Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Her dismissal was also a tacit slap in the face of the cartoonist Henfil. In the satirical magazine O Pasquim, which, despite its relatively (and necessarily) anodyne content, became a symbol of resistance to the dictatorship, Henfil had been assigning prominent Brazilians whom he judged to be insufficiently “engaged” to what he called the “Cemetery of the Living Dead.” At the beginning of 1972 he buried Clarice Lispector. The attack occasioned protests, including from the writer herself. In the next issue Henfil drew a fretting and hysterical Clarice, “a simple writer about flowers, birds, people, the beauty of life …”

  She ended up in the cemetery, Henfil wrote, because she was a reincarnation of Pontius Pilate. He drew her inside a glass dome, washing her hands, surrounded by birds and flowers, while Christ was being crucified.11 Clarice was offended by the ugly and unprovoked attack, which came complete with the original anti-Semitic slur, collaboration with Christ’s crucifixion. In public, all she said was “If I ran into Henfil the only thing I would say is: listen, when you write about me, it’s Clarice with a c, not with two s’s, all right?”12

  Now she, too, was an unambiguous victim of the dictatorship, and Alberto Dines thought that she also liked “belonging” to a Jewish identity she rarely discussed with Gentiles. This identity was not without its anxieties, financial and personal. During the Yom Kippur War, she called up a friend of Lebanese descent and asked point-blank if she would like her less if she knew Clarice was Jewish. The friend and her mother both assured Clarice that it made no difference to them and that she was always welcome to the Arab foods Clarice often enjoyed in their home.13

  “Clarice didn’t like labels,” Dines says. “But around that time we were talking about the Jewish motifs in her work and she asked me if they were obvious. I said that she was like Kafka, whose literature is very Jewish though he never deals with Judaism as such. And she liked the comparison.”14

  38

  Batuba Jantiram Lecoli?

  Another phase of Clarice’s life, commenced around the same time she started writing for the Jornal do Brasil, ended in 1973, when her psychoanalyst, Jacob David Azulay, suggested that they call off her therapy. She had been seeing Dr. Azulay four or five times a week for the previous six years. “I was exhausted,” Azulay told an interviewer. “Clarice drained me more than all my other patients put together. The results were minimal. I was very tired of her and she of me. The effort that I made with her and that she made with me was very great for the little we got in return.”1

  Clarice begged him not to abandon her, and so he suggested she try group analysis. This soon failed; all of Azulay’s patients wanted to be in the same group as the famous writer, and she could not adapt to the group.2 Azulay explained:

  She was a fantastic figure, an extremely generous woman, but even so it was not easy to be with her. She carried a load of anxiety that I have rarely seen in my life. It’s very difficult to be around someone like that. Full-time self-centered, not because she wanted to be, out of vanity, but a real difficulty, in connecting. She couldn’t turn herself off, and when her anxiety heated up, it reached overpowering levels, and she had no rest, she could not calm down. At those times living was a torment for her. She couldn’t stand herself. And other people couldn’t stand her. I myself, as her analyst, couldn’t stand her.3

  The doctor was stunned to learn just how many tranquilizers and antidepressants Clarice was taking. He himself did not prescribe them, aware of what had happened a few years before when she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand. A different doctor, and probably several, gave her whatever she wanted. “When she told me she took that amount of stuff I simply did not believe her. I said, ‘Clarice, that’s unacceptable, bring it here and show me.’ She brought it, it was true. So she swallowed that colossal amount of medicine and even then often couldn’t sleep.”4

  The analysis having failed, and group analysis having only attracted tourists, Dr. Azulay offered Clarice, terrified of being abandoned, another alternative. She could see him once a week, not as a patient but as a friend, and he would try to do what he could for her. “I think that was when I was most useful to her. That was when I thought: I’m not going to be her analyst, I’m going to be an advisor, confidant, teacher. Clarice was very naïve, and people often took advantage of her. With her royalties, for example, it was always like that. And she didn’t have a father, a mother, anyone to help her with it. I liked her a lot and decided to be that person.”5

  In 1973, Pedro, twenty-five years old, moved to Montevideo, where Maury was ambassador to the Latin American Free Trade Association. He had sought the posting in part because Montevideo was the closest foreign post to Rio, and there he could take the more active role he had always desired in the lives of his grown sons. This was especially essential for Pedro, the burden of whose illness Clarice could no longer carry alone. Isabel Gurgel Valente, Maury’s beautiful, aristocratic second wife, whom Clarice had so tormented during the first years of her marriage, became an unexpected ally in the struggle to care for Pedro.

