“But I’m a medical student and even a child can see that the woman’s dead! call the police if you want, do that!”
“Poor thing, but it doesn’t hurt to call the paramedics, maybe it . . .”
“Here comes the guard . . .”
“He said he was a medical student and that even a child could see . . .”
“Will you look at that, will you look at that!” a fat woman shouted astonished and victorious, “I can’t believe I’m seeing that I know this . . . that . . . I was just about to say a name the dead no longer deserve!” she slapped her mouth shut.
“But what? how?” various interested people were asking.
“God forgive me, but that woman was carrying on with my husband — and there’s the punishment! My husband is the doorman of the building where she was living and that . . . that . . . started seeing my man in her room! just imagine! shameless! I warned my husband to cut it out and I almost strangled this . . . But will you look at that, of all people to see die . . . ,” the poor woman was suffocating, choking.
“Ma’am, are you sure?” an old woman in black asked quietly and interested shaking the hard rose on her hat.
“And how!” screamed the woman opening her arms.
A few people were laughing, others murmuring something about the inappropriateness of the conversation.
“Poor thing, but if she’s dead like that man says there’s no paramedic that can save a dead woman, call somebody at the morgue, I’m not from here, I don’t know . . .”
“Since nobody’s moving I’ll call, I’ll call! But there’s no need to push, madam, there’s no hurry now, right? I’ll call . . . Ah, no need, it’s all right, here’s the guard!”
A pallid and shaky brightness reeled in his chest, he saw her lying on the ground with white and peaceful lips, the bun in her hair undone, the brown straw hat smashed. So it really was her.
“And who are you, sir?” the guard was shouting at him taking up his duties and seeing him standing, pale, calm, small. He hesitated for an instant. Then slowly he looked at the guard and with courtesy responded:
“I’m . . .”
“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, I know! Wait . . . wait. Ah, of course, from the Edifício São Tomás! How could I forget?! I gave you a ticket for going the wrong way down a one-way street a long time ago, right?” laughed the guard remembering — all the wrinkles in his face were stretching out kind and innocent.
He laughed too, dabbed the handkerchief on his lips politely.
“So she’s dead?” he asked.
“She sure is and the damn driver got away from me. I already sent someone to call for an ambulance to the morgue. Anyway so glad, really, so glad to see you again!”
So she’d see men in her room. And so she’d see men in her room! Prostitute, he sighed. Death had unfinished forever anything that could be known about her. The impossibility and the mystery tired his heart with strength. Adriano sat on a garden bench, barely leaning on the backrest. His squinting eyes were looking into the distance, he was breathing with difficulty out of surprise and rage. With his handkerchief he slowly smoothed his hard, cold forehead. And all of a sudden he wasn’t sure if it was out of frozen ecstasy or intolerable suffering — because in that single instant he’d won her and lost her forever — all of a sudden, in a first experience of the shame, he felt inside him a horribly free and painful movement, a vague urge to shout or cry, some mortal thing opening in his chest a violent clearing that might have been a new birth.
rio, march 1943
naples, november 1944
Copyright © 1946 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector
Translation copyright © 2018 by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards
Originally published as O lustre. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, Barcelona.
New Directions gratefully acknowledges the support of
MINISTÉRIO DA CULTURA
Fundação BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published clothbound by New Directions in 2018
Manufactured in the United States of America
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lispector, Clarice, author. | Moser, Benjamin, translator. |
Edwards, Magdalena, translator.
Title: The chandelier / Clarice Lispector ; translated by Benjamin Moser
and Magdalena Edwards.
Other titles: Lustre. English
Description: First edition. | Portuguese editions published in 1946, 1967, and 1982.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017051736 | ISBN 9780811223133 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Women — Fiction. | Social isolation — Fiction. |
Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) — Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ9697.L585 L813 2018 | DDC 869.3/42 — dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051736
eISBN: 9780811226707
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
