A Breath of Life

by Clarice Lispector

  I know how to create silence. It’s like this: I turn on the radio really loud — then suddenly turn it off. And that’s how I capture silence. Stellar silence. The silence of the mute moon. It stops everything: I created silence. In silence you can hear noises more. Amidst the hammer blows I was hearing the silence.

  I’m afraid of my freedom. My freedom is red! I want them to put me away. Oh enough with disappointments, I’m so beat up, the back of my neck hurts, my mouth, my ankles, I was flogged on my kidneys — what do I want my body for? what purpose does it serve? just to get beat up? A smack in the face that is swollen and ruddy. I take refuge in roses, in words. Little consolation. I’m inflated. I’m worth nothing.

  I was interrupted by the silence of the night. The spacious silence interrupts me, leaves my body in a bundle of intense and mute attention. I’m on the lookout for nothing. Silence isn’t the void, it’s the completeness.

  I read what I’d written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.

  AUTHOR: I don’t write like Angela. Not just because I lack the ability but because I’m more sober, I don’t spill myself scandalously. And I only rarely use adjectives.

  Angela is a stray dog crossing the deserts of the streets. Angela, a noble mutt, follows the trail of her owner, who is I. But she often meanders away and heads off freely wandering toward nowhere. I leave her in this nowhere, since that’s what she badly wants. And if she finds hell in life she herself will be responsible for it all. If she wants to follow me then go ahead because that way I’ll be in charge and in control. But it’s no use ordering her around: that frivolous creature who loves diamonds and pearls escapes me as the unspeakable emphasis of a dream escapes. Hard to describe Angela: she’s just a mood, she’s just a way of being, a revealing expression of the mouth but revealing of what? of something I didn’t know in her and which now, with no possible description, I barely know, that’s all. She breathes to me in whispers what she is and, if I can’t hear her because of my own lack of acuity, I’ll lose her completely.

  If Angela is a potential suicide, as I ended up realizing, do I make her commit suicide? No. I don’t have the courage: her life is very precious to me. It’s just that she has a taste for danger and so do I.

  ANGELA: I faint for no reason.

  The last time it only took a second. I fall happily into bed and there’s the void, and then just afterward I was saying to myself: it was nothing, it’s already over. Hello! Hello! Picasso! Come see me, as a special favor. I’m a plucked chick.

  But what fireworks! Commemorating what? I wonder.

  I look at myself from the outside in and see: nothing. My dog’s worried. There’s something in the air. A transmission of thoughts. Why don’t people look at me when they speak? They always look at someone else. I resent it. But God looks me right in the pupils of my eyes. And I face him. He is my father-mother-mother-father. And I am they. I think I’ll see God very soon. It will be The Encounter. For I take risks.

  AUTHOR: Angela stirs my fauna and disturbs me. Does her destiny depend on me? Or was she already pretty much freed from my breath to the point of continuing herself? When I think that I could make her die, I tremble all over.

  ANGELA: I ask questions out of nervousness. Dismayed. And ankles? are they very important?

  I hear no reply to my question. May God protect my ankles. And the back of my neck. They are essential places in me.

  Writing never worked out for me. Others are intellectuals and I can hardly pronounce my lovely name: Angela Pralini. An Angela Pralini? the unhappy one, the one who already suffered so much. I’m like a foreigner in any part of the world. I am from the never.

  When I was small I twirled, twirled and twirled around until I got dizzy and fell. I didn’t like falling but the dizziness was delicious.

  I was addicted to getting dizzy. As an adult I twirl but when I get dizzy I take advantage of that brief moment to fly.

  I think that madness is perfection. It’s like perceiving. Seeing is the pure madness of the body. Lethargy. A tremulous sensibility making everything around more sensitive and making visible, with a small and impalpable fright. Sometimes a balanced imbalance happens like a seesaw that goes up then drops down. And the imbalance of the seesaw is exactly its balance.

  AUTHOR: Angela is organic. She’s not stagnant. And she’s my impasse. Beyond her I can barely see, beyond her begins whatever I don’t know how to say.

