Prose

From The Diary of “Helena Morley”

… Thank God Carnival is over. I can’t say that it was very pleasant, because grandma beat me, something she never does.

It’s my fate that everyone who loves me makes my life miserable. The only people who have any authority over my cousins are their fathers. Oh! If only it were like that with me! My father is the person who annoys me least of all. If it hadn’t been for grandma’s and Aunt Madge’s interfering I’d have gone to the masquerade ball at the theatre. Since the age of seven I’ve dreamed of being twelve so that I could go to the ball. And now I’m almost thirteen and I’m beaten for not going!

Aunt Quequeta was the one who made me want to go to the ball, telling me about what they used to do in her day. A friend of hers put on a masquerade costume, disguised her voice, and flirted with her father all evening until he fell madly in love with her and the next day instead of coming in to lunch he kept walking around in the garden with his head hanging down, thinking of the masked woman. Another friend of hers let her husband go to the ball first and she went later, masked, flirted with him, and he fell madly in love with her, to such a degree that he kept sighing the whole evening.

My aunts still have the hoop skirts they used to wear. How I wish they still wore them! They don’t wear anything like that now, but I’d like to go like that even so.

It was my cousin Glorinha who gave me such a swelled head that I thought I could go. I asked mama and she said, “If your grandmother will let you I’ll let you.” I asked grandma, “Grandma, mama will let me go. Will you let me go to the ball with Glorinha?” she said, “I certainly will not!” I stamped my foot hard and I ran and threw myself on her bed, angry. She came in and took off her slipper and hit me twice, saying, “That’ll give you something to cry about!” I thrashed my legs around but I didn’t get up.

But it was worth it because today I got the material for a dress and a silver two milreis piece.

* * *

… Knowing that I and my sister have that failing of laughing at everything, how did papa have the courage to send a guest to our house the way he did? You can’t imagine what our life has been like with this man in the house! Papa has been in Parauna for a week. He went to see a mine that a Frenchman wants to buy and asked papa if he’d go to see if it’s worth it. There papa’s the guest of this man he sent us. But you wouldn’t believe it if I told you what his visit has been like.

We have a little Negro girl, Cesarina, very funny, who makes us laugh all the time at the things she says and does. On the day this man arrived something happened to us that couldn’t possibly happen in any other house; there were only two tallow candles in the house. When mama discovered it there weren’t any stores open. But these candles aren’t any good; they don’t last at all. One was used up before I’d even finished my lessons. Mama had the other one put in the guest room. In our house we only use kerosene in the kitchen and even the kitchen lamp was dry. When my candle came to an end I still had lessons to do, there was nothing else to do but send Cesarina to the guest room, to see if he’d gone to sleep. If he had, she was supposed to steal the candle without waking him up! She went and came back laughing so hard at finding the man still awake that she could only speak to us by making signs.

She held her hands up in the air and made spectacles with her fingers, meaning that the man had his eyes open. She made this sign and all the time she was having such a fit of the giggles that she couldn’t speak.

We are idiots about laughing. We began that night and even now we can’t look at our guest without a fit of giggling. We just have to see the man and then we remember Cesarina’s spectacles and simply burst. Mama, coitada, doesn’t know what excuse to give the man. She’s said everything except that she has two lunatics in the house.

And I think that these attacks of laughing that we’ve had are due to our having as a guest a man who’s never seen us before, and his being silent, without saying a word, in the house and at the table. Now mama’s forbidden us to come to the table, but even in the kitchen we shake with laughter to see the man and mama sitting there in silence! I don’t know what she’ll tell papa. He’s been here three days and it already seems like a week. I envy people who don’t have giggling spells the way I have.

At the saddest moments, sometimes, when we shouldn’t have had cheerful faces, we’ve laughed.…

When papa got back he asked mama if we had treated the guest in our house well, and said, “He and his family couldn’t have done more for me at their house; they almost overwhelmed me with attention. His daughters are homely and not very attractive. I thought he’d come back enchanted with my girls, but when he got back he was silent and didn’t say a thing. I couldn’t keep from asking him if he’d seen my daughters and he told me, ‘I never saw their faces; they laughed from the minute I got there until I left.’”

* * *

… Today we went to Jogo da Bola Street for lunch. There were two guests there, friends of the family. The man is called Anselmo Coelho. He’s good-looking and very nice, married to a terribly homely woman, who speaks through her nose, called Toninha. I asked my cousins why such a handsome man had married such an ugly woman, and they said that he was the widower of a very pretty wife, and, living in Itaipava, he met this teacher, and because she wouldn’t be any expense to him, he married her.

At the table I noticed how little feeling the man had for his wife, and I felt sorry for her, coitada! After lunch we stayed at the table and he got the conversation onto his first wife. He praised her brains, her beauty, and her sympathy so much that I kept looking at the poor creature and feeling sorry for her. He said, “But she was so jealous that she made me suffer. When I miss her I always try to remember how jealous she was. If I had to go out alone on business, before I got to the door she’d fall down in a faint.” He told all this and then added, “I even miss the faints.”

