On June 3, 1949, the young family finally left Bern, sailing to Brazil from Genoa. “The food was awful, extremely greasy,” on the Atlantic crossing, Clarice remembered. “I did what I could to feed without danger my eight-month-old boy.”38 The food improved once they arrived in Recife. A big lunch awaited, prepared by her aunt Mina Lispector. Like Tania, Mina had been a substitute mother for the girl, and Clarice remembered her with great tenderness. On her final visit to Recife, a few months before her death, Clarice named the person who had most marked her life: “Aunt Mina who gave me food. Who took care of me.”39
Clarice had not seen the city of her childhood since 1935, when the family moved to Rio. It had not changed as much as she had. On her way to Aunt Mina’s, she wanted to see the Avenida Conde de Boa Vista, the main artery through the Jewish neighborhood of Boa Vista. She remembered it as enormous and was disappointed when it turned out to be rather unimpressive. She had a similar notion of Recife’s famous law school. “Children generally have a different idea of the dimension of things, you know how it is: I played on the stairs of the Law School and remembered it being enormous. On my way through Recife I saw it again, its actual size.”40
She, Maury, and Pedro had only a few hours in Recife before they had to be back onboard, continuing on to Rio, where she hadn’t been since March 1946. Her news of the city, and of Brazil, had come mainly from Bluma Wainer, who was increasingly depressed and had split from Samuel. Things had not been going well for years. Samuel, tirelessly building up one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of Brazilian journalism, was always darting off on exotic missions, leaving Bluma by herself in Paris or in Rio. “I spoke to Sam on the phone, and as I’ve already said and as always we didn’t get past ‘how are you? Everything ok? Etc.,” she wrote Clarice in 1947.41 By the next year, she told Clarice, “I’m turning to stone, nothing moves me or interests me any more.” Samuel was gone again, flying from Palestine to Bogotá. “Miss Bluma will be alone once more. (I would like to find a word that means more than alone—you who understand the strength of words, find me one and send it).”42
The marriage was definitely over by the beginning of 1949, when Samuel met Getúlio Vargas in Rio Grande do Sul. In his home state, the erstwhile dictator, now a senator, was meticulously planning his return to the presidential palace. Samuel had come to see Getúlio as the leader of a genuinely national movement, with broad support from many sectors of society, as well as one committed to the democracy in place since 1945. He and Bluma had been leftists—Samuel, for example, was the first Brazilian to interview Tito—and Bluma still was. Her letters to Clarice record her enthusiasm over the Spanish Republican movement and her visit to Yugoslavia and are tinged with a mild anti-Americanism. In 1947, she reported, with understandable astonishment, that Brazil had agreed to import twenty-seven thousand tons of American bananas!43 For the woman whose motto was “The ends do not justify the means,” Samuel’s alliance with the dictator was the last straw.
Along with her reports on the unfolding political scene back home—“Brazil just keeps getting more and more Brazil,” she sighed44—Bluma also urged her friend not to pine away for the place. “For the rest, the papers are full of news about wives who kill their husbands, husbands who kill their wives and respective lovers, and others, with less commotion, who simply kill themselves.”45
21
Her Empty Necklaces
For Clarice, arrival in Rio meant reunion with another old friend, Lúcio Cardoso. The boy who had dreamed of film stars in his small backwater now set up his own Chamber Theater to feature the works of classic authors, alongside his own work and that of his friends.1 He had begun working in the theater in 1943, just when he met Clarice. It was a lifelong dream.
“Lúcio Cardoso—I remember well—attributed great importance to his work in the theater,” said his friend the novelist Octávio de Faria. “It was inevitable, since he himself was essentially more a ‘tragedian’ than a novelist.”2 His theatrical work was artistically avant-garde and politically far ahead of his time, nowhere more than in racial questions. Though slavery had not been outlawed until 1888, within the living memory of many Brazilians, the country’s elite held as a doctrine of faith that the country did not suffer racial divisions.3 With Tomás Santa Rosa, who had illustrated the covers of Near to the Wild Heart, The Chandelier, and The Besieged City, Lúcio participated in the Black Experimental Theater of Abdias do Nascimento, an early Afro-Brazilian activist. Santa Rosa designed the sets and became codirector of Lúcio’s The Prodigal Son, a biblical drama performed with an all-black cast.
