Now the consulate that Maury Gurgel Valente was helping to reopen was the base for another critical operation, assisting the twenty-five thousand soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force. In 1944, Naples could hardly be described as a station on the “Elizabeth Arden career,” the chain of ritzy postings diplomats coveted. Maury learned in Algiers that among the comforts he would have to do without were pillows and lunch.25
The city had been liberated less than a year before, on October 1, 1943. Its population had been reduced to misery. “Nothing, absolutely nothing that can be tackled by the human digestive system is wasted in Naples,” wrote the well-known English travel writer Norman Lewis. “The butchers’ shops that have opened here and there sell nothing we would consider acceptable as meat, but their displays of scraps of offal are set out with art, and handled with reverence: chickens’ heads—from which the beak has been neatly trimmed—cost five lire; a little grey pile of chickens’ intestines in a brightly polished saucer, five lire; a gizzard, three lire; calves’ trotters two lire apiece; a large piece of windpipe, seven lire.”26
In addition, much of the city had been booby-trapped by the departing Germans. The explosion of buildings was a regular occurrence, and the unguarded city had been stripped: “Nothing has been too large or too small—from telegraph poles to phials of penicillin—to escape the Neapolitan kleptomania. A week or two ago an orchestra playing at the San Carlo to an audience largely clothed in Allied hospital blankets, returned from a five-minute interval to find all its instruments missing.”27
The sky was electric with omens. Vesuvius had erupted on March 19, and the population was charged with a religious fever whose manifestations would not have seemed unusual to one from northeastern Brazil:
Churches are suddenly full of images that talk, bleed, sweat, nod their heads and exude health-giving liquors to be mopped up by handkerchiefs, or even collected in bottles, and anxious, ecstatic crowds gather waiting for these marvels to happen. Every day the newspapers report new miracles. In the church of Santo Agnello, a speaking crucifix carries on a regular conversation with the image of Santa Maria d’Intercessione—a fact confirmed by reporters on the spot. The image of Santa Maria del Carmine, first recorded as having bowed its head to avoid a cannon-shot during the siege of Naples by Alfonso of Aragon, now does this as a matter of daily routine.28
Bread, meat, oil, and pasta were all very expensive, even a year after the liberation, wrote Rubem Braga, the correspondent of the Diário Carioca.29 “The people of Naples live badly, dress badly, eat little—and their freedom is full of restrictions,” Braga wrote. “The black market works everywhere: sometimes you have the tragic, comic impression that everyone is trying to find something to buy for 20 lire to resell for 40 lire to someone else who will resell it for 70 lire to someone else, who will resell it yet again—and so forth, until, at some point in the chain, a citizen will decide to use the article with money discovered God knows where.” But Braga added, “You don’t see hunger, the absolute hunger that is said to reign in Greece and other places. Food is expensive and rare but it exists.”30
In this garden spot, Clarice and Maury began their overseas careers. In her correspondence, Clarice did not dwell on, or even much mention, the troubles. “It is beautiful here,” she wrote Lúcio. “It’s a dirty, disorganized city, as if the main thing was the sea, the people, the things. People seem to live provisionally. And everything here has a washed-out color, but not as if seen through a veil: those are the colors themselves.”31
She described the situation a bit to Elisa, to whom she generally wrote more descriptive letters than to Tania or Lúcio. “The population clearly live from smuggling, the black market, prostitution, attacks, and robbery. The middle class suffers.”32 A few weeks later, she elaborated: “It’s true that they blame the war for lots of things that always existed here. Prostitution, for example, was always a big profession here. They’ve told us now that boys on the street offer their sisters, the husband who says he has a very pretty girl and it turns out to be his wife, etc.; but everyone says it’s always been that way.”33
She was reading a great deal, mainly in Italian. In that language, she renewed her acquaintance with Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield’s Bliss had made a decisive impact on her a few years before; it was the first book she purchased with her salary as a journalist. “This book is me!” she recalled exclaiming when she first opened it. Now, in Naples, reading Mansfield’s letters, she wrote Lúcio, “There can be no greater life than hers, and I simply don’t know what to do. What an absolutely extraordinary thing she is.”34
Clarice’s admiration for and identification with Mansfield is interesting. There is the admiration a writer would naturally feel for a great predecessor. But the statement “There is no greater life than hers” begs the question of what Clarice meant in reference to a life that included lovers of both sexes, venereal disease, depression, tuberculosis, and death at age thirty-four. Perhaps it was Mansfield’s selfless dedication to her art. But another possibility is Mansfield’s defiance of convention, her ceaseless, doomed fight for freedom. For the young author of Near to the Wild Heart as for her rebellious creation Joana, freedom, personal and artistic, was the highest good. The message of Katherine Mansfield’s life would have especially appealed to Clarice as she was being swallowed up by the diplomatic corps, careful, closed, and highly mannered, even in wartime.
