Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  The Foreign Legion is full of reflections on the meaning and process of writing, a subject Clarice had never addressed so extensively. In a short piece called “Novel,” she wrote, “It would be more attractive if I made it more attractive. Using, for example, some of the things that frame a life or a thing or a novel or a character. It is perfectly acceptable to make something attractive, except for the danger that a painting is a painting because it is in a frame. For reading, of course, I prefer something attractive, it fatigues me less, it delimits me and surrounds me. In my writing, though, I must do without it. The experience was worthwhile, even if only for the person who wrote it.”15 This “attractiveness” was never the point of her writing, which was “the means of someone who has a word like bait: the word fishing whatever is not a word. When that non-word bites the bait, something was written.”16 Abstraction could be the most effective way of “baiting” meaning. “In painting as in music and literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye.”17

  One of Clarice’s greatest stories, “The Egg and the Hen,” appears in The Foreign Legion. Since her childhood, growing up with chickens in the yard behind her house in Recife, Clarice had been interested in chickens and eggs. “I understand a hen, perfectly. I mean, the intimate life of a hen, I know how it is,” she said. But the story has nothing to do with that. At the end of her life, when an interviewer asked her about the charge that she was “hermetic,” she answered, “I understand myself. Well, there’s one story I don’t understand, ‘The Egg and the Hen,’ which is a mystery to me.”18

  “In the morning in the kitchen upon the table I see the egg,” the story begins, conventionally enough. It soon becomes a meditation that recalls Gertrude Stein’s cubist portraits in words.

  An egg is a thing that needs to be careful. That is why the hen is the disguise of the egg. So that the egg can move through time the hen exists. That is what mothers are for. —The egg lives on the run because it is always ahead of its time. —The egg for now will always be revolutionary. —It lives inside the hen so that they cannot call it white. The egg really is white. But it cannot be called white. Not because this harms it, but the people who call the egg white, those people die to the world. To call something white that is white can destroy humanity. Once a man was accused of being what he was, and was called That Man. They hadn’t lied: He was. But to this day we have not got ourselves back, one after the next. The general law to keep us alive: one can say “a pretty face,” but whoever says “the face” dies; because they have exhausted the topic.19

  If this is not a traditional narrative, and is obscure in many places, if even Clarice claimed not to understand it, neither is it entirely opaque. It has a clear subject, and one familiar with her work will find in it many recognizable references. There is the mystery of motherhood and birth, the distance between language and meaning, and even, in the suggestion of revolution, an ironic nod to current politics.

  In the same book, Clarice describes the new modernist capital of Brasília in terms similarly abstract.

  When I died, one day I opened my eyes and it was Brasília. I was alone in the world. There was a parked taxi. Without a driver. —Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, two solitary men. —I look at Brasília as I look at Rome: Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins. The ivy has not yet grown. —Besides the wind is something else blowing. It can only be seen in the supernatural ripples of the lake. —Anywhere one is standing, a child can fall, and outside the world. Brasília is on the edge. —If I lived here, I would let my hair grow to the ground. —Brasília has a splendid past that no longer exists. … From my insomnia I look out the window of the hotel at three in the morning. Brasília is the landscape of insomnia. It never sleeps. —Here the organic being does not deteriorate. It petrifies. —I wanted to see spread throughout Brasília five hundred thousand needles of the blackest onyx. —Brasília is asexual. —The first instant of seeing is like a certain instant of drunkenness: feet that do not touch the ground.20

  The ten pages of this meditation create in the reader precisely the drunken or prayerful feeling that Brasília created in Clarice. “Brasília: Five Days” is not a traditional essay, of course, but no other description of the city has ever come close to capturing its suffocating and enigmatic air. “As in anything else,” she writes in The Foreign Legion, “in writing I also have a kind of worry about going too far. What would that be? For what? I restrain myself, as if holding the reins of a horse that could gallop off and take me God knows where.”21

  31

  A Coarse Cactus

  In 1961, when The Apple in the Dark came out, Rosa Cass, a Jewish journalist who was a friend of Alberto Dines, interviewed Clarice for the Jornal do Comércio. “She hated interviews,” Rosa remembered. “She answered none of my questions.”1 But the two women got on, and after the painfully improvised interview appeared, Rosa sent Clarice flowers to thank her.

