Without this help, Água viva might never have been completed. Clarice had serious doubts about the work. “She was insecure and asked a few people for their opinion,” Olga recalled. “With other books Clarice didn’t show that insecurity. With Água viva she did. That was the only time I saw Clarice hesitate before handing in a book to the publisher. She herself said that.”15
“I don’t know why you liked my book Loud Object,” Clarice wrote Marly de Oliveira. “Since once the first impulse had passed, I reread it and was horrified. It’s so bad, so bad, that I’m not going to publish it, I already pulled it from the publishers.”16 Olga’s delicate interventions may have saved the book, and with it the new kind of writing Clarice was pioneering.
Her editorial method, Olga said, was “breathing together, it’s breathing together.”
Because there is a logic in life, in events, as there is in a book. They follow one another, they must. Since if I took a fragment and wanted to move it further ahead, there wouldn’t be anywhere to put it. It was like a puzzle. I took all the fragments and collected them, kept them in an envelope. On the back of a check, a piece of paper, a napkin … I still have some of those things at home, and some of them still even smell of her lipstick. She would wipe her lips and then stick it in her purse. … Suddenly she noted something down. After collecting all those fragments, I started to note, to number them. So it’s not difficult to structure Clarice, or it’s infinitely difficult, unless you commune with her and already are in the habit of reading her.17
As ultimately published in August 1973, the book was called Água viva. This is the only one of Clarice’s titles that offers no ready translation. Literally “living water,” the words can mean a spring or a fountain, a meaning often suggested inside the book, but to a Brazilian the words will first of all refer to a jellyfish. This was not the meaning Clarice intended—“I preferred Água viva, a thing that bubbles. At the source”18—but for a work without plot or story, the hint of invertebrate floating is especially apt. Perhaps this is what Olga Borelli had in mind when she compared this book to those that had come before it: “The Passion According to G. H. has a backbone, doesn’t it?”19
Água viva does not, and this initially made Clarice nervous. “That book, I spent three years without daring to publish it, thinking it would be awful. Because it didn’t have a story, it didn’t have a plot.”20 The question of what exactly she was writing preoccupied Clarice, and with good reason. “This is not a book because this is not how one writes,” she announces at the beginning.21
It does not, in fact, resemble anything written at the time, in Brazil or anywhere else. Its closest cousins are visual or musical, a resemblance Clarice emphasizes by turning the narrator, a writer in the earlier versions, into a painter; she herself was dabbling in painting at the time. The epigraph comes from the Belgian artist Michel Seuphor: “There must be a painting totally free of dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.” The title Beyond Thought referred to these “incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit,” the unconscious realm she had meant to simulate, and provoke. “Could it be that what I am writing you is beyond thought? Reason is what it isn’t. Whoever can stop reasoning—which is terribly difficult—let them come along with me.”22
She is writing not for the mind but for the ears and nerves and eyes: “I see words. What I am saying is the pure present and this book is a straight line in space.”23
This text I am giving you is not to be seen from close by: it gains its previously invisible secret roundedness when seen from a plane in high flight.24
This is not a story because I don’t know any stories like this, but all I know how to do is go along saying and doing: it is the story of instants that flee like fugitive tracks seen from the window of a train.25
Clarice compares the book to scents (“What am I doing in writing you? trying to photograph perfume”), to tastes (“How to reproduce the taste in words? The taste is one and the words are many”), and touches, though her most insistent metaphor is of sound: “I know what I am doing here: I am improvising. But what’s wrong with that? improvising as in jazz they improvise music, jazz in fury, I improvise in front of the crowd.” This is abstract music, “a melody without words”: “Dissonance is harmonious to me. Melody sometimes wears me out. And also the so-called ‘leit-motif.’ I want in music and in what I write to you and in what I paint, I want geometric streaks that cross in the air and form a disharmony that I understand. Pure ‘it.’ ”26
The Chandelier, published almost three decades before, moved with agonizing slowness, a tension built up, page after glacial page, to climaxes that, because so unexpected, were as potent as the cresting of great waves. Though essential to its power, the long intervals could also make the book unendurable. Freed from the constraints of plot or storytelling, Água viva is all cresting. “What I write is all climax? My days are all climax: I live on the edge.”27
“I think Água viva is the fragmentation of her thought made concrete in a book,” said Olga Borelli. “There are several moments in Água viva where I feel that: days of light, days of darkness, days of discoveries, days of great happiness, of climax. … She loved to live in a climax, in the climax of things.”28
Clarice’s relentless revision of the fragments that make up Água viva, some of whose ancestors go as far back as The Foreign Legion, nine years before, her paring them down and fitting them together, finding the “climaxes” inside them, seeking “the is of a thing,”29 make the book peculiarly hypnotic. The quest for the “is” and the “it” is not, as such, new to her work, but when shorn of the intermediate devices of story and character, her writing gains a riveting immediacy.
