The woman who had so often announced her own death gave no sign of knowing what was happening to her. She continued creating her magical fictions. In her nearly illegible handwriting, she drew up guest lists for the gatherings she would host back home. “She got very excited thinking about these lunches and about the relatives and friends she would invite. It would be a party. Which never happened,” Olga said.48
But it is more likely, as many who accompanied her final weeks felt, that she knew perfectly well what was happening. For their sake, she put on a bold face. “A person knows when they’re dying,” said Rosa Cass, who at Clarice’s request smuggled a black Caracu beer into the hospital. (She had also requested an igurke, a kosher pickle.) She laughed at the situation: “What nonsense,” she told Rosa, when asked about its gravity. But Rosa remembered that Clarice often camouflaged her real feelings. “Clarice never let on what she was thinking.”49
She was less tactful with one of her doctors, who was pained by the worried patient’s persistent questions about what they were going to do with her.50 And the words she wrote or dictated to Olga show that Clarice meant it when she said that she hoped to die writing: “Inside the most interior of my house I die at the end of this year exhausted.” On her deathbed, she returned to the myth she had made about her name, the lily on the breast (lis no peito).
I am an object loved by God. And that makes flowers blossom upon my breast. He created me in the same way I created the sentence I just wrote: “I am an object loved by God” and he enjoyed creating me as much as I enjoyed creating the phrase. And the more spirit the human object has, the greater God’s satisfaction.
White lilies pressing against the nudity of my breast. The lilies I offer to whatever hurts inside you. Since we are beings and needy. Even because certain things—if not given away—wither. For example—beside the warmth of my body the petals of the lilies would wilt. I call out to the light breeze for my future death. I will have to die because otherwise my petals will wilt. And that is why I give myself to death every day. I die and am reborn.
I have also already died the death of others. But now I am dying intoxicated with life. And I bless the warmth of the living body that withers the white lilies.
Desire, no longer moved by hope, calms and longs for nothing. …
I will be the impalpable substance that has no memory of the year before.51
Heavily sedated, she was still dictating words to Olga on the morning of December 9, 1977.
Sudden lack of air. Long before the metamorphosis and my indisposition, I had already noticed in a painting in my house a beginning.
I, I, if memory serves, shall die.
And you do not know how much a person weighs who has no strength. Give me your hand, because I have to hold it so that nothing hurts this much.52
The day before her death, Olga Borelli reported, Clarice Lispector suffered a powerful hemorrhage.
She turned very pale and lost a great deal of blood. Desperate, she got up from her bed and walked toward the door, wanting to leave the room. The nurse stopped her there. Clarice looked at her angrily and said, distressed:
“You killed my character!”53
After their first meeting seven years before, Clarice wrote Olga Borelli that she hoped to have her near at the hour of her death. Now, at ten-thirty in the morning of December 9, 1977, she died holding Olga’s hand.
“She became her own fiction,” wrote Paulo Francis. “It is the best possible epitaph for Clarice.”54
Epilogue
Clarice Lispector could not be buried the following day, her fifty-seventh birthday, because it fell on the Sabbath. On December 11, 1977, in the Israelite Cemetery of Cajú, not far from the port where Macabéa spent her rare off-hours, Clarice Lispector was laid to rest in the Orthodox ritual. Four women from the burial society, the Chevra Kadisha, washed her body inside and out, wrapped it in a white linen sheet, placed her head on a pillow filled with earth, and nailed her inside a simple wooden coffin. The Ninety-first Psalm, the funeral prayer El malei rachamim, and the burial Kaddish were read. There were no speeches from among the mourners. Three spadefuls of dirt were tossed upon the coffin as the words from Genesis rang out: “Dust you are and unto dust you shall return.”
On the tombstone, engraved in Hebrew, the hidden name: Chaya bat Pinkhas. Chaya, daughter of Pinkhas.
Do not read what I write as a reader would do. Unless this reader works, he too, in the soliloquies of the irrational dark.
If this book ever comes out, may the profane recoil from it. Since writing is a sacred thing which no infidel can enter. I am making a really bad book on purpose in order to drive off the profane who want to “like.” But a small group will see that this “liking” is superficial and will enter inside what I am truly writing, which is neither “bad” nor “good.”
Inspiration is like a mysterious scent of amber. I have a small piece of amber with me. The scent makes me the sister of the sacred orgies of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Blessed be your loves. Could it be that I am afraid to take the step of dying at this very instant? Careful not to die. Yet I am already in the future. This future of mine that shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book cry a halleluiah for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and silly book of life then forget me. May God bless you then and this book ends well. That I might at last find respite. May peace be upon us, upon you, and upon me. Am I falling into discourse? may the temple’s faithful forgive me: I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.
