The Chandelier
ALSO BY CLARICE LISPECTOR
available from new directions
* * *
Água Viva
A Breath of Life
The Complete Stories
The Foreign Legion
The Hour of the Star
Near to the Wild Heart
The Passion According to G. H.
Selected Crônicas
Soulstorm
For my sister Tania
The Chandelier
She’d be flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret. She’d never know how to think of it in clear terms afraid to invade and dissolve its image. Yet it had formed in her interior a far-off and living nucleus and had never lost the magic — it sustained her in her unsolvable vagueness like the single reality that for her should always be the lost one. The two of them were leaning over the fragile bridge and Virgínia was feeling her bare feet falter insecurely as if they were dangling atop the calm whirl of the waters. It was a violent and dry day, in broad fixed colors; the trees were creaking beneath the warm wind wrinkled by swift cool drafts. The thin and torn girlish dress was pierced by shivers of coolness. With her serious mouth pressed against the dead branch of the bridge, Virgínia was plunging her distracted eyes into the waters. Suddenly she’d frozen tense and light:
“Look!”
Daniel had turned his head quickly — stuck on a rock was a wet hat, heavy and dark with water. The running river was tugging it with brutality and it was putting up a fight. Until losing its final strength it was taken by the light current and in leaps disappeared into the foam almost happy. They hesitated surprised.
“We can’t tell anyone,” whispered Virgínia finally, her voice distant and dizzy.
“Yes . . . ,” — even Daniel had been frightened and was agreeing . . . the waters kept flowing — “Not even if they ask us about the drow — ”
“Yes!” Virgínia almost shouted . . . both fell silent with strength, their eyes bulging and ferocious.
“Virgínia . . . ,” her brother said slowly with a rawness that left his face all angles, “I will swear.”
“Yes . . . my God, but one always swears . . .”
Daniel was thinking while looking at her and she wasn’t moving her face waiting for him to find in her the answer.
“For example . . . that everything that we are . . . turns to nothing . . . if we speak of this to anyone.”
He had spoken so seriously, he had spoken so beautifully, the river was rolling, the river was rolling. The leaves covered in dust, the thick and moist leaves along the banks, the river was rolling. She wanted to respond and say that yes, yes! hotly, almost happy, laughing with dry lips . . . but she couldn’t speak, she didn’t know how to breathe; how it unsettled her. With dilated eyes, her face suddenly small and colorless, she cautiously assented with her head. Daniel moved off, Daniel was moving off. No! she wanted to shout and tell him to wait, not to leave her alone above the river; but he kept going. Her heart beating in a body suddenly empty of blood, her heart skipping, falling furiously, the waters rushing, she tried to open her lips, blow out any pale word. Like the impossible cry in a nightmare, no sound was heard and the clouds were sliding quickly in the sky toward a destination. Beneath her feet the waters were murmuring — in a bright hallucination she was thinking: ah yes, so she’d fall and drown, ah yes. Some intense and livid thing like terror but triumphant, a certain mad and bristling happiness was now filling her body and she was waiting to die, her hand closed as if for all time on the branch of the bridge. Daniel turned around right then.
“Come,” he said surprised.
She looked at him from the quiet depth of her silence.
“Come on, you idiot,” he repeated angrily.
A dead instant extended things lengthily. She and Daniel were two points forever hushed and immobile. But I already died, she seemed to think as she was letting go of the bridge as if being cut from it with a scythe. I already died, she was still thinking and on strange feet her white face was running heavily toward Daniel.
Walking down the road, blood had started beating with rhythm in her veins again, they were advancing quickly, together. In the dust could be seen the hesitant mark of the only car in Upper Marsh. Beneath the brilliant sky the day was vibrating in its last moment before night, in the paths and in the trees silence was gathering heavy with sultriness — she was feeling the last warm rays of the sun on her back, the thick clouds tensely gilded. It was nevertheless vaguely cold, as if coming from the shady forest. They were looking ahead with keen bodies — there was a threat of transition in the air being breathed . . . the next instant would bring a cry and something puzzlingly would destroy itself, or the light night would suddenly soften that excessive, rude, and solitary existence. They were walking quickly. There was a perfume that was swelling the heart. The shadows were slowly covering the road and when Daniel pushed the heavy garden gate night was falling. The fireflies were opening livid dots in the half-light. They stopped for a moment indecisive in the darkness before mingling with the ones who didn’t know, looking at each other as if for the last time.
