The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

  The week preceding the visit to his cousin was one of constant anticipation. Sometimes his stomach would clench apprehensively: because in that house with no kids he’d be completely at the mercy of a woman’s indiscriminating love. “Indiscriminating love” represented a threatening stability: it would be permanent, and would surely result in a single way of judging, and that was stability. Stability, even back then, meant danger to him: if other people made a mistake in their first pass at stability, the mistake would become permanent, without the advantage of instability, which is that of a possible correction.

  Something else that worried him beforehand was what he’d do for the whole day at his cousin’s house, besides eating and being loved. Well, there was always the solution of being able to go to the bathroom every once in a while, which would make the time pass more quickly. But, having some experience at being loved, it embarrassed him in advance that his cousin, a stranger to him, would regard his trips to the bathroom with infinite affection. In general the mechanism of his life had become a reason for tenderness. Well, it was also true that, as for going to the bathroom, the solution might be not going to the bathroom at all. But that would not only be, for a whole day, impossible so much as—since he didn’t want to be judged as “a boy who doesn’t go to the bathroom”—it offered no advantage either. His cousin, stabilized by her permanent desire for children, would be led, by his not going to the bathroom, down the wrong track of great love.

  During the week that preceded “the whole day,” it wasn’t that he was suffering due to his own vacillation. Because the step most people never manage to take was one he’d already taken: he’d accepted uncertainty, and was dealing with the components of uncertainty with the concentration of someone peering through the lens of a microscope.

  As, during the week, these lightly convulsive inspirations followed one another, they gradually started changing in stature. He abandoned the problem of deciding which elements to offer his cousin so she in turn could temporarily grant him the certainty of “who he was.” He abandoned these musings and started wanting to determine ahead of time how his cousin’s house would smell, how big the little yard was where he’d play, what drawers he’d open while she wasn’t looking. And finally he took up the matter of the cousin herself. How should he handle the love his cousin had for him?

  However, he had neglected one detail: his cousin had a gold tooth, on the left side.

  And that—when he finally entered his cousin’s house—that was what in a single instant threw his entire anticipated structure off balance.

  The rest of the day might have been called horrible, if the boy was inclined to put things in terms of horrible or not horrible. Or it could have been called “dazzling,” if he were the type to expect that things are or not.

  There was that gold tooth, which he hadn’t counted on. But, with the sense of security he found in the idea of a permanent unpredictability, so much that he even wore glasses, he didn’t become insecure because he encountered right from the start something he hadn’t counted on.

  After that the surprise of his cousin’s love. It turned out his cousin’s love started off being obvious, unlike what he’d imagined. She’d greeted him with a naturalness that insulted him at first, but that soon after no longer did. She said right away that she was going to clean the house and that he could go off and play. Which gave the boy, out of the blue, a whole day, empty and full of sun.

  At some point, wiping his glasses, he attempted, though with a certain detachment, a stroke of cleverness and made an observation about the plants in the yard. Since whenever he made an observation aloud, he was judged very observant. But his cool observation about the plants got the reply: “um-hmm” between sweeps of the floor. So he went to the bathroom where he decided that, since everything had failed, he’d play at “not being judged”: for a whole day he wouldn’t be anything, he simply wouldn’t be. And he yanked open the door with a surge of freedom.

  But as the sun climbed higher, the more the delicate pressure of his cousin’s love started to make itself felt. And by the time he realized it, he was beloved. At lunchtime, the food was pure love, misguided and stable: under the doting eyes of his cousin, he adapted with curiosity to the strange taste of that food, maybe it was a different brand of oil, he adapted to a woman’s love, a new love that didn’t resemble the love of the other adults: it was a love begging to be fulfilled, since his cousin had missed out on pregnancy, already itself a fulfillment of maternal love. But it was a love without the prior pregnancy. It was a love begging, a posteriori, for conception. In short, impossible love.

  For the whole day love demanding a past to redeem the present and future. For the whole day, without a word, her demanding of him to have been born from her womb. His cousin wanted nothing from him, except that. She wanted from the boy with glasses not to be a childless woman. On that day, thus, he met with one of the rare forms of stability: the stability of unrealizable desire. The stability of the unattainable ideal. For the first time, he, a being devoted to moderation, for the first time he felt attracted to immoderation: attraction to the impossible extreme. In a word, to the impossible. And for the first time he then felt love for passion.

  And it was as if his myopia had disappeared and he was seeing the world clearly. The deepest and simplest glimpse he had of the kind of universe he would live in and inhabit. Not a mental glimpse. It was only as if he’d taken off his glasses, and myopia itself is what made him see. Maybe that had been when he picked up a lifelong habit: whenever his confusion grew and he could barely see, he’d take off his glasses under the pretext of wiping them and, without his glasses, fix his interlocutor with the reverberating stare of a blind man.

  The Fifth Story

  (“A quinta história”)

  This story could be called “The Statues.” Another possible name is “The Murder.” And also “How to Kill Cockroaches.” So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don’t contradict each other. Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights.

