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

she became skittish and hard, and they sat in silence for the rest of the afternoon. She gradually calmed down and lost her greatest fear: that she’d lose him because she was taking so long.

Her own thought surprised: so she really was planning to be his one day? Since she was always fooling herself into thinking it was an odd kind of friendship and would stay that way forever, until withering like a fruit that isn’t harvested in time and falls rotten from the tree to the ground.

The children’s cries of joy and fright could no longer be heard: it was much later and the sun was weaker, the pool empty. How long had they spent in silence? Their solitude was only interrupted by the silent and eager arrival of the waiter who would come fill Ulisses’s glass as soon as it was emptied.

The silence of the dusk. She looked at Ulisses, and he was looking into the distance with half-closed eyes. She looked at him. And at that hour a luminosity was coming off him. Then Lóri realized that the brilliance was the sun’s flashing before definitively dying. She looked at the little tables with parasols arranged around the pool: they seemed to hover in the homogeneity of the cosmos. Everything was infinite, nothing had a beginning or an end: that was the cosmic eternity. Then in an instant the vision of reality was coming undone, it had only been a split second, the homogeneity was disappearing and her gaze was getting lost in a multiplicity of still-surprising tonalities: after the sharp and instantaneous vision something had followed that was more recognizable on earth. As for Ulisses, in these new colors that Lóri could finally see, as for Ulisses he was now both solid and transparent, which enriched him with resonances and splendor. You could say he was a handsome man.

For the first time then she looked at him from the perspective of strictly masculine beauty, and saw there was in him a calm virility. In the new light, Ulisses was unreal and yet plausible. Unreal because of his kind of beauty, which was now flickering with the last flickers of the sun. Plausible because all you’d have to do was reach out your hand and, in whatever it touched, you’d find the resistance of all solid things. Lóri was afraid of what could happen to her, since she was a worshipper of men.

Ulisses turned his face toward her and discovered he was being inspected. However, being caught, it was Lóri who blushed, averting her eyes.

— Don’t be afraid, he said smiling, don’t be afraid of my silence . . . I’m a madman but I’m guided by some great sage inside me . . .

So he hadn’t understood her: he’d thought she was bothered by the silence. Lóri didn’t reply. She was already used to Ulisses’s didactic tone which actually wasn’t pedantic. She glanced at him: he was so calm as if she were the only one suffering and he’d never known the pain of having no future except that of continuing to exist. He hadn’t understood her, and that made her happy. So Lóri discovered what was happening with great delicacy: what she’d thought was just her direct gaze at Ulisses and his reality had been the first frightening step toward some thing. Or had he noticed? He’d noticed, she felt, but without knowing what it was all about, he’d felt that she’d moved ahead and so he’d wanted to reassure her with the assurance of resuming his silence.

For it was as if she were in her early childhood and unafraid that the anguish might arise: she was in enchantment by the oriental colors of the Sun which was tracing gothic figures in the shadows. Since the God was born of Nature and He in turn meddled with it. The last lights were undulating on the standing green water of the pool. Discovering the sublime in the trivial, the invisible underneath the tangible — she herself completely disarmed as if in that instant she’d learned that her ability to uncover the secrets of natural life was still intact. And also disarmed by the slight anguish that came to her when she felt she could uncover other secrets too, perhaps a mortal secret. But she knew she was ambitious: she’d scorn easy success and want, though she was afraid, to rise higher and higher or descend lower and lower.

Ulisses spoke:

— Nice and easy, Lóri, take it nice and easy. But be careful. It’s better not to speak, not to tell me. There’s a great silence inside me. And this silence has been the source of my words. And from the silence has come the most precious thing of all: silence itself.

— Why do you look at each person so carefully?

She blushed:

— I didn’t know you were observing me. It’s not for nothing that I look: it’s because I like to see people being.

So saying she surprised herself and that seemed to bring her to vertigo. Because she, by surprising herself, was being. Even taking the chance that Ulisses wouldn’t notice, she said very quietly to him:

— I am being . . .

— What? he asked when hearing that whispered voice of Lóri’s.

— Nothing, it doesn’t matter.

— Of course it does. Would you mind saying it again?

She grew more humble, because she’d already lost the strange and enchanted moment in which she’d been being:

— I said to you —Ulisses, I am being.

He looked closely at her and for a moment it was strange, that familiar woman’s face. He found himself strange, and understood Lóri: he was being.

They didn’t say a word as if they’d just met for the first time. They were being.

— Me too, Ulisses said quietly.

Both knew that a great step had been taken in the apprenticeship. And there was no danger of wasting this feeling out of fear of losing it, because being was infinite, infinite like the waves of the sea. I am being,