Apologue 1

The jacket of nettles

In my youth―at about fifteen years old―I had a real passion for Pasolini, because of The Gospel According to St. Matthew. All those boys enchanted me, starting with the angel Gabriel, who didn’t seem as threatening as those in many painted Annunciations (the prime example being Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece). That poor woman―young as she was―who is told she is to be the mother of God, oblivious to the fact that she was pregnant. Her husband, similarly oblivious, is as unhappy as he is perplexed. The young woman also has a heady beauty about her. Judas is the exception, with his twisted mouth, a lovelorn being. That, and I was very much pleased by Jesus’ ire.

There was one thing I found very strange, the figure of Mary following the torments to which her son was being subjected: she was so very old, her hair totally white, her face wizened, so much she looked more like his grandmother. Sometime later I discovered that the actress who had played Jesus’s mother was the director’s own mother, Susana Pasolini. This wasn’t something which occupied me, nor did I extract any conclusions from it.

Now I feel as though that choice saw the melding of theory and desire: through the film, Pasolini’s mother would become a virgin, exempt from violation by a male sexual organ and the gestation caused by it; that’s to say, thanks to the film, Pasolini’s mother was removed from the horror of the heterosexual couple and its exclusively reproductive matrix (both falsely natural and morally repugnant) and thus Pasolini placated the ancestral fear of the male predator who devours his children and liberated his mother from the shame of violation and forced gestation. In truth, the only perspective in which the woman has the right to be is that of virginity:

The corollary of one such blockage is a traumatic and profound “sexophobia”, comprised of the pretension―equally traumatic and profound―of virginity, or at least the woman’s chastity. All of this is true, perhaps even too much so. But it is also my own personal tragedy, on the subject of which it seems rather ungenerous to base (certain) ideological conclusions.” Pier Paolo Pasolini, Letter to Alberto Moravia (30th of January 1975)[1] 

Blockage, traumatic and profound “sexophobia,” the ensuing pretension of virginity, or at least the woman’s chastity, are expressions Alberto Moravia employs to speak of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and which the latter quotes in his return letter. To these, he added “All of this is true, perhaps even too much so. But it is also my own personal tragedy, about which it seems rather ungenerous to base (certain) ideological conclusions.”

Of course, there are no traces of what one might want to call sexophobia in Pasolini, unless liking men doesn’t qualify as sexophilia, which seems a hard point to argue. But he doesn’t exactly deny sexophobia: “All of this is true, perhaps even too much so.” Therefore, sexophobia is being used in a particular sense, that of being terrified of having sexual relations with women. After the confessed acceptance of the epithets attributed to him, there comes a warning―which opens, it must be said, with a biting confession: “it is also my own personal tragedy”―that serves as an appraisal of Alberto Moravia’s exploitation of these as seed for argumentation. The crux of the disagreement has to do with abortion: Moravia is in favour of it, Pasolini is against.

Let us linger on this point. The latter of the two understands abortion to be an incentive for the unbridled expansion of the heterosexual couple’s powers (a crude translation: “if they’re to fuck with such legality, let them at least reproduce”). Indeed, according to him, abortion is a cunning stroke by the capitalist system, an effect and incentive of consumer society. Pasolini wishes to add the charge of crime to women’s guilt, for abortion’s legalization “would sanction the decriminalization of guilt” (143). He seemingly covers his eyes to the reality that the women who had and were suffering most with the criminal punishing of abortion were the poor, the despoiled, those who were subjected to all manner of abuse, as in times of war. However, without speaking of this explicitly, Pasolini does end up hinting at it, as he encourages the struggle “for the dissemination of knowledge about the means for ‘non-procreative love,’ considering (as I was saying) that procreating is now an ecological crime” (144). A well-directed television campaign would, according to him, reduce unwanted pregnancies and, in one fell swoop, the births that are currently “a threat to the survival of humanity” (144).

Supreme abjection will lie in the institutionalization of the commute between birth and abortion, as objectified in the heterosexual couple. There is one exception, that of prostitutes, an abject feminine expedient to the upending of the heterosexual couple’s strategy. Hence the reason pimps are always treated with reverence, as they’re the ones who bring heightened visibility to those women’s abjection, and in so doing, redeem it.

This is, of course, a pessimistic line of thought, according to which a woman’s love for a man, and her desire for maternity are―arguably―unacceptable. At the same time, they are irrepresentable, given the strangeness of that form of feminine existence. This way of thinking is endowed, by the one who thinks it―thus opening it up to an army of hagiographic interpreters—with the mortifying[2] honour of being political.

What to do about women who like being women and like living with men? Pasolini opts to demonstrate that they contribute to the world’s ecological downfall, entertaining themselves by popping out children, and to consumer society by daring to have abortions after having benefited from masculine preference.

In maternity units in Lisbon, there were, at the time when I availed myself of them―and maybe there still are―people, particularly nurses, who would tell women giving birth: “Now, deal with the pain. You didn’t think about it when you were fucking, did you? Well, maybe you should have.” 

Well, here’s yet another profoundly political thought, one which also liberates from the reproductive ideology as enshrined in the heterosexual couple. Although, in this case, the moralistic arguments are far too exposed, as the pregnant woman is a sign of debauchery, something which is avoided in Pasolini. With these matters, it’s important to be both complex and subtle, even if (and though it may seem otherwise) everything ends up leading in the same direction: the feminine desire for man and maternity must be restrained, and if possible, macerated by means of her own, hand-hewn jacket of nettles.

Coda

Here it seems right to evoke the pessimism of Guido Ceronetti[3] (the source is always Il silenzio del corpo, Piccola Biblioteca 75, Adelphi Edizioni, Milano, 1994) for comparison. For this thinker―a student of Qohélet “et pour cause”―there is no objection to the heterosexual couple. He likes women and, though he also defends the avoidance of pregnancy, he doesn’t do so on ecological grounds, much less as a moral defence of virginity and feminine chastity. With him, we enter into an ontological sphere which is grounded in an existential duty: that of stopping yet another being from entering into a world in which they will die, continuing the endless multiplication of human anguish. In that sense, for Ceronetti, abortion is seen as a woman’s legitimate gesture of defence insofar as she does not wish to harbour mortal destinies inside her. What’s more, between accidental pregnancies and planned ones, be it in a domestic or a medical context (he particularly has in mind cases of genetic-gynaecological engineering), he prefers the former. This is because the latter constitutes a premeditated crime, while the former could have started as an act of love.

