The Complete Stories (55 page)

Eyes wide open.

Eyes wide open.

Eyes wide open.

That was when she remembered the vials of sleeping pills that had been her mother’s. She remembered her father: careful, Leontina, with the dosage, one too many could be fatal. I, Leontina would answer, don’t want to leave this good life behind so soon, and I’ll take just two little pills, enough to sleep soundly and wake up all rosy for my little husband.

That’s right, thought Margarida das Flores no Jardim,
§
to get some nice, sound sleep and wake up rosy. She went to her mother’s room, opened a drawer to the left of the big double bed—and indeed found three vials full of tablets. She was going to take two pills to start the day rosy. She didn’t have bad intentions. She went to get the pitcher and a glass. She opened one of the vials: took out two little pills. They tasted like mold and sugar. She didn’t notice the slightest bad intention in herself. But no one in the world will know. And now no one will ever be able to tell whether it happened due to some sort of imbalance or ultimately due to a great balance: glassful after glassful she swallowed each and every pill from the three big vials. But on the second vial she thought for the first time in her life: “I.” And it wasn’t merely a rehearsal: it was in fact a debut. All of her was debuting at last. And even before they ran out, she was already feeling something in her legs, better than anything she’d ever felt. She didn’t even know it was Sunday. She didn’t have the strength to go to her own room: she let herself collapse on the bed where she’d been conceived. It was one day less. Vaguely she thought: if only Augusta had left me a raspberry tart.

Appendix: T
h
e Useless Explanation

Clarice Lispector rarely commented on her own writing, or on anyone else’s. Here, presumably in response to a query, she describes the genesis of
Family Ties
.
Th
is text
appears in the “Back of the Drawer” section of
 The Foreign Legion.

It is not easy to remember how and why I wrote a story or a novel. Once they detach from me, I too find them unfamiliar. It’s not a “trance,” but the concentration during the writing seems to take away the awareness of whatever isn’t writing itself. There is something, however, that I can try to reconstruct, if it really matters, and if it answers what I have been asked.

What I remember of the story “Happy Birthday,” for example, is the impression of a party that was no different from other birthdays; but it was a stifling summer day, and I don’t think I even put the idea of summer in the story. I had an “impression,” from which a few vague lines resulted, set down just for the enjoyment and necessity of deepening a feeling. Years later, when I came across these lines, the whole story was born, with the speed of someone transcribing a previously witnessed scene—yet none of what I wrote happened at that or any other party. Much later a friend asked me whose grandmother that was. I answered that she was someone else’s grandmother. Two days later the true answer came to me spontaneously, and with surprise: I discovered that the grandmother was my very own, and all I had known of her, as a child, was a picture, nothing more.

“Mystery in São Cristóvão” is a mystery to me: I went on writing it calmly like someone unwinding a ball of yarn. I didn’t encounter the least difficulty. I believe that the absence of difficulty arose from the very conception of the story: its atmosphere may have needed this detached attitude of mine, a certain non-participation. The lack of difficulty might have been an internal technique, an approach, delicateness, feigned distraction.

Of “Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady” I know I had so much fun that it really was a pleasure to write. While the work lasted, I was always in a good mood unlike usual days and, though others never quite noticed, I would speak in the Portuguese style, making, it seems to me, an experiment with language. It was great to write about the Portuguese woman.

Of “Family Ties” I recall nothing.

Of the story “Love” I remember two things: one, while writing, the intensity with which I unexpectedly ended up with the character in an uncalculated Botanical Garden, and from which we nearly didn’t manage to get out, from being so surrounded in vines, and half-hypnotized—to the point that I had to make my character call the guard to open the gates that were already shut, or else we would still be living there to this day. The second thing I remember is a friend reading the typed story to critique it, and I, upon hearing it in a human and familiar voice, having the sudden impression that only at that instant was it born, and born fully made, as a child is born. That was the best moment of all: the story was given to me there, and I received it, or there I gave it and it was received, or both things that are one.

Of “The Dinner” I know nothing.

