The Departure of the Train by Clarice Lispector

The Departure of the Train [1974/2015] – ★★★★★

This is Clarice Lispector’s short story about two women who board a train at Rio de Janeiro Central Station. They are strangers to one another, and find themselves on “opposite sides of life”. Dona Maria Rita is an aging widow, who has seen everything in her life and now is going to her son’s farm “to spend the rest of her life there”, while Angela Pralini is an independent, vivacious young woman who begins a new life chapter since she has recently broken off her passionate relationship with one cerebral Eduardo (“because you can’t prolong ecstasy without dying”). She is going to spend time with her aunt and uncle in the countryside, and is looking forward to this new adventure and simple life on the farm. We read these two women’s contrasting thoughts as they ride in a shared train carriage.

The story is about the women’s contrasting positions in life, and their respective thoughts racing in their heads, seemingly determined to overtake one another. Their worlds are different and, yet, there will come a time when these worlds will meet through one shared female experience, and, physically, they have already crossed paths. Lispector shows that what one thinks is also one’s reality, as concrete as this earth we walk on, and, at times, that reality is more “real” to a person than any observable action. An individual thought is undeniable, no matter how unimaginable it is to someone else, but also powerful, since it gives rise to beliefs, convictions and actions.

In her short story (translated from the Portugese by Katrina Dodson), Lispector gives significance and life to the world of the unsaid, to hidden fear, apprehension, joy, and introspection, ruminating on time, love, society, old age, and death. The old woman fears isolation, loneliness, and abandonment, being not wanted or needed anymore, thinking at one point “She didn’t do anything, all she did was this: be old…You reach a certain point—and it no longer matters what you were. A new race begins. An old woman cannot be communicated…she was already the future”. While this is the preoccupation of Dona Maria Rita, Angela has her own age’s troubles, and they are not far from loneliness either. Her romance with Eduardo burned her up, becoming too passionate, too intellectual, too dangerous, too hidden: “the rare ones are persecuted by the people who don’t tolerate the insulting offense of those who are different. They hid their love so as not to wound the eyes of others with envy. So as not to wound them with a spark too luminous for the eyes”. She saw leaving as the only solution to regain control of her own life.

Lispector’s choice of words is akin to that of a poet making sense of the introspective world through just a few rhymed lines: “she made use of the train’s screaming whistle as her own scream. It was a piercing howl, hers, only turned inward” (the thoughts of Angela), and “the old woman was pretending to be reading a newspaper. But she was thinking: her world was a sigh” (Dona Maria Rita’s thoughts). Lispector is also aware of the language’s limitations in expressing truth: “I think that if I happened upon the truth, I wouldn’t be able to think it. It would be mentally unpronounceable.” Will the two women find the solution to their present concerns in their destination? We can only guess. In the countryside, with its freedoms and simple joys, one woman can finally break off from the suffocating world of her distant, busy daughter, and another – escape the high intellectualism of her boyfriend’s circle that has started to dwarf her own intelligence.

The Departure of the Train is the kind of short story that conveys emotions and insights another author would need a whole novel to express. Lispector cuts through subconscious processes effortlessly, exposing uncomfortable truths people have borne inside for years, but have been unable to express. That is the miracle of Lispector’s literary talent. There is always something beyond simple feelings or understanding, and the author captures it with the fewest words possible.