In Brasília, relieved and delighted, she said, “I really needed this money. I feel humbled, since I don’t deserve it,” she said. “Someone told me that when they give us a prize it’s because they think we’re retired. But I shall never retire. I hope to die writing.”18
On October 20 she gave a long interview for the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro, which collected recordings of notable individuals. The interview was conducted by close friends, including Marina Colasanti and Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna. The familial atmosphere allowed Clarice to let down her guard and talk comfortably. But despite her friendly disposition, it was becoming increasingly clear that she was unwell.
In that same month, she visited Porto Alegre, home of Mafalda Verissimo, for a writers’ conference. “When I saw her again,” the writer Luiz Carlos Lisboa said, “I was shocked: she was already very sick, with large bags around her eyes, and hardly recognized me. For the first time I noticed that she was hiding her arm. Even so, you could still glimpse the stunning woman she had been in her youth.”19
Caio Fernando Abreu, a young writer from Porto Alegre who was literally obsessed with her—“I eventually had to forbid myself to read Clarice Lispector. Her books gave me the feeling that everything had already been written, that there was nothing left to say”—remembered this trip: “She—who almost didn’t speak, smoked a lot, and could hardly stand to be around people—invited me to a café on the Rua da Praia. We went. Dense, Lispectorian silence. At the bar, through the cigarette smoke and with that extremely strange accent, she suddenly asked: ‘What’s the name of this city again?’ And she had been in Porto Alegre for three days.”20
Back in Rio, she was briefly hospitalized. She wrote Mafalda to promise to wean herself from sleeping pills and tranquilizers.21 But after so many years, this was easier said than done. One macabre anecdote from around this time suggests just how tormented she was by her inability to sleep, and how lost she was to the dreadful addiction that resulted from it. Clarice, who liked being attractive more than she liked being a great writer, hired a makeup artist named Gilles to come to her house once a month and apply “permanent” makeup.
Month after month, surrounded by magazines and papers, and with her typewriter close at hand, Clarice sat for Gilles’s sessions. He touched up the blonde in her eyebrows and applied false eyelashes and flesh-colored lipstick. She talked a bit about herself, telling him, for example, that she had left her husband because she wanted to be a writer, and mentioning that she didn’t see the point in living any more. But these confessions had not prepared Gilles to be awakened by the famous writer at one in the morning, or to have her schedule her makeup sessions for the middle of the night.
Like so many others who felt her vulnerability and made exceptions for her they would not have made for anyone else, Gilles agreed to come. Occasionally, when he arrived at her apartment, she would be sound asleep: she had taken her pills. Clarice had warned Siléa, her live-in assistant, and Gilles of the possibility and instructed them to make her up anyway. The patient esthetician did what he could. The false eyelashes, he remembered, were the biggest challenge.22
44
Speaking from the Tomb
The most enduring image of Clarice Lispector at the end of her life, perhaps the most enduring image of Clarice Lispector at any time of her life, comes from an interview she gave in February 1977.1 This was the only time Clarice ever spoke in front of a camera, and because these images are unique the interview has had a much greater impact on her popular image than the interviews she gave when she was younger, healthier, or more energetic.
The footage is difficult to watch. With her famously penetrating gaze, Clarice stares straight at the interviewer, her face an almost immobile mask. She sits in a drab leather chair, clutching a big white purse in her left hand and a Hollywood cigarette in her right, burned, hand. Smoking incessantly in the middle of a giant gray studio, punctuating the interview with long, pregnant silences, she answers the questions in her strange and unmistakable voice.
Everyone in the room felt a sense of portent, said the interviewer, a Jewish journalist named Julio Lerner. He was aware of the tremendous weight of the moment and felt a responsibility to history: “Neither Kafka, nor Dostoevsky, nor Fernando Pessoa, nor Peretz” would ever be captured on film. It was up to him to capture Clarice Lispector. He had thirty minutes.2
She had arrived at the studios of TV Cultura in São Paulo with Olga Borelli to participate in a program about film. The director of the station took the chance to ask her for a personal interview, which invitation, to general astonishment, she accepted. Lerner was hauled out of his office and given no time to prepare for the interview. “In only five minutes I get a studio and a team outside the normal hours to interview her. It is 4:15 in the afternoon and I only have half an hour. … At five the children’s program begins and I’ll have to be out of studio B fifteen minutes before.”
Meeting her, he was “pierced by the most unprotected gaze a human being can cast on another.” In an extremely hot studio—February is the height of the southern summer—under heavy lighting, he began to ask the first questions that occurred to him.
“Is it harder for you to communicate with adults or with children?”
“When I communicate with a child, it’s easy, because I’m very maternal. When I communicate with an adult, I’m actually communicating with the most secret part of myself. And that’s when it gets difficult.”
“Are adults always solitary?”
“Adults are sad and solitary.”
“And children?”
“Children … have their imagination. They’re free.”
“At what point do you think a human being starts becoming sad and solitary?”
