Authors: Clarice Lispector
Instantaneous is the light and brief ring of pearls. And when there are many pearls on the ring — they are a smile and an ellipsis. Between parentheses is the ring of diamonds set in white gold because in secret it says an “I-love-you” in Greek.
AUTHOR: I realize with surprise but with resignation that Angela is controlling me. She even writes better than I do. Now our ways of speaking are intersecting and getting confused.
ANGELA: Wild coral is jagged and the isle of Capri in the sun. A coral necklace cannot be grabbed by the hand: it wounds the delicate shell of that white and nervous hand.
Around the neck, the coral necklace is Christ’s crown of thorns.
Ah! The diadem! I am the queen! I blaze like the high crown that I am. Kings use me in the shape of a papal triangular hood. Young princesses adorn with delicate diadems their fresh and innocent faces that are yet capable of cruelty. Marie Antoinette crowned and lovely, months before her head was chopped off and rolled in the street, cried out melodiously: if the people have no bread, let them eat cake. And the response was: allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé. The people devoured what they could and ate jewels and ate trash and guffawed. Meanwhile the pale face of Marie Antoinette displayed pearly silence on a head without hair and without a neck.
Jade grants me divinity. Its traversable green sanctifies me as a Byzantine icon. I, hands clasped together before my serious and transparent face and my diadem are then the entwined braids of my vigorous and tranquil strands of black hair. Jade is my sword unsheathed for the hara-kiri of my humble proud soul that kills itself because it has so little of everything, it’s poverty-stricken, but it has the sovereign pride of death.
But — but only the diamond cuts glass.
And now I’m going to say something very serious, pay attention: a shard of glass is a rare jewel. And its shattering is a sound to be heard on bended knee like the tolling of bells. Elegant bells that are jewel things too. Bells are the jewels of the church. And the clapper of the bell is a ringing of gold that shatters in the air in diamonds and blue birds.
A fiery horse is the ruby in which I plunge so deep that I tear myself apart.
And the emerald? The emerald is something to gnaw with your teeth, and shatter into a thousand little shards of small green children of emeralds.
Topaz is the transparency of your gaze.
The stone? the stone on the ground? It’s a jewel that came from the sky in a whirlwind and stopped right there until I came and saw it and grabbed it and felt it like something of my own, something of my heart.
And the sapphire? it has a reflection that blinds the eyes of the reckless who buy sapphires as if they were diamonds. I’ve never seen a sapphire. I only know what I’ve heard. But the day I come face-to-face with a sapphire — ah! it’ll be sword against sword and we’ll see if I’ll be the one from whom the blood will gush.
The bracelet enslaves me, oh sweet enslavement of a woman to her favorite man.
Platinum is the most expensive. But I don’t want you, you’re ferocious in your white iciness. I prefer the cheap jewelry of a poor woman who buys in the public market diamonds taken from the purest water of the murky sewers.
Amethyst, I do not kiss you because I am not your servant.
Onyx! black prince of roses, you make me bitter and I swim in the waters — darkness of your iron grip, oh mourning of a queen! downy black spider. May you be cursed, black stone of blood, clot of humors and miasmas.
Aquamarine? when I was a child my first boyfriend had blue aquamarine eyes. But I didn’t get close to him: I was afraid. Because still waters run deep and gave me chills.
Jewel
Frisson
Betrayal
But profound regret
And me, just me, resting alert inside the jewel-box of purple velvet.
AUTHOR: Angela — of course — has a conscious mind that doesn’t get along well with her subconscious. Is she double? and is her life double? Like this: on the one hand there’s the attraction to intellectualized things, on the other, something that seeks the comforting and mysterious and free darkness, unafraid of danger.
ANGELA: “
Elevator
”
My elevator suddenly refused to elevate or lower me. It was simply moving between floors, opening the door automatically and presenting me with the slap in the face of a wall. For days: sulky, angry, vindictive. Pointless because no one wished it ill. We were only using its energy. But it got irritated and decided to be rude. It needed a lot of oil and a lot of back-and-forth to finally make up with us and lower and elevate us.
