At the end of Lucrécia’s life, “looking was still her maximum reflection.” Even as a child, she had “seen things as a horse does”;18 that is, Lucrécia is content not to see beyond the surface of things, and this is the positive value of her “superficiality.” Clarice, whose relentless introspection had brought her to despair, could not follow Bluma Wainer’s suggestion to be a bit more superficial herself, to “think as little as possible and analyze even less.” “My misfortune is asking questions,” she later wrote, “since I was little I was nothing but a question.”19
Lucrécia must learn how “to look with a delicate effort at nothing more than the surface—and quickly not to look again.”20 The effort demands a certain determination; she is not, like Perseu or Efigênia, organically a part of the truth.21 “She leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly.”22 Merely—but this way of looking leads, paradoxically but inevitably, to Clarice’s own metaphysical concerns. As it turns out, not being profound is simply another way of being profound.
Lucrécia’s shallowness unites her not only with her immediate creator but with the divine act of creation itself. She creates the city; she creates every thing she looks at. “Some thing could not exist except under intense attention; looking with a severity and a hardness that made her seek not the cause of things, but the thing itself.”23 In other words, her insistent attention to surfaces is yet another way to approach “the thing itself” that Clarice had earlier sought in her previous books.
But what things can be fully seen by looking merely at their surfaces? The shape of a circle, for example, is indistinguishable from the circle itself, containing the entirety of itself in its symbol. This, not simply the untamed “wild heart,” is the significance of the horses of São Geraldo. For Clarice, in this book as in so many others, the horse is a perfect creature, and becoming like a horse is a mystical goal, uniting soul and body, matter and spirit. A horse acts only according to its nature, free of the artifices of thought and analysis, and this is the freedom Clarice seems to long for: the freedom to do as she liked, yes, but more important the freedom from “the shipwreck of introspection.” For a person tormented by her past and incapable of living in her present, the horse was also a solution.
And so, finally, was Lucrécia. “Everything she saw was some thing. In her and in a horse the impression was the expression.”24 The impression was the expression: Lucrécia, and the horses, are “the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.” In a letter, Clarice further explains the phrase: “without the arms of intelligence, and aspiring to the kind of spiritual integrity of a horse, not ‘sharing’ what he sees, not having a mental or ‘vocabular vision’ of things, not feeling the need to complete an impression with an expression—a horse, in which there is the miracle of the impression being total—so real—that in him an impression is already an expression.”25
What a horse feels, its “impressions,” cannot be corrupted by the verbal, linguistic “expressions” that can only dilute or distort those original, authentic feelings. Lucrécia sees only surfaces and herself is nothing but surface, another means for Clarice to approach the same goal: the “word that has its own light,” in which meaning and expression are finally united.
20
The Third Experience
“The word ‘word’ is ex-possible!”
“Ex-possible?”
