Rio de Janeiro –
December, 9th 1977 10:30 a.m. It was only a
day before her fifty-seventh birthday, when, due to cancer, the prodigious Brazilian
writer Clarice Lispector departed from this transitory universe of humans to
perpetuate her existence through some precious writings which overflowed her
complex feminine soul. The numerous connoisseurs of her pulsing nature and her
intrepid-sensitive force became orphans of her epiphanic words and literary
world. Although enriched by an immortal legacy that would remain in tales,
chronicles and novels, all of her work would be unfinished for sharing and even
her posthumous works and her unpublished stories faded along with Clarice.
Meanwhile, long
after her death, numerous controversies concerning her private life came to
public notice when the Clarice Lispector Archive was inaugurated in the Museum
of Brazilian Literature at the House of Rui Barbosa Foundation in September
1987, exhibiting a collection of personal documents of the writer donated by
her son, Paulo Gurgel Valente. After a closer look at some postcards, letters
exchanged between friends/ relatives, snippets of literary writings, and so
many written papers about events, it was clear she was the one who signed a
column under the pseudonym Helen Palmer in the Correio da Manhã newspaper published between August 1959 and
February 1961.
Surely, that
was not one her biggest secrets. In fact, it was not even a fact to hide. Many
of her friends, especially the closest ones, knew that Clarice chose Tereza
Quadros as a pen name to sign a column
writer Ruber Braga invited her to write, from May to October 1952, in a tabloid
called Comício. They were also aware
that, as of April 1960, she was the hand behind the column entitled ‘Just for
Women’, published in Diário da Noite,
signed by the model and actress Ilka Soares. Undoubtedly, Clarice kept
something far beyond her introspective lyricism, something that would exhaust
the interpretation of her hermetic texts and the revelation of her aliases. It
was a mystery that challenged logic, a puzzle that persisted out of her oblique
melancholy eyes.
It is believed
that she had only accepted to participate in the First World Congress of
Witchcraft, held in Bogota, Colombia, in August 1975, because she was already
fully convinced that the cyclical capacity for renewal came from a supreme
force, far more intricate than the religious conflicts she felt. Perhaps that
was true. Perhaps that was not. Maybe more about that inexplicable feeling
could have been noted if, under the guise of a sudden malaise, she had not
given up reading the text about magic she had written for her presentation instead
of having written a different speech.
In fact, Clarice wanted to be buried in St. John the Baptist
Cemetery. In deference to her Jewish customs concerning the Shabbat, she could
only be buried on Sunday. It is known that her body rests in tomb #123, row G,
in Israeli Communal Cemetery, located in Caju, a neighborhood in the Northern
Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Coincidentally, it is located next to the place where
her character Macabéa used to spent her spare time. However, like all the
extraordinary people who make their lives a journey, it is assumed that Clarice
had surely taken a fraction of irrevocable lessons with herself. Perhaps the
most obscure cases, such as the most secretive episodes and unfinished
writings, were left behind, shrouded in shadows, waiting to be unraveled – for
instance, it is unknown the real reason she had created those aliases.
Clarice has an unfathomable existence, and her interests
were the antagonistic as they were voracious: faith and skepticism walked
alongside fear and anguish of living. She felt happy not to cry in the face of
sadness, and claimed that crying gave her comfort. She was indifferent, but
humanist. Tedious and intriguing; reserved and intimate; foreign and native;
Jewish and Christian; lesbian and housewife; man and mother; witch and saint.
Ukrainian, Brazilian, Northeasterner and Carioca. Authorities asserted that she
was right-wing, others claimed she was a communist. She spoke seven languages,
but her nationality was always questioned. At birth, she was registered Chaya
Pinkhasovna, and died Clarice Lispector.
After all, why was the most studied Brazilian writer in the
world known as The Great Witch of Brazilian Literature? What kind of bond
Clarice have possibly established with the universe of witchcraft? One of her
closest friends, journalist and writer Otto Lara Resende always warned readers:
‘You should be careful with Clarice. This is not just literature, it’s
witchcraft.’
