The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

  T H E D A R K

  he found the phrase to be perfect in the resistance it offered

  him. "That is as far as I can go! " And it seemed to him that the

  phrase had touched his very insides, he felt its resistance with

  ecstasy. It was true that a second later, with a glance, Martim

  saw to his distaste the great mistake of a writer: it had been his

  own limitations that had reduced the phrase to what it was, and

  perhaps the resistance that it offered was the resistance of his

  own incapacity. But as he was a difficult person to defeat he

  thought the following, "It doesn't matter, because if at least

  with that phrase I just suggested that the thing is much greater

  than I could say, then I really accomplished a lot. I made an

  allusion! " And then Martim was happy the way an artist is. The

  word "That" contained in itself everything he had not managed

  to say!

  Then he wrote : "Number 2: how to link 'that' which I may

  know with the social state of things."

  And that was what he wrote. Having lost the practice of

  thinking, and having lost the vocabulary, he could not come up

  with any other expression that would show what he wanted to

  say except this, "social state of things," It seemed quite good

  and clear to him, and it had an erudite touch about it that

  Martim had always wanted to have. Erudition, being external,

  became mixed up with the basic idea he had had of objectivity,

  and it always gave him a feeling of satisfaction to hit the nail on

  the head.

  When the man reread his work, his eyes blinking from

  sleepiness now, reality made him make an about-face, and he

  came upon a piece of paper that had the physical and humble

  concretization of a thought, and he gave a long and empty

  laugh�where for the first time, a sense of the ridiculous appeared, and it undermined his grandeur for the first time. That man who had been trying to build up his grandeur and the

  grandeur of others. Then in a painful defense he began to laugh,

  a little against his will and showing his own self a little, and a

  little out of masochism, and a little to show that he was a martyr

  who was making believe that he was not suffering but was

  (I 8 8)

  The Birth of the Hero

  waiting for God to guess with remorse and pity that his son was

  suffering and he was only laughing out of heroism, a little so that

  God would repent as he offered him his disguised suffering as a

  slap, in the way of one who says he does not hurt but hurts and

  who is sanctified in his pain. Then Martim ran into a reality less

  flattering and less possible to dramatize. He ran into the fact

  that he was just a confused person who had forgotten the books

  that he had read; but out of them there had remained many

  doubtful images that he was pursuing, their terminology was

  outmoded, and he had stayed with his first readings. He really

  was a man of slow comprehension and not very intelligent. Why

  not admit it?-a man with a stumbling way of thinking, an illinformed person and one who did not know what to do with the little information he had, and who, now unprotected, was

  obliged to rely on himself. This made him go on living by

  rediscovering gunpowder, as if a person had only one way out :

  himself. "At least that's the way it is today," and then he was

  laughing, which was foolish, because not even God was offended

  at the mistake of having created what he, Martim, was. Because

  God made up for it with more efficient results.

  Out of pure self-martyrdom he laughed again. And as he had

  not laughed for a long time he began to cough; he gagged. Then

  he stopped laughing because the trail of saliva had gone up into

  his nose and had given him the disagreeable suggestion of a

  physical mistake : it was as if his body was failing too. He blew

  out the lantern and lay down.

  But sleep had disappeared with the laughter. And he was

  restless in the dark. The rose that he had inadvertently touched

  in the garden had left him stamping like a horse whose gallop

  was being reined in. At that point things had lost their material

  size in some way. No one could ever have faced for even one

  second the emptiness from which things come without being

  caught forever in the restlessness of want. Goaded by the desire

  to get close, he was indomitable and daring. "What's wrong

  with me?" He was puzzled, alert, sniffing things out. A minute

  ( 1 8 9)

  T H E A P P L E IN

  T H E D A RK

  later he recognized that the state he was in was one of action or

  of love. It so happened that he could do neither. "I'm not used

  to fighting without getting hurt." He avoided the creative act;

  and the night was empty, without a woman's love. "I've got

  insomnia," he said then to his wife in a complaining and

  accusing tone.

  Martim did not know what to do with his desire or how to

  apply it. From one thought to another-most of them were

  getting away from him-he reflected that even if he had failed

  in the creation of the future, he still had the past that was

  already created. With an intense desire he finally wanted to have

  something in his hand. And that seemed to him to be the easiest

  and least sensitive part of disillusion : the clay out of which it

  had already happened was at least a material from which one

  could begin. Then, with the same attitude of severe good will

  with which he had tried to create his plan of action for the

  future, he went back to his memory. "Oh, remember that trees

  exist and there are children and that bodies and tables exist," the

  man said to himself, trying to reach a maximum of objectivity.

