Authors: Clarice Lispector
ANGELA: The dancing of the guests.
Ireland, never shalt thou see me. Malta, of Malta, thou art the prison. A bloody finger points upward. And I remember the future.
Dutch — is what I am. And I am September too. So many fruits the lady has. The dog searching for its own tail. Help! fire! And I am chamber music.
AUTHOR: Angela is a curve in an interminable sinuous spiral. I am upright, I write triangularly and pyramidally. But whatever is inside the pyramid — the untouchable, dangerous and inviolable secret — is Angela. What Angela writes can be read aloud: her words are voluptuous and give physical pleasure. I am geometric, Angela is a spiral, all finesse. She is intuitive, I am logical. She is not afraid to err in the use of words. And I do not err. I am well aware that she is the succulent grape and I am the raisin. I am balanced and sensible. She is free of balance which for her is unnecessary. I am controlled, she doesn’t repress herself — I suffer more than she does because I am imprisoned in a narrow cage of forced mental hygiene. I suffer more because I don’t say why I suffer.
ANGELA: And I am no more than a promise.
But I am a star. I feel that I am a star. Shattered. I am a shard of glass on the ground.
AUTHOR: This woman is scathing toward herself she is the sharp points of a star. Those sparkling points wound me too. You don’t know how to live based on an instant-climax: you feel it but can’t prolong it into a permanent feeling. You don’t learn from others, you don’t learn from yourself. I respect you though you’re not my equal. And am I my equal? I am I? This question arises from my observation that you don’t seem to know yourself. You might not know that there is a center of yourself and that it’s hard as a nut from which your phosphorescent words radiate.
ANGELA: Seriously: what am I?
No answer.
So I throw my body away. Am I Strauss or just Beethoven? Do I laugh or cry? I am name. That’s the answer. It’s not much.
Suddenly I saw myself and saw the world. And I understood: the world is always someone else’s. Never mine. I am the pariah of the rich. The poor in soul keep nothing stored away. The dizziness you feel when in a sudden flash of lightning you suddenly see the brightness of not understanding. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND! For fear of madness, I renounced the truth. My ideas are invented. I don’t take responsibility for them. The funniest thing is that I never learned how to live. I don’t know anything. All I know is how to go on living. Like my dog. I’m afraid of the excellent and the superlative. When something starts getting really good I either mistrust it or step back. If I stepped forward I’d be focused on the yellowness of the splendor that nearly blinds.
AUTHOR: Angela is the vibrating tremor of a tense harp-string after it’s been plucked: she stays in the air still saying, saying — until the vibration dies spreading out in froth across the sands. Afterwards — silence and stars. I know Angela’s body by heart. I just didn’t understand what she wants. But I gave her such shape to my life that she seems more real to me than I do.
ANGELA: My life is a great disaster. It’s a cruel divergence, it’s an empty house. But there’s a dog inside barking. As for me — all that’s left for me is to bark at God. I’m going back to myself. That is where I find a dead destitute girl. But one night I’ll go to the government archives and set fire to everything and all the identity cards of the destitute. And only then do I become so autonomous that I shall only stop writing after I die. But it’s no use, the blue lake of eternity doesn’t catch fire. I am the one who would incinerate myself down to my bones. I shall become number and dust. Let it be. Amen. But I protest. I protest in vain like a dog in the eternity of the government archives.
AUTHOR: Angela is a lot like my opposite. To have inside me the opposite of what I am is in essence indispensible: I won’t give up my struggle and my indecision and the failure — for I’m a great failure — failure serves as the foundation of my existence. If I were a winner? I’d die of boredom. “Getting” isn’t my strong point. I nourish myself with what’s left over of me and it’s very little. There is left over however a certain secret silence.
ANGELA: I only use reason as an anesthetic. But for life I’m a perennial promise of understanding my submerged world. Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions — I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void.
I try to keep myself isolated from the agony of depending on others, and that agony that seems to them a game of life and death masks another reality, a truth so extraordinary that they would keel over in fright were they to face it, as in a scandal. Meanwhile, they’re studying, working, loving, growing up, struggling, feeling happy, feeling sad. Life with a capital letter can give me nothing because I’m going to confess that I too must have turned down a dead-end alley just like the others. For I notice in myself, not a pile of facts, and instead strive almost tragically to be. It’s a question of survival like eating human flesh when there’s no other food. I struggle not against people who buy and sell apartments and cars and try to get married and have children but I struggle with extreme anxiety for a novelty of spirit. Whenever I feel almost a little illuminated I see that I am having a novelty of spirit.
My life is a distorted reflection just as the reflection of a face is distorted in an undulating and unstable lake. Trembling imprecision. Like what happens to water when you dip your hand in it. I’m the faintest reflection of erudition. My receptivity is tuned ceaselessly registering other people’s conceptions, reflecting in my mirror the subtle shades of distinctions between the things of life. I who am the result of the true miracle of the instincts. I am a swampy terrain. In me is born a wet moss covering slippery rocks. A swamp with its suffocating intolerably sweet miasmas. A bubbling swamp.
AUTHOR: Trying to possess Angela is like trying desperately to grab hold of the reflection in the mirror of a rose. Yet all I had to do was turn away from the mirror and I would have the rose itself. But then there enters a chilly fear of owning the strange and delicate reality of a flower.
ANGELA: As a practically permanent contact with logic a feeling arose in me that I had never felt before: the fear of living, the fear of breathing. I must struggle urgently because this fear ties me down more than the fear of death, it is a crime against myself. I long for my previous atmosphere of adventure and my stimulating restlessness. I think I still haven’t fallen into the monotony of living. I recently started suddenly sighing, deep and prolonged sighs.
AUTHOR: Angela has an invisible diadem atop her thick hairdo. Sparkling drops of musical notes run down her hair.