Despite all the group’s efforts, the play flopped. His sister recalled her “anguish seeing Pascola, the most renowned theater critic of the day, snoozing in the front row.”4 Undaunted, convinced that theater was a weak area in Brazilian culture, Lúcio determined to open the Chamber Theater in 1947. To get funding, he invited his writer friends to contribute articles. From Bern, Clarice Lispector sent a blurb: “The authors, set designers, and artists who work for the Chamber Theater guarantee the success of their undertaking—to return to the gesture its meaning and the word its irreplaceable tone; to allow silence, as in good music, to be heard as well, and not to relegate the sets to mere decoration nor to simple background—but to use all these elements in their specific theatrical purity, allowing them to form the invisible structure of a drama.”5 With her own theatrical flourish, she signed this sentence “Lili, queen of the desert.”
To open this ambitious endeavor, Lúcio produced his own The Silver String. “I cannot recall a more carefully prepared, better worked-out, more impressive spectacle for our little group around Lúcio,” Octávio de Faria recalled. “Ester Leão was the director and Lúcio Cardoso submitted (though, it is true, sometimes almost screaming) to all her demands. Sometimes I saw him on the verge of tears. It doesn’t matter. The play opened, and the actress Alma Flora got almost all the applause.”6 As it happened, the poetically named Alma Flora had appeared at Recife’s grandest venue, the Teatro Santa Isabel, when Clarice Lispector was a child. The spectacle had inspired her, age nine, to write her two-page, three-act play, Poor Little Rich Girl.7
Enthusiasm ran high, as always with Lúcio’s undertakings. “I remember it like it was today,” Faria continued.
Lúcio Cardoso, wild about the new “diva” (he never got over his “passion” for Italian film divas), ordered up a huge “banquet,” at Lapa 49, to commemorate Alma Flora’s breakthrough. No end to the beer and the fresh crabs—except that there wasn’t any money to pay for it … and there, in the middle of the table, a magnificent centerpiece of red roses (red, of course! …) dedicated to the diva being honored. It was a great party, one of the few happy, successful ones I can remember. It really was a breakthrough—not for Alma Flora, nor for Maria Sampaio (another actress, splendid, by the way), nor for Ester Leão, a notable director—but for Lúcio Cardoso, one of our greatest playwrights.
The inevitable hangover soon arrived. “Despite this great success, even ‘d’éstime’ (in relation to the earlier plays), it was still a complete professional failure. It vanished without a trace.”8
Still, Lúcio had managed, as always, to infect a group of Brazil’s most talented artists with his extravagant dreams. Participating in his little theater were Marques Rebelo, whose chronicle of Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s is a classic of Brazilian literature; Nelson Rodrigues, later Brazil’s most famous and controversial playwright; the landscape designer Burle Marx, celebrated for his gardens in the new capital, Brasília; and the great poet Cecília Meireles; not to mention Lúcio himself, the painter Santa Rosa, and, modestly and from afar, Clarice Lispector.
Lúcio’s sister, Maria Helena Cardoso, captured the power of his irrepressible enthusiasm:
I remember Nonô [her pet name for him] so joyful, his head full of fantasies, especially when thinking of traveling, and still young, with several books published and many still to be written, deciding to be a rancher some day. Infect
ed by his enthusiasm, by the power of his faith and of his imagination, I seriously believed in all his whims, even the most impossible. For me, it was all feasible, nothing was impossible for him, whom I admired above all else: novels, poems, beautiful plantations conjured out of nothing. His slightest dreams were realities for me, such was the force of his imagination.9
Perhaps it was news of Lúcio’s new theatrical venture that inspired Clarice, toward the end of her time in Switzerland, to write “The Choir of Angels,” later published as “The Burnt Sinner and the Harmonious Angels.” Or the piece may have been inspired by another friend, the Pernambuco poet João Cabral de Melo Neto, who had started a small press from his diplomatic posting in Spain and was eager to have something from Clarice. “I’m still waiting for the ‘Choir of Angels,’ ” he wrote at the beginning of 1949. “You speak of it so fabulously that my hopes are rising.”10
He never published it, and may indeed never have seen it, until the piece appeared in 1964 toward the back of The Foreign Legion, a volume of miscellany. It is Clarice’s only incursion into drama. Though Tania’s granddaughter Nicole Algranti produced it in 2006, “The Burnt Sinner” does not really seem destined for the stage, if only because of its length (thirteen pages). With a biblical rhythm and language that is also unique in her work, the play tells of a woman condemned to death.11 Her sin is banal:
People: So then she hid her lover from her husband, and her husband from her lover? That is the sin of sins.
