The center of this community was the Praça Maciel Pinheiro, known in Yiddish as the pletzele, or little square, and it was here, at number 367, that Clarice Lispector would spend her childhood. “The house was so old that the floorboards bounced when we walked,” Tania Lispector remembered. “It had colonial windows, a balcony, colonial roof tiles, it really was very old. … We lived on the second floor. We eventually moved because we were afraid that the house would fall over.”17 (It is, however, still there.) The square was named for a local hero of the Paraguayan War and was ornamented with a large and splendid fountain made in Lisbon and decorated with the likenesses of Indians. But “there weren’t many friendships with the Pernambucans,” Tania recalled, meaning the Gentiles;18 indeed the pletzele and the surrounding streets were almost as Jewish as the shtetlach its inhabitants had recently abandoned.
Just on the small square itself were Jacob and Lea Lederman’s sodevosser (soda water) parlor; the furniture stores of Maurício Gandelsman, Adolfo Cornistean, Benjamim Berenstein, Moisés Rastolder, Isaac Schwarts, Israel Fainbaum, Leopoldo Edelman, and the Iampolsky brothers; a ready-made clothes store belonging to Júlio and Ana Guendler and Moisés Rochman; the variety store of the memoirist Avrum Ishie Vainer; and Natan and Freida Pincovsky’s fabric shop.19 The Rua Imperatriz, which led from the pletzele down to the Capibaribe River, was also heavily Jewish. There was the Casas Feld, an upscale clothing shop presided over by Luiz Feldmus and his wife, a glamorous figure known in Recife as Madame Clara. There were Jewish bakeries and Jewish dry-goods stores, a Jewish school, and Jacob Berenstein’s Livraria Imperatriz, long the best bookshop in Recife and a gathering place of the city’s intelligentsia.
There were also the institutions, the schools, the synagogues. A few feet from the Lispectors’ door, on the corner of the Rua do Aragão, was the Cooperativa Banco Popular Israelita de Pernambuco, a volunteer “bank” that operated with donations from the community, open from seven to ten on Wednesday evenings. The Cooperativa, which charged no interest on what now would be called microloans, was an essential ingredient in the community’s upward mobility, helping new arrivals set up as peddlers, and peddlers set up as shopkeepers.
Months before her death Clarice Lispector made her final trip to Recife to give a speech at the university. She insisted on staying in the Hotel São Domingos, on the corner of the Praça Maciel Pinheiro, on the site of the old Jewish bank. She spent hours gazing out the window at the little square where she grew up. “That little garden in the square, where taxi drivers flirted with maids, seemed like a forest to me, a world—my world, where I hid things I could never again recover.”20 After all those years only the color of the house had changed. “I remember looking out from the balcony on the Praça Maciel Pinheiro, in Recife, and being afraid of falling: I thought everything was so tall. … It was painted pink. Does a color end? It vanishes into the air, my God.”21
An interviewer asked, “We know that you spent your childhood here in Recife, but does Recife still exist within Clarice Lispector?” She answered, “It is all alive inside me.”22
Her father’s poverty and her mother’s illness conspired against it, but in interviews and occasional writing Clarice always remembered a happy childhood. “Look, I didn’t know we were poor, see?” she said in a later interview. “Not too long ago I asked Elisa, my oldest sister, if we ever went hungry and she said almost. In Recife, in a square, there was a man who sold a kind of orangeade that the oranges had managed to avoid. That and a piece of bread was our lunch.”23
Clarice was lucky to be the youngest child. Unlike her parents and her sisters, she had no memory of the family’s trials in Europe. Where her sisters had been tortured and starved, she was cosseted and spoiled. Her sister Tania remembered that Clarice was strikingly beautiful even as a baby, and that the family and their neighbors doted on her.24 Mischievous and energetic, Clarice was a gifted mimic by the age of four, Tania said. “She went to the kindergarten (one of the first of its kind and very different from the way they are today), a pretty strict place, and Clarice, who was already critical and analytical at that age, came home and imitated the teacher’s every move, to hilarious effect. We asked her to do it again and she did, imitating the way the teacher ordered the group around, interrupting every activity to say ‘Clap your hands, now relax.’ ”25 Seventy years later, Tania could still recall her amazement when they went to the doctor or the dentist and Clarice could immediately imitate all the postures of everyone in the waiting room.
