After his elevation to the governorship of Paraíba, João Pessoa became a candidate for the national vice presidency in the elections of March 1930. He and the presidential candidate, Getúlio Vargas, lost amid widespread voting fraud. In their protests against the results, they took care to stress that they would remain “within the existing order” and in accordance with Brazil’s “political habits and customs.”3
Since Brazil gained independence—peacefully—in 1822, the country had known only one revolution, the bloodless revolt in 1889 that replaced the elderly and benign Emperor Dom Pedro II with a republic. Their relatively orderly politics was a source of pride for Brazilians, who watched, scoffing and appalled, as Spanish America was bled by endless coups and feuds; the reference to their “political habits and customs” may be a veiled attack on Brazil’s chaotic neighbors.
But the peaceful changes of power at the national level masked a level of violence, corruption, and fraud that suggested the national politicians were only barely able to keep a lid on. The northeast, with its masses of illiterate rural workers living in conditions of near-slavery, was in the hands of a few powerful families, like those from which João Pessoa descended. Votes could be easily bought or manipulated. In the more modern south, there was a long-standing rivalry between the largest and most powerful state, São Paulo, and the states of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul. Since the foundation of the Republic in 1889, the presidency had usually passed from a São Paulo candidate to a candidate supported by Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul.
In 1930, this tenuous arrangement was threatened when the outgoing president, a São Paulo man, attempted to install another paulista as his successor. For Getúlio Vargas, the opposition leader from Rio Grande do Sul, and his vice presidential candidate, João Pessoa, who represented the northeastern landed interests, this was a step too far, though Vargas was not in principle opposed to fraud; in Rio Grande do Sul, he garnered 298,000 votes against the opposition’s 982. But it was their turn. Still, armed revolt, so rare in Brazil, did not seem a real option, and it looked like the losing parties would have to swallow their defeat.
Until, that is, João Pessoa was gunned down in the Confeitaria Glória. Given the country’s tense political state, people immediately assumed the motives were political. In fact, the unwitting culprit was a poetess named Anaíde Beiriz, a Paraíban flapper whose vanguardism had so scandalized Paraíba’s society that children were reportedly forbidden to speak her name. A catalogue of Anaíde’s sins gives a good idea of how archaic northeastern society was: she wore makeup, had short hair, and smoked. She said that she did not want to marry or have children. And she went out into the street without a chaperone.
Anaíde was also the lover of João Dantas, a bitter political enemy of João Pessoa. Dantas, a Paraíba lawyer, was allied to a rural clan who opposed Pessoa’s attempt to regularize taxation of the state’s cotton production. Pessoa’s police raided Dantas’s law office, where they found letters from Anaíde; these, Pessoa’s newspapers insinuated, narrated all sorts of dirty acts. Though neither Anaíde nor Dantas was married, this was too heavy for Paraíba. Anaíde’s family disowned her, forcing her to decamp to Recife. It was in that city that João Dantas, thirsting for revenge, walked into the Confeitaria Glória, said, “I am João Dantas, whom you so humiliated and mistreated,” and fired two bullets into his rival’s chest.
This drama ended badly for all involved: Dantas was killed in prison, following which a desolate Anaíde committed suicide. But in a less tense political situation it probably would have been forgotten as the small-town soap opera that it was. Instead, the murder of João Pessoa unleashed passions that Getúlio Vargas’s partisans carefully stoked. The name of the capital of Paraíba was changed to João Pessoa, and the gubernatorial corpse was paraded through the entire length of Brazil, from Paraíba to Rio de Janeiro, provoking mass hysteria at each of its many stops.
Finally, at the funeral in the capital, a multitude arrived to hear inflamed discourses: “We are not going to bury him,” one fiery orator proclaimed. “We are going to leave him standing, standing strong the way he always lived, standing tall, unlike his murderers, standing tall: his heart above his stomach and his head above his heart.”4
Four days after Mania Lispector’s death, Getúlio Vargas began an armed revolution in Rio Grande do Sul. Twenty-eight days later, in a gesture of defiant machismo, Vargas’s gauchos tied their horses to the obelisk at the end of Rio de Janeiro’s grandest boulevard, the Avenida Rio Branco, taking symbolic possession of the capital.