ANGELA: I am extremely tactile. Great aspirations are dangerous, great risk is inherent to great aspirations. Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.
AUTHOR: Since Angela Pralini is a bit unbalanced I would advise her to avoid the dangerous situations that might break our fragility. I say nothing to Angela because it’s no use asking her to avoid recklessness since she was born to be exposed and go through every kind of experience. Angela suffers a lot but is redeemed in pain. It’s like giving birth: one must pass through the sieve of pain in order to be relieved afterwards seeing before one a new child in the world.
ANGELA: But something broke in me and left me with a nerve split in two. In the beginning the extremities linked to the cut hurt me so badly that I paled in pain and perplexity. However the split places gradually scarred over. Until coldly, I no longer hurt. I changed, without planning to. I used to look at you from my inside outward and from the inside of you, which because of love, I could guess. After the scarring I started to look at you from the outside in. And also to see myself from the outside in: I had transformed myself into a heap of facts and actions whose only root was in the domain of logic. At first I couldn’t associate me with myself. Where am I? I wondered. And the one who answered was a stranger who told me coldly and categorically: you are yourself. Slowly, as I stopped looking for myself I ended up distracted and without purpose. I’m good at theorizing. I, who empirically live. I dialogue with myself: I expose and wonder what was exposed, I expose and refute, I pose questions to an invisible audience and they spur me on with their replies. When I look at myself from the outside in I am the bark of a tree and not the tree. I didn’t feel pleasure. After I recovered my contact with myself I impregnated myself and the result was the agitated birth of a pleasure completely different from what they call pleasure.
AUTHOR: She experiences the different phases of a fact or a thought but in the deepest part of her she is extrasituational and even deeper and more unreachably she exists without words and is only an unsayable, incommunicable, inexorable atmosphere. Free of scientific and philosophical rubbish.
ANGELA: I like staircases.
AUTHOR: What charms me about Angela Pralini is her elusiveness.
ANGELA: The hard wooden rose that I am. But to purify me there is the pungent myosotis urgently but delicately called “forget-me-not.”
AUTHOR: I created Angela, but now it’s up to me to create a new man, as Robinson Crusoe created his solitude on this earth that is always strange.
ANGELA: As for me, I offer my face to the wind. I look like I’m bearing news. Joking is one of the most serious things in the world. And I who imagined making music just for fun.
AUTHOR: Traveling through this book while keeping Angela company is tricky like going on a journey with the pure yolk of an egg cupped in the palm of my hand without making it lose its invisible but real surrounding — invisible, but there’s a skin made of almost nothing encircling the delicate yolk and maintaining it without breaking so it can keep being a round yolk.
Angela is a yolk, but with a small black droplet in its yellow sun. That means: problem. Besides the problem we have with living Angela adds another: that of compulsive writing. She thinks that to stop writing is to stop living. I control her as much as I can, deleting her merely foolish comments. For example: she’s dying to write about menstruation just to get it off her chest, and I won’t let her.
ANGELA: I have such a tendency to be happy. These last few days I’ve felt radiant and ecstatic about being alive.
AUTHOR: Angela, you’re a frightened thing in an ever-new world. This very instant will never be repeated until the end of the centuries.
ANGELA: I’m a privileged being because I’m unique in the world. I all coiled up with I.
Dodecaphonic music extracts the I. Ah I can’t go on. I who dance so crazy. Whoever wants me should be the same way.
Bells chime, Orpheus sings. I don’t understand myself and it’s good. Do you understand me? No, you’re crazy and don’t understand me.
Bells, bells, bells.
AUTHOR: Angela is someone who steals away from the big city.
ANGELA: I felt the pulsing of the vein in my neck, I felt the pulse and the heartbeat and suddenly recognized that I had a body. For the first time from the matter arose the soul. It was the first time that I was one. One and grateful. I possessed myself. The spirit possessed the body, the body throbbed with spirit. As if outside myself, I looked at me and saw me. I was a happy woman. So rich that I no longer even needed to live. I was living for free.
AUTHOR: Angela lives in an atmosphere of the miraculous. No, there’s no reason to be shocked: the miracle exists: the miracle is a sensation. Sensation of what? of a miracle. A miracle is a disposition like the sunflower slowly turning its abundant corolla toward the sun. The miracle is the final simplicity of existence. The miracle is the splendid sunflower exploding from its stem, corolla and roots — and being just a seed. A seed that contains the future.
ANGELA: I went around sowing.
Between the word and the thought my being exists. My thought is pure impalpable insaisissable air. My word is made of earth. My heart is life. My electronic energy is magic of divine origin. My symbol is love. My hatred is atomic energy.
Everything I just said is worthless, no more than foam.
Anguished.
Hungry and cold and humiliated.
Barefoot I greet you: this is my humility and this nakedness of feet is my daring.
I don’t want to be only myself. I also want to be what I am not.
AUTHOR: Is Angela my edge? or am I the edge of Angela? Is Angela my mistake? Is Angela my variation?
ANGELA: I like myself a little because I’m astringent. And emollient. And sucupira. And dizzy. Crackling. Not to mention rather estrogenic. I threw the stick at the cat-cat-cat but the cat-cat-cat . . . My God, I’m unhappy. Farewell, Day, it’s already dusk. I’m Sunday’s child.
AUTHOR: Angela is a passion.
ANGELA: I get along better with myself when I’m unhappy: a coming together takes place. When I’m happy, I feel like somebody else. Albeit another version of the same. Someone strangely joyful, whistling, slightly unhappy is more peaceful.
I want so badly to be commonplace and a little vulgar and say: hope is the last to die.
AUTHOR: I’d like to be able to “cure” her of herself. But her — “sickness”? is stronger than my powers, her sickness is the form her life takes.