The Hour of the Star ()

by Clarice Lispector

  Because there’s the right to scream.

  So I scream.

  A pure scream and without begging alms. I know there are girls who sell their bodies, their only real possession, in exchange for a good dinner instead of a bologna sandwich. But the person I’m going to talk about scarcely has a body to sell, nobody wants her, she’s a virgin and harmless, nobody would miss her. Moreover — I realize now — nobody would miss me either. And even what I’m writing somebody else could write. A male writer, that is, because a woman would make it all weepy and maudlin.

  Like the northeastern girl, there are thousands of girls scattered throughout the tenement slums, vacancies in beds in a room, behind the shop counters working to the point of exhaustion. They don’t even realize how easily substitutable they are and that they could just as soon drop off the face of the earth. Few protest and as far as I know they never complain since they don’t know to whom. Does this whom exist?

  I am warming up my body to get started, rubbing my hands together to work up the nerve. I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul — and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing. But the emptiness has the value and the appearance of plenty. One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my — to my mystery.

  I intend, as I earlier suggested, to write in an ever simpler way. Anyway the material I’ve got is too plain and meager, the information about my characters sparse and not very elucidating, this information that painstakingly comes from me to myself, it’s a carpenter’s job.

  Yes, but don’t forget that to write anything at all my basic material is the word. So that’s why this story will be made of words that gather in sentences and from these a secret meaning emanates that goes beyond words and sentences. Naturally, like every writer I’m tempted to use succulent terms: I know splendid adjectives, meaty nouns, and verbs so slender that they travel sharp through the air about to go into action, since words are actions, don’t you agree? I’m not going to adorn the word because if I touch the girl’s bread the bread will turn to gold — and the girl (she’s nineteen) the girl wouldn’t be able to bite it, dying of hunger. So I have to speak simply to capture her delicate and vague existence. I humbly limit myself — without trumpeting my humility for then it wouldn’t be humble — I limit myself to telling of the lame adventures of a girl in a city that’s entirely against her. She who should have stayed in the backlands of Alagoas in a cotton dress and without any typewriter, since she wrote so badly, she only had three years of school. Because she was so ignorant she had to type slowly letter by letter — her aunt was who gave her a crash course in typing. And the girl had acquired a dignity: she was at last a typist. Although, apparently, she didn’t approve of two consonants together and copied from the lovely and round handwriting of her beloved boss the word “designate” as she would have said it: “desiginate."

  Forgive me but I’m going to keep talking about me who am unknown to myself, and as I write I’m a bit surprised because I discover I have a destiny. Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

  Before that, I want to declare that this girl doesn’t know herself except from living aimlessly. If she was dumb enough to ask herself “who am I?” she would fall flat on her face. Because “who am I?” creates a need. And how can you satisfy that need? Those who wonder are incomplete.

  The person I’m going to talk about is so dumb that she sometimes smiles at other people on the street. Nobody smiles back because they don’t even look at her.

  Coming back to me: what I am about to write can’t be absorbed by minds that are very demanding and covet refinement. Since what I’m saying will just be naked. Though in the background — and even now — it has the tormented shadow that is always in my dreams when at night tormented I sleep. So don’t expect stars in what’s coming: nothing will twinkle, this is opaque material and by its very nature despised by everyone. That’s because this story lacks a cantabile melody. Its rhythm is sometimes discordant. And it has facts. I suddenly fell for facts without literature — facts are hard stones and action is now more interesting to me than thinking, you can’t get away from facts.

  I wonder if I should jump ahead and sketch out an ending right away. But it so happens that I myself have no idea how this thing will turn out. And also because I realize that I have to proceed step by step according to a term measured in hours: even an animal has to deal with time. And this is also my most primary condition: to go along gently despite my impatience with that girl.

  With this story I’m going to sensitize myself, and I am well aware that each day is a day stolen from death. I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog. Words are sounds transfused with unequal shadows that intersect, stalactites, lace, transfigured organ music. I hardly dare shout out words at this vibrant and rich, morbid and dark web which has its countertone in the thick bass of pain. Allegro con brio. I’ll try to wrest gold from charcoal. I know that I’m putting off the story and playing ball without a ball. Is the fact an act? I swear this book is made without words. It is a mute photograph. This book is a silence. This book is a question.

