The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

  feeling that my fate is just having a thought I didn't have before.

  I get anxious over what will happen, yes, but at the same time

  I've done everything I could to put it off; I don't know how to

  explain it. I've even yearned for times like now, when I could live

  without it-because I got used to it in such a way that I would

  see it in everything, for better or for worse, in some place. Lots

  of times I felt that if I let myself go, really let myself go, what

  was going to happen would come close. But since I'm afraid, I

  avoid it. Even before I go to sleep I read a little so that it won't

  be able to happen . . . But once"-she said serenely-"once,

  while I was waiting for a streetcar, I got so distracted that when

  I came to, there was wind on the street and in the trees and the

  people were passing by, and I saw that the years were passing by;

  and the policeman signaled to a woman that she could cross.

  Then, do you understand? Then I felt that I, I was there-and

  it's the same as if what was going to happen had been there

  . . . I don't even know what was going to happen, because

  almost before I felt it, I had already recognized it-and without

  even giving me time to know what it was called, I had somehow

  fallen down on my knees before it, like a slave. I swear I don't

  know what had happened to me, but my heart was beating, I

  was I, and what had to happen was happening. Oh, I know that

  I was very frightened, because being on the street had nothing to

  do with my father, or with my life, or even with myself; it was

  something as isolated as if it had been something that had

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  The Apple in the Dark

  happened-and all the while, in spite of that, there I was surrounded by the wind, the streetcar passing by, with my heart beating as if it had just had a thought. That was one of the times

  when I had come closest to what I'm used to calling 'my fate.' I

  could feel it the way a person feels something in his hand."

  The man looked at her austerely, seriously, without understanding, because there was beauty in the woman's face.

  "What you probably needed was somebody next to you to

  give you some kind of guarantee," he said like a priest. "Everything people don't understand is resolved by love. You probably needed to find some kind of love."

  But instead of getting annoyed she answered with a hoarse

  voice. "I've already had plenty," she said hoarsely. "When I was

  a girl I had plenty."

  They both looked at each other with interest, but a little

  tired.

  "Once," she said with sudden recklessness, "once I was

  spending the holidays with my aunt-funny, right here! It was

  right here!" she said, feigning surprise only to make the story

  interesting. "It was right here, when my aunt was alive! What a

  strange coincidence. God, life is full of all sorts of things."

  Since the woman had stopped, he said in a show of impatience, "And then?"

  "It was the first time I'd been here, and I never thought that

  one day it would be mine," she continued, insisting on the

  coincidence. "I was on vacation, and I watched a boy lighting a

  bonfire in the field. I stood there looking at him; there was a

  little boy watching him too! " she exclaimed so as to guarantee

  the truth of what she was saying. "The little boy died sometime

  after," she said hoarsely. "I watched the boy lighting the bonfire,

  the warm dust from the leaves was flying about, making things

  warm-making people warm. The little boy who died said something, if I'm not mistaken he said something like, 'Look at the bonfire.' The boy was quiet, and he was feeding the fire; his face

  kept getting darker and darker, darker with the flames, also

  because it was almost night already. And I-there I was-me,

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  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E D A R K

  still very much a child, a girl, very pretty, crazy, oh so crazy; no

  one knew how crazy I was. When I think what was going

  through my head, I was such an idealist! I was standing there,

  just like that, and 1-1 was in love with that boy, I was in love

  with that boy and with the bonfire he was lighting. He didn't say

  a word ! not a single word."

  Since she had spoken about love, almost to her distaste and

  overcoming a sudden discretion, the man took a quick look at

  her body; he looked at her openly, without pity, without evil. To

  tell the truth, she wasn't bad at all. Martim suddenly looked at

  her attentively, mistrustful, as if they had been hoodwinking

  him until now. The fact was that she was "O.K." She wasn't a

  "dog." Then he turned his eyes away with caution :

  "And he must have been in love with you," he said, covering

  up his discomfort.

  "Of course he knew I was there," she defended. "I was

  young, I didn't have a touch of make-up on my face; I was

  beautiful, idealistic. I was there with my new red jacket on; he

  knew I was there."

  "And that was your love, then?" Martim asked with a delicacy that he did not think himself capable of.

  "Yes," she said a little disappointed, wiping away her perspiration. "That was my love too."

  "It lasted as long as the bonfire," Martim said in a silly way,

  perhaps trying to copy situations in the past or things he had

  read; but his tone came out uncertain, he did not know how to

  build her up to face up to the poverty of her love-story.

