Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  The most famous of these heroes was João Guimarães Rosa, whose Sagarana, published two years after Near to the Wild Heart, announced the arrival of the other great master of twentieth-century Brazilian prose. With Aracy Moebius de Carvalho, his German Brazilian wife, taking the lead, the couple issued illegal visas from the consulate in Hamburg; Aracy even used her diplomatic passport to escort Jews to the ships waiting to take them to safety. After the Brazilian declaration of war, the couple spent four months interned in Baden-Baden, until they were finally exchanged for German diplomats in Brazil.17

  Clarice was now a foreign service wife, but for the time being, though far from home, she was not yet abroad in the diplomatic cocoon. Despite her occasional boredom, she loved Belém, where she spent much of her time reading the books—Sartre, Rilke, Proust, Rosamund Lehmann, and Virginia Woolf in addition to Flaubert—that she bought at the Our Lady, Queen of Sorrows Bookstore.18 Many of her choices seem to have been influenced by reviewers’ comparisons of Near to the Wild Heart to the works of other writers. As the reviews flowed in from all corners of Brazil, dispatched by Tania from Rio, some critics received personal responses from the author, including the author of the most prominent negative review, the young critic Álvaro Lins.

  Lins’s objections to the book now make for amusing reading. “It is true that every work of literature should be the expression, the revelation of a personality. There is, however, in masculine temperaments, a greater tendency to hide the author behind his creations, to disconnect from the finished and completed work. That means that a writer can put all of his personality into a work, but diluting himself inside it so that the spectator sees only the object and not the man.” Lins suggests that “feminine temperaments” are incapable of this kind of distance, except for the odd case of “androgynous intelligence.” Interestingly, however, he uses the term “magic realism” to describe the book: “Realism defined not only as the observation of the exterior aspects of human phenomena, but as an intuition for the knowledge of the intimate and mysterious reality of these same phenomena.” This may be the first use of the term to describe the work of a Latin American writer.19

  “Reviews in general are no good for me,” Clarice wrote Tania. “The one by Álvaro Lins … made me despondent, and that was good in a way. I wrote him that I didn’t know Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Proust when I wrote the book, because the man all but called me their ‘sales representative.’ ”20 Years later, still irritated by the comparison, she wrote, “I don’t like when they say that I have an affinity with Virginia Woolf (I only read her, by the way, after writing my first book): it’s that I don’t want to forgive her for committing suicide. The terrible duty is to go to the end.”21 She also dismissed any comparison to Sartre: “It so happens that I only learned of the existence of Sartre when I was writing my second book. My nausea is different from Sartre’s, because when I was a child I couldn’t stand milk, and almost vomited it back up when I was forced to drink it. They dripped lemon juice into my mouth. I mean, I know what nausea is, in my entire body, in my entire soul. It’s not Sartrean.”22

  After his review appeared on March 12, she wrote Lúcio Cardoso. “I liked it so much. I was scared by what you said—that it’s possible that this book will be my most important. I feel like tearing it up in order to get my freedom back: it’s horrible to already be complete.” A tone of fragility and insecurity creeps through in this letter. She addresses him as unreachable, superior, almost in the same way Maury addressed her before they were married. “I’m having that impulse toward sincerity and confession that I so often have with you,” she told Lúcio. “But I don’t know, maybe because you’ve never felt the same impulse toward me, I suddenly end up finding the words I want to say but not wanting to say them.”23 In a similar vein, she wrote a few months later, “Today I had my picture taken which must look horrible because I looked horrible. But if it comes out all right I’ll send one to you. Do you want it? Poor thing you don’t want a picture or a letter. I invented that you think of me as a friend just because I am your friend: what a little tragedy.”24 He answered, with calm authority, “There is no little tragedy: I really am your friend and would be terribly sorry if you didn’t believe it.”25

  Their collaboration, so important to the making of Near to the Wild Heart, continued in The Chandelier, the book she had begun in March 1943, a few weeks after her marriage, when she was still living in Rio. Near to the Wild Heart would not be published until December, but Clarice was already going off in a different direction. In Belém, she ate açaí, a favorite treat of the Amazonian regions, in order to concentrate on it.26 But the results were disappointing, she wrote Tania in February: “I’m horribly frayed: everything I’ve written is rubbish; flavorless, self-imitating, or in an easy tone that neither interests nor satisfies me.”27

