An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures

by Clarice Lispector

  With Ulisses she’d taken the first steps toward some thing she hadn’t known before. But could she now make progress by herself? At one of their last meetings she’d asked him with an embarrassed smile, trying to hide behind a lightly ironic tone: am I an autodidact? He’d replied:

  — I think so. Lots of things you can only have if you’re an autodidact, if you have the courage to be. Other things need to be learned and felt by two people. But I’m hoping. Hoping you’ll have the courage to be an autodidact despite the dangers, and also hoping you’ll want to be two in one. Your mouth, as I’ve already said, is passionate. And it’s through your mouth that you will start to eat the world, and then the darkness of your eyes will not brighten but iridesce.

  He didn’t call her, she didn’t see him: it occurred to her that he’d disappeared so she could learn by herself. But what happened was that she was still so fragile in the world that she almost fell apart and almost went back to square one. And seeing that she could lose everything she’d gained filled her with the rage of a possessed person against the God. She didn’t have the courage to be angry with Ulisses because in her anger she’d destroy him inside herself. But she was turning against the God who was indestructible. This is the prayer of someone possessed, she thought. And she was coming to know the hell of passion for the world, through Ulisses. She didn’t know what name to give whatever had taken her over or whatever was, with voracity, taking her over except the word passion.

  What was that thing that was so violent that it was making her beg herself for mercy? It was the will to destroy, as if she’d been born to destroy. And the moment of destruction would either come or it wouldn’t, that depended on whether she could hear herself. The God was hearing, but could she hear herself?

  The destructive force still held back and she didn’t understand because she was quivering with joy at being capable of such rage. Because she was living. And there was no danger of really destroying anyone or anything because pity was as strong in her as rage: so she wanted to destroy herself as she was the source of that passion.

  She didn’t want to ask the God to placate her, she loved the God so much that she was afraid to touch Him with her plea, a plea that was burning, her own prayer was so ardent it was dangerous, and might destroy the last image of God inside her, which she still wanted to save.

  Yet, He was the only one she could ask to lay His hand on her and risk burning His own.

  That same night she’d stammered a prayer to the God and to herself: give my soul relief, let me feel that Thy hand is holding mine, let me feel that death doesn’t exist because in truth we are already in eternity, let me feel that loving is not dying, that the surrender of yourself doesn’t mean death but life, let me feel a modest and daily joy, let me not beg too much of Thee, because the answer would be as mysterious as the question, let me receive the world without fear, since for this unfathomable world we were created and are ourselves unfathomable, so it is that there is a connection between this mystery of the world and our own, but that connection isn’t clear to us as long as we want to understand it, bless me so I can enjoy the bread I eat, the slumber I sleep, let me show charity and patience toward myself, amen.

  Suddenly Lóri could no longer take it and called Ulisses:

  — What am I doing, it’s night and I’m alive. Being alive is killing me slowly, and I’m wide awake in the dark.

  There followed a pause, she started to think Ulisses hadn’t heard her. Then he said in a calm and soothing voice:

  — Stand firm.

  When she hung up, the night was humid and the darkness soft, and living meant having a veil covering your hair. So with tenderness she accepted that she was within the mystery of living.

  Before going to bed she went onto the balcony: a full moon was sinister in the sky. So she bathed all over in the lunar rays and felt profoundly clean and calm.

  She slowly started falling asleep in gentleness, and the night was deep inside. When the night matured the fuller veil of the dawn breeze would come. For the time being, she was delicately alive, sleeping.

  A year had gone by. The first heat of spring, ancient as a first breath. And which made her smile all the time. Without looking at herself in the mirror, it was a smile that had the idiocy of angels.

  Long before the arrival of the new season came its harbinger: unexpectedly a mildness in the wind, the first softness in the air. Impossible! Impossible that this softness in the air wouldn’t bring more! says the heart, breaking.

  Impossible, echoes the still nippy and fresh warmth of spring. Impossible that this air won’t bring the love of the world! Repeats the heart that cracks its singed dryness into a smile. And doesn’t even recognize that it’s already brought it, that that is a love. This still-fresh first heat was bringing: everything. Just that, and indivisibly: everything.

  And everything was a lot for a suddenly weakened heart that could only bear the less, could only want the bit by bit. Today she was feeling, and there was a keen nip to it, a kind of future memory of today. And to say that she’d never, never given what she was feeling to anyone or to anything. Had she given it to herself?

  Only to the extent that the poignancy of whatever was good could fit inside such fragile nerves, in such gentle deaths. Ah how she wanted to die. She’d never yet experienced dying — what a path was still open before her. Dying would have the same indivisible poignancy as goodness. To whom would she give her death? Which would be like the first fresh warmth of a new season.

