The Besieged City

by Clarice Lispector

  What is it you’re looking for, my flower? she was wondering without interrupting herself. She also saw the bed with hard vivacity — which immediately transformed into a more vehement search for the bracelet. Tired. Since she alone had worked: how to stop seeing that the things in the room hadn’t transformed themselves for as much as an instant? there they were. Just a moment of weakness, and once again whatever she had built through so many glances would be destroyed . . . And Lucrécia Neves saw with surprise an unconquerable, silent room — with great surprise at not finding the bracelet.

  Once again working furiously, throwing shoes to one side and handkerchiefs to the other, searching. As she was opening and closing drawers, from the drawers opened and closed and half-closed and opened, planes and rectangles were already being reborn, edges being rebuilt, more exposed surfaces aging, heights straightening themselves out: in appalled retreats her glances had recreated the reality of the room. A bit mistrustful, innocent amidst the wreckage . . . And the bracelet? she was scratching herself, now without majesty, looking around covered in dust, charmed, almost near-sighted — she who had such clear eyes. She was searching for the bracelet by squatting to look under the bed, whining wounded with an animal’s delicateness: “where is it, my God,” she kept saying scratching herself.

  Finally removing from the drawer like real pearls her fake jewels, lifting them to her face, giving glory and hope to the room. Where she stopped almost ready. Looking around stupidly, with the difficulty of thought that her lack of sensuality would bring her. What was missing was the perfume!

  Just like that she embalmed herself with perfume, shaking herself all over.

  But it was day, would the sunlight full of wind that was blowing beyond the balcony annul all her adornments? Because she’d dressed trying to recreate the strength of former festive nights, imagining she’d encounter on dirty Market Street the elite of a ball, prestige and extraordinary manners — where girls would laugh having trouble behaving; and where she’d say out loud, threatening with her finger: you’re bad, Joaquim!

  Yes! yes! a ball would be the city of stone surrendering at last: or a military band, a circus! the carousel! or to approach stiff all over the family house transformed into a ball.

  A ball in São Geraldo: the night stultified by the rain and she treading with her hooves on the slippery stone, and the groups of umbrellas arriving. Groups of anonymous gentlemen, the wooden gentlemen around whom people were dancing. She was closing the soaking wet umbrella. And when the brass band burst out everyone would join in. The first steps were taken far from the body, blindly testing the ground. But soon thereafter the dramatic music would draw them in. The trombone was resounding isolated above the melody. Through the windows, in the tepid ballroom, the girl was quickly seeing in the little English waltz the rivulets of rain turning gold awakened beneath the lamps of the courtyard, raising sleepy smoke: it was raining on the deserted courtyard, and she was dancing. With painted cheeks and resistant eyes, expressing; what could she be celebrating? she was dancing in a new composition of trotting. And outside it was raining in silence. Lucrécia Neves was returning from the ball with dusty feet; the nausea of the waltz and of the intimate men was whirling still in her organs because some very similar thing had happened to São Geraldo: she’d danced, it was raining, the drops running beneath the light, she dancing, and the city erected all around.

  The memory of the dance was ravishing her in the bedroom where, decked out like an engraving of a saint, she was ready to go out. With her face immobilized by the disguise the girl examined herself in the mirror.

  She was golden and crude in the shadow.

  That’s how she’d created herself. Though she still needed to create voluptuousness in that face to which selfishness gave a loyal character: she then tinted her lips by moistening with saliva the crimson paper.

  With her mouth dirty her face became childlike, smaller and guilty. In the mirror her elegance had the fallible quality of overly lovely things without root . . . in a quick emotion she slammed the door of the room, cried with a voice suddenly tragic and broken: mama I’m going out! went down the stairs once again slowly, making sure not to slip in the shadows with her horseshoes.

  That’s how she was going out into the street, looking both ways. She really would have liked to give up at last and rest. Sometimes she’d even imagine, smiling in ecstasy, boarding a ship and heading to sea forever. But her journey was by land.

