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Why This World

Page 34

by Benjamin Moser


  On the whole, however, and though Brazilian literary celebrity was a modest outpost of fame, her humble eminence bothered her. “So many desire projection,” she wrote. “Without knowing how this limits one’s life. My little projection wounds my modesty. Even the things I’d like to say I cannot say anymore. Anonymity is as soft as a dream.”32 Anonymity had its price as well, of course, as she had learned during the five years during which her work was ignored, unpublishable. But professional success was not the same as celebrity, and she insisted that “I am not public domain. And I don’t want to be looked at.”33

  Being looked at, she would soon learn, was not the only indignity that fame brought. When The Apple in the Dark won the Carmen Dolores Barbosa Prize for the best book published the preceding year, Clarice traveled to São Paulo to accept the award. She attended the ceremony on September 19, 1962, with her friend Maria Bonomi, the young artist who had worn Clarice’s clothes to the White House. The ceremony was presided over by no one less than Jânio Quadros, former president of Brazil. Only a few months after his landslide election in January 1961 he quit abruptly, alleging, in a self-pitying letter to Congress, that “terrible forces” had compelled him to resign.

  Even before this dramatic turn of events, Quadros was known to be an odd character. The handwritten decrees he fired off did little to change his eccentric reputation; he garnered special renown for outlawing the bikini on the Rio beaches.34 He himself was hardly ready for Copacabana. His folksy image included a droopy moustache and even, the story goes, fake dandruff spread on the shoulders of his jackets. As if that were not enough, he was also missing an eye.

  After proffering an endless speech at Mrs. Barbosa’s gracious home, His Excellency invited Clarice into a private chamber, where he proceeded to grope her so passionately that in the course of fighting him off her dress was ripped. Clarice ran breathlessly out of the room and told Maria Bonomi that they had to leave immediately, throwing Maria’s shawl over her shoulders to cover the slashed dress.

  On the way back to Maria’s house, a final indignity awaited the rattled laureate. Inside the prize envelope, the cash award: a grand total of twenty cruzeiros—for a book that cost 980.35

  Jânio Quadros was not the only man interested in Clarice Lispector. “We all wanted to screw her!” exclaimed the irrepressible Nahum Sirotzky, her publisher at Senhor. “She was very, very sexy. But she was also inaccessible.”36 Putting it more delicately, Paulo Francis, Senhor’s fiction editor, recalled that there were many candidates for her hand. “But the price she would have had to pay for company, in terms of sensibility, would have been as high as the inevitable children.”37

  There was another problem. Three years after splitting with Maury and returning to Brazil, Clarice had still not entirely moved on, and Maury was, as ever, in love with her. Friends say the attraction was not one-sided. If Clarice didn’t want to be married to him, neither was she entirely ready to give him up. Always very correct, she felt awkward about being separated from her husband of sixteen years, the father of her children.

  After a decade steadily rising through the ranks in Washington, Maury had been promoted to ambassador. This long-awaited reward must have seemed a bit less electrifying when he received word of his new posting: dismal Communist Warsaw, whither he departed in March 1962. Alone in his new embassy, he longed for Clarice and his boys, and in mid-July, accepting his invitation, Clarice, Pedro, and Paulo departed for Poland.

  It was the closest Clarice would ever come to her birthplace. The infant refugee from Chechelnik was now the tall, blonde ambassadress of Brazil, the only time in her life when she would bear that title. During this trip, a Soviet representative offered her a trip to her birthplace, which she refused, saying that she had never set foot there—she was an infant, carried by her parents—and never intended to.

  Despite this categorical answer, she pondered the offer. “I remember one evening, in Poland, at the home of one of the secretaries of the embassy, I went out onto the terrace alone: a great black forest movingly pointed me the way to the Ukraine. I felt the call. Russia had me too. But I belong to Brazil.”38

  27

  Better Than Borges

  The reconciliation Maury hoped for did not take place. Friends warned Clarice against leading him on. When she returned to Rio de Janeiro, the diplomat Lauro Escorel, whom she had known since the days of Near to the Wild Heart, told her firmly that she either had to go back to him or let him go. If she was determined to break up with him, he said, she could not keep going on holidays with him and giving him false hopes. It was no good for him and it was no good for the children.1

  Happily for him, Maury eventually put an end to her hesitation by meeting another woman on a visit to Rio. The new Mrs. Gurgel Valente was Isabel Leitão da Cunha, whose aristocratic background was as different from Clarice’s as could be imagined. Her mother, Nininha, was a prominent socialite, and her father was none other than Vasco Leitão da Cunha, consul in Rome during Clarice’s time in Naples. One of the outstanding Brazilian diplomats of his generation, by 1964 he had achieved Itamaraty’s highest office, becoming minister of foreign affairs.

  Maury had been aware of Isabel since she was a girl. Once, visiting her father at the consulate in Geneva, he had seen a picture of her on his desk, and he always spoke of how beautiful she was. Isabel was indeed beautiful, and having grown up in the foreign service she was far more suited to the diplomatic life than was Clarice. She was also twelve years younger than the first Mrs. Gurgel Valente, and this, by all accounts, Clarice found outrageous. After Isabel and Maury married in Montevideo—with divorce illegal in Brazil, Uruguay was Brazil’s Las Vegas—Clarice majestically announced that their friends were not to “receive” the couple. Rubem Braga laughed: “You’re just upset that she’s so good looking—and so much younger.2

  “That woman made my life hell” during the first years of her marriage, Isabel said, her impressions perhaps colored by the rivalry that will naturally subsist between a second wife and a first, particularly when the first was as famous and admired as Clarice. Whenever the boys were with their father, Clarice would badger Isabel constantly. “This is the mother of the Ambassador’s children,” she would grandly growl when Isabel picked up the phone. In classic Jewish mother style, she insisted on being informed of everything the boys ate when they were under Isabel’s supervision, and she constantly pestered Maury to send more money.3

  Once, when they were living in Warsaw, Maury and Isabel, who had not been to Brazil in a while, decided to come to Rio. Clarice was furious. She marched over to Itamaraty Palace and demanded an immediate audience with the minister. Diplomats required permission from the ministry to leave their posts, and the upshot of Clarice’s visit to Dr. Vasco was that the permission was denied. “I was a married woman—my own father!” Isabel gasped, still annoyed forty years later.4

  Maury’s remarriage remained a delicate subject. When Clarice was writing a newspaper column in 1968 she replied to a reader’s letter publicly. “F. N. M., you crafty fox … You muster this fake pity and tell me that you learned that my depression was a result of my ex-husband’s marriage. Keep, dear lady, your pity for yourself, it is no use to me. And if you want to know the truth, which you certainly don’t, here it is: when I separated from my husband, he waited for more than seven years for me to return.”5

  The reaction touched off by Maury’s remarriage may have been extreme, but many friends report that in the early 1960s something in Clarice changed. All descriptions of her as a young woman record her almost excessive politeness. To those who knew her in the foreign service, this went far beyond the normal good manners required of diplomatic spouses: it was a profound empathy that drew all sorts of people to her, that made women confide in her and men fall in love with her.

  “When she was in law school,” Sara Escorel remembered, “she said: I am going be the best diplomatic wife ever. And she was. When she was married to Maury she was perfect.” This perfection wa
s not, of course, without its price. “I wasn’t very comfortable in that setting. … All that formality … But I did my job. … I was more conciliatory than I am now,” she said, looking back.6

  The tension between the rebellious Joana and the placid Lídia, between the animal world and the artifice of human “civilization,” was a favorite symbol, and in her letters Clarice mentioned her fear of losing her “intimate balance.” In his perceptive letter, Maury expressed his fear that she was “following, in a certain sense, in real life, Joana’s destiny.” Already in Bern, her first analyst, Ulysses Girsoler, had warned of this unbearable tension in her personality: “It will be very difficult for such a character to find balance, [requiring] a conscious domestication of these elementary impulses by intellectual participation.”

  Clarice became demanding and, as her interactions with Maury and Isabel showed, even rude. Her friends noticed two major changes. First, she began calling people at all hours of the night, unable to sleep, tormented by unceasing anxiety. Second, her makeup became “scandalous”; the word is often repeated. Shortly before her divorce, she wrote Mafalda that her lipstick looked like she had “just finished eating a pork chop without a napkin.”7

  Many were surprised, considering how elegant Clarice had always been. She was disregarding Helen Palmer’s own advice: “You naturally know that drawing attention to oneself is not done and always gives a bad impression of a woman. Whether with scandalous clothing, exotic hairstyles, ways of walking, manners, rude laughter, any way of calling attention to oneself deserves, in short, nothing more than a prize for vulgarity.”8

  Some attributed the change to her new psychoanalyst, Inês Besouchet. Though Clarice had been in psychiatric treatment on and off since before her marriage, and though his initial refusal to enter analysis was something she held against Maury, she was ashamed to be in therapy. In Brazil as elsewhere, there was in those years a stigma attached to psychotherapy; perhaps she feared a reputation for being crazy. But in Rio she found an analyst she could trust.

  Like Clarice, Besouchet was Jewish. She had trained Clarice’s friend Hélio Pellegrino, one of Fernando Sabino’s Minas Gerais group. She was a leftist who had been exiled to Bolivia during one of Getúlio Vargas’s governments. Wise and circumspect, keeping the distance from her patients that analysts are advised to maintain, Inês nonetheless became a close friend and was, with Tania, one of only two people to whom Clarice dedicated a book, The Foreign Legion (1964).9

  Inês exhorted Clarice to free herself from the burden of always trying to meet other people’s expectations. Perhaps if she lived in a less regimented environment, the reaction would not have been as violent. “Clarice’s sincerity was so bruising that people sometimes confused it with eccentricity,” said her friend Olga Borelli, who met her at the end of the decade. “She always—but always—did what she wanted, and when she wanted. Without asking anyone for permission. It was a strong feature of her character.”10

  “Clarice was an insoluble woman. She knew that,” Paulo Francis wrote.11 Yet, insoluble or not, Clarice had, her discomfort and depression notwithstanding, managed it for many years. Why was she so much less “conciliatory” now? The fact was that Clarice faced challenges that even the most stable personality would have found difficult to overcome.

  She was glad to be back in Brazil. Professional success, after so many years of struggle, was gratifying. But her life was a struggle. She needed to earn a living, which Senhor and her journalism provided. But this work interfered with her “real” writing. She had not worked on a full-length book since 1956, when The Apple in the Dark was completed in Washington. Looking back on this period, she told an interviewer, “Sometimes my production is intense, and certain periods—hiatuses—when life becomes intolerable. … It’s very difficult, this period between one work and the next, yet you have to empty out your head so that something else can be born—if it’s born.”12

  But her greatest pain was the increasing illness of her son Pedro. The brilliant boy had become a troubled teenager. “When he entered adolescence he started closing down,” Tania said. “Clarice did everything possible: she put him in analysis, in a bunch of treatments. Nothing helped.”13 As early as 1957, in Washington, Clarice had sought help, but eventually the eccentricities of an extraordinarily talented child hardened into full-blown schizophrenia.

  Pedro lived in terrible anguish. Rosa Cass saw that the situation hurt his mother “brutally. She was afflicted, desperate.” He was utterly unpredictable. At home, he would shout hysterically, so loud that the neighbors complained. They couldn’t take him anywhere, not even to the movies, because he couldn’t sit still. Another friend remembers a dinner during which Pedro constantly circled the table, his hands covering his face.

  Treatment failed. The only thing that helped, according to Isabel Gurgel Valente, Maury’s second wife, who took charge of him in the 1970s, was heavy medication. When his demons got to be overwhelming, he would start screaming “A shot! A shot!” While Pedro sat beside her, shrieking the entire way, Isabel would drive him to the hospital for his injection.

  Having split with Maury, Clarice was deprived of a source of support, and as Pedro grew sicker her sense of loneliness became unrelenting. Always discreet, she shared the situation with few people; those friends who were aware of it discuss only their own impressions, rarely quoting her words. At the dinner party when Pedro circled the table, for example, Clarice pretended that she didn’t notice him and continued on diplomatically with the conversation. But she did notice, and the guests knew she did, because though they sat there for hours, Clarice forgot to serve the food.

  “When you have a child like that, you always think it’s somehow your fault,” Rosa said. “She just could not stand to see him like that. It hurt her too much.” First she had failed to save her mother. Now she had to look on helplessly as her son went mad. It was another blow for a woman who had so much wanted to be a mother, perhaps partly in compensation for the tragedy of her own family. She was tremendously sensitive to any allusion to this failure. Her friend Otto Lara Resende recalled meeting her on the street in Leme, where he was walking with his young son André. “Who is that blonde lady?” André asked after they parted ways. “Something inside her is always throbbing. Does she have kids? I wouldn’t want to be her child.” A couple of years later, mentioning this to Clarice, but without the last sentence, Otto received a tough rebuke, delivered in an “overwhelming crescendo.” “Tell your son that I can be a mother, yes. I can be his mother. I can be your mother, Otto. I can be the mother of humanity. I am the mother of humanity.”14

  She retreated even further into herself. “She had the face of someone who with the greatest dignity was always suffering. … She didn’t invite effusive, affectionate, affective familiarity,” said one of her editors at Senhor, recalling the magazine’s great phase, when “every month, in our offices, two uncomfortable figures appeared, to hand over the best texts Brazilian literature produced at the time: Guimarães Rosa, with all his pretensions, and Clarice Lispector, with her anguishing silence.”15

  In about 1962 Clarice began her last love affair, with the poet and journalist Paulo Mendes Campos, known as Paulinho. She had known him since the time of Near to the Wild Heart, when she met Fernando Sabino and his friends from Minas Gerais. He was a kind of heterosexual version of Lúcio Cardoso. Both were from Minas and both were chronic miscreants, running away and getting expelled from various schools. Paulinho started courses in dentistry, veterinary science, and law; he entered, and then left, the Air Force Academy in Porto Alegre.16

  Like Lúcio, he was Catholic; like Lúcio, he was good-looking and possessed an extraordinary and seductive talent for language. He was an outstanding poet, broadly and deeply read, eventually becoming director of rare books at the National Library. With Rubem Braga, he was one of Brazil’s most famous practitioners of the brand of literary journalism known as the crônica.

  Like Lúcio, he was bad with money; and like
Lúcio, he was a bohemian and an alcoholic. “Drink consoles; man drinks; therefore, man must be consoled,” he wrote, in one of his many discourses on the topic.17 As he got older he became a bad drunk, aggressive and violent; his friends tended to avoid him. And if Lúcio’s sexual orientation made him inaccessible to Clarice, Paulinho had a wife, an Englishwoman named Joan Abercrombie.

  For a short time, Clarice and Paulinho lived a great passion, as everyone who knew them confirms. They were an odd match, Clarice tall, blonde, and bewitching, and Paulinho, no longer the Byron of his youth, short, dark, and, despite his charm, physically unattractive. A friend recalls seeing them enter a downtown restaurant and saying to her companion, “What is Paulinho doing with that Valkyrie?”18 But as another friend, Ivan Lessa, says, “In terms of neurosis, they were born for one another.”19

  Glimpses of them together, however, were rare, even though, as Lessa says, Rio was “a village, in the best possible sense.” This was especially true in literary circles, which Clarice avoided but in which Paulinho was a central figure. The affair surprised many of their common friends, though Clarice tried to be discreet about it. Lessa, who lived down the street from Clarice, often saw them walking furtively through the back streets of Leme. They also met in a garconnière Clarice and Paulinho shared with his friend, Sérgio Porto. To the doorman, Clarice announced herself as “Madame.”

  Yet if Clarice seemed to take almost nineteenth-century measures to conduct the affair discreetly, she was shockingly reckless with the one person who might be expected to object the most: Paulinho’s wife, Joan Mendes Campos. Clarice’s chronic insomnia and desperate loneliness led her to call Paulo at the oddest hours; in the middle of the night, knowing full well that his wife was in bed beside him, she poured out her heart, endlessly, to her lover.20 This does not seem to be the act of indiscretion, or of a woman flaunting her affair to her rival. It suggests instead a terrible isolation, a need for emotional support that went far beyond sex; indeed Paulinho was far from the only person who received such calls in the middle of the night.

 

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