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

A few nights later she was sleeping. And though it sounds like a contradiction, softly all of a sudden the pleasure of being asleep had awoken her with a gentle start. She stayed lying down for a while and was still feeling the taste in her whole body of that rural area where, underground, she had spread from the roots the tentacles of some dream. It most definitely, by the way, was a good dream that had woken her.

She got up and went to drink a glass of water, without wanting to turn on the lights, trying to get oriented in the darkness which wasn’t total because of the strong light from the house next door. It was only eleven at night. Since she’d gone to bed at ten, she’d only slept an hour, woken by the pleasure of sleeping.

She went to drink the water slowly on the terrace. She felt by the smell of the air and the restlessness of the branches of the trees that it would soon rain. You couldn’t see the moon. The air was muggy, there was a strong smell of jasmine coming from the neighbor’s jasmine bush. Lóri stood on the terrace, somewhat suffocated by the intense perfume. Through the drunkenness of the jasmine, for a moment a revelation came to her, in the form of a feeling — and in the next instant she’d forgotten whatever she’d learned from the revelation. It was as if the pact with the God were this: see and forget, in order not to be struck down by the unbearable knowledge.

Standing there, softer than before, in the semidarkness of the terrace, another revelation came to her that lasted longer because it was the intuitive result of things she’d previously thought rationally. What came to her was the slightly shocking certainty that our feelings and thoughts are as supernatural as a story that takes place after death. And she didn’t understand what she meant by that. She let it linger, the thought, because she knew it was covering another, more profound and more comprehensible. Simply, with the glass of water in her hand, she was discovering that thinking wasn’t natural for her. Then she reflected a little, with her head cocked to one side, on how she didn’t have a day-to-day. It was a life-to-life. And that life was supernatural.

At that hour of the night she was experiencing that fear of being alive, having as her only help the helplessness of being alive. Life was so strong that it was helping itself through its own helplessness. Being alive — she felt — she would from now on make her motive and theme. With gentle curiosity, enveloped in the scent of jasmine, attentive to the hunger of existence, and attentive to her own attention, she seemed to be eating delicately alive what was very much hers. The hunger of living, my God. How far she was going in the wretchedness of need: she’d exchange an eternity after death for eternity while she was alive.

Until she really was hungry, she fetched a pear and came back to the terrace. She was eating. Her human soul was the only possible way of not crashing disastrously into her physical organization, it was such a perfect machine. Her human soul was also the only way given to her to accept without madness the general soul of the world. If the gears failed for half a fraction of a second, she’d fall into nothing.

Despite the threat of looming rain and of the anguish the suffocating jasmine was already giving her, she was discovering, discovering. And it wasn’t raining, wasn’t raining. But the darkest hour preceded that thing that she didn’t even want to try to define. That thing was a light inside her, and people would call it joy, tame joy.

She felt a bit bewildered as if a heart had been pulled out of her, and in its place was now a sudden absence, an almost palpable absence, of something that before had been an organ bathed in the darkness of pain.

Because she was feeling the great pain. In that pain however was the opposite of a numbness: it was a lighter and more silent way to exist. Who am I? she wondered in great danger. And the smell of the jasmine bush replied: I am my perfume.

She saw that, like the restless swaying of the neighbor’s trees, she too was indocile, restless. She’d organized herself in order to console herself for the anguish and pain. But how do you find consolation from the mixture of simple and calm joy with anguish? She wasn’t used to doing without consolation.

Then it finally started to rain.

First a drizzle, then so heavy that it made noise on all the rooftops.

I get it, she suddenly thought. She realized that she was seeking in the rain a joy so great that it became acute, which would put her in touch with an acute feeling like the acuteness of pain. But the search had been pointless. She was at the terrace door and all that was happening was this: she was seeing the rain and the rain was falling in harmony with her. She and the rain were busy flowing with violence.

How long would this state of hers last? She noticed that with this question she was taking her pulse in order to feel where the earlier painful pounding might be.

And she saw that there was no pounding pain as before. Just this: it was pouring rain and she was seeing the rain and getting soaked.

What simplicity.

She’d never imagined that the world and she would ever reach this point of ripe wheat. The rain and Lóri were as joined as the water of the rain was to the rain. And she, Lóri, wasn’t giving thanks