An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures

by Clarice Lispector

  Sleep would sometimes come to her but she was afraid to wake up, be again the former woman. The precariousness of the true life inside her was devastating. She reached out her arm in the dark and in the dark her hand touched the naked chest of the sleeping man: she was creating him by her own hand and making sure her hand would forever carry the imprint of life on its skin. “God,” she thought, “so this is what you seemed to be promising me.” And her eyes closed in a semi­sleep, in a semivigil, for she was keeping vigil over the sleep of her great love.

  It was in this dream-glimmer state that she dreamt seeing that the fruit of the world was hers. Or if it wasn’t, that she’d just touched it. It was an enormous, scarlet, and heavy fruit that was hanging in the dark space, shining with an almost golden light. And that right in the air itself she was placing her mouth on the fruit and managing to bite it, leaving it nevertheless whole, glistening in space. For that’s how it was with Ulisses: they had possessed each other more than seemed possible and permitted, and nevertheless he and she were whole. The fruit was whole, yes, though in her mouth she felt as a living thing the food of the land. It was holy land because it was the only one on which a human could say while loving: I am yours and you are mine, and we is one.

  Until Lóri fell asleep more deeply and the darkness was all hers.

  After a little while they awoke and both Ulisses and Lóri reached a hand out to the other’s hand.

  — My love, she said.

  — Yes?

  But she didn’t reply. Then he said:

  — We both know we’re at the threshold of a door open to a new life. It’s the door, Lóri. And we know that only the death of one of us will separate us. No, Lóri, it won’t be an easy life. But it’s a new life. (Everything seems like a dream to me. But it’s not, he said, reality is what’s unbelievable.)

  Ulisses, wise Ulisses, had lost his tranquility upon finding love for the first time in his life. His voice was different, it had lost its professorial tone, his voice now was that of just a man. Had he wanted to teach Lóri through formulae? No, for he wasn’t a man of formulae, since no formula would do: he was lost in a sea of joy and of the menace of pain. Lóri could finally speak to him as an equal. Because finally he was realizing that he didn’t know anything and the weight was making his voice catch. But he wanted the dangerous new life.

  — I always had to fight my tendency to be the servant of a man, Lóri said, so deeply did I admire men compared to women. In men I feel the courage to be alive. Whereas I, woman, am a bit more refined and for that very reason weaker — you are primitive and direct.

  — Lóri, you are now a super-woman in the sense that I’m a super-man, just because we have the courage to go through the open door. It’s down to us whether we manage painstakingly to be what we really are. We, like all people, have the potential to be gods. I don’t mean gods in the divine sense. First we must follow nature, not forgetting its low moments, since nature is cyclical, it’s rhythm, it’s like a beating heart. Existing is so completely out of the ordinary that if we were aware of existing for more than a few seconds, we’d go mad. The solution to this absurdity called “I exist,” the solution is to love another being who, this someone else, we understand does exist.

  — My love, she said smiling, you seduced me diabolically. Without sadness or regret, I feel as if I’ve finally bitten the flesh of the fruit I thought was forbidden. You transformed me into the woman I am. You seduced me, she smiled. But there’s no dirtiness inside me. I am pure like a woman in bed with a man. A woman is never pornographic. I wouldn’t know how to be, though I’ve never been as intimately with anyone. Do you understand?

  — I understand and know that. But I don’t like to say everything. You too should learn to keep silent so you don’t get lost in words.

  — No. I kept silent all my life. But all right, I’ll say less. What I’d like to know is whether in your eyes I’m the unfortunate heroine who sheds her clothes. I’m naked in body and soul, but I want the darkness to wrap around me and cover me, no, don’t turn on the light.

  — Yes.

  Ulisses had previously lacked a certain humility. But in love, out of awe, he had become humble and serene.

  — I love you, Lóri, and I don’t have much time for you because I work a lot. It was always an effort to find time to have a whiskey with you. I’m going to have more work, you’ll have to be patient, more work because I finally have to write my essay. And I’ll write without any style, he said as if talking to himself. Writing without style is the most anyone who writes can desire. It will be, Lóri, like that thing you said which I memorized: it will be the world with its haughty impersonality versus my individuality as a person but we shall be one. You’ll often have to be alone.

  — I don’t mind. I’m a different woman now. And a minute of certainty about your love will last me for weeks, I’m a different woman. And I even want to be busier: teaching is becoming a passion, I want to clothe, and teach, and love my students, and prepare them in a way I was never prepared.

  — You’re the same as you ever were. You’ve just bloomed into a blood-red rose. I threw away the two dozen roses because I have you, a big rose and with moist and thick petals. Lóri, I’m going to be so busy that we might need to get married in order to be together.

  —Maybe that would be better. Maybe it’s best to—

  He interrupted her kissing lingeringly her scented flesh. And she again fell into the vertigo that overtook her, and again was happy the way a being can die of happiness. And again for the fourth time they loved each other.

