The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

  I am having that hard courage that hurts me like the flesh that transforms itself in childbirth.

  But no. I still haven’t told everything.

  Not that what I am going to tell now is all that’s missing. Much more is missing in this story of mine to myself: father and mother, for example, are missing; I have not yet had the courage to honor them; so many humiliations I went through are missing, and which I omit because only they who are not humbled are humiliated, and instead of humiliation I should speak about my lack of humility; and humility is much more than a feeling, it is reality seen with a minimum of good sense.

  A lot of what I could tell is missing. But there is something that will be indispensable to say.

  (I know one thing: if I reach the end of this story, I shall go, not tomorrow, but this very day, out to eat and dance at the “Top-Bambino,” I furiously need to have some fun and diverge myself. Yes, I’ll definitely wear my new blue dress that flatters me and gives me color, I’ll call Carlos, Josefina, Antônio, I don’t really remember which of the two of them I noticed wanted me or if both of them wanted me, I’ll eat crevettes à la whatever, and I know because I’ll eat crevettes, tonight, tonight will be my normal life resumed, the life of my common joy, for the rest of my days I’ll need my light, sweet and good-humored vulgarity, I need to forget, like everyone.)

  Because I haven’t told everything.

  Because I haven’t told everything.

  I haven’t told how, sitting there and unmoving, I still had not stopped looking with great disgust, yes, still with disgust at the yellowed white paste atop the roach’s grayness. And I knew that as long as I was disgusted, the world would elude me and I would elude me. I knew that the basic error in living was being disgusted by a roach. Being disgusted by kissing the leper was my erring the first life within me — since being disgusted contradicts me, contradicts my matter within me.

  Then the one thing that I, out of pity for myself, didn’t want to think, then I thought it. I could no longer hold myself back, and I thought what really was already thought.

  Now, out pity for the anonymous hand I am holding in mine, out of pity for what that hand is not going to understand, I don’t want to take it with me to the horror to which I went yesterday, alone.

  Because what I suddenly found out is that the moment had come not only to understand that I must no longer transcend, but the instant had come to really no longer transcend. And to have now what I used to think should be for tomorrow. I’m trying to spare you, but I can’t.

  Because redemption had to be in the thing itself. And redemption in the thing itself would be putting into my mouth the white paste of the roach.

  At the very idea, I shut my eyes with the power of someone locking her teeth, and I clenched my teeth so hard that any more and they would have broken inside my mouth. My entrails were saying no, my paste was rejecting the roach’s.

  I had stopped sweating, once again I had entirely dried. I tried to reason with my disgust. Why would I be disgusted by the paste coming out of the roach? had I not drunk of the white milk that is liquid maternal paste? and on drinking the thing of which my mother was made, had I not called it, namelessly, love? But reason was getting me nowhere, except with teeth clenched as though made of shivering flesh.

  I couldn’t.

  There was only one way I could: if I gave myself a hypnotic command, and then as if I had fallen asleep and acted somnambulistically — and when I opened my eyes from sleep, I already would have “done,” and it would be like a nightmare from which one wakes free because it was while sleeping that one lived through the worst.

  But I knew that that was not how I should do it. I knew that I would have to eat the paste of the roach, but eat it all of me, and eat it also my own fear. Only then would I have what suddenly seemed to me would be the anti-sin: eating the paste of the roach is the anti-sin, sin would be my easy purity.

  The anti-sin. But at what a price.

  At the price of traversing a sensation of death.

  I got up and took a step forward, with the determination not of a suicide but of a murderer of myself.

  The sweat now started again, I was now sweating from head to toe, my sticky toes sliding inside my slippers, and the root of my hair was softening that viscous thing that was my new sweat, a sweat I didn’t recognize and that smelled like what comes from dried-up earth after the first rains. That deep sweat was however what enlivened me, I was slowly swimming through my oldest primeval soup, the sweat was plankton and pneuma and pabulum vitae, I was being, I was me being.

  No, my love, it wasn’t good like what’s called good. It was what’s called bad. Really very, very bad. Since my root, which I was only now tasting, had the flavor of potato-tuber, mixed with the earth from which it had been torn. Yet that bad taste had a strange grace of life that I can only understand if I felt it again and can only explain by feeling it again.

  I took one more step. But instead of moving forward, I suddenly threw up the milk and bread I had eaten for breakfast.

  Entirely shaken by the violent vomit, which had not even been preceded by the warning of nausea, disillusioned with myself, frightened by my lack of strength to go through with the gesture that seemed to me the only one that could unite my body to my soul.

  Despite myself, after throwing up, I calmed down, my forehead refreshed, and physically peaceful.

  Which was worse: now I would have to eat the roach but without the help of the earlier exaltation, the exaltation that would have acted in me like a hypnosis; I had vomited the exaltation. And unexpectedly, after the revolution that is vomiting, I felt physically simple as a girl. It would have to be this way, like a girl who was unintentionally happy, that I would eat the paste of the roach.

