Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Her intimate “Saturday conversation” style annoyed some of the genre’s grandees, who thought of the newspaper column as a minor art. Even Rubem Braga, a friend since Naples, apparently badmouthed her, earning a public riposte: “Someone told me that Rubem Braga said I was only good in my books, that my columns were no good,” Clarice wrote. “Is that true, Rubem? Rubem, I do what I can. You can do more, but you shouldn’t insist on others being able to do the same. I write my columns humbly, Rubem. I have no pretensions. But I get letters from readers and they like them. And I like to get them.”8

  The readers did like them. If Senhor introduced Clarice to the literati, the Jornal do Brasil brought her to the middle class, week after week, and her work as a columnist brought her a fame she had never known before. It even brought her an octopus. “I’m shy but I have the right to my impulses,” exclaimed a woman who appeared at her door. “What you wrote in the paper today was exactly how I feel; and so I, who live across the street from you and saw your fire and know when the lights are on that you have insomnia, so I brought you an octopus.”9 To Clarice’s astonishment, the woman proceeded to cook the octopus, a specialty of hers, then and there.

  “I wrote nine books that made many people love me from afar,” Clarice wrote about her newfound popularity. “But being a columnist has a mystery that I don’t understand: it’s that columnists, at least in Rio, are very loved. And writing this kind of Saturday column has brought me even more love. I feel so close to my readers.”10 She reflected the love she received back to her readers. One girl wrote to thank Clarice for helping her to love, and Clarice answered, thanking her: “Thank you also for the adolescent that I was and who wanted to be useful to people, to Brazil, to humanity, and wasn’t even ashamed to use such imposing words for herself.”11

  A fascinating portrait of Clarice around this time emerges from the recollections of Maria Teresa Walcacer,12 a twenty-year-old philosophy student who answered an advertisement for a “writer’s secretary” around the time that Clarice started writing for the Jornal do Brasil. Upon arrival, Walcacer was shocked to find that the writer was none other than Clarice Lispector, who was seated beside the window interviewing the approximately forty candidates. Clarice told her that since the fire she could only type with difficulty, and that she needed someone who would respect every period and comma in her writing. She asked, finally, if Maria Teresa had read any of her books. The young woman answered, “Almost all.” Half an hour later she had the job.

  Why did I choose Maria Teresa, whose nickname is Teté? First because she was as capable as the others. Second, because she had already read some of my novels, she was familiar with my way of writing, and she would be sure to do as I said: when making a copy, she wouldn’t add anything or take anything away. … Third, I chose Teté because she arrived in a miniskirt. A good representative of modern youth. She was the only one in a miniskirt. Fourth, I chose her because I like her voice. There are voices that leave me literally tired. My Teté has a pleasant voice.

  Clarice promised the girl that it would be an ideal job for a student: “The secretary’s only with me for a few hours, and has the rest of the time to study, go to class, see her boyfriend.” Walcacer remembered it a bit differently: “I don’t think she wanted a secretary, exactly, but someone to keep her company, or something like that. She asked me to do all kinds of things, to talk to her, to take her to a friend’s house, to read stories to the boys, to take Pedro for a walk on the beach. She also asked me frequently to stay for lunch, or for dinner. She asked too much of me.”

  The house was in chaos. Maria Teresa, who had imagined a writer working in monastic seclusion, saw something very different. Paulo and Pedro interrupted constantly, the phone rang off the hook, the maid walked around, and Clarice’s papers were spread all over the house. “If it had happened now, it certainly would have been a different story. But at the time, what inadequacy, what distance! I was so young, I had a boyfriend, I was in love, so it really wasn’t a very attractive option to keep having dinner with that lady and her two rather problematic sons. … I also remember Pedro wandering around, with lost eyes. I have a somewhat gloomy memory of the daily life of that house.”

  In the same interview, Walcacer remembered her surprise at reading Clarice’s description of her as perky and relaxed, when in fact she was going through a dark depression. “I was so insecure in front of that woman, that myth. In fact, I don’t even think that I was wearing a miniskirt when we first met. That whole description seems a bit made up.”

