Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  She had her first boyfriend, whose Sephardic origin raised a few eyebrows at home. “Father thought he should be Ashkenazic,” Tania said. “He ended up accepting him, as he always did. But by that time they had already split up, because he told Clarice he wanted eight or nine children. He became a doctor, got married—and ended up having no children at all.”8

  All three daughters recalled that Pedro Lispector was a great mathematician.9 It is hard to know precisely what this means, but Clarice must have inherited from him some of his interest in numbers. Her childhood friend Leopoldo Nachbin, who had an education that Pedro Lispector did not and who was recognized internationally as a great mathematician, happily concurred when Clarice said that “mathematics and physics are not only the product of reasoning: they are as much an art as Bach.”10

  As a child her interest in numbers was conventional. She had a pedagogical bent and taught math and Portuguese to neighborhood children. “Mathematics fascinated me, and I was only a little girl when I put an ad in the paper as a tutor. A lady called me, said she had two sons, gave me the address and I went. She looked at me and said: ‘Oh, sweetie, you’re too young.’ So I said: ‘Listen, if your kids don’t improve their grades, then you don’t have to pay me anything.’ She was intrigued and hired me. And they did improve.”11 Clarice’s little cousin Anatólio (Tutú) Wainstok, whom she also taught to read, proved a disappointing pupil. “Tutú,” she pleaded, “how are you going to learn if you don’t do your homework?” “Clarice,” he answered, “I’m doing you a favor by letting you teach me. You wanted to do it so badly!”12 His shamefaced teacher was unable to respond.

  As an adult, however, her interest in mathematics reflected her broader concern with abstraction and its connection to the divine. Mystical numbers, like hidden names, assumed an important role in her work. Part of this interest was whimsical, as Olga Borelli, who accompanied her in the last years of her life, attested: “When she had me type for her, she would say: ‘Count seven, seven spaces between paragraphs, seven. Then, try not to go over thirteen pages.’ So superstitious! When it was a story, she said: ‘Don’t put as many spaces in, so it won’t go over thirteen pages.’ She really liked the numbers 9, 7, and 5. It’s a rather strange thing she had, but she would ask the publisher not to let something run more than x number pages. … It’s almost cabbalistic, isn’t it? She had a lot of that.”13

  The number seven, she wrote, was “my secret and cabbalistic number”; it recurs throughout her work. In her late short story “Where Were You at Night” she describes a “failed woman writer” who takes her journal, bound in red leather, and writes “July 7, 1974. [i.e., 7/7/74]. I, I, I, I, I, I, I!”—seven times.14 There are the seven notes out of which can be composed “all the music that exists and existed and ever shall exist”;15 and there is a recurrence of “theosophical additions,” numbers that can be added to reveal a magical sum. The year 1978, for example, has an ultimate total of seven: 1 + 9 + 7 + 8 = 25, and 2 + 5 = 7. “I tell you that 1978 is the true cabbalistic year, since the final sum of its units is seven. So I have polished the instants of time, made the stars shine anew, washed the moon with milk and the sun with liquid gold. At the beginning of every year I begin to live.”16 She would die a couple of weeks short of the true cabbalistic year.

  But there was more to her interest in numerology than superstitious games. “My passion for the essence of numbers, wherein I foretell the core of their own rigid and fatal destiny,” was, like her meditations on the neutral pronoun “it,” a desire for the pure truth, neutral, unclassifiable and beyond language, that was the ultimate mystical reality.17 In her late works, bare numbers themselves are conflated with God, now without the mathematics that binds them, one to another, to lend them a syntactical meaning. On their own, numbers, like the paintings she created at the end of her life, were pure abstractions, and as such connected to the random mystery of life itself. In her late abstract masterpiece Água viva she rejects “the meaning that her father’s mathematics provide and elects instead the sheer it” of the unadorned number: “I still have the power of reason—I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason—but now I want the plasma—I want to feed directly from the placenta.”18

  As always, her mother’s silent presence is implied.

  The budding mathematician was in many ways precocious “in picking up on a mood, for example, in learning the intimate atmosphere of a person.” But perhaps because she didn’t have a mother who could teach her these things, she was also remarkably tardy in learning about “what the Americans call the facts of life.” At thirteen, she wrote, “as if I only then [was] mature enough to receive a shocking reality,” she confided her secret to a close friend: “I didn’t know [the facts of life] and just pretended to know. She could hardly believe it, since I had pretended so well. … I was paralyzed looking at her, a mixture of perplexity, terror, indignation, and mortally wounded innocence. Mentally I stuttered: but why? but why? The shock was so great—and for a few months traumatic—that there and then, on the corner of the street, I swore out loud that I would never marry.”19

  This shock soon passed; what did not, the great event of Clarice’s adolescence, was her discovery of literature. In childhood the creative drive was always there, from naming her pencils and the tiles in her shower, to composing the three-page play Poor Little Rich Girl, to telling her miraculous stories about her mother. But a little girl’s fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature. “When I learned how to read and write, I devoured books! I thought books were like trees, like animals: something that was born! I didn’t know there was an author! Eventually I figured out that there was an author. So I said: That’s what I want, too.”20

