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

Well, she sighed, even if it wasn’t reaching me clearly, at least she knew that there was a secret meaning to the things of life. So it was she knew that she occasionally, even if somewhat confusedly, ended up sensing perfection—

these thoughts again, which she was somehow using as a reminder (that, because of the perfection that existed, she’d end up doing the right thing)—once again the reminder acted upon her and with eyes darkened even more now with her perturbed thoughts, she decided she’d see Ulisses at least one more time.

And it wasn’t because he was waiting for her, since often Lóri, counting on Ulisses’s offensively excessive patience, just wouldn’t show up, without letting him know; though at the idea that Ulisses’s patience could run out, her hand rose to her throat trying to staunch an anguish like the one she felt when she wondered “who am I? who is Ulisses? who are people?” It was as if Ulisses had an answer for all of this and had decided not to give it — and now the anguish was returning because she was realizing once again that she did need Ulisses, which made her despair — she wanted to be able to keep seeing him, but without needing him so violently. If she were a person entirely alone, as before, she’d know how to feel and act inside a system. But now, with Ulisses entering ever more fully into her life, she, feeling protected by him, had started to fear losing his protection—

— though she herself wasn’t sure what she meant by “being protected”: did she, perhaps, have a childish wish to have everything but without the anxiety of having to give something in return? Was protection a presence? If she were protected by Ulisses even more than she already was, she’d immediately aim for the maximum: to be so protected that she wouldn’t fear being free: since from her flights of freedom she’d always have somewhere to return.

Having glimpsed her whole body in the mirror, she thought that protection would also mean no longer being one single body: being one single body would give her, as it did now, the impression of being cut off from herself. Having a single body surrounded by isolation, made that body so circumscribed, she felt, that she’d then fear being a person on her own, she looked greedily at herself in the mirror and said amazed: how mysterious I am, I’m so delicate and strong, and the lips’ curve maintained its innocence.

It then seemed to her, mulling things over, that there wasn’t a man or woman who hadn’t chanced to look in the mirror and been taken aback. For a fraction of a second the person saw herself as an object to be looked at, which could be called narcissism but, already influenced by Ulisses, she’d call: pleasure in being. To find in the external figure the echoes of the internal figure: ah, so it’s true I wasn’t just imagining it: I exist.

And because of that very fact of having seen herself in the mirror, she felt how small her condition was because a body is smaller than the thought — to the point that it would be useless to have more freedom: her small condition wouldn’t allow her to make use of freedom. Whereas the condition of the Universe was so great that it wasn’t called a condition. Ulisses’s human condition was greater than hers which, nonetheless, was rich in day-to-day life. But her mismatch with the world was so great it was comic: she hadn’t managed to walk in step with the things around her. She’d already tried to keep pace with the world and had only made a fool of herself: one of her legs was always far too short. (The paradox was that she ought to accept her limping condition gladly, because it too was part of her condition.) (Only when she tried to keep up with the world did she shatter and frighten herself.) And suddenly she smiled to herself with a bitter smile, but that wasn’t bad because it too belonged to her condition. (Lóri often grew tired because she never stopped being.)

It seemed to her that Ulisses, if she plucked up the courage to tell him what she was feeling, and she never would, if she told him he’d reply more or less like this and very calmly: the condition can’t be cured but the fear of the condition is curable. He’d say that or something else — it irritated her because every time a sharper or wiser thought like this occurred to her, she’d suppose that Ulisses was the one who’d have it,

she, who recognized with gratitude the general superiority of men who smelled like men and not perfume, and recognized with irritation that in truth these thoughts she was calling sharp or wise were themselves the result of spending more time with Ulisses. And even the fact that her “sufferings” now came less frequently, which she owed to Ulisses—“sufferings”? was being pain? And was it only when being was no longer pain that Ulisses would consider she was ready to sleep with him? No, I won’t go, she then thought to shake loose of him. But this time she didn’t want him to go to the bar and wait for her: to offend him she wanted to tell him she wasn’t going, he who was used to her not showing up and not even letting him know. This time she’d tell him she wasn’t going, which was a more positive offense.

Had moments gone by or three thousand years? Moments according to the clock by which time is divided, three thousand years according to what Lóri felt when with heavy anguish, all dressed and made up, she reached the window. She was