  So I stepped forward.

  My joy and my shame came upon waking from the faint. No, it hadn’t been a faint. It had been more of a dizziness, since I was still standing, resting my hand on the wardrobe. A dizziness that made me lose track of moments and of time. But I knew, even before thinking, that, while I took leave of myself in the dizziness, “something had been done.”

  I didn’t want to think but I knew. I was afraid of tasting in my mouth what I was tasting, I was afraid of running my hand across my lips and finding traces. And I was afraid of looking at the roach — which now should have less white paste upon its opaque back. . . .

  I was ashamed of having gone dizzy and unconscious in order to do something that I would never again know how I had done — since before doing it I had removed from myself all participation. I had not wanted “to know.”

  So that was how things were processed? “Not knowing” — so that was how the deepest things happened? some thing would always, always have to be apparently dead in order for the living to process? I’d had to not know that I was alive? Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life living like a sleepwalker?

  Or was living like a sleepwalker the greatest act of trust? closing one’s eyes in dizziness, and never knowing what went on.

  Like a transcendence. Transcendence, which is the memory of the past or the present or the future. In me was transcendence the only way I could reach the thing? Since even eating of the roach, I had acted to transcend the very act of eating it. And now all I had was the vague memory of a horror, all I had was the idea.

  Until the memory got so strong that all my body screamed inside itself.

  I tensed my fingernails on the wall: I now felt the nastiness in my mouth, and then began to spit, to furiously spit that taste of no such thing, taste of a nothing that nonetheless seemed almost sweetened to me like certain flower petals, taste of myself — I was spitting out myself, without ever reaching the point of feeling that I had finally spit out my whole soul. “———because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth,” it was the Apocalypse according to Saint John, and the phrase that must refer to other things I no longer remembered, the phrase came to me from the depths of me
mory, standing for the insipid of which I had eaten — and I was spitting.

  Which was difficult: because the neutral thing is extremely energetic, I was spitting and it was still I.

  I only halted in my fury when I understood with surprise that I was undoing everything I had laboriously done, when I understood that I was renouncing myself. And that, alas, I was only up to my own life.

  I stopped astonished, and my eyes filled with tears that only burned and did not flow. I think I did not even judge myself worthy that tears should flow, I lacked the first pity for myself, which allows crying, and in my pupils I retained in ardor the tears that were salting me and that I did not deserve to flow.

  But, even without flowing, the tears were in some way companions and bathed me in some way with commiseration, so that I started lowering a consoled head. And, like someone returning from a journey, I returned to sitting quietly on the bed.

  I who had thought that the best proof of the transmutation of me into myself would be putting the white paste of the roach in my mouth. And that that way I would draw near to whatever is . . . divine? to whatever is real? The divine for me is whatever is real.

  The divine for me is whatever is real.

  But kissing a leper is not even goodness. It is self-reality, self-life — even if that also means the leper’s salvation. But it is first of all one’s own salvation. The saint’s greatest benefit is to himself, which does not matter: since when he reaches his own great largeness, thousands of people are enlarged by his largeness and live from it, and he loves others as much as he loves his own terrible enlargement, he loves his enlargement with impiety for himself. Does the saint want to purify himself because he feels the need to love the neutral? to love whatever is not accretion, and to relinquish the good and the pretty. The great goodness of the saint — is that to him everything is the same. The saint sears himself until he reaches the love of the neutral. He needs that for himself.

  I then understood that, in whatever fashion, living is a goodness toward others. Living is enough, and that itself ends up in the great goodness. He who lives totally is living for others, he who lives his own largeness is making an offering, even if his life takes place within the incommunicability of a cell. Living is such a great offering that thousands of people benefit from every life lived.

  — Does it pain you that the goodness of the God is neutrally continuous and continuously neutral? But what I once wanted as a miracle, what I called a miracle, was really a desire for discontinuity and interruption, the desire for an anomaly: I called a miracle exactly that moment in which the true continuous miracle of the process was interrupted. But the neutral goodness of the God is still more appealable than if it were not neutral: to have it all you must do is go, to have it all you must do is ask.

  And the miracle can be requested, and had, since continuity has interstices that do not discontinue it, the miracle is the note between two notes of music, it is the number between number one and number two. To have it all you have to do is need it. Faith — is knowing you can go and eat the miracle. Hunger, that is what faith is in itself — and needing is my guarantee that to me it will always be given. Needing is my guide.

  No. I did not need to have had the courage to eat the paste of the roach. Since I lacked the humility of the saints: I had given to the act of eating it a meaning of “maximum.” But life is divided into qualities and kinds, and the law is that the roach shall only be loved and eaten by another roach; and that a woman, in the hour of love for a man, that woman is living her own kind. I understood that I had already done the equivalent of living the paste of the roach — for the law is that I must live with the matter of a person and not of a roach.

  I understood that, by placing in my mouth the paste of the roach, I was not stripping myself as the saints do, but was once again yearning for the accretion. The accretion is easier to love.