  After four months, Maria Teresa fled.

  In May 1968, fifteen years after Fernando Sabino had first broached the subject, Clarice began conducting interviews for Manchete, the Brazilian answer to Paris-Match. It was another prominent podium and raised her national profile. Many of the people she interviewed in “Possible Dialogues with Clarice Lispector” were old friends, such as Erico Verissimo and Alzira Vargas; her “first masculine protector,” the mathematician Leopoldo Nachbin; and Hélio Pellegrino, the psychoanalyst who confessed that in another life he would like to be the “husband of Clarice Lispector, to whom I would dedicate myself with velvety and unsleeping dedication.”13

  Clarice told a reporter, “I exposed myself in those interviews and that was how I managed to gain the trust of the people I was interviewing until they exposed themselves. They are more conversations than the classical question-and-answer.”14 Some of the interviews are miracles of candor—on the interviewer’s part. But her journalistic work took up so much of her time, and her natural timidity made it difficult. Hélio Pellegrino, noting her discomfort, said, “Clarice, let’s just have a steak and a beer. Forget the questions. I’ll write the interview.”15

  If Manchete brought her respect and a certain celebrity, it also brought humiliations. At the Jornal do Brasil, her great admirer Alberto Dines was keenly aware of her difficulties and published everything she sent, exactly as she sent it. “Once she sent in a column that was a single paragraph. And that is how it was published.”16 At Manchete, Lêdo Ivo, the poet who had known Clarice since 1944, once witnessed a terrible episode. In rejecting an article of Clarice’s, Justino Martins, the magazine’s director, suggested that, “in order to be more productive and competent, she ought to update her sexual agenda.” The sensitive and discreet Clarice humbly answered, “I can’t sleep with anyone, Justino. My whole body is burned.”17

  It was not easy for a woman who only a couple of years before had been beautiful and desirable to adapt to being outmoded. Lygia Marina de Moraes, who became Fernando Sabino’s third wife in 1974, remembered her first meeting with Clarice. At a bar in Ipanema, Lygia and a friend struck up a conversation with the legendary Tom Jobim, one of the creators of bossa nova, who invited them to Clarice’s house. The girls were stunned at the prospect of meeting, in a single day, Tom Jobim and Clarice Lispector.

  “By then she was already CLARICE,” remembered Lygia, intimidated to meet the icon. The icon, however, was not amused to see Tom arrive with two attractive young girls. In her “metallic voice,” she told Jobim that Vinicius de Moraes, the famous poet and composer, had written a poem for her, and she asked Jobim to do the same. He offered to write some music for her instead, but then, a few minutes later, ended up scrawling a poem for Lygia. Clarice was terribly irritated and hurt.

  She stopped trying to hide her wounds. Otto Lara Resende remembered having lunch with her and the writer Antônio Callado. “Suddenly she exploded at me: ‘Why are you looking at me? Do you want to see my scars?’ And she exhibited the legs that she and we were trying to escape.”18

  33

  Cultural Terror

  At Manchete, though she had license to feature many of her prominent friends, Clarice also had to interview people whom she could not have found very appetizing. In early 1969, these included Yolanda Costa e Silva, wife of General Arthur Costa e Silva, whose reputation as the most disastrous president in Brazilian history has never been seriously challenged. The first
lady was known for her devotion to plastic surgery and her habit of hanging around good-looking younger men.

  Though Clarice wrote her son Paulo, “[Yolanda] doesn’t have what it takes to be a first lady,” Clarice could hardly grill her, and the interview is friendly.1 Setting the tone, Clarice said, “I learned that you worry about the high rate of illiteracy in Brazil.” She wondered how it felt to be a grandmother and inquired, perhaps a bit mischievously, about the first lady’s “concept of elegance.”2 In a large picture of the two, Yolanda, clearly delighted to be in the magazine, radiates pleasure. A wary Clarice, hiding her burned hand behind a piece of paper, hardly cracks a smile.