“Yes! I’d rather say ex-possible than impossible! The word ‘word’ is ex-possible because it means word.”1
One can only imagine with what thrill of motherly pride Clarice Lispector set down this dialogue with her son, Pedro. Named in memory of his grandfather and born in Bern on September 10, 1948, Pedro seemed to have absorbed the philosophical concerns that occupied his mother when he was in the womb. She was just completing The Besieged City: “When I finished the last chapter I went to the hospital to give birth to the boy.”2
Pedro’s birth initiated the third of her “three experiences”: “I was born to love others, I was born to write, and I was born to raise my children.” Not, however, in that order. Clarice often insisted that motherhood was much more important to her than literature: “There is no doubt that I am more important as a mother than as a writer.”3 Motherhood also offered her the possibility of piecing together an existence shattered when she lost her own mother: “If I wasn’t a mother, I would be alone in the world.”4
Motherhood was the one thing that both the wild Joana and the tame Lídia desired, and Clarice wanted it, too: “As for my children, their birth was not haphazard. I wanted to be a mother.”5 It was not easy, though, and the way Pedro came into the world was a taste of what was to come. The birth was induced with injections, but after almost fifteen hours of labor the baby had not come out, and the doctors decided to perform an emergency caesarian.6
Feverish and in pain, Clarice had to spend a couple of weeks in the hospital. “As for Maury, I have rarely seen his equal in my life. He is so good to me, thinks of everything, is enormously patient with me and surrounds me with more care and love than I deserve. I hope I never hurt him. Not only because he’s been this way. In everything, he’s one of the purest people I know. I couldn’t have a better father for my son.”7
Her first reports to her in-laws are full of a new mother’s enthusiasm: “Little Pedro is very funny, constantly putting on weight and making faces. I’m sending an example, a terrible picture that is just a sample. In this photograph he is one week ‘old.’ This is the face he likes the most: opening his nostrils wide and transforming his mouth into a beak.”8 There were some doubts about the nanny: “She’s maniacal about silence (imagine wanting more silence than in Bern!); she wants us to whisper and walk on tiptoes—which would teach the child bad habits: he’ll be frightened in any other country.”9 Later, to Tania, she described the nurse as “a plague with a diploma.”10
But the gravity of the new enterprise was not lost on her. “Every woman, when she learns she is pregnant, lifts her hand to her throat: she knows that she will give birth to a being who will inevitably follow the path of Christ, falling many times along the way under the weight of the cross. There is no escape.”11 Pedro would fall beneath the weight of his cross, causing her a pain as great as the loss of her mother. But for now, not even this foreknowledge would have contaminated her and Maury’s happiness. Perhaps this is what she was thinking when, on December 24, 1971, she wrote a Christmas column called “Today a Child Is Born.” The cross was looming in the future, but “for now, the joy belonged only to a little Jewish family.”12
In 1948, there was joy in other Jewish families. On November 29, 1947, under the gavel of its Brazilian president, Oswaldo Aranha, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine. (The gesture earned Aranha fame as a friend of the Jews, notwithstanding his statement that the creation of Israel meant that Copacabana could now be returned to the Brazilians.)13 By early May, when Clarice was finishing The Besieged City, Bluma’s husband, the globetrotting reporter Samuel Wainer, was standing in front of the Café Brasil in Tel Aviv, a gathering place for the clandestine Jewish government, trying to contact the Irgun. Representatives of the Jewish terrorist organization duly appeared to describe, in detail, their famous attack on the King David Hotel.14 On May 13, on his way out of the country, Wainer was almost blown up by a mine on the road to the airport. The next day the State of Israel was proclaimed.
And there was joy in Rio de Janeiro. Elisa Lispector’s fictionalized memoir, In Exile, opens with Lizza’s early-morning arrival at a train station. She hears a languid newspaper seller say “Read the Diário!” (Samuel Wainer’s paper). “Latest news: Jewish state proclaimed! Read all about it! The Diário!”
Lizza awoke from her stillness with a jolt in her heart. She bought a paper, feverishly opened it, and while her eyes ran across the news, a growing weariness spread through her entire being, as if a dark spring was flowing inside her and penetrating every corner of her soul. Now she would say she was peac
eful—too peaceful for someone who had spent the last days in the sanatorium in unrelenting anxiety, following, through the newspapers and the radio, the events in Lake Success, relative to the problem of Palestine.
“Jewish State!” she heard someone say, irritated, beneath the window of her wagon. “These Jews …”
His steps moved off and the rest of the sentence broke off into the distance.
Lizza heard him without resentment. She had heard similar comments so many times that they could no longer bother her. And now she was calmer than ever. A sweet hope in the destinies of the world was born inside her. Humanity was redeeming itself. Finally, it was paying its debt to the Jews. It was worth the suffering and the struggle. So many tears, so much blood. They did not die in vain.
