Fernando Sabino and Paulo Mendes Campos had recommended one of the new stories, “The Smallest Woman in the World.”22 Alongside works by Ray Bradbury, W. H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, and Carlos Lacerda—Samuel Wainer’s archenemy—this story appeared in Senhor’s inaugural issue, March 1959.
“A Magazine for the Gentleman” was the brainchild of the brothers Simão and Sérgio Waissman. Their father was a publisher who specialized in selling encyclopedias and affordable classics on an installment plan. His sons wanted to produce a magazine to be the exciting public face of their own publishing company, Delta. Senhor turned out to be a sensation.
Earlier in his career, Sirotzky had been a correspondent in New York. His idea was to import the flavor of The New Yorker, Esquire, or the Partisan Review to Brazil. The old style was typified by Dom Casmurro, the most important literary publication of the previous generation, where Clarice had published some early work. Parodying the style he longed to replace, Sirotzky riffs, “This afternoon, a beautiful sunny day, my boss called me into his office and told me to interview so-and-so. I got onto the tram, the city was gorgeous, I ran up the stairs, knocked on the door, was let in and offered a cup of coffee.”23
In the old-style magazines, Sirotzky said, “The delete key didn’t exist.” In his magazine, writers would be edited. This was a remarkable change, as Paulo Francis, Senhor’s fiction editor, recalled. He worked with Clarice, who, like other writers, appreciated his careful attention. “Clarice reacted completely normally, and sometimes rewrote passages that she agreed were unclear. In Brazil, in literature, that is taboo. … You don’t touch the texts of the big names.”24 Except at Senhor, where they even rejected a piece by Erico Verissimo. (They paid him, but he, “extremely dignified,” declined the money.)
Verissimo was not the only big name who had trouble getting into the pages of Senhor. Jânio Quadros, governor of the state of São Paulo and soon to be president of Brazil, fancied himself a litterateur and submitted several articles. Sirotzky rejected them, too. “I even rejected myself!” Sirotzky remembers. “I wasn’t good enough for Senhor.” The magazine’s rigorous requirements for artistic excellence extended to questions of design: famous painters illustrated its covers, and even advertisements that did not meet its standards were rejected.
Clarice Lispector, however, was a favorite. She appeared in roughly one in every three issues. Her stories were prominently announced on the cover, and starting in 1961 she had a column in every issue. Senhor’s circulation peaked at twenty-five thousand, but “its influence in the Brazilian press needs no comment,” Francis wrote; passed hand-to-hand, the magazine reached many more people than its circulation numbers indicated. For Clarice, the result was her first taste of genuine popularity.
One person it reached was Caetano Veloso, a teenager in a small town in the state of Bahia, soon to be one of Brazil’s most famous musicians. The discovery was among the most important of his adolescence: “It was here that I was to discover sex, see La Strada, fall in love for the first (and for the second, even more startling) time, read Clarice Lispector, and—most important—hear João Gilberto,” the inventor of the bossa nova.25
It was the story “The Imitation of the Rose.” … I was frightened. I was so happy to find a new, modern style—I was looking for or waiting for something that I could call modern, something I already called modern—but the aesthetic happiness (it even made me laugh) came with the experience of growing intimacy with the world of feelings that the words evoked, insinuated, let themselves acquire. … So the person reading the story kept wanting, with that woman, to grasp the nuances of normality and, at the same time, to hand oneself over, with her, to the unspeakable luminosity of madness.26
“The Imitation of the Rose” captures the conundrum that had fascinated and tormented Clarice since childhood. It is a poetic encapsulation of the Steppenwolf dilemma, the conflict between Joana and Lídia: between, in Caetano Veloso’s words, the “unspeakable luminosity of madness” and the “normality” of everyday life.
