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

— Look at that sparrow, Lóri — he ordered — it keeps pecking the ground that looks empty but its eyes surely see food.

Obedient, she looked. And suddenly the sparrow took flight, and in her surprise Lóri forgot herself and like a child said to Ulisses:

— It’s so pretty that it flies!

She’d spoken with the innocence she used in her lessons with the children, when she wasn’t afraid of being judged. Anxiously she then glanced at Ulisses. He was looking at her. With a fright Lóri noticed: was it a look . . . of love?

A week later Lóri was still thinking about that last meeting. She hadn’t seen Ulisses since, nor had he called her. She’d been embroidering a tablecloth all week, and keeping her skillful hands busy she’d managed to pass the long days of the vacation. Embroidering, embroidering. Sometimes, when night fell, she’d take a long time making herself up and go to the movies.

But inside she was feeling an urgency, was in a hurry: there was something she needed to know and experience, and she didn’t know what and never had. And somehow time was getting short, it wouldn’t be long before the schools reopened. She was afraid Ulisses would get tired of her pachydermic resistance to letting the world enter her, and give up. And despair would overtake her. She knew she wasn’t yet ready to surrender to him or anyone else, and in this interim he might leave her. During one of those sunny afternoons her despair grew. Suddenly she let herself lie face down on the bed, her face almost buried in her pillow: the pain had returned.

The pain had returned almost physically, and she thought about praying. But she immediately discovered that she didn’t want to speak to the God. Maybe never again. She remembered that once, on holiday on a farm, she’d lain face down in a clearing in a grove, resting her chest on the earth, her limbs on the earth, only her face turned toward the ground was protected in the crook of her arm.

Remembering that day, which she saw again, she thought that from now on this was all she wanted from the God: to rest her chest on him and not say a word. But if that were possible, it would only be after her death. As long as she was alive she’d have to pray, which she no longer wanted to do, or speak with the humans who would answer her and might represent God. Especially Ulisses.

Though Ulisses, through professional deformation, taught too much. Not that he had a professorial air, he looked more like an older student, whose words didn’t come from books but from a life she suspected was full. Which didn’t keep him from being unintentionally a bit pedantic. It annoyed her that he wanted to seem . . . what? Superior? Ulisses, wise Ulisses, someday would fall like a statue from its pedestal. Lóri knew her thoughts were born of rage, of pain, with her face buried in her pillow.

She no longer knew anything. And despite now feeling mute before the God, she was aware in herself of an intense almost piercing desire to complain, to accuse, especially to claim what was hers. She felt she’d already experienced so much that now, according to the romantic logic of humans, the time had come for her to receive peace. She no longer dared think of joy, she didn’t really know what that was, but of peace. What would joy be? Would she still be able to recognize it, if it came? Or was it already too late for her to know what it looked like. For she kept imagining that joy might come like a simple sound almost below what was audible. So she, who’d never again spoken to the cosmic God, said to Him in sudden rage: I’ll give Thee nothing because Thou gavest me nothing.

Because she seemed to know that something existed — what — that humans gave the God — how? And she no longer even wanted to know what it was. Just that she felt that the God too needed humans — and so she refused herself to Him.

Could it be possible that at a certain point in life the world would become obvious? She was afraid of losing the life of continual surprise if she reached that point, and yet it would become a source of peace.

Wasn’t peace what she wanted? Not that she could help herself, however, from almost enjoying what she imagined would happen after death — the way she’d rested her body on the earth, resting herself completely until she was absorbed by the God. She’d once wanted to be dead, not because she didn’t want life — the life that still hadn’t given her its secret — but because she longed for that integration without words. But the word of God was so completely mute that the silence was He Himself. She also no longer wanted to enter a church, not even just to inhale the cool and secluded half-light.

She was now alone for the pain that had to come. She knew that, if she was alone now and for the pain then it would come — but not from the humility of an acceptance or courage. But like a challenge to the God against whom now, out of disappointment and solitude, she seemed to want to test her strength. Thou hast created me through a father and a mother and then abandoned me in the desert. In some strange vengeance, since it was against herself, against a child of the God, she would then stay in the desert, and without asking for water to drink. The one who’d suffer most from this was her, but the main thing is that with her voluntary suffering she