The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who would be 100 years old on December 10.
The gloved hands of the librarian gently extract the page from the binder that she has taken from a box.
They are actually several pieces of paper glued together with yellowish tape and glue.
The word END, in capital letters, stands out in the middle of paragraphs and individual sentences scribbled in ballpoint pen.
Thus, like a
collage
, the works of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) were born, the most original, most translated and most important Brazilian writer of the 20th century.
He used to write down ideas that came to him, disturbing sensations or phrases, literary notes that he mixed with prosaic tasks such as telephoning so-and-so, losing weight or buying flowers, only when those words were mature did he type the text.
Always with the typewriter on his lap.
The glued page belongs to the manuscript of his posthumous work, A breath of life;
It is part of her library, which is kept by the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) in Rio de Janeiro, a small window to the method of creation of a novelist, short story writer and translator who would be 100 years old on December 10.
Lispector published at age 22 his first novel,
Close to the Wild Heart
, which won him an award although it baffled critics.
That run was sold out, but her reputation as a hard-to-read author was a drag for years.
It was clear to her that it was a skin problem, not a brain problem.
"It is not about intelligence, but about feelings, to get in touch," he stressed on television during his last interview, months before he died of ovarian cancer on the eve of his 57th birthday.
“It seems that I win with the rereading.
It's a relief".
Born in Chechelnik, a Ukrainian village then in Russia, she was a baby when the Lispectors, fleeing war and pogroms, reached Brazil, where they had relatives.
She never lost the foreign accent of a girl raised in Yiddish.
Although he spoke and read in French, English and Italian, Portuguese was the language in which he wrote, thought, dreamed and loved.
Lispector revolutionized the Brazilian literary scene in the 1940s.
Being a woman influenced, but it was mainly because that was linked to a groundbreaking style.
“She is a wild author, little polished, as if she went out into the world very hungry.
You perceive in her hunger, thirst, love, passion.
It is very little intellectual ”, explains the scholar of his work Eucanãa Ferraz, from the IMS.
That enigmatic, beautiful woman, groomed like a movie star, bursts into a moment of profound social transformation for Western women.
They begin to break free when Lispector puts her wildest, most animal side into her work, while leading the conventional life of an upper-class woman.
For 15 years she lives abroad to accompany her diplomatic husband while raising the couple's two children.
Keep jotting down ideas.
Writing
Publishing.
Sometimes I would sit in the hammock to swing with the open book on my lap, without touching it, in pure ecstasy.
She was no longer a girl with a book: she was a woman with her lover
, says Lispector in the story
Clandestine Happiness.
In her last interview she described the immense suffering that gripped her between works: "I think that when I don't write I'm dead."
Some of his articles and books are deposited in another cultural institution in Rio, Casa Rui Barbosa, but most of them are in the IMS, two steps from Ipanema beach.
Along with two glued manuscripts, he preserves about 800 books from his personal library, his records, family photographs and correspondence with his sisters, Tania and Elisa.
The exchange of letters recounts his life during the years he traveled through Europe and Africa and lived in Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy.
"My dear", he begins a letter in which he says goodbye with a "thirst for happiness, I am happy in my own way."
A small notebook with annotations donated by his son Paulo Gurgel Valente is one of the most recent additions to the collection.
Cult writer and eclectic reader.
Dostoyevsky's gaze was the same as the novel rose, or
The Steppenwolf
, by Hermann Hess, which left her shocked at age 13.
He chose his readings by titles rather than authors, he said.
Copies of Spinoza with pencil annotations, works by Tolstoy, Kafka or Machado de Assis coexist with books on James Joyce or Shakespeare, metaphysics, spy novels or the
Encyclopedia of Women and the Family
, points out the IMS librarian Jane Leite.
With his first salary - earned as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro - he bought
Felicidad
, by Katherine Mansfield.
That copy is not in the library, but it is from an edition of
Lettere
, the letters of the New Zealand storyteller edited in Italian by Mondadori.
The pandemic has forced the Moreira Salles Institute to suspend visits to the library and postpone to 2021 the
Constelación Clarice
exhibition,
which will bring together contemporary Brazilian visual artists of the author and which should now celebrate its centenary.
At the gates of 40 years, he divorces.
She returns with her two children to Rio, where she now has a sculpture: sitting with a book on her lap, Lispector turns her back on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, Copacabana.
An image of his own work, where there is no place for landscapes, or times.
They are introspective trips to thoughts, fears, anguishes, affections ... almost always carried out by women who live in conventional universes like yours.
He entered children's literature after the complaints of one of his children, who was ugly that he wrote for so many people, but not for him.
She dedicated a story to her in English because the family was living in the US Being a mother is the experience that most marked her, says specialist Ferraz.
But not because of family ties, but because of the fact of giving life, as any animal or seed does.
She never wanted to be that writer who couldn't care for her offspring during work hours.
It never bothered him that Pedro and Paulo altered those hours, just after dawn, when he created from the gut with cigarettes and a lot of coffee.