An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector

Author:Clarice Lispector
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811230674
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:01+00:00

A long and gloomy winter followed, so Lóri read to the children during class and they understood why the cold was wrapping them up in themselves and there was no way to fight it: almost all the children were poor and didn’t have enough warm clothes. Lóri used her father’s allowance to buy a thick woolen sweater for every pupil in her class, and all were red to heat up their view as well as to stop their lips going purple from the cold which was also coming through the cement floor, in that winter that was colder than other winters, Lóri would come in, she herself dressed warmly like the children, there were multiple voices in the room, she’d teach secure in the knowledge that the boys and girls would retain what she was teaching them for later, when they could understand it. So she told them that arithmetic came from “arithmos” which means rhythm, that number came from “nomos” which means “law” or “norm,” norm from the child’s universal flow. It was too early to tell them all that, but she took pleasure in saying it, she wanted them to know, through their Portuguese class, that the taste of a fruit is in the contact of the fruit with the palate and not in the fruit itself.

There was no apprenticeship for new things: it was only rediscovery. And it was raining a lot that winter. So she used another allowance from her father and looked for — what pleasure to wander through the shops looking until she found — and looked for and bought red umbrellas and red woolen socks for all her boys and girls.

That was how she was setting the world on fire.

Ulisses rarely looked up. On the phone, but not by way of justifying his behavior, he said that his class that year was exceptional, that it was asking for answers to everything, and that it was forcing him to get down to the hard pleasure of thinking more and studying more.

But one Saturday morning, while she was lying in bed without the courage to face the temperature outside the sheets, the phone rang. She leapt out of bed, but femininely let the phone ring a few times, as she always did in order not to look too eager, in case it were Ulisses.

It was Ulisses and he asked if she’d like to have lunch in Tijuca Forest. She forced herself not to shout yes. Dissembling, she said:

— Today?

— I’ll come by in the car at one.

She didn’t even need to think about what to wear, she already knew so well: she’d go in her plaid woolen skirt and the red sweater she’d bought for herself too, when she was buying them for the children. She wouldn’t need her own red umbrella, since Ulisses was picking her up at the door. Which was too bad. Her red umbrella when it was open looked like a scarlet bird with transparent wings wide open. So she decided to go out at a quarter to one, to wait for him with her red umbrella open.

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