Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  The “language that resembles an orgasm” is, like an orgasm itself, as far beyond intellect as the words “tilibica samvico esfolerico mazuba.” In this language, “impression and expression” are united. Without moral or human meaning, these words are the linguistic equivalents of the insides of the cockroach or the bark of a dog; like music, they are nothing but sound.

  How could language, which by definition carries meaning, achieve a meaningless purity? The question had always intrigued Clarice Lispector. In Água viva, she had wanted to compose a kind of music of words, or a book that, like an abstract sculpture, could be seen (and not read) from an airplane. In A Breath of Life, she says that she wants to write a book that would be like a dance, “pure movement.”24

  Delight in meaninglessness and sonorous words rings throughout Clarice Lispector’s work. Perseu, in The Besieged City, shares it:

  “They feed on basic microvegetation, infusorials, etc.”

  “Etc.!” he repeated brilliant, unconquerable.25

  The state-without-language is what Ulisses the dog had in common with Martin: “he, too, pure, harmonious, and he too without meaning.”26

  Still, Clarice’s writing, even at its most abstract, always has a comprehensible meaning, a human grammar. Nothing in her work resembles “tilibica samvico esfolerico mazuba.” These words call to mind the meaningless words the cabalists created as a stimulus to meditation. For the Jewish mystic, creating and contemplating random combinations of letters was a path to hidden knowledge, and even a means of discovering the Holy Name itself: that word which, by definition, can belong to no human tongue.

  But as the mystics also knew, a meaningless language is a mortal danger. Clarice was aware of this, too. She often mentioned, in The Foreign Legion, for example, her fear of “going too far” in her writing: “I restrain myself, as if holding the reins of a horse that could gallop off and take me God knows where.”27

  God knows where: it is no coincidence that the manuscript containing this non-sense is incomplete and would not be published in her lifetime. Even more than the cockroach of G. H., “tilibica samvico esfolerico mazuba” is the end of the search, artistic and spiritual, that Clarice Lispector had begun decades before, in Near to the Wild Heart, when she had sought “the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.”

  Sounds, shapes, and movements can be independent of meaning. But language, by definition, cannot. The Name that is beyond human meaning cannot be pronounced. “I write through words that hide others—the true words. Since the true ones cannot be named,” she wrote.28 And so if Clarice Lispector had pursued a divine meaninglessness throughout her life, she knew, as she neared the end of that life, that senseless babble was as close as she was going to get to the “true words.”

  Perhaps the best solution would have been to stop writing entirely. She increasingly despaired of her “damned profession that gives no rest.”29 But because she had to write, she could not say “Atotoquina, zefiram.” Her own definition of madness, after all, was “losing the common language.” She was not kidding when, in A Breath of Life, she wrote, “And I—all that’s left for me is to bark at God.”30

  39

  Hen in Black Sauce

  “If I could describe the inner life of a dog I would have reached a summit,” Clarice wrote, and though she did not try to describe the nonsensical language of animals she nonetheless wrote more and more for children, about animals. Her dog Ulisses was the protagonist of Almost True, written in the mid-1970s and published after her death, a book that is a kind of satire of the social fiction then being produced by artists chafing at Brazil’s censorship and dictatorship.

  Ulisses, the narrator, ventures to a neighbor’s yard and finds chickens being oppressed by a crooked fig tree, who has entered into an alliance with a witch who has tricked the chickens into believing that the sun never sets. This atmospheric inversion makes the cocks crow themselves hoarse and wears out the hens, who lay eggs without rest. The fig tree plans to sell the eggs and become a millionaire—until the poultry revolt. Victorious, the chickens win back their right to sleep, crow, and lay eggs whenever they like.

  The book has a magical, happy ending, as do all her books for children. But the best children’s literature is scary, and in a book published in 1974, Laura’s Intimate Life—dedicated to, among others, Andréa Azulay—Clarice does not spare the gore. “I understand a hen, perfectly. I mean, the intimate life of a hen, I know how it is,” she once said.1 She had grown up with hens, of course, and the hen and the egg form one of her central themes.

