This group, which included Rubem Braga, would be of the first significance in Clarice’s life. Paulo Mendes Campos, an old friend of Fernando’s, had come to Rio to meet the visiting Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. He never left. Though very short, he was refined, charming, and attractive; his lovers eventually included Clarice Lispector. Like her, and like Fernando Sabino, Paulo showed great early promise. “In a literary career, the glory comes at the beginning,” he later reflected. “The rest of one’s life is an intensive school of anonymity and oblivion.”39 Indeed, though he was a lyrical poet of rare quality, he never enjoyed real fame. But when Clarice met him, he was, in the words of another friend, “Byron, aged twenty three.”40
The thrill of these new friendships could not have made the return to Europe in mid-March any easier. “My joyous little departure face melted into tears in the plane,” she wrote her new friends. “The happy Americans kept watching while I didn’t know where to put all those tears and didn’t even have enough tissues.”41 She returned via the “desert sands” of Egypt, where she went head-to-head with the Sphinx, and arrived back in Italy to find that Maury had almost finished the packing for their next post: the Swiss capital, Bern. Another, more painful departure awaited.
A report, which later turned out to be untrue, that Swiss hotels didn’t accept dogs forced her to leave Dilermando behind. She found a nice girl to take care of him, but was heartbroken. “I can’t stand to see a dog in the street, I don’t like to look at them,” she wrote her sisters. “You don’t know what a revelation it was for me to have a dog, to see and feel the material a dog is made of. It’s the sweetest thing I ever saw, and a dog has such patience with his own impotent nature and with the incomprehensible nature of others. … With their limited means, with a sweet dumbness, they find a way to understand us. And more than anything Dilermando was something of my own that I didn’t have to share with anybody else.”42
To excise the guilt of having abandoned Dilermando, she wrote a story, “The Crime,” published in a Rio newspaper on August 25, 1945.43 Expanded and rebaptized “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” this is the earliest of the thirteen famous stories that became Family Ties. A man climbs a hill high above a city, carrying a dead dog in a sack.
While I made you in my image, you made me in yours, he thought. I gave you the name of José so that you would have a name that at the same time could serve as your soul. And you, what name did you give me? You loved me so much more than I loved you, he reflected. We understood one another too well, you with the human name I gave you, I with the name you gave me and that you only pronounced with your eyes, the man thought tenderly. I remember when you were small, cute, and weak, wagging your tail, looking at me, and my surprising in you another way of having my soul. Every day you were a dog that could be abandoned.
When the inevitable abandonment comes, nobody even blames the mathematics teacher for his apparently victimless crime. “With an excuse that everyone approved of: because how could you make such a long journey with baggage and family and a dog on top of all that, said Marta.” The abandonment of Dilermando seems to have reminded Clarice of her original sin, her failure to help her mother; the abandonment of the dog is a substitute for some greater, nameless crime: “There are so many ways to be guilty and to be lost forever; I chose to wound a dog. Because I knew it wasn’t much and I couldn’t be punished for it. Only now do I understand that it really is exempt from punishment, and forever. Nobody damns me for this crime. Neither the church. Not even you would condemn me,” the teacher says, addressing the dead dog.
In its original version, the story is only a sketch of the more terrifying “Crime of the Mathematics Professor” she published in 1960. Yet even the preliminary story shows that, as in Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice was at her most powerful when, rather than trying to create complicated allegories, she sought the universal meaning within her particular experiences.
18
The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace
Even more than Venice, Clarice’s new home, Switzerland, was the ultimate land of artistic death. Here Thomas Mann and Nabokov came to expire; here Nietzsche and Nijinsky went mad. The toy cities, the cuckoo clocks, the chocolates, and the neutrality could not have offered a greater contrast with the chaos, youth, and energy of Rio de Janeiro. Switzerland was somewhat less than Clarice could bear: “This Switzerland,” she wrote Tania, “is a cemetery of sensations.”1
Luckily, some of her new friends had followed her to Europe: Samuel and Bluma Wainer were now based in Paris. The founder of Diretrizes was now making a name for himself as a foreign correspondent, first as the only Brazilian to cover the Nuremberg trials, where he managed to interview Hitler’s successor, Karl Doenitz, and now as a correspondent for another paper.2 Samuel and Bluma came to Bern only a few weeks after Clarice and Maury arrived, and Samuel, at least, was not impressed.
