The Chandelier

by Clarice Lispector

  “Why didn’t you hold me back?” he said.

  But . . . What? . . . what was he saying?! He hadn’t asked anything . . . what was he saying? what was he accusing her of . . . she hadn’t asked anything . . . Suddenly she understood, didn’t look, keeping in check her hard and tense face.

  “Why didn’t you hold me back . . . you should have known that it was out of a kind of desperation. I’m so lost” — he was narrowing his eyes, his face calm, his hands on the back of his neck; his dark teeth inlaid in nearly white gums, because he was seeming to smile — “I’m so lost. Why did you let me make a mistake . . .”

  The brazenness, that brutality in confessing. She found him truculent and voluptuous, that man to whom only ever happened things that he could understand. So that’s why I came, to face down an animal, she almost hated him, oh those friends of Irene’s were right to laugh at him, she looked at him with crudity feeling her own face red with perturbation. How old he was, his face sunburned, the wrinkles . . . she looked at him in desperation, gritted her teeth: but no, if he grows old what do I do? he can’t grow old, he can’t, he can’t.

  “Why did you let me make a mistake?” he repeated suddenly, his monotonous voice frightened her.

  Desperation? no, she didn’t know it. I swear, Daniel, I swear, how could that fool and egoist that I am ever guess — she saw herself once more in the apartment doing nothing, looking out the window, basely desiring some men, waiting, she hated herself profoundly surprised at having forgotten that Daniel was the most important thing. But at the same time how to forget that since they were small . . . her wanting to call out to him and not being able to, him not hearing . . . the hat . . . He’d never know how hard it was to give him a word to ask for assistance or to help him, how alone he was all along. Her heart hurting, she said:

  “You make mistakes with a power that cannot be held back . . . I really think that making a mistake with that violence is lovelier than getting it right, Daniel, it’s like being a hero . . .” — Yes, she’d finally said it. As if hearing herself, she repeated with sweetness and tranquility — “You are a hero.”

  He said nothing, he knew, was closing his eyes enduring his own life. She remembered how he’d say: I don’t want to be a boy. She looked at him with delicacy. He was a man. Boys and girls would have to change their names so much when they grew up. If somebody were named Daniel, now, he should have been Círil one day. Virgínia — she leaned into her own interior thoughtfully, while Daniel seemed to be falling asleep under the tree — Virgínia was a name full of watchful peace like that of an alcove behind a wall, there where thin weeds grew like hair and where nobody existed to hear the wind. But after losing that perfect, skinny figure, as small and delicate as the mechanism of a watch, after losing transparency and gaining a color, she could be called Maria Madalena or Hermínia or even any other name except Virgínia, of such fresh and somber antiquity. Yes, and when she was small she also could have easily been Sibila, Sibila, Sibila. Virgínia . . . She sighed with a movement of her head. As if she couldn’t stand Virgínia’s and Daniel’s past. Sitting on her legs, she looked at him — there had been a time when he’d thought it was essential to possess a magnet. Certain people to whom it seemed to have been given the destiny to live life over again. He stirred, divined his sister’s presence, she flapped her hands, they looked so alike in that moment, they’d always been the same. A long path had brought them to that instant. They felt so sincere that they looked at each other quickly with apprehension. He closed his eyes; she stared at the distant air, so painful was her tense breathing, they were feeling so much brother and sister, so ready to look at the world together, with interest and mockery as on a journey or something, with little chatting and absorbed silences, yes, making everything a joke, everything, the journey was so impossible, they were so full of love forever, forever . . . And which would be buried in seconds beneath the passing of the instants greater than eternity. Oh, grant him an instant of true life, his beautiful face expanded in color and hope! She leaned against the tree with staring eyes. She was urgently needing to say something with rage, with joy, for violence to smash the air into fire, to revolt, understand herself!, for a galloping horse to emerge running through the meadow, for a bird to shriek. As if a stone started to speak, he said and she heard him with a surprised heart — had it been a foreboding? — beating hollowly already in a beginning of tranquility, he said calm, eyes still closed, in such a vulgar tone:

  “What devil makes me want to resemble myself.”

