At the same time, Clarice longs to be two. She desperately longs to be someone other than herself. With Angela, and with her male “author,” Clarice is literally trying to escape her own self. “Angela is my attempt to be two.” And: “I and Angela are my interior dialogue—I in conversation with myself. I am tired of thinking the same things.”9
Plagued by these doubts about the fragility and the reality of her creation, the divine author nonetheless revels in the creation: “As I was saying: it was God who invented me. And so do I—as in the Greek Olympiads the athletes who ran passed forward the burning torch—so too do I use my breath and invent Angela Pralini and make her a woman.”10
The two characters enter into an incantatory dialogue that lasts throughout the book, shedding names, changing roles, and engaging in mystical speculations that burn with a fierce intensity as the author, in this case the “real” author, Clarice Lispector, feels her death approaching.
AUTHOR: I am in love with a character I invented: Angela Pralini. Here she is speaking:
ANGELA: Ah how I would love to have a languid life. I am one of the interpreters of God.
AUTHOR: When Angela thinks about God, is she thinking about God or me?
ANGELA: Who makes my life? I feel that someone orders me about and destines me. As if someone created me. But I am also free and do not obey orders.11
Angela has been planning a “novel of things,”12 but the author knows she will not finish it. Like the young Clarice, who only finished law school because of a friend’s taunt that she never finished anything, the author notes that “Angela never finishes what she starts. Second because the random notes for her book are all fragmentary and Angela doesn’t know how to unify and construct. She will never be a writer.”13
But as in law school, it is Clarice herself who cannot finish what she started. Page after page, the author wonders what to do with Angela. By this, it becomes clear, she means whether to allow Angela, and thus herself, to die. The author has given her life, and the author now must decide whether, and how, to unmake it. “And suddenly—suddenly! a revolted and demoniacal avalanche bursts up inside me: I’m wondering whether it’s worth it for Angela to die. Do I kill her? does she kill herself?” the “author” writes. “I want to justify death.”14
Yet Clarice still cannot justify Angela’s. She tries throughout to find a way to let her character go. “At the hour of my death—what do I do? Teach me how to die. I don’t know,” Angela implores.15 But Clarice Lispector, at the end of her own life, is still addicted to the spells she cast as a child, still searching for the words that might mean salvation. At the very end of the book, an eerie and astonishing paragraph recalls Clarice’s very first magical stories:
Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn’t want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren’t dead in real life, just as actors, the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?16
She could not save her mother, but she still hoped to save someone, even a character as unabashedly artificial as Angela Pralini, and Clarice’s desire—“I am looking for someone whose life I can save. The only one who allows me to do this is Angela. And as I save her life, I save my own”17—gives the book its tragic magnificence. This is no longer a fictional author talking. This is Clarice Lispector.
Clarice knew all too well that if she let Angela die, she herself would have to follow. On the very last page she spares her creation, allowing her to drift off, a figure vanishing from a stage: “I pull back my gaze my camera and Angela starts getting small, small, smaller—until I can see her no longer.”18 Angela may have been the painting of a painting—“The I who appears in this book is not I”—but she was also quite literally Clarice. Olga Borelli understood that the connection was not theoretical: “She asks to die. … I left out one sentence. I left it out to spare the family’s feelings. I mean, the book was fragments, and one fragment touched me deeply, in which she says ‘I asked God to give Angela a cancer that she can’t get rid of.’ Because Angela doesn’t have the courage to kill herself. She needs to, because she says ‘God doesn’t kill anyone, it’s the person that dies.’ Clarice also said that everyone chooses the way they die.”19
43
Lispectorian Silence
On November 28, 1975, after a Thanksgiving dinner with his daughter, Clarissa, and her American family, Erico Verissimo died in Porto Alegre. Clarice was stunned. “It was such a shock that my blood pressure dropped to almost zero and I had to lie in bed, without the strength to move so much as my hands,” she wrote Mafalda. “Excuse me for letting you down at a time like this. I too wanted to see you in order to—as incredibly illogical as it seems—, for you to console me.”1
For Clarice it was a sad end to a tough year, one that included publishing headaches, as so often before. Early in the year, Álvaro Pacheco’s Artenova had brought out a compilation of the interviews she had done through the years with notable Brazilians, under the title The Whole Body. This brought to five the number of books she had published with him: Água viva, The Via Crucis of the Body, Where Were You at Night, and the anthology The Imitation of the Rose.
“Artenova wasn’t a publisher, it was a printing press,” said Alberto Dines, who was also published there for a time.2 Clarice liked Pacheco at first, when he took a chance on Água viva. But she, a perfectionist in her writing, loathed the slovenliness with which her books were published. Especially compared with the stylish editions Autor and Sabiá had produced for her, the Artenova productions do indeed stand out as astonishingly ugly. The first edition of The Via Crucis of the Body, for example, is decorated with an inexplicably grotesque brownish-yellowish African mask.