  Isabel was interested in psychology—she later trained as a psychoanalyst—and cared so well for Pedro that Clarice’s feelings toward her changed completely, from sullen resentment to gratitude. Clarice felt terribly guilty about her inability to cope with Pedro, but after all the long years of trying she was no longer strong enough to deal with his incurable schizophrenia. For a woman who had so eagerly wanted to be a mother and who was proud to say “There is no question that as a mother I am more important than as a writer,” this felt like a particularly bitter failure.6

  Perhaps it was this failure that led Clarice to seek out children she could mother more successfully, and to fall into a childlike role herself. For the past few years, Clarice had been increasingly retreating from the adult world, as Olga Borelli stepped into the maternal role and Jacob David Azulay into the paternal. As she neared the end of her life, her memories of her happiest time, her early childhood, crept into her consciousness with increasing insistence. In a draft of Água viva, she wrote:

  I am walking a tightrope now because I’m not writing well. It’s because I’m hiding something. Here’s what it is: I bought a doll for myself. To sleep with me. I’m only a little bit embarrassed. But when I was a girl I wanted a pretty doll so badly. I only had those little ones made of rags. Filled with dried flowers or straw. I had so much love to give. And now my love was so great that it became compulsive. She is pretty. I’ve already kissed her and hugged her. I sleep clutching her to me. I animate objects. She closes her eyes when she is horizontal. She just didn’t inherit my hair which is soft enough to drive you crazy: hers is shiny and rough. Her name is Laura. And now I have a girl—since I only had sons. She’s so sweet. Now I gave Laura to a poor girl because I wanted to see a girl happy.7

  In the form of the doll, she was almost literally clinging to her childhood. Her desire to rediscover the rebelliousness that she had most memorably described in Near to the Wild Heart appears in another scene in Loud Object, which, like the passage above, did not make it to the final draft:

  I buy clothes ready-to-wear but I wanted to have a black knit dress made. I received it at home and expected a masterpiece. What it was was horrible. In a rage I ripped it to shreds with my two hands. The person watching said: but it still could have been adjusted! The little temperamental one. But I felt so good afterwards. So sated finally that I understood that I have to return to wildness every once in a while. I seek out the animal state. And every time I fall into it I am being me. And how good it is to do what you want without even thinking about it beforehand.8

  The scene recalls the animal ferocity of Joana. But that wild young girl was painfully fading, even dying. In Água viva, she wrote:

  On Sunday inebriated with the sun and with Jupiter I was alone in the house. I suddenly doubled over as if in childbirth—and I saw that the girl in me was dying. I will never forget that bloody Sunday. To heal the wound took days.

  And here I am tough a
nd silent and heroic. Without a girl inside me.9

  To compensate for this loss, Clarice sought the company of children,10 and her mothering impulse now extended to Dr. Azulay’s precocious nine-year-old daughter, Andréa. Azulay had shown Clarice some of her writings, and Clarice was instantly smitten by an intelligence and innocence that must have reminded her of her own. She wrote Andréa a letter:

  To the beautiful princess Andréa de Azulay,

  You need to know that you already are a writer. But don’t pay any attention to that, pretend you’re not. What I wish for you is to be known and admired only by a delicate but large group of people spread across the world. I hope that you never attain cruel popularity because that is bad and invades the sacred intimacy of our hearts. Write about eggs because that works. It also works to write about stars. And about the warmth that animals give us. Surround yourself with divine and human protection, always have a father and mother—write whatever you like without worrying about anyone else. Do you understand?

