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

The most she did was to encourage him once or twice:

— Look, that log isn’t burning . . .

And he, before she’d even finished her sentence, had himself already noticed the log, since he was her man, and was already poking it. Not at her command since she was the man’s woman and would lose her status if she gave him an order. With his right hand he was holding the poker that was making the flames shoot up. His left hand, the free one, was within her reach. Lóri knew she could take it, that he wouldn’t refuse; but she didn’t take it, because she wanted things “to happen” and not set them in motion herself. She knew the world of people who anxiously hunt down pleasures and don’t know how to wait for them to arrive on their own. And it was so tragic: you only had to look around a nightclub, in the half light: it was the search for pleasure that doesn’t come by and of itself. She’d only gone with some of her men from the past, maybe two or three times, and hadn’t wanted to go back. Because the search for pleasure, when she’d tried it, had been bad water: she’d put her mouth on the tap, which tasted like rust and only gave two or three drops of lukewarm water: it was dry water. No, she’d thought, better real suffering than forced pleasure. She wanted Ulisses’s left hand and knew she wanted it, but she did nothing, since she was enjoying the very thing she was needing: being able to have that hand if she stretched out her own.

Oh, and to say that all this would end. That it couldn’t last because of its own nature. No, she didn’t mean the fire, she meant what she was feeling. What she was feeling never lasted, it would end and might never return. So she pounced on the moment, devoured the fire inside it, and the fire outside was burning gently, burning, flaring. Then, since everything would end, with vivid imagination, she took the man’s free hand, and still in her imagination, as she held that hand between hers, all of her was gently burning, burning, flaring.

Because it’s in the Impossible that you find reality.

Lóri could bear the struggle because Ulisses, in the struggle with her, was not her adversary: he was fighting for her.

— Lóri, pain isn’t something to worry about. It’s part of animal life.

She clenched her jaw, looked at the frozen moon, looked at the zenith of the heavenly sphere.

He was crushing a leaf that had fallen from the tree above the bar table. And as if to give her a present of something, he said:

— Do you know what mesophyll means?

— I’ve never heard the word, she replied.

— Mesophyll is the fleshy part of the leaf. Hold this one and feel it.

He held out the leaf to her, Lóri tapped it with sensitive fingers and crushed its mesophyll. She smiled. It was lovely to say and touch: mesophyll.

Why? But why hadn’t Ulisses called her for more than two weeks? Might he be waiting for her to call him? And no sooner had she imagined taking the initiative, the harsh reply came to her: never.

Why had he abandoned her? Was it forever? Or had he broken the vow of chastity that he had imposed upon himself in order to wait for her? She kept remembering that his last word, after the visit to Tijuca Forest, had been “farewell.” But that was how he always said goodbye. As if cutting their tie just like that? And leaving both of them free of one another? Lóri was aware that she was the one who had cut ties all her life, and maybe something in her suggested to others the word “farewell.” “To abandon me right when I was . . . ,” she didn’t finish her thought with a sentence because she wasn’t sure what “she was . . .”

Sometimes at night she’d wake with a start, missing Ulisses, as if she’d once slept with him. And she couldn’t get back to sleep because the desire to be possessed by him was too strong. So she’d get up, make coffee, sit like a good girl in a chair with a big cup of coffee. Yet she knew that her intense desire for him still didn’t mean she’d made any progress. Because in the past she’d also desired her lovers and hadn’t bound herself to any of them.

She was drinking her coffee, and seeing the mute phone beside her. Mute, but also close by if she dared call him. She knew that if she showed him in any way that she already desired him too much, he’d see it was just desire and refuse. And for now she had nothing to give him, except her own body. No, maybe not even her body: for when she’d had lovers it was as if she were only loaning her body to herself for the pleasure, just that, and nothing more.

She was drinking her coffee and thinking without words: my God, and to say that the night is full and that I’m full of the thick night that is dripping with the perfume of sweet almonds. And to think that the world is all thick with so much almond scent, and that I love Thee, God, with a love made of darkness and flashes. And to think that the children of the world grow up and become men and women, and that the night will be full and thick for them too, while I shall be dead, full too. I love Thee, God, without expecting anything but pain from Thou.