An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector [story books to read .TXT] 📗

a great, the greatest obstacle for me to make progress: I myself. I’ve been the greatest hindrance along my path. It’s with enormous effort that I manage to impose myself on myself.

She’d never spoken so many words at a stretch. That’s why she wanted to avoid the main thing. Suddenly however she realized that if she didn’t say the last thing, she wouldn’t have said anything, and spoke:

— I’m an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes through a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear.

Yes, everything sometimes would become clear and she’d emerge from herself almost with splendor.

— Yes, said Ulisses. But you’re wrong. I don’t give you advice. I just — I—I think that what I’m really doing is waiting. Waiting perhaps for you to give yourself advice, I don’t know, Lóri, I swear I don’t know, sometimes it seems like I’m wasting my time, sometimes it seems that on the contrary, there’s no more perfect, though worrisome, way to use time: the time of waiting for you. Do you know how to pray?

— What? she asked with a start.

— Not pray the Lord’s Prayer, but ask something of yourself, ask the maximum of yourself?

— I don’t know if I know, I’ve never tried. Is that a piece of advice? she asked with irony.

He looked flustered:

— I think it was. Forget what I said.

But she didn’t forget.

She was washing her face slowly, combing her hair slowly, already in her nightdress. She was putting it off, putting it off. She brushed her teeth one more time. Her brow was wrinkled, her soul trembling. She knew she’d try to pray and was frightened. As if whatever she was going to ask of herself and of the God required great care: because whatever she asked, she would be given. She went to the fridge, drank a glass of water: acting as if she’d been hypnotized by Ulisses. And a tiny gesture of revolt against the hypnotism to which she’d apparently been subjected was making her delay whatever was coming.

Ask? How do you ask? And what do you ask for?

Do you ask for life?

You ask for life.

But don’t you already have life?

There’s a more real life.

What is real?

And she didn’t know how to answer. Blindly she would have to ask. But she wanted, if she had to ask blindly, at least to understand what she was asking. She knew she shouldn’t ask for the impossible: you can’t ask for the answer. The big answer was not granted us. It is dangerous to meddle with the big answer. She preferred to ask humbly, not on her level, which was enormous: Lóri was feeling that she was an enormous human being. And that she should be careful. Or not? All her life she’d been careful not to be big inside herself so as not to be in pain.

No, she shouldn’t ask for more life. For the time being that was dangerous. She knelt trembling beside the bed for that was how you prayed and said quietly, severely, sadly, mumbling her prayer with a bit of shame: relieve my soul, make me feel that Thy hand is holding mine, make me feel that death doesn’t exist because in truth we are already in eternity, make me feel that loving is not dying, that the surrender of yourself doesn’t mean death, make me feel a modest and daily joy, make me not ask Thee too much, because the answer would be as mysterious as the question, make me remember that there is also no explanation as to why a son wants his mother’s kiss and yet he wants it and yet the kiss is perfect, make me receive the world without fear, since I was created for this incomprehensible world and I myself incomprehensible too, so there’s a connection between this mystery of the world and our own, but that connection isn’t clear to us as long as we hope to understand it, bless me so that I can experience with joy the bread I eat, the slumber I sleep, make me show kindness to myself because otherwise I won’t be able to feel that God has loved me, make me lose the shame of wishing that at the hour of my death there will be a beloved human hand to hold mine, amen.

Not for nothing did she understand those who were seeking a path. How arduously she was seeking her own! And today how impatiently and roughly she was seeking her best way to be, her shortcut, since she no longer dared speak of a path. She was hanging on ferociously to her hunt for a way of walking, for the right steps. But the shortcut with refreshing shade and light flashing between the trees, the shortcut where she’d finally be herself, that she’d only felt in a certain indeterminate moment of the prayer. But she was also aware of something: when she was most ready, she’d move from herself to other people, her path was other people. When she could fully feel the other she’d be safe and think: here is my port of arrival.

But first she needed to reach herself, first she needed to reach the world.

When they next met on the terrace of the bar, a week later, Ulisses had his sluggish and uninterested look about him. But Lóri was familiar with it: he looked like this because he was calmly practicing instant by instant a way to clear a path. Whenever he returned from this distant gaze it was to look at her with a vague desire that didn’t seem to want to grow stronger.

Lóri kept quiet, letting him drink in silence, without looking at him. So it gave her a little fright