  Still, she was happy to be back at work. As she told an interviewer (probably her first), “I write because I find in it a pleasure that I don’t know how to translate. I’m not pretentious. I write for myself, to hear my soul talking and singing, sometimes crying.” In the same interview she agreed that her writing was, in a sense, autobiographical, referring to the book she was reading at the time: “After all Flaubert was right when he said: ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi.’ One is always at the forefront.”28

  By May, she was ready to show parts of her new work to Lúcio. “Now I’d like to write a calm and clean book, without any strong words, but something real—real like something dreamed, like something thought—something real and very delicate.”29 But the book would not be finished in Belém. On July 5, 1944, a month after D-Day and the liberation of Rome, the announcement came that Maury Gurgel Valente was being removed to the consulate in Naples.

  15

  Principessa di Napoli

  After a few days in Rio de Janeiro,1 Clarice and Maury began their trip to Europe on July 19. Their tortured itinerary proved just how difficult it was to get across the Atlantic in those days. Their first stop was the “trampoline to victory,” the great U.S. base at Parnamirim, Natal, where they spent five days awaiting transport. The base was luxurious: its cinema showed films still not available in Rio, its mess hall served delicious food, and its apartments sported enormous electric refrigerators.2 Maury went first, traveling with the other diplomats, who were to reopen the consulate before bringing over their dependents. Their journey was grueling: from Rio to Natal to Ascension Island to Accra to Robertsfield (Liberia) to Dakar to Tindouf to Marrakech to Casablanca to Oran to Algiers, where Maury and his colleagues finally got to rest.

  Clarice, meanwhile, was stuck in Natal. She moved from the U.S. base to the “horrid little Grand Hotel here,” she wrote Lúcio. “Maury left yesterday and I’m waiting for transport maybe over the weekend.” She spent a total of twelve days in Natal, “a little city without character, even that of age,” missing her sisters, Maury, and her friends from Rio and Belém.3

  For the first time since she arrived in Maceió as an immigrant infant, she was going to leave Brazil. The circumstances would have been hard to imagine when she arrived twenty-two years before in steerage class, a poor, hungry child from a family of ragged refugees. There was no sign of her family’s epic struggle in the beautiful young woman, an admired writer and respected journalist, who sat waiting for her plane at the Grand Hotel, a distinguished Catholic name in her diplomatic passport.

  It was a triumph of sorts, but it was not unambiguous. In the years since her family disembarked in the shadow of the faux Statue of Liberty on the docks of Maceió, she had put down deep roots in the only country she knew. “Clarice should never have left Brazil,” said Eliane Weil, who met her a few weeks later in Algiers. “She wasn’t like those other women. Only a very few had any education. They were trained to help their husbands, to look after the children and the servants. Clarice was educated, she had a profession, she had a life in Brazil.”4

  The experience of living abroad would be as difficult as it was rewarding, but first s
he had to get there. On July 30, she embarked from Natal. “I traveled with a bunch of missionaries and looking at a little holy woman asleep in front of me, I myself felt weak and horribly spiritual, free of hunger, ready to convince the blacks of Africa that there is no need of anything, except civilization,” she wrote Lúcio.5

  The next day, she arrived at the U.S. Army Air Corps facility at Fisherman’s Lake, Liberia, where she spent a day and a night. Despite being surrounded by Liberian villagers who were intrigued by her smooth blond hair, she was not struck by the place’s exoticism. “I had to keep telling myself: this is Africa—in order to feel anything. I’ve never seen anyone who was less of a tourist.” On August 1, she reached Bolama in Portuguese Guinea, where she had lunch and saw the nature of the colonial regime. She would still be writing about the experience as late as 1974. “[Seeing Guineans being whipped,] I asked: but do you have to treat them as if they weren’t human beings? He answered: they won’t work any other way. I thought about it: mysterious Africa.”6 She left mysterious Africa through Dakar, flying all night to Lisbon.7