  The short book’s heroine is a hen named Laura, the same name Clarice gave to the doll she bashfully confessed to buying in Loud Object. Laura’s intimate life (“I’ll explain right away what ‘intimate life’ means. It’s this: intimate life means that we don’t have to tell everyone what happens in our house”) is not especially complex.2 She is married to a vain cock named Luís who has an exaggerated idea of his influence over the sun. And she is terrified of being killed.

  As a prolific egg producer, she is not in immediate danger, or so she has been led to believe. Clarice tells some cute stories about Laura before abruptly informing her young readership, “There’s a way of eating hens called ‘hen in black sauce.’ Have you ever eaten it? The sauce is made with the hen’s blood. But you can’t buy a dead hen: she has to be alive and killed at home to be able to use the blood. And I don’t do that. I don’t kill hens. But it’s good food. You eat it with well-cooked white rice.”3

  This grisly recipe fascinated Clarice. She refers to it in Loud Object, and it is the subject of a conversation in An Apprenticeship:

  I don’t remember what restaurant in Tijuca Forest has hen in black sauce, nice and dark because of the thick blood that they know how to make there. When I think of the voracious delight with which we eat the blood of others, I realize how brutal we are, Ulisses said.

  I like it too, said Lori softly. Me of all people, who could never kill a hen, I like them so much alive, moving around their ugly necks and looking for worms. Wouldn’t it be better, when we go there, to eat something else? she asked a bit fearfully.

  Of course we should eat it, we have to remember and respect the violence we have. Small violences save us from greater. Who knows, if we didn’t eat animals, we would eat people in their blood. Our life is brutal, Loreley: we are born in blood and with blood the possibility of perfect union is forever cut: the umbilical cord. And many are they who die with blood spilled inside or out. We have to believe in blood as an important part of life. Brutality is love as well.4

  Laura, the hen, is a proud mother, and the references to the cruelty of the world and the umbilical cord in the passage from An Apprenticeship suggest that Clarice, here as so often, was thinking of her mother’s fate and, increasingly, her own. Previous assurances to the contrary, the same gloomy destiny hangs over an aging and less productive Laura.

  The cook said to Miss Luísa, pointing at Laura:

  “That hen isn’t laying many eggs and is getting old. Before she gets sick or dies of old age we could cook her in black sauce.”

  “I won’t ever kill that one,” Miss Luísa said.

  Laura heard it all and was afraid. If she could have thought, she would have thought this: it’s much better to die being useful and tasty for people who always treated me well, these people for example who never once killed me. (The hen is so dumb that she doesn’t know you only die once, she thinks we die once a day.)

  The choice falls on her fourth cousin, Zeferina, who that evening is served on a silver platter, “all cut into pieces, some nicely browned,” in a sauce of her own blood. As death seems to be inevitably nearing, Clarice rescues the hen with a dramatic deus ex machina, a one-eyed, chicken-size inhabitant of the planet Jupiter named Xext, “pronounced Equzequte.” He invites her to make a wish. “ ‘Ah,’ said Laura, ‘if it’s my destiny to be eaten, I want to be eaten by Pelé!’ ” Xext assures her that she will never be eaten, and that is that. “Laur
a is alive and well,” the story ends.

  It is hard to read this story and not think of Clarice’s own childhood stories, the reason she became a writer in the first place: to save another female threatened with an incomprehensible death. But the story’s gallows humor, and its ironic extraterrestrial denouement, belong to an adult, and Clarice, as much as she liked Laura, was not a sentimental child. She had not saved her mother, and though she saved Laura in the pages of the book, a real Laura would be sacrificed in honor of the one she invented.

