An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector (literature books to read TXT) 📕

“Afterward you never again forget it, Ulisses. There’s no point even in fleeing to another city. For when you least expect it you’ll recognize it — suddenly. While crossing the street amidst the beeping of horns. Between one ghostly cackle and another. After an uttered word. Sometimes in the very heart of a word you recognize the Silence. The ears are spooked, the gaze goes blank — there it is. And this time it’s a ghost.”

Writing brought her relief. She had bags under her eyes after the sleepless night, was tired, but for an instant — ah how Ulisses would want to know — happy. Because, if she hadn’t expressed the inexpressible silence, she’d spoken like a monkey who grunts and makes incoherent gestures, transmitting who knows what. Lóri was. What? But she was.

What was really happening with Lóri was that, due to a decision so deep that the reasons for it escaped her — she had out of fear cut out pain. Only with Ulisses had she come to learn that you can’t cut out pain — otherwise you’d suffer all the time. And she had cut it out without even having some other thing that in itself could stand in for the vision of things through the pain of existence, as before. Without pain, she’d been left with nothing, lost in her own world and in the wider world without any connection to people.

It was then that Ulisses had turned up in her life. He, who had been interested in Lóri only because of desire, was now seeming to see how out of reach she was. And more than that: not just out of reach for him but for herself and for the world. She was living off a tightness in her chest: life.

That’s when their meetings had begun: she only seemed to want to learn something from him and had deceived herself thinking she wanted to learn because he was a professor of Philosophy, using him in that hope. When the hope died, upon seeing that he hadn’t the slightest intention of teaching her a “philosophical” or “literary” way to live, it was already too late: she was bound to him because she wanted to be desired, above all she liked to be desired rather savagely when he’d drink too much. She’d already been desired by other men but what was new was Ulisses wanting her and waiting with patience — even when he was drunk, which didn’t make him lose control — and waiting with patience for her to be ready, while he would say of himself that he was in the middle of his apprenticeship, but so far beyond her that she was transforming into a tiny body, empty and in pain, just that. And she was longing for him exactly because he seemed to her like the border between the past and whatever was to come — whatever would come? Nothing, she’d think in despair. She was waiting, since she had nothing to do except teach in a primary school in the mornings or otherwise be on holiday as she was now, read a little, eat and sleep, and meet Ulisses who was barely transforming her, or if he was transforming her then not enough. And wait.

Yet it was her dread of a possible soul intimacy with Ulisses that made her annoyed with him. Was she in fact fighting her own intense urge to come closer to the impossible part of another human being? Ah, if only the pain were no longer there, and she were helping Ulisses by quickly applying herself to learning — what?—out of fear that in the end he would think it was now too late for her and gently draw back. It seemed to her nonetheless that she herself was getting in the way of their joint mission. Because though she didn’t know what she wanted, besides sleeping with him someday, she guessed that it was something so difficult to give and receive that he might draw back.

Lóri herself had a kind of dread of going, as if she could go too far — in what direction? Which was making it hard to go. She kept holding back a little as if holding the reins of a horse that could gallop off and take her God knows where. She was saving herself. Why and for what? What was she sparing herself for? There was a certain fear of her own capability, large or small, maybe because she didn’t know her own limits. Were the limits of a human divine? They were. But it kept seeming to her that, as a woman sometimes saved herself untouched in order to give herself one day to love, she might want to die still completely whole so that eternity would have all of her.

Did she want salvation? Pain had become stiffened and paralyzed inside her chest, as if she no longer wanted to use it as a way of living. But this precaution — that had come after Ulisses — was not yet the one that would save her: for instead of pain, nothing had come except a stop to the life of feelings. If salvation was what she was hoping for from Ulisses, would that be asking so much and so big that he’d decline? She’d never seen anyone save someone else, so she was afraid of an approach that would only disillusion her by confirming that one being cannot encroach on another the way shadows trespass on each other.

Sometimes she’d regress and succumb to a total irresponsibility: the desire to be possessed by Ulisses without binding herself to him, as she’d done with the others. But therein too she might fail: she was now a big-city woman but the danger was the strong rural heritage in her blood from way back. And