After a while he looked at his watch and said, “It’s time. I have to go.” He got up to go and that fool of a homely wife ran and held onto his arm, trying to imitate the other wife. He kept going out, saying, “Stop it, Toninha. Stop this nonsense!” And the woman kept clinging to his arm and he kept on going. We stayed at the table pretending not to notice in order not to embarrass him. Suddenly we heard a noise, the sound of a body falling on the doorstep. We all ran and there was the poor homely woman stretched out on the ground, with a horrible face, and her husband prodding her with his foot and saying, “Get up, fool! Stop acting! Get up! Don’t disgrace me!” He said this still prodding his wife with his foot, without leaning over. Naninha said, “Coitada! She’s had an attack!” He said, “She wants to do what I said the other one did. But you can leave her here, it isn’t anything. She’ll get up in a little while.” And off he went.

We waited a little for her to open her eyes. When she didn’t open them, we carried her, two with her arms, two with her legs, almost dragging her, and put her on the bed and ran outside to laugh.

Aunt Agostinha said to us, “Now you see, while you’re girls, that men don’t care for silly women. He treats her well, but you see what she did today.”

* * *

… Today I’m tired because it’s one of the days when I have the most work. But shouldn’t I tell what happened to me yesterday, here in my dear diary? I imagine that today all Diamantina hasn’t any other subject of conversation: “Did you see Helena and Luizinha dancing all night long last night, with their aunt lying in her coffin?” I’m only sorry that they won’t say it to me personally, because I could explain. But what bad luck we have! Aunt Neném spent the whole month dying and then had to draw her last breath yesterday.

I know very well that Aunt Neném is my father’s oldest sister and that he esteems her highly. But I confess that I can’t cry for the death of an English aunt whom I didn’t know. She’s been sick for many years at the fazenda and none of her nephews or nieces knew her. When my father learned that she was very low he went there, a week ago. We’d already been invited to Leontina’s wedding here. It was the first dance I’d ever been to. My rose-colored dress was the first pretty dress I’d ever had. How could I miss all that?

Then, I don’t know how, the news spread through town. Papa only wrote to mama, who was all ready to go to the wedding, too, and didn’t go; but she herself thought it was a shame that we couldn’t go, after getting the news at the last minute. She planned it with us: “You go with your cousins and I won’t tell anyone about Neném’s death today. I’ll keep the news until tomorrow.” But I’m so unlucky that I’d barely put my foot in the door of the bride’s house when I received condolences. It seemed like spite. But I lied bravely, with a blank face. “Condolences for what?” “The death of your aunt.” “Who said that? It isn’t true. My father’s at the fazenda and he hasn’t sent word to mama.” But they wouldn’t leave me alone until they convinced themselves that I was more interested in amusing myself than in weeping for the death of an unknown aunt.

Oh! What a wonderful night! In spite of everybody’s eagerness to spoil my fun, they didn’t succeed. It was the first time I’d gone to a dance. How wonderful dancing is! And how quickly I learned all the steps! If I hadn’t gone to the wedding yesterday I could never have been consoled for having missed it. There’s a party like that so seldom! And then I think nobody’s going to remember the lack of feeling we showed for very long. It would have been better if Aunt Neném had died after the wedding and we could have shown more feeling. But it wasn’t God’s will. What could we do?

* * *

… Superstition in Diamantina. Since I was little, I’ve suffered from all sorts of superstitions. If there were thirteen people at the table, I was always the one who had to leave. Combing one’s hair at night, under any circumstances, sends one’s mother straight to hell. Sweeping the house at night upsets one’s life. Breaking a mirror is bad luck. Rubbing one foot against the other, walking backwards, and other things I don’t remember now, are all unlucky. They can explain why some of them do harm, but not others. Such as, for example, if a visitor stays too long, stand the broom behind the door, or throw salt in the fire, and she’ll go away. I believe that salt in the fire works if the visitor hears it crackle, because she knows what it means.

The funny thing is that everybody knows that superstition is a sin, but they prefer to confess it rather than do something that somebody says brings bad luck.

Once I asked grandma, “The Senhora doesn’t like to sin, and how is it that you know superstition is a sin and yet have so many superstitions?” She answered, “There are things that are born in us, daughter. Nobody can see proofs, the way I have — such as thirteen people at the table and within a year one of them dying, or a mirror that fell and broke in Henrique’s house and he had such bad luck afterward — without being afraid. The priests all say it’s a sin, but I don’t doubt that they believe in it, too. It’s something we’re born knowing, the people’s voice is the voice of God.” I said, “I know for my part that I’m not going to believe these things, grandma. If it’s a sin it’s because God thinks it’s absurd.” And she said, “Yes, my child, I don’t say that you should believe in a lot of them, I think that’s nonsense. But some are true and you oughtn’t to ignore them. Like thirteen people at the table, and a broken mirror, you can’t make light of them.”

I’m almost fourteen years old and already I think more than all the rest of the family. I think I began to draw conclusions from the age of ten years, or less. And I swear I never saw anybody from mama’s family think about things. They hear something and believe it: and that’s for the rest of their lives.

They’re all happy like that!

* * *

… I’m going to unburden myself here of the disappointment, the rage and the sorrow, that I suffered yesterday at my cousin Zinha’s wedding. She’s my rich uncle’s daughter, and the wedding was an important occasion.

My uncle ordered dress-lengths of silk from Rio de Janeiro for his girls. All my other cousins were making themselves silk dresses, too. Mama bought two lengths of fine pink wool for me and Luizinha. Aunt Madge took mine to make and Luizinha’s went to another dressmaker.

