A Breath of Life (18 page)

AUTHOR: Angela’s life is continuously at risk. Because I don’t always have the strength to face her and her challenge. And, dealing with her, dealing with myself, I almost give in to the law of easiness. I force myself not to recount the events of Angela’s life. But I’d fall into the descriptive and the discursive and that would cause me tedium and downfall.

Angela not only lives without explanation but also acts inexplicably meanwhile I keep looking at the almost always immortality of things. A stone seen as stone, that’s when it becomes stone with its relative eternity. Angela thinks there’s life after death but she’s unequipped to understand what kind of strange inaugural life follows with an inimitable simplicity that life after death. Except life isn’t the life we think we have and death has another name. There are those who know this because they saw in a glance their own ignorance of what is life and death. Those people live in a state of troubled curiosity while others, thinking that LIFE is their life and death is the end. And they will never be able to divine another truth. Without getting into the theory of antimatter in physics, everything has a front and a back, everything has yes and has no, light and darkness, flesh and spirit, will we end up in that antimatter after we die? How can we explain that every born body has spirit? The unexpected always happens for no one ever put a soul into the life that is born.

It’s time for consummation.

Living is my code and my enigma. And when I die I shall be for others a code and an enigma.

Precipices.

I didn’t know that danger is what makes life precious.

Death is the constant danger of life.

Angela’s advantage over me is that she is non-spatial, while I occupy a place and even after death I shall continue to occupy the earth.

ANGELA: The future calls me furiously — that is where I’m going. Disaster? Who knows. When I think that one day I shall die I double over in laughter. Life is a joke. But everyone knows my true destination.

I didn’t learn it but I know it.

While I write the irreversible minutes drip. It’s Time passing.

I’m thinking out loud. Who hears me? I look at the person’s face and see: she’s going to die.

Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn’t want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren’t dead in real life, just as actors, the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: I dreamed this: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?

Who knows, I only know I like diamonds and jade.

Don’t think that I’m writing here my most intimate secret for there are secrets I never even tell myself. And it’s not only the final secret that I am not revealing: there are many little primary secrets that I allow to remain in enigma. I surrender to the sweet familiarity of eternity. But I don’t know if I deserve it.

AUTHOR: At the same time she gives herself the luxury of being sphinxlike. She tells me nothing of her soul. She tells me nothing of her secret fears. I’m the one who must divine her and support her like a gentleman. But I can no longer stand it and one of these days I’ll let out my cry of freedom or make her kill herself. What I desperately want is to initiate myself in the fleeting Angela who is always escaping me.

ANGELA: Yesterday the world expelled me from life. Today life was born. Wind, so much wind. What instability. Me muero. I live in the future of the wind. Why does everything seem to say: leave it for next week? I’m here, here waiting. I’m alive right now and the rest can fuck off. And my dog who didn’t do anything. He just is. I too am: is. I with my tattered flag.

There are old people who die in the spring, they can’t stand the bursting of the earth.

I want an elegant death. As a matter of fact I already died and didn’t hear about it. I am my unnerving ghost.

AUTHOR: I live you as if death had already separated us. So intense is my longing for you.

Does everything I think about exist? why is my imagination poor and I only think about realities, and if it doesn’t exist, then why do I think it?

ANGELA: An anguish. I’d like to live everything at once and not to keep living bit by bit. But then Death would come.

When I die I won’t know what to do with myself.

There must be a way not to die, it’s just that I haven’t discovered it. At least not to die in life: to die only after death.

The world’s getting ever more dangerous for me. After dying, the perilous danger will cease. Breathing is something magical.

I want my end to be as inevitable as death: my end in life will be possessing. I am virginal.

I almost already know what it will be like after my death. The empty living room the dog about to die of longing. The stained-glass windows of my house. Everything empty and calm.

AUTHOR: If they ask me if there’s life for the soul after death, I answer, mysteriously as I am well aware, why not the mystery, if the thing really is mysterious — I answer in a hesitant outline: it exists but it’s not for me to know how that soul will live. No one has yet discovered the state of things after death — because it’s impossible to imagine how the God will behave, the same God who inexplicably for us makes a seed sprout. I don’t know how the seed sprouts, I don’t know why this blue sky, I don’t know why this life of mine because all this happens in a way that my human mind cannot fathom. I live without a possible explanation. I who have no synonym.

Life, life covered by a veil of melancholy. Death: beacon that leads me the right way. I feel magnificent and solitary between life and death.

Everybody knows everything.

Humanity is becoming hard. The facts are becoming bruising.

The morning is a premature flower.

Morning of never again.

One’s incommunicability with oneself is the great vortex of the nothing. If I don’t find a way to speak to myself the word suffocates my throat sticking there like an unswallowed stone. I want to have access to myself whenever I want like someone opening the doors and going in. I don’t want to be the victim of liberating chance. I want to have the key to the world myself and to transpose it like someone transposing himself from life into death and from death into life.

ANGELA: At the hour of my death — what do I do? Teach me how to die. I don’t know how.

AUTHOR: I lost the Book of Angela, I don’t know where I left her life.

ANGELA: A work of art? No, I want the prime thing. I want the stone that was not sculpted.

I cured myself of death. I never again died.

I see everything as if I had already died and was seeing everything from afar. Then there comes that sadness of a cobweb in an abandoned house. What distracts is frothy hatred. Dry and lashing hatred.

