The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

  sun, maybe a disembodied emblem for the disembodied stones,

  but not for the living rat he wanted to be.

  With a shock the man looked at the stones, which now did

  not go beyond being stones, and again he did not go beyond

  being a thought. Unprotected for a moment, prisoner of himself,

  caught in the act, the man looked around him. But he had

  already come to such a point that he would not know how to

  free himself from the useless vice except with the sinful help of

  another thought. For a moment he was still looking for that

  thought, which showed to what point he was still taking refuge

  in the fact that he was a fingernail that made a scratch on the

  towel and the same fingernail that scratched out what had been

  inscribed.

  But in the following moment he took note of the process.

  And since that man seemed not to want to use thought ever

  again, not even to combat another thought, he rebelled in

  physical rage now that he had finally learned the path of rage.

  His muscles contracted savagely against the dirty conscience that

  had formed itself about the fingernail. Illogically he fought

  primitively against his body, twisting himself into a mask of pain

  and hunger, and all of him made a voracious attempt at becoming just organic.

  ( 4 0 )

  How a Man Is Made

  When the hysteria of thirst had calmed down sweat was

  running down his face. His head was cold, the physical effort of

  the struggle had left him weak and dull. The sun was flashing on

  the stones. Weak, his stomach dry, Martim had never seen

  anything as brilliant as the sun when it shone. The white

  wasteland of light surrounded him. He vaguely recognized that

  light : it was the excessive light by which he had lived when he

  had been a man.

  Tired, he breathed deeply. Still, a late spasm ran through

  him like a cramp. And finally the last frenetic movement

  stopped short, like the convulsions of a horse. When he opened

  his hand, which he had clenched with force he saw that the bird

  was dead.

  The man looked at it carefully. Even its legs seemed old now

  and wavered lightly in the breeze. Its beak was hard. Without

  anxiety, the bird.

  Once more the man's rage had ended up by becoming a

  crime. He looked attentively at the bird. He was amazed at

  himself. The fact was that he had become a dangerous person.

  In accordance with the rules of the hunt a wounded animal

  becomes dangerous. He looked at the bird that he had loved. "I

  killed it," he thought curiously.

  Then, as if he had done something definitive, the man got

  up, seriously and tranquilly, from the rock. What had been a

  kind of uncontrollable delight in an act is the fact that the act

  had gone beyond him. With some reluctance he made himself

  get up, and whether he wished to or not he was forced now to go

  and meet the reward for what he himself had created. He got up

  slowly, avoiding thinking that he had killed exactly what he

  most loved.

  And as if he had survived with the death of the bird, he

  compelled himself to look at the world in the part that he

  himself had just reduced it by.

  The world was large.

  In that world plants grew without sense, and famished birds

  flew as on a Sunday. The tree he saw was standing up-in the

  ( 4 I )

  T H E

  A P P L E

  I N T H E

  D A R K

  beauty of the silence, the tree. This was the way the man

  profoundly saw things. Facing it carefully, he saw that the

  beauty of the tree was useless. Three hundred thousand leaves

  trembled in the tranquil air. The air had so much grace left over

  that the man turned his eyes away. On the hard ground the

  bushes stood up stright. And the stones.

  That was what was left for him.

  That man standing there could not perceive what law ruled

  the harsh wind and the silent sparkling of the stones. But having

  laid down the arms of man, he was giving himself over defenseless to the immense harmony of the wasteland. He too was pure, harmonious, and he too had no sense.

  What was surprising was the extraordinary peace of that hell.

  He had never imagined that with silence like this he could hear

  every one of his movements. Nor the ingenuous perseverance of

  a tree. Nor that enormous sun within hand's reach. Not that

  thing that did not need him, and with which he had ended up

  allying himself like just another star.

  At once, having seen what a person can see, Martim put the

  bird down with some care under the great tree. The last thing he

  had to forget had died.

  Then he began to walk as if he knew where he was going. He

  was occupied with his steps.

  Chapter 3

  Tow ARD the beginning of the afternoon Martim began to imagine-because of the finer quality of the soil and because he had eventually come upon some fruit trees-that perhaps he was

  getting close to a town. He tried to eat one of the unknown

  fruits; but it was green and juiceless, and only irritated his avid

  mouth. But a fresher breeze was blowing, and it carried the

  smell of running water. The ground there was darker. And when

  he found the ferns, it gave him a feeling of dampness that sent a

  sensuous shiver along his dry ribs.

  The silence itself had become different. Even though the

  man had not noticed any sound the birds were flying in a more

  excited way, as if they had heard what he had not. The man

  stopped and was attentive. There was a shifting in the air as if in

  some part of the world a dinosaur had slowly changed its

  position.

