Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  In the maid’s room, that woman expects chaos. Instead, to her shock, she finds a desert, “an entirely clean and vibrating room as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed.” “The room was the opposite of what I had created in my house, the opposite of the soft beauty that came from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and exempt irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, of the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.”8

  Only one thing disturbs its perfect order: black carbon scratches on the dry white wall, outlines of a man, a woman, and a dog. Pondering the inscrutable drawing, she realizes that the black maid, whose name she has forgotten and whose face she has trouble calling to mind, had hated her.

  The drawing, and the realization, unsettles her further, and she, in turn, conceives a hatred for that room. She resolves to make the desert flower: “And I would pour water and water that would run in rivers down the scraping on the wall.” Overwhelmed by anger, she declares, “I wanted to kill something in there.”9

  Opening the door to the wardrobe—“and the darkness inside escaped like a puff”10—she sees a cockroach. Terrified, she slams the door, crushing the roach in its middle. A whitish substance begins to ooze from its body.

  In Near to the Wild Heart, the cockroach represents Joana’s amorality. In The Besieged City, Lucrécia identifies herself with the creature:

  “Daddy’s complaining about the house,” he said throwing with attention the stone far off. “It’s full of flies … Last night I felt mosquitoes, moths, flying roaches, you don’t even know what all’s landing on top of you.”

  “It’s me,” Lucrécia Neves said with great irony.11

  Even in her journalism, Clarice displayed an unusual interest in the roach question. As Teresa Quadros, in 1952, she offered a gruesome recipe for annihilating them: “How can you kill roaches? Every night, in those disgusting little creatures’ favorite haunts, leave the following recipe: sugar, flour, and plaster, mixed in equal parts. This delicacy will attract roaches, who eat it, radiant. After a while, the plaster will insidiously harden inside of them, causing certain death. The next morning, you will find dozens of little hard roaches, transformed into statues.”12 She used the same instructions as Ilka Soares in 1960. By 1962, writing in Senhor, she had fictionalized the recipe as “The Fifth Story,” which she then republished in 1964 in her collection The Foreign Legion. “I complained about roaches,” each of the story’s five parts begins.

  Roaches drove Clarice to murderous fantasies. In G. H. she explains:

  What I had always found repulsive in roaches is that they were obsolete yet still present. Knowing that they were already on the Earth, and the same as they are today, even before the first dinosaurs appeared, knowing that the first man already found them proliferated and crawling alive, knowing that they had witnessed the formation of the great deposits of oil and coal in the world, and there they were during the great advance and then during the great retreat of the glaciers—the peaceful resistance. I knew that roaches could resist for more than a month without food or water. And that they could even make a useable nutritive substance from wood. And that, even after being crushed, they slowly decompressed and kept on walking. Even when frozen, they kept on marching once thawed.13

  In “The Disasters of Sofia,” the child is shocked by the teacher’s eyes. “With their numberless cilia, [they] looked like two sweet cockroaches.” The teacher is shocked by Sofia’s story of “the treasure hidden where it is least expected.”14 G. H. is about to discover the same.

  As the door to the wardrobe crushes the roach, G. H. reaches an unprecedented crisis. She cannot resist or escape: “I was in the desert as I had never been before. It was a desert calling me as a monotonous and remote canticle calls. I was being seduced. And I was going toward that promising madness.”15

  The crux of G. H.’s crisis is the knowledge that the pus leaching through the roach’s wound is the same matter as that at her own center. It is hard to imagine a substance further removed from “what I had created in my house, the opposite of the soft beauty that came from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living.”16

  This life inside the roach is anonymous, meaningless. This was not, of course, a new insight for Clarice. Comparing G. H. to a roach was consistent with her earlier comparisons of people to animals: Joana was a snake, Lucrécia a horse, Martin a cow, “he, too, pure, harmonious, and he too without meaning.”

  But for G. H., “faced with the living roach,” the recognition that “the world is not human, and that we are not human” is a horror. She wants to scream, but she knows it is already too late. A scream would be an idiotic protest against being alive. “If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being.”17 Even worse: “I had nothing left to say. My agony was like that of wanting to speak before dying. I knew that I was saying farewell forever to some thing, something was going to die, and I wanted to say the word that at least summed up whatever it was that was dying.”18

  What is dying is, in Clarice’s term, “civilization.” She used the metaphor most extensively in The Besieged City. Lucrécia and her town, São Geraldo, begin as perfectly authentic, until civilization—viaducts, factories, statues—crowds out the wild horses. Already in The Besieged City, Clarice had conceived civilization as essentially linguistic. Language builds the town, literally: Lucrécia “indicated the intimate name of things. … Reality required the girl in order to take a form.”19 That civilization crumbles when its language is taken away. Alone in the maid’s room, G. H. surveys the wreck, as it were, of São Geraldo. “An entire civilization had sprung up, with the guarantee that what one sees be mixed immediately with what one feels, an entire civilization whose foundation is salvation—so I was in its ruins.”20 G. H. must see without immediately translating the thing she sees into human language. At first, looking at the roach, she grotesquely personifies it, even using Clarice’s favorite bad metaphor, the jewel: “Seen up close, the cockroach is an object of great luxury. A bride in black jewels.”21

