Chronicle of the Murdered House

by Lúcio Cardoso

  Copyright © Estate of Lúcio Cardoso, 1959Translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, 2016Biographical Note copyright © Benjamin Moser, 2016First published in Brazil as Crônica da casa assassinada

  First edition, 2016

  All rights reserved

  Map (pp. ii-iii) is from the 1st ed. of the original 1959 publication in Portuguese. Painting (p. viii) is from Benjamin Moser’s personal collection.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Names: Cardoso, Lúcio, 1912-1968, author. | Moser, Benjamin, writer ofintroduction. | Costa, Margaret Jull, translator. Title: Chronicle of the murdered house / Lúcio Cardoso; translated byMargaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson; introduction by Benjamin Moser. Other titles: Crônica de casa assassinada. EnglishDescription: Rochester, NY Open Letter, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2016020063 (print) | LCCN 2016024405 (ebook) | ISBN 9781940953519 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Families—Brazil—Minas Gerais—Fiction. | Gay men—Brazil—Minas Gerais—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Classics. | FICTION / Gay. | HISTORY / Latin America / South America. Classification: LCC PQ9697.C256 C713 2016 (print) | LCC PQ9697.C256 (ebook) | DDC 869.3/42—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020063

  Work published with the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture / National Library FoundationObra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  For Vito Pentagna

  Biographical Note: Bette Davis in Yoknapatawpha

  by Benjamin Moser

  I keep a tiny watercolor on a bookshelf in my house. It is only a few inches square, slightly larger than a playing card. To all appearances, it is the work of a child: some dabs of color transversed by two black slashes. It looks like something an encouraging parent might have stuck to the refrigerator—but it may be the most poignant thing I own.

  In the bottom right corner, in tiny script, someone—not the artist—has written LÚCIO 62. Those characters let it be dated to within a few weeks. It was made in the last days of 1962 by the Brazilian writer Lúcio Cardoso, fifty years old and at the height of his powers when he suffered a stroke on December 7. He would linger another six years, paralyzed, unable to speak or write, devoting his remaining time to making paintings like these. This smear is what remained of one of the most prodigiously gifted artists of twentieth-century Brazil.

  It is tempting to read symbols into these blotches. Are those black lines a sign of despair? Is that yellow half-circle a setting sun?

  •

  Today, Lúcio Cardoso is primarily remembered for two things: being gay, and being loved by Clarice Lispector, from whose great name his is inseparable. While still a student, the eighteen-year-old Clarice took a job at a government propaganda outfit called the Agência Nacional. There, among the bored young staff, was Lúcio, a twenty-six-year-old from a small town who was already hailed as one of the most talented writers of his generation.

  His father, Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso, had studied engineering but left university without a degree, due to the death of his own father. He then headed into the backlands of the interior state of Minas Gerais, where he enjoyed a period of great prosperity, at one time accumulating eight thousand head of cattle, only to be forced to hand over his fortune to a textile factory owner to whom he was indebted. After the death of his wife, he created a soap factory; but his volatile personality brought him trouble with the local merchants, who boycotted his products. His business ventures failed, Joaquim and his second wife, Dona Nhanhá, raised their six children in relative poverty.

  Their town of Curvelo was typical of the backwoods of Minas Gerais, a state said to imprint a special character on its inhabitants, and one whose personality occupies a prominent place in Brazilian mythology. The mineiros, the stereotype goes, are tight-fisted, wary, and religious; there is a joke that Minas dining tables have drawers built into them, the better, at the first approach of a visitor, to hide food from potential guests. It is a place where mannered elocutions play an important role in the local language. Nobody in Minas is crazy, or louco; the preferred euphemism is “systematic.” There is a taboo against overt descriptions of medical procedures: “They opened him, and closed him back up” is the most that can be conceded of a surgery. A mineiro, above all, does not draw attention to himself. One native, returning home from São Paulo, recalls his puzzlement at being the object of amazed stares. He finally realized that it was because he was wearing a red shirt.

  That was in the capital, Belo Horizonte, one of Brazil’s largest and most modern cities, in the 1960s. Four decades earlier, in the no-name village of Curvelo, it was presumably even easier to provoke a scandal. And nobody did it quite as well as Joaquin and Nhanhá Cardoso’s youngest son, Lúcio, who refused to go to school, was obsessed with movie stars, and played with dolls. This last point especially galled his father, who fought with his wife about it. “It’s your fault,” he would charge, “you brought him up clinging to your skirts, and the result is this queer. Where did you ever hear of a boy playing with dolls? Why doesn’t he like playing with the other boys? He’s a nervous child who’s never going to amount to anything.”

  It was impossible to keep him in school, but he was curious about everything, and his older sister, Maria Helena, who became the best chronicler of his life, oriented his reading. This ranged from Dostoyevsky to the romantic novels serialized in the newspapers, which Lúcio and Maria Helena followed avidly. In his teens, the family moved to Rio de Janeiro, and he was sent to boarding school, where he was predictably miserable, and he eventually ended up working at an insurance company, A Equitativa, run by his uncle. “I was always a terrible employee,” he said. “All I did was write poetry.”

