from Near to the Wild Heart

CLARICE LISPECTOR

I’ve met people who remember the moment they became sexually aware, some early trigger like a tickle or a special itch that, when scratched, evoked a new kind of pleasure, perhaps mingled with a touch of shame. Of course, I too can remember early sexual moments: being dragged under a blanket-covered picnic table for a game of show-and-show with a neighbor girl when I was five (she was enthusiastic and I shy as hell); years later sharing backyard kisses with a future ballerina; later still my repeated and occasionally successful attempts to convince a friend’s sister to striptease; and, finally, deep in junior high, finding my first true girlfriend, who was famous for palming guys from the front and whom I later lost to my best friend. But although these events represent symptoms of sexuality, they still don’t help me recover, in good Proustian fashion, the precise awakening of my sexual self. That sudden flicker or steady trickle remains obscured.

Some of my favorite writers, however, have succeeded in capturing these most elusive moments. In Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, young Oscar first confronts the “hairy triangle”; in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, David discovers he’s gay. The excerpt below, taken from Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, describes the moment when Joana, a young girl taking a bath, discovers both her sexual identity and place in the universe. Near to the Wild Heart was published in 1944, when Lispector was only nineteen, and is a marvel of expressiveness. In this scene, as elsewhere, the young Lispector seems unwilling or unable to filter the raw truth, and her uniquely tactile language strikes a probing, poetic chord: a girl’s recognition of her body and its isolation from the other bodies of the cosmos.

The girl laughs softly, rejoicing in her own body. Her smooth, slender legs, her tiny breasts emerge from the water. She scarcely knows herself, still not fully grown, still almost a child. She stretches out one leg, looks at her foot from a distance, moves it tenderly, slowly, like a fragile wing. She lifts her arms above her head, stretches them out towards the ceiling lost in the shadows, her eyes closed, without any feeling, only movement. Her body stretches and spreads out, the moisture on her skin glistening in the semi-darkness—her body tracing a tense, quivering line. When she drops her arms once more, she becomes compact, white and secure. She chuckles to herself, moves her long neck from one side to another, tilts her head backwards—the grass is always fresh, someone is about to kiss her, soft, tiny rabbits snuggle up against each other with their eyes shut. She starts laughing again, gentle murmurings like those of water. She strokes her waist, her hips, her life. She sinks into the bathtub as if it were the sea. A tepid world closes over her silently, quietly. Small bubbles slip away gently and vanish once they touch the enamel. The young girl feels the water weighing on her body, she pauses for a moment as if someone had tapped her lightly on the shoulder. Paying attention to what she is feeling, the invading tide. What has happened? She becomes a serious creature, with wide, deep eyes. She can scarcely breathe. What has happened? The open, silent eyes of things went on shining amidst the vapors. Over the same body that has divined happiness there is water—water. No, no . . .

I’ve discovered a miracle in the rain—Joana thought—a miracle splintered into dense, solemn, glittering stars, like a suspended warning: like a lighthouse. What are they trying to tell me? In those stars I can foretell the secret, their brilliance is the impassive mystery I can hear flowing inside me, weeping at length in tones of romantic despair. Dear God, at least bring me into contact with them, satisfy my longing to kiss them. To feel their light on my lips, to feel it glow inside my body, leaving it shining and transparent, fresh and moist like the minutes that come before dawn. Why do these strange longings possess me? Raindrops and stars, this dense and chilling fusion has roused me, opened the gates of my green and somber forest, of this forest smelling of an abyss where water flows. And harnessed it to night . . . Because no rain falls inside me, I wish to be a star. Purify me a little and I shall acquire the dimensions of those beings who take refuge behind the rain . . . And I am in the world, as free and lithe as a colt on the plain. I rise as gently as a puff of air . . . I sink only to emerge . . .

—translated by Giovanni Pontiero