  Clarice never replied. Offended, Rosa did not contact her again until she came across The Passion According to G. H. Shocked and impressed, she forgot her previous annoyance and called Clarice. They discussed Beethoven. “How did he compose after he went deaf?” Clarice asked. “He could only hear the music inside him.” Rosa answered. “And that was what I felt when reading your book: that solitude.” Clarice said, “Imagine the solitude of the person who wrote it.”2

  The two women grew close, and Rosa had ample opportunity to see Clarice’s solitude. Rosa worked as a journalist, but for Clarice’s sake she took time off in the afternoons to attend matinees with her. Rosa, who after all had a job, had not seen a matinee since she was a girl, but she adjusted her work schedule to be able to spend more time with Clarice, who went to bed at nine; it was impossible to see her in the evenings. This kind of loyalty was common in Clarice’s friends, at least for a time and from those who felt her vulnerability and wanted to help her, though she often exhausted even the most devoted.

  She was not completely cut off, however. If The Passion According to G. H. had not been extensively reviewed when it first appeared, its impact, once readers began to absorb it, was profound and resulted in a certain popularization of Clarice. In 1965, the first of what would become dozens of theatrical adaptations of her work appeared in Rio; in 1966, the first book about her was published, The World of Clarice Lispector, by the philosopher Benedito Nunes.

  She also found a new circle of friends around Pedro Bloch, cousin of Adolpho Bloch, the powerful owner of Manchete. Born, like Clarice, in the Ukraine, Dr. Bloch was a prominent playwright and physician, who specialized in disorders of the voice. He tried to cure Clarice of her throaty r’s and her lisp, which, he said, might have resulted from her imitating her parents’ speech in childhood. The interventions were successful, but then Clarice relapsed into her old accent: “She told him that she didn’t like losing her characteristics.”3

  Bloch and his Uruguayan wife, Miriam, entertained prominent artists and intellectuals at their beach house in the resort of Cabo Frio. One who came was João Guimarães Rosa, the writer and diplomat who, from his post in Hamburg, had helped many Jews escape to Brazil. Three months before his stroke, Lúcio Cardoso had written that “Brazilian literature belongs to two princes, Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector.”4 Now the two princes, one nearing the end of his life, grew close.

  She had long admired him. When his masterpiece Grande sertão: veredas came out in 1956, she told Fernando Sabino, “I’ve never seen anything like it! It’s the most beautiful thing in a long time. I don’t know how far his inventive power can go, it surpasses any imaginable limit. I’m even giddy. … I’m even upset that I like it so much.”5 Clarice never wrote with such enthusiasm about a contemporary, and a few months before his death the older master gave her a great compliment. After citing by heart long passages from her books, he said “something I will never forget, so happy was I when I heard it: he said he read me, not for
literature, but for life.”6

  In 1965, Clarice finally moved into the large three-bedroom apartment she had bought a couple of years earlier, in a building still under construction. It was close by the apartment she had been renting, also in Leme. After a lifetime on the move, Rua Gustavo Sampaio 88, one block from the beach, next door to the Leme Tennis Club, would be her final home. About a year after she moved in, she very nearly died there.

  On September 12, 1966, Rosa Cass was at the Copacabana apartment of two sisters, Gilka and Gilda, practitioners of the Afro-Brazilian religion umbanda. Rosa was going through a difficult period in her life, and a friend had suggested that she visit Gilda, who could ritually “cleanse” her. During this cleansing, to Rosa’s fright and astonishment, Gilda was suddenly possessed by a spirit that inspired the small woman to seize Rosa, lift her above her head, and spin her around. Once Rosa was safely back on the ground, the medium announced that a close girlfriend’s life was in danger. At the time, Rosa’s two closest friends were Clarice and the prominent novelist Nélida Piñon. Terrified, she wondered which of them was in danger, and she soon got her answer.

