The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

  The thing is, once they’d found the secret part of themselves in each other, the temptation and the hope arrived, of one day reaching the greatest. The greatest what?

  What, after all, did they want? They didn’t know, and were using each other like people clinging to smaller rocks until all by themselves they can scale a big one, the difficult and impossible one; they were using each other to rehearse for the initiation; they were using each other impatiently, practicing the beating of their wings until they finally—each alone and freed—could take wing in that great solitary flight that also meant farewell to each other. Was that it? They needed each other temporarily, each annoyed at the other for being clumsy, each blaming the other for not being experienced. They failed at every encounter, as if disillusioned in bed. What, after all, did they want? They wanted to learn. Learn what? they were an incompetent pair. Oh, they couldn’t say they were unhappy without feeling ashamed, because they knew there were people who were starving; they’d eat with appetite and shame. Unhappy? How? if in fact they were touching, for no reason, some extreme of happiness as if the world were shaken and a thousand fruits fell from that immense tree. Unhappy? if they were bodies coursing with blood like flowers in the sun. How? if they were forever propped on their own weak legs, tumultuous, free, miraculously standing, her legs shaven, his indeterminate but ending in size 44 shoes. How could beings like this ever be unhappy?

  They were very unhappy. Weary, expectant, they sought each other out, forcing a continuation of the initial and casual comprehension that was never repeated—and without even loving one another. The ideal was suffocating them, time was uselessly passing, urgency was calling them—they didn’t know where they were going, and the path was calling them. Each was asking a lot of the other, but both had the same neediness, and neither would ever have sought an older partner to teach them, because they weren’t crazy enough to surrender for no good reason to the ready-made world.

  One possible way they might still have saved themselves would be the thing they never would have called poetry. In fact, what was poetry anyway, that embarrassing word? Could it be meeting when, by coincidence, a sudden rain fell over the city? Or perhaps, while having sodas together, they both looked simultaneously at a passing woman’s face? or even running into each other on that old night of moon and wind? But they’d both already been born by the time the word poetry was being published with the greatest shamelessness in the Sunday paper. Poetry was the word older people used. And their wariness was enormous, like that of animals. Whom instinct alerts: that one day they will be hunted. They had been fooled far too many times to start believing now. And, hunting them would have required utmost caution, lots of tracking and fast-talking, and an even more cautious tenderness—tenderness that wouldn’t offend them—in order to, catching them off guard, capture them in the net. And, more cautiously still to avoid tipping them off, leading them slyly into the world of addicts, into the ready-made world; since that was the role of adults and spies. From having been tricked for so long, prideful from their own bitterness, they felt an aversion to words, especially when a word—like poetry—was so clever that it almost expressed something, and only then really showed how little it expressed. They both felt, in fact, an aversion to most words, which hardly facilitated communication, since they still hadn’t invented better words: they were constantly at odds, stubborn rivals. Poetry? Oh, how they detested it. As if it were sex. They also thought the others wanted to hunt them not for sex, but for normality. They were fearful, scientific, exhausted by experience. As for the word experience, yes, they’d talk about it without shame and without explaining it: indeed the term was always changing its meaning. Experience also sometimes got mixed up with message. They used both words without deepening their meaning much.

  Anyhow, they weren’t deepening anything, as if there weren’t time, as if there were too many things to discuss. Without realizing that they didn’t have a single idea to discuss.

  Well, it wasn’t just that, and it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t just that: meanwhile time was passing, mixed up, vast, fragmented, and at the heart of time there was a shock and that hatred toward the world that no one could convince them was desperate love and compassion, and they had the skeptical wisdom of the ancient Chinese, a wisdom that could suddenly break down exposing two faces that got upset because they couldn’t sit naturally in an ice cream parlor: then everything would break apart, suddenly revealing two imposters. Time was passing, not a single thing was discussed, and never, never did they understand each other as perfectly as that first time when she’d said she felt anguish and, miraculously, he’d said he felt it too, and that horrible pact had been formed. And never, never did anything happen to finish off at last the blindness with which they were reaching out their hands and that would ready them for the destiny that impatiently awaited them, and made them finally bid farewell forever.

  Perhaps they were as ready to break free of each other as a drop of water about to fall, and were just waiting for something symbolizing the fullness of anguish in order to go their separate ways. Perhaps, ripe as a drop of water, they had sparked the event of which I am about to tell.

  The vague event surrounding the old house only came into existence because they were ready for it. It was just an old, empty house. But they had a life that was poor and anxious as if they would never grow old, as if nothing would ever happen to them—and so the house became an event. They’d come from the last class of the year. They had taken the bus, gotten off, and started walking. As always, their pace was somewhere between fast and separate, then suddenly slowing down, never falling into step, uneasy with each other’s presence. It was an awful day for both, right before summer vacation. The last class left them with no future and nothing tying them down, each contemptuous of what their families had in store for them at home in terms of future and love and incomprehension. With no next day and nothing tying them down, they were worse off than ever, mute, eyes wide open.

