The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

  I waited for that mute and imprisoned sound to pass. But the vastness inside the little room was growing, the mute oratorio was enlarging it in vibrations that reached the fissure in the ceiling. The oratorio was not a prayer: it was not asking for anything. Passions in the form of an oratorio.

  The roach suddenly vomited through its slit another fluffy and white spurt.

  — Ah! but who can I ask for help, if you too — I then thought toward a man who had been mine — if you aren’t any use to me now either. Since like me, you wanted to transcend life and therefore surpassed it. But now I won’t be able to transcend anymore, I will have to know, and will go without you, whom I tried to ask for help. Pray for me, my mother, since not transcending is a sacrifice, and transcending used to be my human effort at salvation, there was an immediate usefulness in transcending. Transcending is a transgression. But staying inside whatever is, that demands that I be fearless!

  And I will have to stay inside whatever is.

  There’s something that must be said, don’t you feel that there’s something that must be known? oh, even if I have to transcend it later, even if later the transcending is born inescapably from me like the breath of someone alive.

  But, after what I found out, I’ll accept like a breath of respiration — or like a noxious vapor? no, not like a noxious vapor, I take pity on me! if the transcendence must come to me inescapably, may it be like the breath born of the mouth itself, of the mouth that exists, and not of a false mouth open on the arm or head.

  It was with hellish joy that I as if I were going to die. I was starting to feel that my haunted step would be irremediable, and that I was little by little abandoning my human salvation. I was feeling that what is mine inside me, despite its fluffy and white matter, nevertheless had the power to explode my face of silver and beauty, farewell beauty of the world. Beauty that now is remote to me and that I no longer want — I am no longer able to want beauty — maybe I never had really wanted it, but it was so good! and I remember how the game of beauty was good, beauty was a continuous transmutation.

  But with hellish relief I bid it farewell. What comes out of the roach’s belly is not transcendable — ah, I don’t want to say that it’s the opposite of beauty, “opposite of beauty” doesn’t even make sense — what comes out of the roach is: “today,” blessed be the fruit of thy womb — I want the present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it, not even with a hope — until now what hope wanted in me was just to conjure away the present.

  But I want much more than that: I want to find the redemption in today, in right now, in the reality that is being, and not in the promise, I want to find joy in this instant — I want the God in whatever comes out of the roach’s belly — even if that, in my former human terms, means the worst, and, in human terms, the infernal.

  Yes, I wanted it. But at the same time I was grabbing with both hands onto the pit of my stomach: “I can’t!” I implored of another man who also could not and never could. I can’t! I don’t want to know what the thing I would now call “the nothing” is made of! I don’t want to feel directly in my very delicate mouth the salt in the eyes of the roach, because, my mother, I had been used to the sogginess of its layers and not the simple moistness of the thing.

  It was as I was thinking about the salt in the roach’s eyes that, with the sigh of someone who is going to have to give in yet again, I realized that I was still using the old human beauty: salt.

  Even the beauty of salt and the beauty of tears I would have to abandon. Even that, since what I was seeing predated humanity.

  Since what I was seeing predated humanity.

  No, there was no salt in those eyes. I was sure that the roach’s eyes were saltless. For salt I had always been ready, salt was the transcendence that I used to experience a taste, and to flee what I was calling “nothing.” For salt I was ready, for salt I had built my entire self. But what my mouth wouldn’t know how to understand — was the saltless. What all of me didn’t know — was the neutral.

  And the neutral was the life that I used to call the nothing. The neutral was the hell.

  The Sun had moved a bit and stuck itself to my back. Also in the sunlight the roach was split in two. I can’t do anything for you, roach. I don’t want to do anything for you.

  Because it was no longer about doing something: the neutral gaze of the roach was telling me it wasn’t about that, and I knew it. Only I couldn’t bear just sitting there and being, and so I wanted to do. Doing would be transcending, transcending is an exit.

  But the moment had come for it no longer to be about that. Since the roach didn’t know about hope or pity. If it weren’t imprisoned and were larger than I, with neutral busy pleasure it would kill me. Just as the violent neutral of its life was allowing me, because I was not imprisoned and was larger, to kill it. That was the kind of tranquil neutral ferocity of the desert where we were.

  And its eyes were saltless, not salty as I would have wanted: salt would be the feeling and the word and the taste. I knew that the neutral of the roach has the same lack of taste as its white matter. Seated, I was consisting. Seated, consisting, I was realizing that if I didn’t call things salty or sweet, sad or happy or painful or even with in-between shades of greater subtlety — that only then would I no longer be transcending and remain in the thing itself.

  That thing, whose name I do not know, was that thing that, looking at the roach, I was now starting to call without a name. Contact with that thing without qualities or attributes was disgusting to me, a living thing with no name, or taste, or smell was repugnant. Insipidity: the taste now was no more than a tartness: my own tartness. For a moment, then, I felt a kind of quaking happiness all over my body, a horrible happy unease in which my legs seemed to vanish, as always when the roots of my unknown identity were touched.