For the next quarter-century, under different names and with one important hiatus, Vargas’s provisional government ruled Brazil. When the melancholy strongman, who had ridden into office on a wave of national melodrama, finally departed, he did so in a fashion befitting his entrance. In 1954, in the presidential palace, clad in his pajamas, he shot himself through the heart.
It was a sensational end to the most sensational career in twentieth-century Brazilian politics. The country Getúlio left behind was very different from the one that hailed him in Rio at the end of 1930. He summed up all the contradictions of Brazil. He was short and balding and preceded by an enormous pot belly, and women found him hard to resist. To his supporters’ claim that he was the “father of the poor,” his opponents sneered that he was also the “mother of the rich.”5 He ruled Brazil as a Fascist dictator, yet he, alone among Latin American leaders, sent troops to fight Fascism.
His ability to be all things to all people was the key to his extraordinary staying power. Since the fall of the emperor forty-one years before, Brazil had proven extremely difficult to govern. If there had been no widespread civil war, there was certainly reason to fear one, as the bickering of various regional and class-based parties threatened, every four years, to split the nation once and for all. The southern states were booming as the northeast withered; the new urban middle classes, with their democratic aspirations, were pitted against the old and still powerful rural oligarchy.
The civil war kept threatening to arrive. It had almost come in 1925, with the famous Prestes Column, a middle-class military movement under the leadership of an army engineer, Luís Carlos Prestes, known as the “Knight of Hope.” For two years and five months Prestes led fifteen hundred men throughout almost every corner of Brazil, twenty-five thousand kilometers in all, always just a step ahead of the army. Preaching equality, they died at an alarming rate from cholera, exhaustion, and army attacks before finally fleeing the country. Prestes proved an unwitting ally of Getúlio Vargas, who would become his archenemy; the Prestes Column contributed more than any other movement to the conviction that the Old Republic was bankrupt, waiting to be swept away.
When Vargas’s Revolution of 1930 did sweep it away, the country’s political unrest did not end. A little more than a year later, civil war almost arrived again, after July 9, 1932. The state of São Paulo, the country’s wealthiest and most dynamic, rose against Getúlio Vargas’s strongly centralizing constitution, which would have removed much of the state’s autonomy. São Paulo went on a war footing: ladies offered up their gold jewelry, and men dug trenches around the city. For two months the federal army besieged São Paulo, until the worn-out rebels finally succumbed.
Though Getúlio then appeased the state, suspending some of the more rebarbative provisions of the new constitution and instructing the Bank of Brazil to assume the São Paulo banks’ war debt, the revolt gave him exactly what he needed: a mandate to proceed with the centralization of the Brazilian state. The rebellion was the last gasp of the old political system, based on personalities and regional and class divisions. The new political parties were radical and ideological, on the right and left, as they were in Europe. And, as in Europe, Brazilian politics soon gravitated toward two poles: the Communists on the left and the Integralists, the home-grown Nazis, on the right. Both threatened Getúlio Vargas, and the existence of both threatened the Jews.
Like the São Paulo secessionis
ts, the Communists signed their own death warrants with a premature revolt. At the end of 1935 Communist soldiers rebelled—it began in Recife and Natal—murdering senior officers in their beds.6 But they overestimated their support in the armed forces, and the rebellion quickly evaporated. Luís Carlos Prestes, the leader of the Communists, eluded capture until March 1936. In a horrifying episode that has become the symbol of Vargas’s cruelty, Prestes’s pregnant wife, Olga Benário Prestes, born Jewish in Munich, was deported to Germany. There, at Bernburg, aged thirty-three, she was gassed.