“In general I have been a ‘social success,’ ” she wrote Lúcio. “It’s just that afterwards Maury and I end up pale, exhausted, looking at one another, detesting the populations and full of hate and purity. … Everyone is intelligent, good-looking, polite, gives alms and reads books; but why don’t they go to any hell they can find? I myself would be happy to, if I knew that the place of ‘suffering humanity’ was in heaven. My God, after all I’m not a missionary.”35
Despite this bravura, she was not adverse to “suffering humanity,” or even to missionary work. Soon after her arrival, she invested her energies in helping to care for the “smoking cobras,” the troops of the FEB who had disembarked in Naples to the bewilderment of the Italians. On November 15, the anniversary of the foundation of the Brazilian Republic, Vasco Leitão da Cunha gave a speech outlining the reasons for Brazil’s entry into the war, referring to the Italian submarines that had attacked Brazilian shipping. This needed emphasis, for most Italians had no idea what the Brazilians were doing there. “Hundreds of Italians that I have spoken to—people of all social classes and educational levels, including political journalists—had absolutely no idea of the cowardly actions of Italian submarines, killing the men, women, and children of a neutral country,” Rubem Braga wrote.
The Fascist censorship hid the fact. According to Fascist propaganda, the United States forced Brazil to enter the war. The great protest marches of the Brazilian people after the torpedoing of our ships by German and Italian submarines were not, as it’s easy enough to imagine, reported here. Once Brazil entered the war, Mussolini’s propaganda machine started to take more interest in our country. At the same time that our entry into the conflict was ridiculed in the most vile manner—attacking not only our government’s position but the Brazilian people themselves—they invented stories about thousands of Italian immigrants suffering horrors in prisons and concentration camps in Brazil.36
It was the usual Fascist propaganda, but the Brazilians were not fighting the Italians, who had surrendered in 1943. They were up against the Germans. It was bad enough that they were underequipped and undertrained and that their general condition reflected the lamentable conditions of public health in Brazil.37 Worst of all, they were racially “mongrelized,” a point that pro-Nazi Brazilians had hammered on when stressing the folly of Brazil’s entering the war. Rubem Braga emphasized their toughness: “They’re as good fighters as anyone else—and they don’t believe in the legend of ‘supermen’ that—though it shames me to say it—has been promoted by our own ‘sociologists,’ some of whom, as I myself know,
[are] of ‘inferior’ racial composition themselves.”38
On this point, the Nazis showed more delicacy. In the leaflets they spread to the Brazilian soldiers, the Germans used the same arguments employed by the domestic fifth column, the single difference being the Germans’ bad Portuguese. “The main argument is the question of why the Brazilians are fighting in Italy—though their author never explains why the Germans are fighting in the same country.” The flyers also promise good food for prisoners and deserters, “without distinction of race or nation, and not only good food but consideration, since there ‘everyone is respectfully treated.’ Not a word of racism. The strongest phrase, which deserved a special font, was this deep philosophical truth: ‘In war, the main thing is to get home alive.’ What a nice thought in the mouths of the German soldiers—the supposed authors of the message. Here is Mr. Hitler, pacifistic and anti-racist—in Portuguese.”39
Hitler’s “pacifist and anti-racist” armies inflicted heavy casualties on the Brazilian troops, who streamed back to the hospitals that Elza Cansanção Medeiros and her fellow nurses were staffing. The camp hospitals, just behind the front, were the first station. For those wounded soldiers who could travel and who were expected to recover within a few days, there was an evacuation hospital about twenty kilometers behind the front. The worst cases headed to the main U.S. hospital in Naples.40