  And sometimes as he kept on walking the wind would bring

  a vague sound to him, a more intense call. It was a call to life

  that disturbed the man in a soft sort of way. But it left him not

  knowing what to do as if a flower had blossomed and the only

  thing that he could do was to ]ook at it.

  Little by little Martim was figuring out his own feelings,

  taking care not to understand them too well and thus put a stop

  to his perception. The liquid call came to him as if from far

  away someone were whispering in his ear: that was the strange

  sense he had of distance, and he stopped to sniff. In the

  embarrassment of having recourse only to himself he seemed to

  be attempting to use his own defenselessness as a compass. He

  tried to calculate whether he was near or infinitely far away from

  ( 4 3 )

  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E D A R K

  what was happening somewhere. He had barely stopped when

  the silence of the sun returned and confused him.

  Most likely the thing toward which the man was walking

  uncertainly was just the creation of his anxiety and the intensity

  of his desire to draw close, for alone in that countryside of light all

  the man seemed to want was to draw close somehow-of course

  his listless way of wanting to relate was nothing more than a

  substitute for speech. Who knows but that from now on that

  "wanting" might be his only me
ans of thought. Martim kept on

  advancing without having any idea of what it was that was

  hastening his steps in the direction of nothing but the wind's

  suggestion.

  Until unexpectedly this last, holding sway over his extreme

  attention, brought him back again to that unusual shrillness, as

  if clarity, by dint of being so insistent, had become audible. The

  man stopped short then, abandoning caution. And his whole

  face tried to capture that other quality of silence. But only the

  empty air was beating about his hair. His sharp sense of hearing

  seemed to have reached some state of invention, but just when

  his reception had become sharpest, there was nothing for him to

  listen to.

  Since the breeze was blowing from the left he deliberately

  turned away from the direction he had been following-and

  with great deliberation, with the care of a craftsman, he tried to

  walk in such a way that he would always feel the wind full in the

  face. His groping face was attempting to follow that open path

  in the air and the promise that it held. Of what? The windmaybe the wind. The man had not worked out any plan, and he was armed only with the fact that he was alive. Now, as the

  afternoon became more peaceful he fell into an empty, humble,

  and intense clairvoyance that put him into physical contact with

  the unknown. His will continued to push him forward.

  Now, slowly becoming more systematic, every time the wind

  would start to hit him only on the side of his face, or then only

  on the back of his neck the man would adjust the direction of his

  steps patient as a donkey, until he could feel the moist breeze

  ( 4 4 )

  How a Man Is Made

  upon his mouth once more. And only in that way, from time to

  time, would the peaceful sound come over him again as if he had

  created it. His hard and subtle struggle gave promise of going on

  indefinitely.

  But when that man came to the top of a rise-as if he had

  caught up to an illusion he had been chasing all his life and had

  touched it in the midst of his own intoxication, as if he had

  caught up suddenly in a swirl of the most delicate happinessthe air would open up into a free and whirling wind. And he found himself in the full tumult, so impossible to grasp that it

  could have been the sound of sunset.

  He had not been wrong then! What was it? It was just the

  wind. What was it? No, it was the top of a mountain. His heart

  beat as if he had swallowed it. He, the man, had disembarked.

  There was an air of jubilation, the empty and dizzy jubilation

  that inexplicably comes to a man on top of a mountain. He had

  never been so close to the promise that apparently is made to a

  person at birth. Stupefied, he opened his mouth several times,

  like a fish. He seemed to have reached that thing a person does

  not know how to ask for. The thing that lets him say only

  obscurely, I found it-as if he had aroused the depths of some

  imagined reality. Sometimes a person was so avid for a thing that

  the thing would happen; and that is the way in which the

  destiny of moments is shaped and the reality we hope for. His

  heart, anxious to beat fully, was beating fully. And the wind was

  singing loudly and magnificently the way it does for a pioneer

  who first treads strange soil.

  It is hard to say with what feeling the tired man perceived

  it-perhaps with his acute thirst and with his previous abdication and with the nakedness of his lack of understanding-but there was jubilation in the air. A jubilation which was really just

  as unassimilable as that almost invented blue of the sky which,

  like all softest of blues, had finally made him dizzy with silly

  glory and with noble glory. The man's inner armor was sparkling. Unattainable, yes, but there was jubilation in the air, the same as had been promised him in processions, or in some quiet

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  TH E

  A P P L E

  IN

  T H E D A R K

  female face, or in the idea that one day he would reach what had

  ended with the start of his search. And it seemed to that man,

  who tended to exaggerate, that one could say that he had

  worked quite hard to reach that valuable and useless thing. It

  was an idiot smile, his, if only there had been a mirror to reflect it.

