The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

  memory? How difficult it would be for her memory. "How in

  the world did I ever play the piano when I was alive? How in the

  world?" she would ask herself. So much money spent on lessons

  and she ended up playing with just one anguished finger. And

  would her audience be just one living woman possibly frightened

  by her own imagination?

  No, no, she could not think of frightening a woman with her

  difficult memories. Really-she reflected with that mania of

  worrying beforehand about details-really, she might be content

  to find someone's body in which she could sleep. And some flesh

  where she could explain herself. Because what would hurt most

  of all would be her own absence. For example, there would be

  the water in the river just as now-except that she simply would

  have no more need to drink, the way an amputated leg will

  bother, even though it has no more need to walk. Would she

  still have the function of the leg but have no leg? Then-then

  all that would remain would be to contemplate the water. But

  ( l 6 4 )

  The Birth of the Hero

  would she be her eyes or the countryside itself? And-and what

  a bout hearing? Would she not be the sound herself? And little

  by little, more and more free, could she at least think? Because

  thought is nothing but the child of things, and she would not

  have any more things. She would finally be free.

  Just as horribly free as the hated countryside. So free that

  perhaps she would no longer even be able to be that thing which

  in the meantime was so free and was a bird. Because even a bird

  was covered with warm feathers and was dirty with all of its

  intimate blood.

  Most of all-just as one day when she was a girl she had

  turned into a young woman-most of all, one day she would get

  her first feelings of revulsion like a sign of terrible perfection,

  like a sign of progress. In the first place, she would probably

  begin by avoiding warm things so as not to defile herself. She

  would keep away from everything she needed so that she could

  exist, be in the world for even just one second. Until she would

  end up being what would make a person feeling it say, "I am an

  empty man. I am an empty man."

  "Foolishness," she said suddenly, freezing. "When the time

  comes, I'll figure it out; who knows even if that's the way it

  happens." But that thought did not ease her mind. "What I

  need is confidence in myself, that's my trouble." She knew that

  when the time came she would not figure anything out.

  "Oh, what am I thinking about?" Then she became startled.

  How could she have been able to go so far in the freedom of

  her thought? And-it occurred to her-that freedom, could it be

  just the start of another freedom? . . . Because thinking was

  always the kind of adventure that gave no guarantee . . . Then

  Ermelinda began to perspire, fully awake now from her daydream, feeling herself standing in the middle of the countryside.

  The birds were all that was left, the only real proof of her dream.

  She looked at the birds, wondering, as it all she had left out of a

  whole dream was a feather in her hand, and she did not know

  where the feather had come from. She looked at the simple birds

  and did not understand what was happening to her, like one

  ( 1 6 5)

  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E DA R K

  who wakes up with anxiety and cannot remember the nightmare

  that brought it on.

  Suddenly she did not know about anything. And she asked

  herself with a start whether the man had really said "noon."

  And if he really had been speaking about today. And if Martim

  had really understood her. Or perhaps she had been the one who

  had not understood him? But, feeling her feet tight inside her

  shoes, she remembered with relief that when she had put them

  on she had been sure of the reality that was happening to her.

  And then she courageously resolved to trust more in her previous

  certainty than in her present doubt. "Everything is true," she

  said firmly to herself. "Everything is true," she said now, anchoring herself in that feeling of sin she seemed to have been pursuing all her life. "Evil is being done," she thought strongly,

  and her eyes darkened with pleasure and vengeance; the sun was

  burning her-evil, the symbol of being alive. The birds were

  flying, gliding about in the bright light. She looked out at them

  as if she were shaking her fist at them. They were the opposite of

  evil; they were death and beauty and progress.

  The sun was making an inferno inside of her head; the

  flowers were crackling with light and heat. And inside her highheeled shoes she cursed the day she took them out of the trunk; her tired feet were sweating. All Sundayed-up and unhappy, she

  waited. To tell the truth, she no longer knew very well what she

  was waiting for. If a certain point had been reached, she no

  longer knew very well which point. "But if I were to go away

  now tomorrow I would suddenly understand it all, and I could

  not come back again." Then, resigned, she bore it, a little

  startled. After all, she was a small person put into a big situation.

  She had wanted the situation to be big, as big as she could stand.