Lover: But I laugh not and for a moment neither do I suffer. I open the eyes I have kept closed out of vanity, and I ask you: who? who is this foreign woman, who is this solitary woman for whom a single heart was not enough?
The drama ends when the “foreign woman” is burned to death. Once she is gone the various characters have their say.
Priest: The beauty of a night without passion. What abundance, what consolation. “Great and incomprehensible are his works.”
1st and 2nd Guards: As in war, good does not remain when evil is committed to the flames …
The newborn angels: … we are born.
People: We do not understand and we do not understand.
Husband: I shall now return to the dead woman’s house. Because there is my former spouse, awaiting me in her empty necklaces.
Priest: The silence of a night without sin … What clarity, what harmony.
Sleepy child: Mother, what has happened?
The newborn angels: Mama, what has happened?
Women of the people: My children, it was like this: etc. etc. and etc.
Member of the people: Forgive them, they believe in fatality and are therefore fatal themselves.
This odd short play reproduces with disquieting closeness the helplessness that comes through in Clarice’s letters from exile in Switzerland, when her life was completely out of her hands, when people uttered high-sounding clichés all around her, and when she was completely subject to the will of others. In “The Burnt Sinner,” the people have their say; the lover has his say; the husband has his say; the priest has his say; the guards have their say; and the angels have their say. The “foreign woman” herself, condemned to the flames, never says a word.
Finally back in Rio, Clarice began to find her voice. This time it was not just a quick visit. She would be in Brazil for over a year, while Maury was assigned to the ministry in Itamaraty Palace. After finding an apartment in Flamengo, close to Tania, her first order of business was to find a publisher for The Besieged City. She worked fast. She arrived in Brazil at the end of June and the book appeared by late August.12 The publisher was, once again, A Noite, which had published Near to the Wild Heart five years before. It was the book publishing arm of the newspaper where she had worked earlier in her career, and it was a respectable enough choice, though the rejections from other, more prestigious houses—even Agir, which had produced The Chandelier—must have stung.
Worse, the book bombed. Only a handful of reviews appeared, and these were not positive. Even Sérgio Milliet, the São Paulo critic who had so vocally supported her earlier books, felt the despair so many readers have felt faced with what a close friend called “perhaps the least loved of Clarice Lispector’s novels.”13 Milliet saw the book as rococo, “the writer tangled in her own web of precious images,” the structure lost in the jungle of rhetorical flourishes. A shame, he continued, because the book “shows other ambitions, attempts psychological depth.” He admires her linguistic invention but concludes, “The author succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.”14
Milliet has a point. Clarice said that it was her most difficult book to write,15 and it is frustratingly difficult to read, hard to follow the curlicued inner movements of its heavily allegorical characters. “Its hermeticism has the texture of the hermeticism of dreams. May someone find the key,” wrote the Portuguese critic João Gaspar Simões.16 Clarice acknowledged the problem but hoped that closer acquaintance would reveal the book’s merits, as it had for her law school friend San Tiago Dantas. “He opened the book, read it, and thought, ‘Poor Clarice, she’s really come down.’ Two months later, he told me that when he was going to bed he wanted to read something and picked it up. Then he said: ‘It’s your best book yet.’ ”17
She acknowledged, though, that the book is incomplete: “The Besieged City was one of the most difficult books for me to write, because it demanded an exegesis I am incapable of performing. It’s a dense, closed book. I was chasing after something and there was nobody to tell me what it was.”18 In retrospect, it is easy enough to see what she was chasing after. The refinement of her language had taken her so far. But in the broader sense The Besieged City has no point. Lucrécia’s identification with the horses, and by extension Clarice’s search for the union of expression and impression, was complete, as far as it could be.