  Afterward he asked if she minded if he turned on the lights because he wanted to see her. She said he could. Then they looked at each other. Both were pale and both thought they were beautiful. She covered her body with the sheet. Soon they were smoking with cigarettes in one hand and with the other holding hands. For a long time they sat in silence. Even Lóri wasn’t following her own thoughts until she reached somewhat unexpectedly the sudden question:

  — What is my social value, Ulisses? These days, I mean.

  — That of a woman who isn’t integrated into the Brazilian society of today, into its bourgeois middle class.

  — As I see it, you don’t belong to any class, Ulisses. If you only knew how exciting it is for me to imitate you. I learn from you but you think that I learned from your lessons, yet that wasn’t it, I learned something you weren’t even dreaming of teaching me. Do you think I’m offending my social structure with my great freedom?

  — Of course you do, thankfully. Because you’re leaving prison as a free being, and no one will forgive you that. Sex and love aren’t forbidden for you. You finally learned to exist. And that unlocks many other freedoms, which is a risk to your society. Even the freedom to be good to yourself frightens others. You’ll see how much better you’ll teach. But the two of us, if we have a child, we’re ready.

  — I’d have liked to get pregnant tonight.

  — Be patient. Anyway, next time, you should be careful because we’ll wait for the right moment to have a child. First, not least to make that easier, we really should marry.

  She got up wrapped in the sheet and turned off the lights. There was already a predawn shade. And the even darker shade, since they’d seen each other, was good to them. They sat in silence for so long that for an instant, in the moment of greatest darkness that precedes the dawn, she didn’t realize where she was. There was such a wonderful chaos and nebula that she squeezed his hand so that someone could keep her on earth. They remained silent and let go of each other’s hands and stubbed out their cigarettes. She no longer felt the jealousy she’d felt when she entered the bedroom and noticed that he had a double bed, with two bedside tables and two ashtrays. Now she’d never be jealous again.

  Minutes later she said:

  — I still find no answer when I ask: who am I? But I think I now know: profoundly I am t
he one who has her own life and also your life. I drank our life.

  — But you can’t ask that. And the question should have a different answer. Don’t pretend you’re strong enough to ask a human being’s worst question. I, who am stronger than you, can’t ask myself “who am I” without getting lost.

  And his voice had sounded like that of someone lost.

  She wasn’t startled when she felt his hand rest on her stomach. The hand was now caressing her legs. In that moment there was no sensuality between them. Though she was full of wonders, as if full of stars. She then reached out her own hand and touched his sex which was immediately transformed: but he stayed quiet. They both seemed calm and a little sad.

  — Could love be giving your own solitude to another? Because that’s the ultimate thing you can give of yourself, said Ulisses.

  — I don’t know, my love, but I know that my path has reached its end: I mean I reached the door of a beginning.

  — Woman of mine, he said.

  — Yes, Lóri said, I am your woman.

  Dawn was opening in faltering light. For Lóri the atmosphere was miraculous. She had reached the impossible of herself. Then she said, because she was feeling that Ulisses was once again caught by the pain of existing:

  — My love, you don’t believe in the God because we erred by humanizing him. We humanized Him because we didn’t understand Him, so it didn’t work. I’m sure He isn’t human. But though not human, nonetheless He still sometimes makes us divine. Do you think that—

  — I think, the man interrupted and his voice was slow and muffled because he was suffering from life and from love, this is what I think:

  Afterword

  A human being is a creature who is lost, who is singular, who merges with and is like everything in existence, who knows and doesn’t know God, who has been steeped in pain and who is afraid to love and wants to love and be loved by another person more than anything else in the world. That is the quest of this book: to love and be loved. But in order to truly love and be loved, one must first find one’s way to the most difficult thing, which is a joyful relationship “with the mightiness of life.” And while most love stories do away with this requirement and don’t even recognize it — just have the lovers hurtling toward each other — this love story is a question about this requirement, and can it even be won?

  Who is this man, this Ulisses, who asks of Lóri that she become somehow different before they come together in love? Who is this Lóri, who accepts this demand, and sets off down the road toward it? Who are these bizarre creatures, who ask of each other what no two people who are suffering from desire have perhaps ever asked of the other one?

  How does Ulisses know that Lóri hasn’t yet become the full expression of herself? How does he know that she is someone who exists only through pain and suffering, and not through gladness and joy? How does he know, right from the start, that she “wasn’t up to enjoying a man”?

  We are brought into the story only after all this knowledge has been won.

  * * *

  Before I start reading a book by Clarice Lispector, I always go off somewhere I can be alone, and I don’t check my phone or do anything else until the final page. I prefer to read her from start to finish, without interruption. Her novels are something I want to undergo, like a spiritual exercise. Just as Lóri both loses and finds herself in the salty sea with its “unlimited cold that without rage roars,” I feel, when reading her books, as if I am submerged in just as deep a vastness, in the great soul of a great writer who has access to all of Nature unvarnished. I feel “a dizzying seasickness that stirs [me] from the sleep of ages,” wakened by her philosophical mind, which seems to have grasped the deepest structure and meaning of the greatest mysteries of life. Yet twinned with her esoteric knowledge is also so much insecurity and doubt. This at first feels surprising — then it does not. In fact, it comes to seem outrageous that we had not known all along that of course the wisest among us would also worry about how to enter a party without exposing how vulnerable she feels.