  Ah, at least I had already entered the roach’s nature to the point that I no longer wanted to do anything for it. I was freeing myself from my morality, and that was a catastrophe without crash and without tragedy.

  Morality. Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regard to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to? Am I moral to the extent that I do what I should, and feel as I should? All of a sudden the moral question seemed to me not only overwhelming, but extremely petty. The moral problem, in order for us to adjust to it, should be at once less demanding and greater. Since as an ideal it is both small and unattainable. Small, if one attains it: unattainable, because it cannot even be attained. “The scandal still is necessary, but woe to him through whom the scandal comes” — was it in the New Testament that it was said? The solution had to be secret. The ethics of the moral is keeping it secret. Freedom is a secret.

  Though I know that, even in secret, freedom doesn’t take care of guilt. But one must be greater than guilt. The tiny divine part of me is greater than my human guilt. The God is greater than my essential guilt. So I prefer the God, to my guilt. Not to excuse myself and to flee but because guilt diminishes me.

  I no longer wanted to do anything for the roach. I was freeing myself from my morality — though that gave me fear, curiosity and fascination; and much fear. I’m not going to do anything for you, I too creep along the ground. I’m not going to do anything for you because I no longer know the meaning of love as I used to think I did. Also what I thought about love, that too I’m bidding farewell, I barely know what it is anymore, I don’t remember.

  Maybe I’ll find another name, much crueler initially, and much more it-self. Or maybe I won’t. Is love when you don’t give a name to the identity of things?

  But now I know something horrible: I know what it is to need, need, need. And it’s a new need, on a level that I can only call neutral and terrible. It’s a need without any pity on my need and without pity on the roach’s need. I was seated, calm, sweating, exactly as now — and I see that there is something more serious and more
inevitable and more nucleus than everything I used to call by names. I, who called love my hope for love.

  But now, it’s in this neutral present of nature and of the roach and of the living sleep of my body, that I want to know love. And I want to know if hope was a contemporization with the impossible. Or if it was a way of delaying what’s possible now — and which I only don’t have out of fear. I want the present time that has no promise, that is, that is being. This is the core of what I want and fear. This is the nucleus that I never wanted.

  The roach was touching all of me with its black, faceted, shiny and neutral gaze.

  And now I was starting to let it touch me. In truth I had fought all my life against the profound desire to let myself be touched — and I had fought because I couldn’t allow myself the death of what I called my goodness; the death of human goodness. But now I no longer wanted to fight it. There had to be a goodness so other that it wouldn’t resemble goodness. I no longer wanted to fight.

  With disgust, with despair, with courage, I was giving in. It was too late, and now I wanted.

  Was it only in that instant that I was wanting? No, or else I would have left the room long before, or simply would barely have seen the roach — how often before had roaches happened to me and I had gone another way? I was giving in, but with fear and shattering.

  I thought that if the telephone rang, I would have to answer and would still be saved! But, as if remembering an extinct world, I remembered that I’d taken the phone off the hook. If not for that, it would ring, I would flee the room to answer it, and never again, oh! never again would return.

  — I remembered you, when I kissed your man face, slowly, slowly kissed it, and when the time came to kiss your eyes — I remembered that then I had tasted the salt in my mouth, and that the salt of tears in your eyes was my love for you. But, what bound me most of all in a fright of love, had been, in the depth of the depths of the salt, your saltless and innocent and childish substance: with my kiss your deepest insipid life was given to me, and kissing your face was the saltless and busy patient work of love, it was woman weaving a man, just as you had woven me, neutral crafting of life.

  Neutral crafting of life.

  Through having one day kissed the insipid residue found in the salt of a tear, the unfamiliarity of the room became recognizable, like matter already lived. If it hadn’t been recognized until then, it was because it had only been saltlessly lived by my deepest saltless blood. I was recognizing the familiarity of everything. The figures on the wall, I was recognizing them with a new way of looking. And I was also recognizing the roach’s watchfulness. The roach’s watchfulness was life living, my own watchful life living itself.

  I felt around in the pockets of my robe, found a cigarette and matches, lit it.

  In the sun the white mass of the roach was becoming drier and slightly yellowed. That informed me that more time had passed than I’d imagined. A cloud covered the sun for an instant, and suddenly I was seeing the same room without sun.

  Not dark but just without light. So I noticed that the room existed by itself, that it wasn’t the heat of the sun, it could also be cold and calm as the moon. Imagining its possible moonlit night, I breathed in deeply as if entering a quiet reservoir. Though I also knew that the cold moon wouldn’t be the room either. The room was in itself. It was the loud monotony of an eternity that breathes. That terrified me. The world would only cease to terrify me if I became the world. If I were the world, I wouldn’t be afraid. If we are the world, we are moved by a delicate radar that guides.

  When the cloud passed, the sun in the room became even brighter and whiter.

  From time to time, for a light instant, the roach moved its antennae. Its eyes kept looking at me monotonously, the two neutral and fertile ovaries. In them I was recognizing my two anonymous neutral ovaries. And I didn’t want to, ah, how I didn’t want to!

