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

the sea, and pulls out a head of hair that pours down over salty eyes that burn. She plays with her hand in the water, taking her time, her hair in the sun almost immediately stiffening with salt. With the conch of her hands and the haughtiness of people who never will offer explanations even to themselves: with the conch of her hands full of water, she drinks it in great gulps, good for a body’s health.

And that’s what she’s been missing: the sea inside like the thick liquid of a man.

Now she’s entirely like herself. Her nourished throat tightens with salt, her eyes go red from the drying salt, the waves crash against her and retreat, crash and retreat since she’s a compact barrier.

She dives once again, once again she drinks more water, now no longer greedy since she already knows and already has a rhythm of life in the sea. She’s the lover who is fearless because she knows she’ll have it all again.

The sun comes out more and makes her shiver as it dries her, she dives again: each time less greedy and less sharp. Now she knows what she wants: she wants to stand still in the sea. So she does. As if against the sides of a ship, the water crashes, retreats, crashes, retreats. The woman isn’t receiving transmissions or sending them. She doesn’t need communication.

Then she walks inside the water back to the beach, and the waves push her gently helping her come out. She’s not walking on the waters — ah she’d never do that since walking on the waters had already been done millennia ago — but no one can take this away from her: walking inside the waters. Sometimes the sea resists her exit by pushing her forcefully back, but then the woman’s prow advances a bit harder and rougher.

And now she steps onto the sand. She knows she’s shining with water, and salt and sun. Even if she forgets, she’ll never be able to lose all this. In some obscure way her streaming hair is something from a shipwreck. Because she knows — knows she’s done a danger. A danger as ancient as human beings.

Lóri had gone from the religion of her childhood to a nonreligion and now had gone to something more ample: she’d reached the point of believing in a God so vast that he was the world with its galaxies: that was what she’d seen the day before when she entered the deserted sea on her own. And because of his impersonal vastness this was a God you couldn’t implore: what you could do was join him and be big too.

To compensate, because when in pain she couldn’t stop imploring, she’d learned from one day to the next to implore herself for mercy and strength, since she wasn’t so vast or impersonal or unreachable. And she’d received enough mercy at least to get her breath back.

Her pain in life had now taken the form of being unable to wait without anguish for Ulisses to call. She herself had only called him a few times.

This time she was even more eager to meet him, she wanted him to know somehow about her dawn dip in the sea. But the phone was silent. And Lóri was afraid that, for lack of communication, she’d forfeit her steps forward.

It was the day the Organization of Primary Schools was throwing their back-to-school cocktail party, at the Museum of Modern Art. She wouldn’t go, she’d wait for a possible call from Ulisses. But the hours passed, and she had a hunch that he wouldn’t call. She remembered that at one cocktail party she’d met a man who became her lover for several months. And she thought maybe she should go to the party to “get herself” another man in order to free herself from the idea of Ulisses.

She felt life once again slipping through her fingers. In her humility she forgot that she herself was a source of life and of creation. So she’d rarely go out, didn’t accept invitations. She wasn’t a woman who always noticed a man’s interest in her unless he told her — then she’d be astonished and accept.

First she called her fortune-telling friend who emboldened her. How could she, a grown woman, be so meek? How did she not realize that lots of men wanted her? How not to realize that she should, within the bounds of her dignity, have a love affair?

— At Maria’s party, the fortune-teller said, I saw you enter the room where you knew everyone. And no one there was, as it happened, remotely equal to you, in educational skills, in intuitive understanding, and even in feminine charm. And yet you entered the room as timidly as if you weren’t there, like a doe with its head down.

— But that’s because . . . , Lóri tried to defend herself, because I feel I’m so . . . so nothing.

— That’s not what the cards say. You need to walk with your head held high, you have to suffer because you’re different from other people — cosmically different, that’s what your cards say, so accept that you can’t have the middle-class life other people do and go to the party today, and walk into the room with your head held high.

— But I haven’t gone out for so long that I’ve forgotten how. And walk into a room full of people all by myself? Wouldn’t it be better if I arranged to go with a girlfriend?

— No. You don’t need company in order to go, you yourself are enough.

What her friend had told her, she thought as she hung up the phone, went well with the new attitude she’d been wanting to have since she’d gone into the sea, no, no, since she’d been at the pool with Ulisses. So, courageously she didn’t