Free A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector

Portuguese it’s “eu te amo.” In French — “je t’aime.” In English — “I love you.” In Italian — “io t’amo.” In Spanish — “yo te quiero.” In German — “Ich liebe disch,” is that right? Me of all people, the unloved. The most disappointed one of all, she who every night tastes the sweetness of death.
    I feel like a charlatan. Why? It’s as if I weren’t revealing my final truth. So I have to take off my clothes and be naked in the street. That’s not so hard. But what’s hard is to have a naked soul. So I give myself to God. And I pray a lot that protection might be granted me. Am I from another planet? what am I? the humblest of the humble who is prostrate on the ground and presses her half-open mouth to the earth in order to suck its blood. Oh earth, but what a scent of wet grass. How comforting it is. And I also undress in the sea. Could it be I’ll have a tragic end? Oh please spare me. Please: because I am fragile. What awaits me when I die? I already know: when I die I’ll go transparent as jade.
    AUTHOR: Angela is afraid to travel for fear of losing her I during the trip. She needs for at least one minute in her life to catch herself in the act. To catch what’s living and take her immobile picture and look at herself in the picture and think that the snapshot left a proof, that of the already-dead picture.
    ANGELA: Suddenly an odd feeling. I find myself odd as though a movie camera were filming my steps and suddenly stopped, leaving me immobile in the middle of a gesture: caught in the act. Me? Am I the one who is I? But this is a mad senselessness! Part of me is mechanical and automatic — neurovegetative, the balance between not wanting and wanting, of not being able and being able, all of it sliding along in the routine of mechanism. The camera singled out the instant. And so it is that I automatically left myself in order to capture myself dazed by my own enigma, right there before me, which is unprecedented and terrifying because it’s extremely true, profoundly naked life merged into my identity. And this encounter between life and my identity forms a miniscule unbreakable and radiant indivisible diamond, a single atom and all of me feels my body go numb as when you stay in the same position for a long time and your leg suddenly “falls asleep.”
    I am too nostalgic, I seem to have lost something who knows where or when.

AUTHOR: I shall write here toward the air and responding to nothing because I am free. I — I who exist. There’s a voluptuousness in being someone. I am no longer silence. I feel so impotent while living — life that sums up all the disparate and dissonant opposites in a single and ferocious stance: rage.
    I finally reached the nothing. And in my satisfaction at having reached in myself the minimum of existence, only the necessary breathing — I am therefore free. All that’s left for me is to invent. But I immediately warn myself: I’m uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for myself. I feel ill at ease in this body that is my baggage. But that discomfort is the first step toward my — toward my what? truth? As if I had the truth?
    I say nothing like real music does. It doesn’t speak words. I feel no longing for myself — what I was no longer interests me! And if I should speak, may I allow myself to be discontinuous: I have no obligation to myself. I go on accumulating myself, accumulating myself, accumulating myself — until I no longer fit within me and burst into words.
    When I write, I mix one color with another, and a new color is born.
    I want to forget that I never forgot. I want to forget the praise and the jeers. I want to re-inaugurate myself. And for that I’ll have to renounce my whole body of work and begin humbly, without deificaton, from a beginning in which there are no traces of any habit, foibles or abilities. I’ll have to put aside my know-how. For that reason I expose myself to a new kind of fiction, which I still don’t