The title refers, of course, to another mystical work. “As for my reading,” she wrote Fernando in 1953, “which is varied and probably mistaken, the best is the Imitation of Christ, but it is very difficult to imitate Him, and that’s less obvious than it seems.”27 Less obvious because, as the housewife Laura remembers, waiting for her husband Armando to return home from work, “when they had given her the Imitation of Christ to read [in school], with a stupid ardor she had read it without understanding but, may God forgive her, she felt that whoever imitated Christ was lost—lost in light, but dangerously lost. Christ”—the humanized God—“was the worst temptation.”28
As Laura sits waiting for Armando—“to the contrary of Carlota, who had made her home something that resembled herself, Laura had such pleasure in making her house something impersonal; somehow perfect because impersonal”—the reader understands that she is not a normal housewife. She has “finally returned from the perfection of the planet Mars,” a spell in a mental hospital, and she is cured. Now she is back, to iron her husband’s shirts and sleep peacefully at night. “How rich normal life was, she who had finally returned from extravagance. Even a vase of flowers. She looked at it.”29
The sight of the perfect roses, however, unbalances her. “Oh! Nothing much, it just so happened that extreme beauty made people uncomfortable.” She thinks about having the maid bring them over to her friend Carlota’s house, where she and Armando are going to dinner. Despite the complications that could create, she has to get rid of them. “Could you go to Miss Carlota’s house and leave these roses for her?” she asks the maid. “You say: ‘Miss Carlota, these are from Miss Laura.’ You say: ‘Miss Carlota …’ ‘I know, I know,’ said the patient maid.”30
Like Clarice, who as a little girl in Recife stole roses, Laura fantasizes about keeping one. “She could at least take one rose for herself, nothing more than that: one rose for herself. And she would be the only one who would ever know, and after that never again, oh, she promised herself that she would never again let herself be tempted by perfection, never again!”31
The maid takes them, leaving Laura once again seated on the sofa, lost in reverie. By the time she hears her husband’s key in the door, it is too late. Too late to greet him with a composure that will set his mind at ease. Too late for her to accept “humble joy and not the imitation of Christ.” Too late.
“She was seated in her house dress. He knew that she had done everything possible not to become luminous and unreachable. With shyness and respect, he was looking at her. He had grown older, tired, curious. But there was not a word to say. From the open door he saw his wife who was seated straight-backed on the sofa, once again alert and calm as if in a train. Which had already departed.”32
“Christ was the worst temptation,” she writes. “Genius was the worst temptation,” she adds a few pages later.33 Clarice had always hovered between the imperatives of the mystic and the artist and the sincere desire to excel as a wife and mother.
But just as the train has already departed in “The Imitation of the Rose,” it was obvious, if only in retrospect, that Clarice could not forever play the role of the diplomatic spouse. She, too, “had done everything possible not to become luminous and unreachable,” but it was too violent an effort. So around the time her first stories started appearing in Senhor, she was making preparations to leave her husband and return, this time for good, to Rio de Janeiro.
With the advantage of hindsight, the skepticism about marriage that appears from the beginning of her career makes it less remarkable that her own marriage eventually ended than that it lasted as long as it did. Cristina, in “Obsession,” mockingly speaks of wanting to “marry, have children, and, finally, be happy”;34 Joana thought that after marriage “all you can do is wait for death”; Virginia’s relationships go nowhere; Lucrécia marries for money; and Martin kills his wife, or so he thinks. Solitude, the difficulty of human connection, is as much a theme of Clarice
’s as it is of her sister Elisa’s.
And so the specific reasons behind Clarice’s separation from Maury are, in some sense, superfluous. Things had not been going well for several years. Mafalda Verissimo, who left Washington in 1956, said, “The marriage was starting to go downhill. We did everything to try to get them to stay together, but it didn’t work.”35
There was, first of all, the pain of exile, which after fifteen years had become unbearable. Abroad, Clarice said, “[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.”36
The frustrating difficulty of publishing her books could only have exacerbated her feeling that she was on the wrong track. At such a distance, even with Fernando’s help, she could not personally look after her work, and the evidence, though gracefully disguised in his letters, that she was forgotten in her home country could not have made it easier for her to remain abroad.
