The Passion According to GH

by Clarice Lispector

  It was then that the cockroach started to come out from inside.

  It was then that the cockroach started to come out from inside.

  First the annunciatory flutter of the antennae.

  Then, behind those dry threads, the reluctant body started to appear. Until almost the whole thing was right at the opening of the wardrobe door.

  It was grayish, it was hesitant, as though it carried enormous weight. It was now almost completely visible.

  I quickly lowered my eyes. By hiding my eyes I hid from the cockroach the cunning stratagem that had just taken hold of me—my heart beat almost as with joy. For I had suddenly felt that I had some reserves, that I had never used them before—and now a latent power at last beat inside me and a greatness took me over: a greatness of courage, as if fear itself was what had finally provided me with courage. Just moments before, I had thought, superficially, that my only feelings were ones of indignation and disgust, but now I recognized—although I had never known it before—that what was happening was that I had finally taken on a huge fear, much greater than myself.

  That huge fear completely pervaded me. Turned in upon myself, like a blind man listening to his own listening, I for the first time felt myself taken over by an instinct. And I shivered with great delight, as though I were finally in touch with the grandeur of an instinct that was horrible, totally and completely sweet—as though I were finally experiencing, and within myself, a grandeur greater than myself. I was for the first time becoming drunk with a hatred as clean as water from a spring, I was becoming drunk with the desire, justified or not, to kill.

  An entire life of attentiveness —for fifteen centuries I hadn't fought, for fifteen centuries I hadn't killed, for fifteen centuries I hadn't died—an entire life of aloof attentiveness now came together inside me and rang, like a mute bell whose vibrations I didn't need to hear, for I recognized them. As though at last I was for the first time in balance with Nature.

  A completely controlled rapaciousness had possessed me, and because it was controlled it was pure power. Up to then, I had never been mistress of my powers, powers that I neither understood nor wanted to understand, but the life in me had stored them up so that one day there would blossom forth this unknown, happy, unconscious matter that was, finally, me! me, whatever that might be.

  Without any reticence at all, moved by my delivery over to what is wicked, without any reticence, moved, happy, I was for the first time being the unknown figure that I was . . . but, not knowing myself would no longer be an obstacle for me, the truth had just gone beyond the limits of myself: I raised my hand as though to take an oath, and in one move I slammed the door on the cockroach's half-protruding body . . .

  Simultaneously, I had shut my eyes. And I stayed that way, all ashake. What had I done?

  Could I have known right then that I wasn't referring to what I had done to the cockroach but instead to . . . what I had done to myself?

  In those instants when my eyes were closed I became aware of myself like one becomes aware of a taste: I had through and through the taste of steel and malice, I was all acid, like a piece of metal sitting on your tongue, like a crushed green plant, my taste came full into my mouth. What had I done to myself? My heart pounding, my temples pulsing, I had done this to myself: I had killed. I had killed! But why this jubilation and, even more than it itself, why the vital acceptance of the jubilation? For how long, then, had I been primed to kill?

  No, that wasn't the issue. The question was: what had I killed?

  That calm woman that I had always been, had she gone crazy with pleasure? my eyes still closed, I was trembling with jubilation. Killing . . was so much greater than I, was of a piece with this measureless room. Killing had at last opened up the dry sands of this room to moisture, at last, as though I had dug and dug, with hard, avid fingers, until I found inside myself a potable stream of life that was the stream of a death. I slowly opened my eyes, now in sweetness, in gratitude, timidity, in a shyness of glory.

  From the finally moist world from which I was emerging, I opened my eyes and encountered again the great, harsh, open light, I saw the wardrobe door, now closed.

  And I saw the cockroach's front half sticking out of the door.

  Sticking forward, erect in the air, a caryatid.

  But a living caryatid.

  At first I didn't understand, I just looked in surprise. Slowly I realized what had happened: I hadn't pushed the door hard enough. I had, to be sure, trapped the cockroach in the door so it couldn't come out any farther. But I had left it alive.

  Alive and looking at me. I turned my eyes aside in a quick, violent reaction.

  I still needed, then, the final stroke. One more thrust? I didn't look at the roach, but I kept telling myself that I needed one more thrust—I kept slowly telling myself that, as though every repetition worked to send a command order to my heartbeats, the beats that were spaced too much like a pain whose sensation I couldn't feel.

  Until—succeeding at last in hearing myself, at last succeeding in giving myself orders—I lifted my arm up high, as if my entire body weight would come down on the wardrobe door along with the blow from my arm.

  But it was then that I saw the cockroach's face.

  It was aimed straight ahead, at the same level as my head and eyes. For an instant I paused with my hand poised in the air. Then, gradually, I lowered it.

  An instant before I might not have been able to see the expression on the cockroach's face.

  But it was too late by a split second: I had seen it. My hand, which came down when I stopped the blow, slowly rose again to my stomach: though I had not moved from the spot, my stomach had recoiled inside my body. My mouth had become too dry, I passed my tongue, which was also dry, over my rough lips.

