The authorities packed more and more prisoners into the building, and it soon became Latin America’s largest, famed not for prisoners sketching and planting vegetables but for a rate of violence so appalling that its nickname, Carandirú, became a byword for horror. In 1992, the prisoners revolted, a massacre that left as many as 250 people dead, after which the model prison was finally shuttered.
The “tall, thoughtful, rebellious” blonde girl with the strange accent and outstanding scholastic record made a strong impression.26 At the school where she took extracurricular English classes, one teacher devised a special exercise to discover more about her, assigning an English essay on the question “What do you do during the day?” When Clarice returned a banal recitation of her daily activities, the disappointed teacher said, “I thought you were a painter, or that you played the piano.” A few years later, Clarice ran into the woman again and mentioned that she had published her first novel. “But you were a writer?” the teacher exclaimed. That, she admitted, was what she hoped to learn in assigning the composition.27
But Clarice Lispector was never obvious. She was tentatively taking her first steps as a writer, in secret, “creating her mask,” as she put it, “with great pain. Because to know that from that point on you are going to play a role is a scary surprise. It is the horrible liberty of not being. It is the hour of decision.”28 The decision had already been made, though as far as the outside world knew, her energies were directed toward the law school. She took the entrance examination in February 1939, scoring first in her preparatory class and fourth of the three hundred candidates nationally,29 and prepared to enter the University of Brazil.
“I was a confused and perplexed adolescent who had a mute and intense question: ‘what is the world like? and why this world?’ Later I learned many things. But the adolescent’s question remained, mute and nagging.”30 From almost before she entered university, she knew that she would not find answers in the law. Her mask had already been chosen when she read Steppenwolf and resolved to become a writer; a brief stint working in a lawyer’s office confirmed that she had no vocation for paperwork.
In those days, however, not all students entered law school in order to become lawyers; relatively few, in fact, actually ended up practicing law. It was a training ground for influential journalists, politicians, diplomats, and businessmen, almost anyone aspiring to a nonscientific profession. This was partly because until the year Clarice was born, 1920, giant Brazil did not have a single university. It had schools of medicine, law, engineering, and so on, but no single institution offering a full range of disciplines. (By contrast, in Spanish America, Lima, Mexico City, and Santo Domingo had universities by the middle of the sixteenth century.) The National Law Faculty—housed in the former Imperial Senate, across from a large park, the Campo de Santana, where large bucktoothed rodents called agoutis wandered across the grass—was the most prominent institution of higher learning in Brazil.
As such, it was open to foreign influence, including “scientific racism.” Many of the Foreign Ministry officials who barred Jewish refugees from Brazil had issued from the school, their outlooks formed by writers such as Arthur de Gobineau, who arrived in Rio on a diplomatic mission in 1870 and loathed almost every aspect of the country, with the single exception of its blond Habsburg emperor, Dom Pedro II. Gobineau’s claims that only heavy doses of European blood could fortify Brazil’s lamentably dark population found approving audiences inside the school. Related claims by other authors, including the proto-Nazi Houston Stewart Chamberlain, met with sympathy there, too, along with the notion of a strong centralized state that was so important to both the Integralists and Getúlio Vargas. “The intellectual roots of Integralism were not popular,” one scholar writes. “Rather, they sprang from Brazil’s prestigious law faculties, where Integralists, like many of the diplomats in charge of making and implementing immigration policy, frequently linked communism and ‘international Jewish finance’ in their manifestoes.”31
At the school, one of racial fortification’s leading advocates, Francisco José Oliveira Vianna, was himself a mulatto.32 The ideology’s absurdity, however, did not mean it was without consequence, inside or outside the country. But on the other side, a growing chorus condemned the dictatorship’s affinities with the Axis—and even, increasingly, the dictatorship itself.
Politics were not the reason Clarice Lispector was never much interested in law school. Her grades, which in secondary school had always been outstanding, were respectable rather than stellar, and on December 17, 1943, she didn’t even bother to attend the graduation ceremony.