  Perhaps Yolanda would have been less delighted if she had recalled Clarice’s participation in the March of the Hundred Thousand, one of the events that defined Brazil’s tumultuous late 1960s. This was a gigantic protest held on June 26, 1968, in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Its target was Yolanda’s husband, whose government had taken ever more sinister turns.

  The first president following the 1964 military coup, Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco, was in many ways objectionable, not least in the way he arrived in office. He turned a blind eye to torture and illegally, temporarily, closed the Congress, whose president was Lúcio Cardoso’s brother, Adauto Lúcio Cardoso. His term also saw such absurdities as the arrest of Clarice’s would-be publisher Ênio Silveira for the crime of hosting a feijoada for the deposed governor of Pernambuco.3

  But at least Castello Branco was not a philistine—he enjoyed the theater—and was personally honorable. He protested the arrest of Silveira, accusing its authors of creating a “cultural terror.” Rather than a full-fledged dictatorship, Castello Branco seemed to have imagined for Brazil a system along Mexican lines, in which the ruling party appointed new presidents on a regular schedule. The group—the party in the Mexican case, the military in Brazil—would keep power, but no single dictator could emerge.

  When Castello Branco handed power to Costa e Silva in March 1967, all the contradictions inherent in this model came to the surface. Costa e Silva liked to be thought of as an intellectual, though he proudly, and no doubt correctly, claimed that the only books he read were books of crossword puzzles.4 With his moustache, bemedaled uniform, and mirrored sunglasses, he looked more like a cartoonish Latin American dictator than any previous president of Brazil.

  From the beginning of his administration, he sought ways to consolidate the dictatorial power implicit in the post-1964 political structure. Students, who were rioting and protesting everywhere from Paris to Prague, were a special target of the government. The measures taken to repress them appalled Clarice, who went so far as to send an open letter to the minister of education, published on February 25. “Being a student is a very serious matter,” she wrote. “It is when ideas form, it is when one thinks the most about how to help Brazil. To the Minister or the President of the Republic: preventing young people from entering universities is a crime. Excuse the violence of the word. But it is the right word.”5

  An apparently innocuous issue set off the final confrontation. Poor students, who were dependent on a subsidized cafeteria known as the Calabouço, or “dungeon,” asked for better service. Their protests led to a confrontation with the police on March 29, 1968. An apolitical student named Edson Luis de Lima Souto, seventeen years old, was shot and killed.

  The murder shocked the nation, leading inevitably to more student protests and to violent police attacks. These included an attack on mourners attending a memorial mass for Edson Luis inside the gorgeous Candelária Church, where Rio’s millionaires married and buried. Clarice Lispector appended a single sentence to her column of April 6: “I am sympathetic, in body and soul, to the tragedy of the students of Brazil.”6

  On June 21, Clarice joined a delegation of notables that called on the governor at Guanabara Palace, the same building Alzira Vargas had defended against the Integralist coup thirty years before. The leading names in Brazilian culture were there: the architect of Brasília, Oscar Niemeyer; the musicians Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, and Nara Leão; the actors Paulo Autran and Tônia Carrero. Hélio Pellegrino had been chosen as the spokesman for the group. He addressed the governor, Francisco Negrão de Lima, “firmly and respectfully, requesting him to stand up for the students. … The tense climate grew as Hélio Pellegrino recalled the latest police violence against the students, despite the governor’s promises to the contrary. The governor tried to justify the reaction that a soldier might have if attacked by students.

  At that point, the voice of Congressman Márcio Moreira Alves rang out, interrupting the governor and observing that to defend a soldier who had attacked students would be “to authorize the Police to keep gunning down the people.” “Clarice Lispector almost fainted,” recalled a journalist in attendance. “She had been tense the entire time, dying of fear that her friend Hélio would go too far. Every time the orator seemed to get carried away, Teresa Aragão, standing next to her, heard Clarice say in a prayerful whisper, ‘For the love of God, Hélio, calm down.’ With that ill-timed outburst, Teresa thought that our brilliant writer was going to have an attack.”7

  Five days later, the full range of Rio society united in protest against the regime’s increasing brutality. The March of the Hundred Thousand was blessed by the same conservative cardinal-archbishop of Rio de Janeiro who four years earlier had consecrated the march celebrating the coup. It included 150 priests, sundry congressmen, enraged parents, and a whole contingent of artists.