  The next evening, Nélida was launching her first collection of stories, Time of Fruit, an occasion to which she had invited Clarice. A few hours before the event, Clarice called to say she would not be able to come. Nélida noted that her voice was weak, trailing off. Several hours later, at 3:35 in the morning, a neighbor spotted smoke coming out of the building across the street. She alerted her doorman, and they ran across to Clarice’s building, where they found her apartment in flames.7

  Clarice’s two addictions, to cigarettes and sleeping pills, had finally caught up with her. She slept in a single bed under a curtained window, and she had always slept badly, going to sleep around nine and waking up in the early morning hours. That night, after taking her pills, she sat smoking in bed. She awoke to find the room in flames. In a panicked attempt to save her papers, she tried to put out the fire with her own hands. Her son Paulo brought her out of the blazing room and rang insistently on the doorbell of the next apartment. The frightened inhabitants, Saul and Heloísa Azevedo, awoke to find Clarice, burned all across her body, standing at their door. She did not say a single word. Saul and Paulo rushed to put out the fire while Heloísa led Clarice inside. Her partly melted nylon nightgown was stuck to her body, and when she walked across Heloísa’s carpet, she left bloody footprints behind.

  For three days, in the company of Tania, Elisa, and Rosa, Clarice hovered between life and death. Her right hand, her writing hand, was so badly damaged that there was talk of amputation. Tania pleaded with the doctors to wait another day, and the danger passed. During these three days, the surgeon prohibited visits. “But I want visits, I said, they distract me from the terrible pain. And everyone who did not obey the sign ‘Silence,’ I received them all, groaning in pain, as at a party I had become talkative and my voice was clear: my soul flowered like a coarse cactus. … It seemed that I vaguely felt that, while I suffered physically in such an unendurable way, that would be the proof of living to the maximum.”8

  The pain was monstrous. Besides the third-degree burns on her hand, her legs, too, had been terribly burned, though her face, luckily, had been spared. Almost forty years later, Rosa still shuddered when describing how the nurses had to clean the wounds, unanaesthetized, with a brush and soap. “When they took out the stitches from my operated hand, between the fingers, I screamed,” Clarice wrote. “I screamed out of pain, and out of rage, since pain seems to be an offense to our physical wholeness. But I wasn’t stupid. I took advantage of the pain and screamed for the past and the present. I even screamed for the future, my God.”9

  Clarice had to stay in the hospital for three full months, enduring surgery, skin grafts, and physiotherapy, which enabled her eventually to regain the use of her hand, at least for typing. For the rest of her life it would resemble a blackened claw. “The left hand was a miracle of elegance,” her friend Olga Borelli wrote. “At work, agile and decided, it seemed to try to compensate for the deficiencies of the other, hard, with badly controlled gestures, with burnt fingers, bent back, deeply scarred.”10

  Her bedroom was completely gutted, with one exception: a missal a friend had given her, with the inscription “Pray for me.” “The plaster fell from the walls and the ceiling, the furniture was reduced to powder, and the books as well. I won’t even try to explain what happened: everything was burnt, but the missal remained intact, the cover only lightly singed.”11

  To Rosa, Clarice left the hospital even more beautiful than before, very thin, her features refined and given an even more intensely spiritual aspect by her suffering. But soon afterward, during her difficult convalescence, she began to gain weight and had to consult a dietician.12 She would always remain a striking figure, but at age forty-six her famous beauty, which despite her many difficulties had never left her, was now in the past. According to her son Paulo, she suffered from “an unconfessed disillusionment with the loss of the beauty of her youth.”13

  “It seemed to me that she thought it was ugly to go out when one was no longer young,” Clarice wrote. “The air so clean, the body dirty with fat and wrinkles. Especially the clarity of the sea, how it denudes. It wasn’t for others that it was ugly for her to go out, everyone accepts that other people are old. But for herself.”14

  32

  Possible Dialogues

  As often before in Clarice’s life, triumph soon followed disaster, and 1967 turned out, professionally at least, to be a good year. It saw the publication of the children’s story The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, which she had written in Washington, in English, at Paulo’s request. She had forgotten about it—“It wasn’t much literature for me”1—until a publisher asked if she had anything for children. She pulled it out of the drawer, translated it, and published it.

