A similar principle operated in the Roman art world, where the collapse of the Italian economy had affected painters as much as the rest of the population. As it happened, Landulpho Borges da Fonseca, a colleague of Mozart’s, was an aficionado of contemporary painting and sought out the city’s artists. Perhaps the most famous of these was Giorgio de Chirico, a fifty-six-year-old who had settled in Rome in 1944 and who had taken a leading role in the Surrealist movement earlier in his career.
“I was in Rome,” Clarice wrote, “and a friend of mine said that De Chirico would surely like to paint me. And he asked him. And said he’d have to see me first. And he saw me and said: I will paint your … your portrait.”3 She went to his studio in the Piazza di Spagna, steps from the house where Keats died, to pose for the small portrait. “His pictures are in almost all the museums,” she told Elisa and Tania. “You’ve definitely seen reproductions of them. Mine is little, excellent, beautiful, with expression and everything. He charges a lot, naturally, but he charged me less. And while he was painting a buyer appeared. Of course he didn’t sell it. … Mine is just of my head, neck, and a bit of my shoulders. Everything smaller. I posed in that blue velvet dress from the Mayflower, remember Tania?”4
The picture shows Clarice’s head tilted slightly to the right, her eyes, distrustful or defiant, looking out to the left. Her red lips, right in the center of the picture, are the most notable flash of color in the otherwise dark picture, which captures astonishingly well the intense interior focus, the “brilliant and suffocating air” that comes across so forcefully in her books.
Though it became one of the most celebrated images of Clarice Lispector, the model, never easily impressed by famous names, had her doubts: not only about her own appearance, which she later described as “a bit affected,” but about the artist himself. De Chirico, she told an interviewer a few years later, was a “painter in decline who has lost his artistic feeling.”5
Nonetheless, the portrait is a small witness to a great moment. As Clarice was posing on May 8, 1945, she and the painter heard the newspaper boy shouting from the square below “È finita la guerra!” Upon hearing the news, she wrote her sisters, “I gave a shout, the painter stopped, we talked about people’s strange lack of happiness, and then he kept on painting.”6
With the end of the war, dramatic events ceased to occupy Clarice. Her book was finished, the Brazilian soldiers went home, and the Naples consulate, lately a witness to momentous events, settled into its routine as a sleepy office in an impoverished backwater. Clarice traveled a bit and read a great deal, including Proust, Kafka, and Lúcio Cardoso’s translation of Emily Brontë’s poetry. “How well she understands me, Lúcio, I feel like putting it that way. It’s been so long since I read poetry, I felt I had ascended to the sky, to the open air. I even felt like crying but luckily I didn’t because when I cry it soothes me, and I don’t want to be soothed, neither for her sake, nor for mine.”7
She met another great poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, with whom she had much in common. If Clarice was called “hermetic,” Ungaretti was the proud founder of the so-called hermetic school. Clarice was a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine; Ungaretti was a Jewish Italian born in Egypt. Unlike Clarice, Ungaretti had been a Fascist—Jewish Fascists were not uncommon in Italy, at least in the early years—though in 1936, disillusioned with politics, he went to Brazil, where he taught at the University of São Paulo. Before returning to Italy in 1942, he explored much of the country and came to know many of its leading writers. It was Clarice Lispector, however, who increased his “respect for the Portuguese language, thanks to her poetic intensity, her invention.”8 Meeting her in Italy, he and his daughter translated part of Near to the Wild Heart, which they published in a literary magazine.9
But her closest friend was her dog, Dilermando, whom she found in a Naples street. “One look at him was all I needed to fall in love with his face,” she recounted in her children’s book The Woman Who Killed the Fish.
