The smoking gun was a yellowing document discovered in the archives of a Rio high school, in which Samuel’s older brother, Artur, claimed that his brother was born not in São Paulo but in Bessarabia. Samuel hurriedly explained that “immigrant families, traumatized by the horrors of the war they had witnessed, were afraid that their children could be drafted into the army of the country where they were trying to rebuild their lives.”1 A comical drama ensued, with Wainer dredging up residents of Bom Retiro, São Paulo’s Jewish neighborhood, to testify that they remembered attending his circumcision and Lacerda’s allies dispatching their far-flung correspondents to exotic Bessarabia to try to uncover “Edenitz,” the shtetl from which Samuel supposedly hailed. (The photographer they sent, Jean Manzon, was the only photographer who had captured the mad Nijinsky dancing.)
How exactly they were supposed to carry out this research in a Soviet Union where Stalin was barely cold in his grave was not thought out. Lacerda’s detectives never found Edenitz. In fact, the town, now Edenit¸, did and does exist, today in northern Moldova, a few miles from Soroca, where the Lispector family crossed the Dniester. Though Wainer was briefly jailed over the scandal, he denied until the end that he was not a native Brazilian. (After his death, it turned out that he was, in fact, born in Bessarabia.)
Despite Samuel’s exoneration, the scandal further established Carlos Lacerda as the government’s most powerful enemy, and the points he scored against Última Hora weakened the already embattled Vargas. The coup de grâce came on the morning of August 5, 1954, three weeks into Clarice’s visit to Rio, when Carlos Lacerda, arriving at his Copacabana apartment building, was shot. The assassin only hit Lacerda in the foot—for months afterward he paraded around in a theatrically large cast—but managed to kill an air force major walking alongside Lacerda.
From his hospital bed, Lacerda immediately declared that Samuel Wainer had nothing to do with the assassination attempt. Indeed, he was not interested in Wainer; his real target was the president himself.2 Sure enough, the shot was traced back to one of Getúlio Vargas’s palace guards, a corrupt, illiterate thug named Gregório Fortunato, acting without Getúlio’s authorization or knowledge: Getúlio would not have ruled giant Brazil for most of a quarter-century if he had been that stupid. But the shot, as the president instantly realized, meant the end of his administration.
Rio boiled with indignation and intrigue. Under siege from every side, the wily old “father of the poor” still had one card up his sleeve. On August 23, 1954, Samuel Wainer’s Última Hora published a dramatic headline: “GETÚLIO TO PEOPLE: I WILL ONLY LEAVE THE PALACE DEAD.” He was not kidding. The next evening, after penning an inflammatory farewell letter, a pajama-clad Getúlio Vargas walked into his bedroom, took out a pistol, and fired a single shot into his heart.
Samuel’s was the only newspaper not attacked by enraged mobs. That first day, it sold some eight hundred thousand copies,3 as the offices of Standard Oil and the American embassy were attacked and Carlos Lacerda, still wearing a cast on his foot, fled the country. Vargas’s thunderous suicide note, “Serenely I take the first step on the road to eternity as I leave life to enter history,”4 rang day and night across the nation’s airwaves.
“THE PRESIDENT KEPT HIS PROMISE,” Última Hora blared.
A week after the attack on Carlos Lacerda, Clarice wrote Mafalda Verissimo, “I still haven’t absorbed Rio, I’m slow and difficult. I’d need a few more months to understand the atmosphere again. But it sure is good. It’s wild, it’s astonishing, and it’s every man for himself.”5 For a few days she escaped the capital’s political chaos in the resort of Teresópolis; her apartment in Rio was only a few short blocks from Catete Palace, the center of the turmoil.6 In this electric environment, Clarice managed to see old friends like Fernando Sabino and Lúcio Cardoso, and she cemented her relationship with José Simeão Leal, who, impressed by Some Stories, commissioned a full collection of stories, to include the previously published works. For the first time, Clarice was being paid for a book in advance. Like her Parisian debut, this blessing would soon prove ambiguous.