  But I suspect that all this chitchat is made just to put off the poverty of the story, because I’m scared. Before this typist turned up in my life, I was a man who was even a bit contented, despite my meager success in literature. Things were somehow so good that they could go very bad because fully mature things rot.

  So suddenly the idea of surpassing my own limits fascinated me. And that’s when I thought about writing about reality, since reality was so beyond me. Whatever “reality” means. Will what I’m about to narrate sound treacly? It might but then this very second I’ll dry out and harden. And at least what I’m writing begs no favors and asks for no help: it puts up with so-called pain with the dignity of a baron.

  Anyway. It seems that I’m changing the way I write. But it so happens that I only write what I want, I’m not a professional — and I have to write about this northeastern girl or I’ll choke. She’s accusing me and the way to defend myself is to write about her. I write in bold and severe painter’s strokes. I’ll be dealing with facts as if they were the irremediable stones I spoke of earlier. Even though to get me going I want bells to peal while I guess at reality. And may angels flutter as transparent wasps around my hot head because this head wants finally to transform itself into an object-thing, it’s easier.

  Could it really be that the action is beyond the word?

  But when I write — let things be known by their real names. Each thing is a word and when there is no word it is invented. This your God who commanded us to invent.

  Why do I write? First of all because I captured the spirit of the language and that’s why sometimes the form is what makes the content. So I’m not writing for the northeastern girl but for the serious reason of “force majeure," or as they say in official documents, by “force of law."

  Yes, my strength is in solitude. I’m not afraid of pouring rains or great gusts of wind, for I too am the darkness of the night. Darkness? I recall a girlfriend: she was experienced and what darkness inside her body. I never forgot her: you never forget the person you slept with. The event remains tattooed with a fiery mark on living flesh and all
who glimpse the stigma flee in horror.

  Now I want to speak of the northeastern girl. This is what I mean: she like a stray dog was guided exclusively by herself. I too, from one failure to the next have reduced myself to myself but at least I want to encounter the world and its God.

  I’d like to add by way of information about the young girl and myself, that we live exclusively in the present because it is always eternally today and tomorrow will be a today, eternity is the state of things at this very moment.

  And I just got fearful when I put down words about the northeastern girl. And the question is: how do I write? I can confirm that I write by ear as I learned English and French by ear. Any antecedents as a writer? I’m a man who has more money than people who go hungry, which somehow makes me dishonest. And I only lie precisely when it’s time to lie. But I don’t lie when I write. What else? Yes, I have no social class, marginalized as I am. The upper class considers me a weird monster, the middle class worries I might unsettle them, the lower class never comes to me.

  No, it’s not easy to write. It’s as hard as breaking rocks. But sparks and splinters fly like flashing steel.

  Oh I’m so afraid to start and don’t even know the girl’s name. Not to mention that the story drives me to despair because it’s too simple. What I plan to tell seems easy and accessible to everyone. But its elaboration is very difficult. Since I have to make clear something that’s almost erased and that I can hardly see. With hands with muddy hard fingers to feel for the invisible in the mud itself.

  I’m sure of one thing: this narrative will deal with something delicate: the creation of a whole person who surely is as alive as I am. Take care of her because all I can do is show her so you can recognize her on the street, walking lightly because of her quivering thinness. And what if my narrative is sad? Afterwards I’ll surely write something cheerful, though why cheerful? Because I too am a man of hosannas and someday, perhaps, I’ll sing praises instead of the difficulties of the northeastern girl.

  For now I want to walk naked or in rags, I want to try at least once the lack of taste that they say is in the host. Eating the host will be tasting the flavorlessness of the world and bathing in the no. This will be my courage, to abandon old already comfortable feelings.

  It’s not comfortable now: to speak of the girl I can’t shave for days and must acquire dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep, nodding off from sheer exhaustion, I am a manual laborer. Besides wearing old ragged clothes. All in order to put myself on the northeastern girl’s level. But still aware that I might have to present myself in a more convincing way to the societies that demand a great deal of the person sitting here typing.

  All this, yes, the story is history. But knowing beforehand so you never forget that the word is the fruit of the word, the word must resemble the word. Reaching it is my first duty to myself. And the word can’t be dressed up and artistically vain, it can only be itself. Well, it’s true that I also wanted to arrive at a sheer sensation and for it to be so sheer that it couldn’t break into a perpetual line. At the same time that I want to arrive at the thickest and lowest, deepest and earth trombone, so much for no good reason that out of nervousness in writing I burst out in an uncontrollable laugh coming straight from my chest. And I want to accept my freedom without thinking what so many do, that existing is something for fools, a case of madness. Because that’s what it seems like. Existing isn’t logical.