  That afternoon the girl’s teeth were clenched, she was glaring at everything with resentment or ardor, as if seeking in the wind, in the dust and in her own extreme poverty of spirit something else to provoke her rage.

  And the boy, on that street whose name they didn’t even know, the boy bore little resemblance to the Man of Creation. The day was pale, and the little boy even paler still, involuntarily boyish, windblown, forced to live. Nevertheless he was mild and indeterminate, as if any pain whatsoever would only make him more boyish, unlike her, who was feeling aggressive. Unformed as they were, anything was possible for them, their qualities were even sometimes interchangeable: she became mannish, and he possessed the almost lowly sweetness of a woman. Several times he almost took his leave, but, vague and empty as he was, he didn’t know what to do once he got home, as if the end of school had severed his last link. So he walked on, mute, behind her, following with a meek helplessness. Only a seventh sense of minimal listening to the world kept him going, connecting him in obscure promise to the next day. No, they weren’t exactly neurotic and—despite what they vindictively thought about each other in moments of barely contained hostility—it doesn’t seem that psychoanalysis would have fixed them completely. Or maybe it would.

  It was one of those streets that let out onto the São João Batista cemetery, with its dry dust, loose stones and black men lingering in the doorways of corner bars.

  They walked down a potholed sidewalk so narrow they could hardly fit. She made a movement—he thought she was going to cross the street and took a step to follow her—she turned around without knowing which side he was on—he hung back seeking her. In that sliver of a second in which they worriedly looked for each other, they simultaneously turned their backs to the buses—and stood facing the house, their searching still on their faces.

  Perhaps everything happened because their searching stayed on their faces. Or perhaps from the fact that the house was right on the sidewalk and stood so “
close.” They hardly had room to look at it, crowded as they were on the narrow sidewalk, caught between the threatening movement of the buses and the absolutely serene stillness of the house. No, it wasn’t that it had been bombarded: but it was a broken house, as a child would say. It was big, wide and tall like the multi-storied houses of old Rio. A big rooted house.

  With an inquiry much greater than the question on their faces, they had recklessly turned around at the same time, and the house stood as close as if, coming out of nowhere, a sudden wall had risen before their eyes. Behind them the buses, before them the house—there was no way for them not to be there. If they backed away they’d be hit by the buses, if they stepped forward they’d hit the monstrous house. They’d been captured.

  The house was tall, and close, they couldn’t look at it without having to tilt their heads up childishly, which suddenly made them very small and transformed the house into a mansion. It was as if nothing had ever been so close to them. The house must have had a color. And whatever the original color of the window frames had been, they were now merely old and solid. Shrunken, they widened their eyes in astonishment: the house was anguished.

  The house was anguish and calm. As no word had ever been. It was a building that weighed on the chests of the two kids. A two-storied house like someone raising a hand to his throat. Who? who had built it, erecting that ugliness stone by stone, that cathedral of solidified fear?! Or had it been time that embedded itself in single walls and given them that strangled look, the silence of a tranquil hanged corpse? The house was strong as a boxer dog without a neck. And having your head directly connected to your shoulders was anguish. They looked at the house like children facing a stairway.

  At last both had unexpectedly reached the goal and stood before the sphinx. Openmouthed, in the extreme union of fear and respect and pallor, before that truth. Naked anguish had leaped up and stood facing them—not even familiar like the word they’d grown accustomed to using. Just a thick, crude house with no neck, just that ancient power.

  I am the thing itself you were seeking at last, the big house said.

  And the funniest thing is that I don’t have any secrets at all, the big house also said.

  The girl looked on sleepily. As for the boy, his seventh sense snagged on the building’s innermost part and he felt the slightest tug of a response at the end of the line. He barely moved, fearful of frightening off his own watchfulness. The girl had become anchored in her alarm, afraid to emerge from it into the terror of a discovery. At their slightest word, the house would collapse. Their silence left the old house intact. Yet, if at first they were forced to look at it, now, even if someone informed them that they were free to escape, they would have stayed there, trapped by fascination and horror. Staring at that thing erected so long before they were born, that ages-old thing that was already bereft of meaning, that thing from the past. But what about the future?! Oh God, give us our future! The eyeless house, with the power of a blind man. And if it had eyes, they were the empty, round eyes of a statue. Dear God, don’t let us be the children of this empty past, deliver us unto the future. They wanted to be someone’s children. But not of this hardened, inevitable carcass, they didn’t understand the past: oh deliver us from the past, let us fulfill our difficult duty. For freedom wasn’t what the two children wanted, they really wanted to be persuaded and subjugated and led—but it would have to be by something more powerful than the great power that was pounding in their chests.

