DUBITO ERGO SUM

 Páginas do Editor

THE WOMAN THAT ONLY FICTION CAN SEE

Gustavo Bernardo

 Versão em português

 

Published in
GESTO - Revista do Centro Coreográfico
RIOARTE - Rio de Janeiro
number 3 - december 2003.

 

The reader and I could be among the strange men surrounding the woman they take pleasure in studying, evaluating, judging: this body? They and her meet in the painting O júri, by Di Cavalcanti, one of the best painters of the Brazilian female body – and therefore, for our culture, a painter of beauty and pleasure. However, as Murilo Mendes correctly pointed out in 1949, this painter knew how pleasure can also contain conflicts, abysses, contradictions – how pleasure, in other words, lives under the shadow of pain. For Murilo, as for Di, “the essence of Brazilian happiness is filled with sadness”.

From this subterranean sadness comes the gloomy, sometimes sinister, expression of certain characters in his paintings. In this one, for example. Dark clothes, Machiavellian bald heads, a bowler hat, and a monocle: all the elements contrast with the tranquil luminosity of the woman’s body. She protects her modesty, but not very much: her hands are over the pelvis, but the bosom is revealed. Long hair and neck, the seated woman, her eyes lowered, allows them to examine her. . In the narrow, claustrophobic space, judgment and desire become mixed up with fear, which comes from the man sitting on the floor. I feel this fear while trying to write about the fiction of the female body.

That is why I would not wish to find myself among the men in Di Cavalcanti’s painting. Three centuries traverse this essay and, in them, the fragments of the fiction through which we can see glimpses of the female body. Such glimpses can illuminate, like flashes, this body that we cannot know. The flashes will not exhaust the chosen texts, just as the look can never exhaust the body that leaves the look exhausted.

The first woman who comes to mind is the widow Lívia, precisely the first female character of Machado de Assis in the novel Ressurreição – however, it´s not the description of her body that occurs to me first, but the surprise of her suitor, Félix (who was not “feliz” – happy in English – warns the narrator), when he meets her, eyes looking down, at a terrace: “The afternoon was truly beautiful. Félix, however, cared less for the afternoon than for the girl. He didn’t want to lose the desire to tell her, as though it were true, that he loved her madly.”

The situation was propitious for “loving madly” – which doesn’t imply loving “truly”. The man wanted to love “as though” he loved, that is, as the fictional character he truly was. Félix and Lívia will return, renamed as Bento and Capitolina, in Dom Casmurro. The irony with the name of the male character deepens, transforming the happiness that wasn’t felt into a benediction that didn’t exist: Bento Santiago is cursed since the incorporation of treacherous Yago in his own name, jealousy eating himself away. The livid luminosity of Lívia, who reminds us of the figure by Di Cavalcanti, becomes fiction itself, that is, Capitolina, also known as Capitu, who speaks to us precisely about the chapters of passion.[1]

Passion would transform the eyes “of an oblique and cunning gypsy woman”, as said the plotting José Dias, into “eyes of a stormy sea”, title of chapter XXXII: [her eyes] “would bring some mysterious and energetic fluid, a force that dragged one inside, like the wave that recedes from the beach on days of rough seas.” The eyes of Capitu are the part of the body that would represent the whole, impressing Bentinho almost to the point of madness. However, the two metaphors, of the gypsy and of the rough seas, if they are sufficient to provoke desire, they are not enough to describe, and therefore control, that woman’s body, at least with words. The eyes stand for both good and evil. A little further on, chapter CXXIII will have the same title, “Eyes of a Stormy Sea”, relating these eyes with the “real” rough seas that drowned the friend of the couple, Escobar. The passage stirs up the suspicions of the narrator: “There was a moment in which Capitu’s eyes stared at the deceased, like those of the widow, without her crying or words, but large and open, like the wave in the sea outside, as though it too wanted to swallow the morning swimmer.” The rough seas, in her eyes and in the ocean, confuse the affections and suspend judgment.

There is no possible control, as had been shown in another chapter, in which Capitu turned her back on her boyfriend and sat in front of a mirror. He took her hair and dedicated himself to combing it, “seeing” with his hands those “thick strands, that were part of her”, while the fingers “brushed against the back of her neck or the shoulders dressed in calico, and the sensation was a delight”. The scene is so insinuating that it leads to their first kiss, which in turn makes that young man become a man – but a stunned and silent man: “I didn’t dare say anything; even if I wanted to, I had no tongue.” That darling body showed itself only in painful flashes, very slowly, as though through metonymies.

