An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector (a book to read TXT) 📗

But her God was of no use to her: He had been made in her own image, looked too much like her, fretted about solutions — except in Him it was creative anxiety — the same severity she had. And when He was good, He was just the way she would be if she had goodness. The true God, not made in her image and likeness, was therefore completely misunderstood by her, and she didn’t know if He could understand her. Her God had been terrestrial until now, and no longer was. From now on, if she wanted to pray, it would be like praying blindly to the cosmos and to the Nothing. And above all she could no longer ask the God for anything. She discovered that until now she had prayed to an I-myself, but one that was powerful, magnified and omnipotent, calling it the God and the way a child sees in his father the figure of a king.

Then Lóri woke a little to a more objective reality around her, changed the position of her head on her bent arm. She reflected that she’d been struggling with the God for some minutes, tired, exhausted, she murmured without any modulation in her voice: I don’t understand anything. It was such an indubitable truth that both her body and her soul sagged somewhat and so she rested a little. In that instant she was just one of the women of the world, and not an I, and joined as if for an eternal and aimless march of men and women on pilgrimage toward the Nothing. What was a Nothing was exactly the Everything.

She had demystified one of the few glories from which she lived.

She knew that for now she was hurting a lot and that later she’d hurt even more because she’d suffer the lack of That which, even if it didn’t exist, she loved because she was one of its cells. And she might be saved: because anguish was the inability to feel pain at last. She thought: I never had my own pain. Through a lack of glory, she’d suffered manageably whatever she had to suffer inside her. But now on her own, loving a God that no longer existed, she might finally touch the pain that was her own. Anguish too was the fear of finally feeling pain.

She was already missing what had been: she wouldn’t even visit Santa Luzia church, which was her refugee from the numbing heat of the city, anymore. She was remembering the last time she’d gone in and sat in the limpid shade amid the saints. She’d thought: “Christ was Christ for others, but who? Who was a Christ for Christ?” He’d had to go directly to the God. And she, as she sat in the pew, had also wanted to be able to go directly to the Omnipotence, without having to go through Christ’s human condition which was also hers and everyone else’s. And, oh God, not wanting to go to Him through the merciful condition of Christ might once again be nothing more than the fear of loving. She got up and went back to her embroidery.

That’s when the phone rang. Even before answering she knew it had to be Ulisses. She put her embroidery on a chair and let the phone ring a little more, not wanting to look too eager.

Yes, it was him. And as if a week hadn’t gone by, he said he was at his club’s pool and why didn’t she meet him there, all she had to say at the gate was that she was his guest. She didn’t want to see him at the pool, but the fear of losing him made her agree, though fearing the moment they’d see each other almost naked.

An hour and a half later — the time needed to buy a new swimsuit — she was changed in a cubicle, and without the courage to go out. She wrapped herself in the bathrobe and went out to find him sitting on the edge of the pool. She tried to hide her deep reluctance to appear practically naked, finally took off the robe, she wasn’t even looking at him. They sat without speaking, he was drinking a gin and tonic.

A lot of time had passed or maybe not much but for her the silence was becoming intolerable, while to hide it she was swinging her feet in the green water. Until at last he spoke and without crudeness said:

— Look at that girl over there, for example, the one in the red swimsuit. Look how she walks with the natural pride of someone who has a body. You, besides hiding what is called the soul, are ashamed to have a body.

She didn’t reply, but, struck, became imperceptibly stiffer. Afterward, sensing he wasn’t going to say anything else, she slowly managed to relax her muscles. She thought — inasmuch as she could think while wearing a swimsuit in front of him — she thought: how could I explain to him, even if I wanted to, and she didn’t want to, the long journey she’d taken to reach that possible moment in which her legs were swinging in the pool. And he didn’t think it was a big deal. How to explain that, coming from as far away inside herself as she had, being half-alive was already a victory. Because finally, once the fright of being naked in front of him was broken, she was breathing calmly, already half-alive.

As she made a movement, which was to toss her hair back, she glimpsed his face, and realized he was looking at her and desiring her. She then felt an embarrassment that was now different from what he’d called her embarrassment about having a body. It was the embarrassment of someone who desires too, as Lóri had desired to press her chest and limbs against the God. Feeling very clearly her own desire,