Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Over the course of the book, this pure philosophical love gradually makes way for a more human communion, emotional and, finally, carnal. Ulisses patiently trains Lori for their ultimate sexual encounter in a courtship that, like therapy sessions, takes the form of scheduled meetings, which Lori may or may not cancel. Like a therapist, Ulisses is neither offended nor surprised by her caprices, patiently trying to awaken her to the wonders of the world.

  “But in your travels it’s impossible for you never to have been among orange trees, sun, and flowers with bees. Not only the dark cold but also the rest?”

  “No,” she said solemnly. “Those things are not for me. I am a big city woman.”

  “First of all, Campos is not what I would call a big city. And anyway those things, as symbols are for everyone. That is why you never learned to have them.”

  “And that can be learned? Orange trees, sun, and bees on flowers?”

  “It can be learned when one no longer has as a strong guide one’s own nature. Lori, Lori, listen: one can learn anything, even how to love! And the strangest thing of all, Lori, you can learn to have joy!”19

  Lori’s skepticism in the face of this is understandable. But though she sometimes cancels their meetings and plays little games with Ulisses, she never spurns or mocks his advice, so desperate is she to liberate herself from her loneliness and rejoin the human world. The “strong guide” of her own nature has failed her, leading her only to isolation. “Your advice. But there is a great, the biggest obstacle for me to move ahead: me myself. I have been the biggest difficulty along my path. It is with enormous effort that I manage to impose myself upon myself. … I am an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes with a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear.”20

  It would be a mistake to see Lori’s desire to submit to this man primarily in the terms of gender dynamics, though the book certainly begs the question. (“It was a freedom that he was offering her. Yet she would have rather he ordered her around, setting a date and a time.”) This is not a coquettish pose. She needs help, and she feels that in Ulisses she has an ally: “Lori put up with the struggle because Ulisses, in his struggle with her, was not her adversary: he was struggling for her.”21

  Ever since her mother’s death, Clarice’s awareness of her own inadequacy and failure had been one of the strongest aspects of her character. “When I speak of humility,” she wrote in October 1969, “I don’t mean humility in the Christian sense (as an ideal that can be reached or not); I mean the humility that comes from the full awareness of being truly unable.”22

  In an ironic echo of The Passion According to G. H., Ulisses says to Lori, “Your mouth, as I have told you, is passionate. It is through your mouth that you will come to eat the world.” In An Apprenticeship, no less than in G. H., the heroine makes contact with the world orally. This was a favorite theme of Clarice’s. Lori teaches her pupils something that recalls Virginia’s discoveries. “She wanted them to know … that the taste of a fruit is in the contact of the fruit with the palate and not in the fruit itself.”23

  The Portuguese verb comer means to eat, and in Brazil it is also common slang for fucking, a meaning Clarice suggests in these final chapters. Eating leads to sex, comer to comer. Lori’s redemption begins when she bites an apple—unlike a roach this is a food a person is allowed—and culminates when she finally goes to bed with Ulisses.

  The Fall Lori’s apple triggers is nothing like the dry horror that greets G. H. in the maid’s room, when, in supreme isolation, all human qualities melt away. Lori leaves the divine perfection of that state and falls into her humanity, a state of grace, “light, so light,” that for Lori means profound pleasure in herself and the world.

  “One who is capable of intense suffering can also be capable of intense joy,” Ulisses had told her, and in this state she discovers an “exalted physical happiness with which nothing could be compared. The body was transformed into a gift. And she felt that it was a gift because she was feeling, from a direct source, the indubitable blessing of existing materially.” G. H.’s state of grace made her less human; Lori’s makes her more. “She had experienced something that seemed to redeem the human condition, though at the same time it accentuated the narrow limits of that condition. And exactly because after grace the human condition revealed itself in all its imploring poverty, one learned to love more, to hope more. One began to have a kind of trust in suffering and in its ways that were so often intolerable.”24

  As Lori becomes more human, she is also tempted to humanize God. For the first time Clarice lets a character invest a God with human attributes, as when Lori prays that “the God” will “relieve my soul, make me feel that Thy hand is holding mine.”25 The hand recalls the hand G. H. invented to accompany her as she told what happened in the maid’s room. It also recalls the gesture Clarice mentioned in her unpublished notes: “I want somebody to hold my hand (That was how Papa, when I was hurting, helped me stand the pain).”

