Read Online Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector - Free Book Online Page B

leave upon the sand. I look at the almond trees on the street where I
live. Before going to sleep I look after the world and see if the night sky is
starry and navy blue because on certain nights instead of being black the sky
seems to be an intense navy blue, a color I’ve painted in stained glass. I like
intensities. I look after the boy who is nine years old and dressed in rags and
all skin and bones. He will get tuberculosis, if he doesn’t already have it. In
the Botanical Gardens, then, I get worn out. With my glance I must look after
thousands of plants and trees and especially the giant water lily. It’s there.
And I look at her.
    Note that I don’t mention my emotional impressions: I
lucidly speak about some of the thousands of things and people I look after. Nor
is it a job because I don’t earn any money from it. I just get to know what the
world is like.
    Is it a lot of work to look after the world? Yes. For
example: it forces me to remember the inexpressive and therefore frightening
face of the woman I saw on the street. With my eyes I look after the misery of
the people who live on the hillsides.
    You will no doubt ask me why I look after the world. It’s
because I was born charged with the task.
    As a child I looked after a line of ants: they walk
single file carrying a tiny piece of leaf. That doesn’t keep each one from
communicating something to the ones coming the other way. Ant and bee are not
it
. They are
they
.
    I read the book about the bees and ever since have looked
after the queen bee most of all. Bees fly and deal with flowers. Is that banal?
I saw it myself. Noting the obvious is part of the job. Inside each little ant
fits a whole world that will escape me if I’m not careful. For example: an
instinctive sense of organization, language beyond the supersonic, and feelings
of sex fit in the ant. Now I can’t find a single ant to look at. I know there
wasn’t a massacre because otherwise I’d have already heard.
    Looking after the world also demands a lot of patience: I
have to wait for the day when an ant turns up.
    I just haven’t found anyone to report back to. Or have I?
Since I’m reporting back to you right here. I’m going to report back to you
right now on that spring that was so dry. The radio crackled as it picked up
your static. Clothing bristled as it let go of the electricity of the body and
the comb raised magnetized hair—that was a hard spring. It was exhausted by
the winter and budded all electric. Wherever it was it headed afar. There had
never been so many paths. We spoke little, you and I. I don’t know why the whole
world was so annoyed and electronically able. But able to what? The body heavy
with sleep. And our big eyes inexpressive as the wide-open eyes of a blind man.
On the terrace the fish was in an aquarium and we drank juice in that hotel bar
overlooking the landscape. With the wind came the dream of goats: at the next
table a solitary faun. We looked at our glasses of ice-cold juice and dreamed
statically inside the transparent glass. “What did you say?” you were asking. “I
didn’t say anything.” Days and more days passed and everything in that danger
and the geraniums so scarlet. An instant of tuning-in was all it took and once
again we picked up the ragged static of spring in the wind: the goats’ impudent
dream and the fish all empty and our sudden inclination to steal fruit. The faun
now crowned in solitary leaps. “What?” “I didn’t say anything.” But I noticed a
first rumble like that of a heart beating beneath the earth. I quietly put my
ear to the ground and heard summer forcing its way in and my heart beneath the
earth—“nothing! I said nothing!”—and I felt the patient brutality with which
the closed earth was opening inside in birth, and I knew with what weight of
sweetness the summer was ripening a hundred thousand oranges and I knew that the
oranges were mine. Because that is what I wanted.
    I’m proud that I can