  ANGELA: Today I woke up feeling such nostalgia for happiness. My whole life I’ve never been free. I always persecuted myself within me. I became intolerable to myself. I live in a dilacerating duality. I have an apparent freedom but I am imprisoned inside me. I wanted an Olympian freedom. But that freedom is only granted to immaterial beings. As long as I have a body it will submit me to its demands. I see freedom as a form of beauty and that beauty is what I lack.

  AUTHOR: She is unaware that she’s self-sufficient up to a point. So she depends on someone who’s got arrhythmia and never obtains the complete dependence that would be the surrender of herself, the abandonment of her soul.

  ANGELA: My roots are in the earth and from it I arise naked.

  Cascade — waterfall.

  I want a great heroic panel — upon which I literally spread-my-self-out. I need grandeur and the smell of grass. I emerge from my abysses with hands filled with cold emeralds, transparent topazes and orchidaceous sapphires.

  I am a vibrant and crystalline burst of clarinet.

  AUTHOR: Even though I try to write what happens to Angela. There’s no point: Angela is only a meaning. A stray meaning? She is the words I forgot.

  ANGELA: I’m impersonal even in friendship, even in love.

  I’m an Anonymous Society. An open parenthesis. Please close me.

  Every being is some other being, undoubtedly one but brittle, unique fingerprints ad saecula saeculorum.

  AUTHOR: She’s always in a situation of at least semi-crisis. She applies intensity to things that don’t deserve it. To everything she lends a passion that exceeds the reason for the passion. And the frivolity is in giving such importance to the foam of life. Once she’s got something, she no longer desires it. Grabbing the moment is a synchrony between her and time: without hurry but without delay. An infinite present that neither leans toward the past nor projects itself toward the future. That is why she lives so much. Her life “doesn’t change the subject,” it’s not interrupted by imaginary life. Imaginary life is living off the past or for the future. The present brings her pain. But this highly inexorable present casts a shadow where she can regain her strength, the warrior’s repose. Emotional crisis.

  She can’t adapt to human beings. As though other beings existed, besides animals.

  ANGELA: Oh sweet animal mystery. Oh gentle joy. So fascinating. So tremendously fascinating is this challenge of the beast! Oh sweet martyrdom of not knowing how to speak and only bark. You’re the one who asks me if dying is sweet. I don’t know either if dying is sweet. Until now I’ve only known the death of sleep. I kill myself every night.

  Contact with animal life is indispensable to my psychic health. My dog reinvigorates me completely. Not to mention that he sometimes sleeps at my feet filling my bedroom with hot humid life. My dog teaches me to live. All he does is “be.” “Being” is his activity. And being is my most profound intimacy. When he falls asleep in my lap I watch over him and his very rhythmical breathing. And — he motionless in my lap — we form a single organic being, a living mute statue. That is when I am moon and I am winds of the night. Sometimes, from so much mutual life, we trouble one another. My dog is as dog as a human is human. I love the doggishness and the hot humanity of both.

  The dog is a mysterious animal because he almost thinks, not to mention that he feels everything except the notion of the
future. The horse, unless he is winged, has his mystery resolved by nobility and a tiger is slightly more mysterious than the dog because its manner is even more primitive.

  The dog — that misunderstood being who does whatever he can to share with men what he is . . .

  AUTHOR: Angela’s dog seems to have a person inside him. He is a person trapped by a cruel condition. The dog hungers so much for people and to be a man. A dog’s inability to speak is excruciating.

  If I could describe the inner life of a dog I would have reached a summit. Angela too wants to enter the being-alive of her Ulysses. I was the one who transmitted to her this love of animals.

  ANGELA: Oh God, and here I am competing with myself. I detest myself. Fortunately others like me, it’s a tranquility. My dog Ulysses and I are mutts. Ah what a good rain is falling. It’s manna from heaven and only Ulysses and I know it. Ulysses drinks ice-cold beer so adorably. One of these days it’s going to happen: my dog is going to open his mouth and speak. It’ll be glory. Ulysses is Malta, he’s Amapá — he’s at the end of the world. How do you get there? He barks square — I’m not sure you’re getting what I mean. During the world cup he went mad during the fireworks. And my head got all square. I try to understand my dog. He’s the only innocent.

