An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures Page 5

  Remembering that day, which she saw again, she thought that from now on this was all she wanted from the God: to rest her chest on him and not say a word. But if that were possible, it would only be after her death. As long as she was alive she’d have to pray, which she no longer wanted to do, or speak with the humans who would answer her and might represent God. Especially Ulisses.

  Though Ulisses, through professional deformation, taught too much. Not that he had a professorial air, he looked more like an older student, whose words didn’t come from books but from a life she suspected was full. Which didn’t keep him from being unintentionally a bit pedantic. It annoyed her that he wanted to seem . . . what? Superior? Ulisses, wise Ulisses, someday would fall like a statue from its pedestal. Lóri knew her thoughts were born of rage, of pain, with her face buried in her pillow.

  She no longer knew anything. And despite now feeling mute before the God, she was aware in herself of an intense almost piercing desire to complain, to accuse, especially to claim what was hers. She felt she’d already experienced so much that now, according to the romantic logic of humans, the time had come for her to receive peace. She no longer dared think of joy, she didn’t really know what that was, but of peace. What would joy be? Would she still be able to recognize it, if it came? Or was it already too late for her to know what it looked like. For she kept imagining that joy might come like a simple sound almost below what was audible. So she, who’d never again spoken to the cosmic God, said to Him in sudden rage: I’ll give Thee nothing because Thou gavest me nothing.

  Because she seemed to know that something existed — what — that humans gave the God — how? And she no longer even wanted to know what it was. Just that she felt that the God too needed humans — and so she refused herself to Him.

  Could it be possible that at a certain point in life the world would become obvious? She was afraid of losing the life of continual surprise if she reached that point, and yet it would become a source of peace.

  Wasn’t peace what she wanted? Not that she could help herself, however, from almost enjoying what she imagined would happen after death — the way she’d rested her body on the earth, resting herself completely until she was absorbed by the God. She’d once wanted to be dead, not because she didn’t want life — the life that still hadn’t given her its secret — but because she longed for that integration without words. But the word of God was so completely mute that the silence was He Himself. She also no longer wanted to enter a church, not even just to inhale the cool and secluded half-light.

  She was now alone for the pain that had to come. She knew that, if she was alone now and for the pain then it would come — but not from the humility of an acceptance or courage. But like a challenge to the God against whom now, out of disappointment and solitude, she seemed to want to test her strength. Thou hast created me through a father and a mother and then abandoned me in the desert. In some strange vengeance, since it was against herself, against a child of the God, she would then stay in the desert, and without asking for water to drink. The one who’d suffer most from this was her, but the main thing is that with her voluntary suffering she was offending the God and so she hardly minded the pain.

  But her God was of no use to her: He had been made in her own image, looked too much like her, fretted about solutions — except in Him it was creative anxiety — the same severity she had. And when He was good, He was just the way she would be if she had goodness. The true God, not made in her image and likeness, was therefore completely misunderstood by her, and she didn’t know if He could understand her. Her God had been terrestrial until now, and no longer was. From now on, if she wanted to pray, it would be like praying blindly to the cosmos and to the Nothing. And above all she could no longer ask the God for anything. She discovered that until now she had prayed to an I-myself, but one that was powerful, magnified and omnipotent, calling it the God and the way a child sees in his father the figure of a king.

  Then Lóri woke a little to a more objective reality around her, changed the position of her head on her bent arm. She reflected that she’d been struggling with the God for some minutes, tired, exhausted, she murmured without any modulation in her voice: I don’t understand anything. It was such an indubitable truth that both her body and her soul sagged somewhat and so she rested a little. In that instant she was just one of the women of the world, and not an I, and joined as if for an eternal and aimless march of men and women on pilgrimage toward the Nothing. What was a Nothing was exactly the Everything.

  She had demystified one of the few glories from which she lived.

  She knew that for now she was hurting a lot and that later she’d hurt even more because she’d suffer the lack of That which, even if it didn’t exist, she loved because she was one of its cells. And she might be saved: because anguish was the inability to feel pain at last. She thought: I never had my own pain. Through a lack of glory, she’d suffered manageably whatever she had to suffer inside her. But now on her own, loving a God that no longer existed, she might finally touch the pain that was her own. Anguish too was the fear of finally feeling pain.

  She was already missing what had been: she wouldn’t even visit Santa Luzia church, which was her refugee from the numbing heat of the city, anymore. She was remembering the last time she’d gone in and sat in the limpid shade amid the saints. She’d thought: “Christ was Christ for others, but who? Who was a Christ for Christ?” He’d had to go directly to the God. And she, as she sat in the pew, had also wanted to be able to go directly to the Omnipotence, without having to go through Christ’s human condition which was also hers and everyone else’s. And, oh God, not wanting to go to Him through the merciful condition of Christ might once again be nothing more than the fear of loving. She got up and went back to her embroidery.

  That’s when the phone rang. Even before answering she knew it had to be Ulisses. She put her embroidery on a chair and let the phone ring a little more, not wanting to look too eager.