As Borelli understood, this “spineless” writing is not random, or even abstract. Instead, its consistency more properly belongs to the realm of thought or dreams, in which ideas and images connect with a logic that may not be immediately apparent but is nonetheless real. This was the writing Clarice described when she wrote in The Foreign Legion that “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.”30
When The Besieged City appeared, a critic wrote, “Its hermeticism has the texture of the hermeticism of dreams. May someone find the key.” In contrast to that earlier novel, however, the dreamlike Água viva is not hermetic in the least. It can be opened to any page, just as a painting can be viewed from any angle, and it pulses with a sensuality that gives it an unequaled and direct emotional appeal: “I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music—I press my hand lightly to the record player and my hand vibrates spreading waves through my whole body: that is how I hear the electricity of the vibration, last substratum in the domain of reality, and the world trembles inside my hands.”31
The “more delicate and more difficult reality” Clarice captures is not time lost but time present, “the instant-now.” Her ability to arrest time, which itself has no beginning or end, is the most uncanny aspect of the book.
Now it is an instant.
Now it is another.32
The pulsating, fragmentary form conveys the actual experience of being alive, moving through time, better than any artificially constructed perspective could. The narrator, and with her the reader, is attentive to each passing instant and electrified by the sad beauty of her inescapable destination: death, approaching with each tick of the clock.
As time runs out, awareness of the passing instants takes on the solemnity of a religious ritual. Time belongs to the occult force that Clarice assigns the neutral English pronoun “it,” the unpronounceable and unknowable name: “the God” or, elsewhere, “X.” “The transcendence inside me is the ‘it’ alive and soft and has the thought that an oyster has. Does the oyster wh
en torn from its root feel anxiety? It is troubled in its life without eyes. I used to squeeze drops of lemon onto the living oyster and watch with horror and fascination as it writhed all over. And I was eating the living it. The living it is the God.”33
Alongside the “life without eyes” that a person shares with an oyster (and a cockroach) is a deeply human religious impulse. As the author nears her own denouement, she, “an unbeliever who profoundly wants to hand myself over,” is overcome by a longing for the God who had abandoned her, and whom she in turn had abandoned.34
Even for the unbelievers there is the instant of despair which is divine: the absence of the God is an act of religion. Right this instant I am asking the God to help me. … The God must come to me since I have not gone to Him. Let the God come: please. … I am troubled and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside me. But I don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it scratches like barbs. If I received so much love inside me yet still remain troubled it is because I need the God to come. To come before it is too late.35
At the end of An Apprenticeship, Clarice had written, “Though He is not human, He still sometimes makes us divine.” The dominant impression of Água viva is not of the divine “it” but of the woman with her hand on the record player, feeling the ultimate substrata of the universe and radiating her own “it” outward, the God that is inside her, the God that is her: “I am not joking because I am not a synonym,” she writes. “I am the name itself.”36
37
Purged
By the time Clarice at last completed Água viva, Fernando Sabino and Rubem Braga were no longer in the publishing business. Their editorial ventures had taken too much time away from their own writing, and they sold Sabiá to the prestigious José Olympio. For some reason, perhaps because she was still insecure about the reception Água viva would meet, she did not follow her previous titles to José Olympio, choosing instead Artenova, run by the sometime poet and film producer Álvaro Pacheco, who also worked at the Jornal do Brasil. Clarice had come to know him when she called him to express her admiration for a book of his poetry. In early 1973, he published an anthology of her older material called The Imitation of the Rose, soon followed by Água viva in August.
