The Passion According to GH

by Clarice Lispector

  I had taken the telephone off the hook, but someone might come ring the doorbell and I would be free! The blouse! the blouse I bought, they said they were going to deliver it, so the bell would ring!

  No, it wouldn't ring. And I would be forced to keep on with my realizations. And I recognized in the cockroach the insipidity of when I was pregnant.

  "I remembered myself walking the streets when I realized that I would have the abortion, doctor, I who as regards children only knew and only would know that I would have an abortion. But at least I was experiencing pregnancy. On the street, I could feel inside myself the child not yet moving, while I stopped to look at the wax manikins smiling in the shop windows. And when I went into the restaurant and ate, a child's pores devoured the food like a waiting fish mouth. When I walked, when I walked, I was carrying it."

  In the interminable hours when I walked through the streets thinking about the abortion, which had anyway already been arranged with you, doctor, in those hours my eyes too must have been insipid. On the street I too was no more than thousands of neutral protozoan cilia, quavering, I now knew within myself the shiny stare of a cockroach pinned at the middle. I had walked through the streets with my lips parched, and living, doctor, was the inside of a crime. Pregnancy: I had been cast into the happy horror of neutral life that lives and moves.

  And while I was looking into the display windows, doctor, with my dried lips like someone's who isn't breathing through his nose, while I was looking at the stationary, smiling manikins, I was full of neutral plankton and opened my quiet, suffocated mouth and said this to you: "What bothers me most, doctor, is that I have a hard time breathing." The plankton gave me my color, the Tapajos River is green because its plankton is green.

  When night arrived, I was still deliberating about the abortion that had been decided on, lying on the bed with my thousands of faceted eyes looking into the dark, my lips dark from breathing, without thinking, without thinking, deliberating, deliberating: on those nights I would gradually darken through and through from my own plankton, just as the cockroach matter was becoming yellower and yellower, and my gradual darkening marked time's passing. And could all of that have been love for the child?

  If it was, then love is much more than love: love is yet before love: it is plankton striving, and the great living neutrality striving. Just like life inside the cockroach pinned around the middle.

  The fear I have always had of the silence that life is made up of. Fear of the neutral. The neutral was my deepest, most alive root—I looked at the cockroach and I knew. Till the moment I saw the cockroach, I had always given what I was experiencing some name, if I hadn't given it one I couldn't have saved myself. To escape from the neutral, I had long since abandoned the being for the persona, for the human mask. In humanizing myself, I had freed myself from the desert.

  I had freed myself from the desert, to be sure, but I had also missed it! And I had also missed the forests, and I had missed the air, and I had missed the embryo inside me.

  There it is nevertheless, this neutral cockroach without a name for love or suffering. Its only differentiation in life is that it has to be either male or female. I had been thinking of it only as female since whatever is caved in at the middle must be female.

  I put out the cigarette butt that was now burning my fingers, I put it out carefully on the floor with my slipper, and I crossed my sweaty legs, I never thought that legs could sweat so much. We two, the buried alive. If I was brave, I would wipe the sweat off the cockroach.

  Did she sense something in herself equivalent to what my gaze saw in her? how much did she do herself any good or get any benefit from what she was? did she know, at least in some indirect way, that she scraped along the ground? or isn't scraping along the ground something that one knows one is doing? How much did I know of what people saw clearly in me? How would I know whether I did or did not go about with my belly dragging in the dust of the ground? Does the truth have no witness? is to be not to know? If a person doesn't look and doesn't see, does the truth still exist? The truth that is not communicated, not even to the one who is looking. Is that the secret of a person's being a person?

  If I want to, even now after everything that has happened is over, I can still keep myself from having seen. And then I shall never know about the truth I am trying to go through again—it still depends on me!

  I was looking around at the dry, white room, where I saw only sands and more sands of the demolition, some covering over the others. The minaret where I stood was made of hard gold. I was on the hard, unreceptive gold. And I needed to be received. I was afraid.

  "Mother: I have taken a life, and there are no arms to receive me now and in the hour of our desert, amen. Mother, everything has now turned into hard gold. I have cut off an organized thing, Mother, and that is worse than killing, that has made me come in through a gap that offered itself to me, worse than death, that showed me a whole, neutral life, yellowing. The cockroach is alive, and its eye fecundates, I am afraid of my raucousness, Mother."

  And my mute raucousness was by then the raucousness of someone who is availing herself of a calm Hell.

  Raucousness—on the part of someone experiencing pleasure. Hell was good for me, I was taking advantage of that white blood I had spilled. The cockroach is real, Mother. It isn't just the idea of a cockroach anymore.

  "Mother, I only pretended to want to kill, but just see what I have cracked: I have cracked a shell! Killing is also forbidden because you crack the hard husk and you are left with viscous life. From the inside of the husk, a heart that is thick and white and living, like pus, comes out, Mother, blessed be you among cockroaches, now and in the hour of this, my death of yours, cockroach and jewel."

