It’s funny how life brings people together. Or people’s stories. I wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the conversation. You know when someone starts talking in front of you and you sit there thinking about other things, watching their mouth opening and closing, opening and closing, without taking in a word, a sentence? That’s the state I was in. They started talking about death. And whenever people talk about death around me, that’s what happens. I go into a stupor, a kind of lethargy. I just don’t want to hear it. I risked it once, and opening my ears to death was like raising my face before looking to see what was coming. I could get an enormous slap square across my cheek. Or maybe I’d get my cheek square across a slap? Who knows what’s in store for us when we don’t know what’s in store. They say it’s the reminder that life is mortal that’s terrifying. That must be it. It must be an unconscious reaction or something. I’m not sure. All I know is that an alarm sounds in my mind, and off it goes. Where to, not even I can predict. But I get an odd, almost urgent need to occupy myself with living things. My eyes frenetically seek everything that breathes. People, flowers, animals. Especially flowers and animals, which live in a spontaneous, almost unconscious state. It gives them a vibration without thought. A throbbing of existence. When there are only people around me, like then, I look around expectantly for gazes, colours, movements that contain in themselves a flower’s opening, an animal’s hunger. How enchanted I am by this state, almost pure. A purity made of blood and earth, which for me is the purest. Yes, the sort that isn’t clean. It’s what connects me like a paw full of claws to the consistency of everything that vibrates. I become impregnated. As the mouth opened and closed saying this and that about death, coffin, cemetery, wow, I breathed in the air and aroma of every perfume. What’s more, I tried to go beyond the balsam to get to the raw smell of people. I imagined their bodies without clothes on. And it wasn’t sex, but the absence of modesty that interested me. As the mouth closed and opened: coffin, wake, cemetery — I touched my skin, which was warm. I felt my hairs, goose bumps. The sharp blades of my fingernails. Life tugged at me with a feline-like elasticity. It wrapped me in its concrete wings. Yes, life is concrete. That’s the thought I always want to carry, like a hope. I want to think living things, no matter how small. The sensation of the skin, the pores. Someone next to me was drinking juice and I imagined the taste of the fruit. Liquid mixing with tongue. I drifted further and further away from what was being said. Everyday things started invading my mind. I’ve always harboured the suspicion that the most vivid of things are the ones that occupy us daily. That was when I thought about the ants. It’s almost pathetic to allow myself to get caught up in something so tiny. But lately they’ve been a constant presence in my days. It started with one or two that I absent-mindedly noticed in the kitchen sink. I watched their miniscule scurrying as they noticed my gigantic presence. But I’m incapable of brutality. I let them multiply. One or two became a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. They’re everywhere. I often find them on my body. Even so, I’ve never lifted a finger in violence. I have too much respect for delicate things. But visitors make remarks. People think it’s strange. The truth is simple: I like animals. Big, small, it doesn’t matter, I like them. Sometimes more than people. That’s what I was thinking when out of the blue I heard the word ant, of all words, and realised it hadn’t come from inside my head, but outside. It was as if something had clicked in me, forcing me to listen to the conversation. I looked at the people as if I was seeing them for the first time. Suddenly the mouth wasn’t talking about death anymore. Now it was telling a story that had to do with ants. I thought the coincidence was amazing. The person was talking about the little critters exactly as I was thinking about them. This simultaneity was, for me, an open window to infinity. Coincidences have always terrified me. And terror has always fascinated me. Maybe for that reason, or some other obscure impulse, it struck me that there must be something in the story that I needed to know. I started listening, absorbed. Just as death had taken me far away, the ants had brought me back. It’s funny, really, very funny how life brings people together.

Part II

She was a woman of eighty, or almost. She lived alone in a huge house. A manor, actually. One of those 19th-century type buildings. Just thinking about it gives me goose bumps. Living in a house burdened with so many years. If it were today, it’d be two centuries, but the ants episode took place in the early 20th century. There were, thus, one hundred years of solid memory in the walls. Of voices and silences that had traversed each chamber, each room. Like I said, she was about eighty, give or take a few years. And it was at this age that she moved through the house, taking with her every one of those years. The lighter ones, the heavier ones. The entirety of her life marked on every piece of furniture, every wall, as it was on every part of her body, every furrow of her skin.

One day she was going down the long corridor that led to the kitchen. She must have been lost in thought, her gaze more inward, or focused on other times, because she was walking along without seeing things, without really looking where she was going. She was more focused on her own line of thought, which hovered there, like a ghost. Then, suddenly, something in her surroundings caught her eye. She turned, slowly, and found her father’s firm, tender gaze. The impression was so strong that she steadied herself on the wall so she wouldn’t fall. Her father, before her, looked much younger than she did herself, his own daughter. While she was mulling over eight decades, he was a man of few wrinkles.

