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

the tree in the garden was saying. I am being, said the approaching waiter. I am being, said the green water in the pool. I am being, said the blue sea of the Mediterranean. I am being, said our green and treacherous sea. I am being, said the spider and stunned its prey with its venom. I am being, said a child who’d slipped on the tiles and cried out in fear: Mama! I am being, said the mother who had a son who was slipping on the tiles around the pool. But the light was going quiet for the night and they were surprised again, the dusky light. Lóri was fascinated by this meeting with herself, she fascinated herself and almost hypnotized herself.

There they were. Until the light that preceded the dusk started thinning out between shadows and greater transparencies, and the sky threatened a revelation. The light was turning spectral into near absence, though that kind of neutrality wasn’t yet touched by the darkness: it didn’t look like dusk but instead like the most imponderable part of a dawn. All that was absolutely impossible, that’s why Lóri knew she was seeing it. If it were something reasonable, she would have known nothing of it.

And when everything started to get unbelievable, night fell.

Lóri, for the first time in her life, felt a power that was starting to seem like a threat to what she’d been until then. She then spoke her soul to Ulisses:

— One day it will be the world with its haughty impersonality versus my extreme individuality as a person but we’ll be one and the same.

She looked at Ulisses with the humility she was suddenly feeling and saw with surprise his surprise. Only then was she surprised at herself. The two looked at each other in silence. She seemed to be asking for help against what she’d somehow involuntarily said. And he with moist eyes didn’t want her to flee and said:

— Say that again, Lóri.

— I no longer know what it was.

— But I do, I’ll always know. You literally said: one day it will be the world with its haughty impersonality versus my extreme individuality as a person but we’ll be one and the same.

— Yes.

Lóri was softly astounded. So this was happiness. At first she felt empty. Then her eyes moistened: it was happiness, but how mortal I am, how the love for the world transcends me. Love for mortal life was killing her sweetly, bit by bit. And what can I do? What can I do with happiness? What can I do with this strange and piercing peace, which is already starting to hurt me like an anguish, like a great silence of spaces? To whom can I give my happiness, which is already starting to scratch me a bit and scares me. No, I don’t want to be happy. I prefer mediocrity. Ah, thousands of people don’t have the nerve to linger a while longer in this unknown thing which is feeling happy and they prefer mediocrity. She said goodbye to Ulisses almost in a run: he was the danger.

That night Lóri stayed awake.

It was a very lovely night: it looked like the world. Dark space was studded with stars, the sky in mute eternal watchfulness. And the earth below with its mountains and its seas.

Lóri was sad. It wasn’t a difficult sadness. It was more like a sadness of longing. She was alone. With eternity in front of and behind her. The human is alone.

She wanted to step back. But she kept feeling it was too late: once the first step was taken it was irreversible, and kept pushing her on to more, more, more! What do I want, my God. The thing is she wanted everything.

As if she were passing from the man-ape to pithecanthropus erectus. And then there was no going back: the struggle for survival among mysteries. And the thing the human being aspires to most is to become a human being.

Since she wasn’t sleepy, she went to the kitchen to warm up some coffee. She put too much sugar in the cup and the coffee was dreadful. This brought her to a more everyday reality. She rested a bit from being.

She was hearing the sound of the waves of the sea of Ipanema breaking on the beach. It was a different night, because while Lóri was thinking and doubting, everyone else was sleeping. She went to the window, looked at the street with its few streetlamps and the stronger smell of the sea. It was dark for Lóri. So dark. She thought about people she knew: they were sleeping or having fun. Some were drinking whiskey. Her coffee then became even sweeter, even more impossible. And the darkness of loners grew so much greater.

She was falling into a sadness without pain. It wasn’t bad. It was part of life, certainly. The next day she would probably have some joy, also without great ecstasies, just a little joy, and that wasn’t bad either.

That’s how she tried to make peace with the mediocrity of living.

But it was late: she was already yearning for new ecstasies of joy or of pain. What she needed was everything the most human of humans had. Even if it was pain, she’d bear it, unafraid of again wanting to die. She’d bear everything. Provided she was given everything.

No. No one would give it to her. She herself would have to be the one to try to get it. Ill at ease, she kept pacing her apartment, without anywhere she wanted to sit. Her guardian angel had abandoned her. She herself had to be her own guardian.

And she now had a responsibility to be herself. In this world of choices, she seemed to have chosen.

Once again she went to the window: she saw the landscape that was familiar to her by day but