Just as she was starting to absorb wild and astonishing Rio, Clarice was yanked back to the suburban tranquility of Eisenhower’s Washington, where she arrived on September 15. She had done it often enough before, but it never got easier. “For me, leaving Brazil is a serious matter,” she wrote Fernando upon her return, “and no matter how ‘graceful’ I want to be, when it comes time to depart I really do cry. And I don’t like for people to see me like that, even though they’re polite tears, the tears of a second-rate artist, who doesn’t have the director’s permission to fix her hair.”7
Once she got back, Clarice kept busy. She was learning to drive, again. “The teacher asked me flat out if I really had already learned to drive before. I answered that unfortunately I had. To which he said nothing. … Maury, next to me, feigns a courage worthy of note, so as not to dishearten me. He says that my only problem, just a little detail, is that I don’t pay much attention to traffic.”8 She must have mastered the skill eventually. One of her son Paulo’s first memories of her was in the car, on the way to school: “I must have been three or four, so it was in 1956 or 1957; the school atop a hill, the street snowed under, my mother driving, the car driving around and around until we got up there. … She may have given the impression of being ‘dreaming awake,’ of being connected to some reality other than the present one.”9
She studied English as she studied driving: indifferently. She drank milkshakes and popped pills with Mafalda Verissimo, but in Washington she was increasingly realizing that the diplomatic life was impossible for her. “I wasn’t much at ease in that milieu,” said the woman who once boasted that she came straight from the Zoological Gardens. “All that formality … But I played my role. … I was more conciliatory than I am now. Whatever I thought was my duty, I did.”10 For years the notion of duty had sustained her: “I hated it, but I did what I had to. … I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust.”11 This was the time when she had “the waiter at home pass fingerbowls to all the guests in the following way: every fingerbowl had a rose petal floating in the liquid.”
“Not only the hostess but every guest seemed satisfied that everything was going well. As if there was always the danger that that reality of silent waiters, flowers, and elegance was a bit above them—not because of their social background, just: above them. … The woman next to her said: ‘The landscape there is superb!’ And the hostess, in a tone of anguish, dreaminess, and sweetness answered hastily: ‘Yes … it really is … isn’t it?’ ”12 This fictionalized fragment reads like a setup for so many of Clarice’s stories: chaos shimmering through a veil of order, threatening at any moment to burst through the vigilantly maintained surface.
It did not, though, in Clarice’s diplomatic role, even though her courtesy was often tested, including by anti-Semitism. Eliane Gurgel Valente recalled an embassy function in New York when a diplomat brought up the subject of Jews. “I can smell them,” he said. Staring him straight in the eye, Clarice replied, “You must have a terrible cold, then, since you can’t smell me and my sister-in-law.”13 In another recollection, Clarice, characteristically elliptical, does not name the disease, but it is easy enough to figure out what she is talking about:
I remember an ambassadress in Washington who ordered around the wives of the diplomats serving there. She gave rude commands. She said for example to the wife of a secretary in the embassy: don’t come to the reception dressed like a bum. To me—I don’t know why—she never said anything, not a single rude word: she respected me. Sometimes she was distressed, and asked if she could come visit me. I said yes. She would come. I remember one time—sitting on the sofa of my own house—she confided to me in secret that she didn’t like a certain kind of person. I was surprised because I was exactly that kind of person. She didn’t know. She didn’t know me or at least a part of me.