  Thanks to her parents’ sacrifices, Clarice Lispector could arrive, well-fed and well-dressed, married to a diplomat with a salary paid in dollars, back in her native continent. It is unlikely that she had any knowledge of the extent of the horrors being visited upon her people. Since the 1930s it had been widely known that the European Jews were being persecuted, but the exact nature of that persecution was not yet imagined. Brazil had spent years under the censorship of the Estado Novo. The Yiddish papers, which would have taken the greatest interest in the subject, were still closed; the Portuguese-language papers either weren’t interested or were barred from reporting on it. “We didn’t know,” said Tania Lispector Kaufmann. “We were busy working, and people didn’t really talk about it.”8 For the most part, the Brazilian Jews were in the dark. “When the war ended, many journalists and writers … came to Latin America,” another Brazilian remembered. “Because here we didn’t know anything. The papers didn’t write about it because it was a dictatorship. So they invited journalists and writers who had been in Europe.”9

  Neutral Lisbon, where Clarice arrived on August 2, 1944, was better off than most of the continent, but it was still ratty and poor. “Lisbon must be terrible to live and work in,” she wrote Lúcio a few weeks later. “As Maria Archer said, dignity is the downfall of the Portuguese.”10 Archer, a novelist who grew up in Portuguese Africa, was one of the many cultural figures impressed by the young Brazilian. Clarice wrote Tania and Elisa that Ribeiro Couto, a Brazilian writer and diplomat, “gave a dinner for, among others, João Gaspar Simões, a great Portuguese critic.” (He is today mainly remembered as the first biographer of Fernando Pessoa.) “We talked quite a lot. He liked me and wanted the book (you can’t imagine what a success I was that night. They were all imitating me, they were all ‘charmed’).”11

  She made an enduring friend in the Portuguese poet Natércia Freire. “The four hours we spent together were very little for me and for all we had to say to one another. But one day we will meet again, I will listen a lot and talk a lot.”12 They never did meet again, but those four hours made a deep enough impression on Natércia that they were corresponding as late as 1972. (“My God, we have lived so much!” Clarice wrote.)13

  The trip was not all fun, she wrote Lúcio. “I don’t know if it’s because of the special situation of waiting and anxiety, but I felt an unease I haven’t felt in a long time. But for some reason you do feel like you’re at home—maybe that’s the reason, who knows?”14 And she wrote Tania, “I’m not enjoying travelling. I’d like to be there with you or with Maury. The whole world is lightly annoying, it seems. What matters in life is being close to the people you love. That is the most important truth in the world.”15

  After a week and a half in Lisbon, “Mme Clarisse Gurgel Valente, courrier diplomatique,”16 departed for Morocco bearing correspondence for Dr. Vasco Tristão Leitão da Cunha, the representative of Brazil to the Provisional Government of the French Republic, located at Algiers. Clarice passed through Casablanca, which was “cute, but really different from the film Casablanca,” she wrote her sisters. “The poorer women aren’t veiled. It’s funny to see them covered, veiled, sometimes wearing short dresses and shoes and socks à la Carmen Miranda,” the inevitable ambassadress of Brazilian fashion.17 From Casablanca, Clarice continued to Algiers.

  “Things are the same everywhere—the sigh of a well-traveled little lady,” she wrote Lúcio. “Cinemas across the world are called Odeon, Capital, Empire, Rex, Olympia; the women wear Carmen Miranda shoes, even when their faces are veiled. The truth is still the same: we ourselves are the main thing and we’re the only ones without Carmen Miranda shoes.”18 From Algiers, she wrote Tania and Elisa, “The truth is I don’t know how to write letters about trips; the truth is I don’t even know how to travel. It’s funny how, passing through all these places, I see very little. I think nature all looks pretty much alike, and things are all pretty much alike. I knew more about a veiled Arab woman when I was in Rio. Anyway, I hope I’ll never expect myself to take a stand. That would tire me. … This whole month I haven’t done anything, read anything, anything at all—I am entirely Clarice Gurgel Valente. And I’m in a good mood.”19

  In Algiers, she stayed at the Brazilian legation, in her brother-in-law Mozart Gurgel Valente’s room; he was relegated to the sofa. It was her first extended experience of diplomatic society, and she was not impressed, she wrote Elisa and Tania back in Rio.