  “On the day Laura’s Intimate Life came out,” Olga Borelli remembered, “to celebrate we went out to eat just that: a hen in black sauce. She then gave me a copy of the book with a dedication: ‘To Olga, to the little Laura whom we ate.’ ”5

  Laura’s Intimate Life was one of three books Clarice published in 1974. Her newfound prolificacy may have had something to do with a financial situation that had sharply deteriorated since she lost her job at the Jornal do Brasil. Money had always been a worry for her. As she explained to a journalist in 1971, “I need money. The position of a myth is not very comfortable.”6 Her great dream, according to her son Paulo, was to get rich and to dedicate herself entirely to literature.7

  Since 1967, the newspaper had been her main source of income, and though she still had her alimony from Maury, she could not easily replace the money. After thirty years of publishing her highly regarded and sometimes best-selling books, which had been translated in countries from Czechoslovakia to Venezuela, she earned almost nothing from them. This was not an exceptional situation. Even Brazil’s most important writers struggled. In the twentieth century, only three writers managed to live from their books: Erico Verissimo, Jorge Amado, and Fernando Sabino.

  In a group interview with Clarice at the end of 1976, her friend Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna remarked, “In a better organized, more developed country, a writer like you would have … a comfortable standard of living. I think Clarice’s position reflects the problem of the Brazilian writer.” Clarice expressed her wonderment that it could be otherwise: “A book that’s well received by the critics in the United States makes the author rich! A book!”8

  At this time, she approached several wealthier friends, including Marina Colasanti and Maria Bonomi, offering to sell them some of her paintings. Clarice had been portrayed by many of Brazil’s leading artists, and she still had the valuable De Chirico portrait. Maria Bonomi did not want to take advantage of her friend’s need and at the time could not afford what she thought would be a fair price. Marina Colasanti said that the subject came up every once in a while: “I remember going back to her house and the pictures were still there. I don’t think she ever really had to sell them.”9

  To try to make ends meet, she began to translate English and French works, often for Álvaro Pacheco’s Artenova. For another publisher, she adapted classics for children, including the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. She also translated Burning Lights, the Yiddish memoir of Bella Chagall, Marc Chagall’s first wife. She presumably translated this from the English or French, but the story of Mrs. Chagall’s childhood in Vitebsk, today in Belarus, would have kindled memories of the stories her family told her about their own past.

  Clarice may not have chosen all the titles she translated, but she did have a choice with at least one publisher that employed her,10 and it is nonetheless remarkable how many of them deal with the same themes of crime, sin, and violence that so often appear in her own work. There were the Poe stories and Dorian Gray, there were two novels by Agatha Christie, and there was Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.11 (She had once said that her “ideal would be to write something that at least in the title recalled Agatha Christie.”)12

  Perhaps the choice of books is a coincidence, but Clarice’s interest in crime was not simply metaphysical. “Though incapable of an act of violence,” Olga Borelli wrote, “she only watched powerful films. Crime movies exercised a great attraction over her. … She enjoyed detective novels. Principally those of Georges Simenon.”13 As early as 1946, in Rome, she had written to Elisa that she longed to be back in Brazil, where they could watch detective movies together.14 In a story published in 1974, she quoted Goethe: “There is no crime we have not committed in our thoughts.”15

  Her work as a translator was not distinguished, and she seems to have thrown her translations together in off hours. “I work quickly, intuitively,” she said. “Sometimes I check the dictionary, sometimes not.”16 This lassitude was partly inspired by the pittance she was paid. Álvaro Pacheco, who paid translators by the page, remembered the pathetic spectacle of Brazil’s greatest writer coming to his office with a few pages at a time.

  This did not encourage her to do her best. In 1976, one of Pacheco’s assistants chastised her translation of a French book. Among its faults were “entire sentences omitted,” “words translated by deduction, or by the closest sound to a Brazilian word,” “modification of the meaning of words and even reversal of the sentence’s meaning.” She concluded haughtily, “I think that you have been assisted in this translation by someone who did not take the work very seriously.”17

  Clarice’s nostalgia for childhood may have been growing more intense at this time because she herself was growing older. The fire cost her the queenly beauty for which she had been famous and made her physically fragile. Her addictions to cigarettes and prescription drugs had weakened her. She was only fifty-four when she published Where Were You at Night, the collection of stories she published in 1974. But sadness about growing old casts a shadow across the book, in which, for the first time, she wrote about the melancholy and helplessness of aging.

