Family Ties - Dirty Maid Adventures

Family Ties
by Clarice Lispector
My friends at the Quezon City Hall directed me to the home of this masterpiece. I remember it was a meat shop
before. I passed by it almost everyday but never noticed its transformation into a bakery. Maybe because the
facade didn't change much. Nor did it ever sport any signboard announcing "bakery." The expensive meat shop
sign is gone ("Monterey") and in its stead just this simple sign: "Toasted Siopao."
Siopao is a kind of Chinese dimsum: white bread, roundish, fillings (usually meat-based) and steamed. Fluffy and
soft. In my entire life I had always known siopao that way. Uncooked, it begins small. Steamed, it puffs outward,
grows bigger like an expanding universe. In contrast, this Toasted Siopao isn't steamed but...what? I haven't really
seen it cooked. Judging from the evidence of what it becomes after it has through heat and fire, however, I
definitely can say it isn't steamed, grilled or baked. So toasted, it must be, for it is hard, compact, smaller than the
usual siopao, and from experience, with a little knowledge of physics thrown in, we know that toasting takes
moisture out of food and makes it contract. Toasting instead of steaming makes the universe collapse unto itself.
It sells for eight pesos a piece. Three of them can adequately substitute for an ordinary meal for me, and I am a
guy who eats heartily every time. My theory is that once it hits the gastric juices inside the stomach it starts to
expand again, the nerve linings of the stomach sending electric impulses to the brain similar to what the emit after
a full meal.
Bite into it piping hot and once inside our mouth it explodes into a riot of bread-and-meat flavors, like long
detained rampaging convicts after the prison walls had been breached. The festive atmosphere in your taste buds
will be accompanied by amazement: of how so small and so humble a creation can pack a dynamite of happiness.
Clarice Lispector's short stories are like that. Take a look at her "Mystery in Sao Cristovao," barely just over five
pages. There's a family, they had just dinner. Later, they each retire to their respective rooms to sleep. Their house
has a garden with beautiful hyacinths in full bloom. Then three young guys go out of a nearby house.
Clarice Lispector's short stories are like that. Take a look at her "Mystery in Sao Cristovao," barely just over five
pages. There's a family, they had just dinner. Later, they each retire to their respective rooms to sleep. Their house
has a garden with beautiful hyacinths in full bloom. Then three young guys go out of a nearby house.
Masqueraders. One has the head mask of a rooster- another has a demon's mask, the third is dressed like an
ancient knight. They pass by the house with a garden and get the idea of climbing over the wall and picking some
nice hyacinths for each to add to their costume.
Five pages. So bare a plot. But each word, each phrase, each sentence, placed where they were meant to be since
the beginning of time. In this tight space, but with everything brimming with meaning, Lispector tells the stories of
families, love, danger, youth and generations.
"The Crime of the Mathematics Professor"--seven pages. The professor climbs the highest hill with a dead dog
inside a sack. He is burying the dog there. A substitute doge, unknown, the carcass he just picked up somewhere.
His family had moved and couldn't bring the dog with them. With the same same virtuoso performance Lispector
presents here the age-old saga of guilt, repentance, forgiveness and redemption.
"The Buffalo" is about ten pages. A woman in a zoo looking at the animals. Looking for hate. Later you'll learn that
she is hurting, spurned by a man she loves. One by one the animals (the lion, giraffe, hippos, ape, elephant, camel)
fail her. Until she comes face to face with a big, black buffalo. She had met her match.
A page longer is the short story simply entitled "Love." Principal protagonist is a young housewife. She and her
husband have young children. Her brothers are coming for dinner so she goes out, shops, and boards a tram on
her way home. In a tram stop she sees a blind man, chewing gum. She feels compassion for the man and hell was
let loose upon her quiet, domestic existence.
Probably the shortest is "The Chicken"--just around three pages. An insignificant chicken in a kitchen about to be
slaughtered for a family's lunch. Just before her end she lays an egg. And with this Lispector manages to paint the
aching beauty of all living things' ephemeral existence.
The very first story in this collection (thirteen all in all), "The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman," had given me an
early inkling that I was in for something special. It felt like Lispector transformed Camus here into an ordinary
housewife. And she did that in just ten pages.
Clarice Lispector: born in Ukraine, raised in Brazil, and now, years after her death, her stories had become tasty
dumplings of my ever-hungry mind. We are all indeed connected to each other.|“This afternoon, something
tranquil had exploded, and in the house everything struck a tragicomic note.”
This book is more than an exquisite quilt of brilliantly woven stories. It makes us feel, in random fragments of
common life, a roller coaster of insights and existential disturbances that once experienced, will never be
completely interrupted. The pauses that apparently indicate the end of the ride are just hiatuses preceding
vertiginous falls which completely invert our insides, modifying the route of the blood in our arteries, intoxicating
the fibers of our hearts and transforming us in decompensated beings, incapable of being contented in a reality of
plain white walls, carefully refurbished living rooms and ‘oh, how nice is the weather’.
This was the first book written by Clarice (I need to call my sacred monster by her first name) I’ve read, and the
first to ignite my addiction to this, at the same time, threatening and refreshing sensation of being suspended in a
world where thoughts slap us with the strength of a violent wind and even the most ordinary and uninteresting
routine becomes a house that shakes inside the blender, at its maximum speed. We hear the noise of light bulbs
exploding and furniture collapsing and shoddy paintings plummeting, but we prefer this. We prefer this, we
definitely prefer this, than living and dying in the bovine security of those who don’t wander, who don’t crash and
burn in their passions, who don’t open their eyes in the quiet and solitary dimness of the night. Fuck the weather.
Fuck small talk. This is about music and substance and making inanimate objects dance, this is so fucking young
and alive, we have a hard time to believe it was first published in 1960.
Fuck small talk. This is about music and substance and making inanimate objects dance, this is so fucking young
and alive, we have a hard time to believe it was first published in 1960.
This is also about all sorts of astonishing quotes:
“On the ground there lay dry fruit stones full of circumvolutions like small rotted cerebrums. On the tree trunk the
luxurious feelers of parasites fastened themselves. The rawness of the world was peaceful. And death was not what
one had anticipated.”
I was in awe when I first read it, and I still am.
A short story called ‘Love’ is my favorite part of the book. It simply kills me, it kills me every time. I was shocked,
perplexed for weeks, and I think my state of wonder is something so visceral, nor even this corrosive force we call
time will be able to adulterate it.
Anna is a middle-class housewife who lives in the same quotidian designed for so many necessary yet anonymous
women like her. Oblivious to the dreams of her youth due to the maternal role she now represents, her biggest
concerns revolve around dusting corners and feeding her family:
“And anonymously she nourished life.”
“Her previous youth now seemed alien to her, like one of life’s illnesses”
“She had gradually emerged to discover that life could be lived without happiness: by abolishing it she had found
a legion of persons, who lived as one works — with perseverance, persistence, and contentment.”
“Looking at the polished furnitures, she felt her heart contract a little with fear. But in her life there was no
opportunity to cherish her fears.”
Anna is holding a bag full of groceries, when she takes a tram and sees a blind man chewing gum. With eyes wide
open, the man seems to reciprocate her look. And when he moves his mouth to chew that (probably insipid)
candy, it looks like he’s smiling. Anna then sees herself mirrored in the strangely familiar gesture of that blind man
and something fragile crashes inside her, like eggs breaking in her bag with the sudden tram jerk. At this moment,
a hideous secret in her world of mechanical gestures and faked smiles is disclosed, and the truth slowly overflows
through the pores of her skin, as a raw, intimate and nauseating goo that now leaks in the presence of strangers.
“The eggs had broken in their newspaper wrapping. Yellow sticky yolks dripped between the strands of the bag.”
It’s a shame I can’t express the dexterity of a cardiac surgeon with which Clarice transforms this simple shopping
trip into a walk through the most recondite and obscure places of the human mind. The beauty in this story isn’t
one that can be easily forgotten: I am sure that, from time to time, I’ll return to it and ask if I’m really living or if I’m
just another sheep who passively and anonymously ruminates the routine, another blind soul protecting the
trip into a walk through the most recondite and obscure places of the human mind. The beauty in this story isn’t
one that can be easily forgotten: I am sure that, from time to time, I’ll return to it and ask if I’m really living or if I’m
just another sheep who passively and anonymously ruminates the routine, another blind soul protecting the
appearance of order in a complete chaos to avoid breaking the eggs. I am sure this will still be one of my favorite
books when I become a senile old woman with thin, flyaway gray hair (picture a female Jack Nicholson) who
certainly will annoy younger folks in parks by telling them endless stories that will start with ‘back in my day’.
“Anna took the moment like a butterfly, between her fingers before it might escape forever.”
I try not to hold on to many absolute truths, but somehow I know I’ll always cherish this story as something
vertiginous and indefectible, because it is. A vibrant, psychedelic and ethereal butterfly in the fortunate hands of
our thoughts.
|Não foi amor "à primeira leitura", quando comecei achei a escrita estranha e o primeiro conto não me seduziu.
Depois foi um pouco: " primeiro estranha-se, depois entranha-se" e quando dei por mim estava rendida à
delicadeza de pormenores e à forma como põe a nu a alma das personagens numa escrita deliciosa, cheia de
sensibilidade. Não gostei de todos os contos, alguns deles deixaram-me indiferente, outros fizeram-me rir, um em
particular,"A mulher mais pequena do mundo" deixou-me um nozinho na garganta. Foi o primeiro livro de Clarice
Lispector mas não será seguramente o último.|Foi o meu primeiro namoro com esta autora brasileira, de origem
ucraniana.
Pisei o tapete das sua palavras... hesitei...recuei...tentei de novo. Fiquei enleada na sua escrita pantanosa e crua.
Depois de entrar encontramo-nos ou a um outro.
Sou mulher... o seu livro de contos respira, sobretudo, a vida mundana da mulher burguesa nos anos 60.A
percepção de uma linha ténue que separa um ser acomodado a uma vida caseira e familiar e um outro ser
selvagem que anseia por viver é o que estrutura algumas destas pequenas narrativas.
Essas mulheres, algumas, tão arrastadamente actuais, sentem-se nauseadas, interrogam a sua existência, a dívida
que a vida tem para com elas- preenchem um nada com tão pouco que não lhes chega hoje-um nada que se vai
arrumando todos os dias nos devidos lugares, a rotina que, enganosamente, vai satisfazendo. Até quando? Elas
são criaturas selvagens que questionam a hipocrisia das suas vidas. Nos contos abundam os animais - são
representativos do lado besta que, sob o corpo da mulher, teima em mostrar-se, em deitar "as garras de fora"- é o
querer aprender a não só amar,amar, a não só perdoar, perdoar, a não só pedir desculpas, a odiar também.
Já as "meninas mulheres" que por aqui se passeiam lutam por serem visíveis, anseiam por serem tocadas ao
aperceberem-se da sua inteligência corporal a despontar - o desejo animal supremo de um poder ainda
escondido e envergonhado, porque desconhecido.
Esse choque com a sua beleza ou fealdade físicas, fá-las sentirem-se desiguais, isoladas, sozinhas no mundo,
enquanto entidades perigosas.
O conto "Amor" foi um dos contos que mais me agitou. Ana, a protagonista, vive ou não as suas epifânias, as suas
ínfimas verdades simbolicamente - só ela os entende, aos símbolos, só ela lhes sente o nojo, ou o nojo a sente a
ela, só ela desiste deles, pois são perigosos, desencaminhadores.
"Enquanto não chegou à porta do edifício, parecia à beira de um desastre. Correu com a rede até ao elevador, sua
alma batia-lhe no peito - o que sucedia? A piedade pelo cego era tão violenta como uma ânsia, mas o mundo lhe
parecia seu, sujo, perecível, seu. Abriu a porta de casa. A sala era grande, quadrada, as maçanetas brilhavam
limpas, os vidros das janelas brilhavam, a lâmpada brilhava - que nova terra era essa? E por um instante a vida
sadia que levava até agora pareceu-lhe um modo moralmente louco de viver.(...)Abraçou o filho, quase a ponto de
machucá-lo. (...) Não deixe mamãe te esquecer, disse-lhe.(...)Seu coração se enchera com a pior vontade de
viver.(...)
E se atravessara o amor o seu inferno, penteava-se agora diante do espelho, por um instante sem nenhum mundo
no coração. Antes de se deitar, como se apagasse uma vela, soprou a pequena flama do dia."
É o indizível para além das palavras, tão poetica e hermeticamente desenhadas, que dá corpo a várias pequenas
narrativas sem fim. Cabe-nos a nós finalizá-las...ou não|¡Inmensa! No estoy muy de acuerdo con Lídia Jorge. Me
gusta más la Clarice de largo recorrido, la de las novelas aunque es fascinante ver los brotes de lo que después
serían magníficas historias. Lídia Jorge la incluye en un grupo interesante: Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, Pessoa y Woolf :)
gusta más la Clarice de largo recorrido, la de las novelas aunque es fascinante ver los brotes de lo que después
serían magníficas historias. Lídia Jorge la incluye en un grupo interesante: Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, Pessoa y Woolf :)