—CLARICE LISPECTOR
(1920–1977)
Before the deluge, the family gathers for a wedding in the Ukraine, circa 1917. Clarice’s older sisters, Elisa and Tania, are the little girls in the front row, left; behind them, their parents, Pinkhas and Mania. Seated front row center are Dora and Israel Wainstok, who would join the Lispectors in Recife.
Clarice’s mother, Mania Krimgold, martyred in the Ukrainian pogroms. The specter of her dying mother would forever haunt Clarice.
Pinkhas Lispector, the “brilliant mathematician” whose ambitions, thwarted by persecution and exile, would be redeemed by the dazzling achievement of his youngest daughter.
The document that saved the family, a Russian passport issued at Bucharest in 1922, valid for travel to Brazil. The baby, Clarice, would have no memory of the Ukrainian horrors.
The family in Brazil: Clarice clings to her paralyzed mother.
The sisters in Recife: Tania, Elisa, and Clarice.
The Praça Maciel Pinheiro, Recife, known to the Jews as the pletzele. At right, the house the Lispectors lived in, so rickety that they were afraid it was going to fall over. It is still there today.
Clarice in Recife.
In Rio de Janeiro. The adolescent Clarice was already strikingly beautiful.
Clarice’s first love, standing on Ipanema Beach. The gay writer Lúcio Cardoso was unavailable.
Shortly before his death, Clarice traveled to Minas Gerais with her beloved father for one of his rare holidays.
“More than just sisters”: Clarice and Tania in Rio.
“Hurricane Clarice”: Near to the Wild Heart, the work of an unknown twenty-three-year-old girl, astonished the intellectual and artistic world of Brazil when it appeared at the end of 1943.
Clarice with the man she married shortly after the publication of her novel, the young diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente.
The homeless infant refugee returns to her native continent as an embassy wife: here, on the balcony of her apartment in ravaged Naples.
As Giorgio de Chirico was painting Clarice’s portrait in his studio in the Piazza di Spagna, Rome, they heard a newsboy announce that the war was over.
Clarice with her diplomatic circle in Rome. Seated, left to right: Clarice’s sister-in-law Eliane Gurgel Valente; Vasco Leitão da Cunha, consul in Rome; Clarice; Açucena Borges da Fonseca. Standing, left to right: Mário Soares Brandão; Clarice�
��s husband, Maury; Landulpho Borges da Fonseca; and Maury’s brother, and Eliane’s husband, Mozart Gurgel Valente.
Clarice and Maury (left) on Mount Vesuvius, which had erupted shortly before their arrival in Italy.
Bluma Wainer and Clarice together in Bern, April 1946. Married to the powerful journalist Samuel Wainer, who was posted in Paris, the impressive Bluma would die young, not long after returning from Europe.
Clarice in Bern, with the newborn Pedro, named for her heroic late father.
Elisa Lispector, herself a respected novelist, chose solitude as her great theme.
In her diplomatic state, Clarice at a reception in Washington, heavily pregnant with Paulo.
Clarice at home in Chevy Chase with Alzira Vargas. In her grief, the daughter of the suicidal dictator grew close to the writer.
With Paulo: Clarice, newly popular since her return to her homeland, was becoming a figure of legend, universally known by her first name only.
Clarice, her two sons, and a friend on Leme Beach, with then glamorous Copacabana behind them. In 1959 Clarice finally returned to the country she had so longed for during her years abroad.
Clarice at home in Leme.
Clarice Lispector, surrounded by other leading intellectuals, marches against the dictatorship on June 22, 1968. From left to right: the painter Carlos Scliar; Clarice Lispector; Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brasília; the actress Glauce Rocha; the cartoonist Ziraldo; and the musician Milton Nascimento.
With one of her oldest friends, Fernando Sabino.
The mutt Ulisses, named for the mysterious painter or psychiatrist in Switzerland who had been in love with her. The smoking, drinking dog was himself a legend in Rio de Janeiro.
Clarice at home in the 1970s, surrounded by books and scattered manuscripts.
On her last visit to her hometown of Recife, Clarice signs books with her faithful friend Olga Borelli looking over her shoulder.
The writer toward the end of her life.
In her only televised interview, months before her death, Clarice enigmatically announced that she would be publishing a book with “thirteen names, thirteen titles.” This was The Hour of the Star, composed of loose notes, written on checks, scraps of paper, and even boxes of cigarettes.
In The Hour of the Star she announces her death; a few days after its publication she would be taken to the hospital. In this fragment, she writes: “Do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing.”
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