She moved on almost before she started. During her first year of university, she had discovered an outlet for her true vocation, and on May 25, 1940, she published her first known story, “Triumph,” in Pan. This was a magazine of a type then popular in Brazil, a general-interest periodical that translated and reprinted all kinds of news, essays, stories, and reportage from foreign publications, alongside contributions from Brazilian writers. Since its first issue, at the end of 1935, its political orientation had changed along with the country’s. In that edition, Pan was unabashedly pro-Fascist. Benito Mussolini was the “man of the issue,” “the most vigorous universal personality of this century,” and amid the carnage of the Ethiopian War the back cover featured a cartoon showing “the heroic crusader, so civilized by Fascism, attacking African barbarity, to liberate, disinterestedly, the beautiful black slave.”33
By the time Clarice published her story, that orientation was far in the past, as indeed it was in most of the Brazilian press, heavily censored since the beginning of the Estado Novo. Clarice’s own concerns were closer to home. Appropriately enough for a first story, “Triumph” tells of a beginning writer and his frustrations, seen from his lover’s perspective: “He said he needed special conditions in order to produce, to continue his novel, undermined from the very beginning by an absolute inability to concentrate. He went off to try to find the ‘atmosphere.’ ” He has sacrificed his girlfriend on the altar of literature, though she remembers hearing him say, “the wide beloved shoulders trembling in a laugh, that it was nothing more than a joke, an experience to insert on the page of a book.”34
The short tale includes the unexpected verbal flourishes (“the wide beloved shoulders trembling in a laugh”) that would become trademarks of Clarice Lispector’s. And they already include a doubt about the role of literature in life. Clarice mocks the maudlin drama the writer makes of his petty troubles. At the same time, she sympathizes with his torment, as when Luísa, the girlfriend, finds a note the writer has left behind: “ ‘I can’t write. I can’t write. With these words I am scratching a wound. My mediocrity is so …’ Luísa interrupts her reading. What she had always felt, just vaguely: mediocrity.” In those lines, the young writer’s fear of her own mediocrity comes through, a fear of failure that belies the triumph of the title. That comes when the naked Luísa enters the bath, feels the sensation of the water running over her body in the hot morning sun, and suddenly realizes that he will come back to her. She—the animal, the body, the woman—was stronger than his doubts. Life triumphs over literature.
It is a skilled performance by a nineteen-year-old girl, as Pedro Lispector would have sensed, proud of his youngest daughter’s appearance in a prominent national magazine. Even if he, like most parents, placed an exaggerated value on the productions of his children, he could not have known that he was witnessing the beginning of one of the most extraordinary careers in twentieth-century literature. Perhaps this pride was a small compensation for the fear and depression he felt at the progress of Adolf Hitler across his home continent, a progress that, in mid-1940, seemed unstoppable. When Russia was invaded, he sought news of his relatives through the Red Cross. There was none.
Despite a life of setbacks, “years of heartbreaks, of fruitless, inglorious struggles,” he had not given up. He loved reading and music. “He often came home radiant: ‘I bought tickets for us to go
hear Yehudi Menuhin.’ Or it was Brailowski, or Arthur Rubinstein. It was always thanks to him that we got to go to the theater and hear good music,” Elisa wrote. “He was a dedicated activist: working for the Jewish National Fund, the Keren Hayesod, contributing to help the refugees from the war.”35
These were little compensations in a life that was one unremitting battle. “He never knew what it was to spend a single day without worries, without having to work, without having to save,” Elisa wrote. “Simply without having to think about the day a note was due. Because the truth is that Daddy never had any talent for business, and if people thought we had any claims to wealth, it was only because of the firmness of his character. Whatever happened, Daddy always paid his bills the day they were due. And the day before if possible, which for him was a victory.”36
Like Clarice, Elisa, too, was starting to publish her work. She showed a story to her father, who, after reading it, sat thinking.
“Let me suggest a topic. Write about a man who got lost, a man who lost his way.”