  The young lady suddenly averted her face, I’m so unhappy, I’ve always been so unhappy, school’s over, everything’s over!—because in her eagerness she was ungrateful for a childhood that had probably been happy. The girl suddenly averted her face with a kind of grunt.

  As for the boy, he quickly lost his footing in the vagueness as if mired without a thought. That was also because of the afternoon light: it was a livid light unmarked by the hour of day. The boy’s face was greenish and calm, and now he was getting no help whatsoever from the words of the others: just as he had rashly hoped he would one day manage. Only, he hadn’t counted on the misery there was in being unable to express.

  Green and nauseated, they didn’t know how to express. The house symbolized some thing they could never attain, even after a lifetime spent seeking expression. Seeking expression, be it for an entire life, would be an amusement in itself, bitter and bewildered, but an amusement, and it would be a diversion that would gradually distance them from the dangerous truth—and save them. They, of all people, who, in their desperate cunning to survive, had already invented a future for themselves: both would be writers, and with a determination as obstinate as if expressing a soul would stifle it once and for all. And if it weren’t stifled, that would be a way of merely knowing that you were lying in the solitude of your own heart.

  Whereas the house from the past wasn’t something they could play around with. Now, so much smaller than it, they felt they’d only been playing at being youthful and suffering and sharing the message. Now, alarmed, they finally had what they’d been dangerously and imprudently asking for: they were two youths who really were lost. As their elders would say: “They were getting what they deserved.” And they were as guilty as guilty children, as guilty as criminals are innocent. Ah, if only they could yet pacify the world they’d exacerbated, reassuring it: “we were just kidding! we’re impostors!” But it was too late. “Surrender unconditionally and make yourself a part of me for I am the past”—their future life told them. And, for God’s sake, in whose name could anyone insist on hoping that the future belonged to them? who?! but who cared to dispel the mystery for them, and without lying? was there anyone working to that end? This time, struck mute as they were, it wouldn’t even occur to them to blame society.

  The young lady had suddenly turned her face away with a grunt, some kind of sob or cough.

  “Just like a woman to start crying at a time like this,” he thought from the depths of his perdition, not knowing what he meant by “a time like this.” But this was the first solid thing he’d found for himself. Grabbing this first plank, he could bob up to the surface, and as always before the girl. He recovered first, and saw a house standing there with a “For Rent” sign. He heard the bus behind him, saw an empty house, and beside him the girl with a pained face, trying to hide it from the now-awakened man: she for some reason was trying to hide her face.

  Still hesitant, he waited politely for her to regain her composure. He waited hesitantly, yes, but a man. Skinny and irreparably boyish, yes, but a man. A man’s body was that solid thing that always let him bounce back. Every so often, whenever he really needed to, he became a man. Then, with an unsure hand, he stiffly lit a cigarette, as if he were the others, rescuing himself with the gestures the Masonic brotherhood of men had given him as a crutch and a direction. And as for her?

  But the girl emerged from all this smeared with lipstick, her rouge a little smudged, and adorned with a blue necklace. Plumage that a moment before had belonged to a situation and a future, but now it was as if she hadn’t washed her face before going to bed and had woken up with the indecent traces of a previous orgy. For she, every so often, was a woman.

  With a comforting cynicism, the boy looked at her curiously. And saw that she was no more than a girl.

  “I’m just going to stay here,” he told her then, taking his leave haughtily, he who no longer even had to be home by a certain time and was feeling the house key in his pocket.

  While saying goodbye, they, who never shook hands because it would be conventional, shook hands, for she, flustered at her bad timing in having breasts and a necklace, she had awkwardly reached hers out. The contact between the two clammy hands groping each other without love embarrassed the boy like a shameful operation, he blushed. And she, wearing lipstick and rouge, tried to disguise her own embellished nakedness. She was nothing, and walked away as if a thousand eyes were following her, flighty in her humility at h
aving a condition that could be labeled.

  Seeing her walk away, he examined her incredulously, with amused interest: “could a woman really know what anguish is?” And his doubt made him feel very strong. “No, women were good for something else, that you couldn’t deny.” And what he needed was a male friend. Yes, a loyal male friend. He then felt clean and candid, with nothing to hide, loyal like a man. From any tremor of the earth, he’d emerge with a free forward movement, with the same proud negligence that makes a horse neigh. Whereas she left with her back to the wall like an intruder, nearly a mother already to the children she’d some day have, her body anticipating its submission, sacred and impure body about to bear. The boy looked at her, amazed at having been tricked by the girl for so long, and almost smiled, almost beat the wings he had just grown. I am a man, his sex told him in obscure victory. From every struggle or rest, he’d emerge still more of a man, being a man was even nourished by that wind that was now dragging dust down the lanes of the São João Batista cemetery. The same dusty wind that made that other being, the female, curl up wounded, as if no covering would ever protect her nakedness, that wind in the streets.