Where Elisa and Tania were somewhat timid, Clarice was a natural leader. “Clarice had lots of friends at school. But she was selective, and she was the one who chose her friends,” Tania remembered. “I was kind of bossy,” Clarice admitted. She was also “very imaginative. She was the one who made up the games,” Tania said. “One of them, for example, with a little cousin her age, Clarice in the lead, went like this: ‘Let’s play “Two Ladies.” ’ And they would spend hours playing, irreverently imitating the words and attitudes of housewives.” “Before I could read and write I already made up stories,” Clarice recalled. “I even invented, with a somewhat passive friend of mine, a never-ending story. … I started, everything got very difficult, they both died. … Then she came in and said they weren’t actually as dead as all that. And then it all started over again.”26
Bertha Lispector Cohen, her cousin, recalled that Clarice had names for all the tiles in the shower and for all her pens and pencils. “When I started to read and write, I also started to write little stories,” she said.27 After seeing a play she returned home inspired to write her own, Poor Little Rich Girl, three acts in two pages, which she hid and then lost. She wrote to the children’s page of the Diário de Pernambuco, which on Thursdays published stories sent in by young readers. “I kept sending and sending my stories, but they never published them, and I knew why. Because the others went like this: ‘Once upon a time, and so on and so forth.’ And mine were sensations.”28 “They were stories without fairies, without pirates. So nobody wanted to publish them.”29
“She didn’t study much,” Tania said,30 but she always got good grades. “In everything except behavior,” Clarice added.31 At her first school, the João Barbalho School, a few streets from the Praça Maciel Pinheiro, she became the inseparable companion of Leopoldo Nachbin, a little boy her age who himself had a colorful family history. His father, Jacob Nachbin, had immigrated to Brazil at some point after the First World War. An orphan and an autodidact, he nonetheless became a celebrity in the Yiddish press of the country, traveling to Argentina and Uruguay and later back to Europe, where he was supposed to recruit more immigrants for Brazil. Despite his utter lack of education, he nonetheless became the first Jewish historian to examine the history of the Jewish communities in Brazil, and was a noted poet besides. Eventually he abandoned his Brazilian family and went to the United States.32
Leopoldo, the son he left behind in Recife, grew up to be Brazil’s greatest mathematician. At the João Barbalho School in Recife, however, Leopoldo Nachbin and Clarice Lispector were just “the two impossibles of the class.” The teacher separated them, but in vain: “Leopoldo and I just shouted across the room whatever we had to say to each other.” Leopoldo became, besides her father, Clarice’s first masculine protector, “and he did such a good job that for the rest of my life I have accepted and wanted masculine protection.”33
With a friend she stole roses from the gardens of the better-off residents of Recife: “It was a street without trams, where cars rarely passed. In the midst of my silence and the silence of the rose, there was my desire to possess it as something all my own.” She and a friend ran into the garden, plucked a rose, and made their escape. “It was so good that I simply began stealing roses. The process was always the same: the girl on the lookout, I running in, breaking the stem, and fleeing with the rose in my hand. Always, my heart beating; always a glory that nobody could take from me.”34
The fullest portrait of this bright, impish c
hild can be found in her own first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, published when she was twenty-three. Like so many of Clarice’s fictional manufactures, the main character, Joana, bears a striking resemblance to her creator: the same family circumstances, the same headstrong personality, the same resistance to convention. (“To what extent are you Joana?” an interviewer once asked. She replied: “Madame Bovary c’est moi.”)35 And the same nearness to the wild heart, the same animal-like existence. “Not having been born an animal is one of my secret nostalgias,” Clarice once wrote.36 “Maybe it’s because I’m a Sagittarian, half beast.”37 People who met her frequently compared her to an