Their town of Curvelo was typical of the backwoods of Minas Gerais, a state said to imprint a special character on its inhabitants, and one whose personality occupies a prominent place in Brazilian mythology. The mineiros, the stereotype goes, are tight-fisted, wary, and religious; there is a joke that Minas tables have drawers built into them, the better, at the first approach of a visitor, to hide the silverware. It is a place where mannered elocutions play an important role in the local language. Nobody in Minas is crazy, the preferred euphemism is “systematic.” There is a taboo against overt descriptions of medical procedures: “They opened him, and closed him back up” is the most that can be conceded of a surgery. A mineiro, above all, does not draw attention to himself. One native, returning home from São Paulo, recalls his puzzlement at being the object of amazed stares. He finally realized that he was wearing a red shirt.2
That was in the capital, Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest and most modern cities, in the 1960s. Four decades earlier, in the no-name village of Curvelo, it was presumably even easier to provoke a scandal. And nobody did it quite as well as Joaquin and Nhanhá Cardoso’s youngest son, Lúcio, who refused to go to school, was obsessed with movie stars, and played with dolls. This last point especially galled his father, who fought with his wife about it. “It’s your fault,” he would charge, “you brought him up clinging to your skirts, and the result is this queer. Where did you ever hear of a boy playing with dolls? Why doesn’t he like playing with the other boys? He’s a nervous kid who’s never going to amount to anything.”3
It was impossible to keep him in school, but he was curious about everything, and his older sister, Maria Helena, who became the best chronicler of his life, oriented his reading. He read many of the same authors that Clarice read as a girl, a mix that ranged from Dostoevsky to the romantic novels serialized in the newspapers, which Lúcio and Maria Helena followed avidly.4 The family moved to Rio de Janeiro, and he was sent to boarding school, where he was predictably miserable, eventually ending up working at an insurance company, A Equitativa, run by his uncle. “I was always a terrible worker,” he said. “All I did was write poetry.”5
But he was finally free and in the capital. He was twenty-two when, in 1934, with the help of the Catholic poet and industrialist Augusto Frederico Schmidt, he published his first novel, Maleita. By the time he published his third novel, The Light in the Basement, two years later, he had attracted the attention of Brazil’s ultimate cultural arbiter, Mário de Andrade, who dispatched a typically colorful letter from São Paulo. “Artistically it is terrible,” Andrade thundered. “Socially it is detestable. But I understood its point … to return the spiritual dimension to the materialistic literature that is now being made in Brazil. God has returned to stir the face of the waters. Finally.”6
Since 1826, when the first history of Brazilian literature was published, most Brazilian writers had followed the advice of the pioneer historian who insisted that the country “must remain independent, and seek its only guide in observation … free in its poetry as in its government.”7 That the historian was French and the book published in Paris gave this advice to ignore Europe even more authority. “Whoever examines the Brazilian literature of the present day immediately recognizes its primary trait, a certain instinct of nationality,” Brazil’s classic novelist, Machado de Assis, wrote in 1873. “Poetry, novels, all … dress themselves in the colors of the country.”8
The result was that Brazilian literature was mostly a literature about Brazil, and only to a much lesser degree a literature written by Brazilians. It was local, regional, and patriotic, composed by self-conscious Brazilians dedicated to creating, or opposing, a certain image of Brazil. They celebrated the country’s particularities—its natural beauty, its history, its popular culture, the heritage of the Indian and the African—and they denounced the country’s social problems, its poverty, its injustice, its failure to live up to its apparently limitless potential. Most often they did both.
In this aspect, Brazil’s literature resembles Russia’s. Both colossal countries are part of the Western world and, in an important way, outside it. They have used literature to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gaps imposed by their history and geography. Their regions are spread across enormous distances; the life of their modern cities is often unimaginable in their backward countryside; their upper classes cannot imagine, except through literature, the lives of their mammoth underclasses. And their elites, despite their preoccupation with national “authenticity,” were long under the sway of France, which gave much of their literature, even at its most nationalistic, a colonial, derivative flavor.