Whatever the case, both Pasolini and Ceronetti wanted to liberate women from the constraints of maternity. Some women would welcome this masculine invasion of their private life and others would reject it. But some women certainly think along similar lines. We will find near-equivalent ideas in Agustina’s A Ronda da Noite, although the author has the capacity to pair them with an adequate antidote, without which we’d die poisoned.

Apologue 2

The great thought[4]

The moment Maria Rosa sees Nabasco, her husband, smoking a cigarillo as though lingeringly kissing a lover, is when the misunderstanding between women and men comes to the fore—through resentful jealousy. She saw him smoking as though he were making love, an out-of-body state in which “contained ardour” and “silent astonishment at feeling oneself to be possessed” intermingled. Maria Rosa didn’t feel that he felt that way when he kissed her. “Nor would I want him to.” Dragged forth by spite, vomit rose to her mouth, bringing her rape to light. But that’s not all, for awareness of the rape brought something else with it, “something which grounded her, and which placed within her an insect, one which needed naming and identifying”, to become pregnant, to be impregnated. Out of her rose a strident cry: “What do you want from me?”

Indeed, what does everyone want from her? No answer is given, but there follows a variation of that great thought which would appease all nausea: “The idea that one day she would not give birth, that she would feel neither pleasure nor pain, was like a balm to her. Freedom from desire and death.” (words a Buddhist could not improve upon.)

Anytime her life is pressingly and insolubly at stake, Maria Rosa asks a question to which there will be no answer, like a cry that, while incapable of healing her wounds, works as a temporary liberation from pain. Later on, we will encounter another of these questions, taking the form of an urgent and fatal declaration.

What is the great thought of which the aforementioned is a variation? (I will yet return to the variation.)

Abortion is mentioned twice in A Ronda da Noite,[5] once at the beginning and then halfway through the novel. Although the women have different names, Patrícia and Margô, respectively, their characters seem to be one and the same, either the sister-in-law or one of Maria Rosa’s close friends―perhaps a sign of hesitation or a character duplication. In both cases, the abortion is botched and Patrícia and Margô die from its effects.

Twice, Maria Rosa’s tolerance and lament are unmistakable. However, in literary terms, the emotional and argumentative ingredients don’t tally. News of Margô’s death from a “botched abortion” is preceded by a brief dialogue, filled with jokes and implied meanings:

“Where are you going Margô?” asked Maria Rosa […]

“To the heart of the world.”

“Paris is the heart of the world. And Patras its arsehole.”

“Nonsense! Is there anything you want?”

“Something… a hotdog with plenty of mustard. I’m not kidding. They’re the best out there.”

But Margô didn’t return home, she died from a botched abortion. Few were those who attended her burial. 

Now, between Maria Rosa and Patrícia, there is more of a conversation, preceded by Maria Rosa’s sombre, disquieting thoughts―which wouldn’t court the disdain of any eighteenth-century salon. It seemed to her that abortion was part of “a curse that weighed on women.” And then came unannounced the great thought: “Someone had told her that the world’s only salvation lay in women’s ceasing to have children and the sexes becoming one. It was inconceivable, but maybe one day we’d get there.”[6] Dropping maternity, renouncing the desire of holding another life in one’s body, implies having another body, and from that follows the melding of the two sexes into one.

Of course, Maria Rosa isn’t thinking about women undergoing surgery to rip out their uterus– who would perform such surgery and with what kind of authority? The great thought is an idea and not a plan of action, much in the same way that the conception of the “noble savage” in Rousseau is not a de facto description, but rather an idea as to the origins of humankind―such as we find it in the first of humankind’s poems, Gilgamesh. That’s to say that, far from belonging to any kind of evolutionary chronology, the origin is more like a category that accompanies one’s view of how humankind might be. Hobbes had of course another original idea, that “man is wolf to man,” and his conception of sovereignty attempts, to a point, to correct for that determination which cannot be eradicated from human life. Let them choose who may.

Ideas shoot straight toward reality and are moving forces of reason (using and abusing Wittgenstein and Kant, respectively). This means that, on one hand, ideas go straight to the heart of reality and whatever will be, will be; on the other, that through the movement of ideas, the spirit too is moved―ideas are sources of light. This idea of the erasure of differences between the sexes is, in the words of Maria Rosa, “inconceivable,” and simultaneously implies the tentative expectation that things might come to change: “but maybe one day we’d get there.” Things generated by the immense tiredness of the woman who was at once declared guilty of giving birth and blamed for having an abortion, a breakdown which becomes endlessly nauseating to the one for whom the first experience of having sexual intercourse with a man―and perhaps all that followed―was experienced as rape. So too would the gestation of a child―“an insect, one which needed naming and identifying”―feel like an abuse of the integrity of her own life.

Now one can see why it is that freeing oneself from desire and death, under the assumption that one day she (or any other woman) might no longer give birth, know neither pleasure nor pain, is a variation on that great thought. A variation which, were it to come to fruition, would make ataraxia, nirvana, or some other form of quietism descend upon humans, those who are indifferent, bereft of desire. Supposing that birth, and death with it, were abolished, we would surely be in the face of the end of human history.[7] This is the thought which Hannah Arendt presents—in a letter to Hermann Broch,[8] penned on the 20th of February 1949―as horror’s ultimate expression, an argument against Broch’s conception of death as absolute evil. Without death (and so, without birth), human life would be unsustainable. It would be like living with the thing-in-itself, subjected to its regime.

You say: if there wasn’t death, there would be no terror on earth, there would be no fear on earth. I myself believe that, were there no death, the terror on earth would be unbearable. There would be no possibility of relativisation. Thus, in a manner of speaking, we would be at the mercy of the thing-in-itself, we would be confronted by the thing-in-itself.”

Let us return to Ronda. It should be underscored that in this dialogue between Maria Rosa and Patrícia, it is women who are occupied with women’s problems. This reaches its climax in the manner in which Patrícia closes the conversation with her friend: “There was no first Adam, but the first Eve[9] [a criticism of that “idiot, Lawrence,” he of Lady Chatterley fame]. Pour me another drop of tea.”