Aunt Madge came back from Rio recently and since then I haven’t had any peace. I have to carry a parasol so I won’t get sunburned, because the girls in Rio don’t have freckles. I have to wear my hair loose because the girls in Rio wear their hair loose. The same nagging all the time; the girls in Rio dress this way, the girls in Rio wear their hair that way. I didn’t mind if the dress was made like those the girls in Rio wear. I just wanted it to be pink.

Aunt Madge took the material and never asked me to try it on. I went to her house every day as usual, and saw nothing of the dress. Once I got up my courage and asked for it. She said, “Don’t worry. You’re going to the wedding looking prettier than all the others.”

The wedding was day before yesterday. I and Luizinha went to Dudu’s house to have our hair arranged, and we left delighted, with hairdos that made us look like young ladies. Luizinha dressed up in her dress and we went to Aunt Madge’s; my dress was nowhere to be seen. Aunt Madge said, “There’s no hurry, child. It’s early yet.” And taking a comb, she said, “Sit here. You’re a little girl, why do you want to wear your hair like a young lady?” She wet my hair, pulled out the curls, and let it fall down on my shoulders. Then she went and brought in the dress; a simple dress of navy blue wool with just a row of buttonholes down the back, bound with red ribbon.

Today I think it’s a pretty dress; but at the moment I had one of my attacks of rage and I couldn’t hold back my tears. Unable to say a word, I kissed my aunt’s hands and ran out in the street. Luizinha followed me, in silence. I went up Burgalhau Street, into the Cavalhada Nova, and into Direita Street, running all the way, and blind with rage. I couldn’t see a thing. Grandma’s been at Uncle Geraldo’s for several days, waiting for the wedding. I went into her room and fell on her bed in such a storm of tears it frightened her. But all she said was, “My God! What’s happened!” Luizinha came in and grandma asked, “What’s the matter?” Luizinha said, “It’s because she was longing for a pink dress and Aunt Madge dressed her like that.”

When I break down, it’s always with grandma. I feel she’s the only one who understands me. Then grandma began with her usual remarks: “Another of Madge’s and my trials with this girl! She doesn’t understand that we’re only trying to do what’s right for her. She wants always to be just like all the plain girls!” Then I raised my head sobbing, and said, “I’m the most miserable, the skinniest, the stupidest of them all, grandma, and I always have to be inferior in everything. I’m so envious of Luizinha because Aunt Madge doesn’t like her!” Grandma said, “Stop crying over nothing, silly child. Some day you’ll see that your godmother, who’s so good to you, and I were right. Go wash your face and let’s go to the parlor. They’re all there already.” Then I showed her my hair and said, “Do I have to go into the parlor with my hair like a lunatic from the asylum, grandma?” She said, “It’s pretty, child.” I said, “Grandma, the Senhora just doesn’t know what I’m going through. I was looking forward to my pink dress with such pleasure, and today, to dress like a widow, and to see all the rest of them in pink and pale blue and everything? No, grandma, it was too cruel of Aunt Madge. I don’t want her to take any more interest in me, grandma. This is the end!”

* * *

… If there were diviners of dreams today, the way there were in the time of Joseph of Egypt, what a fine thing it would be! I can never get that story of the seven fat cows and seven lean cows, that meant seven years of plenty and seven years of famine, out of my head.

I suffer a great deal from dreams and one of the worst I had when I was little was the disillusionment I suffered when I died and went to heaven. How horrible heaven was that night! I remember until today the dismal life I led in heaven until I woke up. It was an enormous yard, clean and bare, filled with old women in cloaks, with shawls on their heads, holding their hands up in prayer, not paying any attention to each other. No São Pedro, no angels, nothing. When they were tired of kneeling they walked around in that enormous yard with their heads bent, still praying. When I woke up and saw I wasn’t in heaven, what a relief!

Dreaming that I’m at Mass at the Cathedral in the middle of the crowd in my underwear is something horrible that’s always happening to me. Lots of times I’ve dreamed I was at school in my bare feet, without knowing where to hide them. It’s a constant martyrdom. But I’ve had marvelous dreams, too. I can’t count the times I’ve flown, without wings, to Boa Vista or over the houses of the city. It’s delightful! Or I was in a marvelous palace, like the little girl and the dwarfs. And I’ve dreamed of being in a field of peanuts, and I kept pulling up the plants and finding silver coins at the roots.

But last night’s dream was horrible. I dreamed I’d turned into a monkey, and in spite of my grief I could have resigned myself to being a monkey if I hadn’t had a tail, but my tail was enormous!

* * *

… Grandma’s been sick a week today and everyone in the house is in a state of the greatest anxiety, because they say that if she shows improvement today by tomorrow she’ll be saved.

I don’t know why God let me know grandma! I might have been so happy, because my parents are both strong and healthy, if I’d never known her. If only she’d died when I was little the way the other one did!

I’m in agony today! Esmeralda came to help us and taught us some prayers that God can’t possibly not listen to. We’re all praying with such faith! We’ve done almost nothing else all day today. There wasn’t even anyone to receive the callers.

I spent the day in anguish, seeing grandma in that condition, with nobody able to help her. The doctor comes and prescribes things, and goes away, and then she gets worried about herself!