animal, often a feline: elegant, unknowable, potentially violent. “She was perfectly dressed, long and beautiful, like one of those Egyptian cats,” one friend remembered.38 “Her Slavic face impressed me, strong and beautiful, with something of a feline animal,” the poet Ferreira Gullar remembered. “For me she had the aura of a myth, so impressed had I been by her strange books, woven from a magical language, without an equivalent in Brazilian literature.”39 “Other people think I seem like a tiger, like a panther,” Clarice told an interviewer. He replied, “Because of your eyes—but that’s not it. It’s because you have a cat’s inner composure, that feline way of always being on the lookout.”40 Joana, Clarice wrote, “seemed like a wild cat, her eyes blazing above her fiery cheeks.”41
As a girl, Clarice was “surrounded by cats”: “I had a cat who sometimes had a litter. And I wouldn’t let them get rid of any of the kittens. The result was that the house was happy for me, but hellish for the grownups.”42 She spent hours with the chickens and hens in the yard: “I understand a hen, perfectly. I mean, the intimate life of a hen, I know how it is.”43 When, as an adult, friends recommended a movie starring a French actress who, they said, bore a striking resemblance to Clarice, she had eyes only for the woman’s horse. “I identified more strongly with the black horse than with Barbara Laage,” she wrote.44
“The people here look at me as if I had come straight from the Zoological Gardens,” she wrote a friend from the city of Belo Horizonte. “I entirely agree.”45 The cat-like eyes and their intense gaze, “which no one could stand for long,” were unsettling, and became increasingly so as she aged.46 “Who was she? the viper,” Joana says to herself, using the word her hateful aunt uses to describe her: “She is a strange animal, Alberto,” says the aunt, “without friends and without God—may he forgive me!” And Joana’s own husband, shocked by her behavior, explodes, “Wicked … Evil … Viper! Viper! Viper!”47
She confessed to stealing roses, but there is no evidence that the young Clarice, like Joana, engaged in shoplifting, and certainly no hint that she, like Joana, was given to flinging heavy objects at the heads of elderly men. Nonetheless, as most of Clarice Lispector’s later work will prove, this alliance with the animal kingdom is far more disturbing than any juvenile delinquency. Joana’s family is right to be shocked by her, for Joana is simply the most notable early instance of the embrace of an animal nature that, in Clarice Lispector, approaches a philosophical ideal. This is her complete refusal of any anthropocentric morality.
Morality, Fernando Pessoa wrote, is “the effort to elevate human life, to give it a human value.”48 It is this attempt to cut life down to human size—any sense that life is human or that the universe is organized to comfort humans—that Clarice will most famously reject in The Passion According to G. H., the monumental novel of 1964 in which the protagonist realizes her identity to a cockroach. Clarice’s amorality, as she herself will come to realize, is so horrifying and absolute that taking it to its logical end means madness: in that book she appalls herself much as Joana shocks her relatives.
Given the savage circumstances of Clarice’s early life, she could hardly have reached any other conclusion than that life is not human and has no “human value.” There was no more reason for her existence than there was for the cockroach’s. Blind luck was the only reason she had survived the Ukrainian horrors when so many millions of others had perished. The conclusion that the nature of the world is random and senseless was the only logical one, but to understand the random animal nature of the world was necessarily to reject the conventional morality that meant assigning human meanings to the inhuman world. A person with her history could never be satisfied by a lame fiction of a universe subject to human control.
Life, instead, was neutral and universal, without human value, beyond human knowledge and therefore—like the great holy name of God, which for the Jews is simultaneously unknowable and the ultimate mystical goal—beyond human language, impossible to name or describe. All humans can do is place themselves in contact with that universal life. This is the importance of Joana’s animality, for this will become the mystical goal of Clarice Lispector’s writing.