Prior to this reassuring conclusion, Patrícia had been alarmed by “that notion of a single sex. […] Have you any idea what you’re saying?”, which followed on from “And what is it that you’re reading, miss? After Lady Chatterley, I thought you’d read everything.” Maria Rosa’s swift, clear response leaves her more than a little hesitant as to her own decision: “‘I do. You wouldn’t get into trouble, nor would you end up at a clinic where they rearrange your entrails as though they’re taking eight seconds to crack open a safe! That’s expert burglary!’” Those “eight seconds” were pointed out by Patrícia as the record-beating time that doctor Rogeiro Conceição took to resolve such things. As for being burgled, all women know that of which she speaks, for the process of reaching one’s sexual entrails―clinical examinations, as they’re called―involves a sort of breaking and entering, a ransacking. At this moment, one’s entrails are exposed, in varying degrees, to fear, pain and humiliation. Maria Rosa doesn’t stop here, or rather, she makes a not unfamiliar addendum to the great thought: that being a woman is at the root of all evil, because of the effects that feminine attraction has on men, on their desires and pleasures, such that they spur the growth of a retinue of excitants, essential cruelties. Thus, if the two sexes were to be reduced to one, evil, too, would be eradicated. These words were also the cause of some perplexity in Patrícia Gouveia, who would die some days later in “what was taken to be an accident. The doctors were hushed when it came to the diagnosis, which raised yet more suspicion, especially as she had gone with a midwife, and hadn’t been assisted by the aforementioned safe-cracker.”

At this point, Maria Rosa undertakes an extraordinary meditation on human―in this case, feminine―carelessness, the lack of attention to danger, and the disregard for the ever-present threat. That is what being alive is, and even the most archaic swamp-dwelling crocodile cannot forget it. Her friend Patrícia had forgotten it. Indeed, when it came to humans, nature committed “error after error” and we have not been able to perfect ourselves.  In other words, the struggle for life gave way to the philosophy of finitude and its delusions: “What a life! Patrícia Xavier’s hair was impeccably styled when she went into the coffin and she looked good, which is what she wanted most.”[10]

Perhaps the question Martinho poses, and the answer he gives, has something to do with the secret of the entrails: “What is a woman? It wasn’t, on reflection, a real predicate.” It would not be improper to connect this suspension of a real predicate to the constellation formed by the hiding of woman’s sexual entrails―“woman is in the uterus, so said the Romans,” declared Martinho, in conversation with doctor Horácio―and their preoccupation with appearances.

From menstruation to the climacteric, and menopause, some things just become an almighty headache to men―such as Martinho―who spend their time thinking about them or feeling their inscrutable effects. Doctor Horácio Assis attempts to prepare him for what he still has to learn from Judite. It’s just that, according to him, women know that men sense a breaking point within them, which doctors refer to as the climacteric (the period which precedes or portends menopause). A period in which “women cease to occupy their earthly dimension and in which all earthly connections are indifferent to them. Not without suffering, not without profound disorder. The transformation of the bodily phenomena is akin to the ongoing transformations in their minds.” The consequences of this process were unpredictable. They could just as easily be manifested in a desire for interiority, mayhap even enclosure, as they could by the irrepressible urge to flee. And according to Horácio Assis, Judith’s climacteric had already begun. Often, the solution for this angst and foreseen abandonment lies in an equivalent gesture on behalf of the man, who one day decides to leave, perhaps to start another family. As Agustina stresses, Martinho would have had an easier time accepting his wife’s death than he would being abandoned by her―which is what ultimately happens.

There is, however, a closeness between Martinho and Judite, the woman he married and by whom he was abandoned. This same closeness existed between him and all the women he had seen and who had struck him: from his grandmother and greatest love, Maria Rosa; to the maids who took care of him in his childhood, amongst whom Elisa and Armanda; and finally Josefa (the most recent, most modern, servant girl), who is unable to bear the lack of compassion she associates to his obsession with The Night Watch, that’s to say, that a work of art could possibly mean more than her love for him. Martinho would still have to endure the agony of losing the painting that had been a lifeforce to him, had taught him about life and into which he ardently wished he might plunge without ever needing to exit. But he doesn’t succumb, and instead, for a spell, accepts the love of that latter woman, who would one day also come to abandon him.

Within the entirety of Agustina’s works, Martinho is a unique creature, especially in that he is a boy who feels attracted to obscure feminine passivity, the power of a medium―it’s more common, in Agustina’s work, for the man to have some of that passivity―as well as being a character whom the author follows from beginning to end (though she expresses regret, toward the end of the novel, for not having started out where she ought). She feels a huge sense of curiosity about Martinho, who wanders hither and thither, from property to property, in much the same way that the Rembrandt changes place. No one ought to understand him better than Agustina, but for her too, and by her own admission, he was an enigma, a mutant.

Between pages 111 and 113, with a brief continuation on page 342, there is talk of mutants. A mutant is someone who loves ruins, for they remind them that the “relative sense of life” is pregnant with failure. Twice, Agustina asks:

What if Martinho were a mutant? Ever since he was a child he had acted unto others with a measure of discomfiting projection. […] He remembered how other children (some of them poor, children of washerwomen and factory workers whom Maria Rosa would invite to give an example of social beatitude) would immediately surround him, as though all inner workings were a single phenomenon, from life’s very beginnings.

[…] And what if Martinho were a mutant? Nothing transcendent, superior, but a dynamizing, life-affirming spark of animation. 

Martinho is a listener, a gracious and inclement observer. A force that, born of his wandering ways―that’s to say, by accepting the hand that life deals him, being wounded and yet never stopping to lick his wounds―animates, launches forward, attracts, seduces and drops those who get close to him, always in a state which is best described as one of somnambulant passion, a reincarnation of the platonic eros.

Finally, Agustina picks up her idea of the mutant again: “a visionary, who lives off the power of neurosis.” We thus move from the Greek life force, which has no need for finalistic understandings, to psychoanalytical doctrines, which Agustina rightly takes account of since it is the notion of the visionary that allows for that lethal leap. It follows that a mutant is a human who suffers from a particular form of neurosis, who sees what is before him without glancing sideways, and who envisages the upcoming metamorphoses without attempting to interfere with the world’s changes of face. This is not out of pride or indifference, but simply because he wasn’t fated for it. His destiny is to see and bind together the characters who traverse the romance, passing through his life. Perhaps it is he who weaves Agustina’s web in this work.

