The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

  second they had looked at each other in the eyes.

  When was it that Martim had first heard the professor

  mentioned? It must have been during his first days on the farm,

  when his dull eyes could barely tell Vit6ria from Ermelinda. "As

  good as the professor" -had he heard that phrase? And if he had

  heard it, which one of the women had said it? Martim suddenly

  remembered another phrase : "It's the last Sunday of the month,

  but the professor can't come, he's ill."

  Who had said it? Martim cursed himself for not having paid

  attention to everything now that he needed every detail so that

  he could understand. He had had only the impression of links

  escaping him-but which ones? Could the professor be the same

  person as the German? And in that case the son-would the son

  be the one he had thought was the German's servant? No,

  because Vit6ria had referred to him as the "German," but she

  called tomorrow's visitor the "professor" . . .

  And suddenly Martim managed to find no danger in the

  visit. The professor, as far as he could make out, was accustomed

  to visiting them on the last Sunday of the month, except that

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  through coincidence he had not been able to make it until now.

  And the following day was precisely the last Sunday of the

  month! There was no reason to suspect, then. It was just a

  visit . . .

  The only thing to suspect was the unexpected break in

  Vit6ria's way of life; she had stopped giving orders, and the only

  time she had spoken to him she had withdrawn like a timid

  woman.

  At the same time Martim could not be sure whether the

  change in Vi6tria was real or whether she seemed different only

  because she was wearing feminine clothes and had let her hair

  down, as if it were the first time she had had those graying hairs.

  Yes, it must have been just a superficial transformation in

  appearance. But then it wisely occurred to Martim; "And why

  has Vit6ria suddenly changed her way of dressing? what's the

  reason?" Since he could find no logical explanation he became

  susp1c1ous again.

  On that Saturday, with no work being done on the farm­

  "Why had Vit6ria wanted to stop it? Oh, maybe just because in

  her dry way she wanted to celebrate the sale of the produce?" -

  with no work being done the farm became even vaster. As if it

  were already a Sunday, a soft wind was running along without

  hindrance across the fields. Martim walked around, turned loose,

  the sequence of the days suddenly cut off. It was raining close to

  Vila, and the news that the drought was going to end had left

  them all calm and idle. On the silent Saturday the afternoon

  came on rapidly and tamely. Martim did not even see Ermelinda. And that worried him too. They had given him a sudden freedom. He felt a lack of the encirclement by women which

  had previously hemmed him in. The mulatto woman no longer

  seemed to leave the kitchen. No one was looking for him.

  Martim wandered through the countryside not knowing from

  which direction the danger would come.

  It was then, with his heart pounding, that he saw the child

  playing near the cowshed. The drums had suddenly stopped.

  His first avid impulse was to run over and grab her before she

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  The Apple in the Dark

  too could slip away. But he reined himself in so as not to startle

  her. He could barely contain the suspicion that she too would

  refuse him. With a casual walk, his heart pounding with thirst,

  he approached. And next to her, out of fear and softness of

  feeling, he did not look at her.

  But the girl, the girl lifted up her eyes from the bricks she

  was playing with. She looked at him-and smiled. The man's

  heart contracted with an affliction of joy : she was not afraid of

  him !

  "Perhaps she never had been !" he then thought. For an

  instant a suspicion crossed his mind. Had he been imagining all

  that time the danger in Vit6ria's meeting with the German and

  had he invented that emptiness on the farm-just as it was now

  clearly proved that he had only been imagining that this child

  was afraid of him? Because the girl was smiling at him, and now

  she was pointing her small finger at the unstable structure she

  had managed with the bricks . . .

  In the meantime there was another possibility: that the child

  really had been afraid of him and only had stopped because she

  had become used to his presence around there. If that last

  hypothesis were true, and if he had not just imagined the fear or

  the rebuff of the girl, then the danger of the German too could

  still be a reality! Fearing that he would get the proof that he had

  been right, he looked at the girl without daring to speak to

  her.

  The girl was peacefully piling up bricks. And standing there,

  he soon began to be moved by the charming indifference with

  which she had admitted him, pleased that she was treating him

  as an equal in that same obvious way that children have when

  playing with one another.

  "In this funny house," the girl said suddenly, pointing at the

  bricks-"a funny man lives. His name is Funny because he's

  funny."

