Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  In the notebook in which his mother recorded Pedro’s wit and wisdom, Clarice made a curious notation that she may have looked back on, once the extent of the problem became clear, with a shudder. “Mommy,” he told her, “I have special ears. I can hear music in my brain, and I can also hear voices that aren’t there.”28 It is not clear just when Clarice and Maury began to worry about Pedro, but by the time he was nine years old, Clarice mentioned to her sisters that she was putting him into a guidance center, “where, besides schooling, he’ll get help with his emotions.”29 (Already, in a letter of 1953, when he was five, she mentioned sending him to a psychologist.)30

  Around the same time, she took Pedro to a psychiatrist who determined that Pedro would either turn out to be a genius or would go insane. It was a blunt way of saying what Ulysses Girsoler had told Pedro’s mother a decade earlier, in Bern: “We see that all her sentimental life is stretched between one extreme (impulsivity) all the way to the other extreme (subtlety, sensibility, ability to feel all the possible emotions that other humans feel). —It will be very difficult for such a character to find balance.”

  Pedro inherited much of Clarice’s character. He even bore her a remarkable physical resemblance: as a young man, he, too, was remarkably beautiful, “tall, strong, like a muzhik, one of Tolstoy’s peasants,” one friend remembered. As a boy, he was even more precociously intelligent than his brilliant mother had been. Clarice’s powerful superego kept her emotions in check, if often only at great cost, and the controlled tension between impulsiveness and reason was a source of her creative power. But she always feared the danger. Those of her characters, Virginia, for instance, who try to keep their “intimate balance,” always lost in the end.

  24

  Redemption through Sin

  “God knows what he is doing: I think it’s right that the state of grace not be given to us frequently. If it were, we might pass over definitively to the other side of life, which is also real, but nobody would ever understand us. We would lose the common language,” Clarice wrote.1 Imagining that passage to the other side occupied her years in Washington, where she completed her longest, most complexly allegorical novel, The Apple in the Dark. Begun in Torquay and written in her suburban living room in Chevy Chase, the book describes, in poetic detail, a descent into madness.

  The madness in The Apple in the Dark is a positive tool for knowledge, not a means for self-destruction. Yet self-destruction is its prerequisite. The old world of the protagonist, Martin, a statistician, a man of reason, is destroyed by a crime: he has killed his wife. But it turns out that the crime never took place; the medics got there on time.

  The details of this crime hardly matter, to the character or the author. Over the course of the long book, Clarice devotes no more than a few dismissive lines to its particulars. Martin’s sins are as neutral and amoral as Joana’s and Virginia’s: “Had he by chance felt horror after his crime? The man carefully felt around in his memory. Horror? and yet that was what language would expect of him.”2

  Clarice Lispector’s obsession with crime stemmed from the guilt tied up with her existence: “guilty from birth, she who was born with the mortal sin.”3 Martin, too, is persecuted because he exists. His crime is simply a pretext, “useless: as long as he himself survived, others would call for him.”4 And they do: at the end of the book Martin is arrested. “Being” is not illegal, so he is arrested for a crime that can be given a name.

  Clarice’s view of crime is closely related to her amoral, “animal” view of the world, a view found in Spinoza: “Men commonly suppose that all things in nature act, as they do, with some goal in mind, and even maintain as a certainty that God himself directs everything toward a certain goal. … They believe that everything has been created with them in mind and say that the nature of a thing is good or bad, healthful or rotten and corrupted, depending on how they are themselves affected by it.”5

  The “moral” view of man and God, with man at the center of the universe and history a logical, meaningful process, was always ridiculous to Clarice. At the end of the book, a professor arrives to judge Martin. With all his bloated self-regard, the professor is a caricature of the critic, a personification of the whole edifice of false morality that Martin has rejected.

  “He’s strict with his students, very strict,” she repeated monotonously and without seeming to pay much attention to what she was saying. “One day a student was talking in class, and then at the end of the class, in front of them all, the professor called the student up and made such a moving speech, calling him son and asking him to lift his feelings to God, and the repentant boy couldn’t stop sobbing. Nobody laughs at the professor, he doesn’t allow it. The students laugh at the other teachers, but not at him.”

  “Yes,” said Martin, as a doctor would to a patient.

  “The student cried so much,” said the exhausted woman, “that they had to give him a drink of water. He became a veritable slave of the professor. The professor is very well educated. The boy became a veritable slave, he’s very well educated.”

  For the first time Victoria seemed not to mind Martin’s silence. And standing there, as if she had nothing else to do and no plans to leave, her features puckered up from fatigue, she kept on reciting:

  “To this day the professor uses the boy as an example. The boy looks like an angel, he grew paler, he looks like a saint. The professor was so pleased with what he accomplished, it was such a great moral victory, that he even put on some weight,” she said exhausted.6

  For Clarice Lispector, who did not possess the professor’s moral clarity, crime could never be denounced out of hand. Spinoza wrote that “one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.”7 Joana’s transgressions were an essential part of her being; Virginia found freedom in her meager peccadilloes.

  These crimes (“She took a napkin, a round piece of bread … with an extraordinary effort, breaking in herself a stupefied resistance, deflecting destiny, she threw them out the window—and in that way kept her power”) bore a whiff of the teenager’s rebellion.8 In The Apple in the Dark, crime acquires a higher significance.

  Martin’s crime ushers him into a greater reality. Redemption through sin, enlightenment through crime: it is the kind of paradox in which Clarice Lispector delighted. With it, Clarice goes further than before, and further, too, than Kafka. Like him, she found locked doors, blocked passageways, and generalized punishment. But she also saw a different possibility: a state of grace.

  The Apple in the Dark opens like a detective story. In a distant backwater, Martin is the only guest in a nearly abandoned hotel. The owner, a German, has a Ford parked out front; when the car disappears, Martin fears that the German has turned him in and flees on foot through a night “as dark as the night is while we sleep.”9 He awakens in an abandoned desert.

  It is a rebirth, from darkness into light, from night into day, from the world of language to a world of silence: “One could not even imagine that that place had a name.” Deprived of his senses—there is nothing to smell, nothing to hear, nothing to taste—all Martin can do is see, a “contented idiot.”10

  At last a thought occurs to him: “Today must be Sunday!” The first day, a name and a statistic for the world without meaning. But “without counting the days that had passed he had no reason to think it was Sunday. Martin then stopped, a bit weighed down by the need to be understood, from which he had not yet freed himself.”11

  A black bird appears, seeking refuge inside the palm of Martin’s hand. He speaks to the bird, or tries to, but he cannot speak and the bird cannot, of course, understand. “ ‘I lost the language of others,’ he then repeated very slowly as if the words were more obscure than they actually were. Then the man sat on a stone, erect, solemn, empty, officially holding the bird in his hand. Because something was happening to him. And it was something with a meaning. Thou
gh there was no synonym for this thing that was happening. A man was sitting down. And there was no synonym for anything, and so the man was seated.”

  Having lost the language of others, the term Clarice used for madness, Martin is haunted by the fear of the insanity that shadows the one who “passes over to the other side of life.” “That man had always had a tendency to fall into profundity, which could one day lead him to an abyss.” The best thing is to stop thinking entirely. “He was so repulsed by the fact of almost having thought that he pulled apart his teeth and made a painful face of hunger and helplessness: he turned worried to every side of the desolate land seeking amongst the stones a way of recovering the powerful previous stupidity that for him had become a source of pride and domination. … With enormous courage, that man had finally stopped being intelligent.”12

  Clarice disliked being called intelligent for the same reason many religiously inclined people distrust the word: God is by definition beyond human understanding, so attempts to reach the divine through “intelligence” are futile. The progress of the mystic takes him from rational thought to irrational meditation.

  Yet one cannot linger in the irrational world. If the “state of grace” is the highest temptation, it is also a mortal danger. Losing language and human understanding—“intelligence”— is madness. The difference between the mystic and the madman is that the mystic can return, emerging from the state of grace and finding a human language to describe it.

  From wordlessly being—“But there was not a single synonym for a man seated with a bird in his hand”13—Martin must exit the irrational divine and become a full human, and to be human is to have a language.

  The first words come, a cliché: “ ‘Like jewels, he thought, since he had always had a general tendency to compare things to jewels.” Inspired, he launches into a long soliloquy. At its climax, his hand involuntarily contorts and crushes the little bird. It is a second crime. “He was impressed with himself. He had become a dangerous man.”14

  It is a painterly scene, forty pages of stillness, like a landscape of Magritte’s or De Chirico’s: the solitary man, the burning sun, the shimmering rocks, the dead bird, in the immense desert. The only action takes place inside Martin, who at its conclusion starts to walk away from the desert, arriving at length at a “poor and pretentious” farmhouse. He introduces himself as an engineer, which “lightly scandalizes” the plantation’s boss, a tough woman named Victoria, who looks at him as if he were an animal, “as if she were professionally examining a horse.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Rio.”

  “With that accent?”

  He didn’t reply. With their eyes both agreed that it was a lie.15

  Perhaps Martin was a foreigner all along. But his crime has placed him beyond classification. Imperious Victoria, “a woman as powerful as if she had one day found a key. Whose door, it is true, had been lost years before,” sets him to work. All he can do is labor, and see: “The man expected nothing: he saw what he saw. As if his eyes were not made to conclude but only to look.”16

  His looking perturbs Victoria, who grows concerned by the appearance of the farm, “as if until the arrival of the man she had not noticed the slovenliness of the fields.” Ermelinda, Victoria’s childish, hypochondriac cousin, starts noticing things as well: “With the acuity of wonder, she noticed on her own hand a vein that she hadn’t noticed in years, and saw that she had short thin fingers, and saw a skirt covering her knees.”17

  Martin’s existence is perfect and simple: “When he was sleeping, he was sleeping. When he was working, he was working. Victoria commanded him, he commanded his own body.” This ends when Victoria orders him to clean out the cows’ stable. It is a sickening assignment. “Inside was an atmosphere of intestines and a difficult sleep full of flies. And only God feels no disgust.” But conquering his disgust is the only way Martin can “free himself at last from the kingdom of rats and plants—and finally reach the mysterious breathing of larger animals.”

  Once he has, he must rediscover sex. For this experience he does not choose Ermelinda, who is in love with him, or Victoria, but a mulatto woman—significantly, she is nameless—“a young animal, he calculated her age by patting her.” To her he is “strong as a bull.” He takes her like an animal: “He would have to grab her or leave her. He grabbed her unhurriedly just as one day he had grabbed the little bird.”18

  After the act, “he also began to understand women again. He didn’t understand them in a personal way, as if he were the owner of his own name. But he seemed to understand why women are born when a person is a man.” As Martin enters the wet worlds of stables and sex, a drought is approaching. The days are beautiful and full of sun. “The countryside looks like a jewel, he then said blushing violently.”19

  After evolving from rock to plant to rat to cow to horse, Martin is a now a man. This, for Clarice, means finding a language, and Martin must rediscover symbols: “This necessity a person has to climb a mountain—and look. This was the first symbol he had touched since he had left home: ‘climb a mountain.’ ” With this symbol, Martin draws nearer to Clarice’s old ideal: “There Martin turned into the symbol of himself.”20

  But words barely fit a person so recently an animal. “Oh he was very helpless. He had lost the stage in which he had the dimensions of an animal, and in which understanding was silent as a hand picks up a thing.” Seriously, ceremoniously, he takes up a pencil, but “the man seemed to have disappointedly lost the meaning of what he had wanted to write down. … Once again he rolled around the pencil, doubting and doubting again, with an unexpected respect for the written word. … So disloyal was the power of the simplest word upon the vastest of thoughts.”

  And deflated, wearing glasses, everything that had seemed to him ready to be said had evaporated, now that he wanted to say it. The thing that had filled his days with reality was reduced to nothing when faced with an ultimatum to say it. One could see that that man was not an achiever, and like so many others, he only felt intentions, of which Hell is full. But for writing he was naked as if he had not been allowed to bring anything with him. Not even his own experience. And that man wearing glasses suddenly felt sincerely abashed in front of the white page as if his task were not to write down something that already existed but to create something that would then come to exist. … What was he waiting for with his hand ready? since he had had an experience, he had a pencil and a piece of paper, he had the intention and the desire—nobody ever had more than that. Yet it was the most helpless act he had ever performed.21

  After a struggle that lasts many pages, “modest, serious, myopic, he simply wrote down: ‘Things to do.’ ” Underneath he scrawls, “That.” “ ‘So I really did a great deal: I alluded!’ And Martin was as happy as an artist: in itself the word ‘that’ contained everything he hadn’t managed to say.”22

  Through writing, Martin builds a world, “asking, asking, asking—until little by little the world began to be created in response.” “Yes. The reconstruction of the world. The man had just completely lost his shame. He wasn’t even embarrassed to use words from his adolescence: he had to use them because the last time he had his own language was when he was an adolescent; adolescence meant risking everything—and now he was risking everything.”23 There are echoes here of Clarice’s attempts as a child to save the world with magical stories. As she well knew, however, she did not save her mother. She did not remedy the social tragedy of Recife; she did not reform the penitentiaries; she did not rescue a war-ravaged nation. “I did not rebuild Italy. I tried to rebuild my home, rebuild my children, and myself. I failed.”24

  But her failure was only in the external world. Like Martin, she redirected this heroic impulse inward. “Reconstructing the world” was now a personal goal, as indistinguishable from her artistic mission as it had been when she was telling stories to save her mother. She could no longer expect to see her mother arise from her rocking chair. The child’s desperation
has been transformed into a mystical aim, a fantastic undertaking of breathtaking ambition: to reconstruct the world through words. “I write as if to save somebody’s life,” she wrote shortly before her death. “Probably my own life.”25

  As he embarks on this life-or-death enterprise, Martin hears from Victoria that their tomatoes are to be sold to a German. This, he presumes, is the same man from whose hotel he had fled. He knows that Victoria will turn him in. He wonders if there is time to escape. And he knows he will not try. Martin is still fantasizing about writing when the police arrive: “Above all … I swear that in my book I will have the courage to leave unexplained anything that cannot be explained.”26 The phrase could serve as a motto for The Apple in the Dark. The book is as challenging as The Chandelier or The Besieged City. But where those are sometimes impenetrable—“May someone find the key”—The Apple in the Dark combines their thematic intricacy with the powerful emotional currents of Near to the Wild Heart.

  Now the richness of Clarice Lispector’s thought, rather than being merely daunting, takes on an array of symbolic possibilities that are, along with her incredible linguistic invention, the glory of this novel. Even without the references to apples, crimes, and falls, it is obviously an allegory of creation, and an allegory of creation through the word: “And that man wearing glasses suddenly felt sincerely abashed in front of the white page as if his task were not to write down something that already existed but to create something that would then come to exist.”27