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

her chest is relaxing and a weightless golden light is guiding her through a forest of silent pools and tranquil mortalities, pretends she isn’t lunar, pretends she isn’t crying inside

— because gently now, though her eyes were dry, her heart was soaked; she’d now escaped the voracity of living. She remembered to write Ulisses to tell him what had happened,

but nothing had happened that was utterable in written or spoken words, the system Ulisses had invented was good: whatever she didn’t know or couldn’t say, she’d write down and mutely give him the piece of paper — but this time she didn’t even have anything to tell.

Lucid and calm now, Lóri remembered reading that a captive animal’s hysterical movements were intended to free it, through one of these movements, from the unknown thing that was holding it — not knowing which single, exact, and liberating movement was what made an animal hysterical: it was pleading for a loss of control — during Lóri’s wise loss of control she’d grasped for herself now the liberating advantages of her more primitive and animal life: she had pleaded hysterically to so many contradictory and violent feelings that the liberating feeling had finally released her from the net, in her animal ignorance she didn’t even know how,

she was worn out by the effort of the liberated animal.

And now the moment had come to decide whether she’d keep seeing Ulisses. In sudden rebellion she didn’t want to learn what he was patiently seeming to want to teach and she herself to learn — she was rebelling more than everything because it wasn’t for her the right time for “meditation” which suddenly seemed ridiculous: she was quivering with pure desire as she did before and after menstruation. But it was as if he wanted her to learn to walk on her own legs and only then, prepared for freedom by Ulisses, would she be his — what did he want from her, other than to desire her contentedly? At first Lóri had been wrong and thought that Ulisses wanted to transmit to her some things from his philosophy classes but he said: “philosophy’s not what you need, if it was it would be easy: you’d audit my classes and I’d talk with you in other terms,”

well now that the earthquake would lend itself to her hysteria and now that she was liberated she could even put off the decision not to see Ulisses: except she wanted to see him today and, though she couldn’t stand his mute desire, she knew that in fact she was the one provoking him in order to try to break the patience with which he was waiting; she used the allowance her father sent her to buy expensive, always tight dresses, it was the only way she knew to attract him and

it was time to get dressed: she looked in the mirror and was only beautiful because she was a woman: her body was slim and strong, one of the — imaginary — reasons that made Ulisses desire her; she chose, despite the heat, a dress made of thick cloth, almost shapeless, her body would be the shape but

dressing up was a ritual that put her in a serious mood: the cloth was no longer a mere fabric, it was becoming the matter of the thing and it was this material to which with her body she gave body — how could a simple rag gain such movement? her hair, washed and dried by the sun that morning on the little terrace was of the oldest chestnut silk — beautiful? no, a woman: Lóri then carefully painted her lips and eyes, which she did, according to a colleague, very badly, dabbed perfume on her forehead and cleavage — the earth was perfumed with a thousand crushed leaves and flowers: Lóri put on perfume and this was one of her imitations of the world, she who was trying so hard to learn life — with perfume, somehow she was intensifying what she was and that’s why she couldn’t use perfumes that contradicted her: perfuming herself was an instinctive knowledge, come from millennia of apparently passive women learning, and, like any art, it demanded a minimum of self-knowledge: she’d wear a slightly suffocating perfume, delicious as soil, as if her resting head were crushing the soil, and whose name she wouldn’t say to any of her fellow teachers: because it was hers, it was her, since for Lóri putting on perfume was a secret and almost religious act

— should she wear earrings? she hesitated, for she wanted simply delicate and unadorned ears, something modestly nude, she hesitated again: even richer would be to hide her doe-like ears behind her hair and make a secret of them, but she couldn’t resist: she uncovered them, tucking her hair behind her incongruous and pale ears: an Egyptian queen? no, all adorned like the women of the Bible, and there was also something about her made-up eyes that said with melancholy: decipher me, my love, or I’ll have to devour you, and

now ready, dressed, as pretty as she could make herself, she again wondered whether or not to meet Ulisses — ready, arms hanging by her side, lost in thought, would she or wouldn’t she meet him? around Ulisses she acted like the virgin she no longer was, though she was sure he sensed it too, that strange wise man who nonetheless didn’t seem to guess that she wanted love.

Once more, in her confused hesitation, what reassured her was something that had so often calmed and supported her: the knowledge that everything that exists, exists with absolute exactness and ultimately whatever she ended up doing or not doing would not escape that exactness; something the size of a pinhead would not extend by a fraction of a millimeter beyond the size of a pinhead: everything that existed was of a great perfection. Except most of what existed with such perfection was, technically, invisible: the truth, clear and