  Never would he say “we.” She sat looking at the ground, the hard and brittle stick was leaving gray pieces of rotten wood in her hands. The sun was opening pale over the garden, the ants running without noise, almost without touching with their thin legs the resistant ground. A low and insinuating wind was blowing the dry leaves around the tree. She said, the stick lightly scratching the ground:

  “If you only knew how delicate life can be.”

  They stayed with inexpressive and suspended faces in an indecisive and watchful tranquility. The light feet of a little bird stepped on some leaf that stirred, the shadows were taming and deepening the old garden. She penetrated into a good silence until Daniel asked, suddenly pushing an icy tack into her heart:

  “What about you?”

  “I am Vicente’s lover,” she heard herself answer.

  “Happy?”

  She waited a bit.

  “You know, always the same, I couldn’t be happier than I am, I couldn’t be unhappier than I am.”

  He nodded in agreement. And since she couldn’t stand it a second longer, she stood with a small harrowing shout:

  “Let’s walk!?”

  He said:

  “No, I’m going in” — he got up and walked away from her and as on the day of the drowned man, once again she wouldn’t know how to call out to him, how to cry for him not to leave her alone right then — she sat on the little patch of grass under the tree with open eyes, her heart beating calm, dry, bloodless. Yes, maybe it was better that way. From the dirty earth a smell of dust was coming, a breath that was not born of whatever was always alive but of whatever was seeming continually to die. There was an extremely pleasant, gray, and cold silence beneath the weak sun. But the trees were rustling, green, dark, and leafy. She closed her eyes letting herself almost waver. The day long like an arrow heading nowhere. Gradually, under lowered eyelids, some thing was running ahead like a hare, but sluggish, it kept running and getting lost like a wounded hare losing blood and running until weakly reaching the end of blood. She could say while acknowledging — that’s it, that’s it, with assurance. How sweet it was to run along and get lost in weakness, but it hurt and frightened; she could dread the dark room from outside in yet it was horrible to be the dark room and she was the dark room itself. It was so sweet because you couldn’t understand it; in the middle of everything she sighed and that sigh had been a sensation that the instants were going forward. When she’d possessed a watch she wouldn’t sigh; she’d look at it; but it had broken. It was just that she was feeling tired, leaning against the tree, women tired more easily than men, tired as if from an invisible wound blood were flowing uninterruptedly like air, like thought, like things existing without respite, the hare running. How perturbing lightness was. She was so happy. To live one time was always, always. Except she wasn’t proud and that was as good as being solitary, without sharing oneself with the world — you had to be proud, establish victory and piety. How incomplete it was to live! she shouted at herself sharply in a clarion that suddenly snapped. She slid down the tree, lay atop the sparse grass, covered her eyes with her bare forearm. How incomplete it was to live. What was she fighting against? because in the deepest part of her being, beneath the forearm darkening her, she was feeling a slight tension, her open eyes guarding against. That was destiny — she seemed to notice — because without that she’d be freed to let herself penetrate into
so many possibilities . . . she, who was keeping herself inside good sense with a stubbornness that strangely didn’t seem to be born of a deep desire but from something like a nervous whim, from a foreboding. Open eyes guarding and a slight tension preventing . . . what? behind those eyes there might not be anything dear and alive to protect so faithfully, maybe just the void connecting itself to the infinite, she was feeling confusedly almost in a doze — connecting her own depth to the infinite without so much as awareness, without ecstasy, just a thing living without being seen or felt, dry like an unknown truth. How horrible, pure, and irrevocable it was to live. There was some silent and inexpressible thing beneath her darkening forearm. Atop each day she’d balance on the tips of her toes, atop each fragile day that from one instant to the next could snap and fall into darkness. But she miraculously would cross it and exhausted from joy and fatigue reach sleep in order on the next day to begin again surprised. That was the reality of her life, she was thinking so distantly that the idea was getting lost in her body like a sensation and now she was already sleeping. This was the secret and daily event, which was still beneath her forearm, even if she shut herself in a cell and spent all her hours there, that was the reality of her life: to escape daily. And exhausted from living, to exult in the darkness.