Out of pure chari
ty—in order not to embarrass her—I didn’t tell her what I was. If I had she would be in an awful situation and have to apologize. I listened with my mouth shut. Later she was widowed and came to Rio. She called me. She had a present for me and asked me to visit her. I didn’t. My goodness (?) has its limits: I cannot protect those who offend me.14
Despite her discomfort, Clarice was popular among her embassy colleagues, and the anti-Semitic ambassadress was not the only person who liked and respected her. She had Erico and Mafalda Verissimo, and when they returned to Brazil in 1956 she acquired an unlikely new friend. The new ambassador, Ernani do Amaral Peixoto, was married to none other than Getúlio Vargas’s daughter Alzira. This was the same formidable woman who, at twenty-two, had protected Guanabara Palace, gun in hand, against the Integralist onslaught. Her martial readiness was only one reason she garnered wide respect. (Samuel Wainer, among others, was a great friend.) Often reckoned the brains behind her father’s throne, she was a canny politician who for years was the most powerful woman in Brazil, the daughter of the president and the wife of Amaral Peixoto, whose posts previous to arrival in Washington included the governorship of Rio de Janeiro.15
Alzira took an instant liking to Clarice Lispector, whom she had met on an earlier visit to Washington.16 Despite her redoubtable reputation, the ambassadress was devastated by her father’s suicide. In Washington, perhaps as a way of working through her grief, she wrote a memoir, Getúlio Vargas, My Father, with Clarice’s help. “You were very generous, I see now, in your statements about my literary ‘genius,’ ” she wrote Clarice later. “You spared my ego as much as possible.”17 Clarice was not simply flattering her: the book is admirable. And Clarice could identify with Alzira’s pain at the loss of her father.
Alzira’s fifteen-year-old niece Edith Vargas, on a visit to Washington, noticed that her aunt was still melancholy at the loss and saw that Clarice, who “looked like a queen, there was a greatness within her,” also seemed enveloped by sadness.18 Much as Alzira had served as a privileged conduit to her father, Clarice, known as Alzira’s “right arm,” was the discreet and sympathetic emissary of the diplomats’ wives to the ambassadress. Silvia de Seixas Corrêa (whose nephew married Eliane and Mozart’s daughter Marilu), noted the same sadness, the same friendliness, the same beauty. Clarice never mentioned literature, her own or others.
Another diplomatic spouse, Lalá Ferreira, remembered an urgent call from Clarice, asking her to come to her house immediately. The reason, she learned upon arrival, was that Clarice had bought a record that she was afraid to listen to by herself. “They placed the LP in the record player and sat down to listen. After a moment, sighs, screams, heavy breathing, panting, squeaking doors, strange, phantasmagoric noises, followed one upon the other. Evening fell and the two sat terrified in the dusky light of the living room.” It turned out to be a recording for use in theatrical productions of horror stories.
Lalá recalled another strange incident. At Christmastime, their American neighbors having festively decorated their lawns with the usual twinkling lights and sleigh bells and Santa Clauses, the Valente family was not to be outdone. “Lalá, tipped off by friends, went to see Clarice’s decoration: irregular forms, cut out of sheets of plastic, in dark colors—gray, black, brown—hanging from the branches of the pine tree. There were no lights. The dark green of the pine and the white of the snow did not accentuate the Christmas ‘decorations.’ Lalá asked Clarice why she had selected those ‘ornaments.’ The answer: ‘For me, that’s what Christmas is.’ ”19
Through Alzira Vargas, Clarice met another lifelong friend, the young artist Maria Bonomi. Bonomi’s mother, Georgina, was the illegitimate daughter of the Italian-born magnate Giuseppe Martinelli, famous for building the first skyscraper in São Paulo, the thirty-story Martinelli Building. Today it is hard to imagine that the immense metropolis of São Paulo ever took a dim view of the skyscraper, but the pioneering construction so wracked the nerves of the citizenry that to prove the building was safe Martinelli was obliged to move his own family into its gigantic penthouse, which soon became one of São Paulo’s most glamorous addresses.
His granddaughter Maria Bonomi, born in Italy, came to Brazil as a young girl, after the war made it inadvisable to linger in Europe. Like Clarice, she was precocious, her talent encouraged by her family’s intimacy with many of Brazil’s leading artists. Her interests were early directed to graphic art, and in 1957, at twenty-two, she went to New York to study. Two years later, she participated in an exhibition at the Pan-American Union. To her surprise, she was selected to attend a White House dinner honoring foreign students. Driven to desperation by the occasion’s sartorial requirements, she looked to the Brazilian embassy. Alzira Vargas took one look at her and said, “I know who can lend her some clothes. Clarice Gurgel Valente.”20
Maria arrived in Chevy Chase and found Clarice “with a baby on her lap” and a selection of clothes all laid out: gown, gloves, shoes. “Dressed as Clarice,” she went to the banquet. When she returned the clothes, they started talking. Maria told Clarice about her work, and though Clarice said that she “liked to write” she never mentioned that she was a published writer. When Maria returned to New York, she met one of the rare women in the Brazilian foreign service, the same Dora Alencar de Vasconcellos who had been a witness to Maury and Clarice’s marriage. Clarice’s name came up and Dora loudly regretted seeing Clarice, with all her genius, wasting away amid the tedium of diplomatic life.21
The best portrait of Clarice from her time in Washington, however, comes from João Cabral de Melo Neto, who visited her at the beginning of her stay there. He and other diplomats were at dinner at her house when the talk came around to death. Clarice had to go into the kitchen to check on something, and when she returned she was eager to get back to the subject. João Cabral remembered the incident in “A Story about Clarice Lispector,” composed shortly after she died.
