ones, but in this case the lushness will be eternal.
AHASUERUS: A shining vision! Can it really be me?
PROMETHEUS: Yes, really.
AHASUERUS: These eyes . . . these hands . . . a new and better life . . . Sublime vision! Well, it is only fair, Titan. The punishment was fair, but so is the glorious remission of my sin. I shall live? Me? A new and better life? No, surely you mock me.
PROMETHEUS: Well, then, leave me; one day you will return, when these immense heavens open for the spirits of new life to descend. You will find me here, at peace. Go.
AHASUERUS: Will I greet the sun again?
PROMETHEUS: This very sun which now is setting. Our friend the sun, eye of the ages, will never again close its eyelids. Gaze upon it, if you can.
AHASUERUS: I cannot.
PROMETHEUS: Later you will, when the circumstances of life have changed. Then your eyes will be able to gaze safely at the sun, because future mankind will be a concentration of all that is best in nature: robust and delicate, shimmering and pure.
AHASUERUS: Swear to me you’re not lying.
PROMETHEUS: You will see if I am lying.
AHASUERUS: Speak, tell me more; tell me everything.
PROMETHEUS: Describing life is not the same as feeling it; you will have it in abundance. The bosom of Abraham described in your old Scriptures is none other than this perfect world beyond. There you will see David and the prophets. There you will tell the astonished multitudes not only the great events of the extinct world, but also the evils that they will never know: illness and old age, deceit, selfishness, hypocrisy, tedious vanity, unimaginable foolishness, and all the rest. The soul, like the earth, will have an incorruptible sheath.
AHASUERUS: I will once again see this immense blue sky!
PROMETHEUS: Look, how beautiful it is!
AHASUERUS: As beautiful and serene as eternal justice. O magnificent sky, more beautiful even than the tents of Kedar, I will see you again and forevermore; you will gather up my thoughts as in ages past; you will grant me clear days and friendly nights . . .
PROMETHEUS: Sunrise upon sunrise.
AHASUERUS: Speak, speak! Tell me more. Tell me everything. Let me loosen these chains . . .
PROMETHEUS: Unchain me, new Hercules, last man of one world and first of the next. That is your destiny; neither you nor I, nor anyone else, can change it. You are greater even than your Moses. From the heights of Nebo, ready to die, he gazed upon all the lands of Jericho that would belong to his posterity; and the Lord said unto him: “You have seen it with your eyes, but you will not cross into it.” You will cross into it, Ahasuerus; you will reach Jericho.
AHASUERUS: Place your hand upon my head, look into my eyes; fill me with the reality and force of your prediction; let me feel something of this full, new life . . . King, you said?
PROMETHEUS: Chosen king of a chosen people.
AHASUERUS: It is no more than just amends for the utter scorn in which I have lived. Where one life spat mud at me, another will crown my head with a halo. Go on, tell me more . . . tell me more . . . (He continues dreaming. The two eagles approach.)
FIRST EAGLE: Woe is he, this the last man on earth, for he is dying and yet still dreams of life.
SECOND EAGLE: He only hated life so much because he loved it dearly.