What mama says is always right. Sometimes I thought it was absurd when she said that life is made up of suffering. Now I see she was right. Life really is made up of suffering. These days since grandma’s been sick I’ve forgotten all the joy I ever had and suffering is all I can think about. And since they said that tomorrow would be the crisis, I’ve been in such agony that all I can do is stay on my knees with the others, praying. When they get tired I take a walk around the garden, come back through the kitchen, the parlor, and go to every corner of the house, trying to find some peace, but I can’t. And if I go in grandma’s room, it’s worse torture.

Why does God punish us all this way? We never hurt anyone. I wait for the day He’ll remember and release grandma and us from this suffering.

* * *

… Grandma died!

Oh dear grandma, why has God taken you away and left me all alone in the world, missing you so much! Yes, my dear little grandmother, I’m all alone, because weren’t you the only person who’s ever understood me up until now? Shall I ever find anyone else in this life who’ll tell me I’m intelligent and pretty and good? Who’ll ever remember to give me material for a pretty new dress, so I won’t feel I’m beneath my cousins? Who’ll argue with mama and always try to defend me and find good qualities in me, when everyone else only finds faults?

Why did you love me so much? Me, the most mischievous of the grandchildren, and the noisiest, and the one who gave you the most trouble? I remember now with remorse the struggle you had to get me in from play every evening and onto my knees, when it was time for the rosary. But here in secret I confess now that it was an hour of sacrifice you made me undergo. Even the rage I felt, when after saying the whole rosary and all the mysteries, my aunts and that hypocrite of a Chiquinha used to remember all our dead relatives and we had to say one more Our Father or Hail Mary for the soul of each and every one! I used to think that my prayers might even be sending souls back to hell, because I was always praying under protest. No one else could have made me do it. But I know, grandma, in spite of everything I did, you felt how fond I was of you and you saw the suffering written on my face when I saw you so sick. And I used to see how happy it made you when I came from school and ran to tell you my marks. Now that I’m unburdening myself here I remember all your tenderness, all your kindness. The thought of the day I compared you to Our Lady comes back to me.

On the anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic two officials came to grandma’s to ask my aunts for two little girls, to make up the twenty to represent the States. They needed two more for the States of Piauí and Rio Grande do Norte. The girls were to walk in line, dressed in white, with red liberty bonnets on their heads and wide ribbons across their chests with the names of the States on them in gold letters. I followed all my cousins’ preparations with great interest because it seemed to me it was an extremely important occasion. But I got sadder and sadder all the time because they hadn’t even considered me.

The day of the celebration came and my aunts put my cousins up on the table so they could work over them better, arrange the dresses and the bonnets and tie the ribbons. They were both very proud, with everyone admiring them, and they were gloating because I was jealous. Somebody said, “How pretty they look!” Somebody else said, “Aren’t they sweet!” I looked and listened in silence until I felt a lump in my throat and I ran out and threw myself face down on the grass behind the church. I was crying and sobbing when I felt your cane tap my shoulder. I turned over, frightened, because I was so well-hidden and hadn’t expected anyone there. It was you, grandma! You’d been watching me and reading my soul, and you understood what I felt and had followed there in my steps. You’d walked there with the greatest difficulty, holding onto your cane with one hand and the walls with the other. I remember until now the kind words you said to me that day: “Get up, silly! You came here to cry because you’re jealous of those homely little girls, didn’t you?” I didn’t have time to answer, and besides, I already felt comforted, and you went on: “I don’t know why a girl as intelligent as you are doesn’t understand some things. Don’t you see that this holiday is for idiots, and that a girl like you, pretty, intelligent, and of English descent, couldn’t take part in it? It’s silly to celebrate the Proclamation of the Republic. The Republic is something for common people. It doesn’t concern nice people. They know your father’s a monarchist, that he isn’t one of the turncoats, and he wouldn’t let his daughter go out in the streets to play the fool in an idiotic celebration like that. Let the rest of them do it. Don’t be jealous, because you’re better than any of them.”

Oh grandma, you can’t imagine what your words meant to me! You made me get up, took me around by the back door without anyone’s seeing us to wash my face, and you made me laugh and waited until I looked cheerful again, so no one would notice I’d been crying.

That was the day, grandma, I remember I compared you to Our Lady and I thought to myself, “She’s so good and so holy that she can even guess what I suffer, to comfort me.” But now who will ever comfort me? I have my mother and father, my sister and brothers, but none of them can be to me what you were. Why? Because you were more intelligent? Or because you loved me even better than my own parents?

* * *

… Today, Sunday, it’s raining in Boa Vista, and I am thinking notalgically of my First Communion. When all the little girls had studied the catechism a year, Father Neves told us that we were ready for our First Communion, which would take place in a month.

I was in raptures at this news and I told mama to begin to get everything ready immediately: the long white dress, the veil, the wreath and the decorated wax candle.

On the evening of the great day, Father Neves brought all the pupils together in the church, and he went behind the grating of the screen to hear our confessions. The little girls knelt outside, confessing and then going away. My turn came and I knelt down with my list of sins all memorized: Gluttony, Envy, Luxury (the desire for pretty dresses), stealing fruit from my grandmother, gossiping. I told everything and made my act of contrition, but I left the confessional with a small nail in my conscience.

There were lots of ex-slaves at grandma’s who told nursery tales, tales of the spirits of the other world and the sins that had carried them off to purgatory and hell. If one stole an egg, for example, then the egg would turn into a hen, and one would have to spend as many years in purgatory as the hen had feathers. They also believed that it was an unpardonable sin to think that a priest was homely.

