The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

  that after all, he had nothing to do with any of this.

  "Nobody," Martim said, unexpectedly emphatic-"nobody

  can ask for more than he can receive from someone else! Human

  nature," he said very self-satisfied, "is always the same. Nobody

  can ask for more than someone else can give him because asking

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  The Apple in the Dark

  and giving is the same act, and one doesn't exist without the

  other. Besides, nobody can invent what doesn't exist, my dear

  lady. If asking was invented it's because the answer exists in

  giving! " he said quite firm and contented.

  "But asking whom?" she yelled.

  "Well," Martim said, ,stumbling and already losing interest

  -"that's the question. But then there's also this" -he added,

  suddenly serious and sensual-"there's also this, there's a

  definite technique in asking! Because, my dear lady, things are

  not like that. No, my dear lady! You can't just say 'Give m�! '

  and let i t go a t that! Lots o f times you have to deceive the one

  you're asking," he said, intimate, sensual. "To be exact, you have

  to ask in some disguised sort of way. You're an intelligent and

  well-read woman, you must have learned that too. Let's imagine,

  for example, that you were married and needed a pair of shoes,"

  he said, suddenly most interested in the problem, while the

  woman looked at him, her eyes silly with surprise. "If you

  needed a pair of shoes, the wisest thing would never be to say to

  your husband, 'Give me some shoes !' The wise thing would be

  to say a little by little every day, 'My shoes are getting old.'

  'My shoes are getting old.' 'My shoes are getting old,' " Martim

  said and could not help laughing. "You understand?" he said­

  "and one fine day your husband will wake up in the morning and

  without knowing why he'll say : 'Vit6ria, my love, I'm going to

  buy you a pair of shoes! ' Because in asking for help there's a

  definite technique! Receiving a request frightens people a lot,

  while on the other hand, dear lady, they're really itching to give

  you something. You understand, a definite technique! For everything else too there's a definite technique! For example," he continued with enthusiasm-"for example, you can only express

  what you want to say, when you express it well ! There's a

  definite technique. You've got to know how to live in order to

  live, because the other side, dear lady, is spying on us at every

  step. One wrong step, and suddenly a walking man looks like a

  monkey! Just one wrong step, and instead of being perplexed,

  people laugh ! One moment of weakness, dear lady, and love is

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  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E D A R K

  perdition. It takes skill, dear lady, lots of skill, because without it

  life goes wrong. And lots of wisdom : because time is short, you

  have to pick a fraction of a second between one word and

  another, between remembering and forgetting; there's a definite

  technique! ''

  "Technique?" she repeated, stupefied.

  "That's right," he said, bored with the wisdom she had

  forced on him.

  The lady looked at him, completely stupid. The man smiled

  in a constrained way, without knowing how to get out of the

  predicament to which he had brought himself.

  "I'm going to the cowshed," he then said in a low voice, with

  discreet modesty, as if he were asking permission to go to the

  bathroom.

  But she suddenly came to : "Listen."

  The insistence put into the word began to tear at the man's

  fibers and make him give in. He stopped again. He felt that he

  was being used by that woman as if she were emasculating him

  little by little : there were women like that, who break everything

  they touch. With the mouth of a leech, she was sucking something out of him, something that was not valuable, but which after all still belonged to him. What she was doing with what

  she sucked out he did not know. He looked at her without

  pleasure, without curiosity. He no longer seemed to have the

  strength to resist the word "listen," which finally made him bow

  down, resigned. Slowly, without any defense at all, he prepared

  to hear her out.

  "Listen," she repeated then, gentle, like a mother who had

  surprised her child with an involuntary shout. "Listen : before

  you came here I was different," she then said, as if she were

  going back to the beginning of beginnings. And she gave the

  man the fatigue he had felt before and put a heroic readiness for

  sacrifice on his face. "Not that I was really different," the lady

  added with certain kindness, "but the fact was that I hadn't

  always owned this place."

  She paused. Because-busy at showing consideration for the

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  The Apple in the Dark

  man whom she was nullifying in some way-the meaning of

  what she had wanted to say escaped her. The heat had left them

  wet and salty.

  "I used to live in Rio," she continued, and her tone tried to

  be unpretentious, as if having lived in the city would make her

  too big in the man's eyes. "But I came here of my own volition.

  I know, I know it was a mistake; you don't have to tell me," the

  lady added with that vanity of hers which offended so easily.