In childhood, of course, Clarice did not enunciate this concept as clearly as she would in her maturity. But the feline beauty, the intellectual and spiritual rebelliousness already fascinated and disturbed. Of Joana, Clarice wrote, “She had a crystalline, hard quality that simultaneously attracted and repulsed.”49 And of herself, she said, “As I well know, for they have told me so themselves, certain people think I am dangerous.”50
Joana is not only animal-like; she is also, like Clarice, an eccentric linguistic prodigy. “As a little girl she could play with a word for a whole afternoon,” Clarice wrote of her.51 In one of the last manuscript fragments, found after her death, Clarice scrawled, “A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.”52
Like Clarice, Joana is close to her father, a widower, whom she seeks out to show off her newest inventions.
“Daddy, I made up a poem.”
“What’s it called?”
“Me and the sun.” Without waiting long she recited: “The hens who are in the yard already ate two earthworms but I didn’t see it.”
“Yes? What do you and the sun have to do with the poem?”
She looked at him for a second. He hadn’t understood. …
“The sun is shining on the earthworms, Daddy, and I made the poem and I didn’t see the earthworms.”53
This is the same child who, in her submissions to the Diário de Pernambuco’s children’s page, found it impossible to write the “Once upon a time” stories the editors expected. In Near to the Wild Heart she gives an example of the child’s tendency to use words to evoke sensations, the word “Lalande,” which she invents and then defines: “It’s like angel tears. Do you know what angel tears are? A kind of little narcissus, which the slightest breeze pushes from one side to the other. Lalande is also the sea in the morning, when no one has yet gazed upon the beach, when the sun is still to rise. Every time I say: Lalande, you should feel the fresh and salty breeze from the sea, you should walk along the still-dark beach, slowly, naked. Soon you will feel Lalande …”54
In a late book of stories, Where Were You at Night, Clarice proves that she never lost the habit of inventing names, spending pages playing with the name of an alarm clock, Sveglia. “A quarrel is Sveglia. I’ve just had one with the owner of the clock. I said: since you won’t let me see Sveglia, at least describe to me his works. Then she became furious—and that is Sveglia—and said that she had tons of problems—to have problems is not Sveglia. Then I tried to calm her down, and everything was O.K.”55
These nonsensical riffs, especially when sustained over many pages, have an unsettling, hypnotic effect. At first incomprehensible, like a pointillist painting seen from too close, they gather speed and power as they move forward. Joana, telling such stories at school, “surpassed herself, taking the girls along with her will and her word, filled with an ardent and cutting wit, like light licks. Until, finally enveloped, they inhaled her brilliant and suffocating air.”56
7
The Magical Stories
These childish games, however charming, were not simple pastimes. Their purpose was deadly serious. For over Clarice Lispec
tor’s happy childhood hung the terrible and unremitting sight of her paralyzed mother, Mania Krimgold Lispector, cast into a bewilderingly foreign country, unable to move or speak, trapped in a rocking chair, slowly and painfully dying. This was the dominant impression of Clarice’s childhood, and perhaps of her life. Like the lost or hidden name, the dying mother, and her child’s longing for her, would recur in almost everything Clarice wrote.
“She was like a statue in the house,” Clarice’s cousin Anita Rabin remembered.1 Elisa wrote, “Every afternoon, she sat on the balcony of the old house on the Rua da Imperatriz, dressed in stiff linen, her smooth black hair combed back, her useless arms crossed on her chest. After looking down to see what was happening on the street, pausing to look at one or other passer-by, she dropped her head to the side, her eyes staring off, like slightly deadened blue beads.”2
“I was so happy that I hid from myself the pain of seeing my mother like that,” Clarice said. “I felt so guilty, because I thought my birth had caused it. But they said she was already paralyzed.”3 Even her happiest moments were overshadowed by the woman sitting paralyzed on the balcony. In a telling anecdote, Clarice recalled the Carnival of 1929. It was to be her first, since “amidst the worries about my sick mother, nobody in the house paid much attention to a child’s Carnival.” In other years the most she got was permission to stay downstairs in the doorway until eleven, with a bag of confetti and a little ampoule of perfume to squirt on the revelers.
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