I listened to everything attentively and I couldn’t have stolen an egg under any circumstances. But the sin of finding a priest homely haunted me all year long. Every time Father Neves came into church I thought to myself, “Am I really committing a sin? I do think he’s so homely!” I kept trying to put this wicked thought out of my head but it kept coming back again, and even at the end of the catechism class it hadn’t left me.

When I went to confess that day, I reasoned, “No, I haven’t committed a sin because I’ve never told anyone I think Father Neves is homely. It’s better not to think about it any more.”

I left the confessional very penitent but not quite as peaceful and relieved as one should be. I made a retreat all that day with as much contrition as a seven-year-old girl is capable of.

On the next day, the great day, mama woke me up early and helped me get dressed, giving me some last bits of advice on how to make a good communion. When I got to church I found all my playmates already in their places, just waiting for me for the priest to begin the sermon.

To give this sermon, Father Neves had asked an Italian priest, rather fat and red, who knew how to shout and make a big impression on little girls. The priest began:

“My children, this day is the happiest and most important of your lives. You are going to receive the body, blood and soul of Jesus into your hearts. It is an amazing grace, my dears, that God grants you! But to receive it you must be prepared, and contrite, and you mustn’t have concealed any sin whatsoever in the confessional. To hide a sin and then to receive communion is an abomination! I know of many horrible cases, but I am going to tell you just one as an example.

“Once a group of little girls were making their First Communion just the way you are making it today. They received the host and went solemnly back to their places, and at that very moment one of them fell down and died. The priest said to the little girl’s mother, ‘God has taken her to Glory!’ And all the others were envious of their playmate who had died in the grace of God. And then, what do you suppose they saw? The devil dragging the body of the miserable little girl behind the altar. Do you know why? Because she had concealed a sin in the confessional.”

When I heard this I amazed everyone by bursting out howling. Father Neves ran to find out what was wrong. I said, “I concealed a sin in the confessional.” Father Neves tried to comfort me very gently, “Don’t be so upset, daughter; come and tell the sin and God will forgive you and you can take communion.” I told him, “I want to tell the sin to the other priest, not to you, Senhor.” He took hold of my hands, still very gently, and said, “You can’t do that, little one; you confessed to me so you have to tell me the sin. Don’t be afraid; the priest is here to listen to everything. Come on. I’ll look the other way; you can tell me and go away in just a minute.”

He took me to a corner of the sacristy and was very nice and insisted that I confess. Sobbing and horrified at what I was going to say I hung my head and whispered, “I confess to having thought that a priest was very homely.” Father Neves said, “That isn’t a sin, my child. What’s wrong with thinking that a priest is homely?” I took courage and said, “But the priest is you, Father!”

Father Neves let go of my hands and got up, exclaiming, “I really am homely! And what of it? I can’t stand such silly little girls! Here I spend the whole year struggling to get them ready for communion, and at the end they come to me to confess that I’m homely. It’s too much!”

1957

Stories by Clarice Lispector

The Smallest Woman in the World

In the depths of Equatorial Africa the French explorer Marcel Pretre, hunter and man of the world, came across a tribe of surprisingly small pygmies. Therefore he was even more surprised when he was informed that a still smaller people existed, beyond forests and distances. So he plunged further on.

In the Eastern Congo, near Lake Kivu, he really did discover the smallest pygmies in the world. And — like a box within a box within a box — obedient, perhaps, to the necessity nature sometimes feels of outdoing herself — among the smallest pygmies in the world there was the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world.

Among mosquitoes and lukewarm trees, among leaves of the most rich and lazy green, Marcel Pretre found himself facing a woman seventeen and three-quarter inches high, full-grown, black, silent—“Black as a monkey,” he informed the press — who lived in a treetop with her little spouse. In the tepid miasma of the jungle, that swells the fruits so early and gives them an almost intolerable sweetness, she was pregnant.

So there she stood, the smallest woman in the world. For an instant, in the buzzing heat, it seemed as if the Frenchman had unexpectedly reached his final destination. Probably only because he was not insane, his soul neither wavered nor broke its bounds. Feeling an immediate necessity for order and for giving names to what exists, he called her Little Flower. And in order to be able to classify her among the recognizable realities, he immediately began to collect facts about her.

Her race will soon be exterminated. Few examples are left of this species, which, if it were not for the sly dangers of Africa, might have multiplied. Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes, a threat that surrounds them in the silent air, like the dawn of battle. The Bahundes hunt them with nets, like monkeys. And eat them. Like that: they catch them in nets and eat them. The tiny race, retreating, always retreating, has finished hiding away in the heart of Africa, where the lucky explorer discovered it. For strategic defense, they live in the highest trees. The women descend to grind and cook corn and to gather greens; the men, to hunt. When a child is born, it is left free almost immediately. It is true that, what with the beasts, the child frequently cannot enjoy this freedom for very long. But then it is true that it cannot be lamented that for such a short life there had been any long, hard work. And even the language that the child learns is short and simple, merely the essentials. The Likoualas use few names; they name things by gestures and animal noises. As for things of the spirit, they have a drum. While they dance to the sound of the drum, a little male stands guard against the Bahundes, who come from no one knows where.

