The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector

Author:Clarice Lispector
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811226721
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2019-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

The most difficult part of the house was missing: the parlor, the garrison.

Where each clever thing would exist as if so that others wouldn’t be seen? such was the great defense system. She began carefully, protecting herself with the thought that she was going in there to rest a little, mama, because I washed all the dishes, I’m exhausted.

The balcony was open. And in the middle the small table upon its legs. The chairs on guard. Oh, the infinite positions of the room, as if someone were lying on the floor and looking at the ceiling lamp sway . . . you could get dizzy on the rim of a trinket. And they were always the same things: towers, calendars, streets, chairs — yet camouflaged, unrecognizable. Made for enemies.

The things were difficult because, if they explained themselves, they wouldn’t go from incomprehensible to comprehensible, but from one nature to another. Just the gaze wouldn’t alter them.

Beneath the wheels of a wagon, the mirror on the wall reflected itself in clarity and light. But gradually the wounded room stopped making sounds, while Lucrécia was calming down. Looking at her nails: that’s what she was doing, those nails dulled by soap.

And, everything that had withdrawn with so much reserve upon her entrance, started breathing again full of wood, porcelain, worn varnish and shadow. In the mirror was floating the knowledge of the entire room.

The flower! the flowers were expressing themselves with petals, the curtain advancing to the middle of the room. Ana would remove the dust every day but couldn’t dust the calm penumbra — and the room was growing old with the frozen trinkets.

Since Lucrécia Neves didn’t understand them, she didn’t know how to look at them: she was seeking one way, some other, and suddenly: there were the trinkets. Almost the word: the trinkets.

How to say that the trinkets were there? ah! she stared with brutality at those things made from the things themselves, falsely domesticable, hens that eat out of your hands but recognize you not— only borrowed things, one thing lent to another and another lent to another. Remaining on the shelves or staying indifferent on the floor and on the ceiling — impersonal and proud as a rooster. Since everything that had been created had at the same time been loosed.

Then Lucrécia, she herself independent, beheld them. So anonymously that the rules could be upended without a problem, and she’d be the thing seen by the objects.

It wasn’t for nothing that she’d displayed herself so often on the hill in the pasture awaiting her turn.

Because now she seemed finally to have attained in herself the peak of those peaceful things beneath one’s gaze. Moving her own stupidity forward with majesty to the highest point of the hill, her head dominating the township.

What you don’t know how to think, you see! the maximum accuracy of imagination in this world was at least seeing: who’d ever thought up the daylight? at least Lucrécia was seeing and stomping her hoof.

Experiencing

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