A little further ahead, Capitu’s arms will stand out, and they “deserve a phrase. They were beautiful and on the first night when she took them bare to a ball, I do not believe there were any like them in town, not even yours, reader, which were then those of a girl, if they had already been born, but would probably still be in marble, from where they came, or in the hands of the divine sculptor”. The phrase to which the writer refers would not serve, in a school grammar book, as an example of “bem-dizer” (good speech); on the contrary, truncated like the desire and the jealousy that come together, it seems it will refer to a happening “but” gets lost in the unknown arms of the unknown reader.

The nudity of the arms is highlighted by Poty, in the illustration prepared for the Garnier edition, by covering the face and hands of the character with a checkered veil, at the same time that it allows the black dress to blend in with the environment. As they appear in the drawing, the arms are bare and therefore shine, white, because only they have not been drawn: they show the white of the page, that is, of the world, here understood as a mystery. Capitu’s hands, as the hands of the woman in Di Cavalcanti’s painting, also seem to be relaxed – in fact, they disguise what they protect. This protection, in turn, is equally ambiguous, because it directs the eye of the man-spectator towards what they should disguise.

 Guided by these hands (or misguided , if you wish), I seek this fictional body in the pen of the writer that best characterized the uncertainty of the century that followed that of Machado: Clarice Lispector. In Um sopro de vida, the character Autor (Author), a man, speaks of the difficulty he finds in describing his female character: “It is difficult to describe Ângela: she is just an atmosphere, a way of being, a revealing twist of the mouth, but what is this revealing of? Of something I didn’t know in her and that now, with no description possible, I came to know, just that.” Metonymy occurs not so much in a body part, such as the eyes, but in a gesture, a twist that both reveals and veils at the same time.

Actually, difficulty lies not just in describing this body, but mainly in seeing or having this body, explaining the inherent insecurity of the one who writes and, perhaps, of the one who loves, as the now female narrator comments in A paixão segundo G. H.: “While I write or speak, I must pretend someone is holding my hand. Oh, at least in the beginning, just in the beginning. As soon as I can do without it, I can go on alone. For now I must hold your hand – even though I cannot imagine your face and eyes and mouth.” The whole cannot be fully understood or grasped, if truth, even that of the body, is always not-whole: “I’m not up to imagining a whole person because I’m not a whole person.”

That is why the veils and masks are necessary: “I used to call a mask a lie and that was not: the mask was the essential ceremonial mask. We’d have to put on ritual masks to love each other. Scarabs are born with the mask they will were forever. Through the original sin, we lose our mask.” The mask can be literature. A woman’s best mask can be her naked body shown in dim light (the full, pornographic light removes all depth, that is, shows that beneath the mask there is a flat nothing: only despair).

In this sense, catharsis through fiction is the opposite of a process through which the reader identifies with the character, indicating a process of de-identification, de-personalization and de-heroification: “Whoever is affected by de-personalization will recognize the other under any disguise: the first step towards the other is to find in one’s self the man of all men. Every woman is the woman of all women, every man is the man of all men, and each one of them can present his or her self wherever man is judged.” Because life is a secret mission, “the gradual de-heroification of oneself is the true work which labors under the apparent work”.

Differently from what the senses “think”, the body, especially the feminine body (this is the one we speak of, this is the one we do not see), doesn’t show itself. Precisely for this reason, fiction that recognizes itself as such from the beginning can best lead us into this mystery, into this maze of absences and affections than any “logical” discourse, be it anthropological, psychological or sociological. Fiction says nothing of the “via crucis of a body repressed in its pleasures, sacrificed in its vitality, and repressed in its joy”, nor of the “bitter docility imposed on the feminine body throughout history”, as can be read in Márcia Wanderley’s recent review, published in the Idéias literary supplement of Jornal do Brasil, about the book entitled O corpo feminino em debate (organized by Maria Izilda Matos and Rachel Soihet).

Clarice’s hand is then made necessary – “while I write and speak I must pretend someone is holding my hand” – to find one’s way through the labyrinth. It is the same hand Lya Luft refers to in her first novel, As parceiras – in English, The partners. The first partner of Anelise, the narrator, is a childhood friend who died prematurely: “She was the first love of my life at an age when souls interest us much more than the bodies. (...) Then Adélia was my sister, gave me the tenderness adults forgot about and which I desired so intensely. She has smooth black hair, chubby hands, so warm in mine, dark eyes, an easy laugh and a joie de vivre that astounded me.” The hand holding the other represents a female body getting to know itself during childhood through another, but because they are more interested in the soul than in the body – and one can only reach the soul through a metaphor, a metaphor of the body, and/or through a metonymy, for example, a small, chubby, warm hand.

