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

She put on a fairly new dress, wanting to be ready to meet some man, but courage didn’t come. So, without understanding what she was doing — she only understood afterward — she put too much makeup on her eyes and mouth until her powder-white face looked like a mask: she was putting someone else on top of herself: that someone was fantastically uninhibited, was vain, was proud of herself. That someone was exactly what she wasn’t.

When it was time to go, she lost her nerve: wasn’t she asking too much of herself? Wasn’t going alone just showing off? All ready, with a painted mask on her face — ah “persona,” how not to use you and be!—discouraged, she sat in the armchair in the living room she knew so well and her heart was asking her not to go. It was as if it foresaw that she was going to get hurt a lot and she wasn’t a masochist. Finally she stubbed out her cigarette-for-courage, got up and went.

It seemed to her that a shy person’s tortures had never been completely described — in the taxi that sped along she was dying a bit.

And suddenly there she was in front of an uncommonly large room with lots of people, perhaps, though it didn’t look like many in the enormous space where like a ritual the cocktail party was unfolding.

How long did she bear it with her head held falsely high? The mask was making her uncomfortable, she knew moreover that she was prettier without makeup. But without makeup it would be the nakedness of soul. And she still couldn’t risk that or allow herself that luxury.

Smiling she talked to one man, smiling she talked to another. But as at all cocktail parties, at this one too conversation was impossible and, when she noticed, she was alone again. She saw two men who had been her lovers, they exchanged vain words. And she saw with pain that she no longer desired them. She’d rather suffer from love than feel indifferent. But she wasn’t indifferent: she was quite moved, she hadn’t seen people for so long. She didn’t know what to do: she wanted to leave like someone who was sobbing. But she kept up her pose and stayed a bit longer.

Until she felt that she could no longer bear to hold her head up, despite the two whiskeys she’d had. But how could she cross the enormous expanse to the door? Alone, like a runaway? She saw she’d reached the impasse of herself. So, with mumbled words, she confessed her drama to one of the other teachers, telling her she didn’t want to leave alone and the girl, understanding her, brought her to the door.

And in the darkness of that night which already had a touch of autumn Lóri was an unhappy woman. Yes, she was different. But yes, she was shy. Yes, she was hypersensitive. Yes, she’d seen two men who had been her lovers and now were just semifriends. The darkness of the autumn night in which the wind blew freshly rocking with delicacy the heavy branches of the trees. The perfume of the night. She had always known how to sense the smell of nature. With some pleasure — the only pleasure of the party — she crossed the . . . Overpass (what was it called?). She finally found a cab in which she sat almost crying tears of relief, remembering that the same thing had happened to her in Paris but worse, since now she was more rooted in the earth.

The way the taxi driver looked at her led her to guess: she was so made-up that he’d probably taken her for a prostitute. “Persona.” Lóri’s memory wasn’t great, that’s why she didn’t know if it was in the ancient Greek or Roman theatre that the actors, before going on stage, would stick on a mask whose expression represented the role they were to express. Lóri was well aware that one of the qualities of an actor was in sensitive changes of facial expression, and that the mask would hide those changes. So why did she like the idea of actors going on stage without their own faces so much? Maybe she thought that the mask was a giving of oneself as important as giving oneself through the pain of the face. Teenagers too, who were all face, as they were living their lives were making their own masks. And with much pain. Because knowing that from then on you’ll be playing a role was a frightening surprise. It was the horrible freedom of not-being. And the moment of decision.

Lóri too was wearing the clown’s mask of excessive makeup. The same one that in the birth pains of adolescence you’d choose so as not to be naked for the rest of the struggle. No, it’s not that it would have been wrong to leave your own face exposed to feeling. But because if that face were naked it could, when injured, close into a sudden mask, involuntary and terrible: so it was less dangerous to choose, before that inevitably happened, to choose on your own to be a “persona.” Choosing your own mask was the first voluntary human act. And solitary. But when you finally buckled on the mask of whatever you’d chosen to play yourself and play the world, your body would gain a new firmness, your head could sometimes hold itself high like the head of someone who has overcome an obstacle: the person was.

Though something humiliating could still happen. As it was now in the taxi with Lóri. Because, after years of relative success with the mask, suddenly — ah less than suddenly, because of a glance or an overheard word from the driver — suddenly her life’s war mask was being singed like dry mud, and its jagged pieces were falling to the