  The year after her mother’s death the family moved farther down the Rua Imperatriz. Next door, where the street met the Capibaribe River, a Bessarabian immigrant, Jacob Bernstein, had opened a bookstore that would become a Recife institution, the Livraria Imperatriz, which exists to this day. The shop, long the city’s best, was a meeting place for the local intelligentsia, some of whom became outstanding figures in Pernambuco and Brazil. The sociologist Gilberto Freyre was one; his famous study The Masters and the Slaves was first sold in Bernstein’s store (though Bernstein, correctly, found it slightly anti-Semitic). Through his bookstore, Jacob Bernstein became one of the first Recife Jews to enter the local bourgeoisie.21

  Bernstein’s daughter Reveca was the same age as Clarice. According to Reveca’s sister Suzana, Clarice for a time had the run of the bookstore and the Bernsteins’ large private library. There she read classic Brazilian authors such as Machado de Assis and the children’s writer Monteiro Lobato, books her father could not afford. Suzana remembered that the two were close friends.

  Clarice, however, recalled Reveca less tenderly. “She was all revenge,” Clarice wrote. “What a talent she had for cruelty.” One day Reveca announced casually that she owned Monteiro Lobato’s As Reinações de Narizinho, “a thick book, my God, a book to live with, eating it, sleeping it.” As Reveca well knew, Clarice could never afford such a book, so she told her to come by the next day, when she would let her borrow it. Elated, Clarice returned as told, “literally running” through the mildewed streets of Recife. When she arrived, Reveca put into motion her “quiet and diabolical plan.” With fake regret, she told Clarice that she didn’t have the book yet, and asked her to come back the next day. The next day she invented another excuse and told her to come back the next day. “How long? I went to her house every day, without missing a single one. Sometimes she said: well, the book was here yesterday afternoon, but you only came in the morning, so I loaned it to another girl.”

  At length Mrs. Bernstein grew suspicious and demanded to know why the “blonde girl standing in the doorway, exhausted, in the wind of the streets of Recife,” kept showing up at her house. When she found out, she was horrified by the
discovery of the kind of daughter she had. “But that book never left this house, and you didn’t even want to read it!” she said, appalled, to her daughter, ordering her then and there to loan it to Clarice. Mrs. Bernstein added that Clarice could keep the book as long as she wanted.

  “Arriving back home, I didn’t start to read it. I pretended I didn’t have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, read a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn’t know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. I created the most false difficulties for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me.”22

  In 1933, Clarice Lispector decided to become a writer.

  When, consciously, thirteen years old, I consciously claimed the desire to write—I wrote as a child, but I had not claimed a destiny—, when I claimed the desire to write, I suddenly found myself in a void. And in that void there was nobody who could help me. I had to lift up myself from a nothingness, I myself had to understand myself, I myself had to invent, in a manner of speaking, my own truth. I started, and it wasn’t even from the beginning. The papers piled up—the meanings contradicted one another, the despair of not being able was one more obstacle for really not being able to. The never-ending story which I then began to write (under much influence from Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse), what a pity that I didn’t keep it: I tore it up, despising an entire attempt at apprenticeship, at self-knowledge. And doing everything in such secrecy. I didn’t tell anyone; I lived that pain alone. One thing I had already guessed: I would have to try to write always, not waiting for a better moment because that would simply never come. Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go.23

  These first efforts, she said, were “chaotic … entirely outside of reality,” and fed by a reading that she remembered as being like that of a “starving person, avid; I read randomly, sometimes up to two books a day.”24 She read the Brazilian classics, such as Machado de Assis, and anything else she could find on the shelves of the library, where she chose her books by their titles. Two books, she always remembered, left the deepest impression. The first was Crime and Punishment, a dramatization of human failing and mystic salvation that would have appealed to a person who felt abandoned by God: Dostoevsky had also been a favorite of her father’s. The second, perhaps more interestingly, was Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, an experimental novel published in Germany in 1927. It is easy to see why the book was so attractive to Clarice, whom it left with a “real fever.” So many of its concepts reverberate in her experience that it almost seems to have been written specifically to influence Clarice Lispector. Hesse’s books have always found a particular resonance with teenagers, for whom the longing for love and the question of what sort of life one ought to lead are at their most acute. Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), an allegory of two friends, one a scholarly monk, one a passionate sensualist, outlines two paths that love can take; Siddhartha (1922), his fictionalized life of the Buddha, popularized Eastern spiritual concepts in a world that, after the First World War, had been disillusioned by all its institutions, including religious.

