Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  This Carnival was to be different, though, “as if the streets of Recife finally explained why they had been made.” A friend’s mother had decided to dress up her daughter in pink crepe paper and offered to make Clarice, eight years old, a costume as well; she would be dressed up as a rose. “When I was all dressed up in crepe paper, with my hair in rollers and still without my lipstick and rouge—my mother’s health abruptly took a turn for the worst, there was a sudden tumult in the house, and I had to run off to the pharmacy to buy her medicine. I ran dressed as a rose … running, running, baffled, astonished, through the streamers, confetti, and cries of Carnival. The happiness of those other people frightened me. When, hours later, things had calmed down at home, my sister did my hair and makeup. But something had died inside me.”4

  The mutilated woman was completely dependent on her husband and her daughters, especially the eldest, Elisa, whose book speaks movingly of the emotional and material strain of her mother’s illness, both on her father, whose “rebelliousness had given way to a profound sadness,”5 and on herself. Most of her childhood had already been robbed by the terror of the Ukraine; now, in the new country, she was forced to spend what was left of it in constant attendance on her helpless mother.

  She longed to leave the house—“sad, and uninviting for outsiders”—but when she did, to go to the Jewish club, for example, located on the same Praça Maciel Pinheiro, she was so unused to social interaction that she felt even more out of place and hurried home.6 Over the distressing protests of her mother, she had to leave for school. “My daughter, I don’t want to live, I can’t go on,” the mother tells the Elisa of In Exile in a particularly pathetic scene. “Mother,” the girl answers, trying to encourage her, “you won’t get better this way. Take pity on yourself, and on us. Stop crying. I have to go to school.” “No, don’t go today, just today,” her mother pleads.7

  However awful the situation, Elisa, Tania, and Pedro were at least in a position to help. Pedro could work to earn money to pay for her medicines; Tania and Elisa could feed her, undress her, put her to bed. But Clarice was too small to be able to offer any real assistance. The only help she could offer was magical. She implored God to help her mother, and, according to Bertha Lispector Cohen, she put together little plays to entertain her, sometimes succeeding in making the doomed “statue” laugh. Anita Rabin remembered that, when Clarice was inventing stories, using props such as pencils or tiles, she contrived magical endings in which a miraculous intervention cured her mother’s illness. “We were always worried about it,” Anita said. “I was struck by that dream, that something could cure her.”8

  A little girl’s stories were not enough to save a woman with a devastating terminal illness. And Mania no longer wanted to be saved. “Don’t cry when I die,” Elisa remembered her mother saying. “It will be such a great relief for me.”9 Mania knew the end was nearing. “Resigned and God-fearing, Mother asked Father to buy her a new sidur (prayer book), and she prayed for an entire week, at the end of which she died.”10

  Mania Krimgold Lispector was forty-two years old when, on September 21, 1930, her long suffering finally ended. She was buried in the Israelite Cemetery of Barro, a distant suburb of Recife. Her mother Charna’s silver candlesticks, which she had miraculously rescued from their homeland, were given, as she had asked, to the small local synagogue. The family avoided reference to her, Elisa wrote, having “tacitly agreed to avoid the subject, omitting her name, because she was present in all their thoughts and actions.”11

  Clarice’s trick had failed. Her dreams of divine intervention were disappointed. But the habit she learned in early childhood, of playing with words and telling stories to assure a miraculous outcome, stuck. Half a century later, when Clarice Lispector, herself consumed by a terminal disease, left her house for the last time, she would resort to the same tactic. “Let’s pretend that we’re not going to the hospital, that I’m not sick, and that we’re going to Paris,” her friend Olga Borelli recalled her saying in a taxi on the way to the hospital. “I remember her words perfectly,” Olga went on.