And he was staring at her deeply, as he always had. She felt as if she could reach out and touch him. Her fingers moved slightly, tenderly. She saw herself as a young woman, her father in front of her, talking about business, books. And then she was a girl and he was teaching her mathematics, or leaning over to hand her a toy. The image was so real that it took her a while to understand that it wasn’t really him she was seeing, but his portrait. By the time she understood it was already too late. At her ripe old age, she felt like a little girl waiting for her father’s embrace. She gazed at the picture on the wall. But it wasn’t the picture that she saw: it was the person.

That day the servants had thoroughly cleaned the drawing room, a part of the house she rarely visited, and had taken down all of the pictures to clean the walls. And they had put him there, probably so as not to leave him on the ground or lying around. It had completely slipped her mind. And coming across him like that, without warning, brought a strange feeling: her memories no longer came from the past but surged through her as if they belonged to the present.

Yes, it really was her father calling her, at the other end of the corridor, and she was going to him. It was he who was complimenting her on her dress and stroking her face. She closed her eyes. Her skin, smooth again, received his caress. He asked about everything she had wished for and achieved in life, his voice deep and solid. And she, young as the day she had buried him, opened and closed her lips, yearning to reveal and omit everything she had done since his death, over fifty years earlier. Yes, it had been more than fifty years since she’d seen him. An eternity. Her mother too, since they had died very close to one another, in the space of a year. Two eternities, then. She opened her eyes, almost as if she wasn’t really opening them. And she saw, her vision limpid, the wall, not as it was, completely white, but as it had been, with decorative paint and wallpaper imported from France. She then heard the slave women chattering in the kitchen, peeling vegetables, stirring pots. Sounds from another era, another time, but which reached her unfalteringly, as everything that is real reaches us. She also heard her mother’s voice, checking to see how the food was coming along, if dessert was done. She felt an urge to run to her, brimming with tenderness. Her body even tilted forward in space, her mouth a whisper, mother. But she found herself before the white wall once again. And so much whiteness disoriented her, as it also does with reality.

It was only then that she realised that her mother’s portrait wasn’t next to her father’s, as always. She looked for it, unable to understand how they weren’t together. But suddenly, she heard her soft, almost singsong voice again in the kitchen. And the aroma of the food washed over her. And once more the French wallpaper. The tiniest details of the painting. The bright, vivid colours. Then, without blinking, she saw her father alone again. The missing portrait. And the abruptly white wall. She ran her hand over its pallid surface, feeling the texture of the paint. She stared into the empty space, thinking that perhaps the image was there. Perhaps the exact vision of what she really saw or felt was there. She travelled the length of the corridor, turning here and there, in a fluster. And it was exactly at that instant, searching for the portrait as one might a person, that she saw the ants.

If there had just been one or two maybe they wouldn’t even have caught her eye. But she had come across an enormous trail on the white background, traipsing, silently and quickly, towards the kitchen. For a few moments she just stared at them, absorbed. Suspended, as if her mind had been sucked from one sphere and thrown brutally into another. Her feet suddenly firmly entrenched in the earth, while the rest of her body was still struggling to catch its balance. While her eyes pierced the wall like fingers digging into the cement. She gazed at the ants and there was no doubt about it: they were ants. There are realities that, at times, are not deceptive. Yes, there it was, concreteness. She slowly walked back to see where the Indian file ended. And she realised that it didn’t end. It ran down the corridors, from the library to the study, from one room to another. She followed them, amazed. And suddenly so devoid of past. No future, no nothing. Just that moment. That great silence of ants marching across the wall. Her body, made of so many years, suddenly bore a single instant. That one. And an instant like that one was light, with the minimal density of an ant.
When she got to the back yard she found the point at which they converged, forming their trail. They gathered there, coming from different places, in small groups. A short distance away, a tall negro, her employee of many years, was tending the garden and came over when he saw her staring at the ground. In turn, the sight of the man’s large, heavy feet terrified her. Careful, Ramiro, she said, not to step on the ants. He looked down at his own feet, smiling. Come now, there are so many that if I were to watch my every step there’d be no ground left to walk on. She smiled too, but stayed alert. She asked if he knew where the ant nest was. He said he did, and that it wasn’t just one, but several, scattered throughout the yard. And he quickly added that he had the poison to put an end to them once and for all; that he’d already tried alcohol, kerosene, but nothing had made any difference. They were strong little critters. A shiver ran down her spine. No, Ramiro, I don’t want you to kill the ants. He didn’t understand. But, ma’am, they’re everywhere already, the yard’s not enough for them. They’re in the kitchen, the rooms, even the ballroom, I saw them the other day, they’re very cheeky, they are. She looked at the ground. There they were, scurrying back and forth, tiny, like an instant. No, Ramiro, she repeated. What harm can they do? she argued. She answered herself, none at all. Ahh… that’s where you’re mistaken, ma’am. They take dirt into the house, they walk on the food, clothes, leave their mess. She shrugged. That’s an exaggeration. I’ve always heard that ants are clean. She argued knowing there was little she could say. The most sensible thing was to exterminate the nests for once and for all. But she didn’t want to. She loved watching the way they marched over the earth, with so much tenacity and delicacy. Ramiro scratched his shiny face, looking from his employer to the ants, from the ants to his employer. Let them live, she said finally, in a definitive tone of voice. Yes, ma’am, he stammered and went back to the garden, perplexed.

