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

came from not even knowing where and how to start. She only knew that she’d started a new thing and could never return to her former dimensions. And she also knew that she should start modestly, in order not to get discouraged. And she knew that she should abandon forever the main road. And go down her true path which was the narrow byways.

It was the next day when as she was walking slowly and tiredly down the street, she saw the girl standing and waiting for a bus. And her heart started to beat — because she’d decided to try to make contact with a person. She stopped.

— Is the bus late? she asked, shy and a little disoriented.

— Yes.

She’d failed. Her heart beat even louder because she felt she wasn’t going to give up.

— Your dress is really pretty. I like that big purple print.

The girl smiled immediately.

— I bought it in a shop, and it was cheaper than if I’d had it made. My seamstress is a nightmare, with each dress she gets more expensive, and that’s not counting the notions I pay extra for. So I think—

Lóri didn’t hear anything more: she kept smiling blissfully: she’d made contact with a stranger. She interrupted her somewhat brusquely but with a grateful sweetness in her voice:

— Goodbye. Thank you, thank you very much.

The girl replied in surprise:

— Don’t you want to know where I bought it?

— There’s no need, thank you.

She still managed to glimpse the girl’s astonishment. She kept walking. No, that wasn’t the right type of contact. Deeper contact was what mattered. When she got home she called Ulisses:

— What should I do? I can’t bear living. Life is so short and I can’t bear living.

— But there’s so much, Lóri, that you still don’t know. And there’s a place where despair is a light and a love.

— And afterward?

— Afterward is Nature.

— You’re calling death Nature.

— No, Lóri, I’m calling us Nature.

— Can it be that all lives were like this?

— I don’t know, Lóri.

Again, since he hadn’t feared the wounded tiger and had pulled out the arrow buried in its body. Oh God! Having just one life was so little!

Love for Ulisses came like a wave that she’d managed to hold back until then. But suddenly she was no longer wanting to hold it back.

And when she realized she was accepting love in full, her joy was so great that her heart started beating all through her body, it seemed to her as if a thousand hearts were beating in the depths of her person. A right-to-be possessed her, as if she’d just finished crying after being born. How? How to stretch birth out for a whole lifetime? She quickly went to the mirror to find out who Loreley was and to find out if she could be loved. But she got a shock when she saw herself.

I exist, I see that, but who am I? And she was afraid. It seemed to her that by feeling less pain, she’d lost the advantage of pain as a warning and symptom. She’d become incomparably more serene but in mortal danger: she could be a step from the death of her soul, a step from its already having died, and without the benefit of her own advance warning.

In her fright she called Ulisses. And his domestic said he wasn’t there. So every fifteen minutes, with her fear and pain unleashed, she’d call him. Until two hours later, he himself answered the phone:

— Ulisses, I can’t find an answer when I wonder who I am. I know a bit about me: I am the one who has my own life and yours too, I drink your life. But that doesn’t answer who I am!

— There’s no answer to that, Lóri. Don’t pretend you’re strong enough to ask the worst question. I myself still can’t ask who I am without getting lost.

And his voice had sounded like a lost man’s. Lóri was astounded. No, no, she wasn’t lost, she was even going to make a list of things she could do!

She sat with a blank page and wrote: eat — look at fruit in the market — see people’s faces — feel love — feel hate — have something not known and feel an unbearable suffering — wait impatiently for the beloved — sea — go into the sea — buy a new swimsuit — make coffee — look at objects — listen to music — holding hands — irritation — be right — not be right and give in to someone who is — be forgiven for the vanity of living — be a woman — do myself credit — laugh at the absurdity of my condition — have no choice — have a choice — fall asleep — but of bodily love I shall not speak.

After the list she still didn’t know who she was, but she knew a great many things she could do.

And she knew that she was a fierce one among fierce human beings, we, monkeys of ourselves. We’d never reach the human being inside ourselves. And whoever did was rightly called a saint. Because to relinquish ferocity was a sacrifice. Which apostle was it who’d said of us: you are gods?

She remembered a conversation she’d had with Ulisses and in which he’d wondered almost absentmindedly:

— God isn’t intelligent, you see, because He is Intelligence. He is the sperm and egg of the cosmos that includes us. But I’d like to know why you, instead of saying God, like everyone else, say the God?

— Because God is a noun.

— There’s the primary school teacher talking.

— No, He is a noun, substantive like substance. There’s no single adjective for the God.

“You are gods.” But we were gods with adjectives.

It was the next day when coming inside that she saw the single apple on