The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector Page B

my fear was of having a truth that I’d come not to want, an infamizing truth that would make me crawl along and be on the roach’s level. My first contact with truths always defamed me.
    — Hold my hand, because I feel that I’m going. I’m going once again toward the most divine primary life, I’m going toward a hell of raw life. Don’t let me see because I’m close to seeing the nucleus of life — and, through the cockroach that even now I’m seeing again, through this specimen of calm living horror, I’m afraid that in this nucleus I’ll no longer know what hope is.
    The cockroach is pure seduction. Cilia, blinking cilia that keep calling.
    I too, who was slowly reducing myself to whatever in me was irreducible, I too had thousands of blinking cilia, and with my cilia I move forward, I protozoan, pure protein. Hold my hand, I reached the irreducible with the inevitability of a death-knell — I sense that all this is ancient and vast, I sense in the hieroglyph of the slow roach the writing of the Far East. And in this desert of great seductions, the creatures: I and the living roach. Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.

I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.
    It was then — it was then that as if from a tube the matter began slowly oozing out of the roach that had been crushed.
    The roach’s matter, which was its insides, the thick, whitish and slow matter, was coming out as from a tube of toothpaste.
    Before my nauseated and seduced eyes, the shape of the roach began slowly modifying as it swelled outward. The white matter slowly spilled atop its back like a burden. Immobilized, it was bearing atop its dusty flanks the weight of its own body.
    “Scream,” I calmly ordered myself. “Scream,” I repeated uselessly with a sigh of deep quietude.
    The white thickness had halted atop its scales. I looked at the ceiling, briefly resting the eyes that I felt had become deep and large.
    But if I screamed even once, I might never again be able to stop. If I screamed nobody could ever help me again; whereas, if I never revealed my neediness, I wouldn’t scare anybody and they would help me unawares; but only if I didn’t scare anybody by venturing outside the rules. But if they find out, they’ll be scared, we who keep the scream as an inviolable secret. If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being.
    I looked at the ceiling with heavy eyes. Everything could be fiercely summed up in never emitting a first scream — a first scream unleashes all the others, the first scream at birth unleashes a life, if I screamed I would awaken thousands of screaming beings who would loose upon the rooftops a chorus of screams and horror. If I screamed I would unleash the existence — the existence of what? the existence of the world. With reverence I feared the existence of the world for me.
    — Because, hand that sustains me, because I, in a trial I never want again, in a trial for which I ask pardon for myself, I was exiting my world and entering the world.
    Because I was no longer seeing myself, I was simply seeing. A whole civilization that had sprung up, with the guarantee that what one sees be mixed immediately with what one feels, an entire civilization whose foundation is salvation — so I was in its ruins. The only ones who could depart this civilization were those whose special role is to depart it: a scientist is given leave, a priest is given permission. But not a woman who doesn’t even have the guarantees of a title. And I was fleeing, uneasily I was fleeing.
    If you knew the solitude of those first steps of mine. It wasn’t like the solitude of a person. It was as if I’d