  And now I am not taking your hand for myself. I am the one giving you my hand.

  Now I need your hand, not so that I won’t be scared, but so that you won’t. I know that believing in all this will be, at first, your great solitude. But the moment will come when you will give me your hand, no longer out of solitude, but as I am doing now: out of love. Like me, you will no longer fear adding yourself to the extreme energetic sweetness of the God. Solitude is having only the human destiny.

  And solitude is not needing. Not needing leaves a man very alone, all alone. Ah, needing does not isolate the person, the thing needs the thing: all you have to do is see the chick walking around to see that its destiny will be what neediness makes of it, its destiny is to join as drops of mercury join other drops of mercury, even if, like each drop of mercury, it has in itself an entirely complete and round existence .

  Ah, my love, do not be afraid of neediness: it is our greater destiny. Love is so much more fatal than I had thought, love is as inherent as wanting itself, and we are guaranteed by a necessity that shall renew itself continuously. Love already is, it is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce — which is called passion.

  All that is missing is the coup de grâce — which is called passion.

  What I am feeling now is a joy. Through the living roach I am coming to understand that I too am whatever is alive. Being alive is a very high stage, it is something that I only reached now. It is such a high unstable equilibrium that I know I shall not be able to know about that equilibrium for long — the grace of passion is short.

  Maybe, being man, like us, is only a special sensitization we call “having humanity.” Oh, I too fear losing that sensitization. Until now I had called life my sensitivity to life. But being alive is something else.

  Being alive is a coarse radiating indifference. Being alive is unattainable by the finest sensitivity. Being alive is inhuman — the deepest meditation is so empty that a smile exhales as from a matter. And even more delicate shall I be, and as a more permanent state. Am I speaking of death? am I speaking of after death? I don’t know. I feel that “not human” is a great reality, and that it does not mean “unhuman,” to the contrary: the not-human is the radiating center of a neutral love in Hertzian waves.

  If my life is transformed into it-self, the thing I today call sensitivity will not exist — it will be called indifference. But I cannot yet grasp that way. It is as if hundreds of thousands of years from now we are finally no longer what we feel and think: we shall have something that more closely resembles a “mood” than an idea. We shall be the living matter revealing itself directly, ignorant of word, surpassing thought which is always grotesque.

  And I shall not wander “from thought to thought,” but from mood to mood. We shall be inhuman — as the loftiest conquest of man. Being is being beyond human. Being man does not work, being man has been a constraint. The unknown awaits us, but I feel that this unknown is a totalization and will be the true humanization for which we longed. Am I speaking of death? no, of life. It is not a state of happiness, it is a state of contact.

  Ah, don’t think this all doesn’t nauseate me, I even find it so tiresome that it makes me impatient. Because it seems like heaven, where I cannot even imagine what I would do, since I can only imagine myself thinking and feeling, two attributes of being, and I cannot imagine merely being, and relinquishing the rest. Just being — that would give me an enormous lack of things to do.

  At the same time I was also a bit suspicious.

  Because, just as before when I had frightened myself by entering what could end up being despair, I now suspected that I was once again transcending things. . . .

  Could I be excessively enlarging the thing precisely in order to surpass the roach and the piece of iron and the piece of glass?

  I don’t think so.

  Since I was not even reducing hope to a simple result of constructing and counterfeiting, nor denying that something to hope for exists. Nor had I removed the promise: I was simply feeling, with an enormous effort, that the hope and the promise are fulfilled every instant. And
that was terrifying, I was always afraid of being struck down by completion, I had always thought that completion is an end — and had not counted on the ever-born need.

  And also because I feared, unable to bear simple glory, turning it into yet another accretion. But I know — I know — that there is an experience of glory in which life has the purest taste of the nothing, and that in glory I feel it empty. When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.

  Except I still must be careful not to make more of it than this, or else it will no longer be it. The essence is of a pungent insipidity. I will have “to purify myself” much more in order not to even want the accretion of events. Purifying myself once meant a cruelty against what I called beauty, and against what I called “I,” without knowing that “I” was an accretion of myself.

  But now, through my most difficult fright — I am finally heading toward the inverse path. I head toward the destruction of what I built, I head for depersonalization.

  I am avid for the world, I have strong and defined desires, tonight I’ll go dance and eat, I won’t wear the blue dress, but the black-and-white one. But at the same time I need nothing. I don’t even need for a tree to exist. I now know of a way that relinquishes everything — and including love, nature, objects. A way that does without me. Though, as for my desires, my passions, my contact with a tree — they are still for me like a mouth eating.

  Depersonalization as the dismissal of useless individuality — losing everything one can lose and, even so, being. Little by little stripping, with an effort so mindful that one does not feel the pain, stripping, like getting rid of one’s own skin, one’s characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way that I am most easily visible to others and how I end up being superficially recognizable to myself. As there was the moment in which I saw that the roach is the roach of all roaches, so do I want to find in me the woman of all women.