What I can’t tolerate is fuss. The object is mute, it’s without any fuss.
There was a gaze of the atmosphere of the room upon me. I felt that gaze like a mysterious comfort.
As for how the rotation of the stars produces the inertia of my ashtray — explain it if you can.
AUTHOR: Angela sometimes nauseates me like a chocolate ice-cream soda.
ANGELA: The retch of perplexity.
The sky is concentrated air. It’s the void.
Rotten wood.
Careful, Nature thinks.
AUTHOR: Careful with what? and what does she mean Nature thinks? She’s out of her mind.
ANGELA: If you think we’re made of wax you’re gonna pay.
AUTHOR: For those who write, an idea without words is not an idea. Angela is full of pre-words and unconscious auditory visions of ideas. My job is to cut out her drivel and leave behind only what she at least manages to stammer.
ANGELA: Man sits. Why? Is sitting down something we’ve acquired slowly through process across millennia? Or is it part of human nature? As it’s in a bird’s nature to fly? Lying down is different: except for feathered creatures, every animal lies down.
I sometimes feel such pity for “things.” That small table with the marble top, poor thing so cold and white and pale and proud in vain. It thinks it’s noble. And my trash basket full of paper, so elegant and simple, woven from strips of wood but what’s the point of its beauty if it’s always on the floor, always full of the crumpled paper of the letters I didn’t send.
Farewell, oh thing.
I’m leaving for when-hell-freezes-over.
AUTHOR: Angela lacks the creative ambition that is made of a hunger that is never satisfied.
Discovering a new way to live. I believe that the key lies in seeing the thing in the thing, without going beyond or behind it, outside its context. The result of such a new way of looking at the passing moment is often to wonder at a thing as if we were seeing it for the first time. Seeing the thing in the thing hypnotizes the person looking at the dazzling object seen. There is an encounter between me and that thing vibrating in the air. But the result of that gaze is a sensation of hollowness, empty, impenetrable and of full mutual recognition. God forgive me I believe I’m rambling on about the nothing. But I’m sure of one thing, this nothing is the best character in a novel. In the void of the nothing facts and things insert themselves. What you see in this way of transforming everything absolutely into the present state, the result is not mental: it is a mute form of feeling absolutely untranslatable by words.
I’m only going to reread superficially what I’ve already written and what Angela wrote because I don’t want to influence myself, I don’t want to copy. I don’t want to imitate even the truth. Perhaps by reading only superficially what’s already been written will I lose the thread and everything will come out fragmentary and disconnected. Or maybe it’s disconnected because I speak of one thing that belongs to my path, while Angela speaks of another thing that belongs to her destiny. But, though I am fragmentary and dissonant and out of tune, I believe there exists in all this a hidden order. And! There exists a will.
AUTHOR: I’m in love with a character I invented: Angela Pralini. Here she is speaking:
ANGELA: Ah how I would like a languid life.
I am one of the interpreters of God.
AUTHOR: When Angela thinks of God, is she referring to God or to me?
ANGELA: Who makes my life? I feel that someone is ordering me around and fating me. As if someone were creating me. But I am also free and don’t obey orders.
AUTHOR: I’ve been drinking too much. When you drink, you end up with a naked subconscious and can only feel, feel, feel. God is a thing you breathe. I don’t have faith in God. Luck is sometimes not having faith. Because that way one day you can have The Great Surprise of those who don’t expect miracles. It seems moreover that miracles happen like manna from heaven especially for those who believe in nothing. And those people don’t even realize that they were singled out. I’ve grown tired of asking. For the miracle to happen you have to not expect it. I want nothing more.
I am the night and He is the firefly.
The theme of my life is the nothing.
Reality is very strange, it’s entirely unreal. Why hast thou forsaken me, my God? I live my life apologizing and giving thanks.
Angela gave God the power to cure her soul. It’s a God of great utility: for when Angela feels God then the terribly exposed truth is immediate. Angela uses God to breathe. She divides God to use Him as her protection. Angela is not a mystic and doesn’t even see the golden light in the air.