Her distance from her sisters, too, was increasingly painful. “With the years of absence so many facts and thoughts have accumulated and not been transmitted that one involuntarily acquires an air of mystery,” she wrote Tania. “If we were together, even if I didn’t tell you, something always comes across through the face, through gestures, through being there.”37 Her sisters felt the distance, too. In Body to Body, the painful reckoning the lonely and insecure Elisa wrote after Clarice’s death, a woman (Elisa) movingly writes to a man (Clarice) she has loved and lost:
In your letters, which I now recall so vividly, you loved me so much, you adored me, you enlarged me. You saw in me feelings I myself never suspected I had. And more: you induced me, almost implored me, to be happy, despite your absence.
Across that distance you exalted me.
In letters, our love was such a great love!
“… perhaps, even then, because of my sullen nature, I didn’t know how to match with expansive love the love that overflowed in your letters, and for that too I repent.”
Yet I loved you, and how!
And always you asked me to write more, you wanted to know about the smallest minutiae of my daily life.
“… it’s one more reason that at first I didn’t understand or accept that we gradually, mutually grew apart when you came back from your journey, and in reprisal I moved away.”38
Clarice, in turn, had moved away from Maury. By all accounts he was, and remained, in love with her, and their relationship would remain strong for the rest of their lives. But she was tired of the diplomatic routine and increasingly desperate to return to Brazil. The couple tried to work out their problems, but Clarice finally decided to leave him. In an age when even international telephone contact was rare, expensive, and difficult, the decision to leave and take the boys back to Rio was difficult.
For six-year-old Paulo, he was not only leaving his father, he was also leaving his country, his language, his house, and his beloved nanny, Avani, who was like a second mother to him. Maury was now completely alone, without his sons and without a wife who, by all accounts, he always remained in love with. After her return, he sent an eloquent letter to Clarice begging for a second chance.
I am going to write you asking for your forgiveness. Forgiveness with humility but without humiliation. I speak to you with the authority of someone who is suffering, who is profoundly alone, very unhappy, missing you and the boys in my body and soul. Many of the things that you are going to read will provoke you to anger and derision. I know it, but I can’t help it. My friends have told me to try to reconcile through indirect means. That’s not me, in the first place, and in the second place it wouldn’t help, since you are too perceptive to accept “tactics,” even though the intentions are good. Maybe I should speak to Joana and not Clarice. Forgive me, Joana, for not having given you the support and the understanding that you had the right to expect from me. You told me that you weren’t made for marriage before we got married. Instead of taking that as a slap in the face, I ought to have seen it as a request for support. I failed you in this and many other things. But intuitively I never stopped believing that inside you, Clarice, Joana and Lídia coexist. I rejected Joana because her world frightened me, instead of reaching out to her. I accepted, too much, the role of Otávio and ended up convincing myself that “we were unable to free ourselves for love.” I was unable to undo Joana’s fear of “connecting to a man without allowing him to imprison her.” I didn’t know how to free her from the “asphyxiating certainty that if a man took her in his arms, she wouldn’t feel a very sweet sweetness in any of her boyfriends; it would be the opposite, like an acid lemon juice” and that “it would be dry wood close to the fire, bending, ready to burst” (I’m retranslating from the French). I was blind and didn’t capture the deeper meaning of: “one becomes a monk because, in some way or another, he has inside himself enormous possibilities for pleasure, dangerous possibilities; which makes his fear all the greater.” … [Joana had] a love so strong that she could only exhaust her passion through hatred. … I wasn’t mature enough to understand that, in Joana or in Clarice, “hate can transform itself into love”; not being more than “a search for love.” I didn’t know how to free you from the “fear of not loving.” Perhaps, like Otávio, I didn’t like “the way a woman takes leave of herself” and needed her to be “cold and secure.” I ended up saying, “like in childhood, almost victorious: ‘it’s not my fault.’ ” … I could never understand the intensity of a jealousy, always denied and profoundly repressed by Joana and Clarice, that would make them detest Otávio and Maury. … Lídia, to the contrary, and who is also a facet of Clarice, “isn’t afraid of pleasure and accepts it without remorse.” Forgive me, my darling, for not having known, though I vaguely felt the union of the two, for not having known how, in sixteen years of marriage, to reconcile them. For not knowing how to convince Joana that she and Lídia were, and are, the same person in Clarice. Joana didn’t need to envy Lídia and you didn’t need to envy the famous “sweet women” who came between us, in these sixteen years, toward whom you felt an unacknowledged and repressed jealousy that exploded in rage. … In these circumstances it isn’t surprising that Joana saw marriage “as an end, like death.” It’s not surprising that Joana wanted to have a child with Otávio, to abandon her husband thereafter, giving him back to Lídia. Perfectly logical that Clarice, living out more or less Joana’s destiny, would return Maury’s “beauty” to the world, to the “sweet and thin women.” I could go on quoting but I would have to copy out the whole of that great book, that profound document and testimony of the soul of an adolescent woman, of a great artist. … I can’t accept it, though … that you are following, in a certain sense, in real life, Joana’s destiny. In all sincerity, without even mentioning our boys who, as a result, will end up “losing their father,” who is reduced to a mere bankroller of their lives and their studies. With all sincerity, the point of this letter is to tell you that, whether I am suffering or not, whether you come back to me or not, my part in these events is very, very big. For the love of God, don’t interpret this letter as an accusation. I know that my immaturity, my distraction, my lack of support, were one side of the equation. I wasn’t prepared, because of well-known circumstances from my childhood, to give you a strong hand, to help you resolve the conflict that you so eloquently reflected in your first book.39
As Maury understood, Joana was finally triumphant. Clarice was probably right when, as a young woman, she told him she was not made for marriage. Her constant struggle with depression and her despair at exile could not have made her easy to live with, and Maury, too, had grown depressed at his inability to help her. His own infidelities reflected desperation rather than a lack of affection. Even his second wife said that until he remarried, “sexually, physically, he always liked her. But she was not interested.”40
He sent her a book about marital therapy, adding: “My intention in sendin
g it to you is not to point an ‘accusing finger’ at you or anyone else. If there is any accusation it is against myself, who was stupid and blind. I am not trying to identify you with any of the extreme cases mentioned in the book. As the fado goes, my desire is to give you a kiss, like someone who knows that this smile, on our lips, will end. … I am more and more convinced that you are the woman of my life and that my search for you in others, in the many false Lídias of which the world is full, was the error of someone who gave up early on.”41
26
Belonging to Brazil
But the train had already left. In July 1959, “luminous and unreachable,” Clarice returned to Brazil, where, except for brief excursions, she would spend the rest of her life. When she had departed almost two decades before, barely out of adolescence, the country was in the grip of war and of the quasi-Fascist Estado Novo. She returned in middle age to find her country blossoming in a teenage exuberance, amid a cultural fluorescence that touched every area of national life.
For Europeans, the 1950s were the grim years of postwar reconstruction; for Americans, they reek of suburban conformity. For Brazilians, the decade following Vargas’s suicide is remembered as a golden age, an unprecedented, and never repeated, era of national confidence. Hitherto depressed—“The stork,” a historian wrote, “is the bird that symbolizes our country. Of advantageous stature, it has strong legs and robust wings, yet spends its days with one leg crossed over the other, sad, sad, with that sober, gloomy, unsightly sadness”1—Brazil was suddenly the happiest place around.
In those glorious years, “the Brazilian ceased to be a mutt among men and Brazil to be a mutt among nations.”2 Everything was “novo, nova.” In 1959, João Gilberto launched the bossa nova and soon had Hollywood and the Riviera swaying along. The cinema novo arrived, determined to show Brazil’s excluded in the urban slums and the rural backlands for the very first time. (Not to everyone’s taste, this social emphasis earned the first cinema novo film, Rio, 40 degrees [1955], a ban from the censor. He reportedly alleged that “the average temperature in Rio never exceeded 39.6 degrees.”)
Why This World Page 32
