— Would you like a coffee? She asked as a pretext to get him to come in.

He stayed on the threshold. She was standing, in a short and transparent nightdress. He was going to say: “you can sleep easy now, I found a way to get him to go.” But before he said that he stopped short, his lips pursed, and looked her up and down. Finally he said:
— I’ll call in the morning.

With the despair of a woman scorned, she heard his car pull away.

Ulisses’s gaze robbed her of sleep. She looked herself all over in the mirror in order to figure out what Ulisses had seen. And she found herself attractive. Yet he hadn’t wanted to come in.

And so you didn’t want any more of that. And you stopped the possibility of pain, which no one gets away with. You just stopped and found nothing beyond it. I’m not saying I have much, but I still have intense searching and violent hope. Not that quiet and sweet voice of yours. And I don’t cry, if I need to one day I’ll scream, Lóri. I’m in the middle of a struggle and much closer to whatever people call a poor human victory than you, but it is a victory. I could already have you with my body and soul. I’ll wait for years if I must for you too to have a soul-body in order to love. We’re still young, we can waste some time without wasting our whole lives. But look at everyone around you and see what we’ve made of ourselves and considered our daily victory. We haven’t loved, that most of all. We haven’t accepted what we don’t understand because we don’t want to look stupid. We’ve hoarded things and reassurances because we don’t have each other. We don’t have any joy that hasn’t already been catalogued. We’ve built cathedrals, and stayed outside because the cathedrals we ourselves built, we’re afraid they’re traps. We haven’t surrendered to ourselves, because that would be the start of a long life and we’re afraid of that. We’ve avoided falling to our knees in front of the first one of us who says, out of love: you’re afraid. We’ve organized smiley clubs and associations where you are served with or without soda. We’ve tried to save ourselves but without using the word salvation in order to avoid the embarrassment of being innocents. We haven’t used the word love so as not to have to recognize its contexture of hate, love, jealousy and so many other contradictories. We’ve kept our death a secret in order to make our life possible. Many of us make art because we don’t know what the other thing is like. We’ve disguised our indifference with false love, knowing that our indifference is disguised anguish. We’ve disguised with a small fear the greatest fear of all and that’s why we never speak of what really matters. Speaking about what really matters is considered a blunder. We haven’t worshipped because we have the sensible pettiness to remember on time the false gods. We haven’t been pure and naive in order not to laugh at ourselves and so that at each day’s close we can say “at least I didn’t do something stupid” and that way we don’t feel confused before putting out the light. We’ve smiled in public about things we wouldn’t smile about alone. We’ve called our candor weakness. We have feared each other, most of all. And all this we consider our daily victory. But I escaped that, Lóri, I escaped with the ferocity of someone escaping the plague, Lóri, and I’ll wait until you too are more ready.

— Yes, said Ulisses. But you’re wrong. I don’t give you advice. I just — I—I think that what I’m really doing is waiting. Waiting perhaps for you to give yourself advice, I don’t know, Lóri, I swear I don’t know, sometimes it seems like I’m wasting my time, sometimes it seems that on the contrary, there’s no more perfect, though worrisome, way to use time: the time of waiting for you. Do you know how to pray?

— What? she asked with a start.

— Not pray the Lord’s Prayer, but ask something of yourself, ask the maximum of yourself?

— I don’t know if I know, I’ve never tried. Is that a piece of advice? she asked with irony.

He looked flustered:

— I think it was. Forget what I said.

— My mystery is simple: I don’t know how to be alive.

— Because you only know, or only knew, how to be alive through pain.

— That’s right.

— And don’t you know how to be alive through pleasure?

— I almost do. That’s what I was trying to tell you.

[...] She knew the world of people who anxiously hunt down pleasures and don’t know how to wait for them to arrive on their own. And it was so tragic: you only had to look around a nightclub, in the half light: it was the search for pleasure that doesn’t come by and of itself. She’d only gone with some of her men from the past, maybe two or three times, and hadn’t wanted to go back. Because the search for pleasure, when she’d tried it, had been bad water: she’d put her mouth on the tap, which tasted like rust and only gave two or three drops of lukewarm water: it was dry water. No, she’d thought, better real suffering than forced pleasure. She wanted Ulisses’s left hand and knew she wanted it, but she did nothing, since she was enjoying the very thing she was needing: being able to have that hand if she stretched out her own.