“… they did not die in vain …,” the wheels began to sing on the tracks, while the train began moving once again.15
The story that follows is the story of the Lispector family’s flight from their homeland.16 The creation of the Jewish state, and the happiness it gives the heroine, lends the dreadful suffering of its characters, especially Lizza, a kind of meaning, a hope that her family’s and her people’s sacrifices had been to some positive end, that their loved ones, and particularly her mother, “did not die in vain.”
In both its explicit historical references and its insistent political bent, In Exile is unlike anything Clarice would write. Elisa, who was nine years older, not only remembered the whole hideous story of the family’s flight from Europe. She could, in a sense, never forget it. An active Zionist, secretary of the Jewish Institute of Historical Research in Rio, she traveled to Israel in later years. More academically inclined than her younger sister, she earned degrees in sociology and art history, besides her piano studies at the Recife Conservatory, and she attentively followed literary and intellectual debates.17
As the phrase “someone who had spent the last days in the sanatorium in unrelenting anxiety” reveals, however, what she and Clarice did have in common were their terrible struggles with depression. After Elisa entered the federal bureaucracy, she was overtaken by sorrow and passed through a “tremendous crisis” upon her father’s death.18 This despair led her to write. Her first novel, Across the Border, was written in such secrecy that not even Tania knew she was working on it. Published in 1945, shortly after Near to the Wild Heart, it in fact considerably antedates Clarice’s debut, completed by January 1942.19
The novel betrays its origins as the author’s attempt to write her way out of her despondency. “In an outburst of pain, he began to write quickly, nervously, in shaky uneven handwriting, as if trying to free himself from a great oppression,” the book opens.20 Across the Border is the story of an immigrant writer, Sérgio, né Sergei, who has something in common both with Pedro Lispector and with his daughters. “When I say war psychosis, I mean from the tormented period we’re going through,” a colleague tells Sérgio. “I know you don’t write about wars. I’ve read your writing. But there’s a harmful influence in all of that. I don’t know, maybe it’s exile, the migrations through strange countries, your extreme solitude.”21
A friend of Elisa’s wrote that the book “was inspired by the figure of her father, to whom it is dedicated. It is his daughter’s homage to the unfulfilled artist.”22 The figure of Sérgio announces Elisa’s future theme: “extreme solitude.” “Solitude became his only means of escaping the oppressive feeling that he was constantly failing, since he did not know how to live as others did.”23
The book recalls Pedro Lispector’s confession to Clarice and the words that inspired Elisa to begin writing it: “If I were to write, I would write a book about a man who saw that he had lost.” The incapacity for living in the everyday world was shared by Clarice, who could never adapt to public life, as well as by Elisa, who dealt with her perpetual anxiety by shutting herself off from the world. Elisa was close to her friends and family, who remember her warmly. She had lovers, including the noted novelist Orígenes Lessa,24 but she never married. Solitude was her great theme.
The legacy of the pogroms was an unrelenting depression, an inability to connect, that her friend Renard Perez noted. “I felt her inaptitude, her lack of preparedness for everyday life. A great insecurity, which became a wariness toward other people.”25 Like Sérgio, and like Clarice (“She was happy inside her neurosis. War neurosis.”)26, Elisa had her own crippling war neurosis. In her last novel, which, like In Exile, is strongly autobiographical, Elisa wrote, “But it is not good to survive. Believe me. One never entirely survives, and the part of us that remains grows weak not knowing what to do with one’s time, which stands still, and with one’s arid existence, which stagnates. Surviving means not knowing what to do with oneself.”27
Elisa wrote for many of the same reasons that Clarice created Lucrécia. “If I could at least stop thinking, if only I could forget,” Sérgio says. Like her sister, Elisa sought a solution in writing, but dwelling on misfortune was dangerous. “Writing, reliving, it may root out the evil, I tell myself, but the truth is that the more I touch the wound the more it bleeds.” The antidote proved poisonous. “Will I never be able to put down this burden? always writing, writing. The idea never leaves me, and now I wonder why, what’s the point? If I could stop, perhaps I could find peace.”28