  And it gave her a feeling of punishment and irretrievable advance. And, as can happen in moments of great importance, the moment itself did not seem to have any importance. She was so

  much in contact with the moment that she could not even see

  it. This was the basis that made dreaming superior to reality :

  when she dreamed she knew quite well what was going on. And

  ( 1 6 6 )

  The Birth of the Hero

  still in this terribly real moment the real feeling came from her

  shoes. And in a mistake of reason that was so common to her,

  she asked herself if it had been worth so much trouble dreaming

  for it to end up this way : taking her shoes out of the trunk. She

  felt like taking them off so she could rest her feet. But she knew,

  as if it was the result of a great experiment, that if she took them

  off, her feet, relieved for a minute, would never again fit into the

  shoes. And, by analogy, if for an instant she were to get out of

  the situation into which "they had put her," she would never fit

  into it again. The bones in her toes were sore.

  That moment was noon. The flowers were illuminated from

  within and the red roses were a trumpet-blare; from far off

  Martim saw the girl as a dark patch in the air.

  The garden was lengthened by two or three cutting shadows

  that the clothesline laid upon the ground. The motionless sun

  left the plants heavy, in a watchful silence where anything could

  happen. Martim kept coming closer, with the axe in his hand.

  The things were waiting, deserted. But the honeysuckle was

  quivering the way a lizard does before he dies.

  Then-looking at the bright, motionless roses and walking

  toward them, as if looking and walking were the same perfect

  act, looking at them and what there was red about them-a

  wave of power and calmness and listening passed through the

  man's musc
les. And a man walking in the sun is a man with a

  power that only one who is alive can come to know.

  From afar he saw her standing in the sun, a woman's face

  hardened by lights and shadows, with splotches of light on her

  dress. With interested eyes he asked himself how can it be that a

  person can put so much into another person. And he thought

  that because, while he had been working, it seemed that in a

  short time he had transformed the simple girl into something

  vague and enormous. Only when he got closer did he discover to

  his surprise that the girl's face was really cold and colorless. In

  some way that discovery reconciled him to the fact that she was

  just herself and not the repository of some great hope. And it

  seemed to him that the murmur of the cold water among the

  ( l 6 7 )

  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E D A R K

  rocks also ran inside of her. Not that he was in love with her.

  But it could have been because of love. Attentive, he drew near

  and looked at her, so snuffed out among the mischievous flowers.

  Without any disillusion then he saw her exactly as she was.

  And she, she looked at the stranger. Before that the girl had

  had within her a kind of silent heat of communication from her

  to him, put together from begging, softness, and a kind of

  confidence. But face to face with him, to her surprise, love itself

  seemed to have ceased. And thrown into the situation that she

  had created, feeling herself all alone and intense, she was held

  there only by determination. The way she had spent a whole

  exacting week getting ready for a dance, and just as then, left

  waiting, had taken a taxi and gone to the dance : exactly what

  she had wanted. Ermelinda was sad and surprised. And just

  when he was finally right in front of her, she looked at him with

  resentment, as if he was not the one she had been expecting, and

  she had been sent an emissary with message : "The other fellow

  could not come."

  Martim had not thought about his own timidity, and he was

  ill at ease. So there was nothing Olympian between them. It was

  quite difficult to create the solemn situation that Ermelinda had

  wanted all her life, and into which the man, without any feeling

  of it, had hopelessly joined himself. The girl lowered her eyes

  with a sigh; she was not up to the level of great love affairs. In

  just that .. moment when she wanted most to be herself, her

  whole personality collapsed as if it was not real, and just the

  same it was, because that invented personality would come to be

  the maximum of herself. And what she now felt was only a base

  anxiety that had taken on the form of the ideal she could not

  reach by at last taking off her shoes. And in a disheartening but

  yet disconsolate softness she hid behind a smile in which there

  was no glory; she had wanted so much to have a lover! But now

  it seemed that she did not want to any more. And even to the

  truthful point where the question of dying or not had lost all

  importance, it suddenly seemed to her a faraway and softly

  uncomfortable thing.

  ( l 6 8 )

  The Birth of the Hero

  Why did she not tell the man the truth, then, and go away

  immediately? She felt the truth as a weight upon her heart, and

  she did not know what it was-even though she had been

  thinking more and more, as if all of her was the sleeping heart

  itself. Why then, if she was to open her mouth, would this one

  truth not come out in words? Ermelinda did not even part her

  lips. Not wanting to lie, she would say to him, "I don't love

  you." But she seemed to know something else : that she did love

  him, she did love him. It was only that it seemed as if the things

  in this world were not made for us, it was only that it seemed as

  if in the meantime we had to compromise with the thing we are

  born for, it was only that it suddenly seemed as if love was the

  desperate, clumsy shape that living and dying take on just as if

  even in that very moment the absolute were abandoning us. And

  the truth, still untransmittable in her heart, was the weight with

  which we love and do not love. And yet, the solution for all of

  that was precisely love. "Don't offend me," she thought, looking

  at him, less to protect herself than to save what they both had

  created almost outside of themselves and which they were

  offering each other at that moment.