At first, they thought Martinho’s strangeness came from liking boys, but the idea was soon discarded, as he displayed an undeniable attraction for the scents given off by the legs of women who visited his grandmother. Indeed, it was difficult to get him to abandon his hiding place, under the dining-table. It's because they get a whiff of them, rather than because of what they say, that men pay attention to women, or so said Armanda to Elisa (two of Maria Rosa’s maids, who took care of Martinho during his childhood). Elisa reacts, abruptly: “Don’t be crass”. Armanda’s comment is placatory: “It’s just how I am.”

However, the characterization of mutant (even though the word itself isn’t used) colours his citizenship rights with an outright expression of the great thought. It is from Martinho―borrowing from Euripedes’s Medea, with words which pass for erudition―that his grandmother hears such outrageous things: 

“At some point, Euripides’s Medea claims she would rather go to the battlefront than give birth. I believe this explains the irreconciliation between us and women. We will only have peace when women cease giving birth.”

“This is frightful, but it cannot be allowed to go any further. Where did you read it?”

“I don’t know, nor do I want to.”

“It’s done, it’s done!” she said, as though suddenly reaching a repugnant conclusion. […] Martinho thought: “Everything you do for them is too little, they’re ungrateful and they would like to vanquish us from the world, they find us hopeless, naked or otherwise.”

Although quoting a woman―who was driven, by love’s madness, to infanticide―and getting from her the explanation for the “irreconciliation between us and women”, his perspective is evidently masculine as he refers to him and his fellow men: “We will only have peace when women cease birthing.” Maria Rosa reacts to her grandson’s words in much the same way as Patrícia had reacted to her own, with fright and curiosity. Both grandmother and grandson seem to want the same thing: peace at the expense of the abdication of one of the parties at war. It’s just that, in Maria Rosa’s case, the two sexes would be reduced into one, while Martinho’s words are without allusion: for there to be peace between the sexes, women must give up giving birth. The symbol of reduction, which is itself a sort of return to the rounded form of the first humans―as Aristophanes describes in the Symposium―has faded out.  The answer to his grandmother’s question: “Where did you read it?” is both wilful and harsh: “I don’t know, nor do I want to.” In response, she exclaims, in a burst of fury and resentment: “‘It’s done, it’s done!’ she said, as though suddenly reaching a repugnant conclusion.” She may as well have said: “What do you want from me?” “It’s done, it’s done!”: having been born a woman, having had a daughter, having agreed to raise her grandson after his mother had cast him aside, conscious that nothing could be done to alter her life or the world she inhabits. Martinho simultaneously feels he has gone too far, and he will never come close to capturing that woman, or women in general. He feels that irreconciliation is inevitable and knows that what stands in the way of an understanding is not their giving birth, but rather men’s feeling as though they’re being vanquished from the world, that they’re found―by these insatiable, ungrateful women―to be “hopeless, naked or otherwise.”

Much could be said (so many things which are hinted at in conversations about men and women, women and men are yet to be reflected upon) about the attempt to separate sex from violence. Life is full of violence, so how could sex be exempt from it? Maria Rosa knows all too well that that is how things are and that knowledge bursts out here and there, as we have seen. There is still, however, the forms of violence to which children and new-borns―such as her daughter Paula, whom she watched, night after night, in fear of the male, the predator―are subjected. And so she concludes, halfway between a flash of fury and a feline caress, that: “We’re nothing nice. It’s a pity, but it ought to get better.” That this ought to get better ties in well with the nurse’s expectation, perhaps also Agustina’s, that Martinho would recover from the pneumonia from which he would die.

“Up close, you could see that people’s lives were lived at water’s edge. They plunged not into its depths, down yonder, where blind fish and giant rays dwelled.” An unspoken thought of Martinho’s. We know that Agustina is capable of plumbing these depths, though she doesn’t linger on them overmuch, for doing so would mean losing her vision (it sounds like she’s more likely to be the mutant), being suffocated by mysterious slimes. And so, we see her return to shore, passing the time by eating hotdogs or introducing compassion where one mightn’t have expected it: “Without compassion, sex is a vulgar battle, a crime without equal.” Likewise, it is through Martinho that women―misunderstood, desired beings who are veiled as though they are themselves dead, drifting through life―are taken to be “precious, honourable, seasoned with pepper and clove. Without them, the world would be all stables.” To each their own smell.

These are a few antidotes to the great thought and its variants. But there still remains that most sweet and silent among them (though depths may continue to be plumbed), the scene in which the mother (who works away from home during the day, returning only at suppertime) breastfeeds her child:

The mother arrived only at suppertime, with her blouse wetted by leaking milk, and brought the child to her breast. She would lay a tissue atop his head and, in the shade, protected yet alert to the house’s murmurings, the child would breastfeed. She, the mother, sat on the doorstep or a low chair, speaking out loud, chattering about life. If her voice was angry, the child would cry and she would rock it, adjusting her breast and the boy’s head. The bats began to fly low, sensing the cattle were about to head out to drink.

Apologue 3
The perpetual song

It is in music that the motif of the abandoned woman reaches its most biting, frenetic climax, through the emotive and stylistic form of the lament that only the human voice—particularly that of women—is able to reproduce. You need look only to Monteverdi’s “Lament of the Nymph”, the aria—in Purcell’s opera—in which Dido launches into a mournful cry over Aeneas’s abandonment, and Ernst Chausson’s “The Perpetual Song.”

Kirio Urayama’s film is called “The Girl I Abandoned” (1969) and consists of a description that a man, Tsutomu Yoshioka, gives of an irreparable deed he committed at a point in his life. In spite of that, the title which I chose for this apologue does not simply intend to evoke the film, so much as to do justice to the lament of the abandoned woman, Mitsu Morita—a provincial, timid, somewhat ill-adapted teenager who is hopelessly in love with the man, still a student at the time, who abandoned her—which is heard throughout the film. Tsutomu Yoshioka, too, can hear it, is forever hearing it.