But she let this slide until she began to feel that he was cheating her out of her royalties. “He didn’t enjoy paying authors for their work,” Dines said of Pacheco. “He thought he was doing authors a favor by publishing them.” Despite her legal training, Clarice had never been able take care of her own contracts; this incompetence when it came to business was part of the childlike helplessness Dr. Azulay had noticed. But now, when her paychecks became too insultingly pitiful, even she smelled a rat. “Even published in Portugal and translated in France, the United States, and other countries, and even with my work published in countless school anthologies of Brazilian authors, I never could live exclusively from literature. The reason, however, is not that the public isn’t interested in my work, but an unjust exploitation that only benefits publishers.”3
She rang Artenova to discuss the matter. After several attempts, she managed to schedule a meeting with Pacheco and immediately got into a taxi. Arriving thirty minutes later, she was told to wait: the boss had gone out to lunch with a group of foreigners. When he finally returned, a leisurely two hours later, he gave her a grand total of 140 cruzeiros: her royalties for half a year, for all five books. Olga said that she never saw Clarice so enraged. She stormed out and gave the money to a beggar.4
Her friend Nélida Piñon, a novelist of Spanish parentage who was well-connected in her ancestral country, put her in touch with Carmen Balcells, the Barcelona literary agent who represented so many first-rate Latin American authors, from Gabriel García Márquez to Júlio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. (“When Cervantes appeared,” the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes said, “Carmen Balcells was right there.”)5 At long last, but still years after it would have made a difference in her career, Clarice had professional representation.
With these unpleasant chapters behind her, 1976 was shaping up to be a better year. Early on, Clarice consulted the I Ching. “What attitude should I take in 1976?” she asked the anci
ent Chinese text. “What awaits me this year?”
Answer: 42. “I win.”
How should I do my book?
Answer: 8 of “Unity, Coordination.”
Will I have sublimity, daring, perseverance?
Response: 55. “Abundance.”6
The book was right, after a fashion. She would have “abundance” of a widespread and sustained recognition that throughout most of her life had arrived only in reluctant bits and pieces. A bit amazed by all the attention, she made note of everything that had been happening, as if she couldn’t believe her good fortune.
This year there is so much happening around me, God knows why, since I don’t know. 1) The Colóquio Letras [a Portuguese literary magazine] asked me for a story; 2) the Argentine literary magazine Crisis, considered perhaps the best in Latin America, asked me for an interview; 3) Manchete interviewed me; 4) a paper from São Paulo interviewed me; 5) Bogotá invited me; 6) students from the Communications Department in São Paulo are making a non-profit film based on a novel of mine, An Apprenticeship; 7) TV Globo scheduled a “special” adapted from one of my stories for next January; a magazine invited me to do a book review section (I turned them down because I’m not a critic, and because I wanted to avoid the fuss of having my name in the spotlight); 8) I was invited to the city of Marília, in São Paulo, for a debate with students; 9) lots of unknown people call me, even more than before, to talk and sometimes to confess; 10) I’m going to be invited by the professor and critic Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna to speak with the students at the Catholic University about my experience of creation; 11) I was the Brazilian representative in a story collection with different writers from Latin America; I think they should interview all the young writers, some are very good and they have a lot to say; 12) Julio Cortázar sent me a message saying he’d like to meet me; 13) several translations came out of my books (but I earn little from them); 14) Marília Pera, in her one-woman show, uses phrases of mine from Água viva; 15) two Brazilian magazines published my stories, not to mention that last year Benedito Nunes wrote a book interpreting me.
This all leaves me a bit perplexed. Could it be that I’m fashionable? And why did people complain they didn’t understand me and now seem to understand me?
One of the things that makes me unhappy is this story about the sacred monster: other people fear me for no reason, and I end up fearing myself. The truth is that some people created a myth around me, which gets in my way: it drives people off and I end up alone. But you know that I’m very easy to get along with, even if my soul is complex. Success almost pains me: I looked at success as an invasion. Even a little bit of success, such as I sometimes have, disturbs my inner ear.7
An interviewer asked her to describe what a friend is.
“Someone who sees me as I am. Who doesn’t mystify me. Who treats me as an equal. Who allows me to be humble.”
“It makes you uncomfortable to be treated as a famous person, doesn’t it?”
“Too much praise is like too much water for a flower. It rots it.”
“It gets frightened?”
“It dies.”8
At the same time, her sister Tania said, toward the end of her life Clarice knew how peerless her achievement had been, and this knowledge was a private comfort for the difficulties she had suffered in her life. By 1976, her success was at last being widely recognized and celebrated. Though ambiguous, it was a kind of consolation.
On April 7, 1976, her son Paulo, who was twenty-three, married. He had already been living on his own for over a year. Rosa Cass recalled that “Clarice almost keeled over on the spot” when he first broached the subject, asking for his share of Maury’s child support in order to set up on his own. But Rosa advised her to let him go: “You’ll have more of him that way than if you try to cling on,” she said.9
And she did cling. Paulo lived close by in Leme and ate lunch with her almost every day. He soon became engaged to a woman named Ilana Kaufman. “Clarice was overjoyed that Ilana was Jewish,” said Rosa, who told Clarice that if she had been a pushy yiddishe mama Paulo never would have married a Jewish girl. Clarice wholeheartedly agreed, and reportedly told Elisa that Paulo’s marriage was a way of making up for her own.10
Clarice was also nervous about the wedding. Perhaps part of this was because she knew Maury and Isabel would be coming up from Montevideo, the first and only time Clarice would meet her ex-husband’s second wife. By then, however, Clarice was very grateful to Isabel for taking charge of Pedro, and the early frostiness of their relationship had warmed.