  Has Clarice started to think of God as a comforting father figure? Surely not. But the desire to submit to a superior guiding presence animates An Apprenticeship. Ulisses is as much father or therapist as lover. Lori needs someone above her, some kind of mediation between herself and “a God so vast that he was the world with its galaxies.”26 Having abandoned the religion of her childhood, determined to seek strength and guidance from herself alone, she is worn out by her hard-won independence, “tired of the effort of the liberated animal.”

  In her utter abandonment, Lori even equates herself with the most famous of humanized gods: “Christ was Christ for others, but who? Who was Christ for Christ?” Loving God’s “impersonal vastness and without even wanting him to exist” is not enough for a person requiring urgent and immediate assistance. But the consoling lie of a Christ-like god is impossible for Lori, who “violently rejected a God to whom one could appeal. But she also didn’t want to appeal: she was lost and confused.”27

  It is remarkable how rarely in Clarice’s work sex has any emotional content, any meaning beside the purely animal: Joana and Martin, among others, see it as a physical satisfaction, never a remedy for their emotional isolation. Through sex, Lori learns to be emotionally intimate with another human being, without renouncing her animal physicality. Lori’s answer comes when she finally goes to bed with Ulisses, one of Clarice’s rare happy endings.

  The physical union of two people is a perfect solution to Lori’s previously irremediable solitude. “After Ulisses had been hers, being human seemed now to be the best way of being a living animal.” In the final two paragraphs of the book, which ends with a colon, Lori has abandoned the quest for a humanized god. Instead she finds a deified human.28

  My love, you don’t believe in the God because we erred by humanizing Him. We humanized Him because we don’t understand Him, so it didn’t work. I am sure that He is not human. But even though He is not human, He still sometimes makes us divine. You think that—

  I think—the man interrupted and his voice was slow and muffled because he was suffering from life and love—this is what I think:

  35

  Monstre Sacré

  Alas, finding solutions to real problems in the real world was even harder for Clarice than finding solutions in her books. Lori’s answer to her isolation turned out to be as theoretical a response as G. H. had been. With her burned body and her difficulties connecting to people outside of her writing, Clarice still struggled to discover the “knack of being a person.”

  Her struggles with her ill son, Pedro, had grown more acute. He was almost twenty-one when An Apprenticeship appeared, a grown man, and as he grew older his schizophrenia had taken deeper root. During the first half of 1969, Paulo was an exchange student in Warsaw, Indiana, and her letters to him offer rare glimpses of Pedro’s condition. He suddenly developed a fear of going to the movies. In June, she had to commit him to a clinic: “He went and he’s still there but it seems he’ll leave on the 30th of
this month. He’s much better. I visit him often. Today, Sunday, I took him to lunch. … Don’t worry: it’s a comfortable treatment center, with a bar where you can eat sandwiches and drink sodas.”1

  The effect of all this was not emboldening. “Pedro isn’t well at all and that takes away my joy in life,” she wrote Paulo. Her own health, fragile since the accident, suffered. “Today I had a real hysterical crisis and when he saw it Pedro said: I’m going to call Daddy. Your father doesn’t have the slightest notion of what’s going on here.”2

  Maury did, of course, know what was going on. He and Pedro had not lived under the same roof for a decade, but the boys often visited their father and Pedro’s condition was evident even to casual observers. Still, Clarice generally avoided the painful subject.