Amongst the Japanese directors who form part of the acclaimed canon—which is not the case with Urayama— and although I greatly admire Ozu, my preference still lies with Mizoguchi, whose perspective on women and their own points of view, sufferings, and secrets—in a society in which masculine desire is so sovereign—seems to be a miracle. One reencounters that perspective in Urayama, although I can’t think of a feminine figure equivalent to that of Mitsu Morita in Mizoguchi’s work.

I am grateful to Miguel Patrício[11] for having created the context that introduced me to this filmmaker and this film. In addition to this, I am indebted to him for a series of very enlightening considerations on Japanese culture, particularly relating to the Christian religious background on which the film was conceived—following a script inspired by Shusaku Endô’s novel, whose religious affiliation is indeed Catholic. Miguel Patrício reminded me, over e-mail, that in the afterword, the author writes that “Mitsu is the Jesus that every Christian abandons on the daily”, which according to him, finds its proof in the film, when, “through her apparently absurd suffering, [she] unlocks the conscience of all the characters who cross paths with her.”

Even though alluding to this issue is inevitable—as in the case of Mitsu Morita’s funerary celebrations, where the presence of the crucifix has clear symbolic consequences—I myself will not dwell on this subject for too long, for others are of greater interest to me. Tsutomu’s interiority, as revealed to us by Kirio Urayama—through the former’s dreams, as well as the role played by the theatrical Noh mask, which haunts him, and on the subject of which much shall remain unsaid—shall be similarly skimmed over. Though this may seem a wild move on my part, I feel it cannot go without mention.

So, what is it that interested me about the film? Mitsu’s passion for Tsutomu did, his abandonment of her, the teenager’s endless lament—she who was on the cusp of womanhood, yet who was never to traverse that breach, never to grow up—heard by the man who had abandoned her and who cannot forget her. I was interested in the suffering that she is put through, her death, what he says she is and what he says he is not, and the violence of desire.

In any case, it should be emphasized that “the Jesus that every Christian abandons on the daily” is a woman (I see her always as a teenager, or even a child), Mitsu, who has been possessed by an inextinguishable love which renders the body sovereign, at once ruler and subject to desire, to pleasure’s every impulse. At this point, perhaps it is beneficial to recall Hamann’s statement (and one can never do it too many times): “I cannot imagine divinity without pudenda.”

At the end of the sixties, Tokyo was an Americanised compound—in fact, the resistances which were felt are documented, especially in images of demonstrations against the influence of American power—where men, of all shapes and sizes, enjoy sex and drink, are work-obsessed, and where the economy is enjoying a moment of unbridged expansion, namely the automotive industry. I’m not sure if saying “work-obsessed” is quite right, I suppose it’d be better to stress the importance of having a job and of the hierarchical struggle.

I’ll describe seven scenes: the first takes place on the day Mitsu and Tsutomu see each other for the first time and ends with her slipping away, scared, firm and already open to subjection, to Tsutomu’s violent onslaughts—wishing to forcibly drag her away to his bras nerveux.[12] Kirio Urayama knows better than anyone how to film expressions of desire, its effects upon the muscles in Tsutomu’s face and body, and those in Mitsu, generated by fear, by the desire to obey that irresistible young man and the spontaneous urge to flee. She promises to return: Et puis je ne sais plus comment / Il est devenu mon amant.

In the second scene, we are certain that they have become lovers. Barely a word is uttered (aside from those of the Western-influenced traditional Japanese song to which Mitsu, who knows the lyrics by heart, dances). Before that come the delicious—and disquieting, for one feels Tsutomu’s laconic tension bubbling over—moments at sea, where her childlike nature reigns free, a kind of caper whereby the unflappable belief in her lover’s benevolence is revealed. It is then that she hears the song and, in a flash, determinedly climbs the dunes to join the singing, dancing group of youngsters. Impressed by the way she dances—clumsy, confident, abandoned, sensual—Tsutomu watches from a distance, perhaps already anticipating what he will come to lose, understanding for once that she is beyond grasp, indomitable. In the morning she finds herself alone. She searches and calls for him in vain: Mais lui, sentant son Coeur éteint/ S’en est allé l’autre matin/ Sans moi, dans un pays lointain.[13]

She feels the loss throughout her body. Having fallen pregnant, she has an abortion. She never forgets him, and so is incapable of giving in to the repeated attempts—by a woman with whom she ends up sharing a room and who will follow her ‘til her death—to entice her into prostitution.

Years later, third scene, a re-encounter by chance. No, it isn’t Mitsu who finds him, it is Tsutomu who suddenly, whilst driving—sitting in a car alongside a woman, a secretary at the company where he works and the boss’s niece, whose engagement is to be announced formally at the home of her parents and relatives—and in an extraordinary exercise of minute perception, happens upon her, quite suddenly, amidst a tangle of streets, houses and people. He comes up with a reason to stop and leave the car and runs wildly through the streets, trying to follow Mitsu’s trail. He manages to catch up to her in a sort of alleyway, just when she is just about to slip out of frame, about to turn left, perhaps into the house where she lives. She holds in her hands the shopping which she has just done and, as soon as she sees him—I can’t recall if he calls out after her, but either way, he is standing in front of her, a few short meters away—she freezes as though struck by a burning missile. Their gazes linger on one another, although it all happens in a matter of seconds, he inevitably makes some small talk, and they part. At that point, she drops all the things her hands had held—as though an earthquake had tumbled them—her knees give way and her body sinks to the floor, dragged down by the weight of the pain, as by gravity. A sublime moment.

In the fifth scene (which marries with others of the same genre), Mitsu is lured into prostitution, through coercive arguments and acts, but she resists. Here is a motif which recurs throughout the film, from the moment when she was abandoned by Tsutomu; prostitution is a means of survival for many drifters, teenagers like her. Taken to the brothel by the aforementioned friend and recruiter, who thirsted for having her in the business, Mitsu once again refuses her proposal. The woman locks her in a room abutting that in which she and her lover, pimp or accomplice (it isn’t common for pimps to be the lovers of those whom they pimp out) entertain themselves sexually, shouting and writhing against one another loudly. It is perhaps the woman (or was it the man?) who says: “We’d best not make so much noise, Mitsu’s only the other side of the door.” To which she or he replies: “She better start learning sooner, rather than later.” On the other side of the door, Mitsu contorts herself in desperation. Gosh, how this reminds me of that passage in Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, in which a couple forces their daughter, a seven-year-old girl, to watch their violent sexual encounters. What makes her shudder most are the things she hears, begs them not to shout, not to repeat those words. For them, these pleas are yet another turn-on. Mitsu’s horror-stricken silence must produce the same effect. Kirio Urayama doesn’t linger long in that jeu de massacre.

