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

floor with a hollow clap. And there was her face naked now, mature, sensitive when it was no longer meant to be. And the face with its singed mask was crying in silence in order not to die.

She entered her house like a fugitive from the world. There was no point in hiding it: the truth was she didn’t know how to live. It was nice to be home, she looked at herself in the mirror while washing her hands and saw the “persona” buckled to her face. She looked like a dolled-up monkey. Her eyes, under the thick makeup, were tiny and neutral, as if Intelligence had not yet revealed itself in mankind. So she washed her face, and was relieved to have a naked soul again. Then she took a pill to help her sleep and forget how her bravado had failed. Before sleep came, she was alert and promised herself never again to take a risk without protection.

The sleeping pill had started to calm her down. And the unfathomable night of dreams began, vast, levitating.

When two weeks later Ulisses finally called — he never chatted on the phone, just tersely said when and where they’d meet and without asking if she wanted to go — when he finally called to make a date, with the unexpected relief from pain, after hanging up she started crying briefly, more a spasm of happiness than crying.

Then she calmed down and got dressed. She’d take advantage of the day’s unseasonal heat, which would only ruin makeup, to go without any. Without a mask. She was feeling safer for having gone into the sea on her own and was going to see if she’d dare tell Ulisses about her victory.

It was this time, walking over to the bar and before he saw her, this time after days of pain unlocking, that when she saw him seated with a glass of whiskey — unexpectedly the vision of the two of them, still in the distance, unleashed in her a happy and terrible human greatness, his greatness and hers. She stopped for an instant, stunned. She looked afraid to be advancing inside herself maybe too fast and with all the risks — toward what?

In that instant he spotted her and with his unaffected gallantry rose to greet her. That meant Lóri had to approach while he gazed at her, which was still hard because she hadn’t fully recovered either from going into the sea or from the sight of Ulisses beside the pool, she mixed both sensations into a single shy victory.

And as she was moving toward him, slowly, hesitantly as always, she saw that what she’d seen in Ulisses and had lit her up with its brightness in the middle of the pool was still there, though now mild enough to let her think that Ulisses — though he couldn’t be called levelheaded because of the liberty that in him took the appearance of daring originality — Ulisses was a spartan man, free even of the sin of being a romantic.

When she finally reached his table — they never shook hands — Lóri had already though barely consciously started to feel proud of Ulisses as if he were hers, and this was new. In a way he was, because as soon as Lóri could transform herself he’d be hers, she imagined despite her doubts. What she was afraid of was one of Ulisses’s qualities: his frankness. She was afraid that, if she advanced to the point of being readier and came to accept drawing close to him, he with his frankness might simply tell her it was too late. Because even fruits have seasons.

They sat down. And her earlier shyness had overtaken her at the thought of telling him about that serious moment of entering the sea. Since it had been more of a ritual than . . . than what?

— I, she said but then fell silent: she was too moved to speak.

— Yes? Ulisses encouraged her, leaning forward because he’d sensed that she had something important to say.

Then, as if throwing herself without a second thought into an abyss, Lóri said:

— One day at dawn I went to the sea on my own, there was nobody on the beach, I went into the water, there was just one black dog but far away from me!

He looked at her carefully, at first as if he hadn’t understood what uncommon meaning there could be in that emotional declaration. At last as if he’d understood, he asked slowly:

— Did you enjoy it?

— I did, she replied humbly, and out of shame her eyes filled with tears that wouldn’t fall, they just made her eyes look like two full pools. No, she then corrected herself, looking for the exact term, it’s not that I enjoyed it. It’s something else.

— Better or worse than enjoying?

— It was so different that I can’t compare them.

He looked at her closely for a moment:

— I know, he then said.

And added simply:

— I love you.

She looked at him with darkened eyes but her lips trembled. They sat silently for a moment.

— Your eyes, he said changing his tone entirely, are bewildered but your mouth has that inner passion you fear. Your face, Lóri, is a mystery like the sphinx’s: decipher me or I’ll devour you.

She was surprised that he too had noticed what she’d seen of herself in the mirror.

— My mystery is simple: I don’t know how to be alive.

— Because you only know, or only knew, how to be alive through pain.

— That’s right.

— And don’t you know how to be alive through pleasure?

— I almost do. That’s what I was trying to tell you.

There was a long pause between them. Now Ulisses was the one who seemed moved. He called the waiter over, asked for another whiskey. After the waiter left, he said in a tone