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

strange by night. That high dark and shifting and trembling shadow was the tree that by day would flash sun among its leaves. Now they were quivering in the wind that kept pulling scraps of paper along the curb, making them almost fly. It was windy, and Lóri was afraid that it would rain in the morning and she couldn’t do what she was planning: go to the beach. Though she knew that even if it did rain she would go. She was from Campos, land without sea, and had never managed to get into the habit of going to the beach that was so close to her apartment.

Without noticing, she fell asleep sitting in one of the armchairs. And immediately dreamed that Ulisses that very night was with some other woman. The jealousy woke her with a start. Was she going to suffer that too? Yes, jealousy too, rage too, everything too.

It was still night, she must have just slept for a few minutes. But she didn’t feel tired: she was alert.

So was there some thing you could learn . . . what? She’d gradually find out, no doubt. Lóri wanted to learn, she didn’t know where to start and was also ashamed. The way they had been at the pool and there not only had she figured out the fairylike and at the same time opaque transformation of the sun for the first time, the way she’d felt the world, she was now going to experience the world on her own in order to see what it was like. But this time not at the pool, where she’d find people, but in the sea, at an hour when no one would turn up.

She fell back asleep and this time more deeply for when with a kind of start she awoke it was already light. She looked at the clock: it was ten past five on a clear and limpid morning. The beach would still be deserted and what was she going to learn? She’d go out as if toward the nothing.

She put on her bathing suit and robe, and without breaking her fast walked to the beach. It was so lovely and fresh on the street! Where no one was about, except the milkman’s cart in the distance. She kept walking and looking, looking, looking, seeing. This time it was a bodily wrestling with herself. Dark, wounded, and blind — how to find in this wrestling a diamond that was tiny but fairylike, as fairylike as she imagined pleasures should be. Even if she didn’t find them now, she was aware, her need would not flag. Would she win or lose? But she’d continue her wrestling with life. Not even with her own life, but with life. Something had unlocked within her, at last.

And there it was, the sea.

There was the sea, the most unintelligible of nonhuman existences. And there was the woman, standing, the most unintelligible of living beings. Since the human being had one day asked a question about itself, it had become the most unintelligible of the beings in whom blood circulates. She and the sea.

There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other.

Lóri was gazing at the sea, that was what she could do. It was only marked off for her by the line of the horizon, that is, by her human incapacity to see the curve of the earth.

It must be six in the morning. The free dog was hesitating on the beach, the black dog. Why is a dog so free? Because he’s the living mystery that doesn’t ask itself questions. The woman hesitates because she’s about to go in.

Her body takes comfort in its own smallness in relation to the vastness of the sea because it is the body’s smallness that lets it become hot and marked-off, and that was making her a poor and free person, with her share of the freedom a dog has in the sands. That body will enter the unlimited cold that roars without rage in the silence of the dawn.

The woman doesn’t realize: but she’s carrying out an act of courage. With the beach empty at this hour, she can’t copy other humans who make going into the sea one of life’s simple lighthearted games. Lóri is alone. The salty sea is not alone because it’s salty and big, and that’s an achievement of Nature. Lóri’s courage is that, not knowing herself, she still presses on, and acting without knowing yourself demands courage.

She enters. The very salty water is so cold that it gives her gooseflesh and mounts a ritual of attack on her legs.

But a fated joy — joy is a matter of fate — already took hold of her, though it doesn’t occur to her to smile. To the contrary, she’s very serious. There’s a dizzying sea smell that stirs her from the sleep of ages.

And now she’s alert, even without thinking, as a fisherman is alert without thinking. The woman is now a compact and a light and a sharp one — and heads through the iciness that, liquid, resists her, and yet lets her enter, as in love where resistance can be a secret request.

Walking slowly her secret courage grows — and suddenly she lets herself be covered by the first wave! The salt, the iodine, all the liquid leave her for a moment blind, dripping — standing shocked, fertilized.

Now that her entire body is drenched and water is pouring from her hair, now the cold becomes frigid. Advancing, she opens the waters of the world down the middle. She no longer needs courage, now she’s an old hand at the ritual abandoned millennia ago. She lowers her head into the sparkle of