The Fifth Story

This story could be called "The Statues." Another possible name is “The Murder.” And also “How to Kill Cockroaches.” So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don’t contradict each other. Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights.

The first, “How to Kill Cockroaches,” begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. She gave me this recipe for killing them. I was to mix equal parts sugar, flour and plaster. The flour and sugar would attract them, the plaster would dry up their insides. That’s what I did. They died.

The other story is actually the first one and is called “The Murder.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches. A lady overheard me. The recipe follows. And then comes the murder. The truth is that I was only complaining about cockroaches in the abstract, since they weren’t even mine: they belonged to the ground floor and would crawl up the building’s pipes to our home. Only once I prepared the mixture did they become mine too. In our name, then, I began to measure and weigh the ingredients with a slightly more intense concentration. A vague resentment had overtaken me, a sense of outrage. By day the cockroaches were invisible and no one would believe in the secret curse that gnawed at such a peaceful home. But if they, like secret curses, slept during the day, there I was preparing their evening poison. Meticulous, ardent, I concocted the elixir for drawn-out death. An excited fear and my own secret curse guided me. Now I icily wanted just one thing: to kill every cockroach in existence. Cockroaches crawl up the pipes while we, worn out, dream. And now the recipe was ready, so white. As if for cockroaches as clever as I was, I expertly spread the powder until it looked more like something from nature. From my bed, in the silence of the apartment, I imagined them crawling one by one up to the laundry room where the darkness was sleeping, just one towel alert on the clothesline. I awoke hours later with a start when I realized how late it was. It was already dawn. I crossed the kitchen. There they were on the laundry-room floor, hard, huge. During the night I had killed. In our name, day was breaking. Up in the favela a rooster crowed.

The third story that now begins is the one about the “Statues.” It begins by saying that I had been complaining about cockroaches. Then comes the same lady. It keeps going up to the point where, near dawn, I awake and still sleepy cross the kitchen. Even sleepier than I is the room from the perspective of its tile floor. And in the darkness of dawn, a purplish glow that distances everything, I discern at my feet shadows and white forms: dozens of statues scattered, rigid. The cockroaches that have hardened from the inside out. Some, belly up. Others, in the middle of a gesture never to be completed. In the mouths of some a bit of the white food. I am the first witness of daybreak in Pompeii. I know how this last night went, I know of the orgy in the dark. Inside some of them the plaster will have hardened as slowly as during some vital process, and they, with increasingly arduous movements, will have greedily intensified the night’s joys, trying to escape their own insides. Until they turn to stone, in innocent shock, and with such, such a look of wounded reproach. Others—suddenly assaulted by their own core, without even the slightest inkling that some internal mold was being petrified!—these suddenly crystallize, the way a word is cut off in the mouth: it’s you I... They who, taking the name of love in vain, kept singing through the summer night. Whereas that one there, the one whose brown antenna is smeared with white, must have figured out too late that it had been mummified precisely for not having known how to make use of things with the gratuitous charm of being in vain: “because I looked too deep inside myself! because I looked too deep inside...”—from my cold, human height I look at the destruction of a world. Day breaks. The occasional antenna of a dead cockroach quivers drily in the breeze. From the previous story the rooster crows.

The fourth narrative inaugurates a new era at home. It begins as we know: I was complaining about cockroaches. It goes up to the moment I see the plaster monuments. Dead, yes. But I look toward the pipes, from where this very night a slow and living population will renew itself in single file. So would I renew the lethal sugar every night? like someone who can no longer sleep without the eagerness of a rite. And every dawn lead myself to the pavilion with the compulsion of greeting the statues that my sweaty night has been erecting. I trembled with wicked pleasure at the vision of that double life of a sorceress. And I also trembled at the sign of plaster drying: the compulsion to live that would burst my internal mold. A harsh instant of choosing between two paths that, I thought, are bidding each other farewell, and sure that either choice would be a sacrifice: me or my soul. I chose. And today I secretly boast in my heart a plaque of virtue: “This house has been disinfested.”

The fifth story is called “Leibniz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia.” It begins like this: I was complaining about cockroaches.

Don't try to swallow in one swoop. At least I had to dilute this book (it is the complete stories, so no surprise there) with others in order to get things sorted out in my mind.

If you are looking for magical realism, surrealism, plain craziness and something to laugh now and then, this is for you.

I honestly love Lispector and read 30% of this massive collection before DNFing it.

I don't mind the abstract nature of her writing, and can say I rather enjoy it; however, this collection was grating on me.

The repeated stories of her experiences with maids began to pull me so far out of the stories, I started using a sociological lens to view them. While some may say that detracts from one's ability to appreciate Clarice, I say, so what.

I have always seen Clarice as a witchcrafty writer with existential meanderings that pull at the soul. This collection made me see her as a rich woman who had a lot of time on her hands to pontificate the possible meaning of all emotional and psychological experiences. This didn't help me enjoy her writing at all.

I want to enjoy the rest of her novels that I have yet to finish, and if I complete this collection, I fear I won't be able to enjoy a single thing that she's written after.

if you’re into feminist literature or stories about/by/for women and you haven’t read this yet- it feels crucial that you do. and soon.