Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector

primitive animal life. I need to study
animals. I want to capture the
it
in order not to paint an eagle and a
horse, but a horse with the open wings of a great eagle.
    I shiver all over when I come into physical contact with
animals or simply see them. Animals fantasticate me. They are time that does not
measure itself. I seem to have a certain horror for the living creature that is
not human and that has my own instincts though free and indomitable. The animal
never substitutes one thing for another.
    Animals don’t laugh. Though sometimes dogs laugh. Besides
their panting mouths their smile is transmitted by eyes that start to shine and
become more sensual, while their tails wag in joyous expectation. But cats never
laugh. A “he” I know wants nothing more to do with cats. He’s through with them
forever because he had a certain female cat who periodically got frenzied. When
she was in heat her instincts were so imperative that, after long and plangent
meows, she would throw herself from the roof and injure herself on the
ground.
    Sometimes I get electrified when I see animals. I’m now
hearing the ancestral cry within me: I no longer seem to know who is the
creature, the animal or me. And I get all confused. It seems I get scared of
facing up to stifled instincts that I’m forced to acknowledge in the presence of
the animal.
    I knew a “she” who humanized animals talking to them and
giving them her own characteristics. I don’t humanize animals because it’s an
offense—you must respect their nature—I am the one who animalizes myself.
It’s not hard and comes simply. It’s just a matter of not fighting it and it’s
just surrendering.
    Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the
instant. That difficulty is human pain. It is ours. I surrender in words and
surrender when I paint.
    Holding a little bird in the half-closed cup of your hand
is terrible, like having the trembling instants inside your hand. The frightened
little bird chaotically beats thousands of wings and suddenly you have in your
half-closed hand the thin wings struggling and suddenly you can’t bear it and
quickly open your hand to free the light prisoner. Or you hand it quickly back
to its owner so that he can give it the relatively greater freedom of the cage.
Birds—I want them in the trees or flying far from my hands. I may one day grow
intimate with them and take pleasure in their lightweight presence of an
instant. “Take pleasure in their lightweight presence” gives me the feeling of
having written a complete sentence because it says exactly what it is: the
levitation of the birds.
    It would never occur to me to have an owl, though I have
painted them in caves. But a “she” found a fledgling on the forest floor in
Santa Teresa all alone and bereft of a mother. She took it home. She cuddled it.
She fed it and cooed to it and eventually found out that it liked raw meat. When
it grew up you might expect it to flee immediately but it was in no hurry to go
off in search of its destiny that would be to join others of its mad race: it
had grown fond, that diabolical bird, of the girl. Until in a leap—as if
struggling with itself—it freed itself with a flight into the depth of the
world.
    I have seen wild horses in the meadows where at night the
white horse—king of nature—cast into the high air its long neigh of glory. I
have had perfect relations with them. I remember standing with the same
haughtiness as the horse and running my hand through its naked fur. Through its
wild mane. I felt like this: the woman and the horse.
    I know old stories but that renews themselves now. The he
told me that for some time he lived with part of his family in a little village
in a valley in the high snowy Pyrenees. In the winter the starving wolves came
down from the mountains to the village on the track of prey. All the inhabitants
bolted themselves attentive in their houses sheltering in the main room sheep
and horses and dogs and