The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

  And that was what she’d been missing: the sea inside her like the thick liquid of a man. Now she’s entirely equal to herself. Her nourished throat constricts from the salt, her eyes redden from the salt dried by the sun, the gentle waves slap against her and retreat for she is a compact embankment.

  She dives again, again drinks more water, no longer greedy for she doesn’t need more. She is the lover who knows she’ll have everything all over again. The sun rises higher and makes her bristle as it dries her, she dives again: she is ever less greedy and less sharp. Now she knows what she wants. She wants to stand still inside the sea. So she does. As against the sides of a ship, the water slaps, retreats, slaps. The woman receives no transmissions. She doesn’t need communication.

  Afterward she walks in the water back to the beach. She’s not walking on the water—ah she’d never do that since they walked on water millennia ago—but no one can keep her from: walking in the water. Sometimes the sea resists her, powerfully dragging her backward, but then the woman’s prow pushes ahead a bit harder and tougher.

  And now she steps onto the sand. She knows she is glistening with water, and salt and sun. Even if she forgets a few minutes from now, she can never lose all this. And she knows in some obscure way that her streaming hair is that of a castaway. Because she knows—she knows she has created a danger. A danger as ancient as the human being.

  Involuntary Incarnation

  (“Encarnação involuntária”)

  Sometimes, when I see someone I’ve never seen before, and have some time to observe that person, I incarnate myself in the other person and thus take a great step toward knowing who it is. And this intrusion into a person, whoever it may be, never ends in self-accusation: once I incarnate myself in someone else, I understand her motives and forgive. I must be careful not to incarnate myself into a dangerous and attractive life, and thus not want to return to myself.

  One day, on the airplane . . . “Oh, my God,” I pleaded, “not this, I don’t want to be that missionary!”

  But it was no use. I knew that three hours in her presence would make me a missionary for several days. Her missionary gauntness and extremely polished refinement had already claimed me. I succumb with curiosity, some wonder and advance weariness to the life I’m going to experience living for a few days. And with some apprehension, from a practical standpoint: I’ve been way too busy lately with my own responsibilities and pleasures to withstand the burden of this life unknown to me—but whose evangelical tension I’m already starting to feel. Right there on the plane I notice that I’ve already started walking like a lay saint: then I understand how patient the missionary is, how she effaces herself with that step that hardly wants to touch the ground, how if she treads more heavily it would eventually harm others. Now I am pale, my lips unpainted, my face is thin and I wear that missionary hat.

  When I land I’ll probably already have that air of suffering-transcended-by-peace-at-having-a-mission. And stamped across my face will be the sweetness of moral hope. Because above all I have become utterly moral. Yet when I first boarded the plane I was so robustly amoral. I was, no, I am! I cry in revolt against the missionary’s prejudices. It’s no use: all my strength is directed toward managing to be fragile. I pretend to read a magazine, while she reads the Bible.

  We’re going to make a quick descent before landing. The steward passes out chewing gum. And she blushes at the young man’s approach.

  Back on solid ground I’m a missionary in the airport wind, I secure my imaginary long, gray skirt against the wind’s impropriety. I understand, I understand. I understand her, oh, how I understand her and the propriety with which she exists when not on duty carrying out her mission. I denounce, as the good little missionary, those women’s short skirts, temptation to men. And, when I don’t understand, it’s with the same purified fanaticism of that pale woman who easily blushes when the young man approaches to inform us we must proceed on our journey.

  I already know that it will be several days before I can finally resume my own life. Which, who knows, might never have been my own, except at the moment of birth, and all the rest has been incarnations. But no: I am a person. And when my own ghost claims me—then it’s such a joyful encounter, such a celebration, that in a manner of speaking we cry on each other’s shoulders. Afterward we dry our happy tears, my ghost becomes fully embodied in me, and we venture somewhat haughtily into that outside world.

  Once, also while traveling, I met a heavily perfumed prostitute who smoked with her eyes half closed, while also staring fixedly at a man who was already getting hypnotized. I immediately, to better understand, started smoking with my eyes half closed toward the only man in my line of sight. But the fat man I’d been looking at in order to experience and have the prostitute’s soul, that fatso was absorbed in the New York Times. And my perfume was too discreet. It fell flat.

  Two Stories My Way

  (“Duas histórias a meu modo”)

  Once, having nothing to do, I did a kind of writing exercise, just for fun. And I had fun. I took a double story of Marcel Aymé’s as a theme. I came across the exercise today, and here’s how it goes:

  A good story involving wine is the one about the man who didn’t like it, and Félicien Guérillot, a wine-grower of all things, was his name—names, man and story invented by Marcel Aymé, and so well-invented that all they needed to be true was the truth.

  Félicien would have lived—had he lived—in Arbois, a land in France, and been married to a woman who was neither prettier nor shapelier than necessary for an honest man’s peace. He came from a good family, though he didn’t like wine. Yet the best vines around were his. He didn’t like any kind of wine, and searched in vain for the wine that would free him from the curse of not loving the excellence of something excellent. For even when he was thirsty, which is the very time to have wine, the best wine tasted awful to him. Leontina, the wife who was neither too much nor too little, helped him hide this shame from everyone.