  A kiss on your princess hands.

  Clarice11

  Like so many of the artists she esteemed, Paul Klee, for example, Clarice admired and even envied the spontaneous felicity and unforced ease of childhood expression. As her experience in creating Água viva had proven, that kind of writing was terribly difficult, even, or especially, for a mature artist who had spent years perfecting her language. “Make no mistake,” she later wrote, “I only achieve simplicity through hard work.”12

  That simplicity came naturally to a child, who had none of the self-conscious refinement of the adult artist. For Clarice, caught in “the shipwreck of introspection,” Andréa’s lack of linguistic self-consciousness suggested an innocence now lost to her, a final chance to relive the happy and innocent years when she too still had a father and a mother. In 1975, enchanted by her “spiritual daughter,” Clarice published a small edition of Andréa’s stories, such as the following:

  On a moonlit night something happened by the sea that is hard to describe. I was sitting on a bench, near the beach. It wasn’t very cold, but the waves like fans were calling the wind to dance an unknown dance. The sea was gray like the sky.

  It turned blue-green and didn’t stop changing colors. Then the tide came in, came in … And then went back out, back out …

  And everything stopped. The moon started to turn off and went dark.

  I went to sleep and dreamed about everything that happened by the sea.13

  In her letters, Clarice sent the little girl ready-made phrases to use in her stories. She also confided many of her fears, telling her, for example, of a nightmare: that she had left Brazil and returned to find her name had been stolen. From their correspondence, it seems that Clarice imagined Andréa’s future literary career as completely as she imagined the buzz of the insects of the Italian summer afternoons of all those trips she never managed to take, offering a presumably baffled Andréa all sorts of practical advice about her career. The nine-year-old girl was “not to abuse commas,” “to always keep a simple humility in life as in literature,” and to “try to write in prose, even poetic prose, because from a commercial point of view nobody publishes books of poetry.”14

  Andréa, who eventually became a lawyer, grew very attached to Clarice and was hurt when her older friend, apparently going through a difficult time, temporarily vanished. “Why don’t you write?” the girl asked. “Why do you disguise your voice when you call to speak to Daddy?”15 Clarice was still dependent on Andréa’s father, but her relationship with Andréa became one of the closest in her life. The two often shared meals together, and on one occasion Clarice took her to buy a puppy.16

  A puppy was a particularly appropriate gift for Andréa. Clarice was as drawn to animals as she was to children, and in similar ways; in her writings they are often inextricable. Where she writes about a child, or for children, she always writes about an animal, too. Her own childhood memories were inseparable from her memories of the animals—dogs, cats, hens—that surrounded her in Recife. The connection was so automatic that the first chapter of her first book, Near to the Wild Heart, is a memory of Joana as a girl, playing with the hens in the yard. Every one of the children’s books she later wrote concerns animals. As she grew older and increasingly nostalgic for childhood, her connection to animals grew stronger, and they take an ever more important role in her writing.

  One animal in particular now became as close to Clarice as she was to Andréa Azulay: her dog Ulisses. This mutt’s eccentricity gave him a wide reputation for being as extraordinary as his owner, who wrote about him in several books and even composed an entire book in his voice, a children’s story called Almost True.17 In that book, Ulisses introduces himself by saying, “I’m a little impolite, I don’t always obey, I like to do whatever I want, I pee in Clarice’s living room.”

  In the late 1960s, the director Luiz Carlos Lacerda, whose first love, like Clarice’s, had been Lúcio Cardoso, worked on a screenplay with Clarice based on “The Egg and the Hen.” Arriving at her apartment to discuss this project, which never materialized, he sat on a sofa beneath a whole wall of portraits of the mistress of the house, an intimidating constellation of almond-shaped eyes staring down at him.

  Clarice went into the kitchen, and he lit a cigarette, placing it in an ashtray when she came back in. When he reached back down for his cigarette, it had vanished. Baffled, he thought, It’s true what they say: the woman really is a witch. At a loss, he lit another, but after only a couple of minutes, it, too, disappeared. By now completely spooked, he looked over to see Ulisses the dog spitting out the butt.