  But he was finally free and in the capital. He was twenty-two when, in 1934, with the help of the Catholic poet and industrialist Augusto Frederico Schmidt, he published his first novel, Maleita. By the time he published his third novel, The Light in the Basement, two years later, he had attracted the attention of Brazil’s ultimate cultural arbiter, Mário de Andrade, who dispatched a typically colorful letter from São Paulo. “Artistically it is terrible,” Andrade thundered. “Socially it is detestable. But I understood its point . . . to return the spiritual dimension to the materialistic literature that is now being made in Brazil. God has returned to stir the face of the waters. Finally.”

  •

  One reason for Mário de Andrade’s enthusiasm, no matter how grudgingly expressed, was that Lúcio Cardoso’s early books represented a real revolution in Brazilian literature. This literature had been nationalistic, consumed with questions of Brazil and Brazilianness: “Whoever examines the Brazilian literature of the present day immediately recognizes its primary trait, a certain instinct of nationality,” Brazil’s classic novelist Machado de Assis wrote in 1873. “Poetry, novels, all … dress themselves in the colors of the country.” The result was that Brazilian literature was mostly a literature about Brazil, and only to a much lesser degree a literature written by Brazilians. It was local, regional, and patriotic, written by self-conscious Brazilians dedicated to creating, or opposing, a certain image of Brazil. They celebrated the country’s particularities—its natural beauty, its history, its popular culture, the heritage of the Indian and the African—and they denounced its social problems, its poverty, its injustice, its failu
re to live up to its apparently limitless potential. Most often they did both.

  This literature, above all, was materialistic, rather than spiritual, which is why Mário de Andrade, despite his reservations about the book’s artistic and social qualities, welcomed Lúcio Cardoso’s The Light in the Basement. God had, indeed, returned to stir the waters. Lúcio was not the first godly writer to appear in those years: there was the “introspective school,” whose concerns were less social and national than internal and spiritual. Many of these writers were Catholic, and many, like Mário de Andrade himself, were gay. In that time and place, the alliance with religion made more sense than it would later seem. The Church was a logical home, and not only because it had always been full of gay men, offering redemption to those weighed down by the awareness of sin. Such people did not see art as a way of addressing social issues, or of refining the national language, or of asserting the preeminence of one political party over another. Their mission was much more urgent: they sought to be saved through art. Writing was for them a spiritual exercise, not an intellectual one.

  •

  Fellow writer Clarice Lispector was not the only one to fall in love with Lúcio. He was strikingly handsome, brilliantly witty, and endlessly creative. “It just poured out of him!” said a friend. He would sit in cafés, writing one page after another, tearing one sheet out of the typewriter and immediately beginning another. He completed his novel Inácio in a mere four days. “What a verbal talent he had, my God, Lúcio Cardoso,” another friend recalled. “And what an ability to work, even though he stayed out all night drinking. He got up early and wrote, wrote, wrote. What he published isn’t half of what he wrote.”

  Lúcio was a natural writer, a natural talker, and a natural seducer. On his first meeting with Luiz Carlos Lacerda, a teenager who later became a well-known film director, he scribbled off a poem for him and then took him back to his apartment. Lacerda, young and naïve, assumed they would live happily ever after. A few days later he was devastated when he went to Lúcio’s apartment in Ipanema, saw the light on, rang the doorbell, and got no answer. After waiting a while he saw another boy emerge and understood that he had been just another notch on the bedpost.

  But Lúcio never had a lasting relationship. As anguished and tormented as the characters in his books, he apparently never wanted one either, though he was constantly falling in love with different men. When he died, Clarice wrote, “In so many things, we were so fantastic that, if it hadn’t been for the impossibility, we might have gotten married.” Clarice’s friend Rosa Cass disagrees, seeing a different impossibility. “It wasn’t just that he was gay,” she emphasizes. “They were too much alike. He needed his solitude, he was a ‘star,’ unearthly. The two of them would have been an impossible couple.” This was probably just as well, because anecdotes suggest that Lúcio would have made a difficult spouse.

  “Lúcio went crazy, Helena,” a coworker told his sister when she arrived at his office in downtown Rio. “He sold me a suit because he needed money and now he’s amusing himself by throwing bills and coins out of the window, half of what I just paid him.” “I went to the window,” Maria Helena writes, “laughing myself. Below, the Rua Álvaro Alvim was full of people, and more were streaming in every minute, attracted by the noise of the crowd chasing after the money that was ceaselessly falling from that miraculous window.”

  The prankishness also had a dark side. Once he told people that he had hired someone to kill him, the better to comprehend the feeling of being persecuted. He did not need to resort to such theatrics. The tenants’ union in his building tried to kick him out in a letter that made reference to Oscar Wilde. He himself repeatedly tried to correct his homosexuality, sometimes even punishing himself like a medieval penitent. “This perpetual tendency to self-destruction,” he wrote. “Yes, it has long been inside me, and I know it as a sick man comes to understand his own illness.” He began to drink.

  •

  Lúcio features in Clarice Lispector’s longest and most ambitious piece of early writing, an enigmatic novella from October 1941 called “Obsession.” It introduces a dark character, Daniel, who will reappear at length in her second novel, The Chandelier, published in 1946: Lúcio Cardoso, the seductive guide through occult realms. He had a direct hand in her first novel. “Groping in the darkness,” she pieced the book together by jotting down ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. Lúcio assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves, and suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph. The title, Near to the Wild Heart, became famous, it stands out in Clarice’s work, perhaps because it sounds so mannered, so much like the title of a teen romance, so much like—one might say—the title of a book by Lúcio Cardoso. Clarice left Rio soon after its publication, living abroad for the best part of the next two decades.

  Lúcio, however, remained in Rio, writing one book after another, trying, almost singlehandedly, to remake Brazilian culture. The boy who had dreamed of film stars in his small backwater in Minas Gerais set up his own Chamber Theater. “Lúcio Cardoso—I remember well—attributed great importance to his work in the theater,” said his friend the novelist Otávio de Faria. “It was inevitable, since he himself was essentially more a ‘tragedian’ than a novelist.” His theatrical work was artistically avant-garde and politically far ahead of his time, nowhere more than in racial questions. Though slavery had not been outlawed until 1888, within the living memory of many Brazilians, the country’s elite held as a doctrine of faith that the country did not suffer racial divisions. He participated in the Black Experimental Theater of Abdias do Nascimento, an early Afro-Brazilian activist, writing a biblical drama called The Prodigal Son, performed with an all-black cast. If such productions were radical in the United States, they were unheard-of in Brazil.

  Despite all the group’s efforts, the play flopped. His sister recalled her “anguish seeing Pascola, the most renowned theater critic of the day, snoozing in the front row.” Undaunted, convinced that theater was a weak area in Brazilian culture, Lúcio produced his own The Silver String in 1947. “I cannot recall a more carefully prepared, better worked-out, more impressive spectacle for our little group around Lúcio,” Otávio de Faria recalled. “Ester Leão was the director and Lúcio Cardoso submitted (though, it is true, sometimes almost screaming) to all her demands. Sometimes I saw him on the verge of tears. It doesn’t matter. The play opened, and the actress Alma Flora got almost all the applause.” Enthusiasm ran high, as always with Lúcio’s undertakings. “I remember it like it was today,” de Faria continued, adding:

  Lúcio Cardoso, wild about the new “diva” (he never got over his “passion” for Italian film divas), ordered up a huge “banquet,” at Lapa 49, to commemorate Alma Flora’s breakthrough. No end to the beer and the fresh crabs—except that there wasn’t any money to pay for it . . . and there, in the middle of the table, a magnificent centerpiece of red roses (red, of course! . . .) dedicated to the diva being honored. It was a great party, one of the few happy, successful ones I can remember. It really was a breakthrough—not for Alma Flora, nor for Maria Sampaio (another actress, splendid, by the way), nor for Ester Leão, a notable director—but for Lúcio Cardoso, one of our greatest playwrights.

  The inevitable hangover soon arrived. “Despite this great success, even ‘d’estime’ (in relation to the earlier plays), it was still a complete professional failure. It vanished without a trace.”

  But it was typical of Lúcio to infect a group of Brazil’s most talented artists, an astonishing number of whom participated in this production alone, with his extravagant dreams. “Ipanema ought to be called ‘Lúcio Cardoso,’” one friend said. “I am not a writer,” he himself said, “I am an atmosphere.” His sister Maria Helena captured the
power of his irrepressible enthusiasm:

  I remember Nonô [her pet name for him] so joyful, his head full of fantasies, especially when thinking of traveling, and still young, with several books published and many still to be written, deciding to be a rancher someday. Infected by his enthusiasm, by the power of his faith and of his imagination, I seriously believed in all his whims, even the most impossible things. For me, it was all feasible, nothing was impossible for him, whom I admired above all else: novels, poems, beautiful plantations conjured out of nothing. His slightest dreams were realities for me, such was the force of his imagination.

  Yet his failures, too, were typical. Despite his volcanic creativity and the admiration he inspired from the leading artists of his generation, Lúcio would never enjoy the fame to which his talent seemed to entitle him. His theatrical ventures had come to nothing, and his writing was met with incomprehension. In 1959 he published his masterpiece, Chronicle of the Murdered House, a long novel set in his native Minas Gerais, an attack on “Minas, in its flesh and spirit,” a meditation on good and evil and God.

  Its setting, the decaying mansion of the once-grand Meneses family, and its themes, including the ways that one generation’s sins are visited upon its descendants, are redolent of Faulkner; but its charm resides in the ways Lúcio marries those themes to what can only be called camp: as if Bette Davis had wandered, bewigged and in full makeup, into Yoknapatawpha. The figure of Timóteo, the semi-deranged cross-dressing scion of the decadent dynasty, has no precedents in Brazilian literature, and, almost certainly, no descendants: a not-quite-caricature of a man trapped between his own nature and the expectations of family and society, and who, unable to escape, wavers between alcoholism and hysteria. The character of Timóteo may be seen as representing all those gay people, in Brazil or anywhere else, for whom an adequate language had not been found, and who desperately sought some means of expression.