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

and nuanced colors. She took one of them in her two hands, and its round skin was smooth. The skin of the potato was dusky, and delicate like a newborn’s. Although, when she turned it this way and that, she could feel with her fingers the almost imperceptible presence of tiny buds, invisible to the naked eye. That potato was very lovely. She didn’t want to buy it because she didn’t want to see it shrivel at home and certainly didn’t want to cook it.

The potato is born inside the earth.

And this was a joy she learned right there: the potato is born inside the earth. And inside the potato, if you peel it, it is whiter than a peeled apple.

The potato was unsurpassed as food. She realized this, and it was a light hallelujah.

She slipped through the hundreds of people at the market and inside her she had grown. She stopped for a moment at the stall selling eggs.

They were white.

At the fish stand she squinted and once again inhaled the tangy smell of the fish, and the smell was their souls after death.

The pears were so replete with themselves that, in that ripeness they were almost at their peak. Lóri bought one and right there at the market bit into the flesh of the pear which yielded totally. Lóri was aware that only someone who has eaten a succulent pear could understand her. And she bought a kilo. Maybe not to eat at home, just for decoration, and to be able to look at them for a few more days.

As if she were a painter who had just emerged from an abstract phase, now, without becoming figurative, she had entered a new realism. In this realism each thing at the market had its own importance, connected to a whole — but what was the whole? For as long as she didn’t know, she turned her attention to objects and shapes, as if whatever existed were part of an exhibition of painting and sculpture. If the object were of bronze — at the stall selling trinkets for presents, she saw the small, badly made bronze statuette — the object of bronze, it almost burned in her hands because she enjoyed handling it so much. She bought a bronze ashtray, because the statuette was too ugly.

And suddenly she saw the turnips. She was seeing everything to the point of filling herself with a plenitude of vision and with her handling of the fruits of the earth. Each fruit was unwonted, though familiar and hers. Most had an exterior that was meant to be seen and recognized. Which delighted Lóri. Sometimes she’d compare herself to the fruits, and despising her external appearance, she’d eat herself internally, full of living juice as she was. She was trying to leave pain, as if trying to leave another reality that had lasted her whole life up to that point.

But her search wasn’t easy. Her difficulty was being what she was, which was suddenly turning into an insurmountable difficulty.

One day she sought among the papers strewn throughout the drawers of her house the test written by the best pupil in her class, which she wanted to have another look at in order to give the boy more guidance. And she couldn’t find it, though she remembered that, when she’d put it away, she’d been careful not to lose it, since it was a precious piece of writing. She looked in vain. So she wondered, as she had for years, since she often lost the things she kept: if I were I and had to keep an important document where would I put it? Usually this would help her to find the object.

But this time she felt so pressured by the phrase “if I were I” that the hunt for the paper lost importance and she started thinking without wanting to, which for her meant feeling.

And she wasn’t feeling comfortable. “If I were I” had made her feel awkward: the lie in which she’d been living so comfortably had just been shifted slightly from the spot where it had settled. Yet she’d read biographies of people who had suddenly become themselves and changed their lives completely, at least their inner lives. Lóri was thinking that if she were she, acquaintances wouldn’t greet her on the street because even her countenance would have changed. “If I were I” seemed to represent the greatest danger in living, seemed like another return of the unknown.

At the same time, Lóri had an intuition that, once the early turbulence of the coming intimate celebrations had passed, she’d finally have the experience of the world. She was well aware, she’d finally experience in full the pain of the world. And her own pain as a mortal creature, the pain she’d learned not to feel. But she’d sometimes be swept up by an ecstasy of pure and legitimate pleasure that she could scarcely imagine. Though actually she was starting to imagine it because she felt herself smiling and also felt the kind of bashfulness you feel in the face of something that is too big. To be what you are was too big and uncontrollable. Lóri was feeling a kind of hesitation about going too far. She’d always held back a bit as if gripping the reins of a horse that could gallop off and take her God knows where. She was keeping herself back. Why and for what? What was she saving herself for? It was a certain fear of her capabilities, strong or weak. Maybe she was containing herself out of the fear of not knowing a person’s limits.

Two days later Ulisses called her and asked if she still needed to be alone. She replied, holding back her despair and holding back the desire to fall into his arms so he could protect her, she replied: I still do.

Her despair