  In these short works, the fervently searching Clarice Lispector, the woman whose stunning ambition had not shied from direct conflict with God and the universe, is no longer desperate, as she had been as recently as five years earlier, in An Apprenticeship, to “humanize herself.” Life itself has humbled and domesticated her, and Where Were You at Night has none of the rebellion of Near to the Wild Heart, the rococo of The Besieged City, the heroic allegories of The Apple in the Dark, or the mystic glory of G. H.

  The author of Where Were You at Night has retreated from her previously Himalayan heights, and her language reflects a new modesty. The book is short, about a hundred pages, divided into seventeen stories. Its powerful and direct emotional appeal is typical of her last books. Through her characters—avatars of herself, as tenuously fictionalized as always—she is asking another question, so basic that it is unanswerable: What is a person to do with herself?

  The housewives of Family Ties, struggling to balance the demands of family and marriage, have given way to women who are struggling to find a place for themselves now that their husbands and children have departed. The title of the first story, “In Search of a Dignity,” refers to this attempt to find a new life for themselves once they have outlived their usefulness as wives and mothers.

  In this story, Mrs. Jorge B. Xavier—she does not even have her own name—is on her way to a conference: “The conference might even have already started. She was going to miss it, she who made an effort not to miss anything cultural because that was how she kept herself young inside, since even on the outside nobody imagined that she was almost 70, everyone guessed she was around 57.”18 En route, she gets trapped in the cavernous entrails of Rio’s immense Maracanã Stadium. It is an unexpectedly hot day, as hot as summer, though it is midwinter.

  “There has to be an exit,” she repeatedly thinks, her panic increasing. At length a man turns up to help her, and she realizes that the meeting was not in the stadium but nearby. She does not want to appear crazy to the man who helps her find her way out, but when she gets onto the street and into a taxi, she can remember only a part of the name of the street she is looking for. By the time she and the patient driver finally track down the address, she is exhausted, feeling foolish and old, and has to sit down.

  As the man in the stadium and the taxi
driver had done, an acquaintance at the conference takes charge of her, finding another taxi to take her home. She is an old woman, unable to fend for herself, being handed off from one caretaker to another. But the new taxi driver does not know the way to her neighborhood, and she cannot explain it. The streets, like the hallways of the stadium, feel like an exitless labyrinth. The driver hails down another taxi who knows the way, and hands her over to him.

  Arriving at home, she throws herself onto her bed, her body “as anonymous as a hen’s,” awaking to a sexual fantasy about the matinee idol Roberto Carlos. “So the lady thought this: in my life there was never a climax as in the stories you read. The climax was Roberto Carlos. … There she was, trapped in an out-of-season desire just like the summer day in the middle of winter. Trapped in the tangle of the halls of Maracanã. Trapped in the moral secret of old women. She wasn’t used to being almost seventy years old, she lacked practice, she didn’t have any experience at all.” But she sees her weak old body: “Were her lightly rouged lips still kissable? Or was it by chance disgusting to kiss an old woman’s mouth?” “It was then that Mrs. Jorge B. Xavier bent brusquely over the sink as if she was going to vomit out her insides and interrupted her life with a shattering muteness: there! has! to! be! an! exiiiiit!”19

  “The Departure of the Train,” the next story, also shows an old woman trying in vain to revolt against the irrelevance that age has forced upon her. As her long string of names suggests, Mrs. Maria Rita Alvarenga Chagas Souza Melo is a wealthy lady, “but you reach a certain point—and it doesn’t matter what you were.” Like Mrs. Jorge B. Xavier, Maria Rita is in search of dignity: “ ‘I’m old but I’m rich, richer than everyone else in this compartment. I’m rich, I’m rich.’ She glanced at her watch, more to see its thick gold than to see what time it was. ‘I’m very rich, I’m not just any old lady.’ But she knew, oh she knew very well that she was just any old lady, a little old lady spooked by the slightest things.”20