  The wind greeted her on the street, the girl halted protecting her eyes wounded by the light. And suddenly the brightness revealed her.

  The possibilities had ceased: she was dressed in blue, full of ribbons and bracelets. Her red hat was pushed down to her eyebrows by the power of the insurmountable taste of fashion. Her scarlet purse had beads . . . But she found such a blank street! Without the errors or the mending with which she’d built herself in her room . . . Even the sparrow on the branch was chirping without possible error because it was the first time . . . and was this a street in the afternoon?

  Once again she’d badly imitated São Geraldo. Which at this hour was almost chaste . . . The open afternoon was revealing as much as possible the beads and necklaces. She’d brought useless weapons.

  Soon however she was leaving the bottom of the staircase with a dry sigh, straightening up without wriggling in order not to collapse, moving forward with a certain insolence. The same insolence that would make her buy hats that rarely imitated nature: without birds, without flowers, her hats seemed to be made of hats, with variations in the brims themselves — and which she’d wear the way she’d grasp an object.

  Gradually Lucrécia Neves had pulled herself back together after the collision with the light and once again seemed taller and like a pursuer. She was walking with a daintiness of expression, without joy. Her balance upon the heels of her ankle-high boots was so difficult that she was walking between balance and imbalance, kept in the air by her little open parasol. It wasn’t without constant effort that she was maintaining her elegance right then because she’d dressed in the potent darkness of a bedroom, perhaps in order to be seen at night. And the day in São Geraldo wasn’t the future, it was hard, finished streets. The girl was feeling inferior to that merciless clarity. So current! so current, she was seeing thrown into whatever was happening. She was looking around greedily, so current! she was doing everything possible not to go beyond it, adjusting the bracelets that were colliding on her wrists.

  The clock struck four. For a moment it seemed to wait for an answer. Perseu Maria saw that he was late and started walking faster. His feeling was one of calm and joy because his body was big while marching — steps were climbed, cobblestones stepped on. He was big while marching. And he didn’t know what he was thinking because he was strong. At a certain point he said, in the exterior intimacy with which he was seeing himself walking, he said in a grievous hesitation that came from a certain awareness of his solitude: “the ground.” That’s what he thought as a child says: “the ground.” But when he raised his eyes from his deep dream he realized he wasn’t late. Lucrécia right then was approaching the place where they’d agreed to meet. The fellow stopped on the corner blocked by the truck. The girl stopped on the other corner waiting. They looked at each other. He looked at her. What a face!

  He was thinking.

  Finally he thought more clearly: “the face.” When he’d see her from far off he’d see her better. With bracelets and beads she was looking like a victim. Perseu added the thought with dazzled difficulty: “what a face she’s got,” he saw with still greater clarity.

  “Salutations . . . ,” said the girl.

  “Salutations,” he replied embarrassed by the joke.

  And so it was that, just because of Lucrécia’s presence, he turned entirely dark in the shadow, morose, losing the least bit of singularity. The girl too was breathing modest, calm. On the threshold of São Geraldo they were roughly s
tripping themselves down as much as possible. They became so simple that they became unattainable. And they started strolling through the city.

  Old roaches were coming out of the sewers. From the basements the cellars were suffocating the streets with the smell of rotten rinds. But the saws in the workshops were buzzing in bees and gold throughout the township, almost empty at this hour of extreme brightness.

  From a higher railing the young man and the girl saw an old woman with an open parasol at the other railing — the township rising and falling in prison staircases.

  Market Street still smelled of the fish sold in the morning, in the rivulets running to the sewer were floating scales and the odd soft clove. With the experience of childhood the two were easily steering clear of the straw baskets, passing alertly through the smell of the Iron Crown Charcoal Works, and strolling down narrower streets. The salamis hanging in the doorway of the store were smelling like the back of a house. They smelled it. Finally reaching the Gate.

  They checked by leaning forward that no train was coming. The wind over the tracks blew in their faces. They crossed.