  Yes, it was him. And as if a week hadn’t gone by, he said he was at his club’s pool and why didn’t she meet him there, all she had to say at the gate was that she was his guest. She didn’t want to see him at the pool, but the fear of losing him made her agree, though fearing the moment they’d see each other almost naked.

  An hour and a half later — the time needed to buy a new swimsuit — she was changed in a cubicle, and without the courage to go out. She wrapped herself in the bathrobe and went out to find him sitting on the edge of the pool. She tried to hide her deep reluctance to appear practically naked, finally took off the robe, she wasn’t even looking at him. They sat without speaking, he was drinking a gin and tonic.

  A lot of time had passed or maybe not much but for her the silence was becoming intolerable, while to hide it she was swinging her feet in the green water. Until at last he spoke and without crudeness said:

  — Look at that girl over there, for example, the one in the red swimsuit. Look how she walks with the natural pride of someone who has a body. You, besides hiding what is called the soul, are ashamed to have a body.

  She didn’t reply, but, struck, became imperceptibly stiffer. Afterward, sensing he wasn’t going to say anything else, she slowly managed to relax her muscles. She thought — inasmuch as she could think while wearing a swimsuit in front of him — she thought: how could I explain to him, even if I wanted to, and she didn’t want to, the long journey she’d taken to reach that possible moment in which her legs were swinging in the pool. And he didn’t think it was a big deal. How to explain that, coming from as far away inside herself as she had, being half-alive was already a victory. Because finally, once the fright of being naked in front of him was broken, she was breathing calmly, already half-alive.

  As she made a movement, which was to toss her hair back, she glimpsed his face, and realized he was looking at her and desiring her. She then felt an embarrassment that was now different from what
he’d called her embarrassment about having a body. It was the embarrassment of someone who desires too, as Lóri had desired to press her chest and limbs against the God. Feeling very clearly her own desire, she became skittish and hard, and they sat in silence for the rest of the afternoon. She gradually calmed down and lost her greatest fear: that she’d lose him because she was taking so long.

  Her own thought surprised: so she really was planning to be his one day? Since she was always fooling herself into thinking it was an odd kind of friendship and would stay that way forever, until withering like a fruit that isn’t harvested in time and falls rotten from the tree to the ground.

  The children’s cries of joy and fright could no longer be heard: it was much later and the sun was weaker, the pool empty. How long had they spent in silence? Their solitude was only interrupted by the silent and eager arrival of the waiter who would come fill Ulisses’s glass as soon as it was emptied.

  The silence of the dusk. She looked at Ulisses, and he was looking into the distance with half-closed eyes. She looked at him. And at that hour a luminosity was coming off him. Then Lóri realized that the brilliance was the sun’s flashing before definitively dying. She looked at the little tables with parasols arranged around the pool: they seemed to hover in the homogeneity of the cosmos. Everything was infinite, nothing had a beginning or an end: that was the cosmic eternity. Then in an instant the vision of reality was coming undone, it had only been a split second, the homogeneity was disappearing and her gaze was getting lost in a multiplicity of still-surprising tonalities: after the sharp and instantaneous vision something had followed that was more recognizable on earth. As for Ulisses, in these new colors that Lóri could finally see, as for Ulisses he was now both solid and transparent, which enriched him with resonances and splendor. You could say he was a handsome man.

  For the first time then she looked at him from the perspective of strictly masculine beauty, and saw there was in him a calm virility. In the new light, Ulisses was unreal and yet plausible. Unreal because of his kind of beauty, which was now flickering with the last flickers of the sun. Plausible because all you’d have to do was reach out your hand and, in whatever it touched, you’d find the resistance of all solid things. Lóri was afraid of what could happen to her, since she was a worshipper of men.

  Ulisses turned his face toward her and discovered he was being inspected. However, being caught, it was Lóri who blushed, averting her eyes.

  — Don’t be afraid, he said smiling, don’t be afraid of my silence . . . I’m a madman but I’m guided by some great sage inside me . . .

  So he hadn’t understood her: he’d thought she was bothered by the silence. Lóri didn’t reply. She was already used to Ulisses’s didactic tone which actually wasn’t pedantic. She glanced at him: he was so calm as if she were the only one suffering and he’d never known the pain of having no future except that of continuing to exist. He hadn’t understood her, and that made her happy. So Lóri discovered what was happening with great delicacy: what she’d thought was just her direct gaze at Ulisses and his reality had been the first frightening step toward some thing. Or had he noticed? He’d noticed, she felt, but without knowing what it was all about, he’d felt that she’d moved ahead and so he’d wanted to reassure her with the assurance of resuming his silence.

  For it was as if she were in her early childhood and unafraid that the anguish might arise: she was in enchantment by the oriental colors of the Sun which was tracing gothic figures in the shadows. Since the God was born of Nature and He in turn meddled with it. The last lights were undulating on the standing green water of the pool. Discovering the sublime in the trivial, the invisible underneath the tangible — she herself completely disarmed as if in that instant she’d learned that her ability to uncover the secrets of natural life was still intact. And also disarmed by the slight anguish that came to her when she felt she could uncover other secrets too, perhaps a mortal secret. But she knew she was ambitious: she’d scorn easy success and want, though she was afraid, to rise higher and higher or descend lower and lower.