  I can speak a language that only my dog, the esteemed Ulysses, my dear sir, understands. Like this: dacoleba, tutiban, ziticoba, letuban. Joju leba, leba jan? Tutiban leba, lebajan. Atotoquina, zefiram. Jetobabe? Jetoban. That means something that not even the emperor of China would understand.

  Once he did something unexpected. And I deserved it. I went to pet him, he growled. And I made the mistake of doing it again. He gave a sudden leap that rose up from his wild depths of the wolf and bit my mouth. I was terrified, I had to go to the emergency room where they gave me sixteen stitches. They told me to give Ulysses away because he was a danger. But it so happened that, after the accident, I felt even closer to him. Perhaps because he made me suffer. Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.

  AUTHOR: Angela and I are my inner dialogue — I talk to myself. I’m tired of thinking the same thoughts.

  ANGELA: It’s so wonderful and comforting to meet someone at four. Four p.m. is the best time of day. Four p.m. gives you balance and a calm stability, a serene taste for living. At times almost a bit whizzing and “in tremolo.” So I become fluttering, iridescent and slightly excited.

  AUTHOR: I must forgive Angela, once again, for this business about “the best time of the day.” I must excuse her foolishness because she humbly knows her place: she knows she’s not one of the elect and she’s certainly not among the chosen. She knows that she will only be called and chosen once. When Death decides. Angela would rather it not be so. But, as for me, I’m already prepared and almost ready to be called. I realize it because of the disregard I feel for things and even for the act of writing. I find very little worthwhile now.

  ANGELA: I bought a dress of black gauze with scattered flowers of a dead tone as though there were a veil over them putting them out. The whole dress seems to be played on a harp. I can feel myself flying in it, freed from the law of gravity. I’m ragged and weightless as though from black Africa I were resurging and arising white and pallid.

  Black isn’t a color, it’s the absence of color.

  AUTHOR: Angela is losing it. What do I care about the clothes she bought? She is sometimes an Austrian waltz. And when she speaks of God she becomes Bach. Moreover, she’s hooked on possessing. She confuses possessing for living. That’s why a dress can enrich her soul. Poor soul. She’s vulgar. But she has one charming quality: she’s a jug from which fresh water bubbles.

  ANGELA: I’m suffering from happy love. That only seems like a contradiction. When you feel love, you have a deep anxiety. It’s like I’m laughing and crying at the same time. Not to mention my fear that this happiness won’t last. I have to be free — I can’t stand the slavery of great love, love doesn’t have such a hold on me. I can’t submit to the pressure of the stronger force.

  Where’s my current of energy? my sense of discovery, though it takes an obscure form? I always expect something new from me, I am a shiver of expectation — something is always coming from me or from outside toward me.

  AUTHOR: When Angela has a crisis of “womanishness” she spies on the world through the keyhole of the kitchen door. Her ambition is to live in a whirlpool of happiness. Stubborn without believing in life. I wonder if someone could simply decide: today is going to be an important day in my life. And then concentrate so much that the sun rises from within one’s soul and the galaxies swirl slow and mute.

  The drama of Angela is the drama of us all: balancing upon something unstable. For anything can happen and damage the most intimate life of a person. What will have been done to my soul next year? Will that soul have grown? and grown peacefully or through the pain of doubt?

  ANGELA: A shot in the middle of the night.

  All of a sudden I hear a shot. Or was it a tire that blew out? Did someone die? What a mystery, dear God. It’s as if they were shooting me right into my poor heart.

  Anyway, what poor thing! My heart is rich and strikes well the hours of my life.

  The patience of the spider spinning the web. Moreover I’m bothered by badly making things out in the chiaroscuro of creation. I get skittish with the flash of inspiration. I am pure fear.

  AUTHOR: I’d like to expose Angela to some terrifying music.