According to Gustavo Barroso, Communism equaled capitalism equaled Judaism.7 The formula would not suggest it, but Gustavo Barroso was taken very seriously as an intellectual, and was even elected, three times, as president of the Brazilian Academy, the country’s most prestigious academic and intellectual society. His large body of anti-Semitic writings betray a veritable obsession. He was Brazil’s first translator, in 1936, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose publishers, Agência Minerva of São Paulo, emphasized that by making this book available, they did “not want to offend or injure, and much less promote a racist campaign, but only to increase knowledge of a question—the Jewish Question—of the highest relevance to humanity.”8 Barroso was a leading light of Integralism, Brazil’s derivative Nazi movement; Argentina’s pro-Nazi Deutsche La Plata Zeitung described Barroso as the “Führer of Integralism.”9
His rival for the title was the wannabe tropical Hitler, Plínio Salgado, who, like Barroso, was a mediocre novelist with big ideas. Like many of the Integralists, Salgado was strongly influenced by the Catholic writers who emerged in the 1920s, with their suggestions of mystic nationalism. Clarice Lispector would later become close to some of these figures, such as Augusto Frederico Schmidt and Octávio de Faria. Barroso, Salgado’s rival, attacked him for his associations with Jews, notably Horácio Lafer, a São Paulo politician related to the Segall-Klabin clan, Brazil’s richest and most prominent Jewish family. And in October 1934 Salgado met the prominent rabbi Isaías Raffalovich, who was cordially assured that the Integralists “would leave the Jewish question out of the program.”10 This he did not do.
Still, though there is doubt as to the Integralists’ genocidal intentions, there were no doubts about their inspiration. Salgado grew a Hitler moustache, clad his followers in green shirts, and ornamented them with Nazi-style armbands. In place of the swastika came the Greek letter sigma, which stood for “the sum of all values.” And in place of “Heil Hitler” they greeted one another with the word “Anauê,” which was supposedly Tupi, the indigenous language of Brazil, for “You are my brother” but turned out to be made up.
As in Europe, such kitsch would have been simply embarrassing if it had not had devastating consequences. The Integralists, like the Nazis, took to beating up their political opponents, especially Communists, in the streets, and earned a fearsome reputation. Getúlio Vargas, with his gift for being all things to all people, relied on the Integralists during the early years of his reign. He could hardly ignore them: the party had four hundred thousand paid-up members, an unheard-of number for a Brazilian political party, and many thousands more were sympathizers. Their blend of nationalism and Catholicism, their call for an authoritarian, hierarchical system, for a return to “values,” for a “spiritual revival,” had broad appeal to people scarred by the global economic downturn and disgusted by the everyday sleaze of politics. And their attacks on Communists, their call to put the national interest above petty local feuds, were certainly useful to Getúlio Vargas.
Not all Integralists were anti-Semites, Clarice’s cousin Bertha Lispector Cohen remembers. The ideology had been imported from Europe, but it did not necessarily win many converts as enthusiastic as Gustavo Barroso. Bertha even had friends who belonged to the party. “They thought that ideology was going to change the world, was going to change Brazil,” she said. “Of course,” she adds with a dismissive wave of the hand, “it didn’t change a thing.”11
But a lot of Integralists were in fact anti-Semites. Bertha’s brother Samuel Lispector remembers the climate of fear that spread among the Jews of Boa Vista: “We were scared. We knew what could happen. We had seen it in Europe. There was fear, quite a lot of fear.” At school, where Samuel remembers students and even some teachers wearing the green shirt and the sigma armband, Jewish students were frequently harassed. “ ‘You’re a Jew, you shouldn’t be here,’ they said.” He paused. “You never forget that.”12
Another cousin, David Wainstok, went to a new school at the end of 1933, when the Integralist movement was in full swing, and was also distressed to see students and teachers sporting the green shirts. “We, the Jews at the school, were provoked by ‘shock brigades’ who attacked us as we left the classroom. We had no alternative but to confront them, sometimes attacking, sometimes fighting. On several occasions we arrived home with battle scars.”13
“The Rua da Imperatriz was all Jewish,” one immigrant remembered. This was the street where, since shortly before Mania’s death, Clarice, Tania, Elisa, and Pedro Lispector had been living, a busy commercial street that connects the Praça Maciel Pinheiro, the pletzele, to the Capibaribe River. He remembered green-shirted Integralists shouting slogans in the street, fired up by Plínio Salgado’s articles attacking the Jews. “They made trouble, threw rocks; and the boys, their sons, who are now big shots in the state and whose names I can’t mention, would say: ‘You’re a Jew, and when we’re in charge, we’ll kick all of you out.’ ” There was also the equation of Jews with Communists, which grew throughout the 1930s. “Back then, the police were very uneducated, and they would come into the library and confiscate all the books they thought smacked of Communism. A friend of mine, for example, owned The Red Rover, an adventure story, and it was seized.”14
