It was liberty he was offering her. Though she’d rather he order her around, set a day and time. But she felt there was no point in trying to make him change his mind. At the same time she was happy just to go to his house whenever she wanted. Because, suddenly, she was determined never to go. For they had reached a maturity in their relations, and she was afraid that sleeping together in a bed would break the spell.
During the first days Lóri was bothered because she was sure Ulisses was waiting. It pained her for the roses to wilt and for him pathetically to replace them with others that would wilt too. It consoled her to think that his wait wouldn’t be too painful for him, since he was an extremely patient man who was capable of suffering. So she calmed down. She thought now that the ability to bear suffering was the measure of a person’s greatness and saved that person’s inner life.
Over the next days she was much helped in passing the time because she’d brought home the exam papers for marking.
Besides she was full and didn’t need anyone, it was enough to know that Ulisses loved her and that she loved him. Moreover she was enveloped in a new love for things and people. For things: she bought a green glass vase and painted it an opaque white and that way the flowers she’d buy at the market would leap out of the white. She bought a soapstone ashtray, and couldn’t resist: with her nail she scratched the bottom of it, marking it, engraving it. And she bought a white dimity dress: if she went to see Ulisses, she’d wear this dress. As for people, she was being sincerely sweet and joyous with the pupils whom she now loved with a mother’s love.
One night she called her friend the fortune-teller and said she was coming over. She didn’t much care what the fortune-teller would tell her about the future and a certain love. What she cared most about was this: she’d seen a Thing. It was ten at night in Praça Tiradentes and the taxi was going fast. Then she saw a street she’d never forget. She wasn’t even planning to describe it: that street was hers. She could only say that it was empty and that it was ten at night. Nothing more. She had however, been germinated.
A few nights later she was sleeping. And though it sounds like a contradiction, softly all of a sudden the pleasure of being asleep had awoken her with a gentle start. She stayed lying down for a while and was still feeling the taste in her whole body of that rural area where, underground, she had spread from the roots the tentacles of some dream. It most definitely, by the way, was a good dream that had woken her.
She got up and went to drink a glass of water, without wanting to turn on the lights, trying to get oriented in the darkness which wasn’t total because of the strong light from the house next door. It was only eleven at night. Since she’d gone to bed at ten, she’d only slept an hour, woken by the pleasure of sleeping.
She went to drink the water slowly on the terrace. She felt by the smell of the air and the restlessness of the branches of the trees that it would soon rain. You couldn’t see the moon. The air was muggy, there was a strong smell of jasmine coming from the neighbor’s jasmine bush. Lóri stood on the terrace, somewhat suffocated by the intense perfume. Through the drunkenness of the jasmine, for a moment a revelation came to her, in the form of a feeling — and in the next instant she’d forgotten whatever she’d learned from the revelation. It was as if the pact with the God were this: see and forget, in order not to be struck down by the unbearable knowledge.
Standing there, softer than before, in the semidarkness of the terrace, another revelation came to her that lasted longer because it was the intuitive result of things she’d previously thought rationally. What came to her was the slightly shocking certainty that our feelings and thoughts are as supernatural as a story that takes place after death. And she didn’t understand what she meant by that. She let it linger, the thought, because she knew it was covering another, more profound and more comprehensible. Simply, with the glass of water in her hand, she was discovering that thinking wasn’t natural for her. Then she reflected a little, with her head cocked to one side, on how she didn’t have a day-to-day. It was a life-to-life. And that life was supernatural.
At that hour of the night she was experiencing that fear of being alive, having as her only help the helplessness of being alive. Life was so strong that it was helping itself through its own helplessness. Being alive — she felt — she would from now on make her motive and theme. With gentle curiosity, enveloped in the scent of jasmine, attentive to the hunger of existence, and attentive to her own attention, she seemed to be eating delicately alive what was very much hers. The hunger of living, my God. How far she was going in the wretchedness of need: she’d exchange an eternity after death for eternity while she was alive.
Until she really was hungry, she fetched a pear and came back to the terrace. She was eating. Her human soul was the only possible way of not crashing disastrously into her physical organization, it was such a perfect machine. Her human soul was also the only way given to her to accept without madness the general soul of the world. If the gears failed for half a fraction of a second, she’d fall into nothing.
Despite the threat of looming rain and of the anguish the suffocating jasmine was already giving her, she was discovering, discovering. And it wasn’t raining, wasn’t raining. But the darkest hour preceded that thing that she didn’t even want to try to define. That thing was a light inside her, and people would call it joy, tame joy.
She felt a bit bewildered as if a heart had been pulled out of her, and in its place was now a sudden absence, an almost palpable absence, of something that before had been an organ bathed in the darkness of pain.
Because she was feeling the great pain. In that pain however was the opposite of a numbness: it was a lighter and more silent way to exist. Who am I? she wondered in great danger. And the smell of the jasmine bush replied: I am my perfume.