  And he really did become objective and clear. But what had

  he succeeded in doing? Pebbles-he looked curiously at the

  pebbles of facts, centennial, hard pebbles, unswallowable, irreducible, imperceptible. He was drowning in a sea of pebbles.

  Not only reality but memory too belongs to God. The man

  rolled over in the dark. He had been held prisoner within the

  structure of his own past. He had never left the world, he had

  never entered the world. It was always the same pebbles; the

  roulette wheel had always been spun, and improvisation was

  impossible! Those were the elements-the ones already thereand all at once they had closed the door, and nothing could come in or go out. And if he wanted to make a new construction

  for the future he would have to destroy the first one so that he

  would have some pebbles to use, because nothing more could

  come into the game and nothing else could leave. The material

  of his life was precisely that. But, he thought, "what infinite

  ( l 9 0)

  The Birth of the Hero

  variations! All with the same pebbles." One could go to a

  fortune-teller; she would shuffie the pebbles, a pebble would pop

  out, and she would say mysteriously behind her glasses and her

  wig, before she died of cancer, "I'm looking at a pebble."

  "But the fact is," he reflected with an intense desire to stop

  thinking about the future-"the fact is that there is at least

&nb
sp; something definitely organized about those pebbles. And that is

  where we fit in. True, sometimes we fit in with an arm that was

  paralyzed in the building or with an eye closed by the hardened

  mortar that dried too quickly; but something is at least definitively organized. And even if we just barely fit into it, the fact is that we do fit. What shall we do? Use the same pebbles to build

  another definitive organization, demolishing the earlier one first?

  Or shall we sensibly make up our minds to fit into the first one?

  It is true that in order to fit into the first we shall have to eat

  less. Because if we get fat we will not fit, and if we grow we will

  not fit; and we will be left there with pants that are too short,

  staring meditatively at our exposed feet. But we will be careful.

  It is a question of being careful. Oh, how good it is that we are

  very careful. Until we forget how much we have grown and got

  fat lately, and we give an absent-minded yawn, and the construction is too short. That is what is called being upset."

  It was what that man called being upset. Had that man

  committed a crime because he had grown too fat? Martim rolled

  over with a cramp in his stomach; he did not fit. At that point

  his thought had begun to echo inside a church and that gave

  him a respect that was made of love and respect in its true

  meaning. And just as every time our feet make noise and for

  some reason we instinctively try to walk quietly the man now

  tried to advance on tiptoe. His thoughts had taken on the

  echoing grandeur of a nightmare, and he suddenly struggled

  against his old distaste for thought. Oh, would he never reach

  beyond just being a creator of truths?

  Until, fortunately, he perceived that the creation of the

  world was giving him a stomach ache. Then, happy with the fact

  ( l 9 l )

  T H E A P P L E

  IN

  T H E D A R K

  that finally he could give in to a pain, he lay down on his belly

  and, with the warmth of that contact, began to fall asleep.

  But that night had many lessons. One must be patient;

  sometimes a night can be long.

  The fact was that in the shadows the birds had perceived the

  acidity of dawn, and long before it broke through for a person,

  they were breathing it in; and they had begun to wake up. There

  was one bird especially that drove Martim almost crazy. It was

  one who would call for its mate in the dark. Patiently and calmly

  it called and it called, until things reached the point at which

  Martim jumped up and shoved open the window. At the open

  window he was met with the sudden silence of the bird. More

  with his nostrils than with his eyes he perceived that the darkness was unstable and that the bird was already living in a dawn that for him, Martim, was still in the future. And in a vague way

  it seemed somewhat symbolic and satisfactory to him. He turned

  around and lay down again, and the patient bird began once

  more. The calm song of summons drove the man into a paroxysm; he covered his ears.

  After covering his ears he could not hear the bird.

  It was only then that the man realized that he was really

  burning to hear it. It seems that so many times people love a

  thing so much that they try to deny it, so to speak, and so many

  times it is the beloved face that makes us so ill at ease. And it

  occurred to Martim, who was trying so hard to find explanations

  for his crime, that he might have fled from the world because of

  a love which he had not been able to bear.

  Now defeated and weak, he took his hands away from his

  ears, suddenly accepting the beauty of the pebbles, accepting the

  maddening song of the bird, accepting the fact that dawn

  preceded the perception of dawn. The man began to listen

  sentimentally to the plaintive bird. And more than that : with a

  little timidity, Martim was also plaintive. He smiled in the dark,

  amused and hurt, because Ermelinda was not a name that one

  went about shouting, nor would his manliness allow him to

  ( 1 9 2)

  The Birth of the Hero

  perch up in a tree. And still, if he were to call her, she was quite

  capable of coming. But he did not love her to the point that he

  wanted her to come. Martim smiled again, quite sad. Since his

  stomach ache had returned he rolled over on his belly again, and

  this time he fell asleep.

  That night had been a great experience, one of those that

  cannot be explained in a court of law because words are lacking

  and a man could be constrained because, in the end, he has the

  obligation of being responsible for what he says, of knowing

  what he is talking about, and of understanding what is happening to him.

  The truth is that he did not give up entirely. In his agitated

  sleep, that stubborn man tried to build in his dreams another

  house with the same stones, since now there were no others to

  be used. In every piece of the construction that he attempted he

  would forget something outside or then put something too far

  inside, and the construction would collapse. And then, for the

  first time, the man seemed to see some advantage in the fact

  that the stones were harder than our imagination, that they were

  immutable and intransigent with that human nature that stones

  have; the nature that is our own nature. For the first time he was

  relieved that the creation of the world was not his task. In his

  construction he suddenly saw himself as a man who had built a

  room without a door and was a prisoner inside.

  In his agitated sleep he sat up in bed once or twice. But his

  haste was the useless haste of a man on a train that he is not

  running. Sitting on the bed he was devoured by a thought that

  had not been so strong during the day: that the time was near

  when Vit6ria would go to Vila and see the German. Time was

  passing, time was passing, time was passing; and the future was

  ripening in a way that could be defined.

  Chapter 9

  ONLY WHEN Vit6ria went again with Francisco to the cornfield

  did Ermelinda have a chance to put in an appearance with a

  basket of food.

  "For a picnic in the woodshed," she said, waiting for him to

  give a sign of joy at the surprise.

  But he murmured dully something about the mania women

  have for picnics, and for an instant she shriveled up in disappointment. Just for an instant she had to make the vague effort of pretending that "everything was all right." Because

  even though she ate all the sandwiches herself she recovered

  rapidly, and now she was talking volubly, intoxicated with the

  joy that "whether they wanted it or not," it was a picnic.

  Without blinking, Martim cynically received several spurts of

  saliva on his face. For some reason, he tried to be ironical and

  keep himself above the situation.

  But it was really a relief to him to have that woman who

  gave herself so easily, as if having her at his disposal were a

  milestone he had already reached. He had been in command up

  to that point. The more foolish she was, the more she belonged

  to him. She compensated for the diffic
ulty that Martim was

  having with himself. And with a relief that he realized must

  have been the one man had felt when woman had finally been

  created, a relief that at last brought him freedom and had at last

  made it impossible for him to be formidable, he smiled and

  scarcely listened to her. The girl was one of those women who

  do not take offense at the absence of a man, and he was being

  absent as naturally as if they had been married. And soon, absent

  and smiling, he was flattered by the foolishness that flowed

  sweetly out of her and lulled him into peace. The girl had the

  smell of powder about her, and that made him a little nauseous.

  ( l 9 4 )

  The Birth of the Hero

  "Wouldn't you like to take a bath?" he had said to her one

  day with great delicacy. "I really can't take the smell," he said,

  ill at ease.

  "But it's only powder! " she said, surprised.

  "Well, I can't take it."

  "All right," she said thoughtfully. And she never smelled of

  powder again.

  Now she was caressing his hair attentively, insinuating, distracted, small. "Do you believe in another life?" she asked him then, immediately becoming more tense as she smoothed his

  hair, as if she were blowing on a cut so that it would not hurt so

  much. For an instant he was surprised as if, with the look of· a

  bird who pecks with its beak, she were capable of a thrust. But it

  was only an instant of mistrust-his mistrust. And he smiled,

  grabbing her, foolish and soft as she was, and so curious in the

  way a woman is curious, and it made him remember his wife.

  "No, I don't believe in it," he said.

  "Stupid !" she said laughing. Because people have the habit

  of insulting each other in intimacy; insulting one another could

  ·be a form of intimacy, and therefore they felt very close. With a

  certain amount of speed they had already gone beyond the

  cowardice of simply tolerating love, and they had entered into

  familiarity; and with relief had lost the larger size of things.

  There, familiar at last and all of her revealed to him, the

  man examined her. She would be pretty only if a person was in

  love with her. But she had the beauty that can be seen when one

  is in love with what he sees. "All mothers of ugly daughters

  should promise them that they will be pretty when the wisdom

  of love enlightens a man," he thought. Around Ermelinda's dark