  The action of this story will end up with my transfiguration into somebody else and my materialization finally as an object. Yes, and it might even reach the sweet flute around which I will entwine myself like a supple liana.

  But let’s get back to today. Because, as we know, today is today. You’re not understanding me and I darkly hear you laughing at me with the quick and rasping laugh of the old. And I hear measured footsteps in the street. I’m trembling with fear. Just as well that what I’m about to write is already somehow written within me. What I have to do is copy myself out with the delicacy of a white butterfly. This idea of the white butterfly comes because, if the girl gets married, she’ll marry thin and light, and, as a virgin, in white. Maybe she won’t get married? The fact is I hold a destiny in my hands yet don’t feel powerful enough to invent freely: I follow a hidden, fatal line. I have to seek a truth that is beyond me. Why should I write about a young girl whose poverty isn’t even adorned? Maybe because within her there’s a seclusion and also because in the poverty of body and spirit I touch holiness, I who want to feel the breath of my beyond. To be more than I am, since I am so little.

  I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I’m desperate and I’m tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I’ve experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I’d only like to have what I would have been and never was.

  I seem to know the tiniest details about this northeastern girl, after all I live with her and because I’ve guessed so much about her, she’s stuck to my skin like some sticky treacle or black mud. When I was a boy I read the story of an old man who was afraid to cross a river. That’s when a young man appeared who also wanted to cross to the other side. The old man seized the opportunity and said:

  — Will you take me too? Carried on your shoulders?

  The youth agreed and once they were across said to the old man:

  — Here we are, you can get down now.

  But the old man answered very sly and wise:

  — Not a chance! It’s so nice up here that I’ll never leave you again!

  Well the typist doesn’t want to get off my shoulders. Me of all people who realizes that poverty is ugly and promiscuous. That’s why I don’t know if my story is going to be — be what? I don’t know anything, I still haven’t worked up the nerve to write it. Will things happen? They will. But what things? I don’t know that either. I’m not trying to create in you some afflicted, voracious expectation: I really don’t know what awaits me, I have a fidgety character on my hands and who escapes me at every turn expecting me to retrieve her.

  I forgot to say that everything I’m now writing is accompanied by the emphatic ruffle of a drum being beaten by a soldier. The moment I start my story — suddenly the drum will cease.

  I see the northeastern girl looking in the mirror and — a ruffle of the drum — in the mirror appears my weary and unshaven face. We’re that interchangeable. There’s no doubt she’s a physical person. And I’ll venture a fact: she’s never seen herself naked because she was ashamed. Ashamed because she’s modest or because she’s ugly? I also wonder how to cope with facts and facts. Because all of a sudden the figurative fascinated me: I create human action and I tremble. I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints abstract colors but wants to show that he does so because he chooses to, not because he can’t draw. To draw the girl I have to get a grip on myself and to capture her soul I have to feed myself frugally with fruits and drink iced white wine because it’s hot in this cubbyhole I’ve locked myself into and from which I’m inclined to want to see the world. I’ve also had to give up sex and soccer. Not to mention that I avoid all human contact. Will I someday return to my former way of life? I very much doubt it. I now see that I forgot to mention that for the time being I read nothing for fear of polluting the simplicit
y of my language with luxuries. Since as I said the word has to resemble the word, my instrument. Or am I not a writer? Actually I’m more of an actor because with only one way to punctuate, I juggle with intonation and force another’s breathing to accompany my text.

  I also forgot to say that the account that is soon going to have to start — since I can no longer withstand the pressure of the facts — the account that soon is going to have to start is written with the sponsorship of the most popular soft drink in the world even though it’s not paying me a cent, a soft drink distributed in every country. Moreover it’s the same soft drink that sponsored the last earthquake in Guatemala. Even though it tastes like nail polish, Aristolino soap and chewed plastic. None of this keeps everyone from loving it with servility and subservience. Also because — and now I’m going to say something difficult that only I understand — because this drink which contains coca is today. It’s a way for a person to be up-to-date and in the now.