Near to the Wild Heart

by Clarice Lispector

However—the rare instants I sometimes come by of sufficiency, of blind life, of happiness as intense and serene as organ music—don’t these instants prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this is the longing of my entire being and not just an idea?

I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I’ve always forgotten.

I want to die now, cried something inside me freed, more than suffering. Any instant following that one would be lower and emptier. I wanted to rise and only death like an end, would give me the peak without the decline.

Many years of her existence she had spent at the window, watching the things that passed and those that stayed still. But in fact she didn’t see so much as hear the life inside her. She was fascinated by its noise—like the breathing of a tender child, by its sweet glow—like a newly-born plant.

One can only guess that in the end she was also being as happy as a thing or creature can be. Because she had been born for the essential, to live or to die. And everything in between was suffering for her.

She feared the days, one after another, without surprises, of pure devotion to a man. To a man who would freely use of all of his wife’s forces for his own bonfire, in a serene, unconscious sacrifice of everything that wasn’t his own personality.

If they had any real value, it wouldn’t be because they are the apex, but the base of a triangle. They’d be the condition rather than the fact itself. Yet they end up occupying all of our mental and emotional space precisely because they are impossible to realize, they are against nature.

What was going on then? 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.

The only thing she hadn’t got used to was sleeping. Sleeping was an adventure every night, falling from the easy clarity in which she lived into the same mystery, dark and cool, crossing darkness. Dying and being reborn.

“Now you can open the windows,” he said. “You know, a little darkness and then lots of air; the whole body benefits, receives life. It’s like a neglected child. When they receive everything, they suddenly react, blossom again, more than the others, sometimes.”

She scrutinized him almost distraught like the waters swollen by the rain whose depth was now impossible to gauge. She had come to hear him, to feel his lucidity as a stationary point!

“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.”

“A certain degree of blindness is necessary in order to see certain things. This is perhaps the mark of an artist. Any man might know more than him and safely reason, according to the truth. But those things in particular cannot be seen with the light on. In the darkness they become phosphorescent.”—He

“The modern tragedy is man’s vain attempt to adapt to the state of things that he has created.”

Everything that could exist already exists. Nothing else can be created but revealed.—If,

And she loved him in this instant. 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.

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.

Otávio following her with his eyes . . . that certainty, never again erased, that she was someone . . . That was when she understood that she wasn’t poor, that she had something to give Otávio, that there was a way to dedicate her life to him, everything she had been

Nevertheless imagining him oblivious to what was going on inside her didn’t diminish her tenderness. It increased it, made it bigger than her body and her soul as if to compensate for the man’s distance.

She remembered: I am the light wave that has no other field but the sea, I thrash about, slide, fly, laughing, giving, sleeping, but woe is me, always in me, always in me.

Why refuse the things that happened? Have lots at the same time, feel in a number of ways, recognize life in a range of sources . . . Who could stop someone from living amply?

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?

“I do. 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.

It’s not simply not being able to: but all things laughing and crying at the same time. No, I certainly didn’t invent this situation, and that’s what surprises me the most. Because my desire for experience wouldn’t go as far as to provoke this cold iron pressing against warm flesh, finally warm from yesterday’s tenderness.

Oh, don’t martyr yourself: you know that you wouldn’t remain in the same state for long: you would again open and close circles of life, tossing them aside, withered . . .

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.

If she still hesitated before the stranger drawing closer and closer it was because she feared the life that was again approaching relentless. She tried to cling to the interval, to exist in it suspended, in that cold, abstract world, without mixing with the blood.

She was a weak woman with regards to things. Everything struck her at times as too precious, impossible to touch. And, at times, what people used as air to breathe, was weight and death for her.

Joana didn’t even know his name . . . She hadn’t wanted to know it, she had told him: I want to know you through other sources, seek your soul along other paths; I desire nothing of your life that has passed, not even your name, not even your dreams, not even the story of your suffering; the mystery explains more than the light;

Next to a window, the sky overhead, bright, infinite. There was no point taking shelter in the pain of each episode, getting angry at the things that happened, because the facts were just a big tear in her dress, the silent arrow indicating the bottom of things again, a river that dries up and reveals its naked riverbed.

Maybe she had learned to speak, that was all. But the words, indissoluble, hard, floated on the surface of her sea. Before, she was the pure sea. And all that was left of the past, trickling inside her, quick and tremulous, was a little of the old water through pebbles, shadowy, cool under the trees, dead brown leaves lining the banks.

To use her father’s untouched money, the inheritance abandoned until now, and roam, roam, be humble, suffer, be shaken to her core, without hopes. Above all without hopes.

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?