  The first, “How to Kill Cockroaches,” begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. She gave me this recipe for killing them. I was to mix equal parts sugar, flour and plaster. The flour and sugar would attract them, the plaster would dry up their insides. That’s what I did. They died.

  The other story is actually the first one and is called “The Murder.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. The recipe follows. And then comes the murder. The truth is that I was only complaining about cockroaches in the abstract, since they weren’t even mine: they belonged to the ground floor and would crawl up the building’s pipes to our home. Only once I prepared the mixture did they become mine too. In our name, then, I began to measure and weigh the ingredients with a slightly more intense concentration. A vague resentment had overtaken me, a sense of outrage. By day the cockroaches were invisible and no one would believe in the secret curse that gnawed at such a peaceful home. But if they, like secret curses, slept during the day, there I was preparing their evening poison. Meticulous, ardent, I concocted the elixir for drawn-out death. An excited fear and my own secret curse guided me. Now I icily wanted just one thing: to kill every cockroach in existence. Cockroaches crawl up the pipes while we, worn out, dream. And now the recipe was ready, so white. As if for cockroaches as clever as I was, I expertly spread the powder until it looked more like something from nature. From my bed, in the silence of the apartment, I imagined them crawling one by one up to the laundry room where the darkness was sleeping, just one towel alert on the clothesline. I awoke hours later with a start when I realized how late it was. It was already dawn. I crossed the kitchen. There they were on the laundry-room floor, hard, huge. During the night I had killed. In our name, day was breaking. Up in the favela a rooster crowed.

  The third story that now begins i
s the one about the “Statues.” It begins by saying that I had been complaining about cockroaches. Then comes the same lady. It keeps going up to the point where, near dawn, I awake and still sleepy cross the kitchen. Even sleepier than I is the room from the perspective of its tile floor. And in the darkness of dawn, a purplish glow that distances everything, I discern at my feet shadows and white forms: dozens of statues scattered, rigid. The cockroaches that have hardened from the inside out. Some, belly up. Others, in the middle of a gesture never to be completed. In the mouths of some a bit of the white food. I am the first witness of daybreak in Pompeii. I know how this last night went, I know of the orgy in the dark. Inside some of them the plaster will have hardened as slowly as during some vital process, and they, with increasingly arduous movements, will have greedily intensified the night’s joys, trying to escape their own insides. Until they turn to stone, in innocent shock, and with such, such a look of wounded reproach. Others—suddenly assaulted by their own core, without even the slightest inkling that some internal mold was being petrified!—these suddenly crystallize, the way a word is cut off in the mouth: it’s you I . . . They who, taking the name of love in vain, kept singing through the summer night. Whereas that one there, the one whose brown antenna is smeared with white, must have figured out too late that it had been mummified precisely for not having known how to make use of things with the gratuitous charm of being in vain: “because I looked too deep inside myself! because I looked too deep inside . . .”—from my cold, human height I look at the destruction of a world. Day breaks. The occasional antenna of a dead cockroach quivers drily in the breeze. From the previous story the rooster crows.

  The fourth narrative inaugurates a new era at home. It begins as we know: I was complaining about cockroaches. It goes up to the moment I see the plaster monuments. Dead, yes. But I look toward the pipes, from where this very night a slow and living population will renew itself in single file. So would I renew the lethal sugar every night? like someone who can no longer sleep without the eagerness of a rite. And every dawn lead myself to the pavilion with the compulsion of greeting the statues that my sweaty night has been erecting. I trembled with wicked pleasure at the vision of that double life of a sorceress. And I also trembled at the sign of plaster drying: the compulsion to live that would burst my internal mold. A harsh instant of choosing between two paths that, I thought, are bidding each other farewell, and sure that either choice would be a sacrifice: me or my soul. I chose. And today I secretly boast in my heart a plaque of virtue: “This house has been disinfested.”

  The fifth story is called “Leibniz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches.

  A Sincere Friendship

  (“Uma amizade sincera”)

  Not that we were friends from way back. Weonly met in our last year of school. From then on we were together all the time. We had both been in need of a friend for so long that there was nothing we didn’t confide to each other. We reached the point of friendship at which we could no longer keep a thought to ourselves: one would soon call the other, making plans to meet right away. After the conversation, we felt as happy as if we had given ourselves to each other as presents. This state of constant communication reached such a level of exaltation that, the day neither of us had anything to confide, we searched with some distress for something to talk about. Only, the topic had to be serious, because not just anything would contain the vehemence of a sincerity experienced for the first time.

  Right around that time came the first signs of disturbance between us. Sometimes one would call the other, we’d meet, and have nothing to say. We were very young and didn’t know how to sit quietly. At first, when we started running out of topics, we tried talking about people. But we were well aware that we were already adulterating the nucleus of our friendship. Trying to talk about our respective girlfriends was also out of the question, since a man didn’t talk about his loves. We tried sitting quietly—but we’d get worried soon after parting ways.