  It was only then that Martim noticed that he had been

  walking across an immense plateau beside a range of hills, the

  first slopes of which he surely must have climbed during the

  night. What he thought had been the difficulty of a climb in the

  dark had been his own difficulty, and later on what had really

  been a slow approach up toward the sun had been his own

  fatigue. But what mattered was that he had arrived. The fervent

  happiness of the sky made his heart strangely heavier. There was

  a seriousness in being there that he himself did not understand.

  But he matched its unknown sense with the face a man has

  when wind and silence are hitting him in the face. In some way

  then he had not been lying! Because wobbling from fatigue he

  was standing there as if a man held a prophecy within himself,

  standing, with his tired legs rooted, with a tremulous avidity

  within, like a man who is learning how to read. And there was

  the world along the shores of his muteness. That imminent and

  unreachable thing. His famished heart had clumsily conquered

  emptiness.

  It was a surprising time. Luckily the man did not even

  attempt to understand it. Perhaps the thing in him was only an

  echo of something he had heard that said, "For on the top of a

  mountain one reveals himself."

  Except that he had not revealed anything. And if in his

  dullness he had clumsily recognized that moment on the mountain, it was simply because a person recognizes what he wants to.

  There is not even any word in speech to name the fact that by

  making himself gigantic he had reached the top of the mountain. Then Martim said aloud :

  "Here I am," he said, "and in the heart of something."

  Physically at least he made an attempt with some dignity to

  ( 4 6 )

  How a Man Is Made

  maintain himself at the level of what he had found; he preened

  himself in keeping with the heights that he had reached. It did

  not take very long. And he sat down on the ground.

  Sitting there on the stone the countryside seemed very

  pretty. A touch of sunset began to quiver with a face of quiet

  clarity. Harmony, an immense and senseless harmony, surrounded his empty head. The sun was trembling like the facets of a stained glass window. Now that Martin had brought about

  his own arrival, he did not know what to do. So the man kept on

  sitting, submissive, breathing. So it was true-much sooner than

  he could have believed it was incontravertibly true.

  Then everything turned green. A transparency came peacefully over the wasteland and left no one spot clearer than the next. Then his head, which thirst had emptied, began to calm

  down.

  "What's that light, Daddy? What's that light?" he asked in a

  hoarse voice.

  "It's the sunset, son."

  And so it was. The light had come on with great mystery
.

  Chapter 4

  WITH the clean, new clarity of vision the man's lethargy �Jnished. And just as if his energy was within reach and to his measure he got up without any effort at all. He was dominated

  by an impersonal awareness that made him like a supple-footed

  tiger. Now he was real and silent.

  When he came to that part of the hill where there was

  nothing left to do but go down, he spotted the house there

  below surrounded by green fields, lying at his feet, as it were, but

  so reduced in size that he knew how far away it really was. Then

  he began to go down the slope and his back felt the soft

  encouragement of the descent. Propelled only by the thought of

  how thirsty he was, the man lost track of his progress and was

  finally on the same level as what was there : a house in the

  distance; another man sitting under a distant tree, some dogs

  sprawled about upon the ground.

  Martim could now look at the house on equal terms; it was

  larger than he had thought and there was a thick clump of dark

  trees. He could not tell how far away they were from it, but he

  could see that they were beyond. The dark edge of the woods

  blended into distance itself, and it receded and approached the

  way it would have looked to someone just off a ship after a

  voyage on the high seas.

  He moved along with that lightness born of fatigue, as if he

  was wearing tennis shoes. An artful elegance came over him; he

  was preparing to meet people. And the more he advanced the

  more he recognized that quiet tumult of life which he had

  sensed hours before and to which it seemed he had given the

  private name of "ideal," and which now, even though it was not

  divided up into distinct sounds, was familiar to him-without

  the false joy he had felt up there on the hill which had turned

  ( 4 8 )

  How a Man Is Made

  into dead past and nothing more, and without any promise

  whatever, but sure of some place where there would be water.

  His ecstatic folly on the hilltop had turned into simple thirst

  and vague vivacity. One thing was sure. He was still a little

  intoxicated by the high, purple sky.

  He walked along lightly. At this point his empty head was of

  no help to him at all. What really seemed to be guiding his steps

  was the fact that he was a man inserted between earth and sky.

  And what kept him going was the extraordinary stage of impersonality he had reached, like a rat whose only individuality was what he had inherited from other rats. The man held that