Sixth scene, the total shattering of the mutual decision for one last arranged meeting (I will leave all that leads up to this meeting in the shadows). As Mitsu and Tsutomu (he’s married, by now) part ways and, having mutually agreed that they were never to see each other again, suddenly embrace. Never before had their love been so tumultuous, or compassionate. Perhaps it is because of this that they do not realize they are being photographed by the accomplice-pimp of the woman who seems to have made it her life’s mission to drag Mitsu into the abyss.

We approach the most powerful moment, where pain, daring and delirium meet, in an agonizing, deadly dance. The seventh scene. Mitsu comes to find out from Mariko, who is now married to Tsutomu, that she has been subject to blackmail due to letters written by her husband to Mitsu. Mariko is convinced that Mitsu is behind the scheme, whereas the latter deduces that her so-called friend, together with her accomplice, had managed to get hold of the letters, presumably when they had shared a room—and decides to confront them. It is then that she discovers that not only do they have the letters, but also photos of her romantic encounter with Tsutomu.

It isn’t so much the act of blackmail (using the letters which Tsutomu had written to her) nor the photographs taken in a moment of amorous ecstasy that horrify Mitsu, but rather the fact that love’s mystery could be thus exhibited and sold, at the hands of the uninitiated—in its treasury of uncommunicable secrets. She would give her life for that not to happen. And so she does. A fight takes place between Mitsu and the two damned angels, in which a key, a drawer and a knife are elevated to roles of choreographic mastery. Mitsu looks like a warrior. All of her being is transfigured, leaping, levitating, and upon reaching the ceiling, the uppermost part of the window, they seemed sure to be defeated. But then the man managed to regain hold of the knife, and so Mitsu swings from the window top, somnambulant, righteous, knowing defeat. She swings again and again, like child’s play, and crashes down into the street. Everyone comes running, including the crooks, terribly shaken. For them, the golden goose is dead.

Who is Mitsu Morita? The first time we see her, she is alongside a friend, already struck down by Tsutomu Yoshioka’s disappointed gaze, he who would have preferred the friend’s company—as is made clear through the camera’s covetous movements, slowly sliding up her legs, across her chest, to her face. Unlike her friend, that young man and all the other students, Mitsu is sensitive, timid, provincial, and naive. Even as she is still, she perpetually seems to be running, making up men’s broad steps with her own short footfall. She walks with a slight forward-lean, in the manner of traditional Japanese women, only clumsier and more unprotected, abandoned, confident, submissive and revolted, courageous and innocent, compassionate, the sacrificial victim who impacts each and every person who crosses paths with her.

“Who is Mitsu Morita?” The question posed by Mariko to the man who let the woman who he had abandoned die. A woman whom he never married, but who became pregnant by him and saw herself forced to have an abortion. He replies: “I am not Mitsu, but Mitsu is me.” And he adds: “You too are Mitsu”[14]. Let us linger on this point. On the one hand, Mariko, the wife of the man who had abandoned the woman he loved, comes to be recognised as Mitsu, the lover he left. Could it be that all women have become her? Perhaps she is the very substance, the joint that connects all women, to which Heraclitus gave the name ksunós (although, of course, he doesn’t refer to women, and speaks rather of all things) and which he placed above the all-governing logos. Mitsu is the ksunós in an eccentric sense, somewhere between anonymity and the symbol which her name carries, indomitable and sweet, she weaves her way between all women. On the other hand, Tsutomu, not being Mitsu—how could he be her? he who is a man and was incapable of responding in kind to the attraction that she exerted by virtue of her love for him, for there is no greater aphrodisiac—says that Mitsu is him, that is, that she embodies his desire, his longing. In truth, Tsutomu does not want to renounce his desire. Mitsu belongs to him, and he knows that he shall never come to understand her.

Apologue 4

Variations on woman as an image of man

If I hadn’t read Louise Bourgeois[15], I wouldn’t know who Gaston Lachaise was, nor would I have become acquainted with his sculptures. In fact, I still only know them through a screen, as I don’t recall ever having seen them in museums in Paris or New York, despite belonging to their respective collections.

“So, Gaston Lachaise had a god. And she was a woman, his wife.” Here’s how Louise Bourgeois begins her extraordinary essay on this singular sculptor, a man who was subject to a sovereign power, font and fodder of his artistic life, that of his wife. Everything started in Paris, in the year 1903, upon unexpectedly meeting the American (with origins in French Canada) Isabel Dutaud Nagle (his god’s name), who was ten years older than him (who was twenty, at the time), married, with a son. Isabel returned to Boston. Three years later, Lachaise followed her, but would only marry her in 1917 (seven years, Jacob would serve as shepherd …), after her divorce and her son’s admission into the university.

As a means of survival and amorous submission, “to pay for his wife’s never-ending demands,” he made everything, “from cement plaques for a house in Long Island to zodiac designs for elevator doors, and even a seagull, wings fully outstretched, for Arlington Cemetery”. But he would also make sculpted portraits, amongst which, the busts of Georgia O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz and E. E. Cummings. Louise Bourgeois, however, preferred that of John Marin, and rightly so, for in it you feel a force of combustion, which seems to make the head burn from within. As she remarks,[16] these are the last busts which are known to have been made. And yet, the lion’s share of Lachaise’s work is made up of a group of monumental sculptures of women, or rather, of a woman, his wife[17]—most of which were made in the last years of his life (he dies in 1935).

To be precise, in the sculpted portraits, Bourgeois sees Lachaise as having been made “prisoner to his own talent”, dependent on his clients’ tastes and the effort made to please them. That’s to say that, from an artistic point of view there is a certain stagnation (owing to his successful adjustment to cultural purposes, the vanity of those portrayed, and the market). In the monumental sculptures of women, however—be it those which are whole-bodied or of body parts, particularly in the sensual amalgamations of breasts, arms and legs, arses and vulvas—it is impossible not to recognize his genuine strength, his ability to transfigure, the expressive freedom, all the more ample and profound for his “thoughts being restricted to his muse”, for his entering into an ecstasy wrought by sexual compulsion. It is Isabel, his wife, who leads this man to shut himself away in his studio, to unearth himself, as it were, from the tomb of finalistic intention—from survival to social gratification, including the satisfaction of his own wife. He is alone and it is she who reigns in that solitude, a singular variation upon a thought which is very dear to Louise Bourgeois: “The artist […] insists on doing what he wants the way he wants and when he wants […] he is too concerned with himself [ …] he functions in a vacuum.” (“Does Art Have a Gender?”, Destruction of the Father, p. 98). 

