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

No — it wasn’t red. It was the sensual union of the day with its duskiest hour. It was almost night and there it was still light. If only there was red visibly, the way it was inside her intrinsically. But it was a heat of light without color, and motionless. No, the woman couldn’t breathe. She was dry and limpid. And outside the only birds that were flying had taxidermied feathers. If the woman would close her eyes in order not to see the heat, for it was a visible heat, only then would the slow hallucination appear symbolizing it: she was seeing thick elephants approach, sweet and heavy elephants, their skin dry, though soaked inside their flesh by an unbearable hot tenderness; they had trouble bearing themselves, which made them slow and heavy.

It was still too early to turn on the lights, which at least would hasten the night. The night that wouldn’t, and wouldn’t, and wouldn’t come, that was impossible. And her love that now was impossible — that was dry the way the fever of someone who doesn’t sweat was love without opium or morphine. And “I love you” was a splinter you couldn’t remove with tweezers. A splinter buried in the toughest part of the sole of your foot.

Ah, and the lack of thirst. Heat with thirst would be bearable. But ah, the lack of thirst. There was nothing but lacks and absences. And not even will. Just splinters with no protruding ends by which to pluck and expel them. Only the teeth were moist. Inside a voracious and parched mouth the moist but hard teeth — and especially the mouth voracious for nothingness. And the nothingness was hot on that late afternoon eternalized by the planet Mars.

Her eyes open and diamond. On the roofs the dry sparrows. “I love you, people,” was an impossible phrase. Humanity for her was like eternal death that nevertheless hadn’t had the relief of finally dying. Nothing, nothing was dying on that parched afternoon, nothing rotting. And at six o’clock it was like noon. It was noon with a watchful noise from a water pump’s motor, a pump that had been working for so long without water and that had become rusted iron: for two days there had been no water in different parts of the city. Nothing had ever been as awake as her body without sweat and her diamond eyes, with all vibration stilled. And the God? No. Not even the anguish. Her chest empty, not contracted. There was no scream.

Meanwhile it was summer. An expansive summer like the empty playground during school holidays. Pain? None. No sign of a tear and no sweat. No salt. Just a heavy sweetness: like that of the slow hides of the elephants made of dried-out leather. The limpid and hot squalor. Think about her man? No, that was the splinter in the heart-bit of the foot again. Regret not having married and not having children? Fifteen children hung on her, without swinging in the absence of wind. Ah, if only her hands would start growing moist. Even if there were water, out of hatred she wouldn’t wash. It was out of hatred that there wasn’t water. Nothing was flowing. The difficulty was a motionless thing. It’s a diamond jewel. The cicada with its dry throat wouldn’t stop growling. And what if the God finally liquefies into rain? No. I don’t even want that. Out of calm dry hatred, this is what I want, this silence made of heat that the tough cicada makes you feel. Feel? There’s nothing to feel. Except this hard lack of the opium that soothes. I want this intolerable thing to keep going because I want eternity. I want this ongoing waiting like the red song of the cicada, because all this is the halted death, it’s the Eternity of trillions of years of stars and of the Earth, it’s rutting without desire, dogs without barking. It’s at this time that good and evil don’t exist. It’s the sudden forgiveness, we who nourish ourselves with the secret pleasure of punishment. Now it’s the indifference to forgiveness. For there is no more judgment. It’s not a forgiveness that comes after a judgment. It’s the absence of judge and felon. And it’s not raining, not raining. Menstruation doesn’t exist. The ovaries are two dry pearls. I’ll speak the truth to you: out of dry hatred, that’s exactly what I want, and for it not to rain.

And just then she hears something. A thing dry too that leaves her even drier of attention. It’s a roll of dry thunder, without a drop of saliva, that rolls, but where to? In the naked and absolutely blue sky there’s not a cloud of love crying. The thunder must be very far away. At the same time the air has a sugary scent of big elephants, and of sugary jasmine from the house next door. India invading Rio de Janeiro with its sugary women. A scent of cemetery carnations. Would everything change so quickly? For someone who had neither night nor rain nor rotting of wood in water — for someone who had nothing but pearls, would night really fall? Would there be wood rotting at last, carnations living off rain in the cemetery, rain that comes from Malaysia?

The urgency is still motionless but already has a trembling inside it. Lóri doesn’t realize that the trembling is her own, as she hadn’t realized that what was burning her wasn’t the hot dusk, and instead her own human heat. She only realizes that now some thing will change, that it will rain or night will fall. But she can’t bear the wait for a change, and before the rain falls, the diamond of her eyes liquefies into two tears.

And at last the sky softens.

Lóri called his number:

— I can’t come,