“And when she woke up? When she woke up, she no longer knew her own identity. Only later did she reflect with satisfaction: I am a typist and a virgin, and I like coca-cola. Only then did she get dressed, spend the rest of the day passively enacting the role of being.”
“She meditated while she was typing and that’s why she made even more mistakes.”
Last summer I read Clarice Lispector’s novel “Agua Viva” (“The Stream of Life”) and I was quite smitten with her writing style, it was so unique, flowing and unrestrained, feminine and strange. I knew even then that another novel by this wonderful Brasilian author would find its way in my hands soon, and last week it did. I read her novella “The Hour of the Star” (A hora da estrela). Lispector died on 9th December 1977, a day before her 57th birthday, and this novella was published soon after the author’s death. The narrator, or the “writer” of the novella is Roderigo S.M. who says about himself “I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day.”
The novella tells a tale of a poor, very poor girl called Macabéa who moves from the rural Northwest area of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro and gets a job as typist, shares a room with four other girls and lives on hot-dogs because she is that poor. Roderigo writes that “She scarcely has a body to sell, nobody wants her, she’s a virgin and harmless, nobody would miss her. Moreover – I realize now – nobody would miss me either.” The first five pages bored me a little bit because it was Roderigo writing, but then when the focus shifts to Macabéa, Lispector’s flowing style of writing shines and draws you into the story. The writer said about her novel that it was: “the story of a girl who was so poor that all she ate was hot dogs. That’s not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery.” Tales of sad, poor individuals, crushed innocence and gloomy ending touch the strings of my heart and naturally I was very soon emotionally invested in the book, turning page after page, breathless. It felt like I was inside of Macabéa’s mind, inside her emptiness, basking in its sweetness because it is zen-like, meditative emptiness, no desires, nothing. Macabéa is timid, passive, lost in her thoughts…
A contrasting character is a guy called Olimpicus that Macabéa meets one day; he is aggressive, dominant, chasing money and success, he wants to be rich and he wants to be a butcher because he likes knives. Only in the moment of her death, Macabéa inner emptiness becomes inner freedom. She reminded me of Jack Kerouac’s character based on a real person, a morphine addict called Tristessa, from the novel of the same name. Tristessa, like Macabéa, is sad but hopeful, empty but also serene, makes us readers envy her emptiness, as if it is something sweet and unattainable. Velvet Underground’s song “Sweet Nothing” also came to my mind when I thought of Macabéa. When I finished reading the book, I thought it was a good book, but as hours and days passed, the story, the words I had read were intensifying in my mind and I grew to love it more and more.
(Photo by Magdalena Lutek (Nishe)
“And when she woke up? When she woke up, she no longer knew her own identity…”
And now some beautiful quotes:
“She recalled her childhood with nostalgia – dried mandioca – and believed that she had been happy. In truth, no matter how bad one’s childhood may have been, it always sounds enchanted in recollection – how awful.”
“Her life was duller than plain bread and butter.”
“I am alone in the world and I don’t believe in anyone, everyone lies, sometimes even when making love, I don’t think one being speaks to another, the truth only comes to me when I’m alone.“
“Una furtiva lacrima” had been the only really beautiful thing in her life. Wiping away her own tears she tried to sing what she heard. But her voice was as crude and out of tune as she was. When she heard it she started to cry. It was the first time she’d ever cried, she didn’t know she had so much water in her eyes. She cried, blew her nose no longer knowing what she was crying about. She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of soul.”
“She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself.”
“So she repented. Since she wasn’t quite sure for what, she repented entirely and for everything.”
“if she was dumb enough to ask herself ‘who am I?’ she would fall flat on her face…[She is] so dumb that she sometimes smiles at other people on the street. Nobody smiles back because they don’t even see her.”
“She had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucelus of—of ecstasy, let’s say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn’t know what she was meditating because she didn’t know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she’d get lost in the successive and round emptiness inside her. She meditated while she was typing and that’s why she made even more mistakes.”
“On the pavement tiny blades of grass sprouted between the flagstones — Macabéa noticed them because she always noticed things that were tiny and insignificant. She thought dreamily, as she rang the doorbell: grass is so easy and simple. Her thoughts were gratuitous and unconnected because, however erratic, she possessed vast reserves of inner freedom.”
Byron's Muse 