In May 1948, as war erupted in the Middle East, a pregnant Clarice, in placid Switzerland, finally completed The Besieged City. Her Italian maid, Rosa, shocked by the amount of time Clarice had spent revising it, concluded that it was better to be a cook than a writer, because “if you put too much salt in the food, there’s nothing you can do about it.”29
The book was swiftly rejected by the Editora Agir, the Catholic publishing house that had published The Chandelier. In early July, Clarice wrote Tania:
I don’t know if you know that Agir doesn’t want to or can’t publish my book—the fact is their reply was negative. So I don’t have a publisher. I might send the book to Brazil with someone I know. You can let Lúcio Cardoso read it. He might find a publisher for me. If he doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. What I want is to get that book out of here. It’s impossible to improve it. And besides, I urgently need to be free of it. When you give it to Lúcio, don’t ask him to find a publisher. I’ll write him myself about that. I don’t even have the courage to ask you to read it. It is so tiresome, really. And you might suffer by having to tell me that you don’t like it and feel bad about seeing me literarily lost. … Anyway, do whatever you want, whatever is easiest for you. I hope some day that I’ll get out of this vicious circle into which my “soul has fallen.”30
As always, Tania knew how to cheer up her younger sister, who thanked her exuberantly for her encouraging comments on the book: “I don’t know how to tell you how I thank God, if God exists, for having you as a sister. You are the prize of my life. You are the sun of the Earth, and you give it beauty. Your existence gives meaning to life and makes it worth living.”31 Yet the news was discouraging; Agir’s rejection was soon followed by a rejection from Jackson Editores.
She was elated to be a mother, but not even the birth of Pedro could shake Clarice out of her depression. In December, they moved house, leaving behind the Gerechtigkeitsgasse with its sculpture of Justice. She took a sculpture course, where she tried vainly to sculpt the head of a monkey in clay, and even learned how to knit.32 She and Maury refused to learn how to play cards, though it might have enhanced their social lives: “But we don’t want to on principle: playing cards would be an easy way to get out of the tedium and would work as a kind of morphine. Maybe I’ll learn some day, but I’ll hesitate a long time before I get there.”33
She was, however, already taking other drugs. She recommended Bellergal to Tania, which is commonly prescribed for restlessness, fatigue, insomnia, and headache, but which also contains barbiturates and is contraindicated for pregnant women.34 Pedro was already giving signs that he was not entirely normal. The first shock came when Clarice and Maury, who had to travel out of town, left h
im behind with his nanny. He was still very young and could not yet speak Portuguese. They were only gone for a few days, and when they returned, they found him speaking fluently the nanny’s language. Clarice told Elisa that she was terrified by this abnormal precocity.35
The only thing that could really lift her spirits was the prospect of returning to Brazil. “I was so happy that Marcia [Tania’s daughter] asked when I was coming back. Tell her that we might be there by the beginning of the year,” she wrote Tania. “Tell her that all these years have dripped by and that I practically counted every drip—but that at the same time they’ve gone by incredibly fast because only a single thought connected them: this whole time was like the development of one single idea: return. Tell her that for that reason she shouldn’t expect to see me come back laughing and jumping for joy: you never saw someone come out of prison laughing: it’s a much deeper happiness.”36
They would not return in 1948. Only on March 17, 1949, did the news come that Maury was being removed to Rio de Janeiro. “I’m writing from beneath the hair dryer,” Clarice wrote her sisters a week later, “getting ready to go to Rome to have some clothes made. I can’t tell you what I felt when I heard we would be leaving for Brazil. My great joy is inexpressible. My immediate reaction was my heart speeding up, my hands and feet going cold. Then I started sleeping badly and managed to lose even more weight. I’m so annoying that I’m already thinking that I’ll have to leave Brazil again. I’m controlling myself so I don’t get too happy. I’m so delighted. Maybe in Rio I’ll be able to write again and revive myself.”37
Why This World Page 25