  Past the railway the neighborhood buildings were becoming more spread-out; already you could see really just a few houses. And soon they were strolling beneath telegraph wires. The air was pure and blank as in a salt flat — the girl was looking at the sky taking care to make sure her hat didn’t move, the sky — “what a sight,” she was thinking indecipherably. She was staring at the serene afternoon on the stones, on the rusty tools on the ground — the dry trash was flying around . . . Everything was real but as if seen through a mirror. For a moment the girl was seeking a way to be and didn’t know; excessively calm, untouchable.

  But when they reached the top of the hill in the pasture Perseu pointed out the city with his finger.

  The poise of his finger over the void, the wind, the wind . . . — his mourning hat flew, he ran after it when suddenly the township made itself known at last because a hat had flown in the wind! the young man went past the barbed wire running with open arms, his delicate mouth biting the air. Lucrécia followed him with her eyes until he vanished from sight . . . She then set to waiting, without comprehension, without incomprehension.

  Soon she was veering off a bit, dreaming of walking alone with a dog and being seen on the hill: like the postcard of a city. Lucrécia Neves needed countless things: a checkered skirt and a little hat of the same material; for a long time now she’d been needing to feel how others would see her in a checkered skirt and hat, a belt right on her hips and a flower in the belt: dressed like that she’d look at the township and it would be transformed. With a dog. That’s how you composed a vision. The girl didn’t have any imagination but a watchful reality of things that was making her almost sleepwalk; she was needing things in order for them to exist.

  Perseu brought the hat back and wiping it on his sleeve looked at her laughing with worry, unable to prevent the victory of having caught it; laughing and looking with disquiet at the calm nature of the world. He then thought with wisdom of what he could say to her: “looks like it’s gonna rain, huh, Lucrécia!”, just so they could be in agreement again and in order to make turn toward him the face of the girl which was looking insistently at the tower below. But it was a lie: the bright sky was enveloping them and losing them. When he placed the hat on his head the fellow had forgotten what it was he’d been pointing at.

  He still tried with one finger but withdrew it quickly. Nearby lay the mountain of trash waiting to be burned . . . And the conversation had wrapped up. Lucrécia Neves, looking, wasn’t smiling.

  Only the air was still open, black wires connecting the poles from bottom to top — “what a sight,” Lucrécia was seeing while looking from bottom to top. The little birds were flying imitating each other without tiring. Radio wires were crossing clean and slender the air breathable with cold in the fields . . . they were looking from bottom to top. Motionless. If it were possible for someone to understand and not draw any conclusions — that’s the way the young man was looking deeply. And the way the girl didn’t understand had the same clarity that understandable things had, the same perfection to which both belonged: black wires were swinging in the colorlessness — they were looking from bottom to top, motionless, incomprehensible, constant. What a sight! Lucrécia Neves finally thought.

  Then Perseu moved his head toward the air and gazed at the railroad below.

  Everything was stirred by the young man’s stupid and gentle gaze, everything was hesitating in the wind, and existing within itself, without smell, without taste, with the irreplaceable form of the track itself, of the piled-up wood itself — and of the green, green countryside. “Just look! the dry trough for the horses.” The two of them were so slow and difficult that they were seeing with obstinacy the thing of which things were made, and which was enveloping the girl’s face with the same stridency of the beetle atop that stem. “Just look at the beetle!” They looked at the beetle. Lucrécia and Perseu were watching with wrinkled noses. Perseu was going from himself to the girl and from her to himself without noticing, his eyelids blinking from the sun and from a stubborn thought of love, which he didn’t know how to give her. “And there really was no reason to give her love” — he grabbed a stone and wiped it clean of dust showing an intimacy with dirty things that Lucrécia Neves looked at attentively without understanding — “there really was no reason.” Only reasons not to; and one of them is that “she was really picky,” the young man accused her and maybe only his mother, who’d been dead for a year now, would have understood that this could be a man’s accusation. Lucrécia Neves’s lack of fatigue was also making him wary. She was like one of those foreigners who’d say: “that’s how it is in my country.” Perseu’s narrow forehead was seeking something on which to take amorous pity but even his girlfriend’s physical defects were calm, her accepting them just by saying: that’s how it is in my country! seeming protected by a race of people just like her. Even her pleasures were made of the idea that a night spent in a tent would be so nice, that getting up in the morning was no effort, that a soldier’s life wasn’t hard — she’d always humiliated him with her love for men in uniform, showing great admiration for their physical courage and for their weapons, of which he was ashamed — so tactless! he’d think, and feel that there was something there of which she could be accused.