  The story, now completely rewritten by me, would have proceeded on quite all right—and even better if its nucleus belonged to us, from the good ideas I have about how to end it. Marcel Aymé, however, who began it, this far into describing the man who didn’t love wine seems to have gotten sick of this very story. And he himself intervened to say: but suddenly it bores me, this story. And to escape it, like someone who drinks wine to forget, now the author starts talking about everything he could have invented about Félicien, but won’t because he doesn’t want to. He’s very sorry, because he would even have made Félicien pretend to get the shakes in an attempt to hide from others how he didn’t have the shakes. What a good author, this Marcel Aymé. So good that he spent several pages on what he himself would have invented if Félicien were someone who interested him. The truth is that Aymé, as he’s talking about what he would have invented, takes the opportunity to actually tell it—only, we know that’s not it, because even with invented things what might have been doesn’t count.

  And at this point Aymé moves on to another story. No longer wanting the sad story about wine, he switches to Paris, where he takes up a man named Duvilé.

  And in Paris it’s the opposite: Etienne Duvilé, here was a man who enjoyed wine but didn’t have any. It was expensive, and Etienne was a clerk. He would have liked to be corrupt but selling out or betraying the State isn’t an opportunity that comes along every day. What came along every day was a house full of children, and a father-in-law who lived to eat incessantly. The family dreaming about an abundant table, and Duvilé about wine.

  And there comes a day when Etienne really does dream, by which we mean that this time, while he dreamed, he was asleep. But now that we’re supposed to recount the dream—since Marcel Aymé does at great length—now we’re the ones that ça vraiment bores. We veil whatever the author wished to narrate, just as what we wanted to hear about Félicien was veiled by the author.

 
Here it shall only be said that, after this dream on a Saturday, at night, Duvilé’s thirst worsened substantially. And his hatred for his father-in-law seemed more like a thirst. And everything grew so complicated, its underlying cause always being his original lack of wine, that out of thirst he nearly kills the father of his wife, of whom Aymé fails to say whether she was shapely, apparently neither yes nor no, all that matters to the story is wine. From a sleeping dream he shifted to a waking dream, which is now an illness. And Duvilé wished to drink up the whole world, and at the police station expressed his desire to drink the commissioner.

  To this day Duvilé remains in an asylum, with no hope of getting out, since the doctors, not understanding his spirit, treat him with excellent mineral water that staunches small thirsts but not the great one.

  Meanwhile, Aymé, maybe possessed himself, by thirst and mercy, hopes that Duvilé’s family will send him to the good land of Arbois, where that first man, Félicien Guérillot, after adventures that deserve to be recounted, has now acquired a taste for wine. And, since we’re not told how, we must leave it at that, with two stories not well told, neither by Aymé nor by us, but when it comes to wine people want less talk and more wine.

  The First Kiss

  (“O primeiro beijo”)

  The two murmured more than talked: they had just started dating and were giddy, it was love. Love and what comes with it: jealousy.

  “Okay, I’ll believe I’m your first girlfriend, I’m happy about that. But tell me the truth, the whole truth: have you ever kissed a woman before me?”

  He answered simply:

  “Yes, I’ve kissed a woman before.”

  “Who was she?” she asked, hurt.

  He tried to tell her haltingly, didn’t know how to explain.

  The field-trip bus was slowly climbing into the mountains. He, one of the boys among a boisterous bunch of girls, let the cool breeze hit his face and run its long, thin fingers through his hair with a mother’s light touch. To sit still once in a while, almost without thinking, and just feel—was so good. Staying focused on feeling was hard with all the commotion from his buddies.

  And in any case thirst had hit: joking with his classmates, talking really loud, louder than the noise from the motor, laughing, shouting, thinking, feeling, oh man! did it leave his throat dry.

  And not the slightest hint of water. The thing to do was pool your saliva, and that’s what he did. After gathering it in his burning mouth he swallowed it slowly, over and over. It was warm, though, his saliva, and failed to quench his thirst. An enormous thirst, bigger than he was, that now seized his whole body.

  The delicate breeze, so pleasant before, had now in the midday sun become hot and arid, and going in through his nose further dried what little saliva he was patiently gathering.

  And what if he shut his nostrils and breathed a bit less of that desert wind? He tried for a few seconds but immediately started suffocating. You just had to wait, wait. Maybe just a few minutes, maybe hours, whereas his thirst had been going on for years.

  He didn’t know how and why but he was now feeling closer to water, he had a premonition that it was getting close, and his eyes leaped through the window searching the highway, penetrating the underbrush, scanning, sniffing.

  The animal instinct inside him hadn’t been wrong: around the unexpected curve in the highway, amid the underbrush, was . . . the fountain from which sprang a rivulet of the dreamed-of water.