“That’s a secret.” [She pauses.] “Sorry, I’m not going to answer.” [Another pause.] “At any point in life, a slightly unexpected shock is all it takes. And that happens. But I’m not solitary. I’ve got lots of friends. And I’m only sad today because I’m tired. Usually I’m happy.”
She discusses her ambiguous fame:
“Do you consider yourself a popular writer?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, they even call me hermetic. How can I be popular and hermetic at the same time?”
“And what do you think of that description—‘hermetic’?”
“I don’t understand it. Because I’m not hermetic for myself. Well, there’s one story of mine that I don’t understand very well.”
“Which one?”
“ ‘The Egg and the Hen.’ ”
“Among all your writings, there’s always, naturally enough, a prodigal son. Which one do you have the tenderest feelings for?”
“ ‘The Egg and the Hen,’ which is a mystery for me. A thing I wrote about a gangster, a criminal named Mineirinho, who was shot thirteen times, when one shot was enough. And who was devoted to St. George and had a girlfriend. And which completely revolted me. …”
“What, in your opinion, is the role of the Brazilian writer today?”
“To speak as little as possible. [ … ]”
“Do you have contact with young university students?”
“Sometimes they seek me out, but they are really scared of getting in my way, they’re scared that I won’t … meet them.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why.”
“But the ones who manage …”
“Then they’re perfectly welcome to visit me, to have coffee with me, to come to my house. I greet them as friends.”
“What do the young students who seek you out normally want to talk about?”
“It’s surprising. They get me.”
“What does that mean, they get you?”
“It’s that I thought, that I sometimes think that I’m isolated, and then I see university students, very young people, who are completely by my side. I’m surprised and it’s gratifying, isn’t it? …”
“It depends. It entirely depends. For example, my book The Passion According to G. H., a Portuguese teacher from Pedro II [an elite Rio high school] came to my house, said he’d read it four times, and he didn’t know what it was all about. The next day a young girl, seventeen years old, came over and said that that book was her very favorite. I mean, you can’t understand it.”
“Has this happened with your other books as well?”
“It has. It either touches people, or it doesn’t. I mean, I guess the question of understanding isn’t about intelligence, it’s about feeling, about entering into contact. So the Portuguese and literature teacher, who ought to be the one most prepared to understand me, didn’t, and the seventeen-year-old girl read and reread the book. It seems I gain by rereading, which is a relief.”
“Do you think that this difficulty belongs only to certain people today and that the younger generations will understand you immediately? …”
“I don’t have the slightest idea. I don’t have the slightest idea. I know that nobody used to understand me and now they understand me.”
“How do you explain that?”
“I think everything changed because I didn’t change, no. I didn’t … as far as I know, I made no concessions.”
This is the last remnant of the young Joana’s defiant pride in her uniqueness, now uttered in the resigned voice of a woman who knows she is at the end of her life. It is followed by the most uncanny moment in the interview, Clarice’s apparent announcement of her impending death.
“Do you ever write something only to tear it up again?”
“I put it aside or te … No, I tear things up,” she says, abruptly annoyed.
“Is that reaction purely rational or more of a sudden emotion?”
“Anger, a little bit of anger.” [Her tone hardens; her eyes are downcast and her hands are fiddling with a pack of cigarettes.]
“With whom?”
“With myself.”
“Why, Clarice?”
“Who knows. I’m a little tired.”
“Of what?”
“Of myself.”
“But aren’t you born again and refreshed with every new work?”
“Well.” [She takes a deep breath before finally looking up.] “For now I’m dead. We’ll see if I can be born again. For now I’m dead … I’m speaking from my tomb.”
The camera pans out to reveal a room as bare, hot, and silent as the room in which G. H. encountered the cockroach. The cameraman and Olga Borelli said nothing as an intern stood softly crying. Clarice whispered a request to Lerner that the footage be broadcast only after her death. The wish would be respected.
45
Our Lady of the Good Death
This was not the first time that Clarice had proclaimed that she was about to die. She imagined her death in many of her writings. “Ah how she wanted to die,” she wrote in An Apprenticeship. “She had never tried dying before—what an opening she had before her.”1 “I almost know what it will be like after my death,” she told a Portuguese journalist in 1975. “The living room empty, the dog dying of loneliness. The windows of my house. Everything empty and calm.”2
There was the line Olga cut from A Breath of Life—“I asked God to give Angela a cancer that she can’t get rid of”—and there was her unexpected declaration to Olga, two years before: “I’m going to die of a nasty cancer.” There was the phone call she placed to Jacob David Azulay: “She had heard about my mother’s death and wanted to offer some comforting words. My mother had died a few days before, of an intestinal complication. When I told Clarice this, she said: ‘Look, Dr. Azulay, I’m going to die exactly like your mother.’ And this was in 1972! I remember that she frequently said to me: ‘Doctor, I won’t live to see the end of this year.’ Living for her was torture. She no longer wanted to live.”3
She had, Olga said, “an unbearable genius, for herself and for others.”4 By June 1977, she was already feeling the first signs of illness. Perhaps a foreboding of the end inspired her to depart, almost without warning, for Paris, where she planned to spend a month with Olga. She got there on June 19 but wanted to go home as soon as she arrived. The city was full of painful memories—of her lost friends Bluma Wainer and San Tiago Dantas, of her years with Maury, of her departed beauty and youth—and five days later she was back in Rio de Janeiro.