In the twentieth century, the trend largely continued, even despite the revolution known as “22,” the Modern Art Week held in São Paulo in 1922. Though not published until 1928, the paradigmatic “22” novel was Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, an ironic recycling of many of the old national clichés: Macunaíma himself is an Indian who comes to the big city of São Paulo, and Mário de Andrade’s concern for emancipating the national, Brazilian language from its colonial Portuguese baggage is also typical. Though the novel’s subtitle, The Hero with No Character, is also satirically intended, it nevertheless places the book within the ideological tradition of Brazilian literature, in which people are not shown as fully human but are instead meant to advance or attack one ideological position or another. Mário de Andrade elsewhere defined his goal as “to make the Brazilian one hundred percent Brazilian, to nationalize a nation that is as yet so lacking in national characteristics.”9 It is a surprising statement from a man who knew better than anyone how many national characteristics Brazil had; he was a pioneer collector of Brazilian art and devoted years to cataloguing the country’s musical traditions.
The urge to “nationalize a nation” found sympathetic listeners in both Communism and Fascism, which encouraged artists to look at the national “reality.” Writers influenced by Communists tended to use their fiction to denounce class oppression and assert the claims of Brazil’s oppressed workers in the city and, especially, in the country. Fascist-influenced writers also discovered, again especially in the country, the völkische values of the country’s common people. These contrasted, of course, with the “commercialism” of the foreign cities.
The northeast, where Clarice Lispector grew up and where Brazil’s social contrasts were at their sharpest, was a favorite stage. The years following 1922 saw a blossoming of northeastern-themed novels, “using a Brazilian language within a Brazilian reality,” Clarice Lispector wrote, in one of her rare forays into literary criticism. “This was all the result of 1922. … We are hungry for knowledge about ourselves, because we need ourselves more than we need others.”10
Yet the quest for this knowledge usually delivered dry books. By using fiction as a vehicle to discover some general truth about some aspect of Brazil, writers sacrificed detail for the sweep, the panorama, the grande ligne. It was an inevitable result of the task. As in Germany, where urban intellectuals traipsed through hill and dale in search of some imagined place more “real” than Munich or Hamburg; as in Argentina and Uruguay, where the national gaucho poetry turned out to be written not by gauchos but, in Borges’s words, by “educated people, gentlemen from Buenos Aires or Montevideo,” the attempt to “liberate” Brazil was conducted by educated urban people who decided what they wanted to find before they went out to discover it. It was a Brazil seen from outside in, and the predictable result of the focus on reality was a country just as imaginary as the romantic productions that preceded it.
Above all, this literature was materialistic rather than spiritual, which is why, despite his reservations about the book’s artistic and social qualities, Mário de Andrade welcomed Lúcio Cardoso’s The Light in the Basement.
God had, indeed, returned to stir the waters. But Lúcio Cardoso was not the first godly writer to appear in the years following 1922. Another was Augusto Frederico Schmidt, Lúcio Cardoso’s first publisher, who in 192
8, at twenty-two, published his own collection of poetry entitled Song of the Brazilian Augusto Frederico Schmidt. On the first page the poet put to rest the assertion of nationality in his title:
I no longer want love
I no longer want to sing to my homeland.
I am lost in this world.
I no longer want Brazil,
I no longer want geography
Nor the picturesque.