Despite being Italian, he had a Brazilian face and the face of someone named Dilermando. I paid his owner some money and took Dilermando home. I immediately gave him food. He looked so happy to have me as his owner that he spent the whole day looking at me and wagging his tail. Apparently his other owner beat him. … Dilermando liked me so much that he almost went crazy when he smelled with his snout my woman-mother scent and the scent of the perfume I always wear. … He hated taking baths and thought we were bad when we forced him to make the sacrifice. Since it was a lot of work to make him bathe every day, and since he fled the bathroom all soaped up, I ended up bathing him only twice a week. The result, of course, is that he had a very strong dog scent which I immediately smelled with my snout, because people too have snouts.10
Her love for Dilermando, “the purest person in Naples,” inspired the only expression of resentment toward Maury in her known correspondence. “The dog got sick, I took him to the veterinarian and the fool told me he was incurable,” she wrote Tania. “And there I was crying, I spent the day nervous and sad about the idea that they’d have to kill him, I who love him so much. Maury, as always, reacted normally and wouldn’t regret it too much. But we’re thinking about having him x-rayed and then he’ll be cured, they promised me.”11
“When I was typing, he sat, half stretched out, at my side, in the exact posture of the Sphinx, snoozing. If I stopped typing because I had come across an obstacle and was getting discouraged, he immediately opened his eyes, raised his head high, looked at me, one of his ears cocked, waiting. … No human being ever gave me the feeling of being so completely loved as I was loved without restrictions by that dog.”12
Despite these friendships, Clarice had to find a role for herself as the dust of the war began to settle and the novelty of being abroad wore off. It was not easy, and references to loneliness and depression begin appearing in her letters with ever greater frequency. Even before the war’s end, she had expressed frustration with being cut off from her friends and family: “While you live in Brazil,” she wrote Lúcio in November 1944, “I am drinking tea with milk at a girls’ school.”13
In May she wrote her sisters, “I feel a real thirst to be there with you. The water I have found in this world outside is very dirty, even when it’s champagne.”14 In August she told Natércia Freire, “I’m dying of longing for home and for Brazil. This life of ‘married to a diplomat’ is the first destiny I have. This isn’t traveling: traveling is leaving and going home whenever you want to, traveling is being able to move. But traveling this way is awful: it’s serving out sentences in different places. The impressions you have after a year in a place end up killing your first impressions. At the end of it all you end up ‘educated.’ But that’s not my style. I never minded being ignorant.”15
In a similar vein, about a trip to Florence she was planning, she told Elisa that her life was providing her “a quick and suburban little culture that’s useful later on in ‘drawing rooms,’ ” and reported, “The ambassadors respect me. … People think I’m ‘interesting.’ … I agree with everything, too, I never disagree with anything that’s said, I’m very tactful and I win over the necessary people. As you can see, I’m a good diplomatic wife. Since people vaguely know that I am ‘a writer,’ my God, they would surely allow me to eat with my feet or wipe my mouth with my hair.”16
Between books, working erratically, she struggled with artistic doubts: “All I have is the nostalgia that comes from a mistaken life, from an excessively sensitive temperament, from perhaps a forced or mistaken vocation,” she wrote Tania in September.17 She said to Lúcio, “I haven’t really liked Italy, just as I couldn’t really like any place; since something stands between me and any thing, as if I were one of those people whose eyes are covered with a white film. I horribly regret to have to say that that veil is precisely my desire to work and to see too much.”18
Seeing too much, “an excessively sensitive temperament”: this was how her sister-in-law Eliane remembered her at this time
. “She felt everything others felt,” Eliane said. “She felt what they were feeling even before they did.”19 This extremely refined sensibility was her great strength as a writer: “You pick up a thousand waves that I can’t catch,” Rubem Braga told her. “I feel like a cheap radio, only getting the station around the corner, where you get radar, television, shortwave.”20 But it was also very painful, as Clarice wrote later: “I can no longer carry the pain of the world. What am I to do, if I feel totally what others are and feel?”21
A perceptive reviewer of The Chandelier captured Clarice’s dilemma: “Possessed of an enormous talent and a rare personality, she will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both, since she so amply enjoys their benefits.”22 From Florence, which she visited at the end of 1945, she wrote Elisa and Tania, “I try to do what I ought to do, and be the way one ought to be, and to adapt to the world around me—I manage to do it, but at the price of my intimate balance, I feel it. … I go through phases of being irritable, depressed. My memory doesn’t exist: I forget things from one room to the next.”23
Many years later, Clarice underlined the following sentences in a newspaper article entitled “Volume in the Brain”:
The research showed that the same physical events are perceived by some people as if they were louder, shinier, quicker, more odorous or colorful than they are for others. … In some people, the volume is turned up to the maximum, amplifying the intensity of all sensory experiences. These people are called “amplifiers.” … A level that provokes slight discomfort in “dampeners” can mean intense suffering for “amplifiers.” … At the other extreme, the “amplifier” is an introvert who avoids the busy existence of the “dampener.” He is the kind who complains about the volume of the radio, the seasoning of the food, the brightness of the wallpaper. If it’s up to him, he prefers to be alone, quiet, in solitary environments.