  It was a shapeless face. The antennae stuck out in whiskers at the sides of the mouth. The brown mouth was clearly demarcated. The thin, long whiskers moved about slow and dry. Its faceted black eyes looked around. It was a cockroach as old as a fossilized fish. It was a cockroach as old as salamanders, and chimeras, and griffins, and leviathans. It was as ancient as a legend. I looked at its mouth: there was the real mouth.

  I had never seen a cockroach's mouth. I, in fact. . . I had never really seen a cockroach. I had only felt repugnance at their ancient, ever-present existence . . . but I had never come face to face with one, even in my mind.

  And so I discovered that despite their compactness, they are made up of shell after shell, gray and thin, like the layers of an onion, as though you could lift one layer up with your fingernail and there would always be another one underneath, and another. Maybe those layers were the wings, but then it would be made up of layer after thin layer of wings compressed to form that compact body.

  It was an auburn color. And all covered with cilia. Maybe the cilia were the multiple legs. The antennae were quiet now, dry, dusty filaments.

  Cockroaches don't have noses. I looked at it, with that mouth of its, and its eyes: it looked like a dying mulatto woman. But its eyes were black and radiant. The eyes of a girl about to be married. Each eye itself looked like a cockroach. Each fringed, dark, live, dusted eye. And the other one just the same. Two cockroaches mounted on the cockroach, and each eye reproduced the entire animal.

  Each eye reproduced the entire animal.

  "Pardon my putting this all on you, hand that I have in mine, but I don't want to keep it for myself! take the cockroach, I want nothing to do with what I saw."

  There I was, mouth agape, offended, drawn back— face-to-face with the dusty being that was looking back at me. Take away what I saw: for what I saw, with a compulsiveness so painful and so frightening and so innocent, what I saw was life looking back at me.

  How else could I refer to that horrible, brute raw matter and dry plasma that was simply there while I shrank back within myself in dry nausea, I sinking centuries and centuries deep in mud—it was mud, and not even dried mud but mud still wet, still alive, it was an ooze in whic
h the roots of my identity were twisting about with intolerable slowness.

  Take, take all that for yourself, I don't want to be a living person! I disgust myself, I marvel at myself, thick ooze coming slowly forth.

  That's how it was, that's how it was, then. I had looked upon the live cockroach and had discovered in it my deepest life identity. In a difficult demolition, hard, narrow passages were opening inside me.

  I looked at it, at the cockroach; I hated it so much that I was changing sides, forming solidarity with it, since I couldn't bear being alone with my own aggressiveness.

  And all at once I groaned out loud, this time I heard my groan. My truest coherence was in fact rising up to the surface of me, like a pus—and I sensed, with fright and dread, that that "I-being" came from a source much prior to any human source, and, horribly, much greater than any human one as well.

  There was opening out in me, with the slowness of stone gates, there was opening out in me the wide life of silence, the very life that was to be found in the stationary sun, the very one that was to be found in the motionless cockroach. And it could be the very same inside me! if I had the courage to abandon ... to abandon my feelings? If I had the courage to abandon hope.

  Hope in what? For the first time I had the great fear of feeling that I had based an entire hope on becoming something I was not. The hope—what other word is there for it?—that for the first time now I was going to abandon, through courage and through mortal curiosity. In my life up to now had that hope been grounded in a truth? With childish astonishment, I now . . . doubted.

  To know what I really had to hope for, would I have to pass through my, truth? To what extent had I up to now invented one destiny while in my depths living on another?

  I closed my eyes, waiting for this strange feeling to pass, waiting for my panting to become something more than the panting in that groan that I had heard as though it were coming from the depths of a dry, deep cistern, just as the cockroach is the creature of a dry cistern. I kept feeling the groan, incalculably far within me, but it was no longer reaching my throat.

  This is madness, I thought, with my eyes closed. But the sense of that birth from within the dust was so undeniable . . . that I could only follow what I knew very well was not madness but was, my God, a worse truth, the horrible truth. But why horrible? Because it wordlessly contradicted everything I had been accustomed, also wordlessly, to think.

  I waited for the strange feeling to pass, for health to return. But I recognized, with a long-forgotten force of memory, that I had felt this feeling before: it was the same feeling I had had when I saw my own blood outside myself, and I was shocked by it. For the blood that I saw outside myself, that blood I wondered at with such attraction: it was my own.

  I didn't want to open my eyes again, I didn't want to keep on seeing. The rules and laws, it was important not to forget them, you have to remember that without the rules and laws there would also be no order, it was important for me not to forget them and, in order to defend myself, to defend them.

  But the fact was that I could no longer hold myself down.

  The first tie had already involuntarily broken, and I was loosening myself from law, even though I suspected that I would be going into the inferno of living matter—what sort of inferno awaited me? but I had to go. I had to fall into my soul's condemnation, curiosity was consuming me.

  Then, all at once, I opened my eyes and saw full-on the room's limitless vastness, that room that resounded in silence—Hellish laboratory.

  The room, the unexpected room. My entrance into it had finally become complete.

  This room had only one way in, and it was a narrow one: through the cockroach. The cockroach that filled the room with a resonance that was in the last analysis open, the resonances of its rattlesnake bells in the desert. By a perilous road I had reached the deep breach in the wall that was that room . . . and the break formed a wide natural hall like in a cave.

