The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

I repeated it slowly as if each repetition could command the pulses of my heart, the beats that were spaced too widely like the soreness of a pain I couldn’t feel.
    Until — finally managing to hear myself, finally managing to get myself under control — I lifted my hand high in the air as if my whole body, along with the blow of my arm, would come down against the wardrobe door.
    But that was when I saw the roach’s face.
    It was sticking straight out, at the height of my head and my eyes. For a second I sat there with my hand frozen in the air. Then I gradually lowered it.
    A second earlier I might still have been able not to see the countenance on the cockroach’s face.
    But it happened a fraction of a second too late: I was seeing. My hand, which had lowered when it abandoned its determination to strike, was slowly rising back to stomach-level: though I myself hadn’t moved, my stomach had cringed inside my body. My mouth was terribly dry, I ran an equally dry tongue over my rough lips.
    It was a face without a contour. The antennae stuck out in whiskers on either side of its mouth. Its brown mouth was well-drawn. The long and slender whiskers were moving slow and dry. Its black faceted eyes were looking. It was a cockroach as old as a fossilized fish. It was a cockroach as old as salamanders and chimeras and griffins and leviathans. It was as ancient as a legend. I looked at its mouth: there was the real mouth.
    I had never seen a roach’s mouth. I in fact — I had never actually seen a cockroach. I had just been repulsed by its ancient and ever-present existence — but had never actually come face-to-face with one, not even in thought.
    And so I was discovering that, though compact, a roach is composed of layers and brown layers, fine as onionskin, as if each could be lifted by a fingernail and still there would always be another underneath, and then another. Maybe the scales were its wings, but then it must be made of layers and layers of thin wings pressed together to form that compact body.
    It was reddish-brown. And had cilia all over. Maybe the cilia were its multiple legs. The antennae were now still, dry and dusty strands.
    A cockroach doesn’t have a nose. I looked at it, with that mouth and eyes: it looked like a dying mulatto woman. But its eyes were radiant and black. The eyes of a bride. Each individual eye looked like a cockroach. The fringed, dark, dustless and living eye. And the other eye was the same. Two roaches implanted in the roach, and each eye reproduced the entire cockroach.

Each eye reproduced the entire cockroach.
    — Pardon me for giving you this, hand holding mine, but I don’t want this for myself! take that roach, I don’t want what I saw.
    There I was open-mouthed and offended and withdrawn — faced with the dusty being looking back at me. Take what I saw: because what I was seeing with an embarrassment so painful and so frightened and so innocent, what I was seeing was life looking back at me.
    How else could I describe that crude and horrible, raw matter and dry plasma, that was there, as I shrank into myself with dry nausea, I falling centuries and centuries inside a mud — it was mud, and not even dried mud but mud still damp and still alive, it was a mud in which the roots of my identity were still shifting with unbearable slowness.
    Take it, take all this for yourself, I don’t want to be a living person! I’m disgusted and amazed by myself, thick mud slowly oozing.
    That’s what it was — so that’s what it was. Because I’d looked at the living roach and was discovering inside it the identity of my deepest life. In a difficult demolition, hard and narrow paths were opening within me.
    I looked at it, at the roach: I hated it so much that I was going over to its side, feeling solidarity with it, since I couldn’t stand being left alone with my aggression.
    And all of a sudden I moaned out loud, this time I heard my moan. Because rising to my surface like pus