  As spiritually profound as her writings are, they are also sensually grounded in the things of the world and the pettiest aspects of life as a human — and as a woman specifically. But that all these things are important to the same mind makes the pettinesses seem profound, or at least inseparable from our lives here on earth.

  * * *

  True love involves waiting for one’s love is something we might guess from all the world’s love stories, but I have never before seen the trial of this waiting so transparently formulated as a spiritual discipline through which one comes to win that love and deserve it.

  Each of the two lovers in An Apprenticeship holds all of the power, and each holds none. Each has total dominion over the other, and each is completely flattened beneath the other one’s heel. Although we only see the affair from Lóri’s perspective, it is easy enough to suffer alongside Ulisses, when Lóri doesn’t show up to their meetings, or even touch his hand.

  In reading Lispector’s books, I learn about the structure of the relationship between a human and God, between a human and herself, and between a human and the other; in this case, both the other who is just another person one has slept with and lost desire for, and the Other who holds your life’s happiness in their hands. This second Other is the elemental force that drives the life of the loving one, while the other other has no power at all and might as well not even exist. Why is life like this? How can so much importance (for the one who loves) be concentrated in a random, Other, singular individual, while diffused among the rest is nothing, and we are able to stride past them with complete indifference?

  What is this Other capable of that the other other could never do? In one sense (unhappy as this is to write) the Other is the one who circumscribes our limits. With the choice of who to love, we end up in a city, with a side of the bed on which to sleep, and a certain set of friends (growing further apart from those who are not invited over because one’s partner does not like them). We watch certain shows, not others. And the Other circumscribes our limits metaphysically, too. Maybe this procedure is necessary, in order for our lives to have a form. Just as the art-impulse must take a certain form — a sculpture, a play, a novel, a dance — so does the election of a specific Other shape our blobbish life-impulse into a specific form. I am now thinking of the part of the novel where Claire writes, “Lóri had a kind of dread of going, as if she could go too far — in what direction? Which was making it hard to go . . . There was a certain fear of her own capacity, large or small, maybe because she didn’t know her own limits. Were the limits of a human divine? They were.”

  And so we choose a man or woman to confer some needed limits.

  In this book, both Lóri and Ulisses “are attractive as man and woman.” He is a man with whom women easily fall in love, and she is a woman who surpasses everyone in the room, “in educational skills, in intuitive understanding, and even in feminine charm.” Their magnetism is a gift from the gods: she is that rare woman “who hasn’t broken from the lineage of women down through time,” and he, “from the viewpoint of strictly masculine beauty [had] a calm virility inside him.” She knows what she is doing in bed — you only have to glance at her to see it. And he has the ability to seduce. It’s like any Hollywood movie: the leading man must be attractive, and so must the leading lady, so we understand why she desires him (because we do too), and why he desires her (because we do too). And so Lispector makes them both desirable — or tells us that they are. (Because of course Ulisses is not! I mean, he has the manly virtue of self-restraint, but apart from that, what? Wouldn’t I throw down my napkin in disgust onto the elegant tablecloth of the restaurant we were sitting in if he spoke to me as he does her? — but he wouldn’t want me.)

  So what locks her in?

  Lóri has the twinned feminine virtue and vice of radical self-doubt (which perhaps I also have — but in life, no
t while reading a book), which makes one susceptible to other people, sometimes to a dangerous degree. That Ulisses resists her sexual charms seems to be all she needs to know that he’s the one to whom she must surrender. He can resist her, so he must be above her. And because she is below him, she is ready to make him her teacher. What does he hope to teach her? How to be worthy of him. Which is also how to be worthy of life itself — to be like rain, “without gratitude or ingratitude.”

  This is an incredibly difficult task. It takes great deal of patience to bring herself to that place, and she undergoes a lot of suffering — but also gains more illumination than many people find in a lifetime. Isn’t it horrible? What a plot! Yet can I say Lispector is wrong? It is always tempting to try to make oneself worthy of those who have put themselves above you (or who you have put above you), and nothing is more humiliating than to fail to perform this task well. Anyway, it is a story that should be told.

  (I have also tried to look at waiting for love as a spiritual discipline, from even its smallest expression: like trying not to destroy myself in agony over the pain of being a human who knows she has sent a bad email to someone she admires, from whom she believes she won’t — and actually doesn’t — hear back. That feeling is just a speck of what Clarice Lispector is writing about here, as one of the most important things we grapple with: how to assure ourselves that we are — and to actually be — worthy of loving and being loved.)

  All love stories must have their obstacles: religion, parents, a stone wall. The obstacle in this book is that we may be unfit for love, plain and simple: because we haven’t lived in such a way that we have let ourselves be fit for it; we haven’t even lived in such a way that we have made ourselves fit for life. For God. For sex. For anything! We slack off on the spiritual level, always. We guess no one’s going to see it. Who’s looking? Even we are not. Then someone like Ulisses comes along and says, You cannot have me until you do the difficult work of being a human that you have been putting off. (And inwardly, the man says to himself, I am also not worthy of her, and cannot have her until I make myself fit for love, too.)