“A Chicken” was written in about half an hour. Someone had commissioned a column from me, I was trying without exactly trying, and I ended up not turning it in; until one day I realized that it was a fully rounded story, and felt with what love I had written it. I also saw I had written a story, and that in it was the fondness I’d always had for animals, one of the accessible forms of people.

“Beginnings of a Fortune” was written more to see what would come of trying out a technique so light that it merely gets interspersed with the story. I dove right in and was guided only by curiosity. Another practice scale.

“Preciousness” is a little irritating, I ended up disliking the girl, and then asking her forgiveness for disliking her, and at the moment of asking forgiveness feeling like not asking after all. I ended up sorting out her life more to unburden my conscience and from responsibility than from love. Writing like that isn’t worth it, it gets you caught up in the wrong way, tests the patience. I have the impression that, even if I could make this story into a good one, it intrinsically wouldn’t be worthwhile.

“Imitation of the Rose” made use of several fathers and mothers to be born. There was the initial shock of the news that someone had fallen ill, without my understanding why. On that same day there were roses sent to me, and that I shared with a friend. There was that constant in everyone’s life, which is the rose as flower. And there was all the rest that I don’t know, and that is the fertile ground of any story. “Imitation” gave me a chance to use a monotonous tone that satisfies me very much: repetition pleases me, and repetition happening in the same place ends up digging down bit by bit, the same old song ad nauseam says something.

“The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher” used to be called “The Crime,” and was published. Years later I understood that the story simply hadn’t been written. So I wrote it. I nevertheless have the lingering impression that it remains not written. I still don’t understand the mathematics teacher, though I know that he is what I said.

“The Smallest Woman in the World” reminds me of Sunday, springtime in Washington, child falling asleep on my lap in the middle of an outing, the first heat of May—while the smallest woman in the world (an item read in the newspaper) was intensifying all this in a place that seems to me the birthplace of the world: Africa. I think this story too came from my love of animals; it seems to me that I feel animals as one of the things still very close to God, material that didn’t invent itself, a thing still warm from its own birth; and, nonetheless, a thing already getting up on its feet, and already living fully, and in each minute living all at once, never just bit by bit, never sparing itself, never wasting itself.

“The Buffalo” reminds me very vaguely of a face that I saw on a woman or on several, or on men; and one of the thousand visits I’ve made to zoos. That time, a tiger looked at me, I looked at him, he held my gaze, I did not, and I got out of there until today. The story has nothing to do with all that, it was written and put aside. One day I reread it and felt a shock of distress and horror.

Translator’s Note

Reading Clarice Lispector is a disorienting experience. There are the startling faces and eyes that appear in mirrors, in windows, in crowds, eyes peering out from animal masks or resembling cockroaches fringed with cilia, faces exposed like the viscera of a body on an operating table. There are the intense feelings that explode inside her characters in shifting constellations—nausea, distress, shock, fright, rage, joy. And the moments of grace punctured by jarring intrusions, as when a rat shatters a woman’s communion with the divine.

Translating Clarice has meant growing attuned to the ways her sly surrealism, which can veer into the absurdist or fantastical, is embedded in her style. The logic of a deceptively simple narrative or series of declarations becomes distorted or ends in non sequiturs. “The general law for us to stay alive: one can say ‘a pretty face,’ but whoever says ‘the face,’ dies; for having exhausted the topic.” Or: “Brasília is slim. And utterly elegant. It wears a wig and false eyelashes. It is a scroll inside a Pyramid. It does not age. It is Coca-Cola, my God, and will outlive me.” The most dizzying feature in Clarice’s writing are the surprises on the level of the sentence. Certain combinations seem contradictory or disproportionate like “delicate abyss,” or “horribly marvelous.” The usual expression takes a detour, as when an elderly matriarch scornfully calls her offspring “flesh of my knee” instead of “flesh of my flesh.” A comma trips up the pace where it doesn’t seem to belong, like a hair she’s placed in your soup.

Over and over, these stories find their force in a pivotal encounter, one that forever changes a character, drastically or in the form of a subtle but lasting imprint—a single white hair or wrinkle #3. And the language ripples along the contours of these events, lyrical or hypnotic in a moment of rapture, fragmented or puzzling when a character apprehends something previously unseen. The story “Love” hinges on one such encounter. It occurs when the housewife Ana sees a blind man on the street as she’s riding the tram home from errands. He’s chewing gum in a way that seems to mock her, toppling her contentment with her seemingly picture-perfect domestic life. Just as Ana is thrown into a crisis, the words start revolting against common sense. Subject and object don’t match up: “everything had gained strength and louder voices.” The sentences become as choppy and jumbled as Ana’s consciousness: “Next to her was a lady in blue, with a face. She averted her gaze, quickly. On the sidewalk, a woman shoved her son! Two lovers interlaced their fingers smiling . . . And the blind man? Ana had fallen into an excruciating benevolence.”

Perhaps no one will be as distraught as the translator over what seem to be grammatical mishaps. Why all those commas, why that face? It’s challenging to carry out these choices with the conviction the author is entitled to.
A previous translator chose to smooth things over and interpret the face as an expression: “Beside her sat a woman in blue with an expression which made Ana avert her gaze rapidly. On the pavement a mother shook her little boy.” Yet the original really does include these oddities: “
Junto dela havia uma senhora de azul, com um rosto. Desviou o olhar, depressa. Na calçada, uma mulher deu um empurrão no filho
!” The word
rosto
is almost always just a face, sometimes suggesting a look but in the sense that “face” also can. My advantage in translating the
Complete Stories
nearly forty years after their author’s death, as her international fame and readership rise, is that a growing familiarity with her style enables its peculiarities to be understood as more than arbitrary. If my first instinct is to explain, rereading almost always reveals that Clarice’s mysterious decisions maintain their power in English—as they do here, where the jittery phrasing and the riddle of the face frustrate ordinary comprehension in a way that evokes the unraveling of Ana’s everyday life.

If Clarice’s language were more stridently experimental, finding equivalents would be more straightforward. The departures from standard Portuguese would be more emphatically marked and allow more freedom in English. Instead, she produces a maddening effect (maddening if you’re tasked with reproducing it) of bending known forms nearly to the breaking point, yet almost always making them sound
right
if not correct, as if they ought to exist, or somewhere already do. These unexpected choices often make you do a double-take or blur your reading even if you don’t stumble. She shuffles words, leaves out parts of speech, invents new yet generally understandable words by giving them alternate suffixes or extra syllables. These touches sometimes lend a literary effect and sometimes come off as conversational in the flexible, playful mode of spoken Brazilian Portuguese.

Clarice’s most head-tilting constructions are those involving basic words. “I knew that only a mother can resolve birth,” seems to invoke a saying, yet “
s
ó mãe resolve nascimento
”
is just as ambiguous to Brazilians. In the multiple meanings of
resolver
, is birth a puzzle to solve, a decision to make, or a matter to resolve? Elsewhere, she turns
morrer,
to die, into a cryptic transitive verb in the phrase
te morro
, “I die you,” as in, “Oh how I love you and I love so much that I die you.” And it’s difficult to conclude what a husband means when he reminisces of his sinning wife, “There was no jewel she did not covet, and for her the bareness of her neck did not choke,” and describes her as “awaiting me in her empty necklaces.” When there’s no context to determine a more recognizable sense, the most transparent translation is often precisely the most opaquely literal.

Having all these stories in one volume for the first time in any language allows us to apprehend Clarice’s tremendous range, and to become acclimated to her singular style as it develops over time. The stories share certain characteristics of the novels, such as mystical, philosophical musings, passages that read like fever dreams, a certain noir feel, and intense psychological drama. Yet the stories also offer a more Brazilian, down-to-earth side of Clarice. They give a fuller taste of everyday Brazil during her time, from bourgeois ladies in Rio and drunks at the local bar to children’s adventures in Recife and the dramas of small-town life. She’s also more mischievous and affectionate with her characters, taking pleasure in portraying human vanity, pettiness, and idiosyncratic fixations. This makes for a diverse, often colloquial range of dialects and voices, and language that’s less consistently otherworldly than in the more abstract novels like
Th
e Passion According to G. H.
and
Água Viva
. Clarice’s Portuguese, in fact, often sounds surprisingly normal in these stories, which can make the inevitable deviations hard to assimilate.

Even as Clarice’s voice is distinctly her own from the start, the early stories show a young writer enamored of words and their creative possibilities, revealing a sophisticated knowledge of Portuguese and the ability to write fluid, beautiful prose when she so chooses. She takes up themes she will return to throughout her life—magnetic relationships that flame out, the passion that ideas inspire, questions of perfection versus error, and the trouble with masculine authority, with adult authority, with intellectual authority.
Family Ties
and
Th
e Foreign Legion
, written in the period that bridges marriage, motherhood, and divorce, show a writer in full command of her literary powers. These collections contain her most tightly constructed stories; translating them required constant fine-tuning to follow her dense style. Clarice also becomes more comic during this period, especially in her family and animal portraits, mixing perverse or warm humor with a solemn, mystical tone in the same story, as in “Happy Birthday,” “Temptation,” and “The Foreign Legion.”

In Clarice’s last decade there is a rupture. The great writer is sick of literature and sick of life. She gravitates toward what she calls “antiliterature” and declares, “Any cat, any dog is worth more than literature.” Her stories in
Where Were You At Night
and especially in
Th
e Via Crucis of the Body
take on a certain rawness that goes against writerly restraint. Rejecting concern for reputation or literary refinement, in both technique and subject, she writes in a looser, more provocative mode. She dwells unflinchingly on the body’s mortality and its desires, so often associated with discomfort and shame. Storylines take whimsical turns, as when a prudish secretary loses her virginity to a being from Saturn named Ixtlan. Sentences are bare and disjointed, as in the erotic and bloody story “The Body”: “Sometimes the two women slept together. The day was long. And, though they weren’t homosexuals, they’d turn each other on and make love. Sad love. One day they told Xavier about it. Xavier quivered.” Accounts of the author’s life break into the fiction—waiting for the phone to ring, having a glass of rosé, debating whether to watch television alone, thinking of death—a feature she excised from earlier work. “That Clarice made people uncomfortable,” thinks one character, suddenly interrupting the narrative in “The Departure of the Train.”

In keeping up with Clarice’s shifting registers and translating nearly four decades of work in two years’ time, I’ve often felt like a one-woman vaudeville act, shouting, laughing, crying, musing, singing, and tap-dancing my way breathlessly across the stage. Her language swings between elegant, formal, and poetic in her more conventionally literary stories, colloquial in her comic moods, stark and fragmented in her abstract, oracular pieces, and spontaneous, even delirious, in her later works. Beyond the technical difficulty of capturing these diverse voices and distinguishing the standard from the strange, what makes translating Clarice especially taxing is the emotional weight of inhabiting her characters, often moody, volatile individuals caught in an upheaval. She draws you into these worlds until their logic is yours. I found myself growing as restless and combative as Cristina and Daniel while working on “Obsession.” And I knew I was deep inside “The Buffalo” when I matter-of-factly described it as “a story about a woman who goes to the zoo to learn how to hate,” only realizing from my friend’s confused look that this “plot” wasn’t perfectly normal.

What remains constant is the intimate physicality of Clarice’s voice—its strong rhythms and the way she seems to be whispering in your ear like a sister, mother, and lover, somehow touching you from far away. Part of her rhythm comes from a fondness for repetition: refrains that produce an incantatory feel or thematic crescendo, anaphoric structures that lend a biblical tone, the slapstick effect of a repeated catchphrase, or the compulsive reiterations of an obsessive mind, like Laura’s in “The Imitation of the Rose.” Her words hold onto a sensory coherence, even when their semantic logic threatens to come undone.

Clarice inspires big feelings. As with “the rare thing herself” from “The Smallest Woman in the World,” those who love her want her for their very own. But no one can claim the key to her entirely, not even in the Portuguese. She haunts us each in different ways. I have presented to you the Clarice that I hear best.

KATRINA DODSON