… the last works: Breasts with Female Organ Between (also known as Abstract Figure; large version), 1930-32, Dynamo Mother, 1933, In Extremis, ca. 1934, Kneeling Woman, Hands on Head, ca. 1930-35—reflect a highly powerful and original vision of his relationship with this woman.[18] It is in these works that Lachaise expresses his deepest feelings for his wife—as a mother, a lover, an ideal, a goddess. 

Mother, lover, ideal, goddess are emotive-acts which are invested with the power of engendering and expanding images. The latter two follow from the images formed of the first two emotive-acts, “ideal” being in itself a philosophical and poetic concept. I will rehearse a few such determinations, following this sequence: source, origin, beyond which one cannot retreat; sexual desire, attraction, seduction, possession, submission; limitation and the overcoming of the limit, that which has never happened and which accompanies what happens; adoration, veneration, unconditional surrender, obedience, sacrifice.

One must stress the affinity, the intimate proximity of some of these sculptures by Lachaise with those by Louise Bourgeois (for example, “Janus Fleuri”, 1968; “Cumulus I”; “Mamelles”, 1991, amongst other works).[19] Indeed, the subject of obsession (which gives the essay its name) could not be in better hands than hers. The same applies to the artistic disposition of masochism, to which we shall come back. Art has to do with sex, with seduction (not with love, although, still according to Louise Bourgeois, it has to do with compassion). She was interrogated many times on art and feminism, whether art was gendered. She prefers always to speak of gender as associated with the sexuality of women and men.

In Lachaise’s sculptures, the woman, as a god, is placed “on a pedestal, both figuratively and literally. What is it that he needed from her? What is it that she gave him? This continues to be the mysterious mechanism of a relationship which worked.”

From here, the subject of masochism is engendered, a disposition which Louise Bourgeois recognizes first-hand (there’s no need to go and read Deleuze on Masoch). This is to say that masochism is taken to be an artistic disposition that can be summed up as follows: to be a beggar. The masochistic artist is an eternal beggar, a hungry creature in search of someone to feed them. It is understood that Lachaise remained a beggar for his whole life. He only grows, only matures in the confines of his studio, but as soon as he leaves, he returns to that state of immaturity from which he cannot rid himself (Louise Bourgeois says, of herself, that the wound keeps reopening).

According to her, the artists who find a reason to suffer, a cause, get a perverse pleasure in that suffering, in that cause’s name. It is only through pain and the overcoming of pain that they are able to love themselves; they will do anything to be “heard, considered and noticed” and will pay that debt in “time, labour and expertise.” Lachaise devoted thirty-three years of his life to Isabel Dutaud Nagle. He worked untiringly to provide for her and made use of his talents to drum up business, skilfully seeking out collectors and sales. This was him paying off a debt which would never be settled: “Lachaise’s form of masochism was one which saw him accept being this woman’s slave. He was leeched by his goddess, sacrificed himself to this divinity.”

And yet, the mechanism that operated Isabel and Gaston’s relationship, which remains mysterious, cannot be reduced to sacrifice and desired enslavement, for there is a symmetry that may only be measured through mirror questions. One of them has already been quoted above: “What is it that he needed from her? What is it that she gave him?” The other renders the mirror question self-referential, an intentional inquiry: “The question in Lachaise’s art and life is: who fed whom?”

In any case, the debt was never settled. Artists like him always suffer and beg, they do not know a cure (a formula that Louise Bourgeois applies to herself).

 “Obsession” is thus the name of an article about an artist who served his wife for his entire life, for the purpose of both sponsoring her every whim and fantasy and discovering what his role was in this earth: to make that woman known through his sculptures. If truth be told, however, no woman could stand up to those sculptures. To speak with Alberto Giacometti: “Where have you ever seen women like that?” Giacometti’s question is directed at Titian’s paintings and rooted in his distinction between painting or sculpting that which one sees, and following a studied technique of sight, with the intention of producing particular effects. Either way, the gigantism, the deformations and the amalgamations that characterise Lachaise’s most sublime sculptures—which were not intended to stand in the stead of what he saw—are surely the effect of that which only he discerned in his wife. This is the reason his sculptures acquire a character which is at once experimental and archaic, recalling prehistoric and, anthropologically speaking, primitive sculptures. In them we feel a magical-religious energy, shot through with a strong sexual element.

In fact, Louise Bourgeois accentuates the lack of correlation between Lachaise’s sculptures and Isabel’s appearance, which, according to photographs, was “neither imposing nor heroic […] far from being impressive and monumental […] she was a small, unassuming woman.[20] And yet, to Lachaise, she was ‘the Goddess who I am anxious to express in all things’.” Indeed, Gaston Lachaise’s sculptures are not portraits, but revelations.

Was Isabel Dutaud Nagle an image of Gaston Lachaise’s? Converting oneself into an image is a destiny which no one can escape. However, when a man says a woman is an image—an equivalent perhaps to “not being a real predicate”—we step from the realm of fatal destiny into the war between men and women, which, according to Martinho in A Ronda da Noite, will only come to an end when women cease giving birth.[21] Isabel Dutaud Nagle had one son from her first marriage but didn’t have any children with Lachaise. Perhaps they inhabited a field of truce in which the woman, with her expenses and fantasies, burned a hole in man’s pocket (an expression Louise Bourgeois uses) and was, in turn, sucked dry by each of the sculptures which he would conceive and mold in the solitude of his studio—accepting that he would make a goddess out of her, the goddess of his own fertility. I do not know what she would think of his sculptures, but perhaps I wouldn’t be wrong in supposing that she was profoundly flattered.

