Near to the Wild Heart

by Clarice Lispector

You could spend whole afternoons thinking. For example: who had said for the first time: never?

She remembered her husband, who possibly wouldn’t recognize her in this idea. She tried to remember what Otávio looked like. The minute she sensed he had left the house, however, she transformed, concentrated on herself and, as if she had merely been interrupted by him, continued slowly living the thread of her childhood, forgetting him and moving from room to room profoundly alone. From the quiet neighborhood, from the distant houses, no sounds reached her. And, free, not even she knew what she was thinking.

When the light breeze, the summer breeze, hit her body it shivered all over with cold and heat. And then she thought very quickly, unable to stop inventing. It’s because I’m still very young and whenever I am touched or not touched, I feel—she reflected.

The day went on and left her behind, alone.

Just as the space surrounded by four walls has a specific value, provoked not so much because it is a space but because it is surrounded by walls. Otávio made her into something that wasn’t her but himself and which Joana received out of pity for both, because both were incapable of freeing themselves through love, because she had meekly accepted her own fear of suffering, her inability to move beyond the frontier of revolt. Besides: how could she tie herself to a man without allowing him to imprison her? How could she prevent him from developing his four walls over her body and soul? And was there a way to have things without those things possessing her?

Eternity wasn’t just time, but something like the deeply rooted certainty that she couldn’t contain it in her body because of death; the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute, almost abstract purity was also eternal.

.” “I said: those who deny themselves . . . Because there are the . . . the plans, those made of soil which will never flourish without fertilizer.” “Me?” “You? No, for heaven’s sake . . . You’re one of the ones that would kill to flourish.” She continued listening to him and it was as if her aunt and uncle had never existed, as if the teacher and her were isolated inside the afternoon, inside understanding. “No, I really don’t know what advice I’d

“Bad is not living, that’s all.

dumfounded

That she had put away her smile like one who has finally turned off the lamp and decided to go to bed.

“It’s hard to depreciate what is human,” she went on, “hard to escape this atmosphere of failed revolt (adolescence), of solidarity with others whose efforts have also been impotent. But how good it would be to build something pure, free of false sublimated love, free of the fear of not loving . . . Fear of not loving, worse than the fear of not being loved . .

They’d marry, they’d see one another minute by minute and may she be worse than he. And strong, to teach him not to be afraid. Not even the fear of not loving . . . He wanted her not so he could make his life with her, but so she could allow him to live. To live above himself, above his past, above the small vile acts he had cowardly committed and to which he cowardly remained attached. Otávio thought that by Joana’s side he could continue sinning.

He was the one who was feeling now, thought Joana. And, suddenly, perhaps out of envy, without a single thought, she hated him with such brute force that her hands clamped over the arms of the chair and her teeth clenched together. She palpitated for a few instants, reanimated. Fearing her husband would sense her sharp gaze, she was forced to disguise it and thus diminish the intensity of her feeling. It was his fault, she thought coldly, anticipating a new wave of anger. It was his fault, it was his fault. His presence, and more than his presence: knowing that he existed, took away her freedom. Only rarely now, in a quick escape, was she able to feel. That was it: it was his fault. How hadn’t she discovered it earlier? she wondered victoriously. He stole everything from her, everything. And since the phrase was still weak, she thought intensely, her eyes closed, everything! She felt better, she thought with more clarity.

Then he’d come. And she’d finally rest, with a sigh, heavily.—But she didn’t want to rest!—Her blood ran through her more slowly, its pace domesticated, like a beast that had trained its steps to fit in its cage.

How many more times would she propose it to herself, before she actually left him? She grew tired in advance of the small struggles she was yet to have, rebelling and then giving in, until the end.

She laughed an evil laugh, thinking how mistaken he was and how many thoughts she’d had without his even imagining it. Yes, why put it off?

her pity encompassed her too and she saw the two of them together, pitiful and childish. They were both going to die, the same man who had rapped on his teeth with his knuckles, in such an alive movement. She herself, with the top of the stairs and all of her capacity to want to feel. The main things assaulted her at any old time, in the in-between moments too, filling them with meanings. How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it.

Slowly, very subtly, the idea of death disappeared and she no longer found anything to laugh at. Her heart was softly molded. With her ear she knew that Otávio, oblivious to everything, carried on in his regular beats, on his fatal path. The sea. “Put it off, just put it off,” thought Joana before she stopped thinking. Because the last ice cubes had melted and now she was sadly a happy woman.

She continued not paying attention to her own words, observing him. No feature of the man’s face gave away his wife’s leaving him. Fugitively she saw in her mind’s eye that almost always silent figure, with her impassive, sovereign face, whom she had feared and hated. And, in spite of the repulsion that the wife still inspired in her, recollecting, Joana realized with surprise that not only then, but perhaps always, she had felt united with her, as if they both had something secret and evil in common.