At the top of the page she scrawled, “Everything touches me—I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.”24
The words “diplomatic corps” are often read as synonymous with stuffiness and exclusivity, describing an institution constitutionally incompatible with an artist whose heroes—Spinoza, Katherine Mansfield, Lúcio Cardoso—were the embodiment of rebellion. This is how Clarice would later remember her years as a foreign service wife: “I remembered a time in which I arrived at the refinement (!?) of having the waiter at home pass fingerbowls to all the guests in the following way: every fingerbowl had a rose petal floating in the liquid.”25
Even before she married Maury, Clarice had already started rebelling against the diplomatic world. “Ever since I’ve been going out with Itamarati,” she confessed to Tania and William, “I’ve especially liked using really vulgar slang.”26 Within Itamaraty, however, she had a great deal of freedom. Her duties as the wife of a vice consul, low on the totem pole, were not onerous. She had an ample and guaranteed income, which, vitally, allowed her the space and time to write. She had good friends, including Maury, Eliane and Mozart Gurgel Valente, and Vasco Leitão da Cunha, not to mention Dilermando the dog. Life in the foreign service was not perfect, but in many ways it was less demanding than working as a journalist in Rio.
There is no doubt that she hated being away from Brazil and that she feared exile: “I am sure that in my cradle my first wish was to belong,” she said, and belonging to Brazil was very important to her. “I lived mentally in Brazil, I lived ‘on borrowed time.’ Simply because I like living in Brazil, Brazil is the only place in the world where I don’t ask myself, terrified: what am I doing here after all, why am I here, my God. Because it’s here I have to be, where I have my roots.”27 Certainly she missed her sisters and her friends. But a simpler explanation for her unhappiness at this time was that the excitement of her new life—marriage, success, travel, as well as the usefulness she had felt at the hospital—had ebbed. There was now room for a resurgence of the depression that had already tormented her before she married. “My problems are those of a person with a sick soul,” she wrote Tania, “and cannot be understood by people who are, thank God, healthy.”28
There was hope on the horizon, however. In December, Maury was promoted from vice consul to consul. She wrote Tania and Elisa, “I feel very well, … I’m having fun in Rome and … just by looking at me you can tell I’m much more rested.”29 One reason for her newfound repose was the knowledge that a trip to Brazil was only six weeks away.
The country Clarice returned to in January 1946 was very different from the one she had left eighteen months before. The end of the war brought the end of Getúlio Vargas’s fifteen-year reign. Many Brazilians were embarrassed to be fighting Fascism in Italy in the name of a quasi-Fascist dictatorship at home; for Elza Cansanção Medeiros, Rubem Braga, and many of the Brazilian troops, the fight to free Europe was, at the same time, a fight to free Brazil.30 For the time being, Getúlio Vargas’s long run was up. He was deposed on October 29, 1945.
The new president was the bland Eurico Gaspar Dutra, Vargas’s former minister of war. A close collaborator of Vargas, he was a conservative choice. This he proved when, under the sway of the reactionary Catholic wife who had compared the war nurses to gold-digging whores, he outlawed gambling in a country addicted to games of chance. Dutra’s election did not signify a break with the old regime, nor was it intended to. Still, the end of the war and the return of democracy brought Brazil much needed air, and Brazil brought much needed air to Clarice Lispector.