Fortunately, on his rare visits to Recife, which after all was not an Integralist stronghold, the leader failed to burnish his party’s mystique. “His grotesque, puny figure, with his little Hitler moustache and his strained and wheezing voice, stuffed in a uniform that contrasted with his appearance, made him look a bit comical,” David Wainstok recalled. “Once Plínio came to Recife to give a speech at the famous Law School. His followers had prepared a pompous march in the Fascist style. The ‘national chief’ didn’t manage to get through his harangue. At a certain point, a law student retorted in a ringing voice, perturbing the speaker and his acolytes. Just then the lights went out and the papers on the orator’s desk blew away. Simultaneously, vials of sulfuric acid fell from the galleries, the stink impregnating the room. A general stampede ensued, as the crowd ran for the exits.”15
Another occasion, a martial parade, this time sans “national chief,” resulted in a similar rout. “They were uniformed, brandishing their flags, their symbols, and, to a ruffle of the drums, marching in all their glory through the Rua Nova”—where João Pessoa was killed, just across the river from the Lispectors’ home—“in the busy center of town. Suddenly, from a few buildings, green-painted hens, with the sigma on their wings, began a squawking descent upon the marchers. A great confusion erupted, and the marchers scattered, astonished by the unexpected event. The grotesque spectacle offered considerable hilarity to the onlookers.”16
9
Only for Madmen
Brazil’s troubled politics, even when acted out just beneath their windows, did not distract the Lispectors from their own family dramas. The girls were growing older. Elisa, nineteen when her mother died, was now of marriageable age and had a suitor who, like her, was a Jewish immigrant. Yet unlike the cerebral Elisa—who completed the advanced curso comercial, below university level but nonetheless higher than most girls attained, and who was by now a talented conservatory-trained pianist—the prospective bridegroom was “an uneducated shopkeeper.”1
But it was not just that, according to Tania. Elisa had taken care of a household for as long as she could remember, ever since her mother fell sick. Now she was finally independent. She had a job, her sisters
were old enough to take care of themselves, and she was simply not ready to start over as a wife and mother. Still, she got engaged, accepting a ring from the young man. She soon began to have her doubts, ultimately dispatching her youngest sister, Clarice, to the man’s house with the ring and an apology. “What could I do?” her father asked Dora Wainstok, his wife’s cousin. “Z’hot gepisht met tranen [She had wet herself with tears]!”2 (Devastated, the suitor eventually moved to Israel.)
It was a typical reaction for Pedro Lispector. He was an exceptionally tolerant and good-hearted man, Tania remembered. “He had the finest character of any man I ever knew,” she said.3 “He had a great deal of Biblical education. … He read the newspaper from New York, The Day, in Yiddish. He had very advanced ideas. He was an advanced man. He never laid a finger on a daughter of his. He was exceptional. If the circumstances had been different, he could have had a better life.”4
At age ninety-one, Tania still remembered her wonderment at her father’s reaction when, as a teenager, she came out in favor of “free love” and proclaimed that she wasn’t going to get married. From a girl in the small, conservative Jewish community of Recife of the 1930s, this was a provocation, and Tania braced herself for the reaction. “Other fathers would have beat a child who said something like that. I’m sure he was shocked, but he asked instead why I thought that way. We talked about it. And then, as I’m sure he knew I would, I forgot about the whole thing.”5
Clarice herself was beginning to blossom. In 1932 she entered the Ginásio Pernambucano, the most prestigious secondary school in the state, housed in an elegant building on the Capibaribe River, not far from Boa Vista. Only the best students were admitted, and of the forty-three that passed the examination that year, three were Lispectors: Tania, Clarice, and their cousin Bertha.6 The school was not only prestigious, it was also free, which the Jewish school was not, surely a consideration for Pedro Lispector, who was always teetering on the brink of poverty. Clarice was already flirtatious, Bertha remembered, unafraid of boys, and the beauty that would make her legendary was already apparent. In her first year at the new school she and a colleague were voted the prettiest girls in the class.7
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