As in A Breath of Life, the narrator of this “true though invented” story is a man, Rodrigo S. M.,13 but behind him Clarice Lispector is even more visible than usual. The book opens with a “Dedication by the Author (Actually Clarice Lispector),” who a couple of pages later says,
I know there are girls who sell their bodies, their only real possession, in exchange for a nice dinner instead of a mortadella sandwich. But the person I am going to talk about hardly has a body to sell, nobody wants her, she’s a virgin and innocuous, nobody would mind if she dropped off the face of the earth. Moreover—I discover now—nobody would mind if I vanished either, and even my writing somebody else could do just as well. Another writer, yes, but it’d have to be a man because a woman writer could get all weepy and maudlin.14
The symphonic dedication—“So I dedicate this thing here to old Schumann and his sweet Clara who today alas are bones”—in which Clarice recalls all the musicians and spirits who have “inhabited her life” and remembers “her former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster,” is one of the most beautiful pages in her oeuvre; it is followed by the thirteen titles she mentioned in her interview with Julio Lerner.
The Hour of the Star
It’s My Fault
Or
The Hour of the Star
Or
Let Her Deal with It
Or
The Right to the Scream
CLARICE LISPECTOR
.As For the Future.
Or
Singing the Blues
Or
She Doesn’t Know How to Scream
Or
A Feeling of Loss
Or
Whistling in the Dark Wind
Or
There’s Nothing I Can Do
Or
Register of the Preceding Facts
Or
Cheap Tearjerker
Or
Discreet Exit through the Back Door
Between the fourth and fifth titles, Clarice Lispector signed her name, not in the shaky handwriting that was a legacy of the fire a decade before, but clearly, boldly, a final assertion of the creator’s identity.
The number thirteen was not casually chosen. Speaking of the composition of Água viva, Olga Borelli said, “When she had me type for her, she would say: ‘Count to seven, put seven spaces in the paragraph, seven. Then, try not to go past page 13.’ So superstitious! When it was a story, she would say: ‘Tighten it up. Don’t leave so much space so that it doesn’t go past page 13.’ She really liked the numbers nine, seven, and five. It’s sort of a strange thing about Clarice, but she would ask the publisher not to go past page number x, to end the book there. It’s a bit cabbalistic, isn’t it? She had a lot of that.”15
The book begins with Rodrigo S. M.’s lengthy search for the story he is going to tell. “So that’s why I don’t know if my story is going to be—be what? I don’t know anything about it, I still haven’t worked up the nerve to write it. Will things happen? They will. But what? I don’t know that either.”16
At last the story of Macabéa begins, a girl who was “incompetent for life,” a girl who earns less than the minimum wage. “Some people have it. Some people don’t. It’s very simple: the girl didn’t have it. Didn’t have what? That’s it: she didn’t have it.”17 At work, she makes too many mistakes—she has a third-grade education—and invariably dirties the paper.
Macabéa stinks, but her roommates, afraid of offending her, cannot bring themselves to tell her so: “She didn’t have that delicate thing called charm. Only I find her charming. Only I, her author, love her.” She is an orphan who “no longer knew what it was to have a father and mother, she had forgotten the taste.” But she is not unhappy, because her self-consciousness is as rudimentary as her education. “She thought that people should be happy. So she was.”18
Clarice’s identification with the girl who “didn’t have it” is so complete, she writes, that she hopes she never has to describe a lazar, because she would break out in leprosy. “When I think that I could have been born her—and why not?—I tremble. And it seems a cowardly escape not being her, I feel guilty as I said in one of the titles.”19
Macabéa has her pleasures, though. “I am a typist and a virgin and I like Coca-Cola,” she thinks with satisfaction. Like Clarice Lispector, she likes listening to Clock Radio, which offered “ ‘the correct time and culture,’ and no music, just dripping in the sound of falling drops—each one the drop of a minute passing by. And especially the radio station used the intervals between those drops of minutes to run commercials—she loved commercials. It was the perfect station because also between the drops of time it gave little lessons about things she might need to know some day. That was how she learned that the Emperor Charlemagne was known as Carolus in his own country.”20
She fantasizes about buying a tub of cream she saw advertised in an old newspaper “for the skin of women who simply were not her,” a product so luscious that she dreamed of eating it.21 And once, for the only time in her life, she lies to her boss in order to spend the day sitting by herself in her lousy boardinghouse.
