The Besieged City

by Clarice Lispector

  Lucrécia Neves too was making an effort to give herself outward expression, without knowing whether to turn left or right. Suddenly she awoke.

  The room was full of grace.

  She was awake and difficult. From the shock of waking, she was unfurling in disarray around her own feet — feeling deathly ill. The nauseating music — she was still hearing it and couldn’t believe it. Sitting on the bed in terror . . . She was awake and unaware — sleeping without interruption as if the earth were infinite.

  Sleeping with monstrous patience. She was searching.

  And now it was very late.

  When she’d invented hearing the news, the girl had regressed to being dressed in long skirts and smoothing out plaits of hair on her forehead.

  But now in the dream she could retreat until finding at last: that she was Greek.

  “Like the Greek woman in the magazine,” and she blushed, agitated. Dreaming of being Greek was the only way not to scandalize oneself; and to explain her secret in the form of a secret; to get to know herself in any other way would be the fear.

  She was from before the Greeks had yet thought, it would be so dangerous to think.

  A Greek in a city not yet erected, trying to designate each thing so that later, down through the centuries, they would have the meaning of their names.

  And her life was erecting, with other patient lives, whatever would be later lost in the very form of things. She was pointing with her finger, the faceless Greek. And her destiny as a Greek then was as unconscious as now in São Geraldo. What had remained of what was so far away? what had remained of Greece? the persistence: since she was still pointing.

  Then, with a sigh, she lay down in the garden to rest, repeating the ritual. And that’s how she stayed.

  While she’d dreamed, much time had already passed over her face. A more vivid feature had crumbled, spent, and the evidence of the expression. Her stone lips had cracked and the statue was resting in the darkness of the garden.

  Only a disaster would fill with blood and modesty that deteriorated face that had achieved the cynicism of eternity. And that not even love would decipher. The empty sockets. She herself hardened into a single fragment — if they grabbed her by a leg they’d dislocate the whole body, now easily transportable.

  And that’s how they’d set her down. Upside down and feet together in the air.

  Until, more and more gnawed at by time, she’d arise one day in order to continue her incomplete work in another city.

  When all cities were erected with their names, they’d destroy themselves anew because that’s the way it had always been. Upon the rubble horses would reappear announcing the rebirth of the old reality, their backs without riders. Because that’s the way it had always been.

  Until a few men would tie them to wagons, once again erecting a city that they wouldn’t understand, once again building, with innocent skill, the things. And then once more they’d need a pointing finger to give them their old names. That’s how it would be for the world was round.

  But for now she could still rest.

  In the cold darkness geraniums, artichokes, sunflowers, melons, hard zinnias, pineapples, roses were entwining. From the barge buried in the sand, only the prow was protruding. And, in the mutilated doorway, a rooster’s head was keeping watch. Only with the coming of dawn would you see the broken column. And the flies. Around the chapiter, the feeble and shining germination of mosquitos.

  But suddenly some thing was corrupted: new mosquitos were born — a sparrow flew! oh, it’s still early, it’s too early! yet in the darkness you could already glimpse the statue’s eyes.

  She’d have to get up — oh it’s still early, rest is no nice! but you could already make out the broken mast coming out of the fog and already foresee where the garden wall would end. Around the statue’s head the first bee was darting, coming out of the hard lips. And just beyond emerging from the mist, the rooster. The treasure. Oh it’s still early, it’s too early! yet the stone had been wounded by the chisel: the sun was rising.

  And from the blackened mouth, in a quick sigh, the first halo of moisture was born.

  Now, in the garden, neither darkness nor brightness — coolness. The breeze across the mutilated face amidst the cans.

  Neither darkness nor brightness — dawn. There are three kingdoms in nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. And amidst the rusted cans the peacock displaying itself . . . Neither darkness nor brightness — visibility.

  When could more than that be done? The horse’s head was eating the artichokes. And in the brighter sand the sleeping crocodile was revealed . . . neither shadows nor light — visibility. Morning in the Museum. And the treasure. The treasure.

  Lucrécia Neves trembled at last.

  In her sleep she got up painfully, with her face ruined by the township. Until her rotted hands touched the railings of the park of São Geraldo. There she stood waiting, her passive face stuck to the bars. In a stable stirred the sleeping weight of hooves, the water rippled beyond the Gate. Beneath the changing tremblings of the brightness even the spots were already appearing on her face. Dawn — the lion was walking in his cage. Dawn.

  Then Lucrécia flapped her wings.

  With monotonous and regular flapping she was flying in the darkness above the city.

  She was sleeping with monotonous, regular flapping.

  In the middle of her sleep, in yet another stab of ferocity, Lucrécia Neves got up and paced the room on her four hooves, sniffing the darkness. What a room! that girl was stopping gentle on her hooves. What a room! she was moving her head from side to side with patience.

  Finally she betook herself to sleep.