She turned and went into the house, taking her own perplexity with her. She returned to the ant trail, observing their patience, their organisation. They weren’t afraid, nor did they interrupt their routine because of her enormous, silent presence. Nothing made them stray from their determined path. How concentrated they were. Focused only on what they were doing, one thing at a time. One instant at each instant. It must be a life without memory, she thought. And she hurried to the kitchen, where she crumbled a piece of bread, making little piles here and there, as if they had fallen there by accident. She didn’t want them to suspect she had left them there on purpose. They might not appreciate finding so easily what they had been looking for with such calculated, precise effort. As she crumbled the bread, she did only that. And she found herself light. Her mind occupied with her hands and fingers. A whole, solitary instant, without the burden of any other instant, no other decade inside it.

She waited anxiously for the first ants to arrive. She tried to act natural, as if she’d gone there to drink a glass of water, or to get something, a jar, a cup, a plate. She finally decided to just wait. The kitchen was huge and empty. She could barely contain herself when she saw them approaching. She thought that her enormous, unmoving presence must look like a frightened statue. She lost sight of them as she tried to follow them across the wooden floor, where they disappeared. She cursed old age, which had taken away her eagle eye, which used to let nothing escape. They were eighty-year-old eyes, after all. Eyes saturated with seeing, exhausted by images.

But it was a quick thought, almost weightless. She soon spotted them climbing the table leg. They split into groups. Some headed for the sugar bowl, while others crossed the distance to the little piles of crumbs. She kept her eyes wide open so she wouldn’t make the mistake of blinking and miss a movement. This is what she saw: first the ants split up, undoing their organisation, each going its own way, from one crumb to the next. Then each chose its favourite, hoisted it onto its back and headed off in single file to meet the others. Along the way, they met up with the group from the sugar bowl, reorganised their line and began their trip back.

Sitting firm and erect on a chair in the kitchen, or, on other occasions, in the living room or back yard, she spent hours, sometimes whole days, her curious and admiring gaze following the miniscule movement of each ant, and the enormity of them all. The servants avoided bringing it up in front of her, but looked on in dismay as the house transformed, little by little, into an enormous ant nest. The walls, immense white canvases, were painted with dark images that formed and drifted apart before they could divine, as they did with the clouds in the sky, whether they had the shape of an animal, object or person. There were also times that, instead of following them all around, she’d just stay in one room of the house. She seemed so calm, reading a book, listening to music, engrossed in little things, while all around her the legion of ants also occupied themselves so calmly with their tiny chores. An incomprehensible sight for the servants and rare visitors, but perfectly fine by she who had always thought, ever since she had crawled on those very same floors of that very same house, that nothing living should die for any other reason but the death of itself, because it had run out of life.

Ramiro found it hard to accept, but his employer’s tone had been definitive. Let them live, she had said. And he did, but it wasn’t easy. All that’s missing now is an anthill in the middle of the living room, he grumbled daily. They multiplied, because there were always some crumbs of this or that in the kitchen and at the back door, every morning and every afternoon. And the little devils showed up at exactly the right time, as if they had wristwatches and appointments.
Worse, however, was when she decided to wait for them in the back yard. She’d get all anxious, as if it was a very important matter. Her eyes sparkled — and he hadn’t seen his employer’s eyes light up like that for a long time — but for such a silly reason, he thought. When the crafty little things finally arrived, she’d follow them through the house.
On a few occasions he could swear he’d seen her, a woman who’d spent her life reading, travelling and doing business, I kid you not, chatting with the ants. He’d already seen her talking to dogs and cats as one might speak to people. But to those teensy creatures, he thought it really strange. One day, not only was she talking, but she also seemed to be explaining why she left the crumbs so far away, in the kitchen, instead of just leaving them in the yard, much closer to the ants’ nest. It was so they wouldn’t lose their hard-working nature, she said; they’d have too much time on their hands if they had nothing to do, and that wasn’t good. At other times, Ramiro saw her in the backyard, going to see the ants smiling and full of cheer, as if she was going to meet friends. It may have just been his eyes, but she even seemed lighter and sprightlier as she walked. Before, in spite of her elegant, slender body, she had appeared to be carrying an enormous weight. And before, in spite of the good weather, she had almost never left the house, as if she was still in mid-winter in Europe, where she had lived for many years. After the ants, she became intimate once again with the ground, the yard and the good weather of her land. She’d just dally there, between the trees and flowers, nattering with the ants and turning her face up to catch the sunlight better.