She saw that, like the restless swaying of the neighbor’s trees, she too was indocile, restless. She’d organized herself in order to console herself for the anguish and pain. But how do you find consolation from the mixture of simple and calm joy with anguish? She wasn’t used to doing without consolation.
Then it finally started to rain.
First a drizzle, then so heavy that it made noise on all the rooftops.
I get it, she suddenly thought. She realized that she was seeking in the rain a joy so great that it became acute, which would put her in touch with an acute feeling like the acuteness of pain. But the search had been pointless. She was at the terrace door and all that was happening was this: she was seeing the rain and the rain was falling in harmony with her. She and the rain were busy flowing with violence.
How long would this state of hers last? She noticed that with this question she was taking her pulse in order to feel where the earlier painful pounding might be.
And she saw that there was no pounding pain as before. Just this: it was pouring rain and she was seeing the rain and getting soaked.
What simplicity.
She’d never imagined that the world and she would ever reach this point of ripe wheat. The rain and Lóri were as joined as the water of the rain was to the rain. And she, Lóri, wasn’t giving thanks for anything. Hadn’t she, just after birth taken by chance and necessity the path she’d taken — which?—and wouldn’t she have always been what she now was really being: a peasant who is in a field where it’s raining. Not even thanking the God or Nature. The rain wasn’t giving thanks for anything either. Without gratitude or ingratitude. Lóri was a woman, she was a person, a watchfulness, an inhabited body looking at the thick rain fall. As the rain wasn’t grateful for not being hard like a rock: she was the rain. Maybe she was this, exactly this: living. And despite just living she was full of a tame joy, that of a horse that eats from your hand. Lóri was tamely happy.
And suddenly, but without a fright, she felt an extreme urge to give this secret night to someone. And that someone was Ulisses. Her heart started to pound, and she felt pale because
all her blood, she felt, had drained from her face, all because she felt so suddenly Ulisses’s desire and her own desire. She stood there for a moment, for one unbalanced moment. Then her heart pounded even faster and louder because she realized she wouldn’t put it off any longer, it would be tonight.
She got from her bag his address written on the napkin, put her raincoat over her short nightdress, and in the coat pocket put some money. And without any makeup on her face, with what was left of her short hair falling over her forehead and neck, she went out to hail a cab. It had all been so quick and intense that she hadn’t even thought to change out of her nightdress, or put on her makeup.
Maybe out of a need to protect that too-young soul, in him and in her, he without humiliating himself, but with unexpected devotion and also begging mercy so they wouldn’t hurt each other in this first birth — maybe for all those reasons he knelt before her. And for Lóri that was very nice. Especially because she was aware that it was nice for him too — it was after covering great distances that a man would finally understand that he needed to kneel before his woman as if before his mother. And for Lóri it was nice because the man’s head was close to her knees and close to her hands, in her lap which was her hottest part. And she could make her best gesture: with hands that were both quivering and firm, take that tired head which was her fruit and his. That man’s head belonged to that woman.
Never had a human been closer to another human being. And Lóri’s pleasure was finally opening her hands and letting slip away without greed the full-emptiness that before had so fiercely been grasping her. And suddenly the surge of joy: she noticed that she was opening her hands and her heart but that she could do so without danger! I’m not losing anything! I’m finally giving myself and what happens when I’m giving myself is that I receive, receive. Careful, is there a danger in the heart’s being free?
She realized, while gently stroking the man’s dark hair, she realized that in this spreading-out of hers was contained the still-dangerous pleasure of being. Yet a strange security was coming too: it came from the sudden certainty that she’d always have something to spend and give. So there was no more greed with her full-emptiness that was her soul, and she’d spend it in the name of a man and of a woman.
— Tonight seems like a dream to me.
— But it’s not. It’s that reality is unbelievable.
— What’s that bell ringing?
— It’s the Glória clock that rings every fifteen minutes with chimes that terrify the pigeons.
Lóri had only one fear: that Ulisses, the great Ulisses whose head she was holding, would let her down. Like her father who had overburdened her with contradictions: he had turned her, his daughter, into his protector. And she, in her childhood, couldn’t even look at her father when he was happy about something, because he, the strong one, the wise one, became in his joys entirely innocent and so disarmed. Oh God, her father would forget for a few moments that he was mortal. And would make her, a girl, shoulder the weight of the responsibility of knowing that our most naive and most animal pleasures would die too. In those instants when he’d forget he was going to die, he would turn her, a girl, into a Pietà, the mother of men.
But with Ulisses it felt different now. He’d never been humble in love, out of wonder, he was becoming humble. She didn’t realize how, there on his knees, he’d got her to kneel beside him on the floor, without her feeling awkward. And once the two were kneeling he finally kissed her.
He kissed her for a long time until both could let go, and they sat looking each other in the eye without shame. They both knew they’d already gone too far. And they were still feeling the danger of surrendering so totally. They remained silent. That was when lying on the floor they loved each other so deeply that they were scared of their own greatness.
