Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  But just as Mania Lispector’s fate caught up with her, the hen has exhausted her energy in one fabulous feat. The “queen of the house” cannot avoid her destiny. She prospers for a time, “until one day they killed her, ate her, and the years went by.”13

  Like the hen’s, Clarice’s release into domestic tranquility was only temporary. As the hen was destined to be cooked for dinner, and as Ana inevitably had to return to her “large, square living room,” Clarice was bound for large, square Washington, where Maury was posted as a second secretary in the Brazilian embassy. As always, she hated to leave Brazil. After her long years away, her months in Rio had brought her a modicum of professional success—writing for Comício, publishing her stories—and now she was heading back into a dreary exile. Like the hen protecting her egg, Clarice, too, was pregnant again.

  She, Maury, and Pedro traveled to New York on an opulent English boat in first class. “But I didn’t take advantage of it: I was too sad. I took a sixteen-year-old babysitter along to help. Except she didn’t have the least intention of helping: she was fascinated by the trip and by diplomatic life. And Avani, weighed down with English books and her mind completely dazzled by her good luck, didn’t so much as glance at my son.”14 For the festivities celebrating the crossing of the Equator, during which passengers were thrown fully dressed into the pool, the dejected Clarice stayed in her room.

  They arrived in Washington on September 24, 1952. “Luckily you’ve been here,” she wrote to Fernando Sabino and his wife, “so I don’t have to make this vague and inorganic city concrete for you. It’s beautiful, according to various laws of beauty that are not my own. There’s no mess here, and I don’t understand a city without a bit of confusion. But anyway, it’s not my city.”15 It was, however, more congenial than Bern, with a much bigger city and a much bigger embassy, among whose employees Clarice could find a wider circle of Brazilians.

  Several old friends were already there. There was Lauro Escorel, who had reviewed Near to the Wild Heart years before, and his pregnant wife, Sara, who, along with Clarice and Eliane, was one of three Jewish wives in Itamaraty. Sara went shopping for furniture with Clarice shortly after they arrived, but after a couple of days Clarice banned her from future trips. “But Clarice, what did I do?” Sara asked. “You make up your mind too quickly,” Clarice snapped. There was also a friend from Clarice’s student days, João Augusto de Araújo Castro, whom she had warmly recommended to Fernando Sabino, and Eliane and Mozart Gurgel Valente were close by in New York.

  The ambassador was the wealthy banker Walther Moreira Salles, who owed his prestigious position to none other than Samuel Wainer. In exchange for a loan to purchase a rotary printing press for Última Hora, Samuel put in a good word with the president. Such was Wainer’s influence, and such was Última Hora’s importance to the Vargas regime, that Getúlio passed over a powerful São Paulo industrialist and his own brother-in-law to please Wainer.16 (Samuel never expected the loan to be called in, but when the political winds started blowing in a different direction, it would be.)

  Soon after they arrived, Maury and Clarice bought the house at 4421 Ridge Street, a block from the country club in the leafy, correct suburb of Chevy Chase. It was the first house they had ever owned, and it proved an ideal place for a young family, close to town and good schools. The house, two stories, with a nice yard and a garden, was very comfortable, and it was there that she awaited the birth of her second child. The knowledge that she would have to have a caesarian, Lauro Escorel remembered, scared her to the point of panic.17 This was probably because she remembered her awful experience in Bern when Pedro was born. But on February 10, 1953, a couple of weeks after Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration, Paulo Gurgel Valente was born at the George Washington University Hospital. “This birth had none of the horrible complications of the other one,” she wrote Elisa.18 The family was now complete.

  Shortly after Paulo was born, another family arrived in Washington: Erico and Mafalda Verissimo and their teenage children, Clarissa and Luis Fernando. In May 1953, Erico Verissimo took up the post of director of cultural affairs in the “marble mausoleum” of the Pan-American Union, part of the Organization of American States. At age forty-seven, Verissimo was that rarest phenomenon: the Brazilian novelist who could live from his writing. (In the twentieth century, only Fernando Sabino and Jorge Amado could say the same.) Like Getúlio Vargas, he hailed from a small town in Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, growing up in a rich family that was ruined by his late teens. A high school dropout, he tried his hand at several activities, including running a pharmacy in a small town (the pharmacy failed), before finding a job at the Livraria do Globo, the legendary bookstore and publishing house in the state capital, Porto Alegre.

  There, at last, was a place for his talents. He started reading, writing, and translating; he was responsible for the translation of Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss that had made such an impact on the young Clarice. In 1935, his novel Crossroads and Destinies won the Graça Aranha Prize, the same distinction Near to the Wild Heart claimed nine years later. More important from a marketing perspective, the book was widely denounced for Communism and indecency, raising Verissimo’s national profile. But his real breakthrough came in 1939, when Consider the Lilies of the Field sold a “fabulous,” and in Brazil unheard-of, sixty-two thousand copies.19

  His increasing fame brought him an invitation from the State Department to visit the United States in 1941, followed in 1943 by an invitation to teach Brazilian literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he stayed until 1945 and produced, in English, his short compendium Brazilian Literature. The book’s beginning gives a good impression of the style that won him such a broad readership:

  In a small town of Brazil I saw many years ago a play staged and performed by amateurs, one of the scenes of which I will never forget. (The time was A.D. 1200, and the place somewhere in Europe.) The hero stepped over the proscenium and, beating his pasteboard cuirass with his clenched fists, cried out: “We are the brave and noble knights of the Middle Ages!”

  Later on, a friend of mine told me about another melodramatic play in which the central character, a fair and gallant lad, bidding farewell to his lovely bride, recited: “Oh, my beloved one, now I am going to take part in that tremendous campaign known in history by the name of the Thirty Years’ War!”20

  Early in his career, Brazil’s cultural hogen-mogens—jealous, of course, of his success—attacked his warm, accessible style, until they were silenced by the appearance in 1949 of the first installment of Time and the Wind. Verissimo had started making notes on it in 1939, thinking of a single volume of roughly eight hundred pages, telling the story of a family and a city. The book ended up consuming fifteen years of work and running to 2,200 pages, in which the author, in dramatic narrative form, recounted the entire history of his native province of Rio Grande do Sul. Despite its enormous length, it is, to this day, one of the most beloved and widely read of Brazilian novels; it has frequently been adapted for film and television and its characters are household names.

  Despite his success, however, Verissimo seems to have been nagged by doubts about his claims to literary quality. In an interview he gave Clarice Lispector in 1969, he said, “I plan, but I never stick rigorously to the plan I have sketched. Novels (you know this better than I do) are arts of the unconscious. On the other hand, I’m almost saying I consider myself more of an artisan than an artist. And that’s why you can understand why the critics don’t consider me profound.”21

  Clarice could not let the comment stand. Four years later, in her collection Where Were You at Night, she appended the following “Note to Erico Verissimo” to a story she had earlier published in Comício: “I don’t agree when you said: ‘Excuse me, but I’m not profound.’ You are profoundly human—and what more can you want from a person? You have greatness of spirit. A kiss to you, Erico.”22

  Erico Verissimo’s humanity made him a good choice for the p
restigious post at the Pan-American Union, a position that brought him into contact with all kinds of supplicants. Luckily he was a very tactful man.

  There appeared a retired singer (contralto), who claimed to be the author of a Hymn of the Americas. She requested my good offices to get the piece adopted as the official anthem of the OAS. She showed me the music, crooned it for me in an affected but hesitant whisper. I moved my head in time with the hymn. I remember one irresistibly grotesque line: solution by arbitration. When the lady let out the final note, I declared that the anthem was truly gorgeous, “but you understand, for it to be adopted, we would have to convene a special meeting of the Council, get the unanimous approval of the representatives of the 21 countries in the Organization … Unviable.” Sorry, very sorry.23

  The position also included a great deal of travel throughout the Americas, when he had to leave Mafalda and his children at home. “My wife, who is horrified of air travel, is automatically widowed the moment I step onto a plane,” Erico wrote.24 Perhaps this fear and isolation helped bring Mafalda and Clarice together. With Erico so often abroad and Maury working long hours at the embassy, with their children occupied at school or with their own activities, the two women, away from their country and with time on their hands, grew very close, spending almost every afternoon together. Mafalda Verissimo became Clarice’s closest friend since Bluma Wainer.