One day, Clarice Lispector
was swapping with friends
ten thousand anecdotes about death,
how serious it is, how carnivalesque.
While they were talking, some others
came back from the game.
They sifted through every detail
and analyzed every play.
When the soccer talk died down,
there came a yawning silence
and Clarice’s voice could be heard:
As we were saying, about death …22
Life in Washington was more eventful than in a small embassy in a small Swiss city where, without friends or children, the feral, sparkling adolescent withered into a sad, solitary adult. In Washington, Clarice had plenty of people around her, made plenty of new friends, and received plenty of visitors: Tania, San Tiago Dantas, Rubem Braga, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Augusto Frederico Schmidt. She traveled a lot, returning to Brazil in 1956, visiting California and Mexico in 1957, and accompanying Alzira to Rotterdam in early 1959, where they baptized a new ship, the Getúlio Vargas, and stopped briefly in Greenland on the way back to Washington.
Yet amid these distractions, Clarice was always concerned with preserving the “intimate balance” without which she feared she would slip into madness. Now there was a new threat looming: from her boys. With two young sons to attend to, she could no longer lock herself away in her room to write. “I didn’t want my children to feel that I was a mother-writer, a busy woman, without time for them. I tried to avoid letting that happen. I would sit on the sofa, with the typewriter on my lap, and write. When they were little, they could interrupt me whenever they wanted to. And how they interrupted.”23
Despite her determination to keep herself available, her work did sometimes annoy them. Pedro once told her, in an authoritarian tone, “I don’t want you to write! You’re a mother!”24 And Paulo, fed up with her writing for grown-ups, “ordered” her to write him a story about their bunny, Joãozinho, published a decade later as The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit. The mystery is how Joãozinho, wh
o is not very bright, manages to escape regularly from his apparently secure pen; it was based on a true story. Clarice offers no solution for the mystery, and when the book was published the letters streamed in. “The children’s letters had the most varied solutions. I remember some of them: they accused the ‘grownups’ of killing the little rabbits, and then ‘used the excuse that they had vanished.’ Others said that the rabbits were so strong that they bent the bars of their cages and ran off. Still others thought that a big and powerful rabbit came at night to free them from their captivity.”25
Pedro, the elder, was remarkable from the beginning, and Clarice kept a careful record of his development. In many of her notes, Pedro is doing nothing more than being a cute little kid. “At night, he called me to his bed,” she noted for example. “—Mother, I’m sad. —Why? —Because it’s night and I love you.” On his sixth birthday, September 10, 1954, shortly before the family left Rio for Washington, he seemed bored by the approaching party, until Clarice finally dressed him in his new birthday clothes. “I’m so happy that me exists,” he told her. He went through the usual phases: “1954—Period in which dinosaurs were his most important subject and the central object of his thoughts, including, apparently, of his nightmares.”26
Yet from relatively early on, Pedro was not a normal child. His unusual intelligence impressed people from the very beginning. As an infant in Switzerland, his linguistic gifts had astonished and even frightened his parents. In Washington a couple of years later, Tania remembered Pedro seated on the sofa, reading the encyclopedia with Erico Verissimo. A diplomatic colleague recalled being stunned by a comment Pedro made à propos of a political discussion in Washington: looking up from his playthings, the five-year-old said, “So you mean that a leftist party that takes power automatically shifts to the right?”27
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