It was as if she had regained the distance laid down by the years. As if all the fight and repose in her had finally struck a balance and she could finally breathe, without a Europe weighing on her chest, without a Brazil curving her shoulders. A Brazil that wasn’t that of her childhood or youth, but the distant country of her decades abroad, known only in her absence. Now, it was as if time was going back in time, until it became no time. Just the earth under her feet. Just her feet recognising the earth. Just the ants and that tiny instant, free of all of life.

Extracted from Claudia Lage’s biographical novel Eufrásia’s Worlds (Record), about the lives and love story of two great Brazilians, the idealistic abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco and the millionaire businesswoman Eufrásia Teixeira Leite, against the backdrop of Brazil’s late-19th and early-20th-century cultural and socio-economic transformations.

Claudia Lage’s collection of short stories A pequena morte e outras naturezas [The Little Death and Other States of Nature], is published by Record. In 1996, she won the Rio Arte Stanislaw Ponte Preta short story competition, and in 2001, the Radio França Internacional Guimarães Rosa short story award. She is a columnist on the literary journal Rascunho, a scriptwriter and teaches creative writing in Rio de Janeiro.

Joshua loved Ginips. He had heard precautionary myths about swallowing the seeds, them rooting in bellies and growing. So Joshua swallowed. Ginip pearls pushing down his throat.

He waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited waited

for his stomach to bloom; to feel roots sprout hairs out of his pores, to deliver a new generation of Ginip seeds.

But nothing happened. Had he not waited long enough? Had he waited too long? Joshua grieved for his misconception. Round bursting rot. He sought other fruit for his fancy, tenderly forgetting Ginips as much as he sorely loved them.

Now he puzzles at what people call the YeGaFarsaken tree. Grown as evergreen as a spring regret, a wide bridge, rooted near the sewage pit in his back yard.

JOSHUA VISITS HIS UNCLE

It is Sunday and Joshua went into town to visit his Uncle. They say it is the hottest day of the year. His Uncle’s a broad man in scope, a flexible man in dreams. He could do the splits up the leeward side of his house on a day like today but today he’ll sit, drink Ginip tea and chat with Joshua

It is Sunday, and it’s Uncle’s day off. The gentleman callers have faded into tall tales

He sighs in a white linen suit and leaves his feet bare and with youthful fingers he pours a large glass of chilled Ginip tea for Joshua’s dry throat, sits cross-legged and talks in similes. Uncle stares through the window onto the view of his white picket cage, out beyond.

Uncle: We’re like stones as troubled as tea cups left in the
yard after tea parties, just like all of them.

JOSHUA VISITS HIS AUNT

Auntie always calls on Wednesday. She wants Joshua to sit for a five course dinner silver spread on her shoulders up the country. Joshua hesitates. Wednesday is the day he kneels under the YeGaFarsaken tree rooted near the sewage pit in the back yard and waits for ‘what’ (?)

Auntie doesn’t understand hesitation. It reminds her of fathers. She doesn’t understand children. They remind her of allergies. She doesn’t understand throats. They remind her of drowning

Joshua brings her flowers with tin foil at the base. She understands tin foil. She greets Joshua with mooneyes and a smile broad enough to frame Joshua’s hunger, and from the view on her shoulders she feeds him star apples and soy.

Joshua tells her tales of poets and lovemaking and queer kin and wombs and windows, and visions of holes deep in the earth.

She understands holes deep in the earth

Andra Simons is a Bermudian writer and performer living in London. He is recipient of both the Bermuda Gold Award and the Golden Inkwell for his poetry and plays. Andra has published and performed in Canada, Caribbean, UK, Bermuda and the US. For more about Andra go to: andrasimons.wordpress.com

The full collection of Joshua Tales is published by Treehouse Press.

