Free The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector Page A

a pleasure without hope — I was already giving in, ah, I already wanted to give in — to have experienced it was already the beginning of a hell of wanting, wanting, wanting. . . . Was my will to want stronger than my will for salvation?
    More and more I had nothing to ask for. And I was seeing, with fascination and horror, the pieces of my rotten mummy clothes falling dry to the floor, I was watching my transformation from chrysalis into moist larva, my wings were slowly shrinking back scorched. And a belly entirely new and made for the ground, a new belly was being reborn.
    Without taking my eyes off the cockroach, I began lowering myself until I felt my body meeting the bed and, without taking my eyes from the cockroach, I sat.
    Now it was with raised eyes that I was seeing it. Now, bent over its own midriff, it was looking down at me. I had fastened before me the unclean of the world — and had broken the spell of the living thing. I had lost the ideas.
    Then, once again, another thick millimeter of white matter spurted out.

Then, once again, another thick millimeter of white matter spurted out.
    Holy Mary, mother of God, I offer thee my life in exchange for that moment yesterday’s not being true. The roach with the white matter was looking at me. I don’t know if it was seeing me, I don’t know what a roach sees. But we were looking at each other, and also I don’t know what a woman sees. But if its eyes weren’t seeing me, its existence was existing me — in the primary world I had entered, beings exist others as a way of seeing one another. And in that world I was coming to know, there are several ways that mean seeing: one a looking at the other without seeing him, one possessing the other, one eating the other, one just being in a place and the other being there too: all that also means seeing. The roach wasn’t seeing me directly, it was with me. The roach wasn’t seeing me with its eyes but with its body.
    And I — I was seeing. There was no way not to see it. No way to deny: my convictions and my wings were quickly drying up and no longer had a point. I could no longer deny it. I don’t know what I could no longer deny, but I no longer could. And I could no longer even rescue myself, as before, with a whole civilization that would help me deny what I was seeing.
    I was seeing all of it, the roach.
    The roach is an ugly and sparkling being. The roach is the other way around. No, no, it doesn’t have a way around: it is that. Whatever is exposed in it is what I hide in me: from my outside being exposed I made my unheeded inside. It was looking at me. And it wasn’t a face. It was a mask. A diver’s mask. That precious gem of rusted iron. Its two eyes were alive like two ovaries. It was looking at me with the blind fertility of its gaze. It was fertilizing my dead fertility. Would its eyes be salty? If I touched them — since I was gradually getting more and more unclean — if I touched them with my mouth, would they taste salty?
    I’d already tasted in my mouth a man’s eyes and, from the salt in my mouth, realized he was crying.
    But, thinking about the salt in the roach’s black eyes, suddenly I recoiled again, and my dry lips pulled back to my teeth: the reptiles that move across the earth! In the halted reverberation of the light of the room, the roach was a small slow crocodile. The dry and vibrating room. The roach and I poised in that dryness as on the dry crust of an extinct volcano. That desert I had entered, and also inside it I was discovering life and its salt.
    Once again the white part of the roach spurted out maybe less than a millimeter.
    This time I had hardly perceived the minute movement its matter had made. I was looking on engrossed, unmoving.
    — Never, until then, had life happened to me by day. Never in sunlight. Only in my nights did the world slowly revolve. Only that, whatever happened in the dark of night itself, would also happen at the same time in my own