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

The next day she patiently tried dusk again. She was waiting. With her senses sharpened by the world that surrounded her as if she were entering Venus’s unknown lands. Nothing happened.

LUMINESCENCE . . .

From Ulisses she’d learned to have the courage to have faith — lots of courage, faith in what? In faith itself, since faith can be a real scare, it can mean falling into the abyss, Lóri was afraid of falling into the abyss and was holding on to one of Ulisses’s hands while Ulisses’s other hand was pushing her into the abyss — soon she’d have to let go of the hand that was weaker than the one pushing her, and fall, life isn’t a joke because in the middle of the day you die.

A human being’s most pressing need was to become a human being.

And there was the night of terror. She kept hearing footsteps coming and going. She peeked out of a gap between the blinds and saw it was the same half-crazed man, with long monkey arms, who’d followed her that day. His slow steps were coming and going and returning. Lóri knew he was waiting for her. Through the blinds she saw that he was smoking and patiently walking back and forth.

She couldn’t bear it any longer and called Ulisses. He said he’d be there in minutes. Minutes or interminable hours? Had his car’s brake cable broken or something like that?

Finally she heard his car stop. From the window she saw the two men talking, and a calm whisper that was carrying on too long.

At last she saw the man go away, at the same time that Ulisses was saying to her in a low voice:

— Lóri, it’s fine. It was a man you looked at quite a bit today, maybe you didn’t realize, and he followed you hopefully, hoping you’d open the door.

— Come to the door.

He came:

— Would you like a coffee? She asked as a pretext to get him to come in.

He stayed on the threshold. She was standing, in a short and transparent nightdress. He was going to say: “you can sleep easy now, I found a way to get him to go.” But before he said that he stopped short, his lips pursed, and looked her up and down. Finally he said:

— I’ll call in the morning.

With the despair of a woman scorned, she heard his car pull away.

Ulisses’s gaze robbed her of sleep. She looked herself all over in the mirror in order to figure out what Ulisses had seen. And she found herself attractive. Yet he hadn’t wanted to come in.

She waited unhurriedly for dawn. The best light for living was at dawn, faint such a faint promise of early morning. She knew that, had experienced it countless times. Like a painter who seeks the light most suited to him, Lóri preferred for the discovery of what’s called living those shy hours at the vague start of the day. At dawn she’d step onto her little terrace and if she was lucky it would be dawn with a full moon. She’d learned all this through Ulisses. In the past she’d avoided feeling. She still did but now with short incursions into life.

But she didn’t fear the moon because she was more lunar than solar and could see with wide-open eyes in the dark dawns the sinister moon in the sky. So she bathed all over in the lunar rays, as there are others who sunbathed. And was becoming profoundly limpid.

In this cool dawn she went to the terrace and reflecting a bit came to the frightening certainty that her thoughts were as supernatural as a story that takes place after death. She had simply felt, suddenly, that thinking wasn’t natural for her. After that she’d reached the conclusion that she didn’t have a day-to-day but a life-to-life. And that life that was hers in the dawns was supernatural with its countless moons bathing her in such a terrible silver liquid.

More than anything she’d now learned to approach things without linking them to their function. It now seemed she could see how things and people would be before we gave them the meaning of our human hope or our pain. If there were no humans on earth, it would be like this: it would rain, things would get drenched, alone, and would dry and then burn drily under the sun and get toasted in the dust. Without giving the world our meaning, how frightened Lóri was! She was scared of the rain when she separated it from the city and the open umbrellas and the fields soaking up the water. Then the thing she called death would attract her so strongly that she could only call bravery the way in which, out of solidarity and pity for others, she was still bound to what she called life. It would be profoundly amoral not to wait for death as all others wait for that final hour. It would have been sneaky of her to leap ahead in time, and unforgivable to be cleverer than others. For that reason, despite her intense curiosity about death, Lóri was waiting.

Morning broke.

Whatever had happened in Lóri’s thought in that dawn was as inexpressible and incommunicable as the voice of a hushed human being. Only the silence of a mountain was comparable. The silence of Switzerland, for example. She remembered fondly the time when her father was rich and they’d travel for several months a year.

As intransmissible as humans were, they were always trying to communicate with gestures, with stutters, with badly said