  Ulisses spoke:

  — Nice and easy, Lóri, take it nice and easy. But be careful. It’s better not to speak, not to tell me. There’s a great silence inside me. And this silence has been the source of my words. And from the silence has come the most precious thing of all: silence itself.

  — Why do you look at each person so carefully?

  She blushed:

  — I didn’t know you were observing me. It’s not for nothing that I look: it’s because I like to see people being.

  So saying she surprised herself and that seemed to bring her to vertigo. Because she, by surprising herself, was being. Even taking the chance that Ulisses wouldn’t notice, she said very quietly to him:

  — I am being . . .

  — What? he asked when hearing that whispered voice of Lóri’s.

  — Nothing, it doesn’t matter.

  — Of course it does. Would you mind saying it again?

  She grew more humble, because she’d already lost the strange and enchanted moment in which she’d been being:

  — I said to you —Ulisses, I am being.

  He looked closely at her and for a moment it was strange, that familiar woman’s face. He found himself strange, and understood Lóri: he was being.

  They didn’t say a word as if they’d just met for the first time. They were being.

  — Me too, Ulisses said quietly.

  Both knew that a great step had been taken in the apprenticeship. And there was no danger of wasting this feeling out of fear of losing it, because being was infinite, infinite like the waves of the sea. I am being, the tree in the garden was saying. I am being, said the approaching waiter. I am being, said the green water in the pool. I am being, said the blue sea of the Mediterranean. I am being, said our green and treacherous sea. I am being, said the spider and stunned its prey with its venom. I am being, said a child who’d slipped on the tiles and cried out in fear: Mama! I am being, said the mother who had a son who was slipping on the tiles around the pool. But the light was going quiet for the night and they were surprised again, the dusky light. Lóri was fascinated by this meeting with herself, she fascinated herself and almost hypnotized herself.

  There they were. Until the light that preceded the dusk started thinning out between shadows and greater transparencies, and the sky threatened a revelation. The light was turning spectral into near absence, though that kind of neutrality wasn’t yet touched by the darkness: it didn’t look like dusk but instead like the most imponderable part of a dawn. All that was absolutely impossible, that’s why Lóri knew she was seeing it. If it were something reasonable, she would have known nothing of it.

  And when everything started to get unbelievable, night fell.

  Lóri, for the first time in her life, felt a power that was starting to seem like a threat to what she’d been until then. She then spoke her soul to Ulisses:

  — One day it will be the world with its haughty impersonality versus my extreme individuality as a person but we’ll be one and the same.

  She looked at Ulisses with the humility she was suddenly feeling and saw with surprise his surprise. Only then was she surprised at herself. The two looked at each other in silence. She seemed to be asking for help against what she’d somehow involuntarily said. And he with moist eyes didn’t want her to flee and said:

  — Say that again, Lóri.

  — I no longer know what it was.

  — But I do, I’ll always know. You literally said: one day it will be the world with its haughty impersonality versus my extreme individuality as a person but we’ll be one and the same.

  — Yes.

  Lóri was softly astounded. So this was happiness. At first she felt empty. Then her eyes moistened: it was happiness, but how mortal I am, how the love for the world transcends me. Love for mortal life was
killing her sweetly, bit by bit. And what can I do? What can I do with happiness? What can I do with this strange and piercing peace, which is already starting to hurt me like an anguish, like a great silence of spaces? To whom can I give my happiness, which is already starting to scratch me a bit and scares me. No, I don’t want to be happy. I prefer mediocrity. Ah, thousands of people don’t have the nerve to linger a while longer in this unknown thing which is feeling happy and they prefer mediocrity. She said goodbye to Ulisses almost in a run: he was the danger.

  That night Lóri stayed awake.

  It was a very lovely night: it looked like the world. Dark space was studded with stars, the sky in mute eternal watchfulness. And the earth below with its mountains and its seas.

  Lóri was sad. It wasn’t a difficult sadness. It was more like a sadness of longing. She was alone. With eternity in front of and behind her. The human is alone.

  She wanted to step back. But she kept feeling it was too late: once the first step was taken it was irreversible, and kept pushing her on to more, more, more! What do I want, my God. The thing is she wanted everything.

  As if she were passing from the man-ape to pithecanthropus erectus. And then there was no going back: the struggle for survival among mysteries. And the thing the human being aspires to most is to become a human being.

  Since she wasn’t sleepy, she went to the kitchen to warm up some coffee. She put too much sugar in the cup and the coffee was dreadful. This brought her to a more everyday reality. She rested a bit from being.

  She was hearing the sound of the waves of the sea of Ipanema breaking on the beach. It was a different night, because while Lóri was thinking and doubting, everyone else was sleeping. She went to the window, looked at the street with its few streetlamps and the stronger smell of the sea. It was dark for Lóri. So dark. She thought about people she knew: they were sleeping or having fun. Some were drinking whiskey. Her coffee then became even sweeter, even more impossible. And the darkness of loners grew so much greater.