  As if saying the word "Mother" had released a thick, white part in me—the oratorio's intense resonance suddenly stopped, and the minaret fell silent. And, like after a violent attack of vomiting, my forehead was relieved, fresh, and cool. No more fear, not even fright anymore.

  No more fear, not even fright anymore.

  Had I vomited up my last human remnants? And I wasn't looking for help anymore. The day desert lay before me. And now the oratorio started in again only in a different way, now the oratorio was the deaf sound of the heat refracting off the walls and ceilings, off the round ceiling vault. The oratorio was made of the trembling of a heat wave. And my fear, too, was different now: not the fear of someone who is still about to go in but the so much greater fear of someone who has gone in.

  So much greater: it was fear of my lack of fear.

  For it was with my temerity that I then looked at the cockroach. And I saw: it was an insect without beauty in the eyes of other species. And when I looked at it, there the old, small fear came back for just an instant: "I swear, I shall do everything you want! but don't leave me trapped in the cockroach's room because a huge thing is going to happen to me, I don't like the other species! I like only people!

  But, when I moved slightly backward, the oratorio only grew more intense, and then I remained silent without attempting another move to help myself. I had now abandoned myself—I could almost see, there at the start of the path I had just traveled, the body I had left behind. But I still called to it now and again, still called myself. And it was when I couldn't hear my reply anymore that I knew that I had finally left myself beyond my own reach.

  Yes, the cockroach was an insect without beauty in the eyes of the other species. Its mouth: if it had teeth they would be huge teeth, square and yellow. How I hate the sunlight that shows all, shows even the possible. I wiped my forehead with the corner of my robe, without taking my eyes off the cockroach, and my own eyes too had the same lashes. But no one touches yours, oh filthy one. Only another cockroach would like this cockroach.

  And me—who would like me this day? who had become as mute as I? who, like me, was calling fear love? and wanting, love? and needing, love? Who, like me, knew that she had never changed shape since the time when they drew me on the cav
e rock? beside a man and a dog.

  From now on I could call anything the name I invented for it: in the dry room one could do that, for any name would do since none would do. Within the dry vault sounds, everything could be called anything, because anything would be changed into the same resonating muteness. The cockroach's much greater nature made anything that came in there—name or person—lose its false transcendence. As soon as I saw, only and precisely, the white vomit of its body: I saw only facts and things. I knew I was at the point of irreducibility, although I didn't know what the irreducible was.

  But I also knew that ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law—for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. Worse: the cockroach and I were not in the presence of a law to which we owed obedience. The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my own unknown law, and if I don't carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

  In the Garden of Eden, who was the monster and who was not? amid the buildings and apartments, in the elevated spaces between the skyscrapers, in that hanging garden . . . who is, and who is not? To what extent can I stand not at least knowing what is staring at me? the primal cockroach is staring at me, and its law sees mine. I sensed that I was going to know.

  "Don't leave me at this moment, don't let me make alone this already-made decision. I had, indeed I still had the desire to take refuge in my own fragility and in the clever, though true, argument that my shoulders were those of a woman, thin and weak. Whenever I had needed to, I had excused myself with the argument that I was a woman. But I understood well that not only women fear seeing, everyone fears seeing him who is God."

  I was afraid of God's face, I was afraid of my final nakedness on the wall. The beauty, that new absence of beauty that had nothing to do with what I had been in the habit of calling beauty, terrified me.

  "Give me your hand. For I no longer know what I am speaking of. I think I have invented it all, none of it has existed! But if I invented what happened to me yesterday—who can assure me that I didn't also make up my whole life prior to yesterday?"

  Give me your hand:

  Give me your hand:

  Now I'm going to tell you how I went into that inexpressiveness that was always my blind, secret quest. How I went into what exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the mysterious, fiery line, how it is a surreptitious line. Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—-in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world's breathing, and the world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

  It wasn't by using any of my attributes as an instrument that I was reaching the mysterious, calm fire of that something that is a plasma—it was precisely by stripping myself of all attributes and going on with just my living innards. To arrive at that point, I was leaving my human organization behind—in order to go into that monstrous thing that is my living neutrality.

  "I know, it's awful to hold my hand. It's awful to go without air in this collapsed mine into which I have brought you, without pity for you but because of pity for myself. But I swear that I shall get you out of here alive—even if I have to lie, even if I have to lie about what my eyes have seen. I'll save you from this terror in which, for the moment, I need you. What pity I now have for you, a person I have simply latched on to. You gave me your hand innocently, and because I could hold on to it I have had the courage to plunge to the depths of myself. But don't try to understand me, just keep me company. I know that your hand would let go if you knew."

  How can I repay you? At least use me too, at least use me as a dark tunnel . . . and when you walk through my blackness you will come out the other side with yourself. You may not come out with me, I don't know if I'll go through, but you'll come out with yourself. At least you won't be alone, like I was yesterday, and yesterday I prayed just to get out from inside alive. And not only alive—like that primary, monstrous cockroach was only alive—but organizedly alive, like a person.

