The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

  fruit that could only shrivel up after that. Since Ermelinda was

  quick-witted the vague idea of a fruit brought her to the idea of

  "the harvest of death," for she had read that somewhere, and

  she had even seen pictures to that respect. "Oh, my love," she

  thought then, but her heavy heart did not know how to express

  itself. The hands that had written "those very simple words"

  were large and ugly, and they saddened her. "Oh, my love," she

  said in a final touch of resignation, and while she was asking

  herself if perhaps she could give and receive life in love, she stole

  the list the man had made and kept it in her room. "My way of

  loving is so pretty! " she thought. She had never been so happy.

  In fact, she had never even come to the point of asking that he

  love her. In the selfishness of her happiness she thought like this;

  "a pity that he doesn't feel what I feel, he doesn't know what

  he's 1nissing."

  On Friday, since he was nearby, she finally said the following

  to him: "I'm dying with this heat." And her eyes filled with tears

  because she had said nothing, as it were. Then later on she said

  humbly to Vit6ria : "This heat is bitter."

  But Vit6ria replied with : "Cold is what they call bitter, not

  heat."

  ( 1 0 5)

  Chapter10

  As FOR MARTIM, he had time. In fact, he seemed to have

  discovered time.

  At the end of the day he would leave his work and go to the

  cowshed, with that same serene avidity with which he had

  formerly gone to the plot by the woodshed. And, free at last

  from the imminence of an order from Vit6ria, free from Ermelinda' s increasingly besieging presence-each day the man would again pick up in the cowshed the instant interrupted on the day

  before putting into one theme all the scattered instants that he

  had had with the cows, and creating from it all the only

  sequence, "As I had been feeling . . .

  " he would seem to think

  as he entered the barn-he would go on with what had been

  interrupted.

  The dark heat of the cows filled the barn. And as if there had

  been something which no person and no consciousness could

  have given him, there in the barn, it was given to him; he

  received it. The suffocating smell was that of the slow blood that

  flowed in the bodies of the animals. It was no longer the intense

  sleep of the plants, no longer the mean prudence of survival that

  existed in the suspicious rats.

  But the cows had already begun to upset him a little. One

  day, for example, he woke up and opened the door of the woodshed to let in the first light. And since the day seemed to have been given to him, he received it. But-but now he wanted, for

  the first time, to do something on his own. It was at the door of

  the shed for the first time he was in need of a deeper experience

  -even if he could never share it with the cows. Restless, he was

  separating himself from them. It was a risk and an initial

  audacity. Then seeing that the countryside was large and full

  ( 106)

  How a Man Is Made

  of light he-took the risk of having a deeper experience. He

  blinked several times, quietly.

  That was how that man was growing, the way a rolling thing

  takes on volume. He was growing calmly, emptily, indirectly,

  patiently advancing.

  He had never looked directly at the mulatto woman. But she

  would laugh. And a peaceful strength had come awake in him. It

  was a power-he still remembered well. Alert, without any plan,

  he waited day after day for the moment when he might make

  the mulatto woman stop laughing. Both the woman and the

  child would observe him in pretense from a distance, never

  coming close. As for the child, Martim avoided her, confused,

  evasive.

  But the woman laughed a lot. One might really say that she

  laughed too much. Without thinking about it he knew what her

  laughter meant. And sometimes it was as if her laughter were a

  moo : then he would lift his head, stunned, summoned, powerful. But he waited. As if patience had become a part of desire he waited without hurrying.

  The mulatto had an open nature, as open as her laughter; she

  would laugh before she knew what she was laughing at. Life had

  arranged itself in her in some dark, sweet way, and she laughed

  at anything; perhaps she had pleasure from it. Even if sometimes

  that same thing would stir inside of her in rage the way a dog

  will snarl. She was a person who could err without sinning. The

  slaps she gave her child were almost filled with joy, and they

  reinvigorated her all over. The man observed that the usual

  thing would be for her to start out singing and end up beating

  the child. The girl would duck away from the slaps, learning

  without resentment that this is how it was, and that her mother

  was that force that laughed out loud and beat her without a

  sense of vengeance; and to be a daughter was to belong to that

  mother in whom vigor was laughter. The man pretended to be

  interested in his work as a cover-up. The fact was that a person

  could come to understand himself completely in the mulatto

  woman. The man found in her a past which if it was not his own

  (I 0 7 )

  T H E A P P L E

  IN

  T H E D A R K

  could serve just as well. What she brought out in a man was

  what he was. Martim had only to take a look at her and he knew

  that she was there. You could deal man to man with her, except

  that when you came right down to it, she was a woman.