However, the soul, a name for the best or worst in us, doesn’t exist except as a name. What exists is the body, imperious. Anelise lives under the sign of her grandmother Catarina’s body, ‘who married at the age of 14 to be raped by her husband until she lost her wits and lived like a recluse in the attic. She became a “beautiful, clean, tame lunatic, writing and murmuring among lace and lavender”, not harming a soul. Until “one day, the scandal: Catarina von Sassen, 46 years old, mad and beautiful, was found in bed in a suspicious attitude with the young nurse who daily applied vitamin injections and massages to compensate for the long reclusion”.

Naturally, they got rid of the nurse. Naturally, the doctor prescribed the strongest sedative. Naturally, the resident of the attic became extraordinarily calm, becoming “an absence standing behind the glass door of the terrace”, who would die three months later. The granddaughter-narrator cries “for the persecuted, the unarmed, the dubious, those who cannot love within the limits imposed by others”, thinking many times “on the coarse labels that are applied to the most delicate, intricate, subterranean loves, but not necessarily the most somber. They should have allowed her to know some human warmth in her immaculate universe. They didn’t allow her that ”.

This girl who narrates the story tells how she lost her friend, Adélia, very early, and of how she later lost many children, all stillborn babies, except the last , who was born a vegetable, with irreversible brain damage. She sees her husband, her cousin, her aunt, all cornered, and supposes she must have the same look in her eyes, but she cannot see herself: “I did try to look at myself in the mirror to see what look you have when you suffer so much, but it was always my face.” Only fiction can suggest that her face can serve, for an instant, as our (ritual) mask , since, like her, we can’t see ourselves seeing, we can’t see ourselves being.

It is about this impossibility that Adriana Lisboa speaks. Her novel, Sinfonia em branco, published in the first year of the 21st century, shows two sisters, Maria Inês and Clarice, trying to see themselves. When taking off her clothes in front of the mirror, Maria Inês sees less her body than its accidents – than the history of her body: “A gesture was enough to remove the nightgown, and then she found out again that intimate and banal truth, her body, which in no way evoked Barbies and other standardized beauties, curves classifiable in categories, saleable, temporarily definitive. Her hips were a little wide and her stomach was far from being smooth and flat. The girlish breasts that had nursed two sons were still a girl’s breasts, small and fragile. She kept the scar from an acute appendicitis operated on five years ago. Taking off her panties, it was still possible to make out the vestiges of the c-section, that small, curving, pinkish scar, perhaps ten centimeters long.”

The Barbies and other standardized beauties are equivalent, say, to the Right, jus as the anthropological, psychological or sociological discourses are equivalent to the Left. In both cases, fiction speaks as though it weren’t so, as though it were an objective description. In the case of Maria Inês’ body, which we know is fictitious, the scars that matter the most have a date and pain, like those that her sister Clarice (who is not Lispector) has on her wrists, the result of a suicide attempt with a box cutter. Any similarity between Adriana Lisboa’s Clarice, keloid on the naked wrists, and Clarice Lispector’s right hand, burned to the cartilage by a fire in her bed, will be just sheer coincidence – because, after all, every sheer coincidence is an involuntary metaphor.

Adriana’s Clarice, Maria Inês’s sister, is a sculptor who sculpts incomplete women: “ There were no legs, no arms, no head. The torso curved to the side, slightly backwards and the shoulders were spread out. That incomplete woman stretched her nonexistent arms to receive what? What gift? What punishment? On the irregular skin, purposely rough, the marks of the chisel remain. As though that small work of art should be incomplete. Or ambivalent. Half sculpture, half misshapen stone. Half woman, half suggestion. Half real, half impossible. If it had eyes, maybe it would cry. Since it didn’t , the tears were suggested around them like an odor or a spirit. The entire sculpture almost cried. Perhaps it was a self-portrait which, bordering on the impossible, remembered a danger.”

“Obvious like fear, but aloof like the truth”, Clarice’s sculpture reminds us of René Magritte’s painting entitled, quite appropriately, Tentando o impossível (Attempting the impossible). By referring to the myth of Pygmalion, the painter represents a painter trying to paint in the air, as though it were a sculpture, a woman’s naked body. Only an arm is missing, that is true – but this arm will be missing forever.

The sinister men in Di Cavalcanti’s painting, among which I would like not to be, will forever try to interpret and judge the female body. However, the female body will escape them, from their eyes as well as from their hands, through the edges of fiction. Every allusion to it will be no more than this: a suggestion of a will and an attempt destined, fortunately, to fail – just as, by the way, the present essay.

Translated by
Anna Luisa de Oliveira Araujo
and Claudia Chaves.