  She got up, took off her shoes, tossed them behind the tree, went off walking, walked, walked, walked. She crossed the meadow beyond the Farm, walked, walked. She entered the narrow, long road and her gaze got used to the green shadows, the solid and claylike earth. Now she was wandering distractedly, her bare feet creaking in the warm dust of the late afternoon. She walked, walked. Once she raised her eyes and then they opened and filled with sweet moist surprise . . . Because from the twilight where they found themselves they were sprouting toward the blue-green of an enormous meadow with open arms and from the sad confusion of the intertwined branches on the road, they were now floating in extensive lines of light, long, peaceful, almost cold . . . joyful. It was a plateau of free, green land, open beyond what her gaze could contain. From the low road where she was stopping, Virgínia was seeing at the beginning of the ravine the odd tall weed flutter in the wind where it met the sky, almost getting mixed up with its colorless luminosity. And those vertical, pale strokes were so thin and their rhythm under the wind was so fast and light that her eyes clenched by the light would occasionally stop making them out, just feeling them like a delicate tingle in the air. How could she have forgotten the plateau, how could she have forgotten . . . , she was reproaching herself shaking her head. She abandoned the vine that her fingers were torturing and waited with her eyes vacant, anxious. Slowly silence fell over the murmur of her final steps and a hushed stillness rose. She didn’t know what she was doing standing waiting and hesitated. She also wasn’t familiar with that soft prostration in her heart, smooth and successive drops down to something like a calm weakening like that of the afternoon. Thus she stayed counting with astonishment the seconds by the smooth beating of the arteries somewhere in her body. Until slowly but then in a single instant she understood, she had to go up. She drew back for a moment intimidated by the discovery that wasn’t connected to the whole day, that wasn’t united to old desires and that was arising free like an inspiration. She hesitated, it was getting so late. But in a light urge she leapt over the plain and her body was moving ahead of her thought. A single golden and pale color was covering the grass weightlessly. Yes . . . somewhere a doe was softly opening and closing its eyelids licking a smiling and still tired newborn, her hair was trembling finely like fragile weeds while with half-opened senses opened she with difficulty and attention was conquering the land. No tree, no rock, nakedness up to the horizon of erased mountains; her heart was beating superficially and she was hardly breathing as if in order to live it was enough to look.

  It was then that she experienced all the way to the end whatever it was whose foreboding had already worried her at the edge of the plateau. With a contained joy, flashing and fine, she felt almost ignorantly that, but yes, but yes, somehow there she was in the meadow . . . you understand? she was asking herself confused, her dark eye watching to the rescue of the whitened mountains. With her lips parted, dried by the wind that was blowing ceaselessly she continued her hard and humble glory with lighter feet, her body sharpened in movements. Smiling she imagined that behind her, while she was climbing and never reaching, terrified eyes of many men were following her as if she were an escaped vision . . . yes, yes, that’s how it was getting easier and easier to move her big white body forward . . . she smiled coyly behind her and then, as if she’d really believed in what she’d imagined, saw that she was alone. But a man, a man, she implored frightened . . . who understood her just then in the field, who surprised her almost with pain. But nobody could see her and the wind was blowing almost cold. She was feeling so pretty, she furrowed her eyebrows, grab it, grab it in order to be seen, loved, love! Nothing would make use of her though, beauty seemed so lost to itself, it remained somehow intact and thoughtful like a flower with an unconquerable nature; nobody, nobody could see her — silence and solitude were reaching her from afar in a limpid breath. The light instant would flee without touching the memory of any man of the earth and she could never entrust it to anyone because it would escape gestures and gaze. Only she herself would keep it like a violent spot, a hot, white star in the center of her body. And other human eyes would be useless because only she herself could comprehend that in reality, beneath the final sun, in the long green meadow, in the deepest reality she was almost moving toward the distant light a finally naked being, her legs erasing themselves at the root of her body, her breasts advancing high, translucent, cold — that was the pure urge that was nonetheless false. Only she herself would understand. And because she was creating inside herself, that was where the grace with which she was stepping just then was coming from. She tried to laugh by herself since she was wanting to hear herself and right then might still be able to invent a new laugh. Her light laughter scared her with strange mischief, she shuddered in the air like rosebuds that open in silence, the singularity of cold air atop the flesh of her face. She turned around, the wind covered her cheek with her rough hair, she saw that the road had moved off in a red thread lost forever, her heart took fright, watchful, prudent. The mountains ahead were still unreal and she would never reach them. At large in the field she then felt a slow and serious fear mingled with the joyful event, fear of leaping over the line of pleasure and suddenly sinking into the breadth, deep, dark like the sea . . . and atop that sea was floating the cold pleasure that was sharpening into needles of ice and that would break like a gleam that goes out — then she closed her lips that with great difficulty were ceasing to smile, dry and limpid. She lowered her eyes for a second. When she raised them she wanted to look at the field with solemnity and sadness to hold back the excess of fullness so hard to endure and that’s how she looked at it because she was solemn and sad.