  “I wasn’t an intellectual,” Mafalda told an interviewer, “but I knew how to listen. That was what she needed. She confided in me, naturally.” That is the way her daughter, Clarissa Jaffe, recalls their friendship. “Clarice found in my mother someone she could relax with and let down her guard. My mother was a very uncomplicated woman, the exact opposite of Clarice.”25 “They could not have had more different personalities,” Luis Fernando agrees, “[but] became childhood friends.”26 Mafalda saw in Clarice “an exceptionally intelligent woman and full of problems. I never saw a woman suffer as much.”

  In the long, empty afternoons, the two sat at the lunch counters in drugstores, “talking, drinking coffee, that horrible American coffee, and eating toast.” The topics of their conversations were Clarice’s personal history: Clarice constantly “spoke of Brazil, remembering the past, her family, her Jewish origins.”27 Perhaps under the weight of these memories, Clarice leaned ever harder on the sedatives she had been taking at least since 1948. “We sat around drinking coffee and taking Bellergal, isn’t that crazy?” Mafalda said. “Bellergal was the tranquilizer of the day. It was a tiny little pill and we always had one with us.”

  Mafalda had started taking Bellergal because of her fear of flying, though she never developed a dependency. Such, unfortunately, was not the case with Clarice. Mafalda was struck by an incident at a cinema. Clarice wanted to see Citizen Kane, though she, like Maury, Erico, and Mafalda, had already seen it. They went again only because Clarice insisted. The film had barely started when they looked over to find her sound asleep. “She didn’t see any of the movie,” Mafalda said. “She must have taken more than one Bellergal.”28

  A passage from The Apple in the Dark, the novel Clarice wrote in Washington, recalls this habit: “Ah, she said with simplicity, it’s like this: let’s say someone is screaming and then someone else puts a pillow in their mouth so they don’t have to hear the scream. Because when I take a pill, I don’t hear my scream, I know I’m screaming but I don’t hear it, that’s how it is, she said adjusting her skirt.”29

  But Clarice’s work was catching on. Even the collapse of Comício after less than six months (“Our Comício, you saw, died as soon as Tereza Quadros departed,” Rubem Braga wrote in May 1953), did not mean that her commissions dried up.30 While some Comício alumni went to work for Samuel Wainer, others, including Clarice, signed up with Manchete, a new magazine begun in April 1952, when Clarice was still in Rio.31 Its founder was Adolpho Bloch, who, like Clarice, was born in the Ukraine and likewise fled during the pogroms. His family settled in Rio de Janeiro—they were neighbors of Lúcio Cardoso’s––a few months before the Lispectors got to Maceió.32 Starting with a tiny hand-operated printing press, Bloch built a media empire of which the flagship was Manchete, Brazil’s equivalent of Paris-Match or Life. The editor in chief was an old friend of Clarice’s, Otto Lara Resende. Otto, one of his father’s twenty children, belonged to that celebrated group from Minas Gerais (along with Fernando Sabino, Paulo Mendes Campos, and the psychoanalyst Hélio Pellegrino) known as the “four mineiros.” Like them, he had known Clarice since 1944, when Lúcio Cardoso had introduced Near to the Wild Heart to his literary friends in Minas.

  Fernando, acting once again as Clarice’s impresario, proposed on her behalf a kind of “note from the USA” for the new magazine.33 The idea, readily accepted, ran into an obstacle when Clarice insisted on remaining anonymous. She suggested resuscitating Teresa Quadros, but the Manchete staff had other ideas; she and Fernando exchanged letters on the subject for most of 1953, Fernando sensitively parrying Clarice’s exasperating resolve.