At a meeting in an unnamed city of the Third Talmudic Congress, one of the delegates is found murdered in his room at the Hôtel du Nord. The local police chief. Inspector Treviranus, is in no doubt as to the cause of death: ’No need to look for a three-legged cat here,’ he says to his friend and rival, the amateur detective Erik Lönnrot, scourge of the local gangsters. ‘We all know that the Tetrarch of Galilee owns the finest sapphires in the world. Someone, intending to steal them, must have broken in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky got up; the robber had to kill him.’ ‘Possible, but not interesting,’ responds Lönnrot. ‘You’ll reply that reality has not the least obligation to be interesting. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid that obligation but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you propose, chance intervenes copiously. Here we have a dead rabbi; I would prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.’ Lönnrot’s intuition seems to be borne out by the discovery, in the rabbi’s typewriter, of a piece of paper on which is written: ‘The first letter of the Name has been uttered.’ Lönnrot takes away with him the dead man’s mystical and cabbalistic texts, and gives an interview to a Yiddish journal in which he lays out his hypotheses. Exactly one month later a Jewish hoodlum is found murdered in the Western suburbs, and next to his body the message: ‘The second letter of the Name has been uttered.’ One month after that a man is abducted from a rooming-house in the East of the city where for the past week he has been holed up under an assumed name. Again the message is found: ‘The third letter of the Name has been uttered.’ Are we dealing here with a campaign to terrify the country’s Jews or with some internecine Jewish struggle? Lönnrot is in no doubt that a fourth murder will be committed, since the Name is obviously the tetragrammaton, YHWH, and he predicts the time and place. Armed with a map and compass he makes his way to a mysterious abandoned house, a veritable labyrinth of rooms, corridors and staircases in the Southern sector of the city. There he is apprehended by the master criminal, Red Scharlach, who explains to him how, in revenge for Lönnrot’s role in the incarceration of his brother, he has set about entrapping him. The first crime was indeed an accident, as Inspector Treviranus had suggested: one of Scharlach’s men. David Simon Avezedo, having decided to double-cross the organisation and steal the jewels of the Tetrarch himself, and having blundered into the wrong room, was surprised by the rabbi, who had stayed up late to type out his notes for an essay he was writing on the names of God. He had no option but to kill him. Scharlach, learning through the papers of Lönnrot’s subtle hypothesis, and of the note found in the typewriter, decided it would be both poetic and expedient to kill two birds with one stone, He had the traitor murdered and clues left to led Lönnrot to the conclusion he wished him to arrive at; then he disguised himself and holed up in the rooming-house, from which he had his men ‘abduct’ him. ‘I interspersed repeated signs that would lead you, Lönnrot, the reasoner, to understand that the series was quadruple… I have premeditated everything, Erik Lönnrot, in order to attract you to the solitude of Triste-le-Roy.’ Then, taking careful aim, he fires the bullet which kills the sleuth.

What has all this to do with Finland and the Kalevala? What has Lönnrot the detective to do with Lönnrot the collector of folk songs? Everything and nothing, thought Borges as he lay dying. Everything because nothing. He had always understood that he could not and should not try to speak the skies and streams, the lakes and forests of the world. He had always sensed that, because description is always lame, writing must take another direction if it is not to bore the writer and the reader. The rules of realism are too lax to be a challenge to the true writer, he had always felt, for it does not take much to imitate chance and of what possible interest could anyone find the series of coincidences which form the building blocks of most novels? On the other hand ‘the interesting’, while it is the stuff of true art, becomes, in the real world, not only dangerous but absolutely inimical to life. For it seeks to turn life itself, in all its glorious randomness, into pattern and meaning, and that way lies madness, and not only madness, if the history of the twentieth century is anything to go by, but unspeakable disaster. For what else lay behind the monomaniacal actions of Hitler and Stalin but the desire to turn the contingent into the necessary, to force the world to conform to their imaginations? That is why, at the end of his favourite story, the hero, to escape the seductive power of the imaginary which is slowly taking over the world, retires to a quiet hotel in Adrogué to pursue the mundane but exacting task of translating Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Burial into Quevedan Spanish. Let the artist, he thought, not try to take the place of God, for that is the ambition of madmen and power-crazy tyrants, but instead know precisely what his place is, and, from that place seek to convey to the reader a sense of all that lies beyond the realm of art, a sense of the unspeakable fields and lakes and clouds, of the unspeakable wonder of our common world. He thought: the two Lönnrots, the real one and the fictive one, are the secrets of my life and work. I have been the second Lönnrot, the detective, the creator of labyrinths, who has to die in order for the other Lönnrot to live, the one I should have liked to be, a collector if not a singer of songs. And in my best work, he thought, the work by which I will live on, as Elias Lönnrot lives on in the pages of the Kalevala, I have perhaps managed to make the relation between them manifest.
And with that thought he died.

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 and has lived in England since 1956. He is the author of fourteen novels, three collections of short stories, six critical books and of a dozen plays for stage and radio. His most recent book is Two Novels: After & Making Mistakes (Carcanet).

Carcanet will be publishing a volume of new and selected stories, Heart’s Wings, in 2010.

Raduan Nassar was born of Lebanese parents in 1935, in a small town in the state of São Paulo. His first, prize-winning novel Lavoura arcaica (“Archaic Land”) appeared in 1975. Having worked in trading, agriculture and journalism, Nassar now is devoted to his farm and keeps his distance from the fashions and groups of the literary fraternity. Nassar’s slim oeuvre is regarded as one of the best and best-kept secrets in Brazilian contemporary literature.

Monica Almeida formerly lectured in Translation Theory and Practise at the University of Brasilia. She has just moved back to Brazil from South Africa and runs the company Oi, Active Living.