It was a brief visit, less than two months. She saw the publication of The Chandelier, and she met many people whom she would count among her closest friends. First among them was Bluma Chafir Wainer, a Jewish woman from Bahia whom Clarice met through Rubem Braga. Unlike Clarice, Bluma did not photograph well, and with her big nose and large teeth she could hardly be called beautiful. Yet those who knew her unanimously recall her great charm and appeal. “She was even more beautiful than Clarice,” said the journalist Joel Silveira, “because Clarice was often withdrawn, dejected. Bluma was witty, vibrant, fun.”31
Bluma attracted important and powerful men. Her husband, Samuel Wainer, was one of the most influential journalists in Brazil. His anti-Vargas, pro-Communist monthly Diretrizes, founded at great personal risk in 1938, had at first operated with significant support from the Jewish middle class in Rio, the shopkeepers, dentists, and lawyers who bought ads to help him when the magazine was starting out. Later, in a chapter baroque even by the standards of Brazilian political journalism, Samuel Wainer became Getúlio Vargas’s closest ally in the media. Bluma, a committed leftist of great moral integrity, would be appalled by her husband’s closeness to Getúlio: “The ends do not justify the means” was a favorite saying of hers.32 Though she never joined the Communist Party, the police kept an eye on her. Like Clarice, she was a free thinker who scorned convention. She frequented bars, not to drink but to participate in political and intellectual debates, “in the European manner,”33 a phrase that seems to mean “without her husband,” upon whom she did not depend socially or intellectually.
Or, as it turned out, sexually. Unlike Clarice, who tended to leave her transgressions in the pages of her books, Bluma acted on them. Married to Samuel Wainer since 1933, in 1938 she fell in love with Rubem Braga, a young, married colleague of Samuel’s. Bluma got pregnant, left her husband, and advised Braga that she was ready to live by his side. Panicked, Rubem fled to southern Brazil; Bluma, in Rio, had no choice but to abort.
Such was her charm, however, that Samuel took her back, ensuring that there would be no scandal, and Rubem Braga, decades later, confided that she was the love of his life.34 In 1946 Bluma and Clarice became instant friends, and the beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent pair did not escape the notice of the artistic and journalistic circles of Rio de Janeiro. They were from humble immigrant backgrounds working in the press at a time when few women did. More strikingly, they looked nothing like the Jews of legend. “Before, even the philo-Semites tended to mythologize the Jews. The
y saw them as something wise, mysterious, something out of the Old Testament. Bluma and Clarice were young, beautiful, sensual, cultivated,” said the journalist Alberto Dines. “They changed the idea of Jewish women in this country.”35
When Near to the Wild Heart was published, Clarice, at the behest of Lúcio Cardoso, sent several copies to literary acquaintances in Minas Gerais. One made its way to Fernando Sabino, a young man very much on the make. In 1941, at age seventeen, Sabino published his first book. He sent it to Mário de Andrade, the pope of Brazilian literature, in São Paulo; Andrade, with some exaggeration, saw a resemblance to the work of Machado de Assis. Soon thereafter, Fernando—good-looking, a champion swimmer, but from an unspectacular middle-class background—managed to marry Helena Valladares, daughter of the powerful governor of Minas Gerais. As a wedding gift, Getúlio Vargas himself granted Fernando Sabino a generous lifetime pension, lifting him at a stroke from the penury in which most Brazilian writers lived.36
“I didn’t know who she was,” Sabino wrote of receiving Clarice’s book, which he enthusiastically reviewed. “I also didn’t know who had suggested it—perhaps Lúcio Cardoso. The book stunned me. … When she returned to Brazil, Rubem [Braga] introduced us. She stunned me.”37 Their meetings in Rio, where he had moved in 1944, made a deep impression on them both; he became, after her sisters and Bluma Wainer, Clarice’s most frequent correspondent. “We spent hours talking in our meetings at a café downtown. Or even in my house, where she met, besides Helena, my friends from Minas, Otto Lara Resende, Paulo Mendes Campos (later Hélio Pellegrino).”38
Why This World Page 22