Certainly, even today, many of her readers are completely
unaware of her close involvement with occult practices, either ignore her deep
interest in Kabbalistic magic. Her participation in the Witchcraft Convention
could be just another rumor among many others surrounding the fanciful imagery
of her name.
In spite of this rumors, it is noted that Clarice had
different mystical habits, mainly linked to her beliefs in the power of certain
numbers. For her, numbers 5 (five), 7 (seven) and 13 (thirteen) represented a
magic symbolism, a kind of karmic identity. In her creative process was coffee,
cigarettes and a typewriter in her lap, and she always marked 7 (seven) spaces
before each opening paragraph. On several occasions she did not hesitate to ask
her friend Olga Borelli to finish the last few paragraphs of her texts judiciously
marked on page number 13 (thirteen).
Once, she wrote: ‘Seven is the number of men. The deepest
wound heals in seven days if the destroyer is not around [...] Number seven was
my secret, Kabbalistic number. There are seven notes with which you can compose
all the songs that exist and that will exist.’ There is a recurrence of ‘theosophical
additions,’ numbers that can be summed up to reveal a magic amount. The year
1978, for example, has a sum that results equal to seven: 1 + 9 + 7+ 8 = 25,
and 2 + 5 = 7. ‘I assure you that 1978 will be the one true Kabbalistic year. Therefore,
I commanded to polish the instants of time, to shine the stars, to wash the
moon with milk, and the sun with liquid gold. Every year, I start to live
another life.’
Even though she died only few weeks before the beginning of
that Kabbalist year, all these ritualistic customs undoubtedly clarified the
real reason she had accepted with care and enthusiasm the unexpected invitation
from the Colombian writer and occultist Sorcerer Simon to participate as a
guest in the First World Congress of Witchcraft he was organizing.
December
14th, 1958.
8:15 p.m.
Satin night dress, messy
hair, blurred make-up. A tense body facing the typewriter. Restless breathing,
furrowed brow, stiff neck, and a turgid look trying to sidestep the letters,
numbers, and signs marked on dirty keys, cleared by the low yellowish light of
a small porcelain lamp placed on a rustic dresser with four closed drawers.
Dilated pupils, rapid
heart rate, increased frantic blood pressure and adrenal glands secreting
copious quantities of adrenaline. Muscles of legs contracted, minimisation of
blood flow in the intestines, feet tingling on the cold floor, a line of pain
in the abdomen. One trembling hand repeatedly taking a cigarette from the
ashtray and bringing it to the edges of her lips moistened with a non-expensive
wine.
It was not the first
time Helen had that unpleasant feeling of mediocrity, and even having predicted
that after a lasting feeling inertia, everything would return to normal, a
fearful thinking coerced her that time was going to be different. She felt
unable, incapable of exceeding the limit of her embarrassment. She had the
disgusted impression of having turned into a perpetual prisoner of her own
story. She saw herself completely tied when that damn thirteenth chapter got
her stuck as if some obstacle or some future negative motivation in that plot
was preventing her to keep on writing.
Exasperated, she took a
sip from the bottleneck and a drag on a cigarette. Behind the cloud of smoke
continually exhaled, she glimpsed the blank page, waiting for the next words
that had disappeared with her quiet. Nothing seemed to make sense. In her
disturbed mind, now roamed whirls of disconnected thoughts. Her ideas became
inaccurate, her intentions and faculties were as disorganized as that huge mess
accumulated in pieces and piles of papers on that filthy floor of the room in a
modest pension where she had chosen to hide.
With the mind exhausted, emotions disturbed
and nerves touched, she felt a dreadful will to cry, but hold the tears
pressing the jaw with the teeth. Magnified and inert,
she wanted scream her agony until her throat exploded out. Instead, she
swallowed the anger, and kept quiet. Anguish suffocated her thoracic cavity
walls, making it difficult for air to go into her lungs. This gave her an undefined
grief, an unknown anxiety for something which fatally was about to happen and there
was nothing she could do to stop.
That feisty and
tormenting angry was spreading in a turbulent challenge to hold back the
impulse to throw the typewriter out of the window. That made her express a
passive feeling. She wielded a pencil sharpener blade, and even though it was unbending,
she gave up that almost uncontrollable urge to nail it in her chest. She wanted
to mutilate herself, to punish herself, and desperately needed to take out this
wrath to express her anger.
Swept away by an
indistinguishable fury, she collected the fingers and thought of punching it in
one of her eyes, but she soon could control herself. She thought of scratching
the side of her face with her nails, tried to pull her hair, to slap and bite
herself. Then, sunk in ambiguous impulses and taken by wild drives, she was not
able to curb her right hand holding a glowing tip cigarette upside down, moved steadily
toward her legs and slowly rubbed that red ember on her left knee, unburdening
all her wrath.
Little by little, the
shoulder joints relaxed the arms resting on the chair, while all the frenzy
gradually decreased: the brain and the forehead slowly cooled, and the ears
relaxed in snaps of decompression. The pain became a kind of subterfuge
disguised as a relief, a medicine a greater inner disease. It was a warning
that yet completely disoriented, her flesh was still acting to external
stimuli.
Being happy or being
sad was indifferent. Having the publishers rejected her books and kept them on
shelves for years did not affect her to any less discouragement. There was an infinite
reason greater than a cheap wish for being appreciated. She did not write for
ideology, nor to be judged by the punitive perspectives of literary critics.
Nor to ogle over varied temptations of fame or a vanity. She wrote for urgency,
for an almost vital necessity to stay lucid. She did it to scare away the
bitterness, to exorcise old demons. The letters worked as understandable words,
and become the only remaining sobriety of introspection.
Without a correct perception
of time afflicted by sleepless nights, Clarice no longer remembered of having
contracted that condition to a phobia. Aversion was spontaneous, and panic
attacks were hideous just to imagine herself wandering in the streets full of
people. She had a grudge to fairs, trembling and perspiring cold just thinking
about that trite commotion of downtown area. She did not use to go to the
masses, and never, under any circumstances, was near beaches for she strongly
disliked the sea. The waves brought of a past so nefarious that she would
rather erase it from memory.
Doubtful and without
any prospect of improvement, she chose to be confined and started living alone,
hidden from everyone and everything. She did not have any friends, did not
visit relatives, and did not got involved in any love affairs - possibly
because of her animosity or of obedience to her physical instincts. Apart from
the characters she created, anyone else knew about her daily life. In a barren
experience on the continuous solitary act of writing was found a way to beat
her biggest traumas.
She was not rich or
lived in poverty either, her financial situation was reasonable financial. The good
economic conditions of his foster father allowed her to live some whims. She
could travel the world, meet different civilizations, connect with interesting
and well-educated people. However, she knew that nothing and nobody could fill
that vast emptiness, that deep displeasure. Wherever she goes, her mind was not
there. She had a life inside herself, and rather enjoyed reality of her lies
than watched the made-up truths of her transitional shelters.
Out of social
interaction, she sporadically sought for refuge. Most of the time after having
finished a book, she moved to a different place to avoid the risk of being
mocked or found. For so, anonymously cloistered, she stayed in hostels, hostels
and pensions, hotels, without anyone - not even Jovino Andrade - suspect that
behind that indistinct figure holed up in different streets and neighborhoods
in the capital of Bahia was, in fact, a secret identity of a bizarre writer.
A few months later,
however, all that isolated eccentricity made her turn into a silent hostage of
her own creations. Her monotony blended with the plots of her writings, the inviting
adventures of intrigues seduced her overshadowed routine, and her unpleasant
impressions confused with the intimate sensation with which she described to designed
her characters.
Thus, as much as her unusual
behavior challenged normality, and as much as her nomad action challenged the
pragmatic governing sense, there was - at least for her - a coherent meaning to
act that way: bordering insanity and dueling against all logic.
_________