  Even a person in much better shape than Clarice would have had a hard time dealing with a son so far gone. “Today Pedro went to have lunch with your father, luckily. I was literally getting sick with Pedro over the last few days, since now he stands in front of me or follows me around saying literally without stopping: mother, mother, mother.”3

  Despite all this, Clarice had not given up on Pedro. As she wrote Paulo, “Hope is the last thing that dies.”4 A manuscript she wrote a year or so later suggests that her hope for Pedro was still alive: “The madness of the creators is different from the madness of the mentally ill. They—for some reason of which I am not aware erred along their paths. They are cases for the comprehensive and tough intelligent doctor—whereas creators find fulfillment in the act of madness itself. I know a ‘he’ who will soon be cured.”5

  Around the time that she was writing An Apprenticeship, Clarice found her own father figure, though their relationship lacked the sexual component that brought Lori into harmony with the world. For some reason, her analysis with the German Catarina Kemper had not lasted, and she became a patient of a Jewish psychiatrist named Jacob David Azulay. She would see Azulay five days a week, for an hour each day, “without ever being late or missing a single session,” for a total of six years.6

  During these meetings, Azulay remembered, Clarice played with her own writing, “citing passages, and constructing her books during our sessions.” He jotted down some of her phrases, which do indeed sound like phrases in her books. “I am nothing,” she said, for example. “I feel like those insects who shed their skin. Now I lost the skin. The name of that skin is Clarice Lispector.”

  She had, Azulay could not help but notice, “an enormous maternal and paternal deficit.”

  She was a rough diamond, wild. She had no method. Clarice happened like a volcanic eruption. That little girl who came from down there … As if a volcano had exploded and she had come along with it! Part of her was so childish. She had a fear, a youngest daughter’s respect for her sisters… I think that she didn’t allow herself to go further in her writing, in erotic matters for example, because of a very large super-ego. I think her sisters, mainly, acted as a very apparent super-ego.

  Clarice had always been very close to her sisters, especially to Tania, to whom she was closer in age. Elisa, however, may have been surprised to learn how much respect—and even, apparently, awe—Clarice had for her. By the end of the 1960s, Elisa was herself an established writer. In 1962, with Clarice’s encouragement, she had entered a contest sponsored by the publisher José Olympio, and the novel she submitted, The Stone Wall, won first prize out of 119 entries. It was also later distinguished with a prize from the Brazilian Academy of Letters.7 In 1965, Thereza’s Longest Day was published.8

  Elisa had a very respectable reputation, though she lacked her youngest sister’s genius and, consequently, never enjoyed her fame. She was painfully aware of her inferiority, which only reinforced the self-image that comes across so brutally in all her writings: of a solitary woman, unimportant, unloved, utterly alone. “I have heard,” she wrote in her fictionalized memoir of Clarice, “that when a person is not loved by anyone, not even by an animal, by a cat, for example, or a dog, that person becomes dry and tough. Well, I was slowly transformed into a woman of straw.”9

  Her solitude was, to some extent, self-imposed. Many people were fond of Elisa. One friend, the novelist Maria Alice Barroso, remembered that Elisa avoided discussing personal matters, preferring to talk about literature. She called Maria Alice frequently, but when it came to face-to-face visits she tended to become reclusive. “She cultivated that solitude,” Barroso said. “You had to force her to accept invitations. She always talked about not feeling well. She was pessimistic.” Still, Barroso knew that her friendship was important to Elisa and that her standoffishness came out of shyness and insecurity rather than unsociability.

  Azulay’s recollection of Clarice’s “enormous maternal and paternal deficit” and her deep respect for, and even fear of, her older sisters is interesting in this light. Despite Clarice’s almost religious veneration of Tania and Elisa, a reader of her book about Clarice cannot escape the impression that part of Elisa felt estranged from, inferior to, and unloved by her youngest sister. And Elisa noted the same behaviors in Clarice—the unreachability, the unsociability—that other people regretted in Elisa.

  The horrors of their childhood had alienated them from the world of others, and the pogroms of Podolia cast a long shadow, even half a century on. First among them was a terrible difficulty in connecting to other people. “Surviving means not knowing what to do with oneself,” Elisa had once written, recalling Clarice’s poignant statement, in a letter from Switzerland to her sisters: “There isn’t really a place one can live. It’s all somebody else’s country, where other people are happy.”