“Daniel . . . ,” Virgínia murmured, “I can’t even speak to you?”
“No,” he said surprised by his own response.
They hesitated for a moment, restrained, quiet. No, no! . . . , she was denying the fear that was nearing, as if to buy time before rushing ahead. No, no, she was saying avoiding looking around. Night had fallen, night had fallen. Don’t rush! but suddenly something couldn’t contain itself and started to happen . . . Yes, right there the vapors would arise of the sickly, pale dawn that was like the end of a pain — Virgínia was suddenly seeing calm, submissive, and absorbed. Each dry branch would hide beneath the brightness of a cave. That land beyond the trees, castrated in the bud by the fire, would be seen through the soft mist, blackened and difficult as if through a past — she was now seeing quiet and inexpressive as if without memory. The dead man would slip for the last time among the frozen and sleeping trees. Like bells ringing from afar, Virgínia would feel in her body the touch of his presence, would get out of bed slowly, wise and blind as a sleepwalker, and inside her heart a spot would beat weakly, almost fainting. She would raise the window, her lungs enveloped by the cold mist. Plunging her eyes into the blindness of the dark, her senses beating in the frozen and sharp space; she would perceive nothing but the shady quiet, the twisted and motionless branches . . . the long expanse losing its limits in sudden and unfathomable mist — there was the limit of the possible world! Then, fragile like a memory, she would make out the tired stain of the drowned man moving away, disappearing and reappearing among the haze, plunging at last into whiteness. Forever! the wide wind would blow in the trees. She would call almost mutely: man, but man!, in order to keep him, to bring him back! But it was forever, Virgínia, listen, forever and even if Quiet Farm withers and new lands emerge indefinably never would the man return. Virgínia, never, never, Virgínia. Never. She shook herself out of the sleep into which she’d slid, her eyes had gained a shining and shrewd life, contained exclamations were aching inside her narrow chest; the hard and suffocating incomprehension was hastening her heart into the dark of the night. I don’t want the owl to cry, she shouted at herself in a soundless sob. And the owl immediately cried blackly on a branch. She jumped — or had it cried before her thought? or at the exact same time? I don’t want to hear the trees, she was saying to herself fumbling within herself, moving forward stunned. And the trees upon a sudden wind were rustling in a slow murmur
of strange and tall life. Or hadn’t it been a foreboding? she was begging herself. I don’t want Daniel to move. And Daniel was moving. Her breath light, her hearing new and surprised, she seemed to be able to penetrate and flee things in silence like a shadow; weak and blind, she was feeling the color and the sound of whatever was almost happening. She was tremulously moving ahead of herself, flying with her senses ahead crossing the tense and perfumed air of the new night. I don’t want the bird to fly, she was saying to herself now almost a light in her chest despite the terror, and in a tired and difficult perception was presaging the future movements of things an instant before they ring out. And if she wanted to she’d say: I don’t want to hear the rolling of the river, and there was no nearby river but she would hear its deaf wail over small stones . . . and now . . . now . . . yes . . .!
“Virgínia! Daniel!”
In confusion everything was hurrying scared and dark, their mother’s call was sprouting from the depths of the mansion and bursting between them in a new presence. The voice had not altered the silence of the night but had split its darkness as if the cry were white lightning. Before she was aware of her movements, Virgínia found herself inside the house, behind the closed door. The parlor, the stairs were stretching in indistinct and somber silence. The lit lamps were flickering on their wires under the wind in a prolonged mute movement. Beside her was Daniel, his lips bloodless, hard, and ironic. In the quiet of the Farm some unbridled horse was slowly moving the grass with thin legs. In the kitchen they were rummaging through silverware, a sudden sound of a bell and Esmeralda’s steps quickly crossed a bedroom . . . the lit lamp flickering calmly, the sleeping stairs breathing. Then — neither from relief nor from the end of a fright, but in itself inexplicable, alive, and mysterious — then she felt a long, bright, high instant open inside her. Stroking with cold fingers the old latch of the door, she narrowed her eyes smiling with mischief and deep satisfaction.