  In 1974, a woman who came to interview Clarice (for the same magazine, O Pasquim, in which Henfil had attacked her) was struck by the dog, “who madly swallowed all the cigarette butts, sometimes still partly lit, that the interviewers put out in the ashtray. … She calmly let him do whatever he wanted.”18 Ulisses was a part of her return to childhood, and to motherhood. She told an interviewer that “I bought Ulisses when my sons grew up and went their own way. I needed to love a living creature who would keep me company. Ulisses is mixed-race, which guarantees him a longer life and a greater intelligence. He’s a very special dog. He smokes cigarettes, drinks whisky and Coca-Cola. He’s a bit neurotic.”19

  Ulisses was a friend to Clarice, of course, and her love of animals and children was a love of their innocence and warmth. They eagerly absorbed the love that had brought her so many disappointments when directed at adults. Unlike Clarice, increasingly sinking in the “shipwreck of introspection,” animals were enviably simple. “How I envy you, Ulisses, since all you do is be.”20

  In all of Clarice’s writings, the animal, especially the horse, was a metaphysical ideal, a union of “impression and expression.” The hens who laid eggs were intimately connected to the mystery of birth. And like children such as Andréa Azulay, animals had a special relationship to language. Animals and children, particularly babies, spoke a language that was not made of words with meanings, which Clarice always mistrusted, but of pure sound.

  Clarice had many names for her dog Ulisses: “Vicissitude,” “Pitulcha,” “Pornósio.” Her son’s name, Pedro, may have been ordinary enough, but when he was only a few months old his mother had already embroidered it spectacularly, as she wrote Elisa and Tania: “Euríalo (that’s Juquinha’s new name) is already receiving affection in your names. I’ll tell you straightaway what his names are: Juquinha, Euríalo, Júbilo, Pinacoteca, Vivaldi, Evandro, etc. He answers to any of these names. He also answers to any other name, he’s so dim-witted.”21

  This naming recalled an old habit of Clarice’s: when she was a little girl in Recife, she had even given names to all the tiles in her shower, and when Joana is first encountered as a child, she has already established an unconscious link between an occult language and the world of animals, as in the dialogue from Near to the Wild Heart.

  “Daddy, I made up a poem.”

  “What’s it called?”

  �
�Me and the sun.” Without waiting long she recited: “The hens who are in the yard already ate two earthworms but I didn’t see it.”

  It is not a coincidence that “The Egg and the Hen” has an animal theme and is written in a language that is almost, but not quite, nonsensical. Another great story, “Dry Study of Horses,” is also abstract, and similarly is about animals. In her last book, the incomplete A Breath of Life: Pulsations, she writes:

  If I could describe the inner life of a dog I would have reached a summit. Angela [the book’s protagonist] also wants to enter the living-being of her Ulisses. I was the one who transmitted to her this love for animals. …

  Oh God, and I who compete with myself. I detest myself. Happily other people like me, that’s a relief. I and my dog Ulisses are mutts. …

  I know how to speak a language that only my dog, the honorable Ulisses, my dear lord, understands. It’s like this: dacoleba, titban, ziticoba, letuban. Joju leba, leba jan? Tutiban leba, lebajan. Atotoquina, zefiram. Jetobabe? Jetoban. That means something that not even the emperor of China would understand.22

  For her entire life as a writer, Clarice had pushed against the limits of language; here, abandoning intelligibility, she breaks through them entirely, attaining the ideal to which Água viva had alluded, when she aimed not at the mind but at the senses. In another fragment, not published in A Breath of Life, she explicitly makes the link between nonsensical language and precisely those realms of life that are impossible to define and describe: “Angela—Batuba jantiram lecoli? adapiu quereba sulutria kalusia. I enjoy speaking this way: it is a language that resembles an orgasm. Since I don’t understand, I hand myself over: tilibica samvico esfolerico mazuba! I am the water of a lovely cistern.”23