That was the way, then, that the explorer discovered, standing at his very feet, the smallest existing human thing. His heart beat, because no emerald in the world is so rare. The teachings of the wise men of India are not so rare. The richest man in the world has never set eyes on such strange grace. Right there was a woman that the greed of the most exquisite dream could never have imagined. It was then that the explorer said timidly, and with a delicacy of feeling of which his wife would never have thought him capable: “You are Little Flower.”

At that moment, Little Flower scratched herself where no one scratches. The explorer — as if he were receiving the highest prize for chastity to which an idealistic man dares aspire — the explorer, experienced as he was, looked the other way.

A photograph of Little Flower was published in the colored supplements of the Sunday papers, life-size. She was wrapped in a cloth, her belly already very big. The flat nose, the black face, the splay feet. She looked like a dog.

On that Sunday, in an apartment, a woman seeing the picture of Little Flower in the paper didn’t want to look a second time because “It gives me the creeps.”

In another apartment, a lady felt such perverse tenderness for the smallest of the African women that — an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure — Little Flower could never be left alone to the tenderness of that lady. Who knows to what murkiness of love tenderness can lead? The woman was upset all day, almost as if she were missing something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the air.

In another house, a little girl of five, seeing the picture and hearing the comments, was extremely surprised. In a houseful of adults, this little girl had been the smallest human being up until now. And, if this was the source of all caresses, it was also the source of the first fear of the tyranny of love. The existence of Little Flower made the little girl feel — with a deep uneasiness that only years and years later, and for very different reasons, would turn into thought — made her feel, in her first wisdom, that “sorrow is endless.”

In another house, in the consecration of spring, a girl about to be married felt an ecstasy of piety: “Mama, look at her little picture, poor little thing! Just look how sad she is!”

“But,” said the mother, hard and defeated and proud, “it’s the sadness of an animal. It isn’t human sadness.”

“Oh! Mama!” said the girl, discouraged.

In another house, a clever little boy had a clever idea: “Mummy, if I could put this little woman from Africa in little Paul’s bed when he’s asleep? When he woke up wouldn’t he be frightened? Wouldn’t he howl? When he saw her sitting on his bed? And then we’d play with her! She would be our toy!”

His mother was setting her hair in front of the bathroom mirror at the moment, and she remembered what a cook had told her about life in an orphanage. The orphans had no dolls, and, with terrible maternity already throbbing in their hearts, the little girls had hidden the death of one of the children from the nun. They kept the body in a cupboard and when the nun went out they played with the dead child, giving her baths and things to eat, punishing her only to be able to kiss and console her. In the bathroom, the mother remembered this, and let fall her thoughtful hands, full of curlers. She considered the cruel necessity of loving. And she considered the malignity of our desire for happiness. She considered how ferociously we need to play. How many times we will kill for love. Then she looked at her clever child as if she were looking at a dangerous stranger. And she had a horror of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at life and happiness. She looked at him attentively and with uncomfortable pride, that child who had already lost two front teeth, evolution evolving itself, teeth falling out to give place to those that could bite better. “I’m going to buy him a new suit,” she decided, looking at him, absorbed. Obstinately, she adorned her gap-toothed son with fine clothes; obstinately, she wanted him very clean, as if his cleanliness could emphasize a soothing superficiality, obstinately perfecting the polite side of beauty. Obstinately drawing away from, and drawing him away from, something that ought to be “black as a monkey.” Then, looking in the bathroom mirror, the mother gave a deliberately refined and social smile, placing a distance of insuperable millenniums between the abstract lines of her features and the crude face of Little Flower. But, with years of practice, she knew that this was going to be a Sunday on which she would have to hide from herself anxiety, dreams, and lost millenniums.

In another house, they gave themselves up to the enthralling task of measuring the seventeen and three-quarter inches of Little Flower against the wall. And, really, it was a delightful surprise: she was even smaller than the sharpest imagination could have pictured. In the heart of each member of the family was born, nostalgic, the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for itself, that thing spared having been eaten, that permanent source of charity. The avid family soul wanted to devote itself. To tell the truth, who hasn’t wanted to own a human being just for himself? Which, it is true, wouldn’t always be convenient; there are times at which one doesn’t want to have feelings.

“I bet if she lived here it would end in a fight,” said the father, sitting in the armchair and definitely turning the page of the newspaper. “In this house everything ends in a fight.”

“Oh, you, José—always a pessimist,” said the mother.

“But, mama, have you thought of the size her baby’s going to be?” said the oldest little girl, aged thirteen, eagerly.

The father stirred uneasily behind his paper.

“It should be the smallest black baby in the world,” the mother answered, melting with pleasure. “Imagine her serving our table, with her big little belly!”

“That’s enough!” growled father.

“But you have to admit,” said the mother, unexpectedly offended, “that it is something very rare. You’re the insensitive one.”

And the rare thing itself?

In the meanwhile, in Africa, the rare thing herself, in her heart — and who knows if the heart wasn’t black, too, since once nature has erred she can no longer be trusted — the rare thing herself had something even rarer in her heart, like the secret of her own secret: a minimal child. Methodically, the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest mature human being. It was at this moment that the explorer, for the first time since he had known her, instead of feeling curiosity, or exaltation, or victory, or the scientific spirit, felt sick.

The smallest woman in the world was laughing.