  Two days later, instead of going to the cowshed, he finally

  went over to the woman, who was washing clothes. And he

  stood there without looking at her.

  And without looking at him, she laughed. He meticulously

  crumbled a piece of kindling-wood he had in his hand, and

  without looking at her, he knew that she was young. Her hair

  had long, hard curls. Since Martim was a person who immediately liked what he needed right away he found that she was pretty. Finally he threw the stick of wood away and looked

  straight at her; either he would let her alone or he would grab

  her. He grabbed her slowly, the way one day he had grabbed a

  bird.

  "You're strong as a bull," the woman laughed. He was

  concentrating. Grasping her shoulder the man could feel her

  small bones and higher up the tendons and threads beneath her

  soft skin; she was a young creature, he could calculate her age as

  he felt her. He could feel the warmth coming out of her, and

  that is the way it should be: body to body, in tune with the most

  intimate pulse of the unknown.

  It was already dark when his movements woke up the girl.

  The man lit the lantern in the woodshed and she gave a short

  shout of rage. Whatever it was she had it had curled up into

  anger. He looked at her curiously. She was trembling with rage,

  God only knows why.

  And he was all alone by the door of the woodshed.

  Martim was very surprised because in the past he had been

  used to knowing everything. And now-like a fact that was

  someh
ow much more concrete-he did not know about anything. He who had grown up to be a clear man and around whom everything had been customarily visible. He had been a

  person who had known all the answers; formerly he had been a

  person who had lived without pain. The clarity with which he

  ( l 0 8 )

  How a Man Is Made

  had lived had made him capable of working with figures with

  a never-changing patience; and naked within, his clothes had fit

  him well. Expert and elegant. But now that the layer of words

  had been removed from things, now that he had lost speech, he

  was finally standing in the calm depths of the mystery. By the

  door of the woodshed then, revitalized by his great ignorance, he

  kept on standing in the darkness. It was almost night already.

  He had just learned all of that with that woman : how to keep

  on standing when one has a body.

  Then the days began to pass.

  But if at one time his tongue had grown too thick in his

  mouth for him to give expression, and if in his head there was

  not enough circulation of air for his thoughts to be more than

  anxiety, now behind every clearness there was darkness. And it

  was from her that the dark flame of his life had come. If a man

  were to touch darkness once, offering it his own darkness in

  exchange-and he had touched it-then his acts would lose

  their error, and perhaps he would be able to go back to the city

  one day and sit down in a restaurant in perfect harmony; or

  brush his teeth without compromising himself. A man had only

  one time when he could surrender. And only then would he be

  able to live, as he was now living, in the latency of others.

  And then, perhaps because one day followed upon another,

  something began to happen slowly, enveloping, great, in spite of

  the links that were escaping him. It was as if, living there, he no

  longer counted his life in terms of days or years but in spirals

  that were so large that he would never get to see them, just as he

  would never see the long line of the curvature of the earth.

  There was something that was a gradual essence not to be eaten

  all at once.

  Thus it was that Martim's life began to reach beyond him :

  the days were broad and beautiful, and his life was much broader

  than he. And he himself, after a while, became more than just a

  man alone. There had been a wearing away of his previous

  knowledge, and as for words, he only knew them as a person who

  had once suffered from them-as if he had been cured. "At last

  ( l 0 9)

  THE

  APPLE

  I N THE

  DARK

  his crime was only as big as a fact" -and what he had meant to

  say by that, he did not know.

  He began to understand women again too. He did not

  understand them in a personal way, as if he were master of his

  own name; but he seemed to understand why women are born

  when a person is a man, and it was a strong and tranquil blood

  that rhythmically entered and left his chest. Dealing with the

  cows, he realized the desire to have a woman had been reborn

  with calm. He recognized it then; it was a kind of solitude, as if

  his own body was not enough for himself. It was desire; yes, he

  remembered well. He remembered that a woman is more than

  the friend of a man; that a woman was the very body of man.

  Then, with a smile that was a little painful, he carressed the

  feminine hide of the cow and looked around him; the world was

  masculine and feminine. That way of seeing things gave him a

  ·deep physical contentment, the restful and contained physical

  excitement that he got every time he "drew back the curtains."

  A person has very high spiritual pleasures that no one suspects,

  the life of others always seems empty, but a person has his own

  pleasures.

  It is true that he did not yet understand individual lives : the

  two cousins seemed to him to be both shallow and abstract at

  the same time, and he did not suspect what meaning there was in

  the lives of those two women, nor had it occurred to him that to

  understand them would be a means of contact.

  He did not understand individual lives. But now he looked at

  them all together; the mulatto won1an who had unfortunately

  been his and was now filling the pail with water while she sang,

  Francisco sawing wood, Vit6ria courageous, Ermelinda spying,

  and the smoke rising high out of the kitchen chimney. When it

  was together he seemed to understand. And it was as if a heat

  were evaporating off the efforts of them all, and it was as if he

  was finally learning that night falls and day is reborn and then

  night comes again. And that is how it was. His body was in good

  shape during that understanding without the need for the

  mistake that would be evil. Just as the cows quietly relied on the

  existence of other cows the man became wrapped up in the

  ( l l 0)

  How a Man Is Made

  indirect heat of other people. And furthermore, it even seemed

  sometimes, as he looked out, that he was owner of a great

  factory and that the bustle and the smoke were the sign of a

  progressive advance. In what direction? The man did not ask

  himself, even though he might have felt-with the same vague

  unrest with which the drought was gradually approaching-that

  he was not too far away from the question, unripe as it was.

  During all this time the drought was approaching in the

  tassels of the corn.

  "The days have been beautiful," Vit6ria said apprehensively,

  shading her eyes with her hand.

  They were large and clear days, and while they lasted,

  menacingly infinite.

  "They're beautiful ! " Ermelinda exclaimed, "I even had to

  take a tranquilizer!"

  The lizards, attracted by the promise of glare and glory, were

  appearing in greater numbers, coming from nobody knows

  where. They burst out of the dry land and crackled. Vit6ria

  looked at the arid bodies multiplying, she closely examined some

  leaves that had already begun to curl at the edges; she lifted her

  inquisitive face up to a pure and deserted sky. In the fields the

  sun was full of dusty butterflies.

  "Pretty days like this come before a drought."

  "Oh ! " Ermelinda put her hand over her heart, "They're so

  pretty you don't know what to do with them."

  And Martim? The smell of the earth was breaking up under

  Martim's hoe-the smell of crumbling clods; the smell of hay in

  the light; the smell of certain secret herbs brought to exhalation

  by the heat, confused herbs providing with their twining shadow

  some realm that was darker than the one that could be seen.

  Martim was working; his hoe went up and down, up and down.

  A branch in the shade suddenly became disentangled from

  another branch frightening the bee, and making it fly off until it

  was lost in the distance of the clarity. Its flight made one sense

  of a world that was made up of distances and repercussionsthat deep world which seemed to be enough for the chiaroscuro of a cow and enough for a man raising and lowe
ring a hoe. Sweat

  ( l l l )

  T H E A P P L E

  IN

  T H E D A R K

  was one of the best things that had happened to him : Martim

  raised and lowered the hoe. That nameless thing which is the

  smell of earth, which upsets with its warmth and insistently

  reminds us ( who knows why? ) that one is born to love, and then

  it is not understood. It was when the illuminated bee flew off. It

  made the man stop working and slowly wipe away his sweat,

  squinting his eyes at the clarity-at the clarity that was slowly

  becoming his too. His effort to understand was crude and shy :

  Then, he said "The countryside looks like a jewel," and

  blushed violently.

  He looked around as if someone had seen him do a dirty

  thing. He looked like a man who had unwillingly wanted to give

  someone a flower and had stood there with the flower in his

  hand.

  "The countryside doesn't look like a jewel at all ! " he said

  furiously. Then the bee got tangled up in the grass as it would

  have in a head of hair, the ants marched in a long and wavy

  line-and all of this began to belong to Martim. That was the

  bottomless pit into which he had thrown himself in his passage

  from the plants to the longer future of that black work-horse

  that just then passed by in the distance pulling the plow. And

  Francisco was sitting upright on the plow with his silent effort at

  attentiveness. All of that was beginning to belong to Martim

  because a person looks and sees. The cows were drooling; the

  bee, smaller and smaller, annoyed the air as closer and closer it

  approached an imaginary center. And Francisco's shout suddenly

  gave dimension to the distance.

  "I have to talk to you," Ermelinda said to him at that

  moment.

  The man did not interrupt the movement of his hoe upon

  the ground.

  "You might ask Vit6ria to plant some everlasting," she went

  on with a spruced-up smile.

  "Ask Dona Vit6ria," the man answered without looking at

  her.

  "That's the trouble; I'm afraid of her. Besides," she suddenly

  ( l l 2 )

  How a Man Is Made

  said intimately, "you have to be careful too. Don't get me

  wrong; she's very good, but she's so strict. She's very nervous."

  As the man's face was still bent over the furrow, the girl

  leaned over too and, looking up, tried to figure out his expression. "Just imagine!" she said, from below now and speaking louder, since she was not sure that he had been aware of her