The Sleeping Part

by Clarice Lispector, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

When Ermelinda came down the dentist's stairs into the Rua Barata Ribeiro at a quarter past three in the afternoon, she had half a mouth.

The other half had stayed upstairs. That was how she felt it, and she knew it was a foolish way to feel it, and she felt it so anyway. Doctor Teodoro had pressed the needle into the back of her gum, on the left, below, and said in the voice of a man who has said it ten thousand times: a little prick, Dona Ermelinda. Then the warmth had gone down her jaw like slow water, and her lip had grown large, and then her lip had grown absent. He drilled. She heard the drill through her bones rather than her ears, a sound like a fly inside a closed jar. He filled the tooth. He said: nothing to eat for two hours, and be careful not to bite your lip, people bite their lip and don't know it. She said thank you. Half of the thank you came out.

Now she was standing on the pavement with her handbag over her arm and her gloves in her hand. It was August, the winter of Rio, which is not a winter but a pause, and the sun was white on the shop windows, and she put one finger to her lower lip.

It was there.

It was there and it was not hers. She pressed it. Under her finger was a thing of a certain softness and a certain warmth, a living thing, like the ear of a calf, like a ripe fig through its skin. The finger felt the lip. The lip did not feel the finger. It was as if she were touching a stranger's mouth in the dark, with permission, and the stranger was asleep.

She took the finger away quickly, as one takes a hand away from something in a shop one does not mean to buy.

---

I must say now that Ermelinda was not a woman to whom things happened. She was forty-one years old. She had married Augusto at twenty-three and she had not regretted it, which is not the same as having been glad of it every day, but which is something, it is a great deal, it is perhaps the most that can be honestly said of anything. They had no children. This had not been a tragedy. It had been at first a question, then a sadness, then an arrangement of the furniture, so that the second bedroom held the sewing machine and Augusto's files from the insurance office. She ironed on Tuesdays. She went to the dentist every six months, and every six months the dentist found nothing, and this time, for the first time in years, he had found something: a little darkness at the edge of a molar, a beginning. She had been almost pleased. Something in her had been beginning without asking her.

That is all you need to know about her, and it is already too much. I have made her smaller by telling it.

---

She walked to the bus stop. Her shoes were sensible and did not hurt, and she walked well in them, a woman going home.

Beside the stop there was a pharmacy, and she saw herself in its window, between a pyramid of soap and a poster for a tonic. And here was the scandal: her face was entirely normal. A woman of a certain age in a navy-blue dress with white buttons, a little powder, a mouth. Nobody passing could know that half of that mouth was unattended. She was going through Copacabana with a part of herself switched off, the way one leaves the light off in a room one is not using, and the city did not know. A man selling lottery tickets looked at her and looked away. A girl in a school uniform went by eating a pastel and did not look at all.

How many of them.

How many of them were walking with a part asleep. It was not a thought. It went through her like the warmth of the injection, from the back toward the front. She looked at the man with the lottery tickets. His mouth was moving, he was calling out his numbers, and she could not tell, she could not tell at all, whether he felt his own lips.

The bus came. She paid the conductor and sat by a window on the left side, so that her sleeping half was toward the glass and her waking half toward the people. She did not decide this. Afterward she noticed that she had done it, and she was ashamed, as if she had hidden something.

---

The bus went into the tunnel. In the tunnel the window became a mirror, and in the mirror there was a woman with a yellow face under the yellow lamps, and the lamps went by over her head, one, and one, and one, like the beads of a rosary told by someone in a hurry. She put her tongue against the inside of her cheek. The tongue was hers — half hers. On the left it had gone to sleep as well, and when she moved it along her teeth it came to a border, a line drawn exactly down the middle of her, where on one side there was Ermelinda and on the other side there was —

What was there?

Not nothing. It would have been easier if it were nothing. Nothing she would have understood, the way one understands the dead. But this was there, it was flesh, it was warm, the blood went through it; she knew the blood went through it, Doctor Teodoro had told her once that the blood carries the anaesthetic away, that is why it wears off. So the blood was visiting that country and coming back. Only she was not admitted.

It was like a room in her own house that had been let to a lodger.