“Wainer says that every day in Bern is Sunday,” she wrote her sisters. “He said he couldn’t stand it if we weren’t here. He found it extremely boring and characterless.”3 “The way to do it is to look at Bern through the window and shut your mouth forcefully,” she wrote Fernando Sabino and his friends. “Bern is pretty and calm, expensive and with ugly people; with the lack of meat, with the fish, cheese, milk, neutral people, I end up screaming. … The city lacks a demon.”4 To Elisa and Tania she added, “Bern is terribly silent: the people too are silent and laugh little. I’m the only one laughing.”5
She managed to admire some aspects of the country. “The Swiss people got nothing for free. Everything in this country bears the mark of noble effort, of patient conquest. And what they achieved was not nothing—becoming a symbol of peace,” she later wrote. But she tempered this admiration by adding, “This doesn’t keep so many people, in silence, from throwing themselves off the Kirchenfeld Bridge.”6
Her unspoken sympathy with these quiet suicides comes through in the atmosphere of despair that pervades her letters. The despair includes the Jewish terror of exile and a hint of what happened to her parents. “It’s a shame that I don’t have the patience to enjoy a life as tranquil as that of Bern,” she wrote her sisters. “It’s a farm. … And the silence of Bern—it seems that all the houses are empty, not to mention the calm in the streets. … Could it be that we just can no longer stand peace? In Bern nobody seems to need one another, that much is clear. They all work hard. It’s strange to think that there isn’t really a place one can live. It’s all somebody else’s country, where other people are happy.”7
She was laughing a bit, though, and her letters can be enthusiastic and excited as often as they are depressed. One thing stayed the same: the terrible longing she felt for her sisters and her country. She virtually badgered Elisa and Tania to write more, and when letters did arrive, as on the day after her twenty-sixth birthday, she could hardly contain herself. “I was so moved, I cried out of happiness, gratitude, love, longing, joy. I decided to go straight to the cinema because I need to return to normal and then I can write you back, if I can respond in words to the love I’ve received.”8
“It’s bad to be away from the land where you grew up,” she told Lúcio Cardoso. “It’s horrible to hear foreign languages all around you, everything seems rootless; the real reasons for things are never revealed to foreigners, and the inhabitants of a place see us as gratuitous. If it was good for me, as medicine is good for the health, to see other places and other people, any benefit has long since worn off; I never thought I would be so inadaptable, I never thought I needed the things I had so much. Though now I’m ashamed not to live well in any place where the bells of the cathedral ring, where there’s a river, where people work and do their shopping; but that’s the way it is.”9
“You have to be very happy to live in a small city, because it enlarges happiness just like it enlarges unhappiness,” she told an interviewer in the 1960s, once she was back in Brazil. “So I’m going to stay here in Rio. See, in big cities everybody knows that in eve
ry apartment there’s a kind of solidarity, because an unhappy person lives in every apartment.”10
One reason for her unhappiness in Bern was the indifference that greeted The Chandelier. “The silence around your book is really too much,” Fernando Sabino wrote in May 1946.11 He had written about it, as had a few other critics of note. Sérgio Milliet, who had heralded her first book, published a positive review; Oswald de Andrade, one of the country’s most important writers, called it “terrifying;” another São Paulo reviewer called it “even more significant than her first” and claimed that it “places her in the first rank of our writers.”12 But the contrast with the excitement that greeted Near to the Wild Heart was dramatic. “I was prepared, I don’t know why especially, for an acid beginning and a solitary end,” she had written Milliet after her first book came out. Now she was surprised that even those critics who had praised her first book were ignoring the second. Shouldn’t they at least “note the second one, destroying it or accepting it?” she asked Tania.13