For a while he sat there silently, and then went into his room. He added nothing. And I sat there imagining what would have made him feel shipwrecked, at what point he had gotten lost in his doubts, oscillating between two worlds, lost among different cultures?
Because then Father was in his fifties, and he had built nothing: All his deepest aspirations had remained incomplete.37
In secret, Elisa started gathering notes for a book based on her father’s suggestion.
In August, Pedro had a mild health complaint that led him to a doctor. He learned that his gall bladder would have to be removed, a common surgery scheduled for August 23, 1940. In the Brazil of 1940 any surgery was risky, but his daughters did not think there was any reason to be alarmed. But he returned from the clinic in considerable pain, dying three days later. After a life that had included poverty and exile, the martyrdom of his beloved wife, and the unceasing struggle to raise and establish his daughters in a completely foreign country, he was dead at the age of fifty-five.
“I am going to use a very strong word,” his daughter Tania said. A person of great refinement and discretion, Tania did not use strong words, so it was all the more surprising to hear her claim that her father was murdered. “It was a routine operation,” she said, her pain and bewilderment audible sixty-six years later. “And then, after he died, we went to the clinic and tried to talk to the doctors. They wouldn’t see us, they wouldn’t give us any answers.”38
It was a final defeat in a life that had known little else, a last humiliation for the brilliant Jewish boy from the Ukrainian backwoods, who dreamed of studying mathematics and religion and was forced instead into a distant exile, his wife condemned to a slow extinction, his own ceaseless struggle for a better life never gratified. If he had lived a short time longer, he would have seen the sudden, unexpected fame of his beautiful youngest daughter and the emergence of the Jewish state he had dreamed of. Instead, his death was not reckoned important enough to merit an explanation from the doctors who caused it.
A few years later, Clarice wrote a friend, “Once he said: if I were to write, I would write a book about a man who saw that he had lost. I cannot think about that without unbearable physical pain.”39
Once again, Tania stepped into the parental role. She insisted that the newly orphaned Elisa and Clarice move in with her and William, though their apartment, across the street from the gardens of the Catete Palace, was so small that Elisa had to sleep in the living room and Clarice was forced into the tiny maid’s room. There she spent much of her time studying and writing, and in addition to her law studies she soon began working as a journalist.
In those days, few Brazilian women, with the exception of the occasional society lady, worked for newspapers. Those few were of high caliber, however, including the poet Cecília Meireles, who had worked for the Diário de Notícias in the 1930s, and the novelist Rachel de Queiroz, who in the next decade worked for Cruzeiro.40 A woman in the newsroom was an unusual phenomenon and required a bit of adaptation; her colleagues, embarrassed to use dirty language in front of a woman, had to resort to tapping on the tables instead.41
Clarice’s induction into this world came thanks to one of only three people outside Italy who truly understood Fascism: this, according to no less an authority than Benito Mussolini.42 The all-powerful Lourival Fontes was Getúlio Vargas’s éminence grise, in charge of the Department of Press and Propaganda, the organ that, through “seduction, bribery, and coercion,” controlled the Brazilian press. He helped certain Jewish refugees, including Stefan Zweig, the Hungarian philologist Paulo Rónai, and the French publisher Max Fischer, even as he shut down Jewish newspapers.
From the Tiradentes Palace, a neoclassical pile in downtown Rio that, until 1937, had housed the now extinct Congress, Lourival Fontes reigned over the Brazilian press. His office ornamented by a gigantic portrait of Vargas—his job was to prove that Getúlio “neither peed nor shat”43—the smooth-talking Fontes managed to make overt censorship almost redundant; with the suppression of the Communists and the Integralists, most of the press agreed with the government anyway, and when they didn’t it was easy enough to rearrange their access to newsprint or public funding. “Living from literary or journalistic talent was almost impossible, except if you worked for Lourival Fontes.”44
The Department of Press and Propaganda was the only authorized voice in the country. The dictatorship had taken over Rádio Nacional (Brazil’s most powerful), the evening paper A Noite, the news service Agência Nacional, and a host of magazines, including Vamos Lêr! (Let’s Read!), “a publication for its time, a publication for the man of the dynamic and tremulous era of zeppelins, of fantastic speed ‘records,’ of ‘skyscrapers,’ and of television.”45 It was probably at Vamos Lêr! that Clarice Lispector caught the eye of Lourival Fontes. Just as Tania had done when she convinced Agamemnon Magalhães to employ Elisa, Clarice strode into the office of Fontes’s secretary, Raymundo Magalhães Júnior.