  Steppenwolf is a book about the glory of art and the price the artist pays for it. Like many of Clarice’s own future books, Steppenwolf is a philosophical meditation hung on a fantastic, loosely constructed story, that of the “wolf of the steppes,” Harry Haller, a scholar and artist whose nickname comes from his half-human, half-animal nature. Haller is “an animal who wandered into a world that to him was strange and incomprehensible, who could no longer find his home, passion, or sustenance.”25 His “Steppenwolf Treatise,” prefaced with the warning that it is “Only for Madmen,” lays out a life project for the future artist. The path of art, and the independence it requires, is a terrible one, he seems to be warning the adolescent Clarice. But Haller also notes, “Those who have no wolf inside them are not, for that reason, happy.”26

  “There are quite a lot of people just like Harry,” Hesse wrote. “Many artists belong to this species. These people all have two souls, two beings inside them, in whom the divine and the diabolic, the mother’s blood and the father’s, the capacity for happiness and for suffering, are as tightly and inimically bound as the wolf and the man were inside Harry.” Such people are “near to the wild heart,” but they also know “that man is perhaps not simply a half-witted beast, but also a child of God, destined for immortality.”27

  Like other productions—novelistic, poetic, and cinematic—of Weimar Germany, Hesse’s novel more closely resembles a dreamscape than it does a traditional novel. It tells a story, but the story is simply a framework for the exploration of sensory and philosophical possibilities. The real appeal of Steppenwolf to a budding adolescent writer such as Clarice Lispector was the freedom it offered to pursue her vocation, to describe the inner life.

  “The interior journey fascinated me,” she wrote of her “germination” by Hesse. The possibility he demonstrated, of writing about that journey, was a revelation for the girl whose stories had never been straightforward and who was always much less interested in the novelistic apparatus of plot and character than in the process through which writing could arrive at an inner truth. In Água viva, published three years before her death, she sought to write a book that was like music or sculpture; in the posthumous fragment A Breath of Life, “pure movement,” she conceded only three sentences to traditional storytelling: “Quickly, because facts and particulars annoy me. So let’s see: born in Rio de Janeiro, 34 years old, five foot six and of good family though the daughter of poor parents. Married a businessman, etc.”28

  It was not, she later remembered, that she did not want to write the kind of “once upon a time” stories the editors of the children’s section in the Diário de Pernambuco expected. It was that she couldn’t. As an adult, remembering this rebuff, she decided to try again. “I had changed so much since then,” she figured, “that I might be ready for a real ‘once upon a time.’ So I asked: why don’t I begin? Right now? It would be easy, I felt. So I started. Yet as soon as I wrote the first sentence, I immediately saw it was still impossible. I had written: ‘Once upon a time there was a bird, my God.’ ”29

  10

  Flying Down to Rio

  When Clarice Lispector was fifteen, a year after she discovered the possibility of writing, her father made his final move. Now the destination was Rio de Janeiro. Then as now, the city enjoyed a spectacular natural setting, with giant granite-and-quartz mountains plunging into the sea, primeval forests beginning just behind modern apartment buildings, and miles of great crescent-shaped beaches.

  Unlike now, when the city is associated with violence and drugs, Rio was then at the height of its international reputation. Whereas previously ships traveling to Buenos Aires advertised that they made no stops in Brazil—the foreign mind, when it thought of it at all, imagined a place of monkeys, yellow fever, and cholera—Rio had transformed itself into one of the globe’s ritziest destinations. Cruise ships streamed into the Bay of Guanabara, offloading their well-heeled passengers into the new hotels modeled on the white-wedding-cake originals of the French Riviera: the Hotel Glória, near downtown, opened in 1922; the legendary Copacabana Palace opened a year later, on a beach that was then still out of town.

  The visitors spent their evenings in ritzy venues such as the Casino da Urca, underneath the Sugar Loaf, where rising stars like Carmen Miranda sang and danced into the early hours. Smart tourists would time their visits to coincide with the five days of the February Carnival, an entirely new event despite its ancient origins. Like any other city in the Catholic world, Rio had always had a Lenten carnival. But under the careful tending of Getúlio Vargas’s government, with its unerring flair for public relations, the old festival was reorganized, expan
ded, and promoted heavily abroad.

  It was a Hollywood production, and Hollywood took note. Dolores Del Rio put in an appearance for the 1933 film musical Flying Down to Rio, which launched the careers of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and featured dancing on the wings of airplanes. In those years Orson Welles flew down to Rio and Carmen Miranda flew up to Hollywood from a city she, more than anyone else, made synonymous with dancing and beaches and pretty girls. São Paulo, with its rising industrial power, rivaled Rio for economic dominance, but inside Brazil there was only one undisputed capital, and outside, in the eyes of the world, Brazil was Rio, and Rio was Carnival.

  Ginger and Fred were not the only people arriving in Rio. Pedro Lispector was part of a rush of less glitzy newcomers, the migrants that flowed into the capital in an unbroken stream. They came from all over the world, but the two main currents came from the northeast, the poorest and most backward part of Brazil, and from Portugal, one of the poorest and most backward countries in Europe.

  By 1909, Rio de Janeiro’s population of around one million included two hundred thousand citizens born in Portugal, and that number did not include the Brazilian-born children of Portuguese parents, who, if included, would have at least doubled that number.1 Between 1901 and 1950, almost a million Portuguese citizens arrived in Brazil,2 an enormous percentage of a population that barely numbered six million in 1920 and that represents almost twice the current population of Lisbon. Many, if not most, of these immigrants chose Rio de Janeiro, where they joined the lower middle class: shopkeepers, artisans, and small businesspeople. They dominated certain professions: bakers were almost always Portuguese; Carmen Miranda’s father was a barber.