She was laughing, warm, warm — Little Flower was enjoying life. The rare thing herself was experiencing the ineffable sensation of not having been eaten yet. Not having been eaten yet was something that at any other time would have given her the agile impulse to jump from branch to branch. But, in this moment of tranquility, amid the thick leaves of the Eastern Congo, she was not putting this impulse into action — it was entirely concentrated in the smallness of the rare thing itself. So she was laughing. It was a laugh such as only one who does not speak laughs. It was a laugh that the explorer, constrained, couldn’t classify. And she kept on enjoying her own soft laugh, she who wasn’t being devoured. Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling. Not to be devoured is the secret goal of a whole life. While she was not being eaten, her bestial laughter was as delicate as joy is delicate. The explorer was baffled.

In the second place, if the rare thing herself was laughing, it was because, within her smallness, a great darkness had begun to move.

The rare thing herself felt in her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer. If she could have talked and had told him that she loved him, he would have been puffed up with vanity. Vanity that would have collapsed when she added that she also loved the explorer’s ring very much, and the explorer’s boots. And when that collapse had taken place, Little Flower would not have understood why. Because her love for the explorer — one might even say “profound love,” since, having no other resources, she was reduced to profundity — her profound love for the explorer would not have been at all diminished by the fact that she also loved his boots. There is an old misunderstanding about the word love, and, if many children are born from this misunderstanding, many others have lost the unique chance of being born, only because of a susceptibility that demands that it be me! me! that is loved, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest these cruel refinements do not exist, and love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who isn’t black, love is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warmly, small, gravid, warm.

The explorer tried to smile back, without knowing exactly to what abyss his smile responded, and then he was embarrassed as only a very big man can be embarrassed. He pretended to adjust his explorer’s hat better; he colored, prudishly. He turned a lovely color, a greenish-pink, like a lime at sunrise. He was undoubtedly sour.

Perhaps adjusting the symbolic helmet helped the explorer to get control of himself, severely recapture the discipline of his work, and go on with his note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now, he could ask questions.

Little Flower answered “Yes.” That it was very nice to have a tree of her own to live in. Because — she didn’t say this but her eyes became so dark that they said it — because it is good to own, good to own, good to own. The explorer winked several times.

Marcel Pretre had some difficult moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes. Those who didn’t take notes had to manage as best they could.

“Well,” suddenly declared one old lady, folding up the newspaper decisively, “well, as I always say: God knows what He’s doing.”

A Hen

She was a Sunday hen. She was still alive only because it was not yet 9.00 o’clock.

She seemed calm. Since Saturday she had cowered in a corner of the kitchen. She didn’t look at anyone, no one looked at her. Even when they had selected her, fingering her intimately and indifferently, they couldn’t have said whether she was fat or thin. No one would ever have guessed that she had a desire.

So it was a surprise when she opened her little wings, puffed out her breast, and, after two or three tries, reached the wall of the terrace. For an instant she vacillated — long enough for the cook to scream — and then she was on the neighbor’s terrace, and from there, by means of another awkward flight, she reached a tile roof. There she remained like a misplaced weather vane, hesitating, first on one foot, then the other. The family was urgently called and, in consternation, saw their lunch standing beside a chimney. The father of the family, reminding himself of the double obligation of eating and of occasionally taking exercise, happily got into his bathing trunks and resolved to follow the itinerary of the hen. By cautious jumps he reached the roof, and the hen, trembling and hesitating, quickly picked another direction. The pursuit became more intense. From roof to roof, more than a block of the street was traversed. Unprepared for a more savage struggle for life, the hen had to decide for herself which routes to take, without any help from her race. In the young man, however, the sleeping hunter woke up. Lowly as was the prey, he gave a hunting cry.

Alone in the world, without father or mother, she ran, out of breath, concentrated, mute. Sometimes in her flight she would stand at bay on the edge of a roof, gasping; while the young man leaped over others with difficulty, she had a moment in which to collect herself. Then she looked so free.

Stupid, timid, and free. Not victorious, the way a rooster in flight would have looked. What was there in her entrails that made a being of her? The hen is a being. It’s true, she couldn’t be counted on for anything. She herself couldn’t count on herself — the way a rooster believes in his comb. Her only advantage was that there are so many hens that if one died another would appear at the same moment, exactly like her, as if it were the same hen.

Finally, at one of the moments when she stopped to enjoy her escape, the young man caught her. Amid feathers and cries, she was taken prisoner. Then she was carried in triumph, by one wing, across the roofs and deposited on the kitchen floor with a certain violence. Still dazed, she shook herself a little, cackling hoarsely and uncertainly.

It was then that it happened. Completely overwhelmed, the hen laid an egg. Surprised, exhausted. Perhaps it was premature. But immediately afterward, as if she had been born for maternity, she looked like an old, habitual mother. She sat down on the egg and remained that way, breathing, buttoning and unbuttoning her eyes. Her heart, so small on a plate, made the feathers rise and fall, and filled that which would never be more than an egg with warmth. Only the little girl was near-by and witnessed everything, terrified. As soon as she could tear herself away, she got up off the floor and shrieked: “Mama! Mama! Don’t kill the hen any more! She laid an egg! She likes us!”