It was like that and it was not like that at all. It was simply itself, and she had no comparison for it, and she went on making comparisons the way a woman in the dark goes on feeling along the wall although she knows there is no switch there.

---

Across the aisle a little boy was sitting on his mother's lap. He was perhaps four. He had a paper cone of roasted peanuts and he was not eating them. He was looking at Ermelinda with the terrible frankness of those who have not yet learned that faces are to be looked at only briefly. She did what one does. She smiled at him.

The boy's face changed.

He did not cry. He looked, and then he pressed himself back against his mother's chest, and he went on looking, gravely, as one looks at a dog that may or may not be friendly. And Ermelinda understood that she had smiled with half a mouth. On one side her lips had lifted; she had felt them lift. On the other side — she could not know what the other side had done. It had done something without her. It had lifted late, or not at all, or it had hung there, heavy and indifferent, and the boy had seen two women at once: one who was being kind to him, and one who did not care whether he lived.

And he was right. That was what made her hands go cold in her lap. He was right, the other one did not care. The other one was neither kind nor unkind. It was before kindness. It had been there the whole time, under the smile, under all her smiles of forty-one years, for the butcher, for Augusto's mother, for the priest at her father's funeral, and the injection had not made it. The injection had only lifted the cloth, as one lifts the cloth off a cage in the morning, and there it was, awake, on its perch.

She stopped smiling. She looked at the boy with her whole face still, both halves alike, and the boy eased a little against his mother, and ate a peanut.

---

At home the apartment was as she had left it. That is always a surprise, and it should not be. The clock in the living room. The cushion with the embroidered parrot. The smell of floor wax, and under it, faintly, the smell of gas from the kitchen, which Augusto said she imagined.

She took off her hat. She was thirsty — the dentist always made her thirsty, the cotton rolls drank her mouth dry — and she went into the kitchen and filled a glass from the clay filter and drank.

The water ran out of the left side of her mouth and down her chin and onto the front of her navy-blue dress.

She stood still. She did not feel the water on her chin; she felt it lower, at the jaw, where the waking began, a cold line arriving from nowhere, as if it had been poured on her from inside. She looked down at the dark spreading on the blue cloth, over the white button. A child's stain. She thought she would laugh, and she did not laugh, and then she did something she would not have been able to explain to anyone, to Augusto, to the priest, to herself in another hour: she drank again, slowly, on purpose, and let it run.

She let it run. She stood at the sink and let the water go into the half of her that wanted it and out of the half that did not know there was water in the world, and her dress grew wet and heavy against her breast, and it was the first time in her grown life that she had let anything spill.

Then she put the glass down, very carefully, so that it would not make a sound.

---

Be careful not to bite your lip, people bite their lip and don't know it.

She sat down at the kitchen table. The oilcloth was green with white squares. She put her elbows on it, which her mother had forbidden. She put the tip of her finger against her lower lip again, and this time she did not take it away. She pressed, and pressed harder, until the nail went white and she could feel — in the finger — the hard edge of her teeth behind the lip. The lip felt nothing. It allowed. It was like pressing the cushion with the parrot on it.

And she wanted.

I do not know how to say what she wanted, because she did not know, and I will not lie by knowing more than she did. It was not a wish to be hurt. It was the opposite, or it was the same thing seen from the other side: it was the wish to find out whether something could be done to her and she not be there when it was done. Whether a part of her could be touched, could be used, could be — and she absent. As at a wedding where the bride sends a cousin in her place. As on so many nights.

She put her lower lip between her teeth.

Gently, first. Her teeth knew what they were holding. Her teeth were awake, her jaw was awake behind the hinge, it was only the flesh that slept. She closed. She closed more. A pressure reached her from somewhere far back, in the bone, a news of pressure, a rumour, like hearing that there has been a fire in another city. Nothing else. She closed more. The lip gave, the way the skin of a grape gives just before it breaks —

And then a taste. Iron, and salt, and something sweetish. On the right side of her tongue, which was awake.

She let go.

