At least she couldn’t be bored; unlike in Switzerland, she had little time to stare out the window. Her time in Rio and the relatively short trip to England had restored her spirits, even to the point that she could offer advice to Tania, normally the best adjusted of the three sisters. “Don’t try to take certain problems so seriously,” Clarice wrote with an unaccustomed lightheartedness. “Sometimes, when I look at things in the past that I thought were so important and that now are not important at all, I get annoyed with myself. Take care of yourself morally as well, my dear. Be happy, no matter what!”25
Toward the end of November she took a pleasant trip to London, where she visited the theaters and took in a show starring the American actor Tyrone Power. She liked London. “It wasn’t the way I thought it would be. It’s less ‘obvious.’ … It’s not like Paris which is immediately and clearly Paris. You have to figure it out slowly, get acquainted with it slowly.”26 The memory of England remained with her, and in the 1960s she wrote a short piece about it: “I thought it was very natural to be in England, but now, when I think that I was there, my heart is filled with gratitude.”27
Part of the happy tone of her letters from England may have come from the knowledge that she was pregnant again. It is not clear how far her pregnancy advanced, but around the beginning of 1951, on another trip to London, she suddenly fainted. “I almost died,” she said years later. “I was taken unconscious to a hospital and when I opened my eyes there sitting next to me was João Cabral de Melo Neto. I’ll never forget it.”28
She lost the baby. In her great novel The Passion According to G. H. she would write, “Abandoning everything hurts like separating from a child not yet born.”29
Clarice, Maury, and Pedro sailed for Brazil on March 24, 1951. More sad news awaited them upon their return. Bluma Wainer, who besides Clarice’s sisters was her closest friend, had been suddenly attacked by a brain tumor. Samuel did not abandon Bluma now, though they had been separated for three years. Bluma may have found Samuel morally elastic in his political dealings, but she could not have accused him of a lack of loyalty. He had welcomed her back after the disastrous relationship with Rubem Braga, and now he paid for Bluma to go to the United States for treatment. But there was nothing for it. She returned to Rio, where Clarice helped nurse her, and died only a couple of months later. She was not quite thirty-six years old.30
In 1955, Rubem Braga dedicated a short essay to Bluma Wainer. All that remained of the love of his life was a plaster bust at the entrance to his apartment, commissioned from the eminent sculptor Bruno Giorgi.31 “How many times did I see those eyes laughing in the daylight or softly shining in the dark, looking into mine. Now they look over me or past me, white, having returned with her to her goddess-like form. Now no one can hurt her; and all of us, in this city, who once knew her—and, more than any of them, he who most obstinately and anxiously loved her; he who today sees her like this, imprisoned in the motionless plaster, but free of all the pain and all the tumultuous passion of life—all of us died a bit when she departed.”32
Perhaps it was just as well that Bluma departed when she did, sparing her the horror of watching Samuel Wainer become the éminence grise of the new Getúlio Vargas administration. The erstwhile publisher of Diretrizes, dedicated to combating the dictatorial Estado Novo, was now the media’s most prominent pro-Getúlio voice. On the one hand, this was not saying much. Brazil’s newspapers were unanimously opposed to Getúlio Vargas’s return to power, but this was not because of their own strong democratic credentials; Brazilian newspapers had always been the bastion of a reactionary oligarchy, owned by a few very wealthy families who passed them down from one generation to the next.