  At its head walked Clarice Lispector, arm in arm with Brazil’s leading architects, musicians, writers, and intellectuals. The next day, beneath the headline “MARCH FOR FREEDOM TAKES OVER CITY,” Chico Buarque and Clarice Lispector, separated by a battery of nuns, appeared in giant photographs on the front page of Última Hora.8

  A woman who had never been involved in politics found herself a kind of patron saint of the student protests. Carlos Scliar, a painter who had first met Clarice in Naples, described her at these demonstrations as a “guardian … a protecting, generous, worried Jewish mother.”9

  In her final interview, Clarice was asked if writing had any effect on the outside, political world. “It changes nothing,” she insisted, again and again. “It changes nothing. I write without the hope that anything I write can change anything at all. It changes nothing.”10

  She had learned the lesson as a child, and she would be brutally reminded of it again in 1968. Soon after the March of the Hundred Thousand, the “cultural terror,” of which the first military president had warned, arrived. Groups allied with the Costa e Silva government began by attacking theaters. In Rio, Chico Buarque’s show Roda-Viva was violently dismantled; in São Paulo thugs forced famous actors to run naked from their dressing rooms and into the streets.11

  Costa e Silva was looking for any pretext, however preposterous, to claim absolute power. He found it on September 2. Márcio Moreira Alves, the congressman whose fiery declarations in front of the governor of Guanabara had so agitated Clarice, returned to Brasília from São Paulo. There, in one of the theaters not yet shut down, he had seen Aristophanes’s Lysistrata.

  In a speech before Congress, Alves suggested that, in order to bring about the restoration of democracy, the wives and girlfriends of soldiers ought to follow the example of the Greek women who withheld sex from their husbands and thereby ended the Peloponnesian War. The speech garnered absolutely no notice and would have been instantly forgotten but for the government’s determination to make an example of the congressman.12

  With the honor of the armed forces at stake, Costa e Silva issued Institutional Act Number Five on December 13, 1968. The Act ordered the indefinite recess of the National Congress; declared a state of siege; allowed the president to govern by decree; suspended the rights of habeas corpus and free assembly; established “previous censorship” in the press, music, theater, and cinema; and banned from public life dozens of politicians, diplomats, and judges.

  T
he AI-5, as it became known, was an assault on the rule of law never before contemplated, not even during Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo, in the century and a half since Brazil gained its independence. Torture was institutionalized. Many of the nation’s leading cultural and political figures were attacked. Clarice’s friends Paulo Francis and Ferreira Gullar were immediately arrested,13 as Chico Buarque would soon be; Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were forced into exile. (In protest, the launch party for The Woman Who Killed the Fish, scheduled for the seventeenth, was canceled.)14

  The day after the AI-5 was issued, Alberto Dines at the Jornal do Brasil concocted one of the front pages for which he would become famous. “Yesterday was the Day of the Blind,” the paper noted, top right. Two censored articles on the front page were ostentatiously substituted by classified ads. The weather report, top left, read: “Black weather. Suffocating temperature. The air is unbreathable. The country is being swept by strong winds.”15

  On June 15, when there was still some hope that the protests and petitions might have some positive effect, Clarice wrote in her column, “As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ started invading me like ivy on a wall.”16

  To escape her solitude, Clarice began reaching out to friends. Still unable to sleep, awake at all hours, she telephoned in the middle of the night, sometimes to confess terrible agonies, sometimes just to talk. In her heartbreaking and beautiful elegy for her sister, Elisa Lispector remembered these phone calls: “Today, to punish myself, I remember the impatience with which I answered the phone when you woke me up before dawn, just to chat—I didn’t know that you were going to die, that is my only excuse, because, before you died, death did not really exist.”17