  The bus stopped, everyone was thirsty but he managed to reach the stone fountain first, before everyone else.

  Eyes closed, he parted his lips and put them fiercely to the orifice from which the water was streaming. The first cool sip of water went down, sliding through his chest down to his belly.

  It was life coming back, and it completely soaked his sandy insides until they were quenched. Now he could open his eyes.

  He opened them and saw right near his face the two eyes of a statue staring at him and saw it was the statue of a woman and that the water was flowing from the woman’s mouth. He recalled that at the first sip his lips had actually felt an ice-cold touch, colder than the water.

  And he realized then that he had put his mouth on the mouth of the stone statue of the woman. Life had streamed from that mouth, from one mouth to another.

  Intuitively, confused in his innocence, he felt intrigued: but the life-giving liquid, the liquid seed of life doesn’t come from a woman . . . He gazed at the naked statue.

  He’d kissed her.

  He was racked by a shudder not visible on the outside and that originated from deep within and seized his whole body, bursting onto his face in flames.

  He took a step back or forward, he no longer knew what he was doing. Disconcerted, stunned, he noticed that one part of his body, always relaxed before, was now aggressively tense, and this had never happened to him.

  He stood, sweetly aggressive, alone among the others, his heart beating deeply, at intervals, feeling the world transform. Life was brand new, something else, discovered with a shock. Bewildered, in a fragile balance.

  Until, coming from the depth of his being, streaming from a hidden source inside him came the truth. Which filled him immediately with alarm and also immediately with a pride he had never felt before: he . . .

  He had become a man.

  WHERE WERE YOU AT NIGHT

  (“Onde estivestes de noite”)

  In Search of a Dignity

  (“A procura de uma dignidade”)

  Senhora Jorge B. Xavier simply couldn’t say how she had come in. It hadn’t been through a main gate. It seemed to her in a vaguely dreamy way that she had come in through some kind of narrow opening amid the rubble of a construction site, as if she’d slipped sideways through a hole made just for her. The fact is, by the time she noticed she was already inside.

  And by the time she noticed, she realized that she was deep, deep inside. She was walking interminably through the underground tunnels of Maracanã Stadium or at least they seemed to her narrow caves that ended in closed rooms and when the rooms were opened they had just a single window facing the stadium. Which, at that scorchingly deserted hour, was shimmering in the extreme glare of an uncommon heat that was descending on that midwinter day.

  Then the old woman went down a shadowy passage. It led her like the others to an even darker one. The tunnel ceilings seemed low to her.

  And then that passage led to another that led in turn to another.

  She went down the deserted passage. And then bumped into another corner. That led her to another passage that opened onto another corner.

  So she kept automatically heading down passages that kept ending in other passages. Where could the classroom for the first session be? Because that’s where she would find the people she’d planned to meet. The lecture might have already started. She was going to miss it, she who made every effort not to miss anything cultural because that’s how she stayed young inside, though even from the outside no one ever guessed she was almost 70 years old, everyone assumed she was around 57.

  But now, lost in the dark, inner twists and turns of Maracanã, the woman was now dragging the heavy feet of an old lady.

  That’s when suddenly in a passage she came upon a man who popped up out of nowhere and asked him about the lecture which the man said he knew nothing about. But that man asked a second man who had also popped suddenly from around the bend in the passage.

  Then this second man told them he had seen, near the right-hand bleachers, out there in the stadium, “two ladies and a gentleman, one of the ladies in red.” Senhora Xavier doubted these people were the group she was supposed to meet before the lecture, and in fact had already lost track of the reason she was walking around with no end in sight. In any case she followed the man out to the stadium, where she stopped, dazzled in the hollow space filled with broad daylight and open muteness, the naked
stadium disemboweled, with neither ball nor match. Above all with no crowd. There was a crowd that existed through the void of its absolute absence.

  Had the two ladies and gentleman already vanished down some passage?

  Then the man declared with exaggerated defiance: “Well I’m going to search for you, ma’am, and I’ll find those people no matter what, they can’t have vanished into thin air.”

  And in fact from faraway they both spotted them. But a second later they disappeared again. It was like a child’s game in which muffled peals of laughter were mocking Senhora Jorge B. Xavier.

  Then she accompanied the man down further passages. Then this man too vanished around a corner.

  The woman had already given up on the lecture which deep down didn’t really matter to her. As long as she made it out of that tangle of endless paths. Wasn’t there an exit? Then she felt like she was in an elevator stuck between floors. Wasn’t there an exit?

  And that’s when she suddenly recalled the wording of her friend’s directions on the phone: “it’s more or less near Maracanã Stadium.” In light of this memory she understood her mistake, made by a scatterbrained and distracted person who only heard half of things, the other half remaining submerged. Senhora Xavier was very inattentive. So, then, the meeting wasn’t at Maracanã after all, it was just nearby. Yet that little destiny of hers had wanted her to be lost in the labyrinth.