And she has her boyfriend, who enters her life on a rainy street.
“And if you’ll allow me, what’s your name, little lady?”
“Macabéa.”
“Maca what?”
“Bea,” she had to finish.
“Sorry but that sounds like a disease, a skin disease.”22
Olímpico de Jesus never grows much more charming, but Macabéa, who has nobody else, is, of course, charmed by him. His surname is “the surname of those who have no father,” and his first name is another reference to the story of the Maccabees, to the false god the Jews refused to worship when the Temple was polluted and called “the temple of Jupiter Olympius” (in Portuguese, Zeus Olímpico). Like the pagan idols, which were covered with precious metals, Olímpico has saved up for months in order to have a perfectly good tooth removed and replaced with one of gold.23
They didn’t know how to take a walk. They walked through the heavy rain and stopped in front of a hardware store where the window display featured piping, tin cans, large bolts, and nails. And Macabéa, afraid that the silence might already mean separation, said to her new boyfriend:
“I just love bolts and nails, what about you, sir?”24
This comical scene recalls another, more ghoulish, which the writer José Castello described, dating from the time Clarice was writing The Hour of the Star:
Clarice has halted before a shop window on the Avenida Copacabana and seems to be looking at a dress. Embarrassed, I come up to her. “How are you?” I say. It takes her a while to turn around. She doesn’t move at first, but then, before I dare repeat the greeting, she turns slowly, as if to see where something frightening had come from, and says: “So it’s you.” At that moment, horrified, I notice that there is nothing in the shop window but undressed mannequins. But then my silly horror becomes a conclusion: Clarice has a passion for the void.25
Macabéa shares this passion: “Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn’t know that she was meditating because she didn’t know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing.”26
Macabéa’s relationship with the loathsome Olímpico, whose ambitions include working as a butcher and becoming a congressman, ends when Olímpico discovers a more promising prospect in her colleague Gloria, whose father works in a butcher shop and who eats three square meals a day—and who, unlike Macabéa, with her withered ovaries, has hair bleached “egg-yellow.”27
Gloria is a know-it-all who constantly dishes out advice to Macabéa, including sending her to a cheap doctor who gives the girl more advice, telling her she has a touch of tuberculosis and then suggesting she eat more “nice Italian spaghetti,” a dish the half-starved Macabéa has never heard of.
&nb
sp; When Gloria suggests that Macabéa visit her psychic, Clarice suddenly, violently butts in.
I am absolutely tired of literature: only muteness keeps me company. If I still write it’s because I have nothing better to do in the world while I wait for death. The search for the word in the dark. My small success invades me and exposes me to glances on the street. I wanted to stagger through the mud, my need for abjection I can hardly control, the need for the orgy and the worst absolute delight. Sin attracts me, prohibited things fascinate me. I want to be a pig and a hen and then kill them and drink their blood. I think of Macabéa’s sex, mute but unexpectedly covered with thick and abundant black hairs—her sex was the only vehement sign of her existence.28
When Clarice resumes the story, Macabéa borrows money from Gloria and goes to the psychic, Madame Carlota, a former hooker who lives in a luxury Macabéa had never imagined—“Yellow plastic covering the couches and chairs. And even plastic flowers. Plastic was the greatest”—and who overwhelms Macabéa with her affectionate words. She is a “fan of Jesus”: “I’m just wild about him,” she tells her bedazzled visitor, launching into her inspirational life story: sought after by visitors to the red light district, she “only got syphilis once but penicillin cured [her].”29 When her charms had faded, Jesus wasted no time in setting up her and a colleague with a brothel of their own.