She sat with her mouth a little open, breathing through it, and the taste of her own blood came and went on the waking half of her tongue, and on the other half nothing. There was no thought. There was the green oilcloth and the white squares and the clock in the other room and the taste. Here was Ermelinda's blood. It tasted of a key, of the coins one held in one's mouth as a child, and it had been inside her for forty-one years in the dark, warm, going round and round, faithful, without anyone ever asking it anything.

She got up and looked in the little mirror by the kitchen door, the one where Augusto checked his tie. She pulled her lip down with two fingers. On the inside, pink and wet, there was a small half-moon of dark red, already closing. It was a very small wound. A child's wound. It was nothing. It was the most important thing that had happened to her that year, and she would never be able to tell it, because to tell it would turn it into nothing, and it was not nothing. It was small, which is something else.

She pressed a folded handkerchief against it and sat down again.

---

At about half past five the ants began.

That is what it was like, the waking: a crowd of very small feet arriving in her lip from the direction of the chin, and spreading, and multiplying, and where they walked the lip became hers again. First at the edge. Then toward the middle. It did not hurt. It tickled in a way that was almost unbearable and could not be scratched, because there was nothing yet to scratch, there was only the arriving. She sat very still at the kitchen table and listened to herself come back.

And she was sad.

Do not misunderstand me. She was glad, too. She had been a little afraid, on the bus, that it would not come back, that Doctor Teodoro had made some mistake and she would go about for the rest of her life with half a smile, frightening children. She did not want that. Nobody wants that. But as the feeling came back into her, crumb by crumb, something was being taken from her at the same time, the way the sea takes the sand from under one's feet while one stands in it — that long neutral country, that place in her where nothing was required. It was closing. The border was moving left, across her mouth, like a shadow at noon. Soon the whole of her lip would be Ermelinda again, would answer for itself again, would feel the kiss and the coffee and the cold and the words. Would have to be there.

The little wound woke last. When it woke, it hurt. It hurt with a small, exact, honest pain, precisely the size of itself, and she put her tongue on it, and it hurt, and she put her tongue on it again.

---

Augusto came in at twenty to seven, with the evening paper and the smell of the bus in his jacket. He kissed her on the left cheek, as always, because that was where his face arrived when he leaned. She felt it. She felt all of it, the slight roughness at the end of his day, the warmth, the habit.

"So?" he said. "The dentist?"

"A small filling."

"Did it hurt?"

She looked at him. He was hanging his jacket over the back of a chair, which she had asked him for eighteen years not to do, and he was not looking at her. He was asking the way one asks. And she loved him, in that moment, with a strange clarity, as one loves a piece of bread.

"No," she said. "Nothing hurt."

It was a lie and it was the truth, and she said it without hesitating, and her mouth said it whole.

She had changed her dress before he came. The blue one was hanging in the bathroom over the tub, still dark at the breast. He would not notice. He did not notice. They had rice and beans and a fried egg each, and a slice of guava paste with white cheese, and she chewed on the right, carefully, and he talked about a man at the office called Siqueira who had been passed over, and she said yes, and no, and what a shame, all of it with her whole mouth, which was awake now, which was hers, which was tired.

---

In the night she did not sleep.

Augusto slept beside her on his back, as he did, with his mouth a little open. The light of the street lamp in the Rua Voluntários da Pátria came through the gap in the curtains and lay across the bed in a strip, and the strip fell across his face, across the mouth. She lay on her side and looked at it. It moved a little with his breath. It was a mouth she had kissed — she tried to count, and could not — perhaps ten thousand times. She had never seen it before.

Inside her own mouth the little half-moon beat, faithfully, at the pace of her heart. She touched it with her tongue. It hurt. She touched it again.

Did he feel his lip, now, asleep? Was it his? Or did sleep take him all at once, both halves, the whole country, and leave only the mouth, open, breathing, attending to nothing, neither kind nor unkind, before kindness — the mouth that had always been there, under all his words?

She did not know. She would never know. It is not a thing one can ask.

Slowly, so as not to wake him, she put out one finger into the strip of light and touched his lower lip. It was warm. It was soft, like the ear of a calf, like a fig. He did not stir.

She left her finger there.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Clārīce Lispectōre per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Clarice Lispector, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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