  "But I'd made a mistake. What was I going to do? To err is

  human; I made a mistake like a woman who had been deceived

  by a man's promises-oh, there wasn't any man, if that's what

  you mean or at least what you're thinking," she interrupted,

  flattered by the possibility that it might have occurred to

  Martim. "But how can I explain it?" she asked, as if he were

  anxious to understand, even though there was no question on

  the man's complying face. "I thought that here I could

  find .

  "

  .

  .

  What had she really come to find? The passion of living?

  Yes, she had come in search of the passion of life, the woman

  discovered disappointedly; and a drop of sweat ran sadly down

  her nose.

  "I'll tell you what happened," she said then with effort, and

  probably that woman had already had her speech prepared for

  years. "This is how it all started. Once, some relatives had come

  to visit us in Rio, and I left Ermelinda to take care of my father.

  I took them around to show them the city-my relatives I mean.

  We always drove : my uncle had rented a car. It was already

  getting chilly . . . I never saw such long roads, it was getting

  cold, every day I wore a blue dress that I had never had a good

  chance to wear. And we ate in restaurants so many times, enjoying ourselves and getting to know the restaurants. It was the first time that I had ever done anything like that . . . eating juicy

  steaks. I have to admit" -she informed him-"that I had always

  shied away from big meals. I always liked dry things; my meals

  had always been so simple! Because until then I had ended up

  adopting my father's diet . . .

  T H E A P P LE

  I N THE

  D A R K

  "But at that time," the woman continued, her face suddenly<
br />
  cleared by pleasure and by the unexpected attack of an unattainable ideal, "at that time they would come with huge plates filled with stuffed pork chops; and when I left the restaurant, I could

  see that the fruit in the pushcarts was squashed and then . . ."

  She was quiet. By interrupting herself, however, all she did was

  make herself smell, as if the breeze had brought in the smell that

  came from inside the pushcarts, the whiff of rotten pineapples

  and warm chicken feathers-and then she smiled with a face

  that was clear, mysterious.

  "When I left the restaurant, I tossed my coat, which was

  also new, over my shoulders; but it wasn't because it was cold, it

  was only because it seemed that something was happening to

  me. I don't know," she said, having trouble wiping away the

  perspiration, "but it was as if I saw that things are much more

  than the dry shell, you understand me maybe? It was as if I

  could see that even though I had felt sick before, it was because

  I knew then that the danger was beneath the dryness-I don't

  know why, but driving around those days, it seemed to me that

  everything that existed was, was horribly ripe, you know how it

  is? And I felt so tired that it almost hurt. To tell you the truth, it

  didn't even seem like wintertime. It's hard to believe, but it

  didn't seem like it; the cars blowing their horns, the pushcarts so

  full of fruit . . . fruit that was almost rotten, almost-almost I

  don't know what," Vit6ria said softly, lovingly, and out of pure

  intimacy with the man she did not try to explain it any better.

  Martim took his dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and

  wiped his face. The woman saw that he had not understood. But

  now it was nice and too late to stop, it did not matter now even

  if he did not understand. She stayed there for a moment with an

  unraveled look, reduced to remembering herself alone as in the

  restaurant and how her mouth glowed at the sauce as it poured

  out, giving her a touch of repugnance; how in those days it had

  seemed to her that one had to exult in what was ugly; and then,

  with a feeling of nausea that she suddenly had not been able to

  separate from love, she had admitted that things are ugly. The

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  The Apple in the Dark

  smell of the pushcart seemed to be a warm smell of dirty people,

  and one had to get emotional over things that were so imperfect

  that they seemed to ask for her understanding, her support, her

  pardon, and her love; happiness weighed upon her stomach in

  those days. Yes, and she had felt that she was capable of loving

  all of that. It was surprising, it was horrible, as if it had been a

  wedding.

  At that instant the woman trembled, as she remembered

  that it was precisely those strange days of happiness that later on

  had led her to dare go to the island all alone-to look for something more. And that she had failed nevertheless.

  She looked thoughtfully at the man without seeing him. It

  did not even pain her any more whether Martim understood her

  or not. A woman has the right to speak out once in her life.

  "Driving around that time," she informed him humbly, "it

  was as if I had become ill . . ."

  "Maybe the food was too heavy?" he suggested with his head

  boiling in the sun and his hair crackling itself dry.

  "A man without a calling at least ought to have the advantage of being free," Martim mused, absorbed in his thoughts.

  But everybody calls it following a duty. And truthfully, in the

  sun, he was just as completely mixed up as he had been before;

  wherever a man goes, a city grows up, all that is needed are

  streetcars and movies. Ermelinda wanted him . . . what did

  Ermelinda want? And Vit6ria was forcing him to take her confession. It was difficult not to collaborate. Then in some vague way there grew in Martim a new explanation for his crime-that

  crime which was becoming more and more elastic and amorphous-and the man had already got so far away from it that he really seemed to have committed an abstract crime; and his

  crime now really seemed more like a sin of the spirit, just that.

