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

There was a pause. He finally asked:

— Physically not well?

She answered that it was nothing physical. Then he said:

— Lóri, said Ulisses, and suddenly he seemed serious though he was speaking calmly, Lóri: one of the things I’ve learned is that we ought to live despite. Despite, we should eat. Despite, we should love. Despite, we should die. It’s even often this despite that spurs us on. The despite was what gave me an anguish that when unsatisfied was the creator of my own life. It was despite that I stopped on the street and stood looking at you while you were waiting for a taxi. And immediately desiring you, that body of yours that isn’t even pretty, but it’s the body I want. But I want it all, including the soul. That’s why it doesn’t matter that you’re not coming, I’ll wait as long as I have to.

— Why didn’t you ever marry? she asked out of the blue.

— Because — and his voice was the voice of someone smiling — because I never felt the need to and luckily I had the women I wanted.

She said goodbye, bowed her head with modesty and joy. For despite, she’d had joy. He’d wait for her, she knew that now. Until she learned.

Everything was calm now. And as she remembered her own Biblical image, as she’d looked in the mirror before, she found it so somehow lovely, that she had to give this aspect of beauty to someone. And that someone could only be Ulisses who knew how to see the disguised and innermost beauty that a common person couldn’t. But he, at a glance, could. He was a man, she was a woman, and a miracle more extraordinary than this could only be compared to the falling star that crosses the black sky almost imaginarily and leaves as its trail the vivid amazement of a living Universe. He was a man and she was a woman.

She who had so often reached the point of hating Ulisses, even while still getting him to want her.

Ah! she screamed suddenly mute, may the God help me achieve the impossible, only the impossible matters to me!

She didn’t even understand what she meant by this, but as if she had been heard in her greatest human plea and somehow, just by wanting it, had touched the impossible, she said quietly, audibly, humbly: thank you.

Through her grave defects — which she might one day be able to mention without boasting — she had now come to be able to love. Even that glorification: she loved the Nothing. The awareness of her permanent human fall was leading her to the love of the Nothing. And those falls — like those of Christ who fell several times beneath the weight of the cross — and those falls were what were starting to make her life. Maybe it was her “despites” that, Ulisses had said, despites full of anguish and lack of understanding of herself, were leading her to build bit by bit a life. With stones of poor material she might have been building the horror, and accepting the mystery of with horror loving the unknown God. She didn’t know what to do with herself, already born, except this: Thou, the God, whom I love like one falling into the nothing.

After that it was easy to call Ulisses and tell him she’d changed her mind and he could wait for her in the bar. What she was doing to herself was cruel: taking advantage of her raw living flesh in order to get to know herself better, since the wound was open. But it hurt too much to head in that direction. So she preferred to calm down and decided that, in the taxi, she’d think about Ulisses’s straight nose, his face marked by the slow apprenticeship of life, his lips that she’d never kissed.

Except she didn’t want to go empty-handed. And as if she were bringing him a flower, she wrote on a piece of paper some words that would give him pleasure: “There’s a being who lives inside me as if it were his house, and it is. It’s a black and shiny horse that despite being completely wild — for it never lived in anyone before nor has anyone ever bridled and saddled it — despite being completely wild it has for precisely that reason the primal sweetness of someone who is not afraid: sometimes it eats from my hand. Its muzzle is moist and fresh. I kiss its muzzle. When I die, the black horse will lose its home and suffer a lot. Unless he chooses another house and that other house isn’t afraid of something at the same time wild and tender. I should mention that he has no name: just call him and you’ll get his name right. Or not, but, once he’s been called with sweetness and authority, he’ll come. If he sniffs and feels that a house-body is free, he’ll trot without a sound and come. I should also say that you shouldn’t fear his whinnying: people make the mistake of thinking they’re the ones whinnying with pleasure or rage, people take fright at the excess of sweetness which this is for the first time.”

She smiled. Ulisses would like it, he’d think she was the horse. Was she?

As if a herd of transparent gazelles were passing through the air of the world at dusk — that’s what Lóri managed some weeks later. The translucid victory was as light and promising as pre-sexual pleasure.

She’d become more skillful: as if slowly getting used to the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and strangely to Mars most of all. She was on a terrestrial platform from which for split seconds she seemed to see the super-reality of what is truly real. More real — Ulisses said to her when she