For the most part The Chandelier, which is indeed extremely difficult, seems to have baffled Clarice’s admirers and left most critics speechless.14 The positive signs came from predictable corners. “The Chandelier—I still believe—is an authentic masterpiece,” Lúcio Cardoso wrote her. “What a great book, what a personality, what a writer!”15 The only real attack came from another usual suspect, Álvaro Lins, who had been almost alone in rejecting Near to the Wild Heart. “Everything he says is true,” Clarice wrote Lúcio, “whether it’s caused by some enmity for me or whether it’s just something he dashed off without much thought. … Anyway, he acts like the man who beats his wife every day because she must have done something.”16 A month later, she was still thinking about Lins, telling Fernando Sabino, “Everything he says is true. You can’t make art just because you have an unhappy and nutty temperament. A profound discouragement.”17
This state of mind made progress on her new book, The Besieged City, fitful and uncertain, its creation surrounded by the kinds of doubts she did not record when writing her first two. “I’m struggling with the book, which is horrible. How did I find the courage to publish the other two? I don’t know how to forgive the thoughtlessness of writing. But I’ve already based myself entirely on writing and if that desire goes, there won’t be anything left. So that’s the way it has to be,” she wrote Tania. “But I’ve reached the conclusion that writing is what I want more than anything else in the world, even more than love.”18
“Two souls, alas! inhabit my breast”: Faust’s cry, the leitmotif of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, might also serve as a motto of Near to the Wild Heart. The struggle that book dramatizes––between the charismatic, beastly Joana and the placid bourgeoise Lídia, reflects the struggle between two fundamentally inimical halves of their creator. If, as Clarice said in reference to Joana, Madame Bovary c’est moi, Clarice was also Lídia, a conventional woman, a wife and a mother, a person who wished to live in peace with the world.
“I would like to spend at least one day watching Lídia walk from the kitchen to the living room, then have lunch beside her in a quiet room—a few flies, the silverware clinking,” Joana says. “Then, in the afternoon, seated and watching her sew, helping her out here and there, the scissors, the thread, waiting for a shower and a snack, it would be nice, it would be spacious and fresh. Could a bit of that be what I’ve always been missing? Why is she so powerful? The fact that I never spent my afternoons sewing doesn’t make me less than her, I suppose? Or does it?”19
Clarice and Joana have no contempt for Lídia. In interviews with those who knew Clarice Lispector, the word careta (prim, correct, square) occurs as often as words describing her eccentricity and genius. She was vain of her appearance, thought that her contributions as a mother far outranked her value as an artist, and published, alongside her vivifying mystical novels, tips on fixing mayonnaise and applying eye makeup. “Intuitively I never stopped believing that Clarice, Joana, and Lídia coexist inside you,” Maury wrote her. “Joana and Lídia were, and are, the same person in Clarice.”20
In Switzerland, the wobbly poise between Joana and Lídia inside Clarice threatened to slip. “I don’t agree when you say that you make art because ‘you have an unhappy and nutty temperament,’ ” Fernando Sabino wrote her. “I have a great, an enormous hope in you and I’ve already said that you have moved ahead of all of us, through the window, in advance of us all. I just hope intensely that you don’t advance so far that you fall through the other side. You always have to find balance.”21
But in Bern there was no place for Joana, consigned to a round of tea parties in polite company. Clarice, whose writings so rarely reflect anger or bitterness, never sounded more sardonic or mocking than in her descriptions of the people she encountered in Switzerland. “We went to see the Minister and his family. They’re all great,” she told Tania. “Except they’re another species absolutely. His wife is a nice lady, from a nice family, simple, kind. But I have to keep my mouth shut the whole time because everything I say sounds ‘original’ and frightens her. I want to explain what I mean by ‘original.’ That lady is terrified of anything original. We went to see an exhibition of models of Vienna (not too interesting) and she said: this model is original but it’s pretty. Speaking of an English lady who does a lot of sports: she’s original, I don’t like her. … What they really are is: best-sellers. Their opinions are best-sellers, their ideas are best-sellers.”22 She literally had to keep Joana packed away: “I’m trying to put off loaning them my book, in order not to ‘hurt’ them. Because I would be classified as ‘modern art.’… From lying so much to try to have the same opinion as everyone else, because there’s no point in arguing, I’ve been paralyzed.”23 The connotation cannot be accidental.