Wainer saw, correctly, that the election of Vargas was a genuinely popular phenomenon. After his deposition in 1945, Getúlio had remained in the Senate, plotting to return to the presidential palace he had occupied for fifteen years, and biding his time while the politicians who replaced him discredited themselves. On October 3, 1950, when Clarice and Maury were settling into their Torquay hotel, Vargas was reelected with 48.7 percent of the vote, almost an absolute majority, unheard of in Brazil’s fragmented political system.33 As of January 31, 1951, Getúlio Vargas, democratically elected, was once again president of Brazil. “As I take office the people will climb the steps of Catete Palace with me,” he declared melodramatically during the campaign. “And they will remain with me in power.”34
A genuinely popular press was what Samuel and Bluma had hoped to create with Diretrizes, though Bluma, at least, would never have dreamed that a popular press meant one that supported Getúlio Vargas. In a secret meeting with the new president, Samuel agreed to start a newspaper to reflect the popular mood, helped along by a considerable loan—also, of course, secret—from the Banco do Brasil. On June 1, 1951, a ringing letter of endorsement from the president on its front page, Última Hora made its debut. As Samuel later described it, the paper was “ecumenical by vocation.” In his memoir, he approvingly quotes a colleague who called him “the only journalist who can put out a paper that is capitalist in the first section and communist in the second,”35 a perfect match for the “father of the poor” and the “mother of the rich.” With Última Hora’s launch, Samuel Wainer had become one of the most powerful men in Brazil.
During her year in Rio de Janeiro, Clarice Lispector participated in the birth of another publication. Comício would not make the splash of Última Hora, and it would have been completely forgotten but for the outstanding quality of its contributors, who included most of the rising generation of Brazilian writers, including Paulo Mendes Campos, Fernando Sabino, and Clarice Lispector. Its founders were Rubem Braga and Joel Silveira, who had been a war correspondent with Braga in Italy, and its aims were lofty: to discuss “the dramatic and picturesque march of the affairs of this nation and, a bit, of others,” though the editors made clear that their goal was not “to save the country once a week.”36
Like the rest of the press, Comício was anti-Vargas, at least in theory. Typically enough for the time and place, however, most of its advertisers were delivered by Danton Coelho, Vargas’s minister of labor, who “suggested” that his friends support it.37 Its political orientation, or lack of one, however, mattered little to Teresa Quadros, the chatty, confident person in charge of the women’s page. This is none other than Clarice Lispector, who took the job on the condition that she could work under a pseudonym, presumably to avoid staining her serious literary reputation.
In the pages of Comício, one finds Clarice dishing out advice on, for example, adapting one’s perfume to different occasions: for a dinner, the Brazilian Sphinx suggests, choose something light, to avoid overpowering the smell of the food and ruining the other guests’ appetites. “No matter how French your perfume is, it’s often the grilled meat that matters.” Deploy your jewelry with a bit of class: “Don’t mix real jewels with fake ones. And try not to overdo it. Don’t wear your diamonds with three rows of pearls, gold earrings and three gold bracelets on each arm, besides a gigantic aquamarine ring. You’re not a jeweler’s window, and you’re not the Virgin of Pilar.”38
In a voice exuding lofty control, Teresa Quadros also offered suggestions for getting women to calm down. “Act as if your problems don’t exist,” she wrote in the inaugural issue. “There are few problems that can’t wait a week. Maybe you’ll even be surprised to see they solve themselves.” And in the next issue, Teresa wrote, “Worrying can become a habit, like biting your nails. Maybe the day will come when someone asks you: what are you worried about? And your honest answer should be: nothing, I’m just worried.”39
Yet there was more to Clarice’s page in Comício. “I didn’t think the column was for strictly futile feminine topics, in the sense that feminine is generally understood by men and even by women themselves: as if women belonged to a closed community, separate, and in some sense segregated,” she later wrote.40 The page included much serious writing, including an introduction to a se
ction called “The Peddler’s Box.” This is a veiled homage to her father and to the other Jewish peddlers who brought their wares to the wilds of Brazil.
Amidst such a paradise [urban consumer society], it’s hard for women to imagine the existence of places where the peddler and his box are awaited like the Messiah. But anyone who has crisscrossed the backwoods of Brazil knows that such places exist and that the peddler is also a pioneer, a tamer of the jungle, who brings, inside his box, the beginnings of civilization and the rudiments of hygiene, to places they could only otherwise reach with great difficulty. The anonymous figure of the peddler has never been adequately remembered by the men who wrote about our lives, by those who care about Brazilian things. Never has the peddler received the slightest homage. And he deserved it. Because along with his trinkets he also brought a bit of happiness.41
Clarice also published a short piece that must have been avant-garde for the day, certainly by the standards of the ladies’ pages of Brazilian magazines: “Shakespeare’s Sister,” a reworking of Virginia Woolf’s story about the hypothetical Judith Shakespeare, born with the same talents and the same inclinations as her brother but denied the opportunity to exercise them. She ended up killing herself. “Who,” Clarice quoted Woolf’s famous phrase, “shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”42
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Marble Mausoleum
That violence and its repression is the theme of one of Clarice’s great stories, “Love,” written during this prolonged stay in Rio. Unlike Judith Shakespeare, Ana, its protagonist, is not a poet but a middle-class housewife, one who “had pacified life so well, taken such care for it not to explode.”1 She keeps an eye on her husband and children and regularly dusts the furniture, rather like Lídia in Near to the Wild Heart. And then, as in so many of Clarice’s stories, Ana’s unremarkable existence is shattered by an unremarkable event: returning from the grocery store, sitting in a tram, she sees a blind man chewing gum.
Ana still had time to think for a second that her brothers were coming to dinner—her heart was beating violently, unhurriedly. Bent over, she looked deeply at the blind man, in the way one looks at something that cannot see back. He was chewing gum in the darkness. Without suffering, with open eyes. The chewing movement made him look like he was smiling and then suddenly not smiling, smiling and then not smiling—as if he had insulted her, Ana looked at him. And whoever saw her would have had the impression of a woman full of hate. But she kept looking at him, leaning over further and further—the tram suddenly jerked into motion throwing her back without warning, the heavy knit sack sliding off her lap, crashing onto the ground—Ana cried out, the conductor ordered a stop before realizing what was going on—the tram ground to a halt, the passengers looked scared.
Unable to move to pick up her things, Ana straightened up, pale. An expression on her face, long since unused, welled up in her with difficulty, still uncertain, incomprehensible. The paperboy laughed and handed her the bundle. But the eggs had broken inside the newspapers that contained them. Viscous yellow yolks dripped through the fibers of the knit bag. The blind man interrupted his chewing and advanced his unsure hands, trying uselessly to grab whatever had happened. The package of eggs was tossed out of the sack and, amidst the smiles of the passengers and the signal from the conductor, the tram started up again.
A few instants later nobody was looking at her. The tram shuddered along the tracks and the blind man chewing gum had been left behind forever. But the harm was done.2
Plunged into a kind of dreamy delirium (“Why? had she forgotten that there are blind people?”), Ana misses her stop and finds herself inside the primordial world of Rio’s great Botanical Garden: “And suddenly, uneasily, she felt she had fallen into a trap. In the Garden a secret labor was being done that she was starting to perceive. On the trees the fruits were black, sweet as honey. On the ground there were dry seeds full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains. The bench was stained with purple juices. The waters rustled with intense softness. The luxurious legs of a spider were fastened to the tree trunk. The crudity of the world was restful. And death was not what we thought.”3
The Botanical Garden, with its rotting brains, is “so beautiful that she was scared of hell,” and Ana’s sudden awareness of the “wild heart,” of the rotting, oozing, sprouting garden, brings her to the brink of insanity (“Madness is the neighbor of the most cruel sensitivity,” Clarice wrote).4 But unlike Joana, who had no ties and was free to come and go, Ana cannot linger in the garden, any more than Clarice could stay in the ancient caverns of Torquay: “Pedro’s food is more important.” Ana, too, has a child who needs to be fed, a dinner party to give.
She has lost track of time and must be freed by the night watchman. But her release from one form of madness deposits her in another. She runs home to find the “large, square living room,” where “the clean doorknobs were shining, the glass in the windows was shining, the lamp was shining—what new land was this?” She shocks her son with her violent, fiery gaze, but she takes a deep breath and gives her dinner party, “a bit pale and laughing softly with the others.” At the end of the night, her husband takes her back into her former world. “It’s time to go to bed, he said, it’s late. In a gesture that wasn’t his, but which seemed natural, he clasped the woman’s hand, taking her with him without looking back, removing her from the danger of life.”5
After finishing this story in Rio, Clarice, too, subdued and calm as Ana, would be led away by her husband, on yet another long voyage, to yet another long silence.6 The submission—of Joana to Lídia, of Clarice Lispector to Clarice Gurgel Valente—was painful, a violence against herself, but Clarice knew she could not linger indefinitely in the wild garden. “Ah!” Ana exclaims. “It was easier to be a saint than a person!”7
“Love” was published in 1952 in a thin volume, really no more than a pamphlet, fifty-two pages long, called Some Stories. The book resulted from Fernando Sabino’s friendship with José Simeão Leal, director of the Documentation Service of the Ministry of Education and Culture.8 Sabino put in a word with Simeão Leal, who published a series called “Cadernos de Cultura,” short books, including poetry, stories, and essays, by authors both domestic and international. The goal was to distribute these widely and cheaply, but only the second target was met; in Clarice’s case at least, the book attracted no notice whatsoever.9
Besides “Love,” the book included “Mystery in São Cristóvão,” the story of three children, disguised in costumes, who sneak into a garden and steal hyacinths. The story recalled Clarice’s own experiences as a girl in Recife, when she and her friend stole roses, and along with other short fiction, the story had earlier been auditioned in the pages of Comício. The book also included a longer work called “Family Ties,” which would lend its name to the collection published in 1960. Like “Beginnings of a Fortune” and “Mystery in São Cristóvão,” it had been written earlier, in Bern. The earliest piece was “The Dinner,” written in 1943, at the time of Near to the Wild Heart, and published in a newspaper in 1946.10
“A Hen,” like “Love,” was a more recent production, composed during her visit to Rio. Many of these stories dramatize the Steppenwolf dilemma—“Two souls, alas! inhabit my breast”—that Clarice had already illustrated in the opposition of Joana to Lídia in Near to the Wild Heart. “Love” shows Ana faced with the same impasse, in a concise and more crystallized form. How to choose the wild heart—the wolf, the cat, the horse, the viper, the rotting brains of the Botanical Garden—when a person requires a human form in order to survive? How can a person be true to the animal side of her nature without going mad?
Clarice had written much about animal-like people, but “A Hen” was her first story about a human-like animal. “She was a Sunday hen. Still alive because it was only nine in the morning,” it begins.11 Indifferently selected to provide Sunday lunch, the hen unexpectedly revolts, flapping her way frantically across
the rooftops and through the neighbors’ back gardens, chased by a boy in whom her flight has awakened a dormant hunting instinct. “Alone in the world, without father or mother, she ran, panting, mute, concentrated. Sometimes, during her flight, she fluttered gasping on the edge of a roof and while the boy leapt over other rooftops she had a moment to regain her composure.” At last the boy catches her and drags her by one wing back to the kitchen, where, “with a certain violence,” he dumps her on the floor. Just when it seems that her game is up, however, and to her own and the family’s astonishment, she lays an egg—“Her heart, so small on a plate, raised and lowered her feathers, filling with tepid warmth that thing that would never be more than an egg”—a bravura display of vitality that wins her a reprieve. The performance makes her “queen of the house,” though this is unbeknownst to her. She settles into a routine. “But when all were quiet in the house and seemed to have forgotten her, she filled herself up with a small courage, remnants of the great escape—and circulated around the floor, her body advancing behind her head, leisurely as in a field, though her little head betrayed her: moving around rapid and vibrating, the old fright of her species already mechanized.”12
The story, which is less than three pages long, is full of oblique references to Clarice’s own life: the feeling of imprisonment and the longing for flight; the existence “without father or mother”; the virtuoso performance followed by a long period of silence. The reference to the “old fright of her species” suggests the ancestral Jewish fear of persecution, and the phrase “remnants of the great escape,” coupled with the spectacle of a helpless, flightless, pregnant female running for her life, may refer to her mother’s desperate escape from Europe.
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