As a diplomatic spouse, Lispector had been absent from Brazil for the better part of two decades, living in Italy, Switzerland, England and the United States. She was increasingly unknown to the Brazilian public. She could still count on the small circle of artists and intellectuals who had been fascinated by her since1943 when, twenty-three years old, she published her debut, Near to the Wild Heart. The novel was recognised as the greatest a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language. Despite that early success, her second and third novels struggled to find a broader audience. After she left Brazil, a friend recalled, “publishers avoided her like the plague. The motives seemed obvious to me: she wasn’t a disciple of ‘socialist realism’ or preoccupied with the little dramas of the little Brazilian bourgeoisie.”

During her years abroad, Lispector wrote, “I lived mentally in Brazil, I lived ‘on borrowed time’. Simply because I like living in Brazil, Brazil is the only place in the world where I don’t ask myself, terrified: what am I doing here after all, why am I here, my God.” Perhaps her professional difficulties contributed to Lispector’s decision, in 1959, to leave her husband and return with her two young sons to Rio de Janeiro, where she would spend the rest of her life.

The country she returned to was changing fast. This was the age of the bold new capital, Brasília; bossa nova, which became an international sensation; and Pelé, who led Brazil to back-to-back World Cup victories. ‘Clarice’’s modern style would soon be part of this modern resurgence, but when she arrived in Rio in July 1959, she herself was unknown. The now-classic story collection Family Ties appeared in July 1960, after years in the same frustrating limbo that faced The Apple in the Dark. As a result, a reporter wrote, “There is a great curiosity surrounding the person of ‘Clarice.’ ‘Clarice Lispector doesn’t exist,’ some say. ‘It’s the pseudonym of someone who lives in Europe.’ ‘She’s a beautiful woman,’ claim others. ‘I don’t know her,’ says a third. ‘But I think she’s a man.’” Family Ties at least put to rest the rumour that Lispector was a man. With The Apple in the Dark – at 980 cruzeiros, the most expensive novel ever sold in Brazil – found an eager audience in a nation in the grips of a modern cultural fluorescence. With it, Clarice Lispector earned a position in Brazilian culture unmatched by any other twentieth-century Brazilian writer.

Yet if the novel is quintessentially modern, its sources were older and deeper than was generally understood. Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Lispector in 1920 in Podolia, in what is now south-western Ukraine. Her work is steeped in the mysticism of that area, and she would be forever pursued by the horrifying violence that surrounded her birth. The relationship between knowledge and sin animates many of her greatest works. The Apple in the Dark is the story of an engineer, Martim, who flees to the countryside to escape the consequences of a crime whose nature only becomes clear at the very end of the book. The detective story set-up is a flimsy pretext for the real drama, which is linguistic and mystical. Martim is cast out of the world of language, a “contented idiot”, only to gradually reacquire the human personality he had lost with his crime.

Lispector often reworked and disguised Jewish motifs in her work, but never with the allegorical force deployed in The Apple in the Dark. She hints at the very beginning of the book that Martim is Jewish, when she identifies his shadowy pursuer as a German who owns a Ford. There is no reason in plot or character to assign this vague figure German nationality, especially in a book in which few characters have so much as a name. The word ‘German’, in a work by a Jewish writer of the 1950s, was not a neutral description, especially when applied to a figure of harassment and oppression. And ‘Ford’, the only brand named in the book, suggests Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite whose racist writings were widely distributed in Brazil. Both names suggest that the German’s victim must be Jewish.

The book is a Jewish creation allegory, but of an odd variety. It is the story of the creation of a man, but also the story of how the man creates God. This is Martim’s essential, heroic invention, and it comes through the word. “Then in his colicky flesh he invented God […] A man in the dark was a creator. In the dark the great bargains are struck. When he said ‘Oh God’ Martim felt the first weight of relief in his chest.” Yet this story is the opposite of the Biblical creation story. The man is himself created through sin, and the sinning man creates God; that invention, another of Clarice Lispector’s great paradoxes, redeems the man. The moment Martin invents God is the moment he can finally come to terms with his crime: “I killed, I killed, he finally confessed.” Without God, even an invented God, there can be no sin. In these particulars, especially in the way Lispector reverses the creation story to which she alludes in the title, Martim suggests that most famous figure of Jewish folklore: the Frankenstein-like Golem, who was the mystical reversion of the creation of Adam. Golems are made of earth; at the beginning of the book, Lispector emphasises Martin’s identity with the rocky soil. Like the Golem, Martin cannot originally speak and is used as a house servant. Like the Golem, he is not allowed to go out alone. And as he masters human language, he grows to a position of power over the original inhabitants of the house. “He increases from day to day and can easily become larger and stronger than his house-comrades, however small he may have been in the beginning,” the German folklorist Jacob Grimm wrote in 1808. Golems are associated with murder, as is Martim; and as he masters human language, Martim grows to a position of power over the house’s inhabitants. Fearing him, they have him taken away.
Martin’s crime ushers him into a greater reality. Redemption through sin, enlightenment through crime: it is the kind of paradox in which Clarice Lispector delighted. With it, Lispector goes further than she ever had in her approach to the God she had abandoned when he killed her mother, raped in a Ukrainian pogrom. And she goes further, too, than Kafka. Like him, she found locked doors, blocked passageways and generalised punishment. But she also saw a different possibility: a state of grace.

