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

In some way she’d already learned that each day was never common, was always extraordinary. And that it was up to her to suffer through or take pleasure in the day. She wanted the pleasure of the extraordinary which was so simple to find in common things: the thing didn’t need to be extraordinary in order for her to feel the extraordinary in it.

For days she seemed to meditate deeply but she wasn’t meditating on anything: she was only feeling the gentle pleasure, which was also physical, of well-being.

And now she was the one who was feeling the desire to be apart from Ulisses, for a while, to learn on her own how to be. Two weeks had already passed and Lóri would sometimes feel a longing so enormous that it was like a hunger. It would only pass when she could eat Ulisses’s presence. But sometimes the longing was so deep that his presence, she figured, would seem paltry; she would want to absorb Ulisses completely. This desire of hers to be Ulisses’s and for Ulisses to be hers for a complete unification was one of the most urgent feelings she’d ever had. She got a grip, didn’t call, happy she could feel.

But the nascent pleasure would ache so much in her chest that sometimes Lóri would have preferred to feel her usual pain instead of this unwanted pleasure. True joy had no possible explanation, not even the possibility of being understood — and seemed like the start of an irreparable perdition. That merging with Ulisses that had been and still was her desire, had become unbearably good. But she was aware that she still wasn’t up to enjoying a man. It was as if death were our great and final good, except it wasn’t death, it was unfathomable life that was taking on the grandeur of death. Lóri thought: I can’t have a petty life because it wouldn’t match the absoluteness of death.

From the minutes of joy she’d gone through, Lóri found out that you should let yourself be flooded bit by bit by joy — since it was life being born. And anyone who wasn’t strong enough to have pleasure should cover every nerve with a protective coating, with a coating of death in order to tolerate the mightiness of life. Lóri might have this coating in any formal occasion, in any kind of silence, in school lessons or in a bunch of meaningless words: it was what she did. For you don’t toy with pleasure. Pleasure was us.

And inside Lóri pleasure, through a lack of practice, was at the threshold of anguish. Her chest seized up, her strength crumbled: yes, it was anguish. And, if she did nothing to fight it, she was aware that it would be the worst anguish she’d ever felt. Then she grew afraid.

Then she called Ulisses. He answered and, if he’d been surprised, he hadn’t shown it. She could barely speak, she was so lost: she’d taken a step beyond pleasure and had frightened herself.

When she finally managed to speak, she said to him:

— Ulisses, I was doing well and suddenly I’m really not.

He said:

— You must have gone too far for a beginner.

She said:

— I don’t know if you still plan to see me someday . . .

He interrupted her with a gentle “but of course, whenever you want.”

Everything he’d said — especially the tone he’d used — was meant to soothe her. And she felt so strong through him that, restored and calm again, she said to him:

— I’d rather be on my own for a little longer, even if it’s so hard.

— It’s a sacrifice for me too. But do as you wish, if that’s what you need.

She then spoke with a tranquility she didn’t know she had in her:

— It is, Ulisses, it’s what I still need.

Once again Ulisses had helped her, especially with the tone of his voice that was so rich in inflections. And Lóri thought that might be one of the most important human and animal experiences: asking mutely for help and mutely that help being given. Because, despite the words, it had been mutely that he’d helped her. Lóri was feeling as if she were a dangerous tiger with an arrow buried in its flesh, and which had been circling slowly around frightened people to see who would take away its pain. And then a man, Ulisses, had felt that a wounded tiger isn’t dangerous. And approaching the beast, unafraid to touch her, he had carefully pulled out the buried arrow.

And the tiger? No, neither people nor animals can say thank you for certain things. So she, the tiger, had paced languorously in front of the man, hesitated, licked one of her paws and then, since neither a word or a grunt was what mattered, gone off in silence. Lóri would never forget the help she’d received when she could only manage to stammer with fear.

And Lóri continued in her search for the world.

She went to the fruit and vegetable and fish and flower market: you could get everything at those stalls, full of shouts, of people jostling, squeezing the produce to see if it was good — Lóri went to see the abundance of the earth that was brought each week to a street near her house as an offering to the God and to men. For her survey of the nonhuman world, in order to make contact with the living neutrality of things that, while not thinking, were nevertheless living, she would wander through the stalls and it was hard to get close to any of them, there were so many women milling about with bags and carts.

At last she saw: pure purple blood running from a crushed beet root on the ground. But her gaze fell on a basket of potatoes. They had different shapes