  Their letters from Clarice’s years abroad suggest that it was Elisa, whom Clarice called by the Portuguese diminutive, Leinha, of her Hebrew name, Leah, who had moved away from Clarice. Clarice was no stranger to depression, of course, but in her letters to her sisters she was just as often exorbitantly loving and enthusiastic. Elisa’s tremendous insecurity can be gauged from Clarice’s responses to her. “But, darling, why are you so pessimistic?” she asked from Rome, already in 1945. “My little Elisa, it makes me suffer to see you like this, it makes me suffer to hear you say bad things about yourself, it humiliates me, it makes me suffer. Even saying that you don’t like Leda’s article, you make so many excuses for yourself. A dumb article, empty and pretentious. And about the lava [that Clarice had sent her from Vesuvius], ‘I’m all the more sorry that I can’t match such kindnesses.’ But darling, you seem to suffer from the love one gives you.”10

  In February 1947, Clarice was complaining to Tania that “Elisa’s letters to me are getting shorter and shorter and with less in them. And when she says anything, she usually adds, as in the most recent letter: ‘but you’d say that none of that has anything to do with you.’ As if it were possible for me not to have anything to do with your lives.”11

  Later that same year, still in Bern, Clarice offered Tania some advice about the exhaustion she was suffering, making explicit the connection between the sisters’ problems and their early years. Tania seemed to have been wearing herself out with worries about her young daughter Marcia. “Listen, little darling, you might be trying to make up for the fact that we have the idea that we didn’t do everything we could have for Mama. What I said is that you somehow seem to be wanting to sacrifice yourself—and that’s the same thing that happens, in another area, with Elisa. Realize, darling, you now want to do a thousand things, to dedicate yourself terribly to the house and to Marcia, to make up for, not only the idea that you didn’t do enough before, but to make up for the fact that when we were little, we didn’t get, because of the way things were, all the attention we needed.”12

  When Clarice was living in the United States Tania came to visit, and in 1956 a visit from Elisa was so immanent that Clarice could write, “Elisa, dear, we’re all eager for you to arrive, I’m even trying not to think about it so I don’t get too excited. Paulo got jealous. When I said you were coming, he was very happy. But I added: she’s
my sister. He, after a pause, said: don’t say that or I’ll cry. I think he wants an aunt, but one that has nothing to do with me.”13 For some reason, the trip kept getting put off and ended up never happening at all.

  Much less than Elisa, though, who lived alone and who never married or had children, Clarice’s solitude was not due to a lack of company. As Maria Teresa Walcacer noticed during her four months’ employment, Clarice was surrounded by people. There were her two sons, first of all. And like all middle-class Brazilians, Clarice had live-in servants. Despite her frequent complaints of poverty, she had quite a collection. She grew close to many of them and they featured prominently in her writings, from the absent black maid of G. H. to the women she described in her letters and journalistic anecdotes:

  The cook is Jandira. But this one is powerful. So powerful that she is clairvoyant. One of my sisters was visiting me. Jandira came into the living room, looked at her seriously and suddenly said: “The journey you are thinking about taking will come to pass, and you are going through a very happy period in your life.” And she left the room. My sister looked at me in fright. A bit embarrassed, I made a gesture with my hands that signified that there was nothing I could do about it and explained: “It’s that she’s clairvoyant.” My sister answered calmly: “Fine. Everyone gets the maid they deserve.”14

  Another presence in her home was Siléa Marchi, who, because of her nursing experience, had been hired to help Clarice after her accident and would remain with her until her death. Siléa was the all-purpose companion Clarice required and that Maria Teresa Walcacer could not be. Siléa slept in the house from Monday to Friday and was available to take Clarice to the doctor and to help with Pedro, as well as doing Clarice’s shopping and anything else that needed doing.