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

entrails, and my dark wasn’t differentiated from the dark outside, and in the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was still a surface: the secret life of the night soon reduced in my mouth to the taste of a nightmare that disappears. But now life was happening by day. Undeniable and to be seen. Unless I averted my eyes.
    And I could still avert my eyes.
    — But hell had already taken me, my love, the hell of unhealthy curiosity. I was already selling my human soul, because seeing had already begun to consume me in pleasure, I was selling my future, I was selling my salvation, I was selling us.
    “I’m asking for help,” I then suddenly shouted to myself with the muteness of those whose mouths are gradually filled with quicksand, “I’m asking for help,” I thought still and seated. Yet not once did it occur to me to get up and go, as if that were already impossible. The roach and I had been buried in a mine.
    The scale just had one pan on it now. Upon that pan was my deep refusal of roaches. But now “refusal of roaches” were merely words, and I also knew that in the hour of my death I too would not be translatable by word.
    Dying, yes, I knew, since dying was the future and is imaginable, and for imagining I had always had time. But the instant, this instant — the present — that isn’t imaginable, between the present and I there’s no interval: it is now, in me.
    — Understand, dying I knew beforehand and dying still wasn’t demanding me. But what I’d never experienced was the crash with the moment called “right now.” Today is demanding me this very day. I had never before known that the time to live also has no word. The time to live, my love, was being so right now that I leaned my mouth on the matter of life. The time to live is a slow uninterrupted creaking of doors continuously opening wide. Two gates were opening and had never stopped opening. But they were continuously opening onto — onto the nothing?
    The time to live is so hellishly inexpressive that it is the nothing. What I was calling “nothing” was nevertheless so stuck to me that to me it was . . . I? and that’s why it was becoming invisible as I was invisible to myself, and it was becoming the nothing. The doors as always kept opening.
    Finally, my love, I gave in. And it became a now.

Finally, my love, I gave in. And it became a now.
    It was finally now. It was simply now. It was like this: the country was in eleven in the morning. Superficially as a yard that is green, of the most delicate superficiality. Green, green — green is a yard. Between me and the green, the water of the air. The green water of the air. I see everything through a full glass. Nothing is heard. In the rest of the house the shadows are all swollen. The ripe superficiality. It’s eleven in the morning in Brazil. It’s now. That means exactly now. Now is time swollen to the limit. Eleven o’clock has no depth. Eleven o’clock is full of eleven hours up to the brim of the green glass. Time trembles as a motionless balloon. The air fertilized and wheezing. Until in a national anthem the ringing of eleven-thirty cuts the cables of the balloon. And suddenly we will all reach noon. Which will be green like now.
    I suddenly awoke from the unexpected green oasis where for a moment I had taken full refuge.
    But I was in the desert. And it isn’t only at the summit of an oasis that it’s now: now is also in the desert, and fully. It was right now. For the first time in my life it was fully about now. This was the greatest brutality I had ever received.
    For the present has no hope, and the present has no future: the future will be exactly once again present.
    I was so scared that I got even quieter inside myself. Because it was seeming to me that I would finally have to feel.
    It seems I shall have to give up everything I leave behind the gates. And I know, I knew, that if I went through the gates that are always open, I would enter the heart of