  Lucrécia’s way of seeing was “civilizing” and possessive: “This city is mine, the woman looked.”22 G. H. must unlearn that way of seeing: “And in this world that I was getting to know, there are several ways that mean seeing: a looking at the other without seeing it, a possessing the other, an eating the other, a simply being in a corner and the other being there as well: all this also means seeing. The roach was not seeing me directly, she was with me. The cockroach was not seeing me with its eyes but with its body.”23

  Her final attempt to “civilize” the cockroach is to wonder about its taste: “Would its eyes be salty? If I touched them—since I was gradually becoming ever dirtier—if I touched them with my mouth, would they taste salty?” “No, there was no salt in those eyes. I was sure that the eyes of the roach were tasteless. For salt I had always been ready, salt was the transcendence that I had used in order to be able to feel a taste, and to be able to flee what I called ‘nothing.’ For salt I had always been ready, for salt I had constructed my entire self.”24

  Bereft of salt, “transcendence,” and “civilization” and, devastatingly, no longer able to discover human hope and beauty in the world, G. H. is left with the ooze coming out of the cockroach. It is the ultimate inhumanity. “Whatever comes out of the roach’s belly is not transcendable—ah, I don’t mean that it is the opposite of beauty, ‘opposite of beauty’ doesn’t even make sense—whatever comes out of the roach’s belly is: ‘today,’ blessed be the fruit of thy womb—I want the present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it, not even with a hope.”25 The passage is difficult to translate. The word ventre means, among other things, “womb,” but in the first part of the sentence it suggests a belly or a stomach. Only when Clarice ir
onically quotes the “Ave Maria” does she clearly identify the roach with the Mother of God.

  As she sheds her old world, she calls out desperately for her mother: “Mother: I killed a life, and there are no arms to receive me now and in the hour of our desert, amen. Mother, everything now has turned to hard gold. I interrupted an organized thing, mother, and that is worse than killing, that made me enter through a breach that showed me, worse than death, that showed me the thick and neutral life turning yellow. The roach is alive, her eye is fertilizing, I am afraid of my hoarseness, mother.” In Portuguese the word for cockroach, barata, is feminine, regardless of the animal’s biological gender. Here, however, Clarice is no longer using gender in a purely grammatical sense: “I had only thought of her as female, since things smashed at their waist are female.” And not just any female: “Mother, all I did was want to kill, but just look at what I broke: I broke a casing! Killing is also forbidden because it breaks the hard casing, and one is left with the sticky life. From inside the hard casing is emerging a heart as thick and alive as pus, mother, blessed art thou among the roaches, now and in the hour of this thy my death, cockroach and jewel.”26 Hidden within G. H.’s confrontation with the dying cockroach is a memory of Clarice Lispector’s own dying mother. The identity of her mother with the roach is one of the most shocking aspects of this whole unsettling book. Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that this is what Clarice intended: “Mother, blessed art thou among the roaches.”

  One of the most eminent writers on Clarice Lispector, Claire Varin, has pointed out that “the disgusting roach appears explicitly as the only way to be born. A single narrow passage opens onto the room: ‘through the roach.’ ”27 The roach caught in the door of the wardrobe is described as a “prisoner at the waist,”28 an allusion to the location of Clarice’s mother’s wound: “Things smashed at their waist are female.” Like Mania Lispector, the cockroach is paralyzed, awaiting death: “Immobilized, it supported upon its dusty flank the burden of its own body.”29

  The cockroach is only half a body—“What I could see of her was only half of the body. The rest, which couldn’t be seen, might be enormous, and divided among thousands of houses, behind things and wardrobes”—recalling a passage in one of Clarice’s private notebooks, written in English, presumably in the United States, with Portuguese phrases sprinkled in: “I want somebody to hold my hand (That was how Papa, when I was hurting, helped me stand the pain)—I don’t want to be a single body, I’m cut out from the rest of me—The rest of me is my mother! It’s another body. To have a single body, surrounded by isolation it makes such a limited body. I feel anxiety, I’m afraid to be just one body. Little balls of mercury on the broken thermometer—My fear and anxiety is of being one body.”30

  The roach, the woman, and the mother share the organic life that is the most essential part of any creature. On the level of blood and guts, they are the one and the same.

  In 1964, the year The Passion According to G. H. was published, Clarice wrote, “If I had to give a title to my life it would be: in search of the thing itself.”31 Her goal is G. H.’s too. “Only then,” when G. H. has stripped herself of human language and morality, “would I not be transcending and remain in the thing itself.”