  The color of the chamber was now reaching a sharp neutrality. Neither darkness nor brightness — visibility. The tall and early-rising buildings. Through the window the wind was chilling her hair and nothing else was fluttering in the room. The house was smelling entirely of old trees. Suddenly, bumped about in the cabriolet, with astonished seriousness, she fell asleep. The danger had passed.

  She awoke with the military march of the scouts! drums ruffling among the baskets of fish.

  She awoke late, the horses already lining up to go. The large vegetal ears of sleep were shrinking quickly to small and sensitive ears — the joy of the São Geraldo scouts was also condensed until becoming precise as painstaking bees.

  Whatever had been damp, had been dried of rain. The girl found things already stuffed by the dry sun. Where was last night’s storm? through the window she was seeing calm armies of centaurs advancing in the clouds, dragging their majestic posteriors. And on the side of the fields flocks of crows were cawing loudly announcing good weather . . .

  In the street the procession — it was the trombone. The sounds were exciting the smell of fish, luminous spots were passing through the branches of the trees. The girl was looking at the scattered clothes, the room still enormous.

  But amidst her incomprehension the military march was of a stunning reality. Telegram wires running across the open balcony and all of their sharp carrying-on had an immediacy — the day!

  The girl still suspended in the room. At times spurring it on a bit, swaying on it. Looking from top to bottom, from the bed dangling from the floor; it had never been today until then.

  The night’s outsized wardrobe, now already shrunk, was simmering with clothes and hats. The brightness smelled of cut leaves: they were pruning the trees on Market Street, and the blades were raising dust as though from a construction site — São Geraldo was enormous, full of ladders leaning on the tree trunks, the furniture shaken by a constant violence that was: nine in the morning!: the clock tower started to strike, and the girl sneezed.

  Having crossed the bumpy tunnel that was opening at last onto a room in a house — now she was peering out already awake, shrewd, Lucrécia — a foreigner protected only by a race of p
eople all alike, scattered at their posts.

  Two streets down three stone women were holding up the door of a modern building. The telegraph wires were trembling in dots and dashes . . . With a leap Lucrécia Neves was at the balcony, her hands holding in check against her legs the nightgown that the wind was blowing.

  At first she couldn’t quite open her eyes because of the sun but soon there was the peaceful headquarters of the Commerce Association. The rooftops exposed. Crumbling mortar on the walls . . . In the brightness a mason was shaking all over on his drill, calmly undermining the township through one of its stones. People were looking in the shop windows . . . What had happened to the city of the night before?!

  Like a bat the city was blind by day.

  6 Sketch of the City

  On that day it so happened that Lucrécia Neves was in the kitchen at two in the afternoon.

  Ana had gone out shopping, and silence was spreading in watchfulness throughout the house. It had often occurred before that the girl would do the dishes from lunch while her mother was shopping. It was a day like any other. And maybe it was precisely for this reason that, in a ripening, that afternoon was brightening particularly through the Venetian blinds of the windows. Where the light couldn’t quite penetrate, there was restless darkness: the house was trembling all over.

  What happened that afternoon went beyond Lucrécia Neves in a vibration of sound that would blend into the air and not be heard.

  That’s how she escaped finding out. The girl was lucky: she always escaped by just a second. It was true that, because of the difference of that second, someone else would suddenly understand. But it was also true that because of that same second someone else would be struck down: São Geraldo was full of resplendent people who quivered with joy in the ambulance of the Pedro II Psychiatric Hospital.

  The main thing really was not to understand. Not even joy itself.

  Water was pouring from the tap and she was running the soapy rag over the silverware. From the window you could see the yellow wall — yellow, the simple encounter with the color was saying. Scrubbing the teeth of the fork, Lucrécia was a small gear spinning quickly while the larger one was spinning slowly — the slow gear of brightness, and inside it a girl working like an ant. Being an ant in the light, was absorbing her completely and soon, like a true worker, she no longer knew who was washing and what was being washed — so great was her efficiency. She finally seemed to have surpassed the thousand possibilities that a person has, and to be only in this very day, with such simplicity that things were seen immediately. The sink. The pans. The open window. The order, and the peaceful, isolated position of each thing beneath her gaze: nothing was escaping her.

  When she’d look for another bit of soap, it wouldn’t occur to her not to find it: there it was, at her fingertips. Everything was at her fingertips.

  Which was so important to a person to some extent stupid; Lucrécia who didn’t possess the futilities of the imagination but just the narrow existence of whatever she was seeing. Ah! a bird was crying in the yard of the store.

  Without makeup her face would lose those vices that at other times Lucrécia Neves would need to give herself a certain weight in this world. With her naked face, she too would go ahead if the little children called. All lit up, all of her measured by two o’clock. Ah! the bird in the yard was cutting across. Deep down, she thought she was a goddess.

  Maybe it was in order to express her divinity that the girl stopped tired, wiping the sweat from her brow with the arm that was holding the plate.

  Running her gaze over the vast sunny township. There were the clipped-out things, and without shadows, made for a person to stand up straight while looking at them. With the plate in her hand, her tool, she would have liked to express maybe to her mother, for instance, the extent to which her daughter was . . . was . . .

