Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

  Until the familiar sound comes through the door and the boy, mute with interest in what a boy’s power can provoke, stops crying: mother. A mother is: not dying. And his security is knowing there is a world to be betrayed and sold out, and that will sell him out.

  It’s mother, yes it’s mother holding a diaper. As soon as he sees the diaper, he starts crying again.

  “Look you’re all wet!”

  The news shocks him, his curiosity starts up again, but now it’s a comfortable and assured curiosity. He looks blindly at his own wetness, in another stage he looks at his mother. But suddenly he tenses up again and listens with his whole body, his heart beating heavily in his belly: beep beep! he recognizes it suddenly in a shriek of victory and terror — the boy has just recognized it!

  “That’s it!” his mother says proudly, “that’s it, my darling, it’s beep beep that went by in the street just now, I’m going to tell Papa what you’ve learned, that’s exactly how you say it: beep beep, my darling!” says his mother tugging at him from bottom to top and then from top to bottom, lifting him by the legs, leaning him back, tugging at him again from bottom to top. In every position the boy keeps his eyes wide open. They’re dry as the fresh diaper.

  A Tale of So Much Love

  (“Uma história de tanto amor”)

  Once upon a time there was a little girl who observed chickens so closely that she got to know their souls and innermost yearnings. The chicken is anxious, whereas the rooster suffers a near-human anguish: he lacks a true love in that harem of his, and moreover has to keep watch all night long so as not to miss the first of the most distant daybreaks and to crow as sonorously as possible. It is his duty and his art. Back to the chickens, the little girl had two of her very own. One was named Pedrina and the other Petronilha.

  Whenever the girl thought that one had a sick liver, she’d sniff under their wings, with a nurse’s directness, considering it the primary symptom of illness, for the smell of a live chicken is no laughing matter. Then she’d ask her aunt for some medicine. And her aunt would say: “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your liver.” Then, being very close to this favorite aunt, she explained to her who the medicine was for. The girl thought it wise to give as much to Pedrina as to Petronilha to avoid mysterious contagions. It was almost pointless to give them medicine because Pedrina and Petronilha continued to spend all day pecking at the ground and eating the junk that hurt their livers. And the smell under their wings was precisely that foul odor. It didn’t occur to her to put deodorant on them because in Minas Gerais where they lived people didn’t use it just as they didn’t wear underclothes made of nylon but of muslin. Her aunt went on giving her the medicine, a dark liquid that the girl suspected was water with a few drops of coffee — and then came the hell of trying to pry open the chickens’ beaks to give them something that would cure them of being chickens. The girl hadn’t yet understood that people can’t be cured of being people and chickens of being chickens: people as well as chickens possess sorrows and greatness (the chicken’s is laying a perfectly formed white egg) inherent to their own species. The girl lived in the countryside and there weren’t any pharmacies nearby to advise her.

  Another hellish difficulty came whenever the girl thought Pedrina and Petronilha were too skinny beneath their ruffled feathers, though they ate all day long. The girl hadn’t understood that fattening them up would hasten their destiny on the dinner table. And she’d start in again on the hardest task of all: prying open their beaks. The girl became a great intuitive expert on chickens in that immense yard in Minas Gerais. And when she grew up she was surprised to discover that chicken was slang for something else.* Not realizing the comic seriousness the whole thing took on:

  “But the rooster’s the one who gets worked up, who wants it! The chickens don’t really do anything! and it goes by so fast you hardly notice! The rooster’s the one who’s always trying to love one of them and can’t!”

  One day the family decided to take the little girl to spend the day at a relative’s house, far away from home. And when the girl returned, she who in life had been Petronilha was no more. Her aunt told her:

  “We ate Petronilha.”

  The girl was a creature with a great capacity for loving: a chicken can’t return the love you give yet the girl kept loving it without expecting to be reciprocated. When she found out what happened to Petronilha she began hating everyone in the house, except for her mother who didn’t like chicken and the servants who ate beef or oxtail. As for her father, well, she could hardly look at him: he was the one who liked chicken most of all. Her mother noticed all this and explained things to her.