  Which didn’t keep the two of them just then from being placed on equal footing by the same instant of youth on the hill in the pasture — walking and talking on their way back, their hands moving in explanatory gestures. It didn’t matter what they were saying to each other so excitedly: they themselves were meant to be seen, like the city. And if someone had seen them from afar he’d make out an acrobat and a king. Walking quickly was making them happy — the king was smiling and was handsome, the acrobat was exerting herself with funny faces: there was a lack of mechanical control in the way both of them walked — they were a single person with one short leg and one long one, the beauty of the young man and the horror, the flower and the insect, one short leg and one long one climbing up, down, up. Sometimes the young man would seem to pull ahead and the girl was dancing around him: that’s when he’d smile divine and pure, and Lucrécia Neves would speak — and that’s how others would see them.

  Or on the other hand she was the one who’d stopped up ahead in the wind.

  Had they quarreled? He hesitant while looking at her. When she’d seem to him destructible like that, the fellow out of compassion and disappointment would become rude. He even felt like saying to her: ah, I’m not what you think, honey, you won’t do whatever you like to me! — though he knew, as he was looking at the stones, that she wouldn’t do anything to him and neither would he to her — because that’s how they were and up ahead was the stream.

  “What do you think I did yesterday?” said Perseu Maria presumptuous.

  In vain he was trying, seeing her at times ugly an
d looking at the dark spots on her skin, to protect with a man’s love the feebleness of her figure: the thin mouth that wasn’t laughing, on each cheek those circles of rouge that scandalized the neighbors . . . “she sure did like to show off.”

  Even the girl’s dreams: he himself had never dreamed of statues, he thought with extreme reluctance. He seemed to think that dreaming of statues was going too far. Moving the stone between his fingers, Perseu looked at Lucrécia quickly: he didn’t know how to admire her. He contorted his narrow forehead. When he’d think, his face would get even more prominent and indecisive — he who would get so happy when, taking the train, he’d go to the beach, the exercises and the laughter, and under the sun his youthful body . . . Which girls in swimsuits would look at surrendering, feeling him to be strong and innocent — he was one of the new men of São Geraldo.

  “Papa’s complaining about the house,” he said throwing the stone attentively far away. “It’s full of flies . . . Last night I felt mosquitoes, moths, flying cockroaches, who knows what else landing on us.”

  “It is I,” said Lucrécia Neves with great irony.

  Perseu looked at the ground, ashamed, sorrowful and calm. Keenly trying to disrupt such immodesty through his own interest in the weeds on the ground . . . Because the girl had tossed into the air her bright face where her spots were getting blacker and blacker, things that darken in the winter light. Her brashness was horrible, sometimes she had no shame. He enduring her little games with agony, looking at her quickly and diverting his eyes. But twisting her lips in still greater sarcasm, she said:

  “Hold on to your hat or it’ll fly off again, just think!”

  She thought it was ridiculous for a man to wear a hat . . . , he was well aware. Ah, she doesn’t understand me, the fellow thought, pushed with both hands the hat onto his head, looking at her radiant: the vague cold had given the girl goose bumps . . . but she was cheerful! How impossible to embrace her, he reflected worried, because she’d always make some movement that would make both of them too big, he ashamed to be a man and feeling like laughing . . .