And now she was the one who was feeling the desire to be apart from Ulisses, for a while, to learn on her own how to be. Two weeks had already passed and Lóri would sometimes feel a longing so enormous that it was like a hunger. It would only pass when she could eat Ulisses’s presence. But sometimes the longing was so deep that his presence, she figured, would seem paltry; she would want to absorb Ulisses completely. This desire of hers to be Ulisses’s and for Ulisses to be hers for a complete unification was one of the most urgent feelings she’d ever had. She got a grip, didn’t call, happy she could feel.

But the nascent pleasure would ache so much in her chest that sometimes Lóri would have preferred to feel her usual pain instead of this unwanted pleasure. True joy had no possible explanation, not even the possibility of being understood — and seemed like the start of an irreparable perdition. That merging with Ulisses that had been and still was her desire, had become unbearably good. But she was aware that she still wasn’t up to enjoying a man. It was as if death were our great and final good, except it wasn’t death, it was unfathomable life that was taking on the grandeur of death. Lóri thought: I can’t have a petty life because it wouldn’t match the absoluteness of death.

During the first days Lóri was bothered because she was sure Ulisses was waiting. It pained her for the roses to wilt and for him pathetically to replace them with others that would wilt too. It consoled her to think that his wait wouldn’t be too painful for him, since he was an extremely patient man who was capable of suffering. So she calmed down. She thought now that the ability to bear suffering was the measure of a person’s greatness and saved that person’s inner life.

In reading Lispector’s books, I learn about the structure of the relationship between a human and God, between a human and herself, and between a human and the other; in this case, both the other who is just another person one has slept with and lost desire for, and the Other who holds your life’s happiness in their hands. This second Other is the elemental force that drives the life of the loving one, while the other other has no power at all and might as well not even exist. Why is life like this? How can so much importance (for the one who loves) be concentrated in a random, Other, singular individual, while diffused among the rest is nothing, and we are able to stride past them with complete indifference?

What is this Other capable of that the other other could never do? In one sense (unhappy as this is to write) the Other is the one who circumscribes our limits. With the choice of who to love, we end up in a city, with a side of the bed on which to sleep, and a certain set of friends (growing further apart from those who are not invited over because one’s partner does not like them). We watch certain shows, not others. And the Other circumscribes our limits metaphysically, too. Maybe this procedure is necessary, in order for our lives to have a form. Just as the art-impulse must take a certain form — a sculpture, a play, a novel, a dance — so does the election of a specific Other shape our blobbish life-impulse into a specific form. I am now thinking of the part of the novel where Claire writes, “Lóri had a kind of dread of going, as if she could go too far — in what direction? Which was making it hard to go . . . There was a certain fear of her own capacity, large or small, maybe because she didn’t know her own limits. Were the limits of a human divine? They were.”

All love stories must have their obstacles: religion, parents, a stone wall. The obstacle in this book is that we may be unfit for love, plain and simple: because we haven’t lived in such a way that we have let ourselves be fit for it; we haven’t even lived in such a way that we have made ourselves fit for life. For God. For sex. For anything! We slack off on the spiritual level, always. We guess no one’s going to see it. Who’s looking? Even we are not. Then someone like Ulisses comes along and says, You cannot have me until you do the difficult work of being a human that you have been putting off. (And inwardly, the man says to himself, I am also not worthy of her, and cannot have her until I make myself fit for love, too.)

Is this book a fantasy, in a way? While some writers might fantasize about a man coming along who will shower a woman in diamonds and install her in a penthouse, Clarice Lispector, the great mystic, spins a fantasy of having an explicit reason for doing the most difficult labor a person is capable of: the work of becoming an actual human being in this world. Here, the motive to do the work is to win the love of a man. (But a man is not just some guy; he represents one of the elemental forces of the universe — the masculine force that sets the difficult task in motion, of impelling the feminine force, which would otherwise sit, roundly, alone. What woman has not felt that unfortunate thing, that some man, not yet won, was “like the border between the past and whatever was to come”? Yet in a way, isn’t Ulisses asking Lóri to find the masculine force within herself, before coming to him? Or to find it in herself so she doesn’t come to him seeking it, then get bored of what she’s found, like any woman who goes from man to man, never satisfied because she’s mistaken about what she is looking for, really? Yes. Any woman wanting any sort of lasting happiness has to realize that she can — and must — be the impelling force that moves herself through the world.)