  "Oh, please forgive me," the man said muttering to himself,

  timid, happy. A child is the arrow we shoot off, a child is our

  investment-he needed her so, that he took care not to look at

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  her. He remained still, his heart pounding because it had received human kindness. He was big and clumsy, and feeling himself abandoned did not help his awkward situation. He

  remained still, afraid he would make a mistake. He wanted so

  much to be right, and he did not want to spoil the first thing

  that was being given to him. "Oh God, I've already ruined so

  much; I've already understood so little, I've already refused

  so much. I spoke when I should have kept quiet; I've ruined so

  much already." He, for the first time, was experiencing the worst

  kind of loneliness, the one in which there is no vanity; and then

  he wanted the girl. But he had ruined everything that had been

  given to him ! To him, who once had again been given the first

  Sunday of a man. And out of all that, what remained after a

  while was a crime.

  Martim did not know what word to say to the child without

  its breaking in his heavy hand. The child was silent. Who knows

  but that it too was silence she expected of him. But what sort of

  silence did she want to share with him? Ready to stop being

  entirely what he himself wanted, he just wanted to be what the

  girl wanted him to be. A child was the common denominator of

  a man; he wanted to join in with her.

  But the silence of the busy girl was different from the silence

  he had shared with the cows, and it was different from the high

  cold of a hilltop. He remained silent. As his first donation he

  then stopped t
hinking, and thus he came close to the natural

  heart of a little girl. In a little while the silence between the two

  of them became a silence that would fit into a matchbox, where

  children keep buttons and little wheels. Both of them therefore

  remained in a secret calm. Except that he was afraid because he

  had already ruined so much.

  Then she said; "One day I went to Vila and I went into a

  drugstore," and she knew just how to speak without breaking

  that silence in which they both understood each other and

  which he, since his heart was soft now, loved. "When I went

  into the drugstore I ran and I didn't even fall down. Then I

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  The Apple in the Dark

  weighed myself on the scale in the drugstore with Mommy."

  She adjusted the bricks and she added in an educated way,

  "You know what? I don't weigh anything. Even Mommy said

  so. She said I didn't weigh anything. Then I ran and I didn't

  even fall down, and I almost crossed the street all by myself but

  I'm too smart because of the cars. Mommy doesn't like for me

  to sleep in her bed and she stays there looking at magazines,

  looking at magazines, looking at magazines. Then in the night

  time she'd go out with her high heels on, but I didn't cry : I slept

  and I slept and I slept. The next morning when I woke up I

  stubbed my toe here on the edge of the bed. Do you think it

  hurt?" she asked and stared expectantly at him with her calm

  and yellow eyes.

  When the man finally managed to speak, he said with effort,

  "I don't know, child, I don't know."

  "Well it didn't," she told him with impersonal sweetness.

  She was almost black and she had little teeth. She started

  putting one brick on top of another again and another one on

  top of that-for the tall man who was standing there. They

  looked at each other. The man's heart gave way with difficulty;

  he could not swallow his saliva, an extremely painful sweetness

  weakened him. "Oh God, then it's not with thought a person

  loves ! It's not with thought that we build other people! And a

  little girl escapes my strength, and what do you do with a bird

  that sings?"

  The girl looked at him attentively.

  "Will you give me something? Will you give me something?" she said, attent and expectant; and her little face was that of a prostitute.

  Then the man tried not to look at the girl. He stared

  stoically at a tree.

  "Will you, huh? Anything!" she said very intimately.

  "I will," he said hoarsely.

  Suddenly satisfied, pacified, her face again became childlike

  and extremely shiny. "Did you know that Jose's grandmother

  died one day?" she said in thanks.

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  "No, I didn't."

  "I swear by the Holy Virgin," she said without insisting. "I

  was even there when she died."

  She arranged the bricks better, socially, carefully, maternally.

  But a slight restlessness passed across her face. She lifted up her

  blinking eyes at him, and once more a false flattery appeared on

  her features, which were mature, sweet, corrupt.

  "You will give me something? A present? It doesn't have to

  be today," she conceded greedily. "Maybe tomorrow? Yes, tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow?" he said, lost. "Tomorrow?" he said with horror.

  "Yes, tomorrow! " she repeated authoritatively, laughing.

  "Tomorrow, silly, it's what comes after I fall asleep! "

  The man drew back horrified. He could not leave right away.