But that search is, by definition, spiritual. And in The Besieged City Clarice is not yet ready to acknowledge frankly that the point of these extravagant linguistic exercises is to lead her to a God who had abandoned her and whom she had in turn rejected. In this book, it is as if she is still clinging to her statement of August 1941, that “beyond mankind there is nothing else at all.” Though she had spent years refining her tools, her increasingly fantastic mastery of her language, she was as yet loath to use them. Hence the book’s “dense, closed” air. Hence also, more than simple frustration at the restraints of diplomatic society, the foreign woman’s silence.
On September 8, 1949, a few days after The Besieged City appeared, Maury received news of his next posting: Torquay, a Devon resort where the third round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was set to begin. Unlike his posting in Bern, which had lasted several years, the mission to Torquay was only a matter of six months, which for Clarice would mean more of a long holiday and less of an interminable prison sentence. And they would not have to leave immediately; they would remain in Rio for another year, until the end of September 1950.
While she was home, Clarice sketched out some stories and dabbled in journalism, but most of her time was taken up with her family and her new baby. She renewed her acquaintance with old friends, including Paulo Mendes Campos, who came to the apartment to interview her for the Diário Carioca. When he arrived, he found Pedro, “fat and happy,” being transported from the bath to his bed. Clarice told Mendes Campos that maternity had taught her that “her voice was raspier, her gestures more brusque” than she had previously believed, and because her journalism, and presumably motherhood, was keeping her busy, she hadn’t started thinking about another novel.19
That would have to wait until her arrival on the English Riviera, when the young family settled into one of the picturesque town’s many hotels. The owners of these hotels had a reputation for snobbishness and intransigence later immortalized in the Monty Python spinoff Fawlty Towers. Like the hotels, not everything in the little beach town was as charming as it seemed. Agatha Christie was born there in 1890 and set many of her murder mysteries in the area, i
ncluding her famous Ten Little Indians, also known as And Then There Were None. (Clarice Lispector would later translate Hercule Poirot’s final case into Portuguese. She once said, “My ideal would be to write something that at least in the title recalled Agatha Christie.”)20
With diplomats from thirty-eight countries streaming into town for the conference, Torquay’s hospitality industry was presumably on its best behavior. Clarice’s letters, at any rate, make no mention of any problems. She rather enjoyed England. “This here is a typical small town, with a whiff of Bern. If we weren’t going to be here for such a short time, it would be unendurable. Everyone is more or less ugly, wearing horrible hats, and with horrible clothes in the shop windows … but though Torquay is boring I like England. The lack of sun, certain beaches with dark rocks, the lack of beauty—it all moves me much more than the beauty of Switzerland. Speaking of which, I hate it more and more. I hope never to return.”21
She and Maury found time to visit Kents Cavern, a cave system near Torquay that has been inhabited by man for around forty thousand years (and that put in an appearance in Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit). The outing gave Clarice a certain perspective. “It was very nice. Though it causes a certain affliction. I left there determined not to worry about little things, since there were so very many years behind me. But when I got back to the hotel I realized that it was no use—prehistory has nothing to do with me, Pedro’s food is more important.”22
Pedro, who was already two, kept Clarice busy. He was learning English, which, Clarice wrote, he spoke like a backwoods Brazilian: “gude morningue,” “looki di funni mani.” It was quite an ordeal to find him a proper nanny; she went through three in two months and by the end of October was still “waiting for ‘the woman of my life,’ ” she told Tania.23 “He eats marvelously, is starving all the time, talking about food: ‘good meat,’ ‘nice fish,’ etc. He talks so much that if he wasn’t my own I would get tired. The conversation doesn’t vary much—it’s about food, cars, busses, and then back to food.”24
Why This World Page 26
