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What was making her glow so much? Boredom . . . Yes, in spite of everything there was fire under it, there was fire even when it represented death. Maybe this was the joy of living.
She always did this, trusting that deep down, beneath the lava, there was a desire already headed for an end.
No, she still wasn’t so worn out that she wanted cowardly to pray instead of discovering pain, suffering it, owning it entirely so she could know all of its mysteries.
Why not? Why not try to love? Why not try to live?
Cowardice is lukewarm and I resign myself to it, laying down all of the hero’s weapons that twenty-seven years of thinking have afforded me.
All it took was his presence, merely sensed, for her entire self to annul itself and wait.
“Only after I’ve lived more or better, will I manage to depreciate what is human,”
In this state hatred becomes love, which is really no more than the quest for love, never attained except in theory, as in Christianity.
Fear of not loving, worse than the fear of not being loved . . .”
the moments of abandonment stretched out and succeeded one another, then with a fright he’d see ugliness, and more than ugliness, a kind of vileness and brutality, something blind and inescapable take over Joana’s body as if in a decomposition. Yes, yes, perhaps something released by her fear of not loving then rose to the surface.
the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say. Or at least what makes me act is not, most certainly, what I feel but what I say.”
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.
How?—she wondered and felt she was being naïve, were there two sides to it? Suffering for the same reason that had made her terribly happy?
She suffered above all from lack of understanding, alone, dumfounded.
Love came to confirm all of the old things whose existence she only knew of without ever having accepted or felt them.
Miraculously alive, free of all memories. The whole past had fogged over. And the present was also mists, the sweet, cool mists that separated her from solid reality, preventing her from touching it. If she prayed, if she thought it would be to give thanks for having a body made for love.
She wasn’t suffering, but where was she? “Joana . . . Joana . . .” she called herself softly. And her body barely answered slowly, quietly: “Joana.”
Happiness was erasing her, erasing her . . . She already wanted to feel herself again, even if it was with pain. But she sunk down further and further.
Her life was made up of complete little lives, of whole, closed circles, which isolated themselves from one another.
It was always useless to have been happy or unhappy. And even to have loved. No happiness or unhappiness had been so strong that it had transformed the elements of her matter, giving her a single path, as the truth path must be.
And without knowing why she’d feel a sudden happiness, almost painful, a languor in her heart, as if it were made of dough and someone had sunk their fingers into it, kneading it softly.
His presence, and more than his presence: knowing that he existed, took away her freedom.
He stole everything from her, everything.
of sweet surprise, like a rain of little lights . . . Now all of her time had been forfeited to him and she felt that the minutes that were hers had been ceded, split into tiny ice cubes that she had to swallow quickly, before they melted. And flogging herself to go at a gallop: look, because this time is freedom! look, think quickly, look, find yourself quickly, look . . . it’s over!
I don’t like myself that much that I like the things I like. I love what I want more than myself.”
“That is why the poetry of the poets who have suffered is sweet, tender. And that of the others, of those who have never been deprived, is blazing, suffering and rebellious.”
Everything that could exist already exists. Nothing else can be created but revealed.—If,
His ugliness didn’t excite her, didn’t inspire pity. She simply became even more attached to him and with greater happiness. 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.
Alone in the world, crushed by the excess of life, feeling the music vibrate too high for a body.
On what poetry might her life be based?
Someone who takes me in like a humble dog, who opens the door for me, brushes me, feeds me, loves me severely like a dog, that’s all I want, like a dog, a child.
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.
I thought: not even the freedom to be unhappy is preserved because you are dragging another person around with you. There is someone who is always observing you, who scrutinizes you, who sees your every move. And even the weariness of living has a certain beauty when it is born alone and desperate—I thought.
She spoke of love with such simplicity and clarity because doubtless nothing had been revealed to her through it yet. She hadn’t fallen into its shadows, she still hadn’t felt its profound and secret transformations.
But I’ve never known what to do with the people and the things I like, sometimes they weigh me down, ever since I was a girl. Maybe if I really liked him with my body . . . Maybe I’d care more . . .” These are confidences, good God. Now I’m going to say: “Otávio runs from me because I don’t bring anyone peace, I am always the same millstone to others, I make them say: I was blind, it wasn’t peace that I had, and now I want it.”
I am so happy to feel that I stay quiet in order to feel more; it was in silence that a light, tender spider web was born in me: this soft incomprehension of life that allows me to live.
Again she hoped for an end, the end that never came to complete her moments. She wished something inevitable would descend over her, she wanted to cede, to submit.
She learned to think at a young age and because she hadn’t seen any human being up close except herself, she was awe-struck, she suffered, her pride was painful, sometimes light but almost always difficult to carry. How to end Joana’s story? If she could take the look she had caught on Lídia and add it: no one will love you . . . Yes, end like that: even though she was one of those creatures that are straggling and alone in the world, no one had ever thought to give Joana anything. Not love, they always gave her some other emotion. She lived her life, avid as a virgin—and would be to the
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Where does music go when it’s not playing?—she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: may they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.
She is vague and audacious. She doesn’t love, she isn’t loved.
She could be left in the desert, in the solitude of the glaciers, any place on Earth and she would still have the same white, fallen hands, the same almost serene disconnectedness.
“It’s just that everything I have can’t be given. Or taken. I myself could die of thirst in my presence. Solitude is mixed up with my essence
. It is engraved in me that solitude comes from the fact that each body irremediably has its own end, it is engraved in me that love ceases in death
She would rise up in him, not in his head like a common memory, but in the center of his body, vague and lucid, interrupting his life like the sudden pealing of a bell.
Yet she was his, yes, profoundly, diffusely like a song once heard. Mine, mine, don’t leave!—he implored from the depths of his being.
Dear God, how sweetly she sank into the incomprehension of herself.
Eternity is non-being, death is immortality—they were still floating there, leftover scraps of torment.
blossom in my breast, I am nothing and misfortune falls on my head and I only know how to use words and words lie and I continue to suffer, in the end the trickle over the dark wall, God come to me and I am joyless and my life is as dark as the starless night and God why do you not exist in me? why did you make me separate to you? God come to me, I am nothing, I am less than dust and I wait for you every day and every night, help me, 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
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depths I call thee from the depths I call thee . .