She begged Maria Bonomi to come from São Paulo, saying that she feared being left alone. Faced with Clarice’s insistence, Maria came, though she did not understand how the mother of the groom could lack for company. But she was surprised to see that Clarice’s premonitions were right: the other guests gave the “sacred monster,” with all her social inhibitions, wide berth, and Maria was glad she was there to keep her company.
Clarice was not entirely ignored, of course. An aunt came up to her and mentioned, to Clarice’s tremendous astonishment, that Mania Lispector had been a writer, too, keeping a diary and writing poems. Clarice had no idea. Perhaps her mother had stopped writing after all the disasters that overcame her and her family in their homeland, or perhaps she continued the habit in Brazil until, in the face of her advancing illness, she could no longer summon the energy. In any case, Clarice had never known that they had writing in common. Clarice’s own writing had always been so intimately connected with her mother that the news came as a shock. “It was a present to learn that,” she said.11
Later in the month of April, she was invited to a book fair in Buenos Aires, whence she traveled with Olga Borelli and where she was surprised to see her books in unauthorized, and thus unpaid-for, Spanish translations. She was also surprised at the level of interest her work provoked in Argentina. “I was amazed when I got there, I didn’t know they knew me,” she said upon her return. “They gave me a reception, thirty journalists. I spoke on the radio. All a bit on automatic pilot because (laughing) it was all so strange, it was so unexpected that I was just going through the motions. I didn’t even notice that I was on the radio. Who knows (Pause) A woman there kissed my hand.”12
A month later, she had another occasion to remember her mother. On May 30, 1976, Clarice and Olga arrived in Recife. On the plane she ran into Alberto Dines and told him that she was going to “stuff herself with the Jewish food” that her aunt, Mina Lispector, had promised to prepare for her. Mina’s son Samuel had made the trip possible. He had prospered in the low-end jewelry business; he later built an apartment building on the Avenida Boa Viagem, Recife’s most exclusive street, and named it in honor of his beloved cousin.
She stayed in the Hotel São Domingos, on the same Praça Maciel Pinheiro, the pletzele, where she had spent her childhood. The old house from whose balcony the paralyzed Mania had sat staring away her final days, and which the family had had to leave because they were afraid it was going to fall over, was still defying gravity. “The only thing different is the color,” Clarice said.13 She sat on the benches in the square listening, enraptured, to the distinctive Pernambuco dialect of the fruit sellers.
Clarice was not a good speaker, Samuel’s wife, Rosa Lispector, remembered, after the presentation at a cultural center. She was anxious about being photographed. After her event, the press rushed forward, and Clarice cried, “No pictures, no pictures!” Rosa noted that Olga spoke to her as if she were a child: “Don’t you want to go to the bathroom?” she asked gently, and Clarice allowed herself to be led to the bathroom.14 She inspired in Rosa the same protective feeling. When she found out Clarice’s shoes were hurting and that they wore the same size, Rosa simply removed hers and gave them to Clarice, ending up barefoot herself. When a reporter asked her what had had the greatest impact on her life, “I think it was my birth,” she answered, “and its mystery.”15
She would never again see the city of her childhood, but aft
er years without traveling, Clarice was in demand. In July 1976 came word of a great honor. Her lifetime achievement was to be honored by the Federal District Cultural Foundation in Brasília. The prize came with a whopping 70,000 cruzeiro cash award.
Before she left for Brasília, she gave an interview to a journalist named Edilberto Coutinho. Unlike the many journalists who had to make do with a few grudgingly proffered phrases, Coutinho found her in such a chatty mood that if he hadn’t taken the initiative to leave he feared she would have talked all night.16
“I was extremely happy,” she said. “I didn’t expect it. A complete surprise. But then came a terrible depression. I, winning all that money and so many children out there who need it.”
“Why don’t you make a donation to those children?” Coutinho asked.
“Because the adults would keep the money. Listen here, I already tried to change the world. That’s why I went to law school. I was interested in the problem of prisons. But ever since I got the news of the prize, all I can think is: children starving to death, children dead of starvation. But who am I, my God, to change things?”
In a confessional mood, she spoke a bit about the Jews as a chosen people—“That’s ridiculous. The Germans ought to be because they did what they did. How did being chosen ever help the Jews?”—and about her vanity, which had nothing to do with her writing: “I like for people to think I’m pretty,” she confessed. “That, yes. It does me an enormous amount of good. I’ve had many admirers. Some men couldn’t forget me in ten years. There was the American poet who threatened to commit suicide because I didn’t feel the same way. I think about those things a lot.”17
Why This World Page 48