Quiet Farm and its lands extended some miles from the houses clustered around the school and the health clinic, keeping a distance from the center of the municipality of Upper Marsh, to which they belonged. The mansion belonged to their grandmother; her children had married and lived far away. The youngest son had brought his wife there and in Quiet Farm Esmeralda, Daniel, and Virgínia had been born. Little by little the furniture had defected, sold, broken, or grown old and the bedrooms were emptying palely. Virgínia’s, cold, light, and square, had nothing more than a bed. On the headboard she’d deposit her dress before going to sleep and sheathed in her thin petticoat, her feet dirty with earth, hide beneath the enormous queen-size sheets with extended pleasure.
“It’d be preferable to have more furniture and fewer bedrooms,” Esmeralda would complain lowering her eyes with rage and annoyance, her big feet bare.
“Quite the contrary,” her father would answer when she wouldn’t shut up. The stairs meanwhile were covered with a thick carpet of purple velvet, dating from the time of her grandmother’s wedding, branching out through the hallways to the rooms in a sudden luxury, safe and serious. The doors would open and instead of the cozy wealth that the carpet announced you found emptiness, silence, and shadow, the wind communicating with the world through windows without curtains. From the high windowpanes you saw besides the garden of tangled plants and dry twigs the long stretch of land of a sad and whispered silence. The dining room itself, the largest room in the mansion, extended below in long damp shadows, almost deserted: the heavy oak table, the light and gilded chairs of an old set of furniture, a console with thin twisted legs, the quick air on the shining latches, and a long sideboard where a few glass and crystal pieces were shimmering translucently in smothered cries, asleep in dust. On the shelf of that fixture lay the washbasin of pink china, the cold water in the half-light refreshing the bottom where a fat, crooked, and sensual angel was struggling, captive. Tall murals were rising from the walls scratching vertical and silent shadows over the floor. On afternoons when wind would roll through the Farm — the women in the rooms, her father at work, Daniel in the forest — on smooth afternoons when a wind full of sun would blow as if over ruins, stripping the walls eaten in the rubble, Virgínia would roam in abandoned brightness. She’d walk while looking, in a serious distraction. It was daytime, the fields were stretching out brightly, without stains and she’d go ahead wakefully. She felt a diffuse nausea in her calm nerves — small and thin, her legs marked by mosquitoes and falls, she’d stop next to the staircase looking. The steps rising sinuously would achieve a firm loveliness so light that Virgínia would lose her perception almost upon grasping it and stop short just ahead seeing only dusty wood and incarnadine velvet, step, step, dry angles. Without knowing why, she’d nonetheless halt, fanning her bare thin arms; she lived on the verge of things. The parlor. The parlor filled with neutral spots. The smell of an empty house. But the chandelier! There was the chandelier. The great spider would glow. She’d look at it immobile, uneasy, seeming to foresee a terrible life. That icy existence. Once! once in a flash — the chandelier would scatter in chrysanthemums and joy. Another time — while she was running through the parlor — it was a chaste seed. The chandelier. She’d skip off without looking back.
At night the parlor was lit up in a flickering and sweet brightness. Two lamps were resting on the buffet available for anyone ready to retire. Before entering the bedroom the light should be put out. At dawn a rooster would sing a clean cross in the dark space — the humid scratch was spreading a cold smell all around, the sound of a little bird was scraping the surface of the half-light without piercing it. Virgínia would hoist her dull senses, her closed eyes. The bloody young cries of the roosters were repeated throughout the neighborhood of Upper Marsh. A red crest would shake in a shiver, while delicate and decided legs were advancing slow steps on the pale floor, the cry was released — and far off like the flight of an arrow another tough and living rooster was opening his ferocious beak and responding — while the still-sleeping ears were awaiting with vague attention. The enraptured and weak morning was radiating outward like a bit of news. Virgínia was getting up, getting into her short dress, pushing open the tall windows of the bedroom, the mist penetrating slow and oppressed; she was dunking her head, her face sweet like that of an animal eating from your hand. Her damp nose was moving, her cold cheek sharpened in brightness was moving forward in a searching, free, and frightened thrust. She could only make out a couple of metal posts from the garden fence. The barbed wire was pointing dryly from inside the frozen fog; the trees were emerging blackly, with hidden roots. She was opening wide eyes. There was the stone streaming with dew. And beyond the garden the land disappearing abruptly. The whole house was floating, floating in clouds, disconnected from Upper Marsh. Even the unkempt brush was moving off pale and still and in vain Virgínia was seeking in her immobility the familiar line; the loose kindling beneath the window, near the ruined entryway arch, was resting neat and lifeless. But then only seconds later the sun was coming out bleached like a moon. Then only seconds later the mists were disappearing with the speed of a scattered dream and the whole garden, the mansion, the plains, the forest were shining even brighter setting off small thin, brittle, still-tired sounds. An intelligent, clear, and dry cold was traversing the garden, blowing itself into the flesh of the body. A cry of fresh coffee was rising from the kitchen mixed with the smooth and breathless smell of wet grass. Her heart was beating in a painful and moist flutter as if pierced by an impossible desire. And the life of the day was beginning puzzled. Her cheek tender and frozen as a hare’s, her lips hard from the cold, Virgínia lingered for a vacant second at the window listening with some spot of her body to the space before her. She was hesitating between disappointment and a difficult charm — like a madwoman the night would lie during the day . . .