Thinking is so immaterial that it has no words. Never forget, when you have a pain, that pain will pass: never forget that, when you die, death will pass. One doesn’t die eternally. It is just once, and it lasts an instant.

AUTHOR: I still haven’t reached myself. Do Angela’s rags make her reach herself? My absence from myself hurts me. There isn’t a single act into which I throw all of myself. And the grandiosity of life is throwing oneself — throwing oneself even into death.

“I want to die” with you of love.

So a dreamer I smile: yes, I wanted to die of love with a with you.

I am looking for somebody whose life I can save. The only one who allows me to do that is Angela. And as I save her life, I save my own.

ANGELA: A place in the world is waiting for me to inhabit it.

I was made for no one to need me.

AUTHOR: Somewhere in the world someone is waiting for me.

My face seems to say: my life is not significant.

Only after you die shall I love you completely. I need all your life for me to love it as if it were mine.

There’s a way of looking that makes you shiver. The forgotten and Spartan obvious way: the strongest wins.

Angela is stronger than I. I die before she does.

Once there was a man who walked, walked and walked and stopped and drank cold water from a spring. Then he sat on a rock and rested his staff. That man was I. And God was at peace.

ANGELA: It’s dawning: I hear the roosters.

I am dawning.

— The rest is the implicit tragedy of man — mine and yours? Is solidarity the only way? But “solidarity” I know looks like the word “solitude.”

[When his eyes withdraw from Angela and she gets smaller and disappears, then the AUTHOR says:]

— As for me I’m also withdrawing from me. If the voice of God manifests itself in silence, I too silence myself. Farewell.

I pull back my gaze my camera and Angela starts getting small, small, smaller — until I lose sight of her.

And now I must interrupt myself because Angela interrupted life by going into the earth. But not the earth in which one is buried but the earth in which one is revived. With abundant rain in the forests and the whisper of the winds.

As for me, I am. Yes.

“I . . . I . . . no. I cannot end.”

I think that . . .

Notes

This book, incomplete at Clarice Lispector’s death in 1977, was organized by her friend Olga Borelli and published the following year. The author did not have the opportunity to revise the final manuscript for publication. Clarice Lispector’s style, even in the books published in her lifetime, is so strange that it is very hard to tell what is an error and what is a deliberate choice. We have therefore elected to stay as close to the original as possible.

In doing so, we are aware that we are not necessarily following Borelli’s own process. Clarice wrote that “The I who appears in this book is not I.” But Borelli understood that the connection was terribly real.

“She asks to die,” Borelli said in her only known statement about the editing of the work. “I left out one sentence. I left it out to spare the family’s feelings. I mean, the book was fragments, and one fragment touched me deeply, in which she says ‘I asked God to give Angela a cancer that she can’t get rid of.’ Because Angela doesn’t have the courage to kill herself. She needs to, because she says ‘God doesn’t kill anyone. It’s the person who dies.’ Clarice also said that everyone chooses the way they die.”

On December 9, 1977, one day before her fifty-seventh birthday, Clarice Lispector died of ovarian cancer in Rio de Janeiro.

page 3 (epigraphs): “The absurd joy par excellence is creation.” — This citation is actually taken from Albert Camus’s essay “Absurd Creation.” In the original text, this passage is followed by a quote by Nietzsche, which might explain the confusion.

p. 9: “But a journey with eyes covered thro’ seas never before discovered . . .” — The language here parodies the opening lines of the famous epic by Luís de Camões,
The Lusiads
.

p. 14: “The scent makes me sister to the sacred orgies of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.” — The male figure of the “Author” describes himself here as “sister.” We have preserved this interesting, perhaps revealing, moment of gender confusion.

p. 18: “Iansã” — In candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religious belief system, Iansã is the goddess of winds.

p. 20: “immanescence” — In the original text, the word is “imanescença,” a neologism possibly inspired by “immanence” and/or “essence.”

p. 43: “I threw the stick . . .” — This is an allusion to a well-known nursery rhyme. The complete first stanza would read: “I threw the stick at the cat-cat-cat but the cat-cat-cat didn’t die-die-die.”

p. 51: “I’m an Anonymous Society.” — The original text uses “S.A.,” which is the equivalent of “Inc.” or “Incorporated,” but in Portuguese the abbreviation stands for “Sociedade Anônima,” or “Anonymous Society.”

p. 58: “the God” — In the work of Clarice Lispector, God is often referred to with an article.

p. 91: “scentillating” — In the original text, the word is “faruscante,” another neologism probably inspired by “fariscar,” to scent or sniff, but the word is written as an adjective. It will appear again later in the text.

p. 102: “Georges Auric ‘The Speech of the General.’ ” — The text refers here to “Le discours du general,” composed by Francis Poulenc in the ballet “Les mariés de la tour Eiffel.” The text misattributes this, though Auric also collaborated on the ballet.

p. 116: “Hudra” — This truck is actually called “Hydra.”

p. 156: “I’ve already said this in my book calling that cry ‘it.’ ” — This is a reference to
Água Viva
.

Copyright © 1978 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector

Translation copyright © 2012 by Johnny Lorenz

Preface copyright © 2012 by Pedro Almodóvar and Benjamin Moser

Originally published as
Um sopro de vida: pulsações
. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, Barcelona.