  Ah how much easier to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy. And with such modesty she was awaiting it: the poignancy of goodness.

  But never die before really dying: because it was so good to prolong the promise. She wanted to prolong it with such finesse.

  Lóri reveled in that finesse, feeding off the better and finer life, since nothing was too good to prepare her for the instant of that new season. She wanted the best oils and perfumes, wanted the best kind of life, wanted the most tender hopes, wanted the best delicate meats and also the heaviest ones to eat, wanted her flesh to break into spirit and her spirit to break into flesh, wanted those fine mixtures — everything that would secretly ready her for those first moments that would come.

  Initiated, she foresaw the change of season. And desired the fuller life of an enormous fruit. Inside that fruit that was preparing itself in her, inside that fruit that was succulent, there was room for the lightest of daytime insomnias which was her wisdom of the wakeful animal: a veil of watchfulness, clever enough to do no more than foresee. Ah foreseeing was gentler than the intolerable acuteness of goodness. And she mustn’t forget, in the delicate struggle she was engaged in, that the hardest thing to understand was joy.

  She mustn’t forget that the steepest ascent, and most exposed to the elements, was to smile with joy. And that’s why it was what had least fit inside her: the infinite delicacy of joy. So when she’d linger too long inside it and try to possess its airy vastness, tears of exhaustion would well up in her eyes: she was weak when faced with the beauty of what existed and would yet exist.

  And she couldn’t manage, in this constant training, to seize the first delight of life.

  Would she manage this time to grasp the infinitely sweet delight that was like dying? Ah how she worried she wouldn’t manage to live the best she could, and thus one day be able at last to die the best she could. How she would worry that someone might not understand that she’d die on the way to spring’s giddy bliss. But she wouldn’t rush the arrival of that happiness by one instant — because waiting for it while living was her chaste vigil.

  Day and night she wouldn’t let the candle go out— prolonging it in the best of kind of holding out.

  The first fresh heat of spring . . . but that was love! Happiness gave her a daughter’s smile. She’d cut her hair and was out and about looking good. Except the waiting almos
t no longer fit inside her. It was so nice that Lóri was running the risk of overdoing it, of losing her first springtime death, and, in the sweat of too much clammy waiting, dying too early. Out of curiosity dying too early: since she was already wanting to know what the new season was like.

  But she’d wait. She’d wait while eating with delicacy and decorum and controlled avidity each tiniest crumb of everything, wanting everything since nothing was too good for her death which was her life so eternal that this very day it already existed and already was.

  Through that world she started to wander. She’d met Ulisses, in her search she journeyed far into herself. And then finally the day came when she realized she was no longer on her own, recognized Ulisses, had found her destiny as a woman. And to know that he was chaste, waiting for her, she found natural and accepted. For she, despite desire, didn’t want to rush anything and remained chaste too.

  Everyone was fighting for freedom — that’s what she was seeing in the newspapers, and she was happy that injustices were finally no longer being tolerated. In the Sunday paper she saw the lyrics to a song from Czechoslovakia. She copied it out in her best teacher’s handwriting, and gave it to Ulisses. It was called “Distant Voice” and went like this:

  Low and far off

  It’s the voice I hear. Where from,

  So weak and vague?

  It imprisons me in words,

  I struggle to grasp

  The things it asks about

  I don’t and I don’t know

  How I’ll answer it.

  Only the wind knows,

  Only the wise sun can see.

  Thoughtful birds,

  Love is beautiful,

  Suggest something to me.

  And the rest

  Only the wind knows,

  Only the sun can see.

  Why, in the distance, do rocks arise,

  Why does love come?

  People don’t care,

  Why does everything work out for them?

  Why can’t I change the world?

  Why don’t I know how to kiss?

  I don’t and I don’t know

  Maybe someday I’ll understand.

  Only the wind knows,

  Only the wise sun can see.

  Thoughtful birds,

  Beautiful love,

  Suggest something to me.

  And the rest,

  Only the wind knows,

  Only the sun can see.

  The song’s lyrics were by a name that was charming her with its strangeness and she asked Ulisses to pronounce it which he did with ease: Zdenek Rytir. And the music, which she’d never hear, was by Karel Svoboda.

  — It’s pretty, Loreley, there’s a pretty and accepting sadness about it.

  Then suddenly she’d calmed down. Never, until then, had she felt the sensation of absolute calm. She was now feeling such a great clarity that it was canceling her out as a simple, existing person: it was an empty lucidity, like a perfect mathematical calculation that you don’t need. She was clearly seeing the void. And not even understanding the thing that part of her was understanding. What would she do with this lucidity? She also knew that her clarity could become a human hell. For she knew that — in terms of our daily and permanent resigned accommodation with unreality — clarity of reality was a risk. “And so put out my flame, God, because it is no use to me for my days. Help me once again to consist in a more possible way. I consist, I consist.”