  So we started making plans and talking about everything we would do in Paris. The taxi driver, poor thing, already tired from working all night long, timidly asked: “Can I go on the trip too?” And Clarice said: “Of course you can, and you can even bring your girlfriend.” He said: “My girlfriend is an old lady, seventy years old, and I don’t have any money.” Clarice answered: “She’s coming too. Let’s pretend you won the lottery.” When we got to the hospital, Clarice asked how much it was. Only twenty cruzeiros, and she gave him two hundred.12

  Needless to say, the trip to Paris never happened. Clarice Lispector died six weeks later.

  A friend once asked what Clarice thought of a painting in an Italian museum. “Ah,” he answered, when she couldn’t remember it, “it’s true, you’re one of those people who only remembers things that happened before they were ten years old.”13

  Her early childhood, its lost happiness and its immitigable tragedies, were never far from her mind. A late essay on the new capital of Brasília includes an unexpected lament: “Ah, poor me. So without a mother. It is a duty to have a mother. It is a thing of nature.”14 An interviewer discovered what was really on her mind:

  —Do you have peace [paz—a homophone of pais, parents], Clarice?

  —Neither father [pai] nor mother.

  —I said “peace.”

  —How odd, I thought you said “father.” I was thinking about my mother a few seconds before. I thought—mama—and then I didn’t hear anything else. Peace? Who does?15

  Though in the real world stories and myths proved unequal to a deadly virus, she clung to them. “She was devastated by her mother’s death,” said Anita Levy. “They told her [at school] that you couldn’t leave scissors open on the table. At home she had seen a pair of scissors open on the table. So she said that was the reason. That was why her mother died. Because someone left out an open pair of scissors.”16

  For a child, miraculous stories might have been a reasonable means of sparking divine intervention, and an open pair of scissors as good an explanation as any for an incomprehensible disaster. But the woman sitting in a taxi half a century later, dreaming of Paris on her way to the hospital, was not a child. Stories had proven powerless to save her mother, and she could not have reasonably believed in their efficacy. For an adult, silent acceptance might have seemed more fitting.

  Yet that woman had dedicated her life to writing. She scribbled notes into her last hours. Why, having seen the impotence of this activity so forcefully demonstrated, did she continue to bother? Part of it, surely, was a reflex, a resort, in a desperate situation, to an old tactic. Part of it was to comfort the other people in the taxi, distraught by their friend’s illness. In 1977, however, the illusion was not for herself. The disappointment she experienced as a nine-year-old girl taught her how worthless such poetic efforts were. Writing was the last thing that could tack a happy ending onto the end of a stubborn reality.

  But the habit stuck. Throughout her life she would search for justifications for her activities. She clung to a hope that there was something she could do to save the world. She always, sometimes bitterly, lamented her powerlessness––

  In Recife, where I lived until I was twelve, there was often a crowd on the streets, listening to someone speak ardently about the social tragedy. And I remember how I trembled and how I promised myself that this would one day be my task: to defend the rights of others.

  Yet what did I end up being, and so early? I ended up as a person who searches for what she deeply feels and uses the word to express it.

  It’s little, it’s very little.17

  —but she never sought to deny or disguise it. The problem was not hers alone: many artists were distressed by their powerlessness in the face of the horrors of the twentieth century. The atomic bombs exploded; the gas chambers hissed; a raped mother stared blankly from her rocking chair.

  One could ch
oose to embrace irrelevance, making art for art’s sake. Or one could address one’s palpable inconsequence with engagement: using fiction or drama or architecture to redress social injustices. This approach was especially attractive in Brazil, where so many wrongs demanded righting. But the problems persisted, despite (or, as in many parts of Latin America, because of) political activism. Artists who sought a greater meaning for their work were frustrated. “If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative,” V. S. Naipaul has said. “And it’s O.K., but it’s of no account. If you’re a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it’s of no account.”18

  Despite her fanciful jaunt to Paris on the way to the hospital, Clarice Lispector entertained no illusions about the greater meaning of her work. She was an animal and destined to die as one, and she never forgot the lessons she learned before she was ten years old. “It changes nothing,” she emphasized in one of her last interviews. “It changes nothing. I write without the hope that anything I write can change anything at all. It changes nothing.”19