  The book won the Calunga Prize for the best children’s book of the year, which made Clarice happy. “But I was even happier when it occurred to me that they call me a hermetic writer. How? When I write for children, I am understood, but when I write for adults I become difficult? Should I write for adults with the words and the feelings appropriate to a child? Can’t I speak as an equal?”2

  The next year saw her second incursion into children’s literature, The Woman Who Killed the Fish, which opens with a confession: “The woman who killed the fish unfortunately is me. But I promise I didn’t mean to. Me of all people! who doesn’t have the heart to kill a living thing! I don’t even always kill cockroaches.”3 In the book, she remembers all her pets, from Dilermando, whom she had to leave behind in Naples, to Jack, the dog she had in Washington. Like “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” The Woman Who Killed the Fish was conceived because of a “feeling of guilt that [she] wanted to expiate.”4 In this case, the victims were two little red fish her son Pedro entrusted to her when he went away for a month. Busy working and absentminded, she simply forgot to feed them for a couple of days; when she finally remembered, they were dead. Once again, just as she had done following her mother’s death, she told a story in order to assuage her guilt, reasserting the connection between crime and creation.

  The chance “to speak as an equal,” to adults, came when her old friend Alberto Dines, who had given her work at the Diário da Noite after her return to Brazil, got a phone call from another friend, Otto Lara Resende. As in 1960, Otto said, “Clarice is having trouble.” And as in 1960, Dines, now editor in chief of the Jornal do Brasil, the country’s most prestigious newspaper, was in a position to help. Dines was creating a new Saturday cultural supplement and was anxious to attract a more cultured readership for the section. He immediately offered Clarice a weekly column.

  On August 19, 1967, she debuted as a cronista, or “chronicler.” The crônica is a free-form literary column, and it was a Brazilian institution. The cronistas were popular and even revered. Whether this was because, as João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote, “in Brazil, all they understand is writing f
or newspapers,” or simply because newspapers were still the primary medium in the country, the genre was genuinely popular. Its practitioners included many of Clarice’s friends, including Paulo Mendes Campos, Rubem Braga, and Fernando Sabino.

  Clarice feared that she was not up to the task and often confessed, over the six and a half years that she worked for the Jornal do Brasil, that she was a bit cowed by the genre.

  Besides being a neophyte in these matters, I’m also new to writing for money. I worked before in the press as a professional, without signing my name. Signing, however, automatically makes it more personal. And I feel a bit like I’m selling my soul. I told a friend about this and he said: but writing is selling one’s soul a little bit. It’s true. Even when it’s not to make money, we expose ourselves a great deal. Though a doctor friend disagreed: she argued that in her profession she gives her whole soul too, yet she charges for it because she too has to live. So with great pleasure I sell you a certain part of my soul—the part of Saturday conversation.5

  Part of her feeling of inadequacy may have come from being a rare female in an almost exclusively male domain. Only three or four women worked as literary columnists.6 The men, particularly Rubem Braga, possessed a belle-lettristic grandiloquence, a self-conscious refinement of tone, utterly lacking in Clarice’s work. Her columns were unabashedly personal and unabashedly feminine.

  In them, Clarice did not abandon many of her old metaphysical themes, but she also chronicled her life as a mother and a housewife in directly personal terms. “I think that if I wrote about the problem of overproduction of coffee in Brazil I would end up making it personal,” she said in one column.7 She wrote about her children, her friends, her maids, her childhood, her travels, so much so that Discovering the World, the posthumously published collection of her columns, is the closest thing to an autobiography that Clarice left.