  But when he did manage to get out of the greedy claws of the

  child, he almost ran-and as he looked behind in disbelief, he

  saw to his still greater horror that the little girl was laughing,

  laughing, laughing. As if he had been horrified with himself, he

  almost ran. The water-the water was polluted. The girl had not

  wanted to be the symbol of childhood for him. For the first

  time, then, he thought that he was a criminal, and he got all

  mixed up because, even though he was a criminal, he had at the

  same time a great horror of the impure. And what confused him

  even more was that that child with her sharp little teeth that

  could bite and with her yellowish, expectant and dirty eyes full

  of hope was also pure-delicate and pardoned eyes like those of

  an animal. He almost ran. What did he need so much that he

  froze up when they asked him for it? He saw Vit6ria again with

  her graying hair, which now seemed luxuriant and lascivious to

  him. He felt in his heart the hardness with which Ermelinda had

  fallen out of love. "Are we terrible?" he asked himself perplexed,

  as if he had never lived. "What a dark thing is it that we need;

  what an avid thing is this existence which makes our hand

  scratch like a claw? And yet this avid desire is our strength. Our

  children are born astute and unprotected out of our darkness,

  and they inherit it; and the beauty is in that dirty wanting,

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  The Apple in the Dark

  wanting, wanting. Oh, body and soul, how can we judge you if

  we love you? Are we terrible?"-that had never occurred to him

  except as an abstraction. "Are we terrible?" he asked himself, he

  who had not committed a crime out of evil. Not even his own

  crime had ever given him the idea of decay and anxiety and

  pardon and the irreparable way the innocence of the Negro girl

  had.

  Now it was nighttime and everything was peaceful. He spent

  the whole night waiting. The drums had been beating all the

  while. He had not been able to lie down. Then he sat down on

  the bed and waited the whole night through.

  Chapter

  ON THE LIMPID SUNDAY that seemed to have dawned before its

  time the man had the impression that he had only invented the

  danger. In the round sky the angels were on guard across the

  clouds-that was how he had the idea of inoffensive peace.

  Later on, when he saw Ermelinda with her hair curled, it

  became clear to him that she had disappeared the day before to

  curl her hair: it had been only that, then ! And-why not? The

  doldrums had only 1ueant the eve of the last Sunday of the

  month; for Martim now understood what a revolution took

  place for the visit of the professor and his son. In the happy

  morning two chickens had been snatched up out of their

  squawking and had turned up dead in the kitchen. Jam to stuff a

  cake with had appeared out of the pantry.

  And at eleven o'clock, from behind the woodshed door, he

  finally saw an old car approaching. The short fat man who got

  out did not look anything like the German ! And the boy who

  was with him, looked timidly at Ermelinda and Vit6ria waiting

  there well-dressed on the porch unsure of himself. Then the

  visitors disappeared inside the house . . .

  So everything had been in his own imagination ! Almost

  laughing, passing his trembling hand across the dryness of his

  mouth. With relief Martim heard for an indeterminate time the

  sound of conversation coming from the house and the sound of

  dishes
. The noises were familiar, innocent, reassuring. Free of

  tension at last, he fell onto the bed and into a deep sleep.

  When he woke up, the afternoon had become broad and

  tranquil. And a while later Vit6ria appeared. She still looked

  tired and defeated, erect in the woodshed door.

  "Since you are an engineer," she said to him, "and he is a

  teacher, the two of you should have lots to talk about."

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  When Martim did not answer she added with even more

  fatigue, "The professor is very intelligent, he makes wonderful

  puns."

  There was an empty pause.

  "We' re expecting you; all right?"

  Martim ran his hand across his rough face, which he had not

  shaved for days. She noticed the gesture and made one of her

  own that showed an inexplicable despondency.

  "It doesn't matter," she said, "the professor doesn't worry

  about things like that."

  She was already going away when she stopped short. She

  seemed to make a resolution and she explained to him. "He isn't

  the headmaster, but he really runs the whole school because he

  has a strong personality. His puns are excellent. He's quite smart

  and brilliant."

  The sleep had left Martim feeling calm and well-fed; and

  now that there was no danger, he looked at her expectantly.

  "The professor is strict, but he's like a father to his students.

  His theory is that a teacher deserves to be on a higher level than

  the students."

  He did not ask any questions, and he looked at her serenely.

  She was pretty and she was tired. He had never seen her so wellgroomed. She was still waiting, and for the first time they were talking about something that did not have to do with work. It

  was then that Martim, sensing the novelty, looked her over with

  mistrust.

  "He's quite strict with his students," she went on monotonously, and she did not seem to be paying much attention to what she was saying. "One day a student was whispering in class,

  and at the end of the period, in front of them all, he called the

  student up-and such a speech he made, calling him son and

  asking him to lift his feelings up to God. The boy was so sorry

  that all he could do was cry. No one laughs at the professor; he

  won't tolerate that. The students laugh at other teachers, but

  not at him."