  In some way she’d already learned that each day was never common, was always extraordinary. And that it was up to her to suffer through or take pleasure in the day. She wanted the pleasure of the extraordinary which was so simple to find in common things: the thing didn’t need to be extraordinary in order for her to feel the extraordinary in it.

  For days she seemed to meditate deeply but she wasn’t meditating on anything: she was only feeling the gentle pleasure, which was also physical, of well-being.

  And now she was the one who was feeling the desire to be apart from Ulisses, for a while, to learn on her own how to be. Two weeks had already passed and Lóri would sometimes feel a longing so enormous that it was like a hunger. It would only pass when she could eat Ulisses’s presence. But sometimes the longing was so deep that his presence, she figured, would seem paltry; she would want to absorb Ulisses completely. This desire of hers to be Ulisses’s and for Ulisses to be hers for a complete unification was one of the most urgent feelings she’d ever had. She got a grip, didn’t call, happy she could feel.

  But the nascent pleasure would ache so much in her chest that sometimes Lóri would have preferred to feel her usual pain instead of this unwanted pleasure. True joy had no possible explanation, not even the possibility of being understood — and seemed like the start of an irreparable perdition. That merging with Ulisses that had been and still was her desire, had become unbearably good. But she was aware that she still wasn’t up to enjoying a man. It was as if death were our great and final good, except it wasn’t death, it was unfathomable life that was taking on the grandeur of death. Lóri thought: I can’t have a petty life because it wouldn’t match the absoluteness of death.

  From the minutes of joy she’d gone through, Lóri found out that you should let yourself be flooded bit by bit by joy — since it was life being born. And anyone who wasn’t strong enough to have pleasure should cover every nerve with a protective coating, with a coating of death in order to tolerate the mightiness of life. Lóri might have this coating in any formal occasion, in any kind of silence, in school lessons or in a bunch of meaningless words: it was what she did. For you don’t toy with pleasure. Pleasure was us.

  And inside Lóri pleasure, through a lack of practice, was at the threshold of anguish. Her chest seized up, her strength crumbled: yes, it was anguish. And, if she did nothing to fight it, she was aware that it would be the worst anguish she’d ever felt. Then she grew afraid.

  Then she called Ulisses. He answered and, if he’d been surprised, he hadn’t shown it. She could barely speak, she was so lost: she’d taken a step beyond pleasure and had frightened herself.

  When she finally managed to speak, she said to him:

  — Ulisses, I was doing well and suddenly I’m really not.

  He said:

  — You must have gone too far for a beginner.

  She said:

  — I don’t know if you still plan to see me someday . . .

  He interrupted her with a gentle “but of course, whenever you want.”

  Everything he’d said — especially the tone he’d used — was meant to soothe her. And she felt so strong through him that, restored and calm again, she said to him:

  — I’d rather be on my own for a little longer, even if it’s so hard.

  — It’s a sacrifice for me too. But do as you wish, if that’s what you need.

  She then spoke with a tranquility she didn’t know she had in her:

  — It is, Ulisses, it’s what I still need.

  Once again Ulisses had helped her, especially with the tone of his voice that was so rich in inflections. And Lóri thought that might be one of the most important human and animal experiences: asking mutely for help and mutely that help being given. Because, despite the words, it had been mutely that he’d helped her. Lóri was feeling as if she were a dangerous tiger with an arrow buried in its flesh, and which had been circling slowly around frightened people to see who would take away its pain. And then a man, Ulisses, had felt that a wounded tiger isn’t dangerous. And approaching the beast, unafraid to touch her, he had carefully pulled out the buried arrow.

  And the tiger? No, neither people nor animals can say thank you for certain things. So she, the tiger, had paced languorously in front of the man, hesitated, licked one of her paws and then, since neither a word or a grunt was what mattered, gone off in s
ilence. Lóri would never forget the help she’d received when she could only manage to stammer with fear.

  And Lóri continued in her search for the world.

  She went to the fruit and vegetable and fish and flower market: you could get everything at those stalls, full of shouts, of people jostling, squeezing the produce to see if it was good — Lóri went to see the abundance of the earth that was brought each week to a street near her house as an offering to the God and to men. For her survey of the nonhuman world, in order to make contact with the living neutrality of things that, while not thinking, were nevertheless living, she would wander through the stalls and it was hard to get close to any of them, there were so many women milling about with bags and carts.

  At last she saw: pure purple blood running from a crushed beet root on the ground. But her gaze fell on a basket of potatoes. They had different shapes 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.