In September, Clarice decided to go on a vacation. With the exception of visits to conferences, including her one brief trip to Texas, she had not taken a proper holiday since 1959. This was not because she had lost her wanderlust. Olga Borelli remembered that Clarice went through “periods of great dynamism: she would start exercising, riding a stationary bicycle, applying creams to her face, wearing a lot of perfume. She would drink orange, melon, or strawberry juice, cutting out sodas.” And she would dream of travel.
She would call travel agencies, making appointments, dreaming of itineraries and spending day after day fantasizing about the places she would visit: contemplating landscapes and listening to the buzz of the insects in the Italian summer afternoon; or ecstatically watching the snow fall, transmuting the glimmering yellow-gold of the European autumn into purplish tones. She would watch the smoke rising from the chimneys and hear the rain falling heavily on the rooftops and tumbling over the paving-stones. She would delicately walk through the flowering gardens of the Rosegarten, in Switzerland, on her way to the museum with works by Paul Klee. …
It was all so real that suddenly there was nothing left to be seen or experienced; an inevitable sluggishness came over her when she imagined her dreams transformed into reality. Exhausted, she would cancel the trip.1
This time, Clarice actually managed to get on the plane. She had not been to Europe for fourteen years, since she visited the Netherlands with Alzira Vargas in 1959. She and Olga embarked on a one-month trip across the continent, following a sentimental itinerary that showed her new friend the places she had lived as a young woman: London, Paris, Rome, Zurich, Lausanne, and Bern.
The day they arrived at Gatwick, September 11, 1973, was a watershed in Latin American history and would touch the lives of millions of people, including Clarice’s own. As she was flying over the Atlantic a brutal military coup was beginning in Santiago de Chile. In one of the continent’s most venerable democracies, the presidential palace was bombed and the leftist president, Salvador Allende, committed suicide in his office. Forty-five thousand people were arrested, and, with the active encouragement of the Nixon administration, a little-known thug named Augusto Pinochet was installed as military dictator.
Brazil, too, was still suffering under a tense military dictatorship. Artur Costa e Silva had been removed from office following a stroke in August 1969, eventually succeeded by Emílio Garrastazú Medici, a hard-line general who encouraged the further institutionalization of torture and censorship. Torture in Brazil became an international scandal, even earning an unprecedented papal condemnation in March 1970.2
Censorship reached absurd heights, perhaps most emblematically in September 1972, when Filinto Müller, a pro-government politician (formerly Getúlio Vargas’s anti-Semitic police chief), found that his statement that there was no censorship in Brazil had been censored.3 This state of affairs produced some memorable protest journalism, starting with Alberto Dines’s front page of the Jornal do Brasil in 1968, announcing the imposition of the AI-5. To mock the censors, editors took to featuring, in place of repressed articles, classified advertisements, favorite recipes, or long extracts from the poetry of Camões.
When news of the coup in Chile arrived in Rio, the censors stationed at the Jornal do Brasil informed Dines that he could place the death of Allende on the front page on the condition that he not make it the headline. Meeting the request, he ordered a page prepared with no headlines or photographs at all, notifying Brazil of the coup in long columns of uninterrupted black print.4
This was not the kind of thing that endeared the paper, then still Brazil’s most influential, to the military authorities. At the time of Allende’s overthrow, the country was tensely anticipating its upcoming “elections.” Under the regime, presidents were chosen by the Congress, which the military controlled. The owner of the Jornal do Brasil, Manuel Francisco do Nascimento Brito, was opposed to Ernesto Geisel, a general who was one of the contenders, and this opinion was known in high circles. In the backroom politicking that led to Geisel’s appointment, Nascimento Brito bet on the wrong horse.