Madame Carlota finally tires of talking about herself, spreads Macabéa’s cards, and sees her horrible destiny before her. But “(explosion) suddenly it happened: Madame’s face lit up all illuminated.” She tells Macabéa that as soon as she walks out of her house her life will change entirely. “Madame was right: Jesus was finally paying attention to her.” She learns that she is about to meet a rich foreigner named Hans, “blond with blue or green or brown or black eyes,” who will fall in love with her and buy her a fur coat. Macabéa stammers:
“But you don’t need a fur coat in the heat of Rio …”
“You’ll have it just to dress up. It’s been a while since I’ve had such good cards. And I’m always honest: for example, I was open enough to tell that girl who just left that she was going to be run over by a car, she even cried a lot, didn’t you see her bleary eyes?”30
Dazzled, amazed, already burning with passion for Hans, Macabéa’s life has been changed: “And changed by words—we have known since Moses that the word is divine.” As she walks out of Madame Carlota’s house, “pregnant with the future,” she is struck by a giant yellow Mercedes.31
At the suggestion of Marina Colasanti and Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna, Clarice, in her last years, had frequented a fortune-teller in the working-class neighborhood of Méier. This woman, with the Dickensian name of Miss Nadir, often gave Clarice rosy prognoses: “Health tending to improve, nothing seriously wrong. Ex-husband to leave posting with son, who is well and making a lot of progress. Happiness will chase away problems! Romance confirmed and in your house. Not family love,” Miss Nadir wrote on October 7, 1976, for example.32
“I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me,” she told Julio Lerner in the interview with TV Cultura, “and on the way home in the taxi I thought it’d be really funny if a taxi hit me and ran me over and I died after hearing all those good things.”33 The combination was typical of Clarice: of wanting to believe, of seeking out fortune-tellers and astrologers, only to dismiss their pronouncements with a dark and ironic joke.
Yet in the same dark and ironic fashion, Madame Carlota’s predictions do come true. Macabéa does “meet” the foreigner she has been promised. And by now, after a fashion, Clarice did believe. In the book’s dedication to the musicians, she wrote, “And—and do not forget that the structure of the atom is invisible but nonetheless known. I know of many things I have never seen. And so do you. There is no proof of the existence of the truest thing of all; all we can do is believe.”34
“God is the world,” she wrote on the first page of The Hour of the Star, a final distant echo of the Spinoza she had read as a student. “The truth is always an interior and inexplicable contact. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and not a single word can describe it.”35
Macabéa, who like Clarice meditates on the nothing and “bathes in the no,” is a kind of saint: “In the poverty of body and spirit I reach saintliness, I who want to feel the breath of my beyond. To be more than I, who am so little.” Macabéa has “reduced herself to herself. And so have I,” writes Clarice, “from failure to failure, reduced myself to myself but at least I want to meet the world and its God.” “Like the northeasterner, there are thousands of girls spread though the slums, vacancies in boardinghouse beds, working behind counters till they drop. They don’t even notice that they are easily substitutable and that they could just as soon not exist at all. Few complain and as far as I know none of them protest because they don’t know to whom. Could this whom exist?”36
The tormenting question persists. “She prayed but without God, she didn’t know who He was and therefore He did not exist,” Clarice wrote of Macabéa.37 But at last she herself did know who He was. When the book came out in October 1977, she sent Alceu Amoroso Lima a copy. This was the same Catholic writer who had contributed an introductory essay to the first edition of The Chandelier. In that book, he had written thirty-one years before, “there is the most complete absence of God.” Now he received a copy of The Hour of the Star with an inscription in Clarice’s shaking hand: “I know that God exists.”38
“Before I could read and write I already made up stories,” Clarice once said, remembering her earliest childhood. “I even invented, with a somewhat passive friend of mine, a never-ending story. … I started, everything got very difficult, they both died. … Then she came in and said they weren’t actually as dead as all that. And then it all started over again.”39