At the time, Schmidt was running a Catholic magazine called The Order, which attracted writers who would come to be associated, like Schmidt himself, with the “introspective school.” This was a loose grouping of writers whose concerns were less social and national than internal and spiritual. They included Vinicius de Moraes, later famed as a bohemian poet who married nine times and became an early champion of bossa nova; the beloved poetess Cecília Meireles; the aristocratic novelist Octávio de Faria, whose enormous thirteen-volume cycle Bourgeois Tragedy is one of the famous unread works of Brazilian literature; and the half-blind Cornélio Penna, whose novel Border appeared in 1936, the same year as The Light in the Basement. “Everything happens on the border between dream and reality, between past and present, between the natural and the pre-natural, between clarity and madness,” wrote a preeminent critic, Tristão de Athayde, of the book.11 The description could also serve for the works of Lúcio Cardoso, who was first published by Schmidt—or, for that matter, of Hermann Hesse.12 The Catholic faith of many of these writers led some to associate, usually temporarily, with Integralism and to defend certain reactionary propositions, such as militating in favor of silent films.
But Catholicism played a different role in the works of the homosexuals among them, including Mário de Andrade, Octávio de Faria, Cornélio Penna, and Lúcio Cardoso. For these people, the Church was a logical home. Not only because, in Brazil as everywhere else, it was chockablock with gay men, but because of the redemption the Church promised those weighed down by the awareness of sin. These people did not see art as a way of addressing social issues, or of refining the national language, or of asserting the preeminence of one political party over another. Their mission was much more urgent: they sought to be saved through art. Writing was for them a spiritual exercise, not an intellectual one.
That is what Clarice Lispector, “guilty from birth, she who was born with the mortal sin,”13 had in common with Lúcio Cardoso. “Beauty was a quality, not a form; a content, not an arrangement,” one writer has said of the worldview of the poor Jews of Eastern Europe. When he wrote that the “Jews would have been deeply puzzled by the idea that the aesthetic and the moral are distinct realms,”14 he might as well have been speaking of the works of Lúcio Cardoso and other gay Catholics, whose frenzied work was in large part an urgent mission to save souls they feared irrevocably damned.
This was also the goal of Clarice Lispector and many other Jewish writers, faced with the silence of a God who, despite their fervent prayers, withdrew from them over and over again. Both were rejects, and both thirsted for the redemption they despaired of finding. It is no wonder that Clarice Lispector fell passionately in love with Lúcio Cardoso.
She was not the only one. Many people fell in love with Lúcio, a friend remembered.15 He was strikingly handsome, brilliantly witty, and endlessly creative. “It just poured out of him!” said another. He would sit in cafés, writing one page after another, tearing one sheet out of the typewriter and immediately beginning another.16 He completed his novel Inácio in a mere four days.17 “What a verbal talent he had, my God, Lúcio Cardoso,” another friend recalled. “And what an ability to work, even though he stayed out all night drinking. He got up early and wrote, wrote, wrote. What he published isn’t half of what he wrote.”18
He was a natural writer, a natural talker, and a natural seducer. On his first meeting with Luiz Carlos Lacerda, a teenager who later became a well-known film director, he scribbled off a poem for him and then took him back to his apartment. Lacerda, young and naïve, assumed they would live happily ever after. A few days later, he was devastated when he walked by Lúcio’s apartment in Ipanema, saw the light on, rang up, and got no answer. After waiting a while, he saw another boy emerge and understood that he was just another notch on the bedpost.19
Lúcio never had a lasting relationship. As anguished and tormented as the characters in his books, he apparently never wanted one either, though he was constantly falling in love with different men. When he died, Clarice wrote, “In so many things, we were so fantastic that, if it hadn’t been for the impossibility, we might have gotten married.”20 Clarice’s friend Rosa Cass disagrees, seeing a different impossibility. “It wasn’t just that he was gay,” she emphasizes. “They were too much alike. He needed his solitude, he was a ‘star,’ unearthly. The two of them would have been an impossible couple.”21
That did not prevent Clarice from trying. “He’ll never marry you, he’s homosexual,” their colleague Francisco de Assis Barbosa told her. “But I’ll save him,” Clarice retorted. “He’ll like me.”22 The relationship, needless to say, never got off the ground. This was probably just as well, because anecdotes suggest that Lúcio would have made a difficult spouse.