  I’d taken the phone off the hook, but somebody could maybe ring the doorbell, and I’d be free! The blouse! that I’d bought, they’d said they’d deliver it, and then they’d ring the bell!

  No, they wouldn’t. I’d have to keep recognizing. And I was recognizing in the roach the saltlessness of the time I was pregnant.

  — I recalled myself roaming the streets knowing I’d have the abortion, doctor, I who about children only knew and only would know that I was going to have an abortion. But at least I was getting to know pregnancy. Along the streets I was feeling inside me the child that still wasn’t moving, while I was stopping to look in the shop windows at the smiling wax mannequins. And when I entered a restaurant and ate, the pores of a child were devouring like the mouth of a waiting fish. When I was walking, when I was walking I was carrying it.

  During the interminable hours that I roamed the streets making up my mind about the abortion, which I had nevertheless already arranged with you, sir, doctor, during those hours my eyes too must have been saltless. On the street I too was no more than thousands of cilia of a neutral protozoan beating, I had already known within myself the shiny gaze of a roach captured at the waist. I had walked the streets with my lips parched, and living, doctor, was for me the opposite side of a crime. Pregnancy: I had been flung into the happy horror of the neutral life that lives and moves.

  And while I was looking at the shop windows, doctor, with my lips as parched as someone who doesn’t breathe through her nose, while I was looking at the fixed and smiling mannequins, I was full of neutral plankton, and was opening my suffocated and quiet mouth, I said this to you, sir: “what’s bothering me most, doctor, is that I’m having trouble breathing.” The plankton was giving me my color, the Tapajós River is green because its plankton is green.

  When night arrived, I was making up my mind about the abortion I’d already made up my mind about, lying on the bed with my thousands of faceted eyes spying on the dark, with lips blackened from breathing, without thinking, without thinking, making up my mind, making up my mind: on those nights all of me was slowly blackening from my own plankton just as the matter of the roach was yellowing, and my gradual blackening was keeping track of the passing time. And was all that love for the child?

  If so, then love is much more than love: love is something before love: it’s plankton struggling, and the great living neutrality struggling. Just like the life in the roach stuck at the waist.

  The fear I always had of the silence with which life makes itself. Fear of the neutral. The neutral was my deepest and most living root — I looked at the roach and knew. Until the moment of seeing the roach I’d always had some name for what I was living, otherwise I wouldn’t get away. To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona, for the human mask. When I humanized myself, I’d freed myself from the desert.

  I’d freed myself from the desert, yes, but had also lost it! and also lost the forests, and lost the air, and lost the embryo inside me.

  But there it is, the neutral roach, without a name for pain or for love. Its only differentiation in life is that it has to be either male or female. I had only thought of it as female, since things crushed at the waist are female.

  I put out the cigarette butt that was already burning my fingers, I put it out carefully on the floor with my slipper, and crossed my sweaty legs, I had never thought legs could sweat that much. The two of us, the ones buried alive. If I had the courage, and I’d wipe the sweat from the roach.

  Did it feel inside itself something like what my gaze saw in it? how much did it take advantage of itself and take advantage of what it was? even somehow indirectly, did it know that it crawled? or is crawling something we ourselves don’t know is happening? What did I know about whatever it was that others obviously saw in me? how would I know if I went around with my stomach pressed into the dust of the ground. Truth has no witness? being isn’t knowing? If a person doesn’t look and doesn’t see, does the truth exist anyway? The truth that doesn’t transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person?

/>   If I wanted to, even now, after everything that’s happened, I can still keep myself from having seen. And then I’ll never know about the truth I’m trying again to cross — it still depends on me!

  I was looking around the dry and white room, from which I could only see sands and sands of wreckage, some covering others. The minaret where I was standing was made of hard gold. I was upon the hard gold that receives nothing. And I was needing to be received. I was afraid.

  — Mother: I killed a life, and there are no arms to receive me now and in the hour of our desert, amen. Mother, everything now has turned to hard gold. I interrupted an organized thing, mother, and that is worse than killing, that made me enter through a breach that showed me, worse than death, that showed me the thick and neutral life turning yellow. The roach is alive, its eye gaze is fertilizing, I am afraid of my hoarseness, mother.

  Because my mute hoarseness was already the hoarseness of someone enjoying a gentle hell.

  The hoarseness — of someone having pleasure. The hell was good for me, I was enjoying that white blood that I had spilled. The roach is real, mother. It is no longer an idea of a roach.

  — Mother, all I did was want to kill, but just look at what I broke: I broke a casing! Killing is also forbidden because it breaks the hard casing, and leaves one with the sticky life. From inside the hard casing is emerging a heart thick and white and alive with pus, mother, blessed art thou among the roaches, now and in the hour of this thy my death, cockroach and jewel.

  As if having said the word “mother” had freed inside myself a thick and white part — the intense vibration of the oratorio suddenly stopped, and the minaret fell mute. And as after an intense attack of vomiting, my forehead was relieved, fresh and cold. No longer even fear, no longer even fright.

  No longer even fear, no longer even fright.