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

for anything. Hadn’t she, just after birth taken by chance and necessity the path she’d taken — which?—and wouldn’t she have always been what she now was really being: a peasant who is in a field where it’s raining. Not even thanking the God or Nature. The rain wasn’t giving thanks for anything either. Without gratitude or ingratitude. Lóri was a woman, she was a person, a watchfulness, an inhabited body looking at the thick rain fall. As the rain wasn’t grateful for not being hard like a rock: she was the rain. Maybe she was this, exactly this: living. And despite just living she was full of a tame joy, that of a horse that eats from your hand. Lóri was tamely happy.

And suddenly, but without a fright, she felt an extreme urge to give this secret night to someone. And that someone was Ulisses. Her heart started to pound, and she felt pale because all her blood, she felt, had drained from her face, all because she felt so suddenly Ulisses’s desire and her own desire. She stood there for a moment, for one unbalanced moment. Then her heart pounded even faster and louder because she realized she wouldn’t put it off any longer, it would be tonight.

She got from her bag his address written on the napkin, put her raincoat over her short nightdress, and in the coat pocket put some money. And without any makeup on her face, with what was left of her short hair falling over her forehead and neck, she went out to hail a cab. It had all been so quick and intense that she hadn’t even thought to change out of her nightdress, or put on her makeup.

Maybe out of a need to protect that too-young soul, in him and in her, he without humiliating himself, but with unexpected devotion and also begging mercy so they wouldn’t hurt each other in this first birth — maybe for all those reasons he knelt before her. And for Lóri that was very nice. Especially because she was aware that it was nice for him too — it was after covering great distances that a man would finally understand that he needed to kneel before his woman as if before his mother. And for Lóri it was nice because the man’s head was close to her knees and close to her hands, in her lap which was her hottest part. And she could make her best gesture: with hands that were both quivering and firm, take that tired head which was her fruit and his. That man’s head belonged to that woman.

Never had a human been closer to another human being. And Lóri’s pleasure was finally opening her hands and letting slip away without greed the full-emptiness that before had so fiercely been grasping her. And suddenly the surge of joy: she noticed that she was opening her hands and her heart but that she could do so without danger! I’m not losing anything! I’m finally giving myself and what happens when I’m giving myself is that I receive, receive. Careful, is there a danger in the heart’s being free?

She realized, while gently stroking the man’s dark hair, she realized that in this spreading-out of hers was contained the still-dangerous pleasure of being. Yet a strange security was coming too: it came from the sudden certainty that she’d always have something to spend and give. So there was no more greed with her full-emptiness that was her soul, and she’d spend it in the name of a man and of a woman.

— Tonight seems like a dream to me.

— But it’s not. It’s that reality is unbelievable.

— What’s that bell ringing?

— It’s the Glória clock that rings every fifteen minutes with chimes that terrify the pigeons.

Lóri had only one fear: that Ulisses, the great Ulisses whose head she was holding, would let her down. Like her father who had overburdened her with contradictions: he had turned her, his daughter, into his protector. And she, in her childhood, couldn’t even look at her father when he was happy about something, because he, the strong one, the wise one, became in his joys entirely innocent and so disarmed. Oh God, her father would forget for a few moments that he was mortal. And would make her, a girl, shoulder the weight of the responsibility of knowing that our most naive and most animal pleasures would die too. In those instants when he’d forget he was going to die, he would turn her, a girl, into a Pietà, the mother of men.

But with Ulisses it felt different now. He’d never been humble in love, out of wonder, he was becoming humble. She didn’t realize how, there on his knees, he’d got her to kneel beside him on the floor, without her feeling awkward. And once the two were kneeling he finally kissed her.

He kissed her for a long time until both could let go, and they sat looking each other in the eye without shame. They both knew they’d already gone too far. And they were still feeling the danger of surrendering so totally. They remained silent. That was when lying on the floor they loved each other so deeply that they were scared of their own greatness.

— Slowly, Lóri, slowly, we have the whole night, slowly.

They seemed to understand that when love was too big and when one person couldn’t live without the other, this love was no longer applicable: nor could the beloved receive so much. Lóri was confused to notice that even in love you had to keep your common sense and sense of proportion. For an instant, as if they’d planned it, he kissed her hand, humanizing himself. For there was the danger of, in a manner of speaking, dying of love.

And as soon as the danger passed, he kissed her again