  Bare, as though prepared for only one person's entrance. And whoever came in would be transformed into a "she" or into a "he." I was the person the room called "she." I had come in an "I," but the room then gave me the dimensions of "she." As though I were also the other side of a cube, the side that you don't see because you are seeing the front side.

  And, in my great expansion, I was on the desert. How can I make you understand? I was on the desert as I had never been before. It was a desert that called me like a monotonous, remote canticle calls. I was being seduced. And I went toward that enticing madness. But my fear was not the fear of someone who was going toward madness and thus toward a truth—my fear was the fear of having a truth that I would come to despise, a defamatory truth that would make me get down and exist at the level of the cockroach. My first contact with truths always defamed me.

  "Hold my hand tight, because I feel that I'm going. I am again going to the most primary divine life, I am going to an inferno of brute life. Don't let me see because I am close to seeing the core of life—and through the cockroach, which I am now beginning to see again, through that sample of calm, live fear, I am afraid that in that core I won't know anymore what hope is."

  The cockroach is pure seduction. Cilia, blinking cilia that beckon.

  I too, gradually reducing myself to what was irreducible in me, I too had thousands of cilia blinking, and with my cilia I advance, I protozoic, pure protein. Hold my hand tight, I have reached the irreducible with the fatefulness of a deathknell—I sense that all this is ancient and immense, I sense in the hieroglyph of the slow cockroach the writing of the Far East. And in this desert of great seductions, the creatures: I and the live cockroach. Life, my love, is one great seduction where everything that exists is seduced. That room that was desert and therefore primitively alive. I had reached nothingness, and the nothingness was live and moist.

  I had reached nothingness, and the nothingness was live and moist.

  It was then—it was then that the pulp started slowly to come out of the cockroach I had smashed, like out of a tube.

  The cockroach's pulp, which was its insides, raw matter that was whitish and thick and slow, was piling up on it as though it were toothpaste coming out of the tube.

  Before my nauseated, attracted eyes, the cockroach's form, as it grew on the outside, kept slowly changing. The white matter was slowly spreading across its back, like a load set for it to carry. Pinched in place, it was increasingly carrying on its dusty back a load that was in fact its own body.

  "Scream," I silently commanded myself. "Scream," I told myself again with a sigh of deep quietude.

  The white mass had stopped piling up on top of the shell. I looked up to the ceiling, resting for a while eyes that I could feel had grown great and deep.

  But if I had screamed, even if only once, I might never have been able to stop. If I had screamed, nobody could have done anything to help me; as it is, if I never reveal my lacking, no one will become frightened of me, and they'll help me without knowing it; but only so long as I don't frighten anyone by going beyond the rules. But if they know, they become frightened, we who keep our screams inviolable secrets. If I give the call of alarm of someone living, they will drag me along silently and harshly, for that is what they do to anyone who crosses the lines of the permissible world, the exceptional being is dragged along, the being who screams.

  I looked up to the ceiling with heavy eyes. Everything was summed up fiercely in my never uttering an initial scream—a first scream sets off all the others, the first scream of birth sets off a life, if I were to scream it would awaken thousands of screaming beings who would unleash a chorus of screams and horror all along the rooftops. If I screamed, it would unleash existence—the existence of what? the existence of the world. For myself, I reverently feared the existence of the world.

  "The fact, oh hand that gives me strength, the fact is that, in an experience that I would like to forget, an experience for which I ask forgiveness of myself, I was leaving my world and going into the world."<
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  The fact is that I was no longer seeing myself, I was just seeing. An entire civilization that had been set up having as its guarantee that one should immediately mix what one sees with what one feels, an entire civilization that has self-salvation as its foundation stone—I was now in its debris. The only person who can get out of that civilization is one whose special function is getting out: a scientist is given the chance, a priest has permission. But not a woman who hasn't the guarantee that such titles bring. And I fled, regretfully, I fled.

  If you knew the loneliness of those first steps I took. It wasn't like a person's loneliness. It was as though I had died and was taking my first steps alone into another life. And it was as though they called that loneliness glory, and I too knew that it was a kind of glory, and I shook all over with that primary, divine glory that I not only did not understand but also profoundly wanted to reject.

  "Because, look, I knew that I was entering the crude, raw glory of nature. Seduced, I nonetheless struggled as much as I could against the shifting sands that were sucking me down: and every move that I made toward 'no, no,' every new move pushed me inexorably; not having the strength to struggle was my only pardon."

  I looked around the room in which I had been imprisoned and looked for a way out, desperately looked to escape, and within myself I had already retreated so far that my soul had flattened itself against the wall . . . without even being able to stop myself, without even wanting to stop anymore, fascinated by the control of the magnet that was pulling me, I retreated within myself, up against the wall, onto which I grafted myself in the design of the woman. I had retreated all the way to the marrow of my bones, my last redoubt. Where, on the wall, I was so naked that I cast no shadow.

  And the dimensions, the dimensions remained the same, I could feel that they were, I knew that I had never been anything other than that woman on the wall, I was her. And I was completely perpetuated, a long, fecund road.