— Slowly, Lóri, slowly, we have the whole night, slowly.
They seemed to understand that when love was too big and when one person couldn’t live without the other, this love was no longer applicable: nor could the beloved receive so much. Lóri was confused to notice that even in love you had to keep your common sense and sense of proportion. For an instant, as if they’d planned it, he kissed her hand, humanizing himself. For there was the danger of, in a manner of speaking, dying of love.
And as soon as the danger passed, he kissed her again without any fear.
— What was sex like for you before?
— It was the only thing, she said, that I got right.
— I suspected as much, he said, and out of pure jealousy, he hurt her: when I saw you in the street the first time I immediately saw you’d be good in a bed.
Lóri’s peasant vitality is what saved her from a world of excessively delicate emotions. He saw that he’d hurt her out of jealousy. And said:
— But tonight is my first time.
At first he’d treated her with delicacy and a willingness to wait as if she were a virgin. But soon Lóri’s hunger made Ulisses forget all courtesy, and it was with a voracity without joy that they loved each other the second time. And if that wasn’t enough, since they’d waited so long, almost immediately they really possessed each other again, this time with an austere and silent joy. She felt herself losing all the weight of her body like a figure from Chagall.
Then they lay there quietly, holding hands. For an instant she took her hand away, lit a cigarette, passed it to him, and lit another for herself — and then took his hand again. Soon he stubbed his out. It was dark, the way she’d wanted, and neither spoke a word. I never knew myself like now, Lóri was feeling. It was a knowledge without mercy or joy or blame, it was a realization you couldn’t translate into feelings separated from each other and hence without names. It was a vast and calm knowing that “I am not I,” she was feeling. And it was also the very least, because it was, at the same time, a macrocosm and a microcosm. I know myself as the larva transmutes into a chrysalis: this is my life between vegetable and animal. She was as complete as the God: except the Latter had a wise and perfect ignorance that guided Him and the Universe. To know herself was supernatural. But the God was natural. Lóri wanted to transmit this to Ulisses but didn’t have the gift of words and couldn’t explain what she was feeling or thinking, not to mention that she was thinking almost without words.
She guessed that he was about to fall asleep, and so she slowly took her hand out of his. He immediately felt her touch disappear and said half-awake and half-asleep:
— It’s because I love you.
So she, in a low voice in order not to wake him completely, said for the first time in her life:
— It’s because I love you.
A great peace took hold of her for having finally said it. Unafraid of waking him and unafraid of his answer, she asked:
— Listen, are you still going to want me?
— More than ever, he replied with a calm and controlled voice. The truth, Lóri, is that deep down I’ve been searching all my life for the intoxication of holiness. I’d never thought that what I’d achieve was the holiness of the body.
As for her, she’d struggled her whole life against a penchant for reverie, never letting it sweep her to the final waters. But the effort of swimming against the sweet current had sapped some of her life force. Now, in the silence in which they both found themselves, she opened her doors, relaxed her soul and body, and didn’t realize how much time had passed for she had surrendered to a profound and blind reverie that the Glória clock didn’t interrupt.
He stirred in the bed. Then she spoke:
— You once said that when people ask my name I shouldn’t say Lóri but “I.” Well it’s only now that I call myself “I.” And say: I am in love with your I. So we is. Ulisses, we is original.
The night was getting darker and darker and it was raining a lot. Though she couldn’t see him, she recognized by his measured breathing that he was sleeping. Her eyes were open in t
he dark and the darkness kept revealing itself to her as a dense compact pleasure, almost unrecognizable as pleasure, when compared to what she’d had with Ulisses. His sleeping beside her, was leaving her both alone and integrated. She didn’t want anything except just what was happening to her: to be a woman in the dark beside a man who was sleeping. She wondered for an instant if death could interfere with the heavy pleasure of being alive. And the answer was that not even the idea of death could manage to disturb the boundless dark field in which everything was throbbing thick, heavy and happy. Death had lost its glory.
She remembered how it was before these moments now. She was a woman seeking a way, a form. And now she had what in fact was so much more perfect: it was the great freedom of not having ways or forms.
She wasn’t fooling herself: was it possible that those perfect moments would pass? Leaving her in the middle of an unknown path? But she could always keep in her hands a bit of what she was getting to know now, and then it would be easier to live not living, barely living. Even if she were never again to feel the serious and serene power of existing and loving, as she did now, in the future she would already know what to wait for, waiting her whole life if necessary, and if necessary never again having what she was waiting for. She suddenly shifted in bed because it was unbearable to imagine for an instant that she might never repeat her profound existence on earth. But, to her unexpected joy, she realized she’d always love him. After Ulisses had become hers, being human now seemed to her the right way of being a living animal. And through Ulisses’s great love, she finally understood the kind of beauty she had. It was a beauty that nothing and no one could reach and take away, because it was so high, big, deep, and dark. As if her image were reflected trembling in a reservoir of black and translucent waters.
An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures Page 11
