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

words and bad words. Morning was already well underway when she made strong coffee, drank it and got ready to communicate with Ulisses, since Ulisses was her man. She wrote:

“Night is so vast in the mountains. So uninhabited. The Spanish night has the scent and the hard echo of the tap dance, the Italian night has the warm sea even in its absence. But the night of Bern has the silence.

“We can try in vain to read so as not to hear it, to think quickly so as to disguise it, to invent a plan, a fragile bridge that barely connects us to the suddenly improbable next day. How to get beyond the peace that lies in wait for us. Mountains so high that despair becomes bashful. The ears prick, the head bends, the whole body listens: not a sound. No possible rooster. How to be within reach of that profound meditation of silence? Of this silence without memory of words. If thou art death, how to bless thee?

“It’s a silence, Ulisses, that doesn’t sleep: it’s insomniac: immobile but insomniac and without ghosts. It’s terrible — not a single ghost. It’s useless to want to populate it with the possibility of a door that opens with a creak, of a curtain that opens and ‘says’ something. It’s empty and without promise. Like me, Ulisses? If at least there were wind. Wind is rage, rage is life. But during the nights I spent in Bern there was no wind and every leaf was inlaid on the branch of the immobile trees. Or it was the time of year for snow. Which is silent but leaves a trace — everything turns white, children laugh playing with the flakes, footsteps creak and leave prints. This is so intense during the day that the night is inhabited still. There’s a continuity that is life. But this silence doesn’t leave evidence. You can’t speak of silence the way you speak of snow. Silence is the profound secret night of the world. And you can’t speak of silence the way you speak of snow: have you felt the silence of those nights? No one who has heard tells. There’s a freemasonry around the silence that consists of not speaking of it and of worshipping it without words.

“Night falls, Ulisses, with the little joys of someone turning on the lights, with the fatigue that does so much to justify the day. The children of Bern fall asleep, the last doors are closed. The streets shine on the paving stones and shine already empty. And finally the lights in the houses go out. Just the odd lit streetlight to illuminate the silence.

“But that first silence, Ulisses, is not silence yet. Wait a bit, because the leaves on the trees will adjust their positions, some belated footstep might be heard going hopefully up some stairs.

“But there’s a moment in which from the rested body the watchful spirit rises, and from the Earth and the Moon. Then it, the silence, appears. And the heart quickens in recognition: for it is the silence inside us.

“You can quickly think of the day that passed. Or of the friends that passed and were lost forever. But it’s no use to try to avoid it: the silence is there. Even the worst suffering, that of lost friendship, is just an attempt to escape. For if at first the silence seems to expect a reply — what an urge, Ulisses, to be called and to respond; soon you discover that it demands nothing of you, perhaps only your silence. But the members of the masonic order know this. How many hours I wasted in the dark supposing that silence judges you — how I waited in vain to be judged by the God. Justifications arise, tragic fabricated justifications, humble apologies to the point of indignity. It’s so pleasant for human beings to show at last their indignity and be forgiven with the excuse that humans are humiliated beings from birth.

“Until you discover, Ulisses — it doesn’t even want your indignity. It is the Silence. Is it the God?

“You can also try to trick it. Let as if by chance the book on the bedside table fall to the floor. But — horror — the book falls into the silence and gets lost in its mute and motionless whirl. And what if a crazed bird were to sing? Vain hope. The song would just cross the silence like a light flute. The thing that most resembled, in the realm of sound, the silence, was a flute.

“So, if you dare, you stop fighting. Do you enter it, go into it to Hell? You go with it, we the only ghosts of a night in Bern. Enter. Don’t wait out the rest of the darkness before it, just the silence itself. It will be as if we were in a ship so uncommonly enormous that we didn’t realize we were in a ship. And as if it were sailing so slowly that we didn’t realize we were moving. A man can’t do more than this. Living on the edge of death and of the stars is a tenser vibration than the veins can stand. There’s not even a son of a star and a woman as a merciful intermediary. The heart must present itself alone to the Nothing and alone beat out in silence its palpitations in the shadows. You only sense your own heart in your ears. When it presents itself completely naked, it’s not even communication, it’s submission. For we were only made for the little silence, not for the silence of the stars.

“And if you don’t dare, don’t enter. Wait out the rest of the darkness before the silence, only your feet wet from the surf of something that spreads out inside us. Wait. One insoluble in the other. One beside the other, two things that do not see one another in the darkness. Wait. Not for the end of silence but for the blessed