Symbolically enough, the hospital was located at the Mostra d’Oltremare, the Overseas Exhibition, an ultramodern fairground complex Mussolini had inaugurated in May 1940.41 It celebrated exactly the same “heroic crusader, so civilized by Fascism, attacking African barbarity, to liberate, disinterestedly, the beautiful black slave” that Pan, where Clarice published her first story, had honored a decade before.42 Only four years after the complex’s pompous inauguration, the pavilions commemorating the Italian colonies Eritrea, Ethiopia, Albania, and Libya were already housing the latest victims of those “heroic crusaders,” the Allied soldiers wounded in the Italian campaign.
There, Elza Cansanção Medeiros, a nineteen-year-old from a well-to-do Rio family, whose English came from an Oxford-educated governess, recalled her despair at finding the hospital run by “TEXANS!” “What they speak is almost a dialect, with their mouths half-closed. It was a horror! In a few days I was crying desperately, since I had to translate the doctors’ words for the patients, and vice-versa.”43
The nurses needed all the help they could get and were happy to have the reinforcement of Mrs. Clarice Gurgel Valente, who, despite her dismissive remarks about “suffering humanity,” proved an indefatigable humanitarian. Because there were no social workers with the Brazilian army, Clarice “requested authorization from the military authorities, both Brazilian and American, to visit the hospital every day and chat a bit with the sick men,” Elza remembered. “It was hard to obtain the authorization, since she was a civilian, who, though a member of our diplomatic corps, had no military position. After a long struggle, she received her authorization. She started coming to the hospital every day, a real Samaritan. That gracious figure passed from bed to bed, always with a happy smile on her lips, conversing with the soldiers, reading them letters from home, giving them advice, writing for those who couldn’t or didn’t know how, organizing games for the wounded men, and distributing the poor things we could offer our sick men.”44
The great mystic, Elza remembered, had a particular gift for clipping toenails.45 Rubem Braga gives an idea of the letters Clarice might have read, or even written. Wounded and stranded overseas, the soldiers’ thoughts were never far from home. “One of them—the censor tells me, without violating his professional oath—wrote an enormous sentimental drivel, saying he missed her to death, living without her was a tragedy, I don’t know how I can take it, this separation is a piercing agony, I weep when I think of you, and at the end of it added PS—Tell me who won the game against Bangu. … Another, writing to his wife, spoke about how he longed for her, about the Fatherland, and then said: ‘Woman, don’t forget to weed the yard, it was really ugly the last time I was there.’ ”46
“I visit all the sick men every day,” Clarice told Lúcio in March. “I give them what they need, I talk to them, I fight to get them things from the administration, in other words I’m amazing. I go every morning and it annoys me when I can’t, since the men are waiting for me, and since I miss them myself.”47
She didn’t limit herself to bedside visits. Elza recalled “arriving from an infirmary where some of [the] wounded officers were, and happening upon a conversation between Miss Clarice and the patients, who were about to be evacuated to the United States, where they would have to stay for many months, learning to use mechanical limbs.” One of these officers said:
“Ah, Miss Clarice, how I would love to eat a bit of Brazilian food before heading to the United States, I miss Brazil so much, the food there, and now it’ll be so long before I can have some good Brazilian beans, or rice with sweet sauce!”
