Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  She sits across from a younger woman, Angela Pralini, who has just left her lover. Angela watches Maria Rita as she thinks about the man she has left, Eduardo, and “seeing the old Maria Rita was afraid to grow old and die.”21

  Clarice was never far from the surface of her fictions—Angela Pralini, for example, lost her mother when she was nine and has a dog named Ulisses—and in this story the irrepressible author suddenly bursts to the forefront.

  The old woman was as anonymous as a hen, as a certain Clarice had said on the subject of a shameless old woman who was in love with Roberto Carlos. That Clarice made people uncomfortable. She made the old woman shout: there! has! to! be! an! exiiiiit! And there was. For example, that old woman’s exit was the husband who would be back the next day, it was the people she knew, it was her maid, it was an intense and fruitful prayer when faced with despair. Angela said to herself as if biting herself in rage: there has to be an exit. For me as for Maria Rita.22

  In a copy of the book Clarice gave to Autran and Lucia Dourado she scrawled, in the almost illegible handwriting that was a legacy of her injury in the fire, “This book is no good. I’ll only make allowance for ‘In Search of a Dignity,’ ‘Dry Study of Horses,’ and ‘The Departure of the Train.’ ” “Dry Study of Horses” is a hallucinatory, abstract collection of short prose poems about horses that also includes a quick stylized summary of The Besieged City.

  Many of the other stories had been published elsewhere, but to the three stories she approved of Clarice might also have added the title story, “Where Were You at Night.” As in “The Departure of the Train,” in which the voices of Angela and Maria Rita alternate and comment on each other, “Where Were You at Night” is a series of voices captured at random throughout a single night. In this kaleidoscope of characters, the author herself is close by: “ ‘My life is truly a novel!’ cried the failed woman writer.” The only Jewish character named as such anywhere in Clarice’s work also appears, perhaps a fictionalized memory of her father: “ ‘I am Jesus! I am a Jew!’ screamed in silence the poor Jew.” Praying to God, he says, “Deliver me from the pride of being a Jew!” But if the story mourns this poor man and speaks of “the person living unanaesthetized the terror of life,” it also betrays the light touch and subtle wit that readers rarely expect, but frequently meet, in Clarice’s writing: “As a child Max Ernst was taken for Baby Jesus during a religious procession. Later he provoked artistic scandals.”23

  Clarice combines this playfulness with the abstraction of “The Egg and the Hen” in the sparkling “Report on a Thing,” the thing being an alarm clock called Sveglia:

  I went five years without getting a cold: that is Sveglia. And when I got a cold it lasted three days. Then I had a dry cough. But the doctor prescribed me antibiotics and I got better. Antibiotics are Sveglia.

  This is a report. Sveglia doesn’t allow stories or novels or anything else. It only allows transmission. It can hardly stand my calling this a report. I call it a report on the mystery. And I do what I can to make it a dry report like extra-dry champagne. But sometimes—I beg your pardon—it gets wet. A dry thing is made of sterling silver. Gold is already wet. Could I speak of diamonds in relation to Sveglia?

  No, it just is. And in truth Sveglia has no intimate name: it remains anonymous. In any case God has no name: he remains perfectly anonymous: no tongue can pronounce his real name.24

  40

  Pornography

  Like Mrs. Jorge B. Xavier and Mrs. Maria Rita Alvarenga Chagas Souza Melo, Clarice Lispector feared that she, “the failed woman writer,” had become outmoded, superfluous. As Olga Borelli remembered, she quite literally did not know what to do with herself. “She always said: ‘Now what?’ Can you imagine being friends with someone who is constantly saying: ‘Now what?’ Now … let’s have something to eat, have tea in such and such a restaurant—we would go to the Méridien. We’d finish the tea, pay the bill, and she’d be asking: ‘Now what?’ Now we’re going home to watch TV. ‘Now what? Now what? Then what? Then what?’ Clarice was like that.”1

  By the middle of the 1970s, Clarice’s reputation as an eccentric genius, more or less unfit for society, had grown to legendary proportions. Autran and Lucia Dourado invited her to lunch almost every Sunday. In the late afternoon, sitting in their apartment, she would take a sleeping pill and begin removing her jewelry so that she would not fall asleep wearing her bracelets and earrings. They would put her in a cab and dispatch her to her house, where she sometimes arrived sound asleep.