  The music would have intervals of terrible silence with drops of flute-song here and there. Then a contralto voice suddenly and with extreme softness would hum with a closed mouth excessively calm and sure of itself: as in the threat that is made when one is sure of possessing deadly weapons. Angela would run and hide beneath the covers, holding on tightly to her dog Ulysses. I’m a little jealous of Ulysses. He’s so important to Angela. And she doesn’t seem grateful to me for having invented her. So I’ll avenge myself with that terrifying music: a single note but repeated, repeated, repeated until near-madness. Angela fears madness and already thinks she’s strange. I too find myself a bit strange but I don’t fear madness: I venture an icy lucidity. I see everything, I hear everything, I feel everything. And I stay far away from the intellectualized environments that would confound me. I am alone in the world. Angela is my only companion. You must understand me: I had to invent a being that was entirely mine. But it so happens that she’s becoming too powerful.

  ANGELA: I rarely scream. When I do scream it is a red and emerald scream. But in general I whisper. I speak quietly to tell timidly. Telling is very important. Telling the truth that covers itself in lies. How often I lie, my God. But it’s to save myself. A lie is also a truth, it’s just cunning and a little nervous. Lie if you can, and may you lie with a peaceful spirit. Because the truth demands a long staircase to climb as if I were condemned never to stop. I’m tired: that’s also why I speak softly — it’s so I don’t offend myself.

  AUTHOR: I’m an entangled and lost writer. Writing is difficult because it touches the boundaries of the impossible.

  My head is full of characters but only Angela occupies my mental space.

  ANGELA: It was intensely cold without any possible shelter. And the driver of the yellow cab had a bad cold. I forgot to say that, when I jumped out of the first taxi, in the middle of Avenida Rio Branco, people were crying out to me: I looked and saw everything that belonged to me exposed without blood on the asphalt of the street. And people were helping me in the middle of the traffic to gather my secrets. Because my purse had opened and been disemboweled: its entrails and my trampled prayers scattered across the ground. I gathered everything and stood humble and dignified waiting for who knows what. And while I was waiting a thin woman appeared and said, startling me: pardon me for asking, ma’am, but where did you buy that lovely green shawl? I was dismayed, and said to her defeated: I don’t remember. Small unusual facts were happening to me, and I at their mercy.

  AUTHOR: Angela is always becom
ing. Angela is my adventure. For that matter I am my own great adventure: I risk myself every instant. But there is a greater adventure: the God, I won’t risk it.

  ANGELA: I kept wandering aimlessly through the city. In the square the ones who give crumbs to the pigeons are the prostitutes and bums — more children of God than I. I give crumbs to you, my love. I, prostitute and bum. But with honor, folks, with my tribute to the pigeons. What a desire to do something wrong. The error is exciting. I’m going to sin. I’m going to confess something: sometimes, just for fun, I lie. I’m not at all what you think I am. But I respect the truth: I’m pure of sins.

  Organ music is demonic. I want my life to be accompanied, as with twin sisters, by organ music. But it frightens me. Funeral music? I’m not sure, I’m a little out of it.

  Today I killed a mosquito. With the most brutal sort of tact. Why? Why kill something that lives? I feel like a murderer and a guilty person. And I’ll never forget that mosquito. Whose destiny I traced. The great killer. I, like an industrial crane, dealing with a delicate atom. Forgive me, little mosquito, forgive me, I’ll never do it again. I think we have to do forbidden things — otherwise we suffocate. But without feeling guilty and instead as an announcement that we are free.

  I’m my own mirror. And I live off the lost and found. That’s what saves me. I’m caught in an invisible war between dangers. Who will win? I always lose.

  AUTHOR: Angela is very provisional.

  ANGELA: I can’t manage to comprehend myself, no.

  It’s smoke in my eyes, it’s the busy signal, it’s the broken fingernail, scratch of chalk on the blackboard, it’s the stuffy nose, it’s suddenly rotten fruit, it’s a speck in the eye, it’s a kick in the butt, it’s a stomp on the corn on my foot, it’s a needle piercing my tender finger, it’s a shot of Novocain, it’s spit in my face.