Extracted from Benjamin Moser’s introduction to The Apple in the Dark, by Clarice Lispector (Haus Publishing).

Benjamin Moser is the author of Why this World: a biography of Clarice Lispector (Haus Publishing), and is the New Books columnist of Harper’s Magazine. He was born in Houston, Texas, in 1976 and now lives in the Netherlands. He is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications.

‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked. ‘The sea doesn’t fit in there!’
He sat down beside me. He told me that sometimes when he woke up, there was a pain on the left side of his chest – humanity. That’s when he’d walk to the beach, lie down in the sand, and dream up a fish.
‘You know, it was Clarice. She initiated me.’

At the time I didn’t understand who he was talking about. He had started by dreaming up small fish, very rudimentary fish, just a quick dash of silver, a light comma flashing in the air, but with time, as he developed his technique, he came to dream up serrans, black groupers, even swordfish. His ambition was one day to dream up a whale. A blue whale.

‘Watch the colour of the water,’ was his tip. ‘For example, really early in the morning, if the sea is calm and silvery, that’s a good time to dream up shad. The tarpon, one of our fish here, a big thing, is much easier after it’s rained and the river waters darken the sea. Golden mackerel though, are better dreamt with a blue sea.’

And mermaids? He looked at me, shocked.
‘Mermaids?! What good are mermaids? Mermaids are badly dreamt creatures, like duck-billed platypuses, or generals. You’ll do better than that.’

And so I try. I never knew the fisherman’s name. He was a tall guy, straight as a pole, his eyes were alive and his skin healthy, stretched taut over his bones. His voice was so clear and warm that, when he spoke at night, it seemed like he was spitting fireflies. You should be able to bequeath a voice like that in your will. It reminded me of Fernando Alves’ voice. People on the island said that the old man had been lost at sea for three weeks. He’d had a miraculous rescue. On his thirteenth day at sea Our Lady had appeared to him on his skiff, bringing him a leg of pork and a litre bottle of Coke. He himself flatly denied the miracle, sounding a little annoyed.

‘Our Lady?! Rubbish! It was Clarice Lispector who appeared to me! . . .’
All fishermen’s tales contain exaggerations, sometimes even barefaced lies, else they wouldn’t be fishermen’s tales. On this particular point, however, I must preclude debate (I’m using this phrase for the first time in my life, see how it shines?): he was a reader! He was fervent devotee of Clarice Lispector and Alberto Caeiro. He told me that Clarice had appeared to him at daybreak holding The Apple in the Dark, and read the entire novel to him. Afterwards, when she saw that he felt better, she taught him to dream up fish.

‘Dreaming up fish is good for the soul. Just remember that for every bad person in the world, there are a thousand good fish in the sea.’
My fisherman didn’t have a television. Sometimes he’d be dawdling in a bar or the square (there was a television in the square), and the din of distant wars would rob him of his sleep. Other people’s mistakes caused him suffering. He would walk around with The Hour of the Star tucked under his arm, trying, without any success, to convert the other islanders. I was the only one who paid him any attention:

‘If nothing else works, read Clarice.’
One afternoon I saw him dream up a dolphin. ‘It was my first mammal,’ he told me afterwards, exhausted by the effort. ‘Next week I’ll try for an orca.’ I never went back to Itamaracá, and never saw him again, but I reckon that by now he has managed to dream up his blue whale. He’ll have launched it into the sea, one hundred and thirty tons of pure dream, and its song must be resounding through the waters now. One day the whales will come to save humanity.

Born in 1960, José Eduardo Agualusa is one of the leading young literary voices from Angola, writing in Portuguese, today. His novel Creole, which has evoked comparisons with Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah, was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, while The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2007.

‘Se nada mais der certo leia Clarice’ appears in Agualusa’s 2004 collection of stories Catálogo de Sombras (Dom Quixote). English rights are held by Arcadia Books.

Tilley lamp was brought and threw

fitful beams into the darkening room, the stranger

grew unknowable. They washed his neck

and, as they knew nothing of his circumstances,

they wove a history for him from lies,

diligently washing. A cough forced one to pause,

to rest her loaded vinegar sponge

on the face. The second one took the opportunity too,

to pause. The heavy drops fell

from the hard brush, and his horribly contorted hand

tried to signal to the whole house

that he no longer thirsted.

It understood. Abashed, clearing their throats,

they resumed their work, their bent shadows caught

by the net cast by the patterned wallpaper,

twisting until the end.

The night stood blank in the curtainless window.

The nameless one lay there, naked, clean,

and demanding.