  So Ermelinda only realized that she loved him when he took

  a step and she thought he was going away. With a start, she

  stretched out a hand to hold him back. And she knew that if he

  went away, she would not be able to bear it. She saw then that

  the truth was that she loved him; she resigned herself to not

  understanding. Then she smiled at him, fawning, hopeless.

  Intimidated, the man sensed that he had to do something.

  Then he took her hand. The woman's hand was freezing cold.

  "Are you afraid of me?" He was sincerely startled, because

  after all, the girl was the one who had offered herself to him.

  "Yes," she said as her voice cracked, abandoning pretenses.

  "But don't get upset over my fear," she said wearily, calming

  him down. "I'm not upset, you see," she said as if she were the

  mother of both of them, or pardoning nature.

  "Afraid of what?" he asked, very curious, prepared for some·

  thing trivial.

  T H E A P P L E

  I N T H E D A R K

  "I don't know," she said confused. "I don't know, afraid

  because-because you're made a different way from me, I don't

  k now . . ."

  "What?"

  "Oh," she said desperately, "but it has to be just like that!

  Of course! Otherwise how could it be?"

  "Be what?" the man asked stupefied.

  "Oh, Lord ! " she said crying, "I mean that you're a man and

  I'm not a man, and that's just it! " she exclaimed, making a

  great effort at conciliation.

  "Oh," he said, puzzled.

  Martim's curiosity, increased now by ignorance, was growing

  blindly, instinctively. He had let go of her hand when he had

  felt it so cold, but this time he took it again without effort. And

  the little hand was light between his hands hardened by those

  calluses of which he was proud and which were there like a

  stigma. His pride in himself filled him with emotion then. And

  with pride he was able to take that hand with assurance.

  When a man and a woman are close, and the woman feels

  that she is a woman and the man feels that he is a man-is that

  love? The sun, ninety million miles away, was burning both their

  heads. "Oh, free me from my mystery!" she implored him inside

  herself. And as if everything were entering into the same serene

  and violent harmony, life became so beautiful that they looked

  into each other's eyes with the tension of a question, the

  incomprehensible eyes of a man and a woman. Sometimes

  people feel like that when they are all alone and with the

  question. But it does not hurt-or if it does hurt, that is the way

  in which th
ings are alive. "If you knew how much I love you,"

  the girl looked at him, "and it's for ever." She, who at least once

  in her life wanted to be able to say "for ever."

  And Martim? When they went into the woodshed, after

  going through hedge after hedge as through so many doors, what

  he loved in her had already become mixed in with the freshness

  there was among the shining flowers, mixed in with the smell of

  rotting wood, the good smell of the damp earth that comes from

  ( l 7 0 )

  The Birth of the Hero

  logs-as if he had been thrown into his first human love. In the

  woodshed the incandescent flowers lost their sway. There it was

  like a stable, and people became slower and larger, like animals

  who do not accuse or pardon themselves. He looked at her, and

  she seemed to have been storing her body in a cool, dark place,

  like a fruit that must get through an adverse season without

  damage. There were golden hairs on her arms and that gave her

  the value of golden things.

  But it was certain that in the disorder of a first encounter

  there was a moment in which they both finally forgot what they

  were painfully trying to copy for reality; the moment had not

  been prepared for either of them. It was a gift of nature in which

  both needed to know why the other one was the other one, and

  they forgot to say "please"; it was a moment in which, without

  abuse, they both took for themselves what was owed them, not

  stealing anything from the other one. That was more than they

  would have dared to imagine; that was love with all its selfishness, and without which there would have been no giving. One gave to the other the need to be loved, and if there was a certain

  sadness in submitting to the law of the world, that submission

  was also their dignity. It was selfishness which gave itself entirely. And although the girl's desire to give was greater than what she had to give she did not know what to give him. She

  remembered mothers giving to their children but she did not

  feel maternal toward that man. With the great strength of the

  irrational she wanted to give him something, simply so that

  ultimately she could go beyond what one can do and in the end

  break the great mystery of being only one. She gave him her

  completely empty thought within which her whole self was

  contained. In the wanting to give, rather than in the giving

  itself, something had been accomplished. She had gained the