  Therefore, in the sun, persecuted by the presence of Vit6ria, he

  thought like this : that the only way to be free, as a man without

  any calling has the right to be, had been to commit a crime, and

  make other people stop recognizing him as someone like themselves and not ask anything of him. But if that explanation was ( 2 9 5 )

  T H E A P P L E I N T H E D A R K

  the right one then his crime had been useless. As long as he

  himself survived, other people would call on him. Burning there

  in the sun, that man, tired out by a sleepless Sunday night,

  thought that this was the most reasonable explanation for his

  crime. Restless, he knew also that he was only wandering.

  It was then that it occurred to him that he was about to be

  arrested. So that they could tell him at last what his crime had

  been. He was about to be arrested and so other people could

  judge him, because he, he had already made up a legend about

  himself.

  "It's quite possible," Vit6ria said in anguish-"it's quite

  possible that the meat was very heavy indeed, and I had been

  eating my father's diet for so long!" she added distractedly.

  They remained silent, and the man scratched himself.

  "Why didn't you go to a stomach specialist?" Martim asked,

  not exactly because he did not understand her, but because he

  was trying to see if, honestly reducing what she was saying to a

  question of a medical cure, everything would come out in its real

  proportions.

  "The fact is that it was partly because of those days driving

  around that years later I found that I ought not sell the place

  I had inherited from my aunt, and I decided to live here," she

  concluded suddenly, startled as if she had come to the tape

  much more quickly than she had calculated, and without even

  being ready to have arrived there.

  "Oh," he said as if he had understood.

  They remained silent again. The woman had finally stopped

  wringing her hands.

  "I think," she said with a final sigh, "I think that I thought I

  would be able to find here in this place what had happened to

  me during the days I was driving around. I mean those things I

  saw when I came out of restaurants. Of course, not in the impossible way I wanted to find them on the island-find them here, yes, but within my reach, every day and little by little

  within my reach," she said, feeling herself that she was irremediably obscure and foundering in the inexplicable.

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  The Apple in the Dark

  And suddenly everything seemed really inexplicable to her. It

  was true that living in the country had come to give a passion to

  her purity; it was true that for the first few nlonths she had been

  touched by the laziness with which the plants grew erect, and for

  the first few months nature had given an ardor to her confusion.

  Yes, that was true . . . . But it was also true that because of

  paths that could no longer be retraced she had ended up falling

  into the truculent brutality of moral purity; and her arteries ha
d

  hardened like those of a judge.

  But all the same, that wasn't the only truth ! She justified

  herself, because there she was, a hard woman, unburdening herself so simply in front of a man who was not even listening to her, the way a drop of water can no longer bear its own weight

  and falls where it falls; the thing had had enough strength of selfdirection to do it all alone. And it was also true that at the same time in which a moral code could harden that she herself did not

  understand; she had approached inside, without knowing in the

  slightest, through despoilment upon despoilment, something

  that was alive.

  "I suppose," she said to the man, "that I was imagining I

  would find all of that on the farm. But later on" -she added

  surprised, as if only then she had realized-"later on I got a little

  confused . . .

  " she said and smiled, constrained, pardonable,

  with the enchantment of unprotection on her face.

  What Martim had least expected had been a smile. And he

  agreed, interested. Going back over it all in a more alert way, he

  managed to reproduce in his ears the last words of the woman,

  "I got a little confused." It was, therefore, those words which,

  even though they said no more than any others, seemed to

  transmit to the man a kind of total understanding, as if out of

  tenderness he could no longer ignore anything about that

  woman. With his effort of looking at her and understanding her,

  the material that made up the man's face finally melted, and on

  the surface a kind of expression arose, the shadow of a thought

  perhaps.

  Vit6ria noticed it, emotional, sad, modest:

  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E D A R K

  "As I was saying, it was because of that that I came here. It

  was a mistake. But I've done so many other things for the same

  reason that I can't explain it! " she said simply, perplexed. "It's

  as if something that should happen is waiting for me; and then I

  try to go after it, and I keep on trying, trying. It's something that

  happens that keeps on encircling me-it's something that owes

  itself to me, it looks like me, it's almost myself. But it never gets

  close. You can call it fate if you want. Because I've tried to go

  out and meet it. I sense this happening as if it were some kind of

  affliction. And it's as if, after it happened, I would become

  someone else," she added peacefully. "Sometimes I have the