“ ‘Lúcio went crazy, Helena,’ ” a coworker told his sister when she arrived at his office in downtown Rio. “ ‘He sold me a suit because he needed money and now he’s entertaining himself by throwing bills and coins out of the window, half of what I just paid him.’ … I went to the window, laughing myself. Below, the Rua Álvaro Alvim was full of people, and more were streaming in every minute, attracted by the noise of the crowd chasing after the money that was ceaselessly falling from that miraculous window.”23
The prankishness also had a dark side. Once he told people that he had hired someone to kill him, the better to comprehend the feeling of being persecuted.24 He did not need to resort to such theatrics. The tenants’ union in his building tried to kick him out, in a letter that made reference to Oscar Wilde.25 He himself repeatedly tried to correct his homosexuality, sometimes going so far as to punish himself like a medieval penitent. “This perpetual tendency to self-destruction,” he wrote. “Yes, it has long been inside me, and I know it as a sick man comes to understand his own illness.”26 He began to drink.
Her encounter with Lúcio Cardoso caused Clarice a fever as intense as her discovery of Hermann Hesse had provoked a few years earlier. Under his influence, and with the new world opened to her by the university and by her employment as a journalist, she began to write and publish prolifically.
Her longest and most ambitious piece of early writing is an enigmatic novella from October 1941, by which time reality had sunk in and she had abandoned her former hope of “rescuing” Lúcio.27 “Obsession” introduces a dark character, Daniel, who will reappear at length in her second novel, The Chandelier, and who is almost certainly Lúcio Cardoso, the guide through occult realms.
Clarice tells the story as conventionally as her protagonist, Cristina, lives. One sees the young writer grasping at fictional devices, still unsure of her narrative footing. Unlike most of her writing, “Obsession” also has a clear traditional plot. “I must tell a bit about myself before I met Daniel,” she writes with uncharacteristic explicitness. “I was always calm and never showed any sign of possessing the elements that Daniel developed in me.”28
Cristina had wanted only to “marry, have children, and, finally, be happy.” She weds the dull Jaime and lives in a world where “the people around me move peacefully, their foreheads smooth and free of worries, in a circle where habit had long since opened clear paths, in which facts were reasonably explained by visible causes, and the most extraordinary were attributed, not out of mysticism but out of convention, to God.”29
Perhaps her disappointed love for Lúcio led Clarice to the skepticism about marriage that returns again and again in her work. In any case, Clarice mocks Cristina’s smug, safe world, which is rocked by a nearly fatal bout with typhoid fever, the same disease that nearly killed Pedro Lispec
tor in Bessarabia. After she recovers, the family sends her to the better air of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, Lúcio Cardoso’s native province, and places her in a boardinghouse. Free of the cozy certainties of her home, she finds herself “suddenly thrown into a liberty I had not requested and did not know how to use.”30
At this point in the story, Cristina, like her author, fumbles back to narrative convention. “But I have to start from the beginning, place a little order in this narrative of mine,” she stammers, her disorder provoked by a mysterious figure who is also staying in the boardinghouse. She overhears him saying unconventional, disturbing things. “Daniel was the danger,” she realizes. “What interests me more than anything else,” Daniel says, “is feeling, accumulating desires, filling myself with myself. Accomplishment opens me, empties me, satisfies me.” She recognizes in him “the destiny of the wanderers of the earth, of those who no longer measure their actions as Good and Bad.”31
This amorality will mark many of Clarice’s characters. Her recognition of the random nature of the universe, her knowledge that hers was not a world in which “facts were reasonably explained by visible causes,” had always been present to her. What, for example, were the “reasonable explanations” for the tragedy of her mother? But for Cristina it is a revelation: Daniel “awakens” her, not least to her animal nature (“my addled eyes, attesting to my animal ingenuity”) but also to her human possibilities. “ ‘To reach one’s potential,’ he said, ‘that is the highest and most noble human goal’ ”—and the state of artistic creation was the greatest available joy.32
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