Miss Clarice stood silently, thinking, thinking, and having reached a decision replied:
“Well then, if your doctor agrees, come to the consulate tomorrow, and I’ll see what I can do, with our rations, to make a Brazilian meal.”
“Reading this now,” Elza comments, “it seems very unremarkable, but only someone who has been in a country devastated by the War can realize what a sacrifice this invitation represented, because even the diplomatic corps had great difficulty finding food. Even more so because it was five extra people, who wanted the kinds of food not normally covered by the rations. … Our good fairy spared no sacrifice, and the following day the mutilated officers received a warm reception at the consulate, with good Brazilian food, lovingly prepared by Miss Clarice.”48
The girl who had left Europe as a hunted refugee had returned to help the victims of another war, a “good fairy” for Elza, the “Principessa di Napoli” for Rubem Braga and Joel Silveira, another reporter, who in February 1945 traveled two thousand kilometers through the war zone to visit her.49 Photographs show her at the height of her beauty, which stood out all the more dramatically in her devastated surroundings. The greatest compliment she ever received, she wrote, came when she and Maury were walking down a Naples street. “And a man said loudly to another, so that I would hear it: ‘That is the kind of woman we are counting on to rebuild Italy.’ ”50
16
The Society of Shadows
In October 1944, back in Rio, Clarice Lispector was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for best novel of the year, bringing Near to the Wild Heart a fresh round of publicity. In the enormous apartment on the Via Giambattista Pergolesi, which she and Maury shared with the consulate, the consul, Mozart Gurgel Valente’s fiancée, Eliane Weil, and the second secretary of the embassy, Clarice was putting the finishing touches on The Chandelier, the novel she had begun in Rio the previous March. As she had done when she was trying to finish Near to the Wild Heart in Tania and William Kaufmann’s crowded apartment, she locked herself away to work.1
“My housewifely duties are null, happily,” she wrote Elisa in November. “I don’t make any decisions and only get involved occasionally; because otherwise it would all become my responsibility and even things that were meant to be bad would be explained as my mistakes. I have better things to do than take care of a kind of boardinghouse: for example, sitting and staring at the wall.”2
That was not all she was doing, of course. By November, the new book was ready, she wrote Lúcio. “The only thing that’s missing is everything I can’t say. I also have the idea that it was already finished when I left Brazil; and that I didn’t think it was complete, like a mother who looks at her enormous daughter and says: you can tell she’s still not ready to get married.” She asked him to “find [her] a husband at the Editora José Olympio,” then the most prestigious publisher in Rio.3 She surely thought that after the thundering success of Near to the Wild Heart she would have her pick of publishers.
She was wrong. Despite the accolades for Near to th
e Wild Heart, her next book would not be published by José Olympio. Rubem Braga helped place it with the Editora Agir, a Catholic publisher. Clarice thought it a strange choice, writing to Elisa, “I admit I don’t understand why the Editora Agir, run essentially by Catholics, is accepting a book that isn’t Catholic and that isn’t written by a Catholic. I think it’s very odd.”4 And when Elisa sent her more information about the house, Clarice responded, “I can see that I could become a nun if I wanted to: my poor book is so surrounded by an orgy of Catholic books.”5
To Lúcio she reported, “Tania had serious doubts about The Chandelier. Including about the title.”6 He, too, had expressed his reservations, writing earlier, “I like the title The Chandelier but not much. I think it’s a bit Mansfieldian and too poor for a person as rich as you.”7 Clarice responded, “[The title] stays even though [Tania’s] right. Nothing in it is very good. My problem is that I only have defects, so if I take out the defects there’s almost nothing left but a magazine for teenage girls.”8
One reason The Chandelier had problems finding a publisher is surely that it stands out, in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book. It is her least translated major work, and though Clarice Lispector is perhaps the most studied Brazilian writer of her century, there is remarkably little critical writing on The Chandelier. Yet the book’s difficulty is, in a way, what makes it linger in the mind. Clarice often said that her books profited by rereading, and that is certainly true of The Chandelier.
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