Man raises houses to look at rather than to live in.

Neither understanding or volition are part of God’s nature, says Spinoza. This makes me happier and freer. Because the idea of the existence of a conscious God is horribly dissatisfying.

Happiness to accept entirely, to feel that she was uniting what was true and primitive in herself with someone, regardless of any received ideas about beauty.

Yes, she thought distantly, staring at him—there are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. And one of them is what is created between a man and a woman who have experienced certain moments together.

descant

And suddenly, treacherously, she had a real fear, as alive as living things. The unknown that existed in that animal that was hers, in that man whom she had only known how to love! Fear in her body, fear in her blood!

She wanted to call to him, to ask for his support, to ask him to say pacifying words. But she didn’t want to wake him. She feared he didn’t know how to make her rise to a higher feeling, to the realization of that which at present was still a sweet embryo. She knew that even in this moment she was alone, that the man would wake up distant. That he could intercept with a block —an absent-minded, lukewarm word—the narrow, glowing path where she was taking her first stumbling steps.

And she, as solitary as the ticking of a clock in an empty house.

On what poetry might her life be based?

What might that murmuring she sensed inside Lídia be saying? The woman with the voice multiplied into countless women . . . But all said and done where was their divinity? Even in the weakest there was the shadow of the knowledge that is not acquired through intelligence. The intelligence of blind things. The power of a rock which when it topples bumps another that will fall into the sea and kill a fish. Sometimes the same power could be seen in women who were only slightly mothers and wives, men’s timid females, like her aunt, like Armanda. Nevertheless that strength, unity in weakness . . . Oh, maybe she was exaggerating, maybe women’s divinity wasn’t specific, but merely resided in the fact of their existence. Yes, yes, there was the truth: they existed more than other people, they were the symbol of the thing in the thing itself. And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was “becoming.” Wasn’t it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times?

The divine feminine

I believed more or less this: marriage is the end, after marrying nothing else can happen to me. Imagine: always having someone beside you, never knowing solitude.—Good God!— not being with myself ever, ever. And being a married woman, that is, a person with her destiny all mapped out. From then on all you do is wait to die. I thought: not even the freedom to be unhappy is preserved because you are dragging another person around with you.

She compared her to Otávio, for whom life would never be more than a narrow individual adventure.

Between one instant and another, between past and future, the white vagueness of the interval. Empty like the distance from one minute to the next in the clock’s circle. The bottom of events rising up silent and dead, a little bit of eternity. Just a quiet second perhaps separating one stretch of life from the next. Not even a second, she couldn’t count it in time, but long like an infinite straight line. Deep, coming from far off—a black bird, a dot growing on the horizon, drawing closer to awareness like a ball thrown from the end to the beginning. And exploding before perplexed eyes in an essence of silence. Leaving behind it the perfect interval like a single sound vibrating in the air. Be reborn later, store away the strange memory of the interval, not knowing how to mix it into life. Carry forever the small empty dot—dazed and virgin, too fleeting to allow itself to be revealed.

“You promise too much . . . All the possibilities that you offer people, within themselves, with a look . . . I don’t know.”

herself had barely been touched. A pause, a light note, without resonance

She had even danced it for the man who was on the run or locked up, for her lover—and fascinated and anxious he had ended up squeezing it, kissing it as if her hand alone really was a woman.

South Park Cartman doing J Lo hand to Ben Affleck

Whole summers, where the nights passed sleepless, leaving her pale, eyes dark. Inside insomnia, several insomnias. She had known perfumes. A smell of moist greenery, greenery illuminated by lights, where? She had stepped then in the wet earth of the flower beds, while the guard wasn’t paying attention.

Inside her she felt the time lived piling up again. The feeling was floaty like the memory of a house in which one has lived. Not the house itself, but the position of the house inside her, in relation to her father pounding at the typewriter, in relation to the neighbor’s yard and the late afternoon sun.

I only have one life and this life slips through my fingers and travels to death serenely and I can do nothing and all I do is watch my depletion with each passing minute, I am alone in the world, those who are fond of me don’t know me, those who know me fear me and I am small and poor, I won’t know I existed in a few years’ time, all that is left for me to live is little and yet all that is left for me to live will remain untouched and useless, why do you not take pity on me? me who is nothing, give me what I need, God, give me what I need and I don’t know what that is, my desolation is as deep as a well and I am not mistaken as far as myself and others are concerned, come to me in misfortune and misfortune is today, misfortune is always, I kiss your feet and the dust of your feet, I want to dissolve in tears, from the depths I call thee, come to my aid for I have not sinned, from the depths I call thee and you do not answer and my desperation is dry like the desert sands and my perplexity suffocates me, humiliates me, God, this pride to be alive gags me, I am nothing, from the depths I call thee, from the depths I call thee from the depths I call thee from the depths I call thee . . .