  The way back was hard going, without momentum and without ecstasy. She felt like she was crawling along in the dust, night was falling, she was halting with hurting feet, desperate. She was sitting for a while on the side of the road, the clouds were darkening, the branches were swaying in calm murmuring; she was squinting afraid to start crying. She was thirsty, saw a little stream flowing nearby but the liquid was tired and warm, giving in her thirsty mouth a harsh impression instead of prickling her with cold shudders. Everything was starting to refuse itself, everything was putting away its qualities of being, night was closing. It was seeming more and more impossible for her to reach the Farm, she was hoisting her heavy, sweaty body and seeing nothing but the road going round and round, shutting itself up like a goal that she was trying to reach hopefully but that wasn’t a goal, that was opening onto a new already-dark road, slow and staggering like a nightmare. Darkness was falling bluish over the mountains; in the twilight the fireflies were existing in a colorless instant of flight, the shrill and fearless song of a bird was pe
netrating like a sidelong flight far away. Did I go the wrong way? she was wondering extremely disturbed . . . Arrh, she was saying deafly, going ahead inexpressible and at large, arrh! Her bare feet were burning and her little toe was bleeding black with dust. She was stumbling out of dismay and fright, stopping at times for a second, just to listen — nothing could be heard, the crickets were buzzing unsteady, hard, incessant, the dizzy twilight, so vacant, it seemed to be some error of vision, she was running her hand over her eyes but again finding the gray and cold air, full of the new rumblings of the forest, the trees creaking. Intimately she was still the one who had dared lift herself beyond what she could do, again she had been the one who had created the moment of pain, dreading herself surprised by the coldness with which she was directing herself to live, and how she was regretting it, how she was regretting it! don’t dare, don’t dare, have less courage and even less strength than she did, that’s it, that’s it! She was thinking softly encouraging herself, her eyes open with difficulty in the half-dark of the night, her body moving ahead unsteady at a speed that kept on giving out. It seemed to her that with every moment a pause was being born in which she was fleeing backward, backward, having to travel back over the road already traveled. Invisible branches were catching on her clothes, thorns tearing apart the fabric, scratching her skin with sharp violence and blood was blossoming like drops of sweat. She wasn’t groaning, no, she wasn’t groaning, she was saying with rage and mettle like a beast of burden whose steps falter: ah! ah!, her voice was coming out hoarse and intense, she was getting excited, almost running, never, never had her body existed so much, never had living weighed so heavy upon her — her spirit was breathing a fragile and hesitant breath, enraptured she was inhaling the cold air with violence but wasn’t bringing it beyond the surface of her being, suffocated. I promise, I promise not to go back to Vicente, my God! Carried by a veiled foreboding, expending the new sensation as the memory of the past unfurls, she was thinking of the sin and telling herself disturbed: later, later I’ll think it over, later, I promise to stop everything, not to go back to the city, yes, that’s what they were wanting, they, “they” were wanting her not to return to the city, to stay here. She remembered that when she was small she’d walk around the cemetery in Upper Marsh, where thick fruit trees arose, heavy, calm, and she’d say to herself wounded like an instrument that frees a sound, she’d say to herself: don’t eat those fruits, don’t eat! she’d say it to herself as if something had previously inspired her: eat, steal, eat — and she could only manage to say frightened: don’t eat the fruits!, she was distracting herself by thinking, distracted herself by walking . . . There! there was the end of the road! all she had to do was run and reach the field, then the fence . . . the gate . . . home. She started to murmur words in a low voice in a deep prayer, speaking to herself intensely, maddened, hurting herself with hard words of purification while with eyes shining with extraordinary firmness she was gradually reaching the meadow . . . the gate was creaking. She was on the grounds of the Farm, started running while raving tears were flowing from her eyes and she was sobbing without even trying to understand herself, running ahead, surrendered to the stream of life.