  My solitude, upon returning from these outings, was great and arid. I started reading books just to be able to talk about them. But a sincere friendship called for the purest sincerity. Seeking this, I began to feel empty. Our outings were getting ever more disappointing. My sincere poverty was gradually being revealed. He too, I knew, had reached the impasse of himself.

  That’s when, since my family had moved to São Paulo, and he was living alone, because his family was from Piauí, that’s when I invited him to move into our apartment, which had remained in my care. What a tumult of the soul. Ecstatic, we arranged our books and records, setting up an environment perfect for friendship. After everything was ready—there we were at home, at a loss, mute, filled solely with friendship.

  We wanted so badly to save each other. Friendship is the stuff of salvation.

  But we’d already gone over every problem, already studied every possibility. All we had was that thing we’d sought thirstily until at last finding it: a sincere friendship. The only way, we knew, and how bitterly we knew it, to emerge from the solitude a spirit feels in the body.

  But how synthetic this friendship revealed itself to us. As if we wanted to disseminate through a lengthy speech a truism that a single word would exhaust. Our friendship was as unsolvable as the sum of two numbers: it was pointless trying to explore for more than a second the certainty that two and three make five.

  We tried to throw a few wild parties at the apartment, but not only did the neighbors complain as it was no use.

  If only we could have at least done each other favors. But no opportunity came up, nor did we believe in giving proof of a friendship that didn’t need any. The most we could do was what we did: know that we were friends. Which wasn’t enough to fill the days, especially the long holidays.

  The real trouble dates from these holidays.

  He, to whom I could offer nothing but my sincerity, he started becoming an accusation of my poverty. Moreover, our solitude when side by side, listening to music or reading, was much greater than when alone. And, more than greater, uncomfortable. There was no peace. Heading to our own rooms afterward, in relief we wouldn’t even look at each other.

  It’s true there was a break in the course of things, a truce that gave us more hope than there was actually room for. It happened when my friend had a little dispute with City Hall. Not that it was a serious issue, but we made it one to put it to better use. Because by that time we’d already fallen into the habit of doing favors. I went around enthusiastically to the offices of family acquaintances, pulling strings on my friend’s behalf. And when it came time for the paperwork, I ran all over the city—I can say in good conscience that not a single signature was notarized without my intervention.

  During that time we’d meet at home in the evenings, exhausted and excited: we’d recount the day’s exploits, plan our next line of attack. We didn’t really delve into what was happening, it was enough that it had the makings of friendship. I thought I understood why couples gave each other presents, why the husband makes a point of comforting his wife, and she toils at making him food, why the mother goes overboard when caring for her child. It was, incidentally, during this time that, with a bit of sacrifice, I gave a little gold brooch to the woman who’s now my wife. Only much later did I understand that being there is also giving.

  Once the trouble with City Hall was over—let the record show, by the way, that we won—we went on side by side, without finding that word that would yield the soul. Yield the soul? but after all, who wants to yield his soul? Of all things.

  After all, what did we want? Nothing. We were worn out, disillusioned.

  Under the pretext of a vacation with my family, we parted ways. Incidentally he was also going to Piauí. A heartfelt handshake was our farewell at the airport. We knew we wouldn’t see each other again, except by chance. More: that we didn’t want to see each other again. And
we also knew that we were friends. Sincere friends.

  The Obedient Ones

  (“Os obedientes”)

  It was a simple situation, a fact to mention and forget.

  But if you’re imprudent enough to linger an instant longer than you should, a foot sinks in and you’re involved. From the instant we venture into it, it’s no longer one more fact to tell, we begin to lack the words that would not betray it. At that point, we’re in too deep, the fact is no longer a fact and becomes merely its dispersed repercussion. Which, if overly stunted, will one day explode as it did on this Sunday afternoon, when it hasn’t rained for weeks and when, like today, beauty desiccated persists nonetheless as beauty. Before which I grow solemn as before a grave. At that point, what has happened to the initial fact? it became this afternoon. Without knowing how to handle it, I hesitate to be aggressive or to retreat a bit wounded. The initial fact is suspended in the sunlit dust of this Sunday—until they call me to the phone and in a single bound I go gratefully to lick the hand of the one who loves me and sets me free.

  Chronologically the situation was thus: a man and a woman were married.

  Merely by noting this fact, my foot has sunk in. I have been forced to think about something. Even if I said nothing else, and concluded the story by establishing this, I’d have already got involved in my most unknowable thoughts. It would already be as if I had seen, black outline on a white background, a man and a woman. And on that white background my eyes would be riveted with quite enough to see, for every word has its shadow.

  That man and that woman began—without the least intention of going too far, and perhaps spurred by some need people have—they began trying to live more intensely. In search of the destiny that precedes us? and toward which instinct wants to lead us? instinct?!