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

— I think so. Lots of things you can only have if you’re an autodidact, if you have the courage to be. Other things need to be learned and felt by two people. But I’m hoping. Hoping you’ll have the courage to be an autodidact despite the dangers, and also hoping you’ll want to be two in one. Your mouth, as I’ve already said, is passionate. And it’s through your mouth that you will start to eat the world, and then the darkness of your eyes will not brighten but iridesce.

He didn’t call her, she didn’t see him: it occurred to her that he’d disappeared so she could learn by herself. But what happened was that she was still so fragile in the world that she almost fell apart and almost went back to square one. And seeing that she could lose everything she’d gained filled her with the rage of a possessed person against the God. She didn’t have the courage to be angry with Ulisses because in her anger she’d destroy him inside herself. But she was turning against the God who was indestructible. This is the prayer of someone possessed, she thought. And she was coming to know the hell of passion for the world, through Ulisses. She didn’t know what name to give whatever had taken her over or whatever was, with voracity, taking her over except the word passion.

What was that thing that was so violent that it was making her beg herself for mercy? It was the will to destroy, as if she’d been born to destroy. And the moment of destruction would either come or it wouldn’t, that depended on whether she could hear herself. The God was hearing, but could she hear herself?

The destructive force still held back and she didn’t understand because she was quivering with joy at being capable of such rage. Because she was living. And there was no danger of really destroying anyone or anything because pity was as strong in her as rage: so she wanted to destroy herself as she was the source of that passion.

She didn’t want to ask the God to placate her, she loved the God so much that she was afraid to touch Him with her plea, a plea that was burning, her own prayer was so ardent it was dangerous, and might destroy the last image of God inside her, which she still wanted to save.

Yet, He was the only one she could ask to lay His hand on her and risk burning His own.

That same night she’d stammered a prayer to the God and to herself: give my soul relief, let me feel that Thy hand is holding mine, let me feel that death doesn’t exist because in truth we are already in eternity, let me feel that loving is not dying, that the surrender of yourself doesn’t mean death but life, let me feel a modest and daily joy, let me not beg too much of Thee, because the answer would be as mysterious as the question, let me receive the world without fear, since for this unfathomable world we were created and are ourselves unfathomable, so it is that there is a connection between this mystery of the world and our own, but that connection isn’t clear to us as long as we want to understand it, bless me so I can enjoy the bread I eat, the slumber I sleep, let me show charity and patience toward myself, amen.

Suddenly Lóri could no longer take it and called Ulisses:

— What am I doing, it’s night and I’m alive. Being alive is killing me slowly, and I’m wide awake in the dark.

There followed a pause, she started to think Ulisses hadn’t heard her. Then he said in a calm and soothing voice:

— Stand firm.

When she hung up, the night was humid and the darkness soft, and living meant having a veil covering your hair. So with tenderness she accepted that she was within the mystery of living.

Before going to bed she went onto the balcony: a full moon was sinister in the sky. So she bathed all over in the lunar rays and felt profoundly clean and calm.

She slowly started falling asleep in gentleness, and the night was deep inside. When the night matured the fuller veil of the dawn breeze would come. For the time being, she was delicately alive, sleeping.

A year had gone by. The first heat of spring, ancient as a first breath. And which made her smile all the time. Without looking at herself in the mirror, it was a smile that had the idiocy of angels.

Long before the arrival of the new season came its harbinger: unexpectedly a mildness in the wind, the first softness in the air. Impossible! Impossible that this softness in the air wouldn’t bring more! says the heart, breaking.

Impossible, echoes the still nippy and fresh warmth of spring. Impossible that this air won’t bring the love of the world! Repeats the heart that cracks its singed dryness into a smile. And doesn’t even recognize that it’s already brought it, that that is a love. This still-fresh first heat was bringing: everything. Just that, and indivisibly: everything.

And everything was a lot for a suddenly weakened heart that could only bear the less, could only want the bit by bit. Today she was feeling, and there was a keen nip to it, a kind of future memory of today. And to say that she’d never, never given what she was feeling to anyone or to anything. Had she given it to herself?

Only to the extent that the poignancy of whatever was good could fit inside such fragile nerves, in such gentle deaths. Ah how she wanted to die. She’d never yet experienced dying — what a path was still open before her. Dying would