Leichen-Wäsche
(1908, Paris)

Sie hatten sich an ihn gewöhnt. Doch als

die Küchenlampe kam und unruhig brannte

im dunkeln Luftzug, war der Unbekannte

ganz unbekannt. Sie wuschen seinen Hals,

und da sie nichts von seinem Schicksal wussten,

so logen sie ein anderes zusamm,

fortwährend waschend. Eine musste husten

und ließ solang den schweren Essigschwamm

auf dem Gesicht. Da gab es eine Pause

auch für die zweite. Aus der harten Bürste

klopften die Tropfen; während seine grause

gekrampfte Hand dem ganzen Hause

beweisen wollte, dass ihn nicht mehr dürste.

Und er bewies. Sie nahmen wie betreten

eiliger jetzt mit einem kurzen Huster

die Arbeit auf, so dass an den Tapeten

ihr krummer Schatten in dem stummen Muster

sich wand und wälzte wie in einem Netze,

bis dass die Waschenden zu Ende kamen.

Die Nacht im vorhanglosen Fensterrahmen

war rücksichtslos. Und einer ohne Namen

lag bar und reinlich da und gab Gesetze.

Swiss writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is one of the greatest 20th-century poets. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; among his prose works are the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Timothy Taylor is reader in Archaeology at the University of Bradford and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Prehistory.

Maria, always first, my little sister, boldly clambering up the rocks, steadying herself atop the wall, and walking in that baby-sister way of hers with her parasol of bright flowers on a yellow background, high heels, red lipstick, rouge, patting her chestnut curls, wanting to be prettier than mummy. Maria holding her head high, willowy, trying to be thin, ever so poised, until she bumped into the branch of the guava tree, which no one ever pruned, and tumbled almost into Rita’s arms. Rita, the oldest and most suntanned, always laughing, even at daddy, the only one, scooping Maria up as if she were her own daughter and planting kisses on her weeping until they were both rolling across the yard dirtying satin, shoes, suit coat, mixing dust, leaves, the two of them laughing at branches and tumbles, and finally hugging one another, exhausted, on the ground, bellies up, mouths open to the sky, like always, mummy used to say, the two loonies.

Then Clarice, the oh-so pretty one, more than mummy I thought but never said it. Light, her delicate little feet bare, wearing just a large white shirt of daddy’s, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, Clarice pulling back her long, straight black hair, fastening it at the back of her neck, smiling at the three of us down below and looking, being, definitely prettier than mummy but no one ever said anything, not even daddy. Clarice, the only olive-skinned one, coloured by the sun and some plants I think, her skin tanned but not red like Rita’s, so like the Indian woman on the wall in our room hypnotising my sleepless nights, dreaming I was her, the Indian woman, and Clarice, her colour contrasting with the white of the shirt and the teeth that she revealed and hid in such a bewitching smile that it even seemed on purpose.

Clarice motioning to me, for me to get up there with her, not afterwards, like normally, but together this time. The rocks, the wall, and suddenly me in a crimson dress, navy blue suede shoes, a silver clasp in my hair, seeing my sister there next to me, with me, gazing at me pretty, so like the afternoon. I felt a lump growing in my throat, this thing, wanting to be said, and I realised I urgently needed something wondrous, from me, slowly leaving my mouth as if I didn’t want it to come out like that, in the form of a word. But it did: Clarice, you are… splendid!

First, silence, centuries-long. Then applause. The three of them clapping, Rita and Maria below, Clarice next to me, my three sisters making me the winner of that afternoon, for the first time in my life, before I’d even begun my parade, always the weakest, poor thing. And then this: there I was, a statue, hearing clap clap clap, and Maria and Rita’s laughter laced with dust, sunshine and leaves, and my sister Clarice, with her enchanted gaze, splendid.

Born in Goiânia, Brazil, in 1962, Flávio Carneiro writes novels, short stories and books for children, teenagers and adults. His two film scripts have been awarded prizes he has recently been awarded the Jabuti Prize for The Distance of Things (A Distância das Coisas).

“The Pageant”, by Flávio Carneiro, was originally published in English in Brazil: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, ed. Alexis Levitin (Whereabouts Press).

The issue is, particularly, an homage to Clarice Lispector, often called the greatest modern Brazilian writer but still essentially an enigma in Britain. Benjamin Moser writes here on one of Lispector’s best novels, while José Eduardo Agualusa’s story pays a generation’s dues to the ‘Brazilian sphinx’. Her name echoes through Flávio Carneiro’s ‘The Pageant’ and in the tone of Raduan Nassar’s and Claudia Laje’s salutary fantasies.

We also bring you a poetry sequence by Andra Simons, a poem by Rilke and a story by Gabriel Josipovici, each of which looks forward to our February issue – which will now be the first of 2010 – themed in celebration of the Joy of Crime. (If you have already submitted for this theme, we assure you your stories are safe and will be considered for the next issue.)

Let us know if you like what you’re reading!

Sophie Lewis
& Dena Ziari