Geisel, from Rio Grande do Sul, was the son of a German immigrant, and German was the language of his childhood home. Geisel was not outspokenly anti-Semitic and had not been an Integralist, but there were a few elements in his biography that raised Jewish eyebrows, such as his youthful affiliation with the active Nazi sympathizer General Álcio Souto.5 He is recorded as describing Professor Eugênio Gudin (who was not Jewish) as “that crook Gudin, who is a rogue, a shameless Jew.”6 Unlike many elements in the Brazilian military, who were awed by Israel’s martial prowess, there is no hint that he was favorably disposed to the Jews.
The Yom Kippur War influenced Geisel’s thinking, as it did that of so many others. It broke out a bit more than a month after Água viva’s publication, and three months before Geisel’s “election.” As director of Petrobras, the giant national oil company, Geisel already had strong Arab connections; Brazil was not (as it later would become) self-sufficient in energy.7 The war and the new administration brought about a revolution in Brazilian foreign policy; the country whose ambassador had presided over the United Nations vote authorizing the creation of the State of Israel now threw its diplomatic support to the Arab nations.
The Jornal do Brasil, reflecting Brazil’s traditional foreign policy orientation, had always been pro-Jewish and Zionist. Nascimento Brito, its rich and influential owner, was an admirer of Israel; he had even sent his son to a kibbutz on his first trip abroad. But business was business, and his indiscreet opposition to Geisel created the need for a gesture toward the new ruling clique. As Samuel Wainer, among others, had learned, the military regime could make life very difficult for an uncooperative media magnate.
T
he solution he hit upon was clear enough: fire the Jews. That this move might have appealed to Geisel is suggested by the rest of his comment about the “crook” Eugênio Gudin: “O Globo opens its columns for Gudin to write his drivel every day.” O Globo was the Jornal do Brasil’s principal competitor in Rio, and a hint of Geisel’s distaste for the “shameless Jew” in its pages might have reached the ears of, and suggested an opportunity for, Nascimento Brito.
In December, Clarice Lispector heard a rumor that she would be let go at the end of the year. Panicked, she called up Alberto Dines and Álvaro Pacheco, who stayed at her apartment most of the night, assuring her that she had nothing to worry about and that it was all a misunderstanding. The next morning Alberto Dines awoke to see an announcement of his dismissal on the front page of his own newspaper.8
The stated reason was “a lack of discipline,” though Dines had run the paper for years and had never heard such a complaint. It was not done all at once; “his people” were let go one by one. “I was very careful not to bring on too many Jews, so that they couldn’t accuse me of favoritism. And those I did hire were of the highest quality. Nobody could say that Clarice Lispector didn’t deserve to be there,” Dines recalled. “The paper ended up Judenrein. But they did it carefully enough that it wasn’t immediately obvious. They never said it, but the result was clear enough. Typically Brazilian.”9 Not one of the non-Jews he had hired were dismissed.
On January 2, 1974, Clarice received an envelope with her still unpublished columns and a dry letter, “not even thanking [her] for [her] services over the last seven years.”10 Outraged, she hired a lawyer, but Dines said that despite the insult and the serious damage to her income the loss of her job represented, she was secretly proud of having been fired. Her prominence in the 1968 demonstrations notwithstanding, it was the first time in her life she had gotten into trouble for being “political,” though of course nothing in her columns related directly to the country’s tense politics. She had always wanted to “belong,” and now, for the first time, she belonged to the growing opposition to a dictatorship she despised.
Why This World Page 43
