Her immeasurable soul. For she was the World. And yet she was living so little. This was one of the sources of her humility and forced acceptance, and also kept her weak in the face of any possibility of action.
Moreover feeling overly humble was paradoxically where her haughtiness came from. For her haughtiness — which was reflected in her supple and calm way of walking — her haughtiness came from the obscure certainty that her roots were strong, and that her humility was not just human humility: for every root is strong, and her humility came from the obscure certainty that all roots are humble, earthy and full of a moist vigor in their gnarled rooted modesty.
Of course none of this was thought: it was lived, with the odd rapid sweeping beam in the night illuminating the sky for a fraction of a second of thought in the dark.
What had also saved Lóri was that she was feeling that if her own world weren’t human, there would still be room for her, and with great beauty: she’d be a smudge of instincts, affections and ferocities, a shimmering irradiation of peace and struggle, the way she was humanly, but it would be permanent: because if her world weren’t human she’d be a creature. For an instant then she scorned whatever was human and experienced the silent soul of animal life.
And it was good. “Not understanding” was so vast that it surpassed all understanding — understanding was always limited. But not-understanding had no frontiers and led to the infinite, to the God. It wasn’t a not-understanding like that of a simpleton. What was good was having an intelligence and not understanding. It was a strange blessing like that of having madness without being crazy. It was a gentle disinterest toward the so-called matters of the intellect, a sweetness of stupidity.
But sometimes the unbearable anxiety would come: she wanted to understand enough so that she’d at least become more aware of everything she didn’t understand. Though deep down she didn’t want to comprehend. She knew it was impossible and every time she had thought she’d understood herself it was because she’d understood wrongly. Understanding was always a mistake — she preferred the largesse, so wide and free and without mistakes, of not-understanding. It was bad, but at least you knew you were in the full human condition.
Yet sometimes she’d guess right. There were cosmic streaks that substituted for understanding.
Lóri had already told Ulisses about the period, in Campos, when her parents were rich and would travel, staying in this country or that for months with their children, until, at the same time as her mother died, the family fortune was reduced to a third. Ulisses, despite only ever having traveled inside Brazil, had never asked her touristy questions. Nor did she ever describe places. Lóri had barely spoken of herself in other countries. She’d said little but he, through the attention he’d given her, seemed to have heard more than she’d told him.
She’d spoken of Paris but not of the land called Paris. She’d spoken of how the winter there was full of darkness at dusk and how it snowed bad snow, not the light kind but the thick kind, and even more: the frozen flakes borne on gusts of wind lashed her face already stiff with cold. She’d mentioned that one day, as it got dark, she’d started to cry quietly on a street corner. There was no one around, and so she’d started to talk to herself: “O God help me in this frozen darkness that is my own.”
— On that corner, she’d said to Ulisses in the same quiet voice, I felt lost, saved from some shipwreck and thrown onto a dark, cold, deserted beach.
Paris, suddenly, that strange land, had given her the oddest pain — that of her real perdition. Perdition was not the everyday truth but was the unreality that would let her sense her true condition. And everyone else’s.
She also told him how that same winter in Paris, she’d gone to a seamstress in a district far from the hotel. Inside she hadn’t noticed night fall and, in front of a lit fire, hadn’t realized that the cold with the early nightfall had turned freezing. It was the ninth of February. As she went out she was shocked to find it was night. She didn’t know the area and there weren’t many taxis, those going down that black street already had passengers. She didn’t know exactly how far she was from the hotel. She’d stood there waiting in vain for a taxi. And what if she forgot the name of the hotel? And suddenly she no longer had the slightest idea what it was called, such did the names of hotels in all the cities of the world resemble one another and she had lived or just stayed in so many. If she never again remembered the name of the hotel, no one would find her, she’d carry on living in that dirty black district with its blackened buildings, isolated from the rest of Paris and would have to
