CLANDESTINE HAPPINESS

POSTWORD
“A thread above the abyss”
by Marina Colasanti

After finishing the reading of this book, what we have is Clarice Lispector at her most. Not
only she is the narrator character of almost every tale of this collection, painting her own
portrait or the portrait of her feelings - of her in her childhood, in her youth, of her as an
attentive and observing mother for her sons, of her and her relationship with chickens - as
the world she delivers to us, of pure density, born out of an incessant observation of life.
“Being aware took me days and days,” she says in The Disasters of Sofia. Actually, it took a
lot more than that. Clarice was a woman who was incessantly in an attentive state. A being in
a high voltage.
Clarice’s attention always cut both ways, being both headed outwards and bleeding
inwards. Because everything she’d see, everything that would draw her attention would
unfold itself in labyrinthine personal interrogations, as if she herself was a filter for the world
and her first reference to her thoughts.
That was the reason for the scribbled papers found at any circumstance, which would
later be used to compose tales, novels and chronicles, in a long knitting work. What had cost
her so much effort and percutiation could not be lost.
“Sometimes, when I see a person I had never seen, and I’ve got some time to watch
them, I usually incarnate them (...)” This quote, which opens the tale Involuntary
Incarnation, tells us quite a bit about Clarice’s view. More than just observing, she
incarnates others in order to understand them. And “when I incarnate them, I comprehend
their reasons”. What she looks for is to understand the other and, through them, understand
herself, even though the “premature acceptance of the key is being held by no one.”
Since her childhood Clarice struggled with accepting herself: “In that carnival,
because, for the first time in life I would have what I always wanted: to be someone other
than myself.” This other, this impossible twin, she would then search for during her whole
lifetime.
In another tale, Clarice draws with no complacency the girl who: “Supporting with
bitter elegance my long legs and shoes always knock-kneed, humiliated for not being a
flower, and mostly, tortured by an enormous infancy which I feared would never come to an
end.”
Although, at a given point she had been a flower: Then, me, an 8-year-old little
woman, considered for the rest of the night that somebody had finally recognized me: I was,
indeed, a rose.” Perhaps that was why she used to steal roses from other’s gardens, like a girl
who steals her mother’s mirror looking for a double face, her own and her mother’s, to which
hers is to be similar in the future.
The precarious economic situation of the family, the ill mother, the fact that she was
the younger sibling with a considerate age gap between her and her sisters, it all certainly
made her feel isolated. In an interview with Leo Gilson Ribeiro, she talked about her feeling
of loneliness. “I never enjoyed being inside the house. Every time I could I’d be on the
sidewalking trying to find someone to play with. (...) That’s why when I’d see a boy or a girl
walk by my house’s door I’d ask: ‘Do you want to play with me?’ There were lots of no’s, and
few yeses.”
Besides, she was a very light girl “in a land of dark-haired people,” and her ripped
eyes, her prominent zygomas, her lisp forcing her to having an accent apparently foreign - a
physical phenomenon which the phoniatrician and writer Pedro Block contracted, ascribing
it to an infant imitation of her parent’s speaking - increased the feeling of strangeness to her.
Like many transported people and from foreignt families, she wanted to belong, she pursued
recognition. Even if it came from a red basset dog, “beautiful and miserable”.

SHUFFLED CLUES

Clarice became, very soon, the owner of her doings.

Although, when she wrote chronicles for the Caderno B from Jornal do Brasil
between 1967 and 1973 - chronicles and non-chronicles just like some of the tales from this
book, one of which gives its title - Clarice said repeated times that, like she had told
previously to Senhor magazine, she did not know how to make chronicles, that she didn’t
even know what was a chronicle.
She liked to shuffle her clues, Clarice. Like when she’d say she was a different age
from hers - never making herself older, though - or when she’d declare that she wasn’t
reading anything at the moment, even though when we would visit her at her home, my
husband Affonso and I, there was always a book or another left on a seat or any other
furniture. Or when she wrote for JB: “Is chronicle a report? Is it a conversation? Is it a
resume of a state of mind? I don’t know, because before I started writing for Jornal do Brasil
I had only written novels and tales”, omitting all of her previous journalistic activity. She,
indeed, pursued recognition, but she feared the debauchery of her own self, and made sure to
put up bulkheads to it!
Not only did she know exactly what a chronicle was, but also visited it through a
fraternal friendship with two of the most important chronists of her time. What she didn’t
want was to have her writings put into molds by editors, or by eventual critics from readers.
It was her space, she would manage it in her way, without subserving to standard
architectures.
And what a delight that it happened this way! Her chronicles didn’t obey any mold for
traditional chronicles. They were miles away from the well-behaving chronicles from
Drummond, her driving partner. Nor were they alike to her friend’s Rubem Braga,
magnificently built from an insignificant starting point, or to Fernando Sabino’s, her friend
and literary advisor, similar to tales, light and crossed by humorous tips - to both of them is
ascribed the function of founders of Sabiá publisher, the first edition of this book, in 1971.
Clarice’s chronicles obeyed only to her unique style of writing, which could be fluid or
intermittent and that was delivered this way, almost like a confession or a subit revelation.
They constituted a new model of chronicle, created by her from the Children’s Corner
section, which she had kept in the Senhor magazine in the 1960s.
An idea, a thought, a feeling would invade her in the middle of the quotidian and
she’d catch it with the tip of her pen or pencil, just like you catch a flying butterfly, so as to
deposit it on the palm of your reader’s hands next Saturday.
In assemble, she would work like a spider, pulling from herself a transforming wire
that would attach all these fragments into this thick web of her writings, aware that the
impulses of her ever-aware sensibility were sides of the same coin.
Not every note would be used. Mas, as she said in an interview with Reny Gorga
Filho: “Step by step, everything coordinates itself within me. Each time I rewrite them, I go
deeper in their meaning, understand better what it is that I want to say and everything that
showed up to me like a nebulosa.” She would rewrite over and over not only her notes, but
also entire novels, and turned to rewriting them as many times she felt fit to digest “step by
step” to the bottom of comprehension, and improving her writing. That in a time with no
computers, in which carbon paper made itself necessary. The tale “The crime of the math
teacher” was rewritten and re-elaborated multiple times in a row, and the novel The Apple in
the Dark was rewritten eleven times, until Lispector had total understanding and domain of
what once had been like a nebulosa. I recall her repeatedly recommending to the telephone -
correction, demanding - that the proofreaders didn’t even touch her punctuation. “My
punctuation is my breathing,” she’d told me.

A STRETCHED THREAD

An element connects all of the tales in this book, even though each one of them has its own
universe clearly circumscribed: there’s something that is in suspension. Between fear and
hope. Between love and cruelty. Between reality and promise. Between darkness and
epiphany. In suspension just like a thread stretched above the abyss, on which the characters
keep a balance, threatened by the fall. Every day the little girl knocks on the library owner’s
door, but the book she’s longing for is not given to her and she has to come back on the next
day; the boy with the glasses goes to spend his day with the cousin who has no kids, but what
he had predicted doesn’t happen, because he can’t give her what it is that she longs for; from
Copacabana Avenue you can see pieces of the sea, but a crushed rat brings back the
vulnerability of the being; the chubby teacher, big and silent, stalked by the student, gets
transformed by a shock of sweetness; the enigmatic girl who came to visit, leaves well-
behaved, but that had killed a chick. The unexpected awaits for Clarice’s characters, who
follow a certain path and find another path, in a quotidian made of street corners behind
which everything can hide.
This unexpected is announced in the text even before the fact itself, forcing the reader
to move forward in groping as if they were blind, as close to the edge of the abyss as the
characters. “In what precedes the event - it's where I live.”
And it embodies itself in so many interrogation marks, in so much lack of knowledge.
“I was the dark ignorance with its hungers and laughs (...) what could I do?” “If they asked
you about Ofélia and her parents I would have answered (...): I barely got to know them.
Before the same jury to which I would answer: I barely know myself - and to each judge I
would say (...): I barely know you.” The woman walks into the sea alone and thinks: “It’s fatal
not to know yourself, and to know yourself demands courage.”
Not knowing yourself, or not knowing another demands from Clarice the constant
search, constant attention.
An antidote against the darkness of the unknown flourishes, although, in many tales
from this book: hope. The “hope for joy”, the “slight hope that no one gives and no one takes
away”, the “hopeful threat”, “could someone demand that they had hope?”. The same hope
from the novel The apple in the dark in a triumphal quote, told to Martin by his father: “Go,
then, my son! I demand you. I demand you suffer from hope.”
Only in “The disasters of Sofia” Clarice reveals what the reader had in intuition: “It is
possible too that my life motif could be the unreasonable hope.”
 THE ESSENCE OF LIFE

In a self-knowledge endeavor, Clarice not only searched for herself but also for the essence of
life. Reaching that essence was equivalent for her to be “the mother of things”, just like she
had felt like the “mother of God” before she ran into the dead rat.
Somehow this leads us into “The egg and the chicken”, a tale that she had planned to
read at the I World Congress of Witchcraft, that happened in Bogotá in 1975, if it hadn’t been
for an indisposition the day before - certainly caused by the altitude - that led her to ask
somebody else to read it instead of her.
The egg is a promise of life, possibility of life contained within the darkness of the
shell. It is the latent life behind a protection that is at once so fragile and so resistant. The
egg, so the same for so many centuries, corresponds to the donation of life not only by
women but by all females. And each female has within themselves the potential to be the
mother of all things.
“The life of a chicken is hollow… a chicken is hollow,” Clarice told us in an MIS
interview in which João Salgueir, Affonso and I interviewed her. And she told us that she had
always felt impressionated by chickens, that when she was little she would stare at the
chickens for a long time and that had learned how to imitate them.
The chicken is a female that gives life to the egg before giving life to the chick, that
gives life to the essence before giving life to the thing itself.
Exactly the way Clarice gave life to words, before even reaching through them the
essence that she searched for.
“The egg is something to be cautious with,” she wrote in that tale. The same
cautiousness to be taken with words, above everything written words that, just like Clarice’s
and just like the egg, can hide a precious content.
Being mother of things was equivalent to understanding the content of the egg. To
being the egg. Just like it was equivalent to grabbing a dead rat with your hand, or eating the
white substance from the crushed interior of a cockroach. The pitiful acceptance of the
within, the assimilation of the inside, would lead her to a comprehension of herself. Being
mother of all things would allow Clarice to be a mother to herself, since her mother, always
ill, could not give her the affection that she needed so much.

THE ACHIEVED GOAL

Clarice’s writings, just like any other note or tale in this book, do not reach through reason.
Reason can’t handle Clarice. Though, like water on the ceiling, the sense of suspension
infiltrates in the reader’s subconscient, and mates with its own instability between a known
present and a doubtful future, between sun and mist. Clarice then goes to dialogue with the
inner side of the reader.
When I was young, when I fell in love with the writing of this incomparable writer, I
couldn’t have known how to tell where this enchantment of mine came from. I couldn’t have
explained each one of her thoughts or each one of her phrases. But they were vivid to me and
touched me intensely. The same happens to a great part of her readers.
I don’t believe that Clarice had realized it, but the welcoming and the profound
relatedness offered by her writing allowed her to achieve her goal, reach the core, the
essence. And when she touched the essence, she became the mother of things.