In Naples, she had ample opportunity to be useful, especially when caring for the wounded Brazilian soldiers. In Switzerland, the sense of uselessness oppressed her, and the possible reference to the mother she failed to rescue echoes the helplessness she felt toward the victims of a more recent tragedy. She confessed to Tania that she was “intimately bothered” by her inability to face up to “the situation of the War, the situation of people, those tragedies,” adding, “[Although I feel] the necessity to do something, I feel that I don’t have the means. You would say that I do, through my work. I’ve been thinking a lot about that but I don’t see how, I mean, in a real way.”24 She tried to get a job at the Red Cross, but the local branch accepted only Swiss.25
With Joana banished from the country of a thousand years of peace, Clarice was increasingly unable to work at all. “I don’t work any more, Fernando. I spend my days trying to trick my anxiety and to avoid horrifying myself. There are days when I lie down at three in the afternoon and get up at six to go to the sofa and close my eyes until seven which is dinner time,” she wrote at the end of July.26 “But I didn’t want to rest!” Joana had shouted. “The blood ran through her more indolently, its rhythm domesticated, like an animal who shortened its paces in order to fit the cage.”27
The caged animal, the Steppenwolf: “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,” Hesse wrote. Could the wolf and the man, Joana and Lídia, live side by side? Among Clarice’s last notes is this: “Writing can drive a person mad. You must lead a serene life, well appointed, middle class. If you don’t the madness comes. It is dangerous. You must shut your mouth and say nothing about what you know and what you know is so much, and is so glorious. I know, for example, God.”28
She went to the movies every afternoon: “It hardly mattered what was on.”29 She saw some sights; she visited art exhibitions; and it was in Bern that she began her lifelong habit of visiting card readers and astrologers. She went to Paris a few times to visit Bluma Wainer and other friends; she and Maury took a happy trip to Spain and
Portugal. In August 1947, she was on hand when Eva Perón’s lavish European “Rainbow Tour” disembarked in Bern. (Rumor had it that her unexpected detour to Switzerland had something to do with the country’s banks.) When the Argentine first lady appeared at the train station, a volley of ripened tomatoes sailed from the crowd and splattered the Swiss foreign minister.30 To Clarice, Evita seemed “slightly disgusted to see that not everybody likes her.”31 But the tomato incident gave Bluma hope for Switzerland: “In that tidy little Bern, with its polite people! It’s good, this way not everything is lost. Our waiting for something to happen is not in vain.”32
Her life was not without its distractions, but her pleasures were always transitory, and every time she thought she was recovering she ended up breaking down again. Nothing helped. “Every day I go up and down,” she wrote Tania. “Even worse: sometimes I spend entire weeks without going up even a little bit. I’ve so lost my courage and energy that I no longer even complain about it. I can spend hours in an armchair, without so much as a book in my hand, without so much as the radio on—just sitting, waiting for the hours to pass by and for others just like them to appear.”33
She sought distractions, private exercises, to rescue herself and Joana. In the footsteps of her father, she studied calculus: “Abstraction interests me more and more.”34 At Fernando’s suggestion, she read a French translation of the Imitation of Christ, “which has purified me at times.”35 Bluma came to Switzerland, but Bluma’s marriage was finally disintegrating and she herself was often depressed. “Everything here is quiet and clean,” Bluma wrote in July from her hotel in Montparnasse. “Any coincidence with the cemetery is pure resemblance.”36
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