  When, in this “mystic phase,” she received them at her house, the lights were usually out, the curtains shut, a single candle flickering on the coffee table, half-illuminating the gallery of portraits that commemorated the vanished beauty of her youth. “Those who pray, pray to themselves, calling themselves by another name. The flame of the candle. Fire makes me pray. I have a secret pagan adoration for the red and yellow flame.” She was increasingly incapable of small talk. “God, death, matter, spirit” were the subjects of her everyday conversation.2 Every once in a while, though, she resolved to reengage, and did so with characteristic élan. Olga Borelli remembered:

  There were periods in which she made up her mind to break out of her solitude and communicate with the outside world. She would repaint the walls in white, decorate the living room with foliage, have the maid polish her few pieces of silver, the chandelier, rearrange the paintings. She would make a guest list. She would take from the sideboard the crystal and china that she reserved for special occasions, spread out her best linen tablecloth, and order Rio’s most famous vatapá (she never had a good cook). She would light her long jasmine incense-burner, fill the ice bucket, bring out a bottle of whisky and lemon-juice cocktails, and torture herself waiting for the guests.3

  These excursions into society were not always successful, as Olga’s friend Gilda Murray remembers. Once, Clarice and Olga had planned a birthday party for Clarice two months in advance. At the appointed hour, the guests, including Chico Buarque and Maria Bethânia, the famous singers, began to arrive. Clarice opened the door, very welcoming and polite, leading one guest after another into the living room. As more and more people appeared, Clarice turned, astonished, to Olga, and whispered, “What do you think got into them? It’s almost like they planned it!”4 She had no idea she had invited them.

  On another occasion, Clarice’s old friend Walther Moreira Salles, who had been ambassador in Washington in the 1950s, invited her to what he described as an “intimate dinner.” When she arrived at his mansion in Gávea, one of the most beautiful houses in Rio de Janeiro, she found him waiting with two couples she had never met. By the time the salad was being served, she had already decided to leave. Rising from her chair and pointing a finger at the ambassador, she shouted, “Walther, you betrayed me!” before storming out.5

  What was Moreira Salles’s crime? When Clarice told Luiz Carlos Lacerda the story, he realized that she had no idea that her outrage might suggest that she and Walther were sexually involved. “Do you think I did something stupid?” she asked, utterly astonished. He thought she had. What would the other guests think? “But I didn’t know those people! There was absolutely no intimacy there!”6

  Moreira Salles had betrayed her by misusing a word.

  Despite her social difficulties, Clarice was often invited to literary conferences. Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna and Marina Colasanti recall her at a seminar on literary theory, where two scholars were discussing epistemology. Clarice vanished. When Affonso called her to see if she was all right, she answered, “That whole discussion made me so hungry. I came home and ate an entire chicken.”7

  Alberto Dines remembers hearing her work discussed in terms of structuralism. She leaned over and grumbled, “I don’t even have any idea what that is, structuralism.” For Dines, it was a very Jewish contrarianism, a way of mocking the pomposity of the grandees.8

  Her irreverence hid a genuine frustration that she was not understood through the haze of terminol
ogy and theory. Nélida Piñon recalled her at yet another conference, where she “rose indignantly from her chair, ordering me to follow her.” She said, “Tell them that if I had understood a single word of all that, I wouldn’t have written a line of any of my books.”9

  As a young writer, she had keenly followed critical appraisals and accepted even the harshest judgments. “Everything he says is true,” Clarice wrote Lúcio Cardoso about a devastating review of The Chandelier—though she added that the critic was acting “like the man who beats his wife every day because she must have done something.”

