One Hundred Years after Tomorrow: Brazilian Women's Fiction in the Twentieth Century

Elisa Lispector / The Fragile Balance (1977)

Elisa Lispector Born in the Ukraine in 1911, Elisa Lispector was a young girl when her family emigrated to the Brazilian Northeast. After attending the Conservat6rio de Musica in Recife, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, which was her home until her death in 1989. In the 1940s and 1950s, Elisa Lispector was perhaps better known than her younger sister, Clarice, who is now considered to be one of Latin America's most distinguished authors. Elisa published her first novel, Alem da Fronteira (Beyond the Border) in 1945; several others followed, among them 0 Muro dePedras (Wall of Stones), which in 1963 was selected from more than one hundred entries in the competition for the newly created Jose Lins do Rego Prize. The following year, the book also won an award from the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Lispector's fiction is usually concerned with introspective women from the middle class. Her 1975 novel, A Ultima Porta (The Last Door), is a compelling book that explores the difficulty of communication between men and women. In her later years, she abandoned novels for short fiction, publishing three collections: Sangue no Sol (1970) (Blood on the Sun), Inventdrio (1977) (Inventory), and Tigre de Bengala (1985) (Bengal Tiger). Many of these stories, like "0 Pragil Equilibrio" (The Fragile Balance), focus on the inner turmoil of older, single women. 174 The Fragile Balance (1977) As she sewed, methodically making one stitch then another, she said to herself as if issuing a warning: I must be careful with my thoughts. From random thoughts ideas are born, grow, and take shape. Soon you're right in the middle of a circle, without any possibility of escape. That's where she found herself as she hemmed her traveling outfit, not knowing for certain how events had linked themselves together up to that point. She vaguely remembered having said that she intended to take her vacation. To travel. More vaguely still, she recalled picking out one date, then another, and then still another. Always putting it off. One day, without her knowledge, the indefinite project escaped her control and took the form of a sealed agreement that pushed her forward almost against her will. As if she were being exiled. Everybody in the office knew her vacation was set and her trip was planned. "Now it's packing the bag and getting myself off," she said to herself, wanting to joke about it, but deep down forcing herself to contain an anxiety, an imprecise fear, so subtle that it was almost vertiginous. Never before had she had a clearer sense that she was in danger, that she might be cut off from the small world in which she had been incrusted for so many years. Even prior to taking the train, she felt as if she were being pushed away. Farther away. Away from what, she didn't know, since there was nothing or no one holding her there. Then, for the first time, she looked back at that little world, like one who looks over a fence, and was suddenly assailed by an ambivalent reaction, the feeling of an oyster out of its shell, of a decapitated head-and, at the same time, of a wanderer for whom a long indefinite road had been cleared. She knew she wasn't a mollusk, so she resisted the disturbing sense of becoming a trembling and pulsating bit of gelatin held at the brink of 175 176 Elisa Lispector disaster, in order to concentrate on the denser but still risky feeling of human living. "What I always lacked was cunning," she thought, and her mouth suddenly filled with saliva, as if her passivity made her nauseated. And because she didn't know how to lie or pretend, she didn't know how to impose herself on people. She was exactly as she presented herself, and everyone made her run in circles. They hoodwinked her, overloading her with work that wasn't hers, giving her advice she didn't ask for. If no one contradicted her on the few times when she dared to offer an opinion, it was simply because she'd never been taken seriously , she knew that now. She was a person of no importance, and who was going to pay attention to her? The many times she had felt set apart from others, unloved to the point of aversion. "It didn't even need to be...