  "It lasted as long as the bonfire," she repeated, surprised,

  looking at him. "But if you could have seen it," she said,

  suddenly taken up with sweetness-"if you could have seen how

  there was-how there was a little aurora-and a small horizon

  because of the bonfire. I t was all there. The two of us," she

  added suddenly, imploring, as if she were asking Martim also to

  take such a soft detail into consideration-"the two of us were

  standing there, he with his back to me almost all the time. Oh,"

  she shouted then without being understood-"you have to re-

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  The Apple in the Dark

  member that I was different from what I am now; I was slow to

  answer everything. When a leaf would fall, I would just watch

  it. It wasn't happiness the way they talk about happiness today.

  Times change everything; today people ask much more of other

  people."

  She became quiet, a little stupefied. A greedy love for her

  own story had taken possession of her. There she was standing at

  that moment, rich, crazy, boring, even making up there, while

  she had been speaking, a past for herself that she had never

  suspected . . . "But I still have a whole past in back of me! "

  she shouted suddenly i n a burst o f surprise. She had even been

  beautiful, she had even been young-things that she would

  never be in the future. She trembled when she thought that if

  she had not told Martim about the boy at the bonfire, perhaps

  she would have never known what had been happening to her,

  happenings that belonged to her, that she had a right to. Because only when she told about them had she remembered . . .

  as if only then did she know that a boy and a bonfire were also

  feelings, and th
at that too had been her life. Oh, who can tell if

  the vehemence resulted from her coming out with what she had

  forgotten, who knows.

  The woman then wondered, absorbed, whether there might

  not be a thousand other things that had happened to her . . .

  and which she simply had not learned about yet. She wondered,

  with the gravity of a discovery, whether she had not really

  chosen to live off a few past facts, when would she be able to live

  off others that had happened just the same way-and she had

  every right to them-just as at that moment she was reliving the

  boy by the bonfire. There she was, stupid and heavy; here the

  past was revealing itself to be as full of possibilities as the future.

  Because the past had the richness of what has already happened.

  "And naturally you will never enjoy anyone else," Martim

  said with irony.

  "Why?" she replied distractedly. "But that was love."

  "And where is the bonfire boy?" he asked in a polished way.

  "How should I know?" she said startled, because with that

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  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E D A R K

  question the man had shown that he had not understood anything.

  She had been reduced, my Martim's incomprehension, to

  remembering all by herself. Besides, at that moment she asked

  nothing except this : to think alone, like a person who has

  received a letter and is impatiently waiting for a chance to read

  it. In her first cautious steps toward an unexplored past, Vit6ria

  was trying to remember more about the boy at the bonfire. In

  that inferno of fire, in that soft evening, that boy who moved

  with the dark delicacy of an animal . . . That was how Vit6ria

  saw the boy in her own past. And telling herself that the boy had

  always been there! That young man, big, dark, moving about the

  fire, moving about in his own autonomous existence and irradiating his own warmth. And life was big in him; life had space in him. He was not nervous-oh not the least. There were people

  like that : life was big in them, but that did not make them

  nervous. Oh, how many memories she had, and she had never

  touched upon them ! Avid as she was to live, when-when she

  really had already lived. When really what was to happen had

  already happened. What was to happen had already happened

  to her a thousand times. And she had not known.

  She unexpectedly remembered another man, so similar to

  the one by the bonfire that she was surprised. Happenings

  repeating themselves and persisting-and blind as she was, she

  had not noticed. "But I was always alive! " She remembered that

  other boy who was playing ping-pong and who had repeated for

  her the existence of the boy by the bonfire. She had seen him

  playing in a club where she had taken her father to let him enjoy

  himself. It was twenty years ago! It was twenty years ago that it

  had happened. Oh, the richness of getting old. The older one

  gets the more unknown the past is. The woman blinked in

  surprise; twenty years ago a boy had been playing ping-pong,

  agile and calm, and-while the world had continued on its

  way-she, Vit6ria, had stopped at the door of the game-room

  and, twenty years ago, she had watched him. And watching him,

  she had known that that was the way one could love because she

  had seen, once and for always, that boy playing ping-pong.

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  The Apple in the Dark

  "And did he love you?" Martim would have asked if she had

  told him that fact too, that fact which from then on, yes, from

  then on would be her future.

  "How do I know?" she would have answered. Because afterwards she had left the club, passing through the rooms on the lower floor. And she had taken with her the impression that

  today, now, at that moment, was finally being revealed to her.