  Now, with a lifetime of work behind her, she was no longer interested in the opinion of the critics. She proved this with the bravura of The Via Crucis of the Body, the last of the three books she published in 1974. The woman who had spent years revising her books now dashed one off in the course of a single weekend.

  In Loud Object, she had written, “I wouldn’t write a story here because then it would be prostitution. I don’t write to please anybody. But it’s great when I do please. I have to follow the pure line and keep my ‘it’ uncontaminated.”10 In Via Crucis, she explicitly links storytelling and prostitution.

  The book is defiantly, spectacularly sexual in a way Clarice had never been before and would never be again. In its eighty-odd pages, we meet a drag queen, a stripper, a horny nun, a sixty-year-old lady with a teenage lover, a couple of murderous lesbians, an old woman masturbating, and an English secretary who has ecstatic intercourse with a being from the planet Saturn.

  As a provocation to her critics, it is not subtle. (“She was subject to judgment,” the first line of the first story reads. “That is why she never told anybody anything.”)11 In a foreword that she calls an “explanation,” Clarice explains the book’s genesis. Her publisher at Artenova, Álvaro Pacheco, had commissioned three stories based on true events. At first she hesitated, but, feeling a nascent inspiration, she decided to accept the challenge.

  Just as she had when she started writing for the Jornal do Brasil, however, she distances herself from the whiff of whorishness she associated with writing for money. “I simply want to say that I write on impulse and not for money,” she emphasizes on the first page. Imagining the reactions, she uses a metaphor alluding to the punishment meted out to a biblical prostitute: “They will throw stones. Which hardly matters. I don’t joke around, I’m a serious woman.”12

  She had her doubts about publishing the stories and asked Pacheco if she could use a pseudonym. He said she ought to be free to write whatever she wanted, and Clarice agreed. “One person”—this may have been Olga Borelli—“read my stories and said this isn’t literature, this is trash. I agree. But there is a time for everything. There is also a time for trash.”13

  It was less that she savored the provocation as that she increasingly did not care what people thought of her work. In the story “Day after Day,” she writes, “Who knows if this book is going to add something to my oeuvre. My oeuvre be damned. I don’t know why people think literature is so important. And as for my good name? it can be damned too, I have other things to worry about.”14

  The Via Crucis of the Body added to Clarice’s reputation for being weird and unpredictable—and even, for the first time, “pornographic.” Her interest in deviant sexuality did not, at least as far as is known, derive from personal experience. As she writes in her preface, “If there are indecencies in these stories it’s not my fault. Needless to say they didn’t happen to me, my family, or my friends. How do I know? Knowing. Artists know things.”15

  Some friends found her touchingly naïve on the subject of sex. Maria Bonomi, who left her husband to begin a relationship with a woman around this time, was peppered with “technical questions” by an intrigued Clarice. This interest is further substantiated by a tantalizingly brief and possibly apocryphal reference to Clarice’s having “swapped imported pornographic magazines” with the celebrated poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.16

  “I was even frightened … by how much I knew about the subject,” she told an interviewer when the book came out. “Álvaro gave me three ideas, three facts that really happened: an Englishwoman who said she had slept with an alien; a woman in Minas who thought she had been impregnated by the Holy Ghost; and the Argentine man who lived with two women. The rest was my imagination.”17

  Despite the exoticism of some of its settings and characters, only a person of the most rigid and archaic moral principles could find the book scandalous. Clarice’s tone ranges from the serious to the farcical, as in “The Body,” in which two women who share a male lover kill him and bury him in the garden, where he provides excellent mulch for their roses. The stories are written with a freedom and spontaneity that Clarice must have found exhilarating.