  If Clarice knew what she was looking for, the “thing itself” remained elusive, except in abstract philosophical language. In G. H., she broadens this language, offering new synonyms for the intangible “thing.” It is neutral, inexpressive, tasteless, unsalted.32 But no matter how many words she uses to describe it, it remains unfathomable. “I would horrify myself like a person who was blind and finally opened his eyes to see—but see what? a mute and incomprehensible triangle. Could that person consider himself no longer blind simply because he sees an incomprehensible triangle? I wonder: if I look at the darkness with a lens, will I see more than darkness?” At length, G. H. takes her “first steps into the nothing”: “My first hesitant steps toward Life, and abandoning my life.”33

  In The Apple in the Dark, Clarice referred to the descent into the nothing. Still, the equivalence between “Life” and “the nothing” in G. H. is surprising, especially when Clarice stretches it even further, describing “a nothing that is the God.”34 The notion that God equals nothing is, however, a cabbalistic commonplace: “Creation out of nothing means to many mystics just creation out of God.”35 Read in this light, Clarice’s statement that “above mankind there is nothing else at all” acquires an unexpected subtlety. Not above mankind but inside mankind is “the God,” “nothing else at all.” If God is nothing, God is also everything: “Life.” This too is a Jewish definition: God is everything and nothing, the union of everything in the world and its opposite.36 As G. H. says, “God is what exists, and all contradictions are inside the God, and for that reason do not contradict Him.”37

  The statement is logically agreeable. But after such a long and painful search, saying that God is “what exists” feels like a thundering letdown.

  Since prehistory I had started my march through the desert, and without a star to guide me, only perdition guiding me, only going astray guiding me—until, almost dead from the ecstasy of fatigue, illuminated by passion, I finally found the safe. And in the safe, sparkling with glory, the hidden secret. The most remote secret in the world, opaque, but blinding me with the irradiation of its simple existence, sparkling there with glory that hurt my eyes. Inside the safe the secret:

  A piece of thing.

  A piece of iron, a roach’s antenna, a plaster chip.38

  Finding the treasure of the world in “a piece of thing,” or writing that “the divine for me is whatever is real,”39 recalls the famous statement by Clarice’s earlier mentor, Spinoza, that God is equivalent to Nature. And writing that “our condition is accepted as the only one possible, since it is the one that exists, and not any other,” recalls Spinoza’s proposition that “things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order, than they have been produced.”40

  In repeating these definitions, Clarice is yet again rejecting what she already called, in Near to the Wild Heart, “the humanized God of the religions.” It is a rejection that has an intellectual perfection to it. But for a woman longing to know God, the “thing itself” is so barren, so at “the opposite pole of the sentimental-human-Christian,” that “in [her] old human terms, [it] means the worst, and, in human terms, the infernal.”41 The neutral God, “a piece of iron, a roach’s antenna,” can never satisfy a person longing for an emotional connection with the divine.

  And so if Clarice must accept “our condition as the only one possible,” she rages against it. The painstaking definitions, parsed over decades, have finally brought her to a God that can satisfy her rationally. But they are dry. The climax of her search, her most shocking and unforgettable symbol, is quite literally wet.

  Abandoning hope and beauty and redemption but still desperate for union with the fundamental matter of the universe, G. H. takes the yellowish slime leaking from the belly of the cockroach and places it in her mouth.

  It is one thing to speculate about eating a roach as a possible outcome of an abstract philosophical search. “Why would I be disgusted by the matter coming out of the roach?” G. H. wonders. “Hadn’t I drunk of the white milk that is the liquid maternal matter?” It is quite something else, of course, to actually eat a roach. “Give me your hand, don’t abandon me, I swear I didn’t want it either: I too lived well, I was a woman of whom you could say ‘life and loves of G. H.’ ”42

  Clarice was horrified by her own creation, she later remembered. “The thing escaped from my control when I, for example, realized that the woman was going to have to eat the insides of the roach. I trembled in fright.”43

  The woman eating a roach is so extreme a symbol, such a blunt illustration for Clarice’s horror of encountering “the God,” that it inevitably begs another question: Where, psychologically and artistically, can she possibly go from here? In The Apple in the Dark Clari
ce had already written that “Nobody could live based on having vomited or having seen someone vomit; they were not things to think about very much: they were facts of a life.”44 Thinking about these facts of life can lead in only one direction, as Clarice writes in G. H.: “Why not stay inside, without trying to cross over to the other shore?” She then answers her own question: “Staying inside the thing is madness.”45

  On the same page, she points out a possible solution: “It is like the sculpted eye of a statue which is empty and has no expression, since when art is good it is because it touched upon the inexpressive, the worst art is expressive, that art which transgresses the piece of iron and the piece of glass, and the smile, and the scream.”46

  29

  And Revolution!

  The ghastly magnificence of The Passion According to G. H. has placed it among the century’s greatest novels. Shortly before her death, on her last visit to Recife, Clarice told a reporter that of all her books it was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”1 It has inspired a gigantic bibliography, but at the time it came out it seems to have been all but ignored. Only one review was published in 1964, by Lúcio Cardoso’s friend Walmir Ayala.2

  This time, at least, Clarice did not have to search for a publisher. A strange turn of events had turned two of her closest friends, Fernando Sabino and Rubem Braga, into the proprietors of a publishing house. On March 28, 1960, they had traveled to Cuba as part of a delegation led by Clarice’s future assailant, the one-eyed Jânio Quadros, who on October 3 would be elected president of Brazil. The group stayed in revolutionary Cuba for less than a week and returned to Brazil enthusiastic.