  “When people eat animals, the animals become more like people, since they end up inside us. We’re the only ones in the house who don’t have Petronilha inside us. It’s too bad.”

  Pedrina, secretly the girl’s favorite, dropped dead of natural causes, for she’d always been a fragile thing. The girl, seeing Pedrina trembling in a yard being scorched by the sun, bundled her in a dark cloth and after she was all bundled up, put her on top of one of those big brick ovens they have on ranches in Minas Gerais. Everyone warned her she was hastening Pedrina’s death, but the girl was stubborn and placed the swaddled Pedrina on top of the hot bricks anyway. The next morning when Pedrina began the day stiff from being so dead, only then was the girl, amid endless tears, convinced she had hastened the death of that dear being.

  When she was a little older, the girl got a chicken named Eponina.

  Her love for Eponina: this time it was a more realistic love and not romantic; it was the love of someone who has suffered from love before. And when it came Eponina’s turn to be eaten, the girl not only knew but also considered it the inevitable fate of whoever is born a chicken. Chickens seem to have a prescience about their own fate and they never learn to love either their owners or the rooster. A chicken is alone in the world.

  But the girl hadn’t forgotten what her mother had said about eating beloved animals: she ate more of Eponina than the rest of the family, she ate without appetite, but with a near-physical pleasure because now she knew this was how Eponina would be incorporated into her and become more hers than in life. They had cooked Eponina in a blood sauce. So the girl, in a pagan ritual transmitted to her from body to body through the centuries, ate her flesh and drank her blood. During this meal she was jealous of whoever else was eating Eponina too. The girl was a being made to love until she grew into a young woman and there were men.

  * * *

  * A loose woman.

  The Waters of the World

  (“As águas do mundo”)

  There it is, the sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings. As a human being she once posed a question about herself, becoming the most unintelligible of living beings. She and the sea.

  Their mysteries could only meet if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds made with the trust by which two understandings would surrender to each other.

  She looks at the sea, that’s what she can do. It is only cut off for her by the line of the horizon, that is, by her human incapacity to see the Earth’s curvature.

  It is six in the morning. There is only a free dog hesitating on the beach, a black dog. Why is a dog so free? Because it is the living mystery that doesn’t wonder about itself. The woman hesitates because she’s about to go in.

  Her body soothes itself with its own slightness compared to the vastness of the sea because it’s her body’s slightness that lets her stay warm and it’s this slightness that makes her a poor and free person, with her portion of a dog’s freedom on the sands. That body will enter the limitless cold that roars without rage in the silence of six o’clock. The woman doesn’t know it: but she’s fulfilling a courage. With the beach empty at this morning hour, she doesn’t have the examp
le of other humans who transform the entry into the sea into a simple lighthearted game of living. She is alone. The salty sea is not alone because it’s salty and vast, and this is an achievement. Right then she knows herself even less than she knows the sea. Her courage comes from not knowing herself, but going ahead nevertheless. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.

  She goes in. The salt water is cold enough to make her legs shiver in a ritual. But an inevitable joy — joy is an inevitability — has already seized her, though smiling doesn’t even occur to her. On the contrary, she is very serious. The smell is of a heady sea air that awakens her most dormant age-old slumbers. And now she is alert, even without thinking, as a hunter is alert without thinking. The woman is now a compact and a light and a sharp one — and cuts a path through the iciness that, liquid, opposes her, yet lets her in, as in love when opposition can be a request.

  The slow journey fortifies her secret courage. And suddenly she lets herself be covered by the first wave. The salt, iodine, everything liquid, blind her for a few instants, streaming all over — surprised standing up, fertilized.

  Now the cold becomes frigid. Moving ahead, she splits the sea down the middle. She no longer needs courage, now already ancient in the ritual. She lowers her head into the shine of the sea, and then lifts out the hair that emerges streaming over her salty eyes that are stinging. She plays with her hand in the water, leisurely, her hair in the sun almost immediately stiffens with salt. With cupped hands she does what she’s always done in the sea, and with the pride of people who never explain even to themselves: with cupped hands filled with water, she drinks in great, good gulps.

  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 very well — 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 si
ck 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.