After her return, the journalist Norma Couri, Alberto Dines’s wife, spoke to her. During the conversation, Clarice mentioned that when she was walking down the street, she always went against the oncoming tide of people.5 “She was a brutal example of the singularity of the human person,” a friend wrote when she died.6 Her inflexible individuality would find its last and greatest expression in the book she published in October: The Hour of the Star.
Much of Clarice Lispector’s subsequent fame, her enduring popularity among a broad public, rests on this thin book, in which she managed to bring together all the strands of her writing and of her life. Explicitly Jewish and explicitly Brazilian, joining the northeast of her childhood with the Rio de Janeiro of her adulthood, “social” and abstract, tragic and comic, uniting her religious and linguistic questions with the narrative drive of her finest stories, The Hour of the Star is a fitting monument to its author’s “unbearable genius.”
In her legendary interview with Julio Lerner, Clarice mentioned a book she had just completed. “Thirteen names,” Clarice smiled, when asked what it was called. “Thirteen titles.” “It’s the story of a girl who was so poor that all she ate was hot dogs. That’s not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery.” But she refused to tell Lerner the protagonist’s name: “It’s a secret.”7
This is Macabéa, who, far more than the elderly women in Where Were You at Night, is superfluous and useless, more so, even, than Laura the hen: “Anyway I never saw anyone clumsier than that hen. Everything she does is pretty much wrong. Except eating. And, of course, she knows how to make an egg.”8 Macabéa is so poor that she hardly eats, and, Clarice says, her ovaries are dried up.
She is a poor girl from Alagoas, the state where the Lispectors first landed in Brazil, who has migrated, like the Lispectors and so many millions of others, to the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. Her strange name, Macabéa, comes from a promise her mother made to a saint widely venerated in northeastern Brazil, Our Lady of the Good Death.9 It alludes to the biblical story of the Maccabees, the band led by Judas Maccabaeus, one of the greatest heroes of Jewish history.
The Maccabees are the stars of the Chanukah celebration, and Clarice would have known their story from childhood. Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers defied the orders of a foreign king who desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem, ordered the Jews to worship false gods, and tried to destroy those who resisted. Resistance was not the easiest path, as an officer told Judas’s father, Mattathias: “Mattathias answered and spake with a loud voice, Though all the nations that are under the king’s dominion obey him, and fall away every one from the religion of their fathers, and give consent to his commandments: Yet will I and my sons and my brethren walk in the covenant of our fathers. God forbid that we should forsake the law and the ordinances.”10
Judas Maccabaeus’s story of sacrifice and doomed struggle against impossible odds would have appealed, like the climax of his glorious “good death,” to Clarice Lispector, who had spent her life fighting through a crowd headed in the opposite direction.
The “failed woman writer,” of course, was the last person to think of herself as a heroine. But the suggestion of the Maccabees’ manly and warlike valor is even more ironic when applied to their namesake, Macabéa, a smelly, dirty, starving typist living with four other girls in a cheap boardinghouse in a scummy part of downtown Rio, the Rua do Acre.
As she had on her last visit to Recife, when she sat in the Praça Maciel Pinheiro listening, captivated, to the dialect of the fruit se
llers, Clarice in her final years often went with Olga to a market, the Northeastern Fair, held in São Cristóvão. This was near the area, north of downtown, where she, her father, and sisters had lived when they first moved from Recife to Rio. It represented a double return: to the northeast of her childhood and to the Rio de Janeiro of her early adolescence, before her father’s death.
At the fair, poor northeastern migrants gathered, and Macabéa’s dodgy boyfriend, Olímpico, appeared there one day, Olga Borelli remembered.
Take the Olímpico of Macabéa, he was born in a trip to the São Cristóvão fair, which is the northeastern market. We had walked around quite a bit on that visit, and she was eating beiju and eating rapadura and listening to the Northeastern songs. Suddenly she said: “Let’s sit on that bench.” She sat down and wrote, I think, about four or five pages about Olímpico, described Olímpico completely and she herself says in the book: “I caught the eye of a man from the Northeast.” She got his entire story. Distractedly, she picked up on everything around her at that market. And she was wolfing down her beiju and talking about one thing and another and laughing at the singer. You’d never have guessed that Clarice was already working on that character.11
Macabéa’s genesis was similar, Clarice writes at the beginning of the book: “On a street in Rio de Janeiro I suddenly got a glimpse of the feeling of perdition in the face of a northeastern girl. Not to mention that I as a boy grew up in the Northeast.”12
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