“I went with enormous shyness, but I was bold at the same time,” she recalled. “I went to the magazines and said: ‘I have a story, do you want to publish it?’ I remember one time it was Raymundo Magalhães, Jr., who looked at it, read a bit of it, looked at me, and said: ‘Who did you copy this from?’ I said nobody, it’s mine. He said: ‘Did you translate it?’ I said no. He said: ‘Then I’ll publish it.’ ”46
This was probably “Jimmy and I,” which appeared in Vamos Lêr! on October 10, 1940. Clarice Lispector is occasionally thought of as a feminist writer, but she wrote few stories as overt. “What could I do, after all?” the protagonist asks. “Ever since I was a little girl, I had seen and felt the predominance of men’s ideas over women’s. Before she got married, according to Aunt Emília, Mother was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with her own ideas about the freedom and equality of women. But along came Daddy, very serious and tall, who also had his own ideas, about … the freedom and equality of women,” Clarice wrote, with an unaccustomed political stridence and verbal clumsiness. Other themes reappear: when the narrator dumps her lover, Jimmy, she thinks, “Well, figure it out! We’re just animals. … I didn’t think this was an argument, but it made me feel a bit better. I was a little sad when I went to bed. But I woke up happy, a pure animal.”47
Perhaps it was the publication of this story that emboldened Clarice to approach Magalhães’s boss. Lourival Fontes may have been a Fascist propagandist, but he was also a cultured man with a weakness for beautiful literary women: In the same year he hired Clarice Lispector, he married the poetess Adalgisa Nery. Still, it required some nerve to knock on his door. “In those days,” Tania said, “you didn’t do anything without connections. Nobody showed up and asked for a job. It was all through your cousin or your brother-in-law. But Clarice did. He liked her and he hired her.”48
Fontes put her to work at the Agência Nacional, the national wire service, which distributed laudatory news to papers and radio stations all ove
r Brazil. She was first meant to work as a translator, but there were already enough translators, so she was assigned to work as an editor and a reporter, the only woman so employed. Perhaps the only person actually employed at all: her enthusiasm contrasted with the lazy atmosphere of the newsroom. Their job was not, after all, to discover news, but to dress up items from other papers, making it sound official before redistributing it to other outlets.49
It was a young group, and her friend Francisco de Assis Barbosa, then twenty-eight, recalled the impression she made: “A marvelous being. Beautiful, attractive, but completely unpretentious. She always wore white. A blouse and a skirt. A leather belt. Nothing else. Low shoes, maybe sandals. Light brown hair. Ah, yes, long shoulder-length hair. She spoke softly. A slight accent, revealing her Jewish origins. She laughed a lot. She enjoyed life. She was happy with life. She was ready to live.”50
11
God Stirs the Waters
Among the bored young staff of the Agência Nacional was Lúcio Cardoso, a twenty-six-year-old from a small town who was already hailed as one of the most talented writers of his generation. His father, Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso, had studied engineering but left university without a degree, due to the death of his own father. He then headed into the backlands of the interior state of Minas Gerais, where he enjoyed a period of great prosperity, at one time accumulating eight thousand head of cattle, only to fall into debt and be forced to hand over his fortune to a textile factory owner. After the death of his wife, he created, like Pedro Lispector in Maceió, a soap factory. But his volatile personality brought him trouble with the local merchants, who boycotted his products. His business ventures failed, Joaquim and his second wife, Dona Nhanhá, raised their six children in relative poverty.1
Why This World Page 13