In The Chandelier, Virginia is killed by an oncoming car, but in Near to the Wild Heart the child Joana pulls off the same magic trick Clarice had performed as a child: “Joana had already dressed the doll, had already undressed her, she had imagined her going to a party where she would shine among all the other girls. A blue car crossed the girl’s body, killed her. Then along came the fairy and the girl came back to life.”40
Clarice could not let Angela die; now, at the end of The Hour of the Star, she still wants to rescue poor Macabéa. As soon as the Mercedes strikes, she rushes back to save her, only to pull herself back: “I could happily start again at the point that Macabéa was standing on the sidewalk—but it’s not up to me to say that the blond and foreign man looked at her. Because I’ve gone too far and cannot turn back now.”41
“I’m going to do everything I can to keep her from dying,” Clarice writes on the next page. “But what an urge to put her to sleep and to go to bed myself.” The rest of the book is Clarice’s desperate effort to save her. “Is Macabéa by chance going to die? How do I know?” she writes. “And not even the people there knew. Though just in case a neighbor had lit a candle next to the body. The luxury of the rich flame seemed to sing glory.”42
For pages and pages Clarice holds the girl’s fate in her hands. “For now Macabéa is nothing more than a vague feeling on the dirty cobblestones. I could leave her on the street and simply not finish the story,” she writes, exactly as she had done with Angela. Yet doubt has crept in. “But couldn’t she be needing to die? Since there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn’t even know it.”43
Macabéa crimps into the fetal position.
Then—lying there—she had a moist and supreme happiness, since she had been born for the embrace of death. Death which is my favorite character in this story. Was she going to say farewell to herself? I don’t think she is going to die because she wants to live so much. And there was a certain sensuality in the way she had huddled up. Or is it because pre-death resembles intense sensual throes? Because her face looked like a grimace of desire. Things are always days before and if she doesn’t die
now she is like us on the day before her death, forgive me for reminding you because as for me I can’t forgive my clairvoyance.44
This time, the character will not stand up again. Clarice lets her beloved Macabéa die.
“But do not mourn the dead,” she insists. “They know what they are doing.”45
In October, only a couple of days after the publication of The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector was suddenly hospitalized. In the taxi on the way to the hospital, she said, “Let’s pretend that we’re not going to the hospital, that I’m not sick, and that we’re going to Paris,” Olga Borelli remembered.
So we started making plans and talking about everything we would do in Paris. The taxi driver, poor thing, already tired from working all night long, timidly asked: “Can I go on the trip too?” And Clarice said: “Of course you can, and you can even bring your girlfriend.” He said: “My girlfriend is an old lady, seventy years old, and I don’t have any money.” Clarice answered: “She’s coming too. Let’s pretend you won the lottery.” When we got to the hospital, Clarice asked how much it was. Only twenty cruzeiros, and she gave him two hundred.46
Clarice had said that “everyone chooses the way they die,” and the way she chose was spookily appropriate. After a lifetime writing about eggs and the mystery of birth—in The Hour of the Star she insistently referred to Macabéa’s withered ovaries—she herself was now suffering from an untreatable ovarian cancer.
After an exploratory operation on October 28, she was transferred to a public hospital, the Hospital da Lagoa, and from her room she had a view of Rio’s tremendous mountains and the Botanic Garden she so loved. She received few visitors: Tania and Elisa; Paulo and his wife, Ilana; Rosa Cass; Olga Borelli; Nélida Piñon; Autran Dourado; Siléa Marchi.
The diagnosis was terminal, but she was not told the news. “Clarice talked a lot,” Siléa said. “She was very alert. … Moreover, she knew nothing about her illness and indicated, to everyone she talked to, how optimistic she was and how much she wanted to go home as soon as possible.”47
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