  A bit intrigued, she looked at those illuminated things around her, forcing herself now to give outward expression, with a real thought, to whatever was happening outside her.

  Nothing was happening though: a creature was facing whatever it was seeing, taken by the quality of what it was seeing, with its eyes obfuscated by its own calm way of looking; the light in the kitchen was her way of seeing — things at two o’clock seem to be made, even in their depths, of the way their surfaces are seen. She really would have liked to tell Ana or Perseu something about this brightness.

  But forsaken, strong, she was standing. Mulling over her inability to reason.

  In that goddess consecrated by two o’clock, her thought, almost never utilized, had been perfected until transforming into merely one of her senses. Her most stripped-down thought was seeing, strolling, hearing. But her crude spirit, like a great bird, followed along without demanding explanations of itself.

  And as for telling Perseu what was happening — it was all too simple, even stupid: she was just constructing whatever exists. What! she was seeing reality.

  Besides which how could she tell Perseu or even manage to think, if all that were made of things of which if you were to demand proof . . . In order to sustain them, you just had to believe and not even address them — the whole kitchen was a sidelong vision. Whenever you turned to one side, the vision would once more be off to the side. That was how the girl was keeping up the illumination of two o’clock — now lifting her head at a sound, and now running through the house all the way to the balcony, summoned by the noise of many footsteps in the street.

  She opened the doors to the balcony, saw seminarians walking down the sidewalk, lined up two by two and vague gestures, the flight of cassocks . . . Could they be happy? she wondered slyly. Sometimes Lucrécia Neves was terribly intelligent. She laughed. She looked at the store across the street.

  And she looked at a third floor that the sun was fully brightening. One of the thousand bunkers of the stupid illuminated city.

  But what pride in seeing the state of its perfect system of defense. Maybe one day armored cars would be posted on every corner. That bulwark. The glory of a person was to have a city.

  And now, after crossing the shadowy hallways once again, the kitchen was opening into the parlor.

  One more minute had already transformed it: now the previous way of seeing was no use. These changes seemed to leave Lucrécia extremely satisfied and the girl was looking at such lovely, such unswollen pans.

  Oh, she’d never need more than all this, nothing extraordinary would ever tempt her, or her imaginings: in fact she liked whatever’s there.

  That was the question, “the thing that’s there.” You couldn’t do anything but: go beyond it. And in order to go beyond it, having to consider it a supposition. But once in a while, it was no longer a hypothesis: it was the thing that’s there. Lucrécia even used to tell anecdotes, but pretending they were true! and people would laugh much more, if they thought it was true — so frightening was the irremediable.

  She’d believe in certain facts, not in others — she didn’t believe that clouds were evaporated water: why should she? since the clouds were right there. Neither did she come close to liking anything poetic. What she really liked was people who talked about how things were, enumerating them somehow: that was what she’d always admired, she who in order to try to learn about a town square would make an effort not to fly over it, which would be so much easier. She liked to stay in the thing itself: the happy smile is happy, the big city is big, the pretty face is pretty — and thus whatever turned out to be clear was just her way of seeing.

  Until, every once in a while, she’d see even more perfectly: the city is the city. Her crude spirit still lacked the ultimate refinement in order to be able to see just as if saying: city.

  After she put away the dry dishes is when the true story of that afternoon began.

  A story that could be seen in such different ways that the best way not to make a mistake would be just to enumerate the girl’s steps
and see her acting the way you’d just say: city.

  The fact really is that Lucrécia Neves had leaned forward to beat dust off the broom in the backyard of the store. And on the windowsill of “The Golden Tie” was the orange on the plate.

  It was a new way of seeing; limpid, indubitable. Lucrécia Neves peered at an orange on the plate.

  Farther on the bin for bottles, the wooden crate, the decaying ledger, a dirty rag and the orange once again. The gaze was not descriptive, what was descriptive were the positions of the things.

  No, whatever was in the yard was not an ornament. Some unknown thing had taken for an instant the form of this position. All this constituted the city’s defense system.

  Things seemed only to want: to appear — and nothing else. “I see” —was all you could say.

  Going afterward to put away the dishrag, stopping now for a moment by Ana’s bedroom, locked. Looking now through the keyhole. How big things seemed when seen through the aperture. They acquired volume, shadow and clarity: they were appearing. Through the keyhole the bedroom had a motionless, astonished wealth — which would disappear if you opened the door.

  The city too should be spied upon through an embrasure. So whoever was spying, would defend himself, like the thing spied upon. Both out of reach. That’s how Lucrécia was spying curious through the embrasure, almost squatting beside the keyhole. Within a maximum watchfulness she was unaware.

  Standing up straight now with pain in her kidneys, going to the back balcony, and spreading out the damp towel.

  And seeing the wall cut by the flat balcony with clean iron rods. Some thing was happening.

  Looking, the girl seemed to be trying to keep the high wall with the balcony from existing, so that nothing could be done with them — just inexplicably see their existence. She breathed calmly, without overdoing it.