  Identity—identity which is the first immanence — was that what I was giving in to? was that what I had gone into?

  Identity is forbidden me, I know. But I am going to put myself at peril by having faith in my future cowardice, and it will be my essential cowardice that will reorganize me again into a person.

  Not only through my cowardice. But I shall reorganize myself through the ritual with which I have now been born, just as the ritual of life is inherent in the neutrality of semen. Identity is forbidden me but my love is so great that I shall not resist my will to go into the mysterious web, into that plasma that I may never be able to leave. My belief, however, is also so profound that, if I cannot leave, I know, even in my new unreality, there will be the plasma of God in my life.

  Oh, but at the same time, how can I want my heart to see? if my body is so weak that I cannot look at the sun without my eyes physically weeping—how could I keep my heart from shining in physically organic tears if in nakedness I felt identity: God? My heart, which has cloaked itself in a thousand veils.

  The great, neutral reality of what I was experiencing outstripped me in its extreme objectivity. I felt unable to be as real as the reality that was reaching me—could I be starting in contortions to be as nakedly real as what I was seeing? However, I experienced all this reality with a sense of the unreality of reality. Could I be living not truth but the myth of truth? Whenever I experienced truth, it was through an impression of unshakable dream: unshakable dream is my truth.

  I am trying to tell you how I came to the neutrality and inexpressivity of myself. I don't know if I am understanding what I say, I feel—and I very much fear feeling, for feeling is merely one of the styles of being. Still, I shall go through the sultry torpor that swells with nothingness, and I shall have to understand neutrality through feeling.

  Neutrality. I am speaking of the vital element linking things. Oh, I'm not afraid you won't understand but rather that I'll understand myself poorly. If I don't understand myself, I shall die of exactly what I'm still living on. Let me now tell you the most frightening part:

  I was being swept along by the demonic.

  For the unexpressive is diabolical. If a person is not committed to hope, she lives in the demonic. If that person has the courage to leave her feeling behind, she discovers that huge life of an extremely busy silence, the same sort that exists in the cockroach, the same as in the stars, the same as in herself—the demonic is prior to the human. And if that person sees that nowness, she singes herself, as though she saw God. Prehuman divine life is a life of singeing nowness.

  Prehuman divine life is a life of singeing nowness.

  I am going to tell you: the fact is that I was afraid of a certain blind and now fierce joy that began to take me over. And to make me lose myself.

  The joy of losing oneself is a Black Sabbath joy. Losing oneself is finding oneself dangerous. I was experiencing in that desert the fire of things: and it was a neutral fire. I was living off the whole span that things comprise. And it was a Hell, that experience, because in that world that I was living there exists neither pity nor hope.

  I had come into the Sabbath orgy. I know now what is done in the darkness of the mountains during nights of orgy. I know! I know with horror: things are enjoyed. The thing of which things are made is delighted in—that is the brute joy of black magic. It was that neutrality that I experienced—neutrality was my true cultural broth. I kept going on, and I was feeling the joy of Hell.

  And Hell is not the torture of pain! it is the torture of a certain joy.

  The neutral is unexplainable and alive, it seeks to understand me:
just as protoplasm and semen and protein belong to a living neutrality. And I was completely new, like a new initiate. It was as if up to now I had had my palate corrupted by salt and sugar, my soul corrupted by pleasures and pains—and I had never tasted the primary taste. And I now experienced the taste of nothingness. I quickly uncorrupted myself, and the taste was new like the taste of mother's milk that has a taste only to the mouth of the child. With the collapse of my culture and my humanity—which was a suffering with a great sense of loss for me—with the loss of humanity, I came, orgiastically, to taste the taste of things' identity.

  It is very hard to taste. Up to then I had been so swollen with feeling that when I experienced the taste of real identity, it seemed as tasteless as the taste that a drop of rainwater has in your mouth. It's horribly insipid, my love.

  My love, it's like the blandest nectar—it's like the air, which in itself has no smell at all. Up to then, my corrupted senses were mute to the taste of things. But my most archaic and demonic of thirsts had led me, subterraneously, to collapse all constructs. Sinful thirst was guiding me—and I know now that tasting the taste of that almost-nothingness is the gods' secret joy. It is a nothingness that is God—and that has no taste.

  But it is the most primary of pleasures. And only it—at last, at last!—is the pole opposite to the pole of Christian-human feeling. Through the pole of the first demonic pleasure I perceived, at a great distance and for the first time . . . that there really was an opposite pole.

  I was clear of my own intoxication by feelings, clear to the point of going into the divine life that was a primary life entirely without elegance, a life as primary as if it was a manna falling from the heavens without any taste whatsoever: manna is like rain and has no taste. To taste that taste of nothingness was my condemnation and my joyful terror.