  What, then, was the point? She would always try to discover it. But the basic instinct never changed. Among her last notes is this: “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own life.”20

  “Every story of a person is the story of his failure,” Clarice wrote, perhaps thinking of her own.21 “I was guilty from birth, she who was born with the mortal sin.”22 As long as her mother was alive, she could still hold out hope that her birth had not been in vain. With Mania’s death that possibility vanished, and a note of sadness appeared in the happy child’s personality. “I often found her crying silently, alone,” Tania remembered.23

  Her sadness and disbelief soon turned into a kind of revolt, a word that frequently recurs in her writings: the same word, perhaps not coincidentally, that Elisa attaches to their father in his youth. In the year her mother died Clarice composed a two-part piano piece: “The first was soft, the second somewhat military, somewhat violent, a revolt, I suppose.” This, in lieu of studying with the immense Dona Pupu, “who could not have been fatter” and who presided over the piano lessons Pedro Lispector had, with considerable difficulty, arranged for his daughters. Tania and Elisa enjoyed the lessons; Elisa was a talented musician and went on to study at the Recife Conservatory. Clarice, however, spent her time in class wondering how a woman as fat as Dona Pupu had ever managed to get married; she was far more interested in her own inventions than in the assigned works.24

  Tania, moved by Clarice’s quiet suffering, helped her with this and other difficulties. When Clarice didn’t want to practice piano, Tania helped her by playing the black keys while Clarice played the white, “until, to Clarice’s great relief, the piano lessons were called off.” After seeing her crying, Tania wrote, “I, as the older sister, out of love and pity, to a certain extent adopted her,” filling in for their lost mother. “This maternal-filial bond united us forever. We were more than sisters.”25

  In a fragment written in English during the years Clarice lived in the United States, she recalls her childhood and the origins of her bond with Tania. “ ‘Till you were about 10 [Tania said to Clarice] I was not very aware of you, suddenly I became aware how interesting you were.’ I suppose she really meant: I became aware how much you needed me. I don’t know what to do when the person comes to me; I’m the one to go to the person. To be selected is disturbing. I have to ask, I have to select.”26

  Through the unlikely vehicle of a piece of chewing gum, Tania introduced her younger sister to the “painful and dramatic” concept of eternity. Tania bought her the gum, novel in Recife, and said, “Be careful not to lose it, because it never ends. It lasts a lifetime.” The perplexed Clarice took it, “almost unable to believe in the miracle,” and Tania ordered her to “chew it forever.” Clarice was terrified, not wanting to confess that she was unequal to eternity, that the idea tormented her, but she didn’t dare. Finally, when they were going into school, she managed to drop the gum into the sand, feigning distress and embarrassed to be lying to her sister. “But I was relieved. Without the weight of eternity upon me.”27

  At school Clarice didn’t study much, though she got good grades. In the third grade, before her mother died, she went to a new school, the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro, on the Rua da Glória, a block or so away from the Praça Maciel Pinheiro. As the name indicates, the school taught Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to the usual disciplines. But despite her obvious talents, she did not go straight into the fourth grade, her cousin Samuel Lispector recalled. “She was really small and couldn’t even carry the bigger books, like an atlas, which was enormous. Then my uncle decided: ‘The book is too big for you. You’re not going to fourth grade.’ So she repeated a year.”28

  Perhaps her size was not the only reason she was held back. In the public school she would not have had Hebrew classes, which the other students would already have started. She seems, however, to have had a talent for the language. There are no references to Hebrew in her work, but the child with the gift for words apparently made up the gap quickly, for she was chosen to give one of the three year-end discourses the students presented to the faculty and parents, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Portuguese. The small Clarice gave the Hebrew discourse, which means she was at the top of the class.29