ANGELA: I wanted to lead an ascetic life, of purification, of exclusive contact with the beyond. But how? If at the same time I want money for my comforts, I want a man for my sensuality, I want the precious stones that are the gem of the earth and that are for that reason also sacred? My duality surprises me, I’m dizzy and unhappy. At the same time it’s a richness to have the element sky-air and the element earth-love, without one getting in the way of the other.
The moment I grasp myself — I shall have reached eternity no matter how ephemeral.
God was not made for us. We are the ones who were made for Him. What we must do, though He doesn’t care for us, is adore Him and in the worst circumstances fill our hearts with the pleasure of praising Him.
AUTHOR: A man imagined God and made a chair, in that chair there must be a bit of that man’s energy. Such is the spirit of made things, lived things.
I invented God — and don’t believe in Him. It’s as if I had written a poem about the nothing and then suddenly found myself face-to-face with the nothing itself. Is God a word? If so then I’m full of Him: thousands of words crammed inside a jar that’s shut and that I sometimes open — and I am dazzled. God-word is dazzling.
ANGELA: Sometimes, just to feel myself living, I think about death. Death justifies me.
An object ages because it has within it dynamics.
Instead of saying “my world,” I say audaciously: the world depends on me. Because if I don’t exist, the Universe ceases within me. Could it be that abstraction begins after death?
I, reduced to a word? but what word represents me? I know one thing: I am not my name. My name belongs to those who call me. But, my intimate name is: zero. It is an eternal beginning permanently interrupted by my awareness of beginning.
God is neither the beginning nor the end. He is always the middle.
AUTHOR: I participate in Angela’s shaking restlessness but do not imitate her.
ANGELA: I’m weak, dubious, there’s a charlatan inside me though I tell the truth. And I feel guilty about everything. I who have crises of rage, “sacred rage.” And I can’t find the refuge of peace. For pity’s sake, let me live! I ask for little, it’s almost nothing but it’s everything! peace, peace, peace! No, my God, I don’t want peace with an exclamation mark. I want only this minimum: peace. Just so, very, very slowly . . . like this . . . almost asleep . . . that’s right . . . that’s right . . . it’s almost coming . . . Don’t frighten me, I am terribly frightened.
He is the well-applied word. And I rolling through space like a baby without gravity. Where’s my gravity? Or are you supposed to say gravitation? Do me a favor, give me somewhere to land. I’m not someone to believe in. But to imagine without managing to. It makes me want to talk wrong. Like: Dog. That means God.
AUTHOR: Angela doesn’t know how to live gradually: she wants to eat life all at once. And so she’s got empty
time
left over. The meditation inside the emptiness is what she manages, being at the last human stage before our lives that are without exception glorious.
Solitary eagle.
Living is a hobby for her. She thinks it has nothing to do with her and lives tossed to the side, without past or future; just today forever.
ANGELA: Is what’s happening to me Grace? Because my body I don’t feel it, it doesn’t weigh me down, it doesn’t desire, the spirit neither strains nor searches, a luminous aura of silence envelops me: I hover in the air, free of time but fully in this very moment, without before or after. I greet myself and the world does not touch me. For me to be two and for there to be the participation of this state, I look at myself in the mirror, I look at the other of me. And I see that my fluid appearance has the loveliness of the floating human face. Then I feel with a most delicate pleasure that I’m whole. And an air of truth. I am finally barefoot.
I did what was most urgent: a prayer.
I pray to find my true path. But I discovered that I don’t give myself entirely to the
prayer
, I seem to know that the true path is with pain. There is a secret and to me incomprehensible law: only through suffering does one find happiness. I fear myself because I’m always ready to be able to suffer. If I don’t love myself I’ll be lost — because no one loves me to the point of being I, of being me. I must want myself in order to give something to myself. Must I be worth something? Oh protect me from myself, who persecutes me. I’m worth something in relation to others — but in relation to myself, I am nothing.