Hurricane Clarice in Buenos Aires

Lispector, Nabokov, Orwell and Joyce meet in an underwater café...

“It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.”

“I write to save someone's life, probably my own.”

“The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.”

All quotes by the indomitable “Hurricane” Clarice Lispector

Joel Bowman, shoes full of water, musing today from Buenos Aires, Argentina…

Outside Mala Cara, bistrot a las brasas, down on the sodden corner of Paraná and Marcelo T. Alvear, the flood falls in fast and flaying sheets. Soon the gutters will be full, then overflowing. Slick streets reflect the city lights, awash in the blackened skies overhead. Hither and thither dash the downtown denizens, newspapers atop their sopping manes, briefcases clenched under trench coats, shoes filled up with water, like Buckley’s funeral mourners. A sad parade, indeed. 

Warm and dry inside, observing the commuters trudge the asphalt stream, the reader dives into his dog-eared paperback, Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart. Some authors, he considers, are apt to inspire. Their clarity of composition appears almost – if illusorily – attainable. 

“Good prose is like a windowpane,” observed clever, open-eyed Orwell (behind a pseudonymic blur for Blair, Eric). By which the reader takes to mean: good writing is clear thinking, transcribed. 

But this is not Clarice’s gambit... 

“Never put a policeman in an automobile when you can put a cop in a car.” Who said that, anyway? Hemingway? Either way, the injunction remains the same: direct... simple...to the point. 

“All you have to do is write one true sentence.” (This Papa said for sure, de verdad.) “Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Ah, but whence cometh Truth, with its condescending smirk, staring down from the mountaintop with leering, beady eyes, beyond its unscalable Capital-T overhang? 

Neither is this Clarice...

And what then of those other artists, Dali’s of the pen, who toil with sweaty abandon, feverish in their struggle, desktop strewn with metaphorical fragments and half-concocted clauses and mystical motivations, whose workplace more resembles an abattoir than a boudoir, more crime scene than pristine? 

Here the reader rushes to confront the merry Modernists, calling to the stand; Joyce... Woolf... Mann... Kafka... and the very defendant in hand, Hurricane Clarice Lispector. 

Reader: Charged with presenting the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, how do you plead? 

Chorus: Ambivalent, your dishonor! Resoundingly, resolutely, indubitably ambivalent!

Out on the streets of Buenos Aires, meanwhile, the rains continue to lash in biblical torrents. An entire fleet of radio taxis now hopelessly submerged, dinghies, skiffs and dories take to the choppy waters, ferrying busy passengers among the downtown estuaries. Beneath the bistrot’s drawbridge doors the brackish waters lap, filling steadily the readers’ untied shoes. 

Oblivious, engrossed, he considers the final passage of Lispector’s debut novel, its title lifted from Joyce’s own Portrait: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.”  

(Arrives the waitress: “Brewed tea is truth,” chimes she, “truth, brewed tea.” Angelica root to boot, thinks he, before returning to the task at hand.) 

According to Vladimir Nabokov, whose entire life appeared to be one protracted battle waged against the very existence of concise dictionaries, “There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered; as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.”

For the author of Lo-lee-ta (Lo, plain Lo, in the morning...), “it is the enchanter that predominates...”

Into the final pages storms Clarice, a squalling force of nature, with vivid streams-of-consciousness, recalling Molly Bloom’s trembling crescendo in luscious, Penelopean energy... 

“...I will build in me what I am one day, with one gesture of mine my waves will rise up powerful, pure water drowning doubt, awareness, I will be strong like the soul of an animal and when I speak my words will be unthought and slow, not lightly felt, not full of yearning for humanity, not the past corrupting the future! what I say will resound fatal and whole!...”

~ From Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector

Kicking off his shoes at last, the reader breastrokes for the bistrot door, exhaling tiny oxygen bubbles which sparkle like pearls as they float to the gurgling surface. Downtown along Paraná he swims, before being swept away on Marcelo T. Alvear, carried off in the raging flood. 

Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires ~ November, 2023

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