Like a madwoman the night would lie, like a madwoman the night would lie — she’d go down the dusty stairs barefoot, her steps warmed by the velvet. They were sitting at the table for br
eakfast and if Virgínia didn’t eat enough she’d get slapped right then — how nice it was, his flattened hand would quickly fly and crack with a joyful sound on one of her cheeks cooling the somber parlor with the lightness of a sneeze. Her face would awake like an anthill in the sun and then she’d ask for more cornbread, filled with a lie of hunger. Her father would keep chewing, his lips wet with milk, while along with the wind a certain joy was lingering in the air; a fresh sound from the back of the mansion was filling the parlor softly. But Esmeralda always got away, her back upright, her chest raised. Because Mother would stand up pale and stuttering and say — while a bit of cold was coming through the bright emptiness of the window and looking at Daniel’s hard and beloved face a desire to escape with him and run made Virgínia’s heart swell dizzy and light in a forward thrust — while her mother would say:
“I don’t even have the right to a son?”
“To a daughter, she should say” — Virgínia would think without raising her eyes from the cup because in those very moments the neigh of some horse in the pasture would hurt like a sad and thoughtful daring. Esmeralda and Mother would talk at length in the bedroom, their eyes shining with quick understandings. Every once in a while the two would work on the cut of a dress as if defying the world. Father never spoke to Esmeralda and nobody ever mentioned what had happened to her except from a distance. Not even Virgínia had ever asked about it; she could live with an unrevealed secret in her hands without anxiety as if that were the true life of things. Esmeralda would clasp the long skirt she wore at home, climb the stairs, burn an angry, insistent, and solemn perfume in her room; you couldn’t stay in her room for more than a few minutes, suddenly the smell cloyed and stunned in a chapel-like queasiness. But she herself would stay absorbed before the bowl that served as a vase, seem to inhale the hot flame with her strong, feminine, and hypocritical eyes. All her underwear was embroidered by hand; Father didn’t look at Esmeralda as if she were dead. The last time he’d touched her had been precisely when she’d spoken once again of the journey that Daniel and Virgínia would one day make to the city in order to study languages, business, and piano — Daniel who had such a good ear and practiced sometimes on a piano in Upper Marsh. With the other daughter, he’d say, he wouldn’t do the same because “you only set loose a toothless animal.” Esmeralda would sit with Mother at mealtimes; she’d always come down a bit late and slow, but Father wouldn’t say anything. And she could also turn up pale and with bags under her eyes because she’d gone dancing in the house of a family in Upper Marsh. Mother would then come down invigorated by exhaustion, her body frightened, such was the excitement that would overtake her when she started going to parties again. Her eyes would go blank and she’d envision the salon again as she chewed. Sweet and shining the girls once again would spread across the balconies, the parlor, in calm and contained poses, waiting their turn to be entwined; then they’d dance, their faces almost serious; the more immoral ones would heave their bosoms with innocence, all of them coiffed and content, in their eyes a single and indecipherable thought; but the men, as always, were inferior, pale, and dashing; they’d sweat a lot; since they were few in number, some girls would end up dancing with other girls, excited, laughing, jumping, their eyes surprised. She was chewing, her gaze fixed, feeling the incomprehensible reality of the dance floating like a lie. Father would stare at them in silence. Before starting to eat and letting everyone begin, he’d agree with a certain sadness: