The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

  She had to traverse the long, deserted street before reaching the main avenue, at the end of which a bus would emerge careening through the fog, its headlights still on at the stoplight. In the wintry June wind, her mysterious, authoritative and perfect act was to raise her arm—and already from a distance the shuddering bus would start contorting itself in obedience to the arrogance of her body, the representative of a supreme power, from a distance the bus would grow uncertain and lumbering, lumbering and advancing, increasingly solid—until it screeched to a halt right in her face amid fumes and heat, heat and fumes. Then she’d board, solemn as a missionary because of all the laborers on the bus who “might say something to her.” Those men who were no longer young. But she was afraid of young men too, afraid of boys too. Afraid they “might say something” to her, that they’d look at her too long. In the seriousness of her closed mouth was this great supplication: for them to respect her. More than that. As if she’d taken vows, she must be venerated, and, while inwardly her heart beat with fear, she too venerated herself, she, the guardian of a rhythm. If they looked at her, she grew stiff and doleful. What spared her was that the men didn’t see her. Though something inside her, as the age of sixteen was approaching amid fumes and heat, something was intensely surprised—and this surprised a few men. As if someone had tapped them on the shoulder. A shadow perhaps. On the ground the looming shadow of a girl without a man, an indeterminate, crystallizable element that took part in the monotonous geometry of great public ceremonies. As if they’d been tapped on the shoulder. They looked and never saw her. She cast more of a shadow than she existed.

  On the bus the laborers were silent, holding their lunch boxes, sleep still on their faces. She felt ashamed at not trusting them, tired as they were. But until she forgot them, the discomfort. Because they “knew.” And since she knew too, hence her discomfort. They all knew the same thing. Her father knew too. An old man begging for change knew. The wealth distributed, and the silence.

  Then, marching like a soldier, she’d cross—unscathed—the Largo da Lapa, where it was day. By now the battle was nearly won. She’d choose a row on the tram that was empty if possible or, with luck, sit next to some reassuring woman with a bundle of laundry on her lap, for example—and that was the first truce. She’d still have to face the long hallway at school where her classmates would be standing around chatting, and where the heels of her shoes would make a noise that her tense legs couldn’t hold back as if she wished in vain to make her heart stop beating, shoes that danced of their own accord. A vague silence would descend over the young men who sensed perhaps, beneath her disguise, that she was one of the devout. She’d pass by the ranks of classmates growing, and they wouldn’t know what to think or what to say about her. The noise her shoes made was ugly. She was betraying her own secret with wooden heels. If the hallway went on any longer, it would be as if she’d forgotten her destiny and she’d break into a run with her hands over her ears. All the shoes she had were sturdy. As if they were still the same ones they’d solemnly slipped on her feet at birth. She’d walk the length of the interminable hallway as if mired in the silence of the trenches, and in her face was something so fierce—and haughty too, because of her shadow—that no one said a thing to her. Forbidding, she prevented them from thinking.

  Until, at last, the classroom. Where suddenly everything became unimportant and faster and lighter, where her face had some freckles, her hair fell into her eyes, and where she was treated like a boy. Where she was intelligent. The sly profession. She seemed to have done her homework. Her curiosity gave her more information than answers ever did. She’d sense, tasting in her mouth the citric flavor of heroic pains, she’d sense the fascinated revulsion her thinking head inspired in her classmates, who, once more, didn’t know what to say about her. The big faker was getting smarter and smarter. She’d learned how to think. The necessary sacrifice: that way “no one had the nerve.”

  Sometimes, while the teacher was talking, she, intense, hazy, would make symmetrical lines in her notebook. If a line, which had to be both strong and delicate, strayed outside the imaginary circle it was supposed to fit inside, everything would collapse: she’d concentrate absently, guided by eagerness for the ideal. Sometimes, instead of lines, she’d draw stars, stars, stars, so many and so high that she’d emerge from this annunciatory work exhausted, raising a barely awake head.

  The way home was so plagued by hunger that impatience and hatred gnawed at her heart. On the way back it looked like a different city: across the Largo da Lapa hundreds of people reverberating with hunger seemed to have forgotten and, if reminded, would gnash their teeth. The sun outlined every man in black charcoal. Her own shadow was a black pole. At this hour that required greater caution, she was protected by a kind of ugliness that hunger accentuated, her features darkened by the adrenaline that darkened the flesh of hunted animals. In the empty house, the whole family away at work, she’d shout at the maid who wouldn’t even respond. She’d eat like a centaur. Her face close to the plate, her hair nearly in the food.

  “So skinny, but you sure can wolf it down,” the clever maid would say.

  “Go to hell,” she’d shout gloomily.

  In the empty house, alone with the maid, she no longer marched like a soldier, since she no longer needed to be careful. But she missed the battle on the streets. The melancholy of freedom, with the horizon still so far off. She’d given herself to the horizon. But this nostalgia for the present. The apprenticeship of patience, the vow of waiting. From which she might never manage to free herself. The afternoon stretching out interminably and, until everyone came home for dinner and with relief she could become a daughter, it was the heat, the book opened and then shut, an intuition, the heat: she sat with her head in her hands, hopeless. When she was ten, she recalled, a boy with a crush on her had thrown a dead rat at her. Disgusting! she’d yelled pale with indignation. It had been an experience. She’d never told anyone. With her head in her hands, sitting. She’d say fifteen times over: I am vigorous, I am vigorous, I am vigorous—then realize that she was only paying attention to the count. Compensating with quantity, she’d say one more time: I am vigorous, sixteen. And now she was no longer at the mercy of anyone. Despondent because, vigorous, free, she was no longer at their mercy. She had lost her faith. She went to talk with the maid, ancient priestess. They understood one another. Both barefoot, standing in the kitchen, steam from the stove. She had lost her faith, but, on the verge of grace, she sought in the maid only what was already lost, not what she had gained. So she’d act distracted and, chatting, avoid the subject. “She thinks that at my age I ought to know more than I do and might try to teach me something,” she thought, head in her hands, shielding her ignorance as she would a body. There were elements she lacked, but she didn’t want them from someone who’d already forgotten them. The great waiting played a part. Inside the vastness, plotting.

  All that, yes. Prolonged, weary, the exasperation. But at dawn the next day, like a slow ostrich straightening itself out, she was waking up. She awoke to the same intact mystery, opening her eyes she was the princess of the intact mystery.

  As if the factory whistle had already blown, she dressed in a hurry, downed her coffee in one gulp. Opened the front door.

  And then she stopped hurrying. The great immolation of the streets. Cunning, alert, an Apache woman. Part of the crude rhythm of a ritual.

  It was an even colder, darker morning than the others, she shivered inside her sweater. The white haziness made the end of the street invisible. Everything was cottony, you couldn’t even hear the sound of a bus passing on the avenue. She was heading toward the unforeseeable of the street. The houses were sleeping behind closed doors. The gardens rigid with cold. In the dark air, more than in the sky, in the middle of the street a star. A great ice star that hadn’t yet returned, tentative in the air, damp, formless. Surprised in its delay, it swelled roundly in hesitation. She looked at the n
earby star. She walked alone through the bombarded city.

  No, she was not alone. Eyes frowning in disbelief at the far end of her street, inside the mist, she saw two men. Two young men approaching. She looked around as if she could have had the wrong street or city. But her timing was off by minutes: she’d left home before the star and the two men had time to vanish. Her heart took fright.

  Her initial impulse, when realizing her mistake, was to retrace her steps and go back home until they had passed: “they’re going to look at me, I know it, there’s no one else for them to look at and they’re going to stare at me!” But how could she turn back and flee, if she had been born for adversity. Since all her slow preparation had an unknown destiny that she, out of devotion, must obey. How could she retreat, and then never again forget the shame of having waited miserably behind a door?

  And anyway maybe there wasn’t any danger. They wouldn’t have the nerve to say anything because she’d stride firmly past, jaw set, with her Spanish rhythm.

  Legs heroic, she kept walking. The closer she got, the closer they got too—so that they were all getting closer, the street shrinking bit by bit. The shoes of the two young men mingled with the sound of her own, it was awful to hear. It was relentless to hear. Either their shoes were hollow or the sidewalk was hollow. The paving stones sounded a warning. All was echo and she heard, unable to prevent it, the silence of the siege being broadcast through the neighborhood streets, and she saw, unable to prevent it, that the front doors were shut even tighter. Even the star had retreated. In the newly arisen pallor of the dark, the street left to those three. She walked, listened to the men, since she couldn’t look at them yet needed to know about them. She listened to them and was surprised by her own nerve in pressing on. But it wasn’t nerve. It was her gift. And the great vocation for a destiny. She kept on, suffering in obedience. If she managed to think about something else she wouldn’t hear their shoes. Nor whatever they might say. Nor the silence with which their paths would cross.

  With abrupt rigidity she looked at them. When she least expected to, betraying her vow of secrecy, she glimpsed them. Were they smiling? No, they were somber.

  She shouldn’t have seen. Because, by seeing, she for an instant risked becoming an individual, and so did they. That’s what it seemed she’d been warned against: as long as she operated in a classical world, as long as she was impersonal, she’d be a daughter of the gods, aided by whatever must be done. Yet, having seen whatever it is that eyes, upon seeing, diminish, she risked being a she-herself that tradition couldn’t support. For an instant she hesitated completely, having lost her way. But it was too late to retreat. The only way it wouldn’t be too late was if she ran. But running would be like going astray at every step, and losing the rhythm that still sustained her, the rhythm that was her sole talisman, which had been delivered unto her at the edge of the world where one must be alone—at the edge of the world where all memories were wiped out, and all that remained as an incomprehensible souvenir was the blind talisman, a rhythm she was destined to copy, performing it for the consummation of the world. Not her own. If she ran, this order would be altered. And she’d never be forgiven the worst thing of all: haste. And even when you flee they give chase, these are things everyone knows.

  Rigid, catechistic, not altering for a second the slow pace at which she advanced, she advanced. “They’re going to look at me, I know it!” But she struggled, out of some instinct from a past life, not to signal her fear to them. She sensed that fear unleashed things. It would be swift, painless. For just a fraction of a second they’d cross paths, swiftly, instantaneously, thanks to her advantage that she was moving ahead while they approached in an opposite movement, reducing the instant to its bare essence—to revealing the first of the seven mysteries that were so secret that only one thing was known about them: the number seven. Make them not say anything, make them just think, I’ll let them think. It would be swift, and a second after the transposition she’d declare in wonder, dashing down streets further and further on: it barely hurt at all. But what happened next had no explanation.

  What happened next were four difficult hands, four hands that didn’t know what they wanted, four errant hands belonging to people who lacked the vocation, four hands that touched her so unexpectedly that she did the best thing she could have in the realm of movement: she got paralyzed. They, whose predestined role consisted only of passing near the darkness of her fear, and then the first of the seven mysteries would be revealed; they who represented only the horizon of a single approaching footstep, they hadn’t understood their designated function and, with the individuality of the fearful, had attacked. It was less than a fraction of a second on the tranquil street. In a fraction of a second they touched her as if entitled to all the seven mysteries. All of which she preserved, and she became more larval, and seven years further behind.

  She didn’t look at them because her face was turned serenely toward the nothing.

  But from the haste with which they hurt her she could tell they were more scared than she was. So scared that they weren’t even there anymore. They were running. “They were scared she would scream and the front doors would open one by one,” she reasoned, they didn’t know you don’t scream.

  She stood there, listening in tranquil madness to their fleeing shoes. Either the sidewalk was hollow or their shoes were hollow or she herself was hollow. In the hollow sound of their shoes she listened intently to their fear. The sound rang distinctly off the paving stones as if they were banging on the door incessantly and she was waiting for them to go away. So distinctly on the bareness of the stone that the tap dance didn’t seem to be fading into the distance: it was right there at her feet, like a victory dance. Standing there, she had nothing to hold her up except her ears.

  The sonority wasn’t fading, their distance was conveyed to her by the ever-more-precise hurrying of heels. Their heels no longer echoed off the stone, they echoed in the air like ever-more-delicate castanets. Then she realized she hadn’t heard a noise in a while.

  And, brought back by the breeze, silence and an empty street.

  Until that instant she’d kept quiet, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Then, as if passing through several stages of the same immobility, she stood still. After a while, she sighed. And in another stage, she stayed still. Next she moved her head, and then stood even more deeply still.

  Then she retreated slowly over to a wall, hunched, very slowly, as if her arm were broken, until all her weight slumped against the wall, where she became inscribed. And then she stayed still. The important thing is not to move, she thought distantly, not to move. After a while, she had probably told herself this: now move your legs a little but very slowly. Since, very slowly, she moved her legs. After which, she sighed and kept quiet while glancing around. It was still dark.

  Then morning came.

  Slowly she gathered her books strewn on the ground. Further off lay her open notebook. When she bent to retrieve it, she saw the large, curved handwriting that until this morning had been hers.

  Then she left. Without knowing how she had filled the time, except with footsteps and footsteps, she got to school over two hours late. Since she hadn’t been thinking about anything, she didn’t know how much time had passed. The presence of her Latin teacher made her realize with polite surprise that third period had already begun.

  “What happened to you?” whispered the girl at the next desk.

  “Why?”

  “You’re pale. Are you getting sick?”

  “No,” she said so loudly that several classmates looked at her. She got up and said very loudly:

  “Excuse me.”

  She went to the restroom. Where, facing the great silence of the tiles, she shrieked piercingly, supersonically: “I’m alone in the world! Nobody’s ever going to help me, nobody’s ever going to love me! I’m alone in the world!”

  There she w
as missing her third class too, sitting on the long bench in the restroom, across from several sinks. “It’s okay, later I’ll just copy the main points, I’ll borrow someone’s notes to copy at home—I’m alone in the world!” she interrupted herself pounding her fist several times on the bench. The sound of those four shoes suddenly started up again like a light swift rain. A blind sound, nothing bouncing off the gleaming tiles. Just the distinctness of each shoe that never got entangled with the other shoe. Like nuts falling. All she could do was wait the way you wait for someone to stop banging on the door. Then they stopped.

  When she went to the mirror to wet her hair, she was so ugly.

  She possessed so little, and they had touched it.

  She was so ugly and precious.

  She was pale, her features grown delicate. Her hands, dampening her hair, still stained with yesterday’s ink. “I need to take better care of myself,” she thought. She didn’t know how. The truth is that more and more she knew how even less. Her nose stuck out like a snout poking through the fence.

  She returned to the bench and sat there quietly, with a snout. “A person is nothing.” “No,” she shot back in mild protest, “don’t say that,” she thought with kindness and melancholy. “A person is something,” she said just to be nice.

  But at dinner life took an urgent and hysterical turn:

  “I need new shoes! mine make too much noise, a woman can’t walk in wooden heels, they attract too much attention! Nobody ever gets me anything! Nobody ever gets me anything!”—and she was so frantic and sputtering that no one had the nerve to tell her she wouldn’t be getting them. All they said was: