Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Unlike so many Latin American writers and intellectuals at the time, neither Braga nor Sabino were Communists. Sabino was Catholic and Braga a kind of Social Democrat. Their reports from Havana, therefore, are valuable indicators of the excitement that the Cuban Revolution sparked throughout the continent, even among people not automatically inclined to be swept away by the romance of Fidel Castro. Only thirty-three when he conquered the island, Castro, together with his cohort of “sincere,” “honest” revolutionaries, appealed to dreamers, and not only dreamers, throughout Latin America.

  Even the sober, wary Braga fell for it. He analyzed the Leader’s handwriting and discovered in it no “despotic spirit.” And if “good cashmere” was becoming hard to find in Havana, he wrote, that was only because “the government wants to use foreign currency to buy tractors, machines, factories, productive goods.”3 Sabino, more romantic, showed a certain understanding for the regime’s public executions and, perhaps even more embarrassingly, exulted that the Havana Country Club was now opened to the “humble people.” How easy it would be to right the wrongs of a slave society, half a millennium old!

  But these were articles in the local press, no different from, and indeed more skeptical than, many published during the Revolution’s honeymoon. And they were nothing compared to the articles the world’s most famous philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, had penned after his visit to Havana, from the beginning of February to mid-March 1960. The articles he published in France-Soir are what one would expect from a person who never met a bad leftist idea he didn’t like, issuing apologies for everything from the more extreme elements in Algeria to the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

  At the invitation of Jorge Amado, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir came to Brazil in August 1960, embarking on a triumphal tour of the country. For some reason, Sartre decided to cede his France-Soir articles to Sabino and Braga, who had been thinking about starting their own publishing house in order to avoid the exploitive royalties paid by existing houses. Sartre charged them nothing, and the Editôra do Autor had its first title: Hurricane over Cuba. But to produce it during Sartre’s visit to Brazil, Sabino and Braga had to coordinate an amazing effort. With no experience in publishing, they gathered the rare originals of the articles, translated them, then edited, typeset, and printed the book—in little more than a week.4

  The book betrays such ignorance of basic economic, historical, and political concepts that it is hard to imagine its author was seen as a global intellectual heavyweight, or indeed taken seriously at all. But it was the book of the moment by the man of the moment on the topic of the moment, and it launched the Editôra do Autor as prominently and lucratively as could be imagined.

  By the time the publishing house appeared, Clarice already had a contract with Francisco Alves for The Apple in the Dark and Family Ties. But the Editôra do Autor was the most logical home for her next book, and it must have been a great relief to her to know that anything she wrote would be immediately welcomed by close friends and longtime admirers. By 1964, when Clarice published two books there, it had become known primarily for its finely produced editions of Brazilian writers, including Sabino and Braga, and for its pioneering anthologies of Brazil’s modern poets.

  In 1964, the Editôra do Autor had moved past Cuba, but Brazil, and Latin America, had certainly not. Fidel Castro elated the left, but after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Castro’s embrace of Soviet Russia, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, he terrified the right.

  These were not idle fears. During Jânio Quadros’s visit to Cuba in 1960, after Castro listed Cuba’s principal export products for the Brazilian delegation, his brother Raúl added, “And revolution!”5 He was not kidding. In 1959, when the Cuban Revolution triumphed, Latin America had more democratic regimes than ever before in its history, with only five tiny exceptions: Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Paraguay. Upon taking power, the Cuban government immediately began sponsoring subversion across the continent. In 1959 it had bankrolled guerrillas in Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; by 1963 it started to support armed movements in Venezuela, Peru, Guatemala, and Argentina.6

  No country was untouched, either by Cuba and its Soviet sponsors or by the brutal and panicked reaction. Fear of another Cuba galvanized the Latin American militaries into something like hysteria, and in this they were actively assisted by the United States, which feared a continent controlled by the Soviet Union. The reactions to the Cuban Revolution, by admirers and opponents, would form the bloodiest and most traumatic episode in Latin American history since the wars of independence a century and a half before.

  In Brazil, too, the consequences would be terrible. They began on August 19, 1961, when Jânio Quadros awarded Che Guevara Brazil’s highest honor, the Order of the Southern Cross. This was the kind of eccentricity for which Quadros, outlawer of the bikini, had become known. But it was a needless offense to the Kennedy administration, well disposed to the Brazilian government, and perfect ammunition for Quadros’s domestic opponents.

  Carlos Lacerda, the “destroyer of presidents” and Samuel Wainer’s nemesis, had been an early supporter of Quadros, but now, as governor of the state of Guanabara, he turned against him. As Wainer learned, the famous polemicist was harshest on his erstwhile friends. Lacerda used the occasion to great effect, presenting the Key to the State to the anti-Castro leader Manuel Verona and accusing Quadros of wanting to lead Brazil to Communism.

  This was very far from the case. The award to Guevara was thanks for respecting a Brazilian request not to execute twenty Catholic priests, who were instead exiled to Spain. But Quadros’s foreign policy had already been raising eyebrows. Two of Clarice’s oldest diplomatic friends were partially responsible for it. Araújo Castro had served in the New York consulate when Fernando Sabino lived there, and San Tiago Dantas, the brilliant Catholic lawyer, had fallen in love with Clarice on a visit to Paris in the 1940s. Both were respected establishment figures. Their plan for an “Independent Foreign Policy” was basically an attempt to increase Brazilian diplomatic influence in an international situation that, with the independence of former European colonies in Asia and Africa, was rapidly changing. The plan suggested that Brazil ought to maintain relations with all powers, which in practice meant China and the Soviet Union, with which Brazil had had no relations since 1947. This was controversial, but hardly a sign that Brazil was going Communist.

  More alarming were signs that Quadros was simply unhinged. He planned, for example, to invade neighboring French Guiana, alleging that Brazil needed an outlet to the Caribbean, even though French Guiana is hundreds of miles from the Caribbean. The opposition, which had been dispirited by his overwhelming election victory, began to taunt him, and six days after he decorated Che Guevara he unexpectedly resigned the presidency. He had taken power only seven months before.

  This resignation, too, was inspired by Cuba. In July 1959, Fidel Castro, caught in a power struggle with Cuba’s president, Manuel Urrutia, borrowed a gambit from Perón and dramatically “resigned.” The predictable outcry went a long way toward consolidating his absolute power; Urrutia ended his days as a Spanish teacher in Queens. Quadros apparently hoped that his sudden departure would unleash a similar reaction. But Brazilians were by and large relieved to see him go. (He briefly returned to politics in the 1980s. As mayor of São Paulo, he rekindled memories of his presidency by, among other things, banning homosexuals from the Municipal Theater’s ballet school.)

  Quadros’s resignation unleashed a crisis. Under the Brazilian constitution, the president and vice president were elected separately and thus were not of the same party. Quadros’s legal successor was João Goulart, known as Jango. Goulart was an unlikely revolutionary, and nothing in his curriculum suggested that he would push Brazil into the hands of the Communists. He was from a family of rich landowners in Rio Grande do Sul and was mainly known for his passionate appetite for the actresses and dancer
s that hung out in the exclusive clubs of Clarice’s neighborhood, Leme.

  Rather than seeing a friendly, mediocre playboy, however, the right wing looked at Jango and saw a much more powerful figure. Though he had been dead for seven years, Getúlio Vargas still dominated Brazilian politics. Jango and Getúlio were from the same town, São Borja, and Goulart had been Getúlio’s minister of labor until 1954, when, seeing him as too sympathetic to labor unions, the military forced him out.

  Those who imagined that Jango was a secret Communist were given an unexpected public relations lift when, upon Quadros’s resignation, the vice president was found on a tour of Red China. Civil war briefly threatened when different army divisions declared themselves for or against Goulart, but after a ten-day crisis Jango was allowed to take power under a new “parliamentary” system designed to weaken the power of the executive.

  Goulart thus struggled from the beginning, with Brazil terribly divided and without the talent necessary to reassure the right while also seeking to implement socially necessary reforms. At the center of his administration were two of Clarice’s old friends, Samuel Wainer, who had known Goulart for years and whose Última Hora was the most powerful, and later only, pro-Goulart voice in the national press, and San Tiago Dantas.

  Wainer thought little of Dantas––he saw him as power-hungry, “irremediably ambitious,” and dangerously friendly to the Communists7—who became foreign minister and, after 1963, minister of finance. With Brazil’s debt at a historic high and inflation spinning out of control, this was an unenviable position, especially with the Americans increasingly wary of Goulart’s inability to stick to an economic plan. Moreover, San Tiago Dantas was dying of cancer, which did not help the government’s chances of negotiating an economic settlement. The last time Clarice saw him was shortly before his death, at the marriage of one of his nieces. “He could hardly speak. He asked me what I was writing. I answered that I had just written a book and that the name was The Passion According to G. H. And he said that he liked the name very much. He would have liked the book, I know.”8

  He died on September 6, 1964, before G. H. came out. On March 31, Goulart was deposed in a military coup. Thousands were arrested or went into exile, most in less luxurious circumstances than Samuel Wainer. After taking refuge in the Chilean embassy, he made his way to Paris, where he spent four years being photographed in the company of Anita Ekberg, various Rothschilds, and the Shah’s ex-wife, Princess Soraya.

  The country he was forced to flee faced a grimmer future. The era of good feelings, of bossa nova and Brasília and girls from Ipanema, of energy and optimism and belief in the nation’s future, was definitively over. Many, including Elizabeth Bishop, hailed the coup as a temporary expedient to save Brazil from Communism. It instead produced an unprecedented twenty-one years of military dictatorship.

  30

  The Egg Really Is White

  The Passion According to G. H. was one of two books Clarice Lispector published in the watershed year 1964. In September, before the novel appeared, the Editôra do Autor published a collection of shorter writings, The Foreign Legion. If it is hard to imagine where Clarice—artistically, intellectually, spiritually—could go after the cockroach, The Foreign Legion offers several possibilities.

  The book consists of stories and miscellany. There are older pieces, such as the beautiful and affecting “Journey to Petrópolis,” first published in a newspaper in 1949, and “The Burnt Sinner and the Harmonious Angels,” the play she wrote in Bern. There are also many pieces first published in Senhor, both long essays and short speculations: “If I get a present given thoughtfully by someone I don’t like—how do I call what I feel? A person you no longer like and who no longer likes you—how do you call that sorrow and that spite?”1 Or, revealingly, “Being born ruined my health.”2

  The title of the collection is borrowed from a story about a smart and curious little girl, Ofélia. The girl begins to visit the woman next door, who owns a tiny frightened chick, “the chick full of grace, [a] brief and yellow thing.” Words cannot calm the baby bird’s fright: “It was impossible to give him the reassuring word that would make him no longer be afraid, to console a thing that is afraid because it was born. How to promise him habit?”3

  The story, which combines children and animals, announces a new strain in Clarice’s writing. Indeed, some of the aphorisms, which may not have anything to do with either children or animals, come from a rubric in Senhor entitled, in English, “Children’s Corner.” She had been using the title since 1947, when she submitted some pieces to Samuel Wainer’s O Jornal.4 In Senhor she had a monthly column with the same title starting in October 1961, which displeased at least one of her editors: “My dislike of the name she’d chosen for her page wasn’t enough for her to change it.”5

  It is, in fact, an odd title. It was in a foreign language, and the subject matter of her articles in Senhor was not children, except occasionally and incidentally. It is a revealing allusion to the writer’s state of mind. “Children’s Corner” is the title, also in English, of a series of piano pieces the French composer Claude Debussy dedicated to his daughter. Very difficult, they are not designed to be played by children but to express a nostalgia for childhood, and to evoke its mood.

  As her use of the title indicates, the nostalgia for childhood grew particularly acute as Clarice aged. “I don’t miss it, you understand?” Joana asks in Near to the Wild Heart. “I don’t miss it, because I have my childhood more now than while it was happening.”6 Clarice increasingly did miss her own childhood, and she longed for the happy time before life had “tamed” her. In “Drawing a Boy,” she writes, “One day we will domesticate him as a human, and will be able to draw him. Since that is what we did with ourselves and with God.”7

  The reference to the missing mother is not far behind. “He would trade all the possibilities of a world for: mother. Mother is: not to die.”8 In the title story, Clarice obviously identifies with both the bright impish Ofélia as well as with the helpless chick, who has lost his mother.

  In one particularly moving anecdote, Clarice describes a coati, a long-tailed member of the raccoon family, whom she unexpectedly encounters, leashed like a dog, at a bus stop in Copacabana: “I imagine: if the man took him to play in the square, at some point the coati would grow uncomfortable: ‘but, good God, why are the dogs looking at me like that?’ I also imagine that, after a perfect day of being a dog, the coati would feel melancholic, looking at the stars: ‘what’s wrong with me, after all? what am I missing? I am as happy as any dog, so why this emptiness, this nostalgia? what is this anxiety, as if I only loved something I didn’t know?’ ”9 This is not G. H.’s monstrous mystical identification with the cockroach’s entrails. It is softer and more sorrowful, the sympathy with the outsider that had always been natural to someone whose “first desire was the desire to belong.”

  The question of identifying with outsiders, which in Brazil traditionally meant the rural northeastern poor, had long been central to Brazilian culture, from the “northeastern novels” of the 1930s to the cinema novo of the 1950s. With the coup of 1964, the question of the social relevance of art was once again pushed to the forefront. The extent to which one was engaged, and with whom, became the main dividing line in Brazilian culture.

  Clarice was not immune to the problems of her country, though she had difficulty conveying that solidarity in her work. In a short piece in The Foreign Legion, she explains that her social engagement was simply too obvious and natural:

  For example, my tolerance in relation to myself, as a person who writes, is to forgive myself for not knowing how to approach in a “literary” fashion (that is, transforming into the vehemence of art) the “social thing.” As long as I have known myself the social fact has been more important to me than any other: in Recife the slums were the first truth for me. Long before I felt “art,” I felt the profound beauty of the struggle. But I have a foolish way of approaching the social fact: what I want
ed was to “do” something, as if writing was not doing. What I can’t manage is to use writing for that, as much as my incapacity hurts and humiliates me. The problem of justice is in me a feeling so obvious and so basic that I can’t surprise myself with it—and, without surprising myself, I can’t write. And also because for me writing is searching. The feeling of justice was never a search for me, it never had to be discovered, and what astounds me is that it is not just as obvious for everyone.10

  She did, however, have the ability to give voice to her rage at Brazil’s injustices, as an essay published in Senhor and reprinted in The Foreign Legion illustrates. The piece is about Mineirinho, a murderer who had a girlfriend and was a devotee of St. George, and whom the police killed with “thirteen shots, when a single shot was enough.” The extreme violence of his death revolted Clarice. “I became Mineirinho, massacred by the police. Whatever his crime had been, one bullet was enough, the rest was the desire to kill.”11

  That is the law. But while something makes me hear the first and second shots with the relief of security, it puts me on alert at the third, unsettles me at the fourth, at the fifth and the sixth covers me with shame; the seventh and the eighth I hear with my heart beating in horror; at the ninth and tenth my mouth is quivering, at the eleventh I say God’s name in fright, at the twelfth I call for my brother. The thirteenth shot kills me-because I am the other. Because I want to be the other.12

  The three sentences of “The Greatest Experience” sum up this question as well as Clarice ever would: “I used to want to be others to learn about what wasn’t me. Then I understood that I had already been others and it was easy. My greatest experience would be to be the other of others: and the other of others was me.”13

  The Foreign Legion also points in another direction: toward abstraction. With their strong emphasis on the interior worlds of her characters, Clarice’s works had always had an important abstract element. “When art is good it is because it touched upon the inexpressive,” she wrote in G. H. “The worst art is expressive, that art which transgresses the piece of iron and the piece of glass, and the smile, and the scream.”14