  The Via Crucis of the Body is remarkable as a portrait of Clarice’s creative life captured in real time, her fiction intruding into her everyday life, and her existence as a mother and a housewife constantly penetrating and undermining her fiction. The imaginative, “fictional” stories alternate with diary-like notes of her daily activities: the phone rings; she runs into a man she used to know; her son Paulo arrives for lunch. These alternating tableaux add up to a picture of May 11 to 13, 1974, the days Clarice spent writing the book. That weekend, on Sunday, May 12, significantly included Mother’s Day. And the theme that unites the collection is not, in fact, sex. It is motherhood. A transsexual has an adopted daughter, to whom he is a “true mother.” The woman who bears an immaculately conceived child knows that he will walk the via crucis: “They all do.”18

  In the parts of the book that include her day-to-day jottings, Clarice writes, “My dog is scratching his ear and with so much delight that he’s even moaning. I am his mother.” Meeting a wreck of a man, once a promising poet she had known in college, she writes, “Today is Sunday, May 12, Mother’s Day. How can I be a mother to this man?”19 On that same day, Clarice’s son Paulo remembered, they went out to lunch to celebrate. When she was paying, “in place of dating the check the 10th of May (maio) she wrote the 10th of mother (mãe), 1974.”20

  The most shocking aspect of the book has to do precisely with the connection between motherhood and illicit sex, though there is nothing teasing or pornographic about the fact that on Monday, May 13, 1974, the day after Mother’s Day, Clarice Lispector wrote her only explicit description of rape.21

  “Pig Latin” is a story about Cidinha, a prim English teacher from Minas Gerais, who is on a train to Rio de Janeiro. Two men enter her compartment, “one tall, thin, with a small moustache and a cold look in his eyes, the other short, potbellied, and bald.” “There was an uneasiness in the wagon. As if it were too hot. The girl worried. The men on alert. My God, the girl thought, what do they want from me? There was no answer. And to top it all off she was a virgin. Why, but why had she thought about her own virginity?”22

  The men begin speaking an incomprehensible tongue, which Cidinha soon recognizes as pig Latin. But she has to pretend not to understand, because they are saying that as soon as the train enters a tunnel they will rape her. “Save me, Virgin Mary! save me! save me!” she inwardly begs, as the men prattle in the childish language. They can always kill her, they say, if she puts up a fight. Lighting a cigarette to buy some time, inspiration strikes her: “If I pretend to be a prostitute, they’ll lay off, they don’t like sluts.”

  So she hitched up her skirt, grimaced sensually—she didn’t even know she knew how, so little did she know about herself—opened some buttons to leave her breasts halfway exposed. The men suddenly startled.

  “Eshay isway azycray.”

  She’s crazy, they meant.

  And there she was boogying like a samba dancer from the slums.23

  The men laugh at her, and her antics are spotted by the conductor, who decides that he’ll turn her in to the cops at the next station. When she is escorted onto the platform, a young woman with a suitcase gets in, casting the whorish Cidinha a disparaging gaze. Cursed and despised, Cidinha spends
three days in jail. “There was a fat cockroach crawling across the floor.”24

  When she is finally released, she takes the next train to Rio. “So little did she know about herself”: to her terror, she realizes that “when the two had talked of raping her, she had wanted to be raped. She was brazen. Iway amway away ookerhay. That was what she discovered. Eyes downcast.” Walking through the streets of Rio, she sees a newspaper headline. A girl has been raped and murdered in a train. “So it had happened. And to the girl who had looked down on her.”25

  Without Cidinha’s unexpected realization that she had desired the men, “Pig Latin” would lose much of its impact. For Clarice, who found God inside a roach, the conventional, moral solution was never attractive. Still, perversely, this is a happy ending. The way she deflects her protagonist’s rape recalls the stories she told as a child, her vain attempts to cure her mother. The horror is transferred from a woman with a name and a history to someone anonymous—as if by magic.

  41

  The Witch

  “Trash indeed,” huffed the leading newsmagazine Veja, reacting with foreseeable thickness to the bait in The Via Crucis of the Body.1 “One critic said it was trash, dirty, unworthy of me,” said an unsurprised Clarice.2 Even the Jornal do Brasil, where she had worked for so many years, piled on. Its critic opined that “it would have been better not to have published the book, rather than being forced to defend herself with this phony contempt for herself as a writer.”3