  “She [Teresa] is much better than I am, sincerely: the magazine stands to gain more from her—she’s eager, feminine, lively, doesn’t have low blood pressure—a good journalist in other words,” she insisted. To which Fernando replied, “I feel awkward telling them that you don’t want to sign it: for two reasons: first, because despite the great respect and distinct consideration they have for the lovely Teresa Quadros, I know they want your name. That was how we discussed it; I don’t know if you realize that you have a name.” “It so happens,” Clarice replied, rather petulantly meeting him halfway, “that I would only like to sign it C. L.” Fernando answered, “What people are interested in is Clarice Lispector, at least a Clarice Lispector reporting the news—even signing C. L.”34

  Clarice would, in fact, end up writing for Manchete, in 1968. Meanwhile, for the first time, a book of hers was being published abroad, an event that brought its own headaches. Near to the Wild Heart had been sold to Plon, in Paris, to the editor Pierre de Lescure. Along with “Vercors,” the pseudonym of Jean Bruller, author of the celebrated novella Le silence de la mer, Lescure had founded the famous Resistance publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit.

  In the spring of 1954, the translation arrived in Washington, riddled with faults, the work of a translator whose knowledge of Portuguese was clearly defective and who had not hesitated to hack out entire chapters of the book. Moreover, it seemed to be the final pass, and Clarice was given very little time to correct it.

  Erico Verissimo told her to fire off a letter to Lescure,35 which she did. “I hasten to inform you,” she wrote in her most formal French, “that I cannot consent to the publication of the book in its current state.” The translation was “scandalously bad … often even ridiculous.” Finally, she wrote, “I prefer that the book not be published in France at all to having it appear so ridden with errors.”36 The poor translation was apparently the result of a miscommunication, because six weeks later she was assuring Lescure that she did not receive his earlier letters on the subject. Still, she was not ready to let the matter rest. “I admit, if you like, that the sentences do not reflect the usual manner of speaking, but I assure you that it is the same in Portuguese,” she writes. “The punctuation I employed in the book is not accidental and does not result from an ignorance of the rules of grammar. You will agree that the elementary principles of punctuation are taught in every school. I am fully aware of the reasons that led me to choose this punctuation and I insist that it be respected.”37

  This is a point her translators would do well to recall: no matter how odd Clarice’s prose sounds in translation, it sounds just as unusual in the original. “The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language,” her friend the poet Lêdo Ivo wrote. The Canadian scholar Claire Varin has regretted her translators’ tendency to “pluck the spines from the cactus.”38

  Notwithstanding her problems with the translation, Clarice assured Le
scure that she regretted the phrase “scandalously bad.” Worse, she wrote in June, she regretted that her communications had “damaged his health.” The hero who had stood up to the German Occupation withered when confronted by Clarice Lispector. “As for myself,” she added, “I am used, by temperament, to anxiety. But I take constant care not to disturb the tranquility of others.”39

  23

  The Intimate Balance

  On July 15, 1954, the family flew to Rio for a two-month holiday, arriving just in time to witness one of the greatest uproars in modern Brazilian history. As was becoming usual, Samuel Wainer played a central role. Getúlio Vargas’s only ally in the print media was an irresistible target for the president’s enemies, who were led by a crusading—some said deranged—journalist named Carlos Lacerda. Carlos was an old friend of Samuel’s from their leftist days, so close, in fact, that when Lacerda was expelled from the Communist Party (over a misunderstanding, he claimed), the first person he sought to console him was Bluma Wainer. The expulsion, however, enraged him, and he placed his considerable polemical talents at the service of anti-Communism.

  A man of many enemies, Lacerda did not stop with attacking Communists; he detested the new incarnation of Getúlio Vargas as a democratically elected populist above all else and could not pardon his old friend Wainer’s alliance with the president. His attacks on Wainer and Última Hora became steadily more aggressive until finally he got his biggest scoop. On July 12, 1953, his headline screamed: “WAINER NOT BORN IN BRAZIL.” Wainer’s nationality was of the greatest importance, because a foreigner could not legally own a Brazilian newspaper. Eliminating him and Última Hora would almost guarantee the fall of Getúlio Vargas.