Everyone ran to the kitchen again and, silent, stood in a circle around the new mother. Warming her child, she was neither gentle nor harsh, neither happy nor sad; she was nothing; she was a hen. Which suggests no special sentiment. The father, the mother, and the daughter looked at her for some time, without any thought whatever to speak of. No one had ever patted the head of a hen. Finally, with a certain brusqueness, the father decided: “If you have this hen killed, I’ll never eat chicken again in my life!”

“Me too!” the little girl vowed ardently.

The mother shrugged, tired.

Unconscious of the life that had been granted her, the hen began to live with the family. The little girl, coming home from school, threw down her school-bag and ran to the kitchen without stopping. Once in a while the father would still remember: “And to think I made her run in that state!” The hen became the queen of the house. Everyone knew it except the hen. She lived between the kitchen and the kitchen terrace, making use of her two capacities: apathy and fear.

But when everyone in the house was quiet and seemed to have forgotten her, she plucked up a little of the courage left over from her great escape and perambulated the tile floor, her body moving behind her head, deliberate as in a field, while the little head betrayed her: moving, rapid and vibrant, with the ancient and by now mechanical terror of her species.

Occasionally, and always more rarely, the hen resembled the one that had once stood plain against the air on the edge of the roof, ready to make an announcement. At such moments she filled her lungs with the impure air of the kitchen and, if females had been able to sing, she would not have sung, but she would have been much more contented. Though not even at these moments did the expression of her empty head change. In flight, at rest, giving birth, or pecking corn — it was the head of a hen, the same that was designed at the beginning of the centuries.

Until one day they killed her and ate her and the years went by.

Marmosets

The first time we had a marmoset was just before New Year’s. We were without water and without a maid, people were lining up to buy meat, the hot weather had suddenly begun — when, dumfounded, I saw the present enter the house, already eating a banana, examining everything with great rapidity, and with a long tail. It looked like a monkey not yet grown; its potentialities were tremendous. It climbed up the drying clothes to the clothesline, where it swore like a sailor, and the banana-peelings fell where they would. I was exhausted already. Every time I forgot and absentmindedly went out on the back terrace, I gave a start: there was that happy man. My younger son knew, before I did, that I would get rid of this gorilla: “If I promise that sometime the monkey will get sick and die, will you let him stay? Or if you knew that sometime he’d fall out the window, somehow, and die down there?” My feelings would glance aside. The filthiness and blithe unconsciousness of the little monkey made me responsible for his fate, since he himself would not take any blame. A friend understood how bitterly I had resigned myself, what dark deeds were being nourished beneath my dreaminess, and rudely saved me: a delighted gang of little boys appeared from the hill and carried off the laughing man. The new year was devitalized but at least monkey-less.

A year later, at a time of happiness, suddenly there in Copacabana I saw the small crowd. I thought of my children, the joys they gave me, free, unconnected with the worries they also gave me, free, and I thought of a chain of joy: “Will the person receiving this pass it along to someone else,” one to another, like a spark along a train of powder. Then and there I bought the one who would be called Lisette.

She could almost fit in one hand. She was wearing a skirt, and earrings, necklace, and bracelet of glass beads. The air of an immigrant just disembarking in her native costume. Like an immigrant’s, too, her round eyes.

This one was a woman in miniature. She lived with us three days. She had such delicate bones. She was of such a sweetness. More than her eyes, her look was rounded. With every movement, the earrings shook; the skirt was always neat, the red necklace glinted. She slept a lot, but, as to eating, she was discreet and languid. Her rare caress was only a light bite that left no mark.

On the third day we were out on the back terrace admiring Lisette and the way she was ours. “A little too gentle,” I thought, missing the gorilla. And suddenly my heart said harshly: “But this isn’t sweetness. This is death.” The dryness of the message left me calm. I said to the children: “Lisette is dying.” Looking at her, I realized the stage of love we had already reached. I rolled her up in a napkin and went with the children to the nearest first-aid station, where the doctor couldn’t attend to her because he was performing an emergency operation on a dog. Another taxi—“Lisette thinks she’s out for a drive, mama”—another hospital. There they gave her oxygen.

And with the breath of life, a Lisette we hadn’t known was revealed. The eyes less round, more secretive, more laughing, and in the prognathous and ordinary face a certain ironic haughtiness. A little more oxygen and she wanted to speak so badly she couldn’t bear being a monkey; she was, and she would have had much to tell. More oxygen, and then an injection of salt solution; she reacted to the prick with an angry slap, her bracelet glittering. The male nurse smiled: “Lisette! Gently, my dear!”

The diagnosis: she wouldn’t live unless there was oxygen at hand, and even then it was unlikely. “Don’t buy monkeys in the street,” he scolded me; “sometimes they’re already sick.” No, one must buy dependable monkeys, and know where they came from, to ensure at least five years of love, and know what they had or hadn’t done, like getting married. I discussed it with the children a minute. Then I said to the nurse: “You seem to like Lisette very much. So if you let her stay a few days, near the oxygen, you can have her.” He was thinking. “Lisette is pretty!” I implored.

“She’s beautiful!” he agreed, thoughtfully. Then he sighed and said, “If I cure Lisette, she’s yours.” We went away with our empty napkin.

The next day they telephoned, and I informed the children that Lisette had died. The younger one asked me, “Do you think she died wearing her earrings?” I said yes. A week later the older one told me, “You look so much like Lisette!”

I replied, “I like you, too.”