  Recife’s Hebrew teacher, Moysés Lazar, was a man of such progressive ideas that, Anita Rabin remembered, “We were horrified by some of the things he said [in religion class], and he wasn’t one of those people who said, No, you just have to believe it.”30 Clarice badgered him with her questions: “How did it happen?” she demanded, when he told how God gave the Torah to Moses. “God put the Torah in his hand?” Lazar told the girl, “Look, nobody saw it.”31

  These questions never left Clarice. In a manuscript from the end of her life, she wrote, “But there are questions that nobody can answer for me: who made the world? Was the world made? But where? in what place? And if it was ‘God’—who made ‘God’?”32

  Another friend remembers a heated discussion. “She was tall, thin. She was talking to her Hebrew teacher, Lazar, who was an eminence. He didn’t just teach the abc’s. I was walking by. And Clarice was persistently asking what the difference was between a man and a woman. She kept hammering away, demanding an explanation! She wouldn’t let go of it. Because she already had a different kind of mind.”33 Lazar may have been the model for a recurrent figure in Clarice’s writing: the old teacher, alternatively exasperated and fascinated by a precocious girl. “I knew about the existence of this teacher,” Tania Kaufmann told an interviewer, “but I never knew that Clarice felt that way about him when she was a little girl. She was always a surprise for me.”34

  The teacher appears in Near to the Wild Heart, and he appears in “The Disasters of Sofia,” the story of a wild, brilliant nine-year-old girl who torments a teacher she both loves and despises. The girl, whose mother has recently died, tries ceaselessly to provoke him, but she can never get the better of him, until the day he assigns the class a writing composition. He gives the outline of the plot, which the students are to re-create, using their own words: “A very poor man dreamt that he discovered a treasure and became very rich; upon awaking, he gathered his belongings and went off in search of the treasure; tired, he returned to his poor, poor house; and since he had nothing to eat, he began planting his own poor yard; he planted so much, he harvested so much, he started to sell so much that he ended up very rich.”35

  “Since all I knew was how to ‘use my own words,’ writing was easy,” the girl remembers. She is the first to leave, insolently handing her notebook to the teacher and escaping to the recess area. She returns to the classroom, where the teacher has read her story and where she feels she has stumbled into a great danger. “To my sudden torture, without taking his eyes off me, he slowly began to take off his glasses. And he looked at me with naked eyes that had many eyelashes. I had never seen hi
s eyes that, with their numberless cilia, looked like two sweet cockroaches,” she wrote. The professor has been changed by her story of “the hidden treasure,” “the treasure that is hidden where it is least expected.”36

  Her fear of the teacher strips away his human layers—his glasses are an example—and to her horror she sees what they both are, “anonymous as a belly opened for an intestinal operation,” what she called the “wild heart” of life. “I saw inside the eye. Which was as incomprehensible as an eye. An eye open with its mobile gelatin. With its organic tears.” Finally, breaking the silence, the teacher tells Sofia, “Your composition about the treasure is very pretty. You … —for a moment he added nothing. He looked at me smoothly, indiscreetly, as intimate as if he were my heart. —You’re a very funny girl, he finally said.”37

  8

  National Melodrama

  On July 26, 1930, weeks before Mania Lispector’s death, the humble neighborhood of Boa Vista unwittingly stepped into the national limelight when the governor of Paraíba, which borders Pernambuco to the north, was gunned down in the Confeitaria Glória, on the Rua Nova. Clarice’s cousin Samuel Lispector watched the tumult from the balcony of their house with Elisa and Tania.1 Running to the scene of the crime, another cousin, David Wainstok, arrived in time to see João Pessoa laid out on a bench in the neighboring pharmacy, “his shirt drenched in blood.”2

  The macabre event had revolutionary consequences, but the ensuing national melodrama had decidedly domestic origins. João Pessoa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, its first victim, bore a name enclosing three northeastern dynasties. His uncle, Epitácio Pessoa, was president of Brazil from 1919 to 1922; the Cavalcantis and the Albuquerques, with their innumerable ramifications, were among the first families of Pernambuco. João Pessoa ran on an anti-oligarchic platform.