  Lots of these people are extremely snobbish, hard and merciless, though not actively bad-natured. I think it’s funny to hear them talk about nobilities and aristocracies and to see myself sitting there in the middle of them all, with the kindest and most delicate look I can muster. I’ve never heard so much serious and irremediable nonsense as over the month of this trip. People full of certainties and judgments, whose empty lives are filled up with social pleasures and daintiness. Of course you have to know the real person beneath all that. But though I’ve always been a protector of animals the task is difficult.20

  The picture was not all bleak, though, and over her twelve eventful days in Algiers she made lasting friends. One was a young Jewish Frenchwoman named Eliane Weil, who had escaped the Nazis in Paris and made her way to Algeria on the last ship from Marseilles. There, where she worked in psychological operations for the Americans, she met Mozart, four years Maury’s senior, who had been in Algiers since April 1943. They fell in love, but, as Clarice and Maury had discovered, Brazilian diplomats were not allowed to marry foreigners.

  Luckily, a quirk of genealogy was on their side: Eliane’s mother, Lucy Israel, had chanced to be born in Rio in 1899. The family were among the first Jews to settle in Brazil, but they returned to Europe when Lucy was seven. In Paris, Lucy married an Alsatian Jew, Léon Weil, in 1920, making their daughter Eliane legally a “Brazilian, born in Paris,” just as Lucy had been a “Frenchwoman, born in Rio de Janeiro.” Her papers had to be processed, and then, reborn as a Brazilian national, she married Mozart in Rome in December 1944, becoming the third Jewish spouse in Itamaraty.

  Another surprise awaited Mozart and Maury when, a few weeks earlier, Elza Cansanção Medeiros showed up at the legation in Algiers. Their father was the Medeiros family’s dentist back in Copacabana; the families were neighbors who had known each other for years, and the last place they expected to run into nineteen-year-old Elza was at the legation in Algiers. “What are you doing here?” the astonished brothers demanded. “How did your father let you come?” He hadn’t, Elza replied. Her father cut her off when she became the first female volunteer for the FEB.21

  Dr. Medeiros was not the only one to regard the Brazilian nurses with skepticism. Santinha Dutra, the “little saint,” renowned for her reactionary Catholicism and married to the minister of war, saw the volunteer nurses as “prostitutes going off to war to make their careers.” She convinced her husband, Eurico Gaspar Dutra, to put the nurses in a posit
ion as neither soldiers nor officers. That, Elza remembered, meant they couldn’t eat: there were messes for soldiers and messes for officers, but none for the nurses. Luckily, the president of the Red Cross in Recife, who owned a biscuit factory, had given her a couple of boxes of his manufacture, which is all they had to eat on the trip from Brazil to Algeria.

  Safely arrived, Elza was greeted by another astonished family friend, Dr. Vasco Leitão da Cunha, who helped the young women find lodgings in the servants’ wing of a nearby hotel. Dr. Vasco, the representative of Brazil to the French Provisional Government, was about to take up his position as consul general in the newly reopened embassy in Rome. Clarice liked the talented and charming Dr. Vasco a great deal, as did everyone else who knew him; over the course of his career in Itamaraty, he held the essential ambassadorships in Washington and Moscow and rose to become minister of foreign relations. He and Mozart accompanied Clarice to Italy by ship, “to Taranto, without letting go for a minute of the obligatory life jacket, escorted by two destroyers.” “In Taranto we took the private plane of the commander-in-chief of Allied forces in the Mediterranean, until we arrived in this city.”22

  They arrived on August 24, the day before the liberation of Paris. Like so many other people throughout the world, Elisa Lispector, back in Rio, spent a night sleepless with joy and excitement.23

  Long before the Second World War, the Naples consulate had played a vital role in Brazilian history. With the abolition of slavery in 1888, Brazil began to look abroad for sources of free labor to work its booming coffee plantations. Impoverished Italy, with its large surplus of agricultural workers, was an ideal solution. Italians, unlike Jews or Japanese, also met the requirements of Brazilian racial theorists: they were white, Latin Catholics who could be painlessly absorbed. Hundreds of thousands arrived, especially in the south, so many that they account for the ancestors of a full 15 percent of the current Brazilian population.24 Like the Italians who arrived in the United States and Argentina, most of those bound for Brazil sailed from Naples, their papers stamped at the Brazilian consulate.