  As if she had kept it hidden in herself for so long that what had

  finally happened gave off a ripe smell of fruit, and the wine that

  had been new had taken on body and the quality that make it

  shine in a glass.

  The man, who at that moment was waiting on the sun, did

  not understand anything; he knew it all. But Vit6ria did not

  seem to need him any more-as if she had chosen to live the

  great freedom that can be lived when everything that has happened has happened. She looked at Martim with a deep and tired sigh. He did not understand anything. But she could not

  even blame him. Because looking, absorbed now by everything

  around her, not even she herself could know how to make logical

  and rational the fact that one's own deep love had been

  scattered away, the fact that the mystery had been kept, the fact

  that one time or another the sign of richness had pointed toward

  a warning, the fact that she had always tried in her humble

  calling to look for some kind of intimate glory. And how could

  one make rational the fact that all of this mixed-up business was

  the source of the austere beauty and goodness of a saint, and

  that all the while it was also the source of the suffering of a

  woman? And how could one make rational the fact that a boy in

  front of a bonfire was there warming her face today? And how

  could one explain that she, all by herself on the farm, she was

  the queen of a world where at night one could look into her own

  entrails and no longer be surprised-oh, no more surprises,

  because a person is not herself; a person is somebody else? And

  how could one make rational the fact that all alone she was

  walking along that thought which a person should have at the

  most only once in a lifetime? And how could one explain that

  love is not just love; love was all of that-and how heavy it was

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  T H E A P P L E

  IN

  T H E D A R K

  on her, oh, how heavy it weighed. How could she blame Martim

  for not understanding, if she herself did not understand . . .

  "Why didn't you ever get married?" Martim asked without

  having noticed that the conversation was over.

  "I never found a man who was honest enough and who could

  understand," she replied simply. "I could see when I looked

  closely that everyone I've met up until now was too free. I never

  found anyone who came close to my needs of order and respectability."

  "You're terribly conventional !" he said half gallantly, and

  trying to do homage to her rectitude of character, he was judging

  her in a quite conventional way, as people expect to be judged.

  That is why they work their whole lives through. "You are

  conventional," he said with a degree of respect.

  "Conventional?" she repeated. "No," she explained slowly­

  "it's just that I've always needed some shape out of life because

  I'm also the kind of person who is so free that I look for some

  kind of order where I can use my freedom."

  "In that respect," she thought-"I'm a saint." She did not

  tell the man, because so many mistakes can be made about

  saints.

  And Martim did not really understand what she had saidbecause not only did the lives of others seem quite abstract to him, but also he was more alert to his own thoughts than to


  those of others-nor did she herself entirely understand what

  she had said. But, if she had not spoken the truth in all the words

  of truth, she had said something that could be recognized. And

  the woman assumed a vaguely satisfied air. Both of them, furthermore, had the tranquil impression that something had finally been justified.

  The heat of the sun was unbearable : it was noontime. The

  man looked with speculating eyes at the blouse of the woman

  which was wet around the armpits. He tried to turn his eyes

  away, but something in that dark dampness held his fascinated

  eye. Vit6ria, not realizing that there had been silence for a time

  and that her own thoughts were very confused, closed her mouth

  then, and became even more silent.

  The Apple in the Dark

  "So?" the man said, tired.

  "So what?" she asked, waking up surprised.

  As if she had shown him in a mixed-up sort of way everything she had to show, the lady had nothing more for him.

  What had she wanted from Martim? Because everything she

  had told him had had nothing to do with the purified and

  useless life that she had chosen one day back everything that she

  had told him had nothing to do with the night of frogs that she

  had gone through. And it had nothing to do with the fact that

  she had just discovered that, without having known it, she had

  been alive. And if until now the knowledge of herself had pot

  brought her anywhere except to a rocky gorge out of which she

  could not climb it now seemed as if the rocks had become

  crumbly and had allowed her to pass, pass at last into a past. Oh,

  she deserved that : to experience at last what she had been

  through. And that man? What had she wanted of him? She

  looked at him without surprise, and he was a stranger. She had

  even forgotten that she had turned him in; she had forgotten

  again. Now that she had a whole past in front of her again he

  was a familiar stranger.

  And he, the stranger? The stranger was looking at her with a

  polite and curious attention. As he was looking at that woman,

  he thought, "Bad people are so ingenuous! " Because Vit6ria's

  face was only soft and tired. In a contradictory way he was thinking, "The danger is only in what bad people can do because they can make some effect. They themselves are not dangerous,

  they're infantile; they're tired, they need a little sleep." And he