“Obsession” is the written work of a woman artist, Louise Bourgeois, about a man who was also an artist, Gaston Lachaise. Both were sculptors. It is significant that this text was written when she was already around the age of eighty, at the peak of her maturity. I do not know of another equivalent and, even though she mentioned Picasso and Francis Bacon several times as being her favourite artists (occasionally adding some illuminating remarks), she did not devote herself to writing about them. Nonetheless, in “Obsession”, Bourgeois resorts to Bacon to illustrate a conception of art as the payment of a debt, an homage to sexual seduction that is then objectified in the work of art. Lachaise’s works have their origin in an obsession with his wife and her body, by the body of women more generally, with certain parts of women’s bodies: breasts, vulvas, arms, legs. “Give it a rest!,” as Agustina would say.

Contrary to Don Juan, and to what many feminists may feel, Lachaise did not exploit women, but rather enjoyed them. Being a sexual object is a flattering experience. Why her and not me? His sculptures are his greatest tribute to women, similar to the way in which Francis Bacon’s work or Gary Indiana’s book Crazy Horse are a tribute to men: they pay tribute to the power of the sexual object to spark such ardent a passion. 

There is a sequence which no law can shake: attraction, seduction, obsession. Art has to do with seduction, like that which leads birds into the mouths of serpents. In so much as they dig into her, her own obsessions, Louise Bourgeois’s theses on Lachaise suffer from a kind of torsion, so to speak, for she had no Isabel Dutaud Nagle in her life. This difference is a significant one and it is intensified as we understand that Bourgeois is profoundly impacted by this debt which she has never had to repay.

And so, although at times she does notice a sort of creative spasm (in a repetitive sense) which may have to do with an evolutionary impotence, Louise Bourgeois thinks that the inextinguishable obsession which Gaston Lachaise has for his wife does not allow for any kind of evaluative judgement of his works. That’s to say that it is the obsession itself that saves repetition from being a mere sclerotic impulse, turning it instead into a secret to be communicated—as we take in his sculptures—but not deciphered. It is a gift: “What are the secret demons in Lachaise’s relationship with his muse? Why the obsession with breasts and vulvas? Why is it that he had to go on repeating himself and what was it that he had to prove? Here lies the secret to his life.”

Apologue 5

Forbidden Crown

(for Joana Emídio Marques)

Here is Paradise, dredged of original sin. In this most cryptic of paintings, Eve does not lament, nor does she cover her intimate parts. In fact, much to the contrary: she is glorious, half-standing, having crowned herself (yes, for it was she who wrapped the serpent around her head, and the serpent let itself be, a forbidden crown). Adam doesn’t lament himself either, and nothing is said of his shame, but he has gone mindless, the bite of the apple having seemingly had an anti-erotic, lethal effect upon him. “A castrated Adam,” so writes the poet. It is he who, against all iconographic tradition relating to the Virgin Mary, is at Eve’s feet. He is the beaten one, not the serpent. He drops the apple, of long mythological standing, chewing at its core—for apples don’t have one core, they have multiple small ones. But as experts would say, in painting, not all is as it seems.

I have never liked the existence of a Woman’s Day, have never celebrated the 8th of March, and have rebuffed invitations to events to that effect. However, if it is to exist, then it must the day in which Eve is elevated to queen, without referendum or applause, while, with a single sovereign gesture, she wraps the villainous creature around her head.

Mild Appendix

(for Pedro Galé)

To earn a living, Clarice Lispector wrote under pseudonyms—Teresa Quadros, Helen Palmer and Ilka Soares (the name of a very popular actress, star of TV Tupi, for whom Clarice would be the ghost-writer)—on feminine subjects for a variety of periodicals: Comício (for a few months in 1952; Correio da Manhã (a column titled “Correio Feminino—Feira de Utilidades” [Feminine Mail—Utilities Fair], from 1959 to 1960); and Diário da Noite (a column titled “Só Para Mulheres” [For Women Only], from 1960 to 1961).[22] In 2006, two volumes were published, grouping the chronicles which Clarice wrote under her pseudonyms, namely Correio Feminino and Só Para Mulheres[23]—I am only familiar with the second, whose title is most suitable.

The book is organized in three sections: “Advice”, “Secrets”—these occupy the better part of the volume—and “Recipes”—to which the smaller, middle section is devoted. I shall dwell on a brief back and forth, a certain promise of correspondence between advice and secrets. Its motto could be given by the expression: “looking good or the taste for good appearance and the importance of appearances”. However adequate, it would only do half the job if appearances were not supplemented with a glimpse into the mysteries of women’s lives, including their relationship with men.

In that sense, the idea that “woman hasn’t been imprisoned by man, but by her own physiology” (“A Mulher e o Preconceito” [Woman and Prejudice], Helen Palmer, 16th of March 1961, 99) ought to be understood as a factor in the constitution of a natural history of woman, inseparable from the effects wrought by the imaginative resistance to that imprisonment. In truth, fashion, makeup, embellishments are part of a playful, restorative method of liberation.[24]

As in the case with the Talmudic doctrine’s standing on the significance of each of the Torah’s passages, humour leaves the chronicles open for interpretation—has its 49 degrees, as it were—often making the obvious answer, the hasty conclusion skitter away. Let us re-read this appendix’s brief epigraph. It is not only chilling to find out, through Helen Palmer, that during the French Revolution’s period of carnage, someone conceived of a “macabre ornament” to be worn by “working-class women”—a miniature guillotine, painted blood red to rouse the senses. One also tends toward amusement when reading the free, bold, sharp observation of which only Clarice is capable. While she considers the invention to have been the product of a “sick imagination”, the fact that women were wearing it—“And they weren’t few in number!”—is taken to be an act of courage. “It was fashion”, which is to say that in wearing that miniaturized object of bloody condemnation, the sign of a social and political torsion and all its horrors, those women rendered the spirit of the time tangible. This is the cause of far more admiration in the chronicler than the inventor’s perversity. Life goes on, then and forevermore, and one day the guillotines, so much of their moment, will cease to make sense, will no longer be worn, will be thrown away and swapped for some other adornment. That is fashion.

It is in “A Sós” [Alone] (again by Helen Palmer, 10th of June of 1960, Diário da Noite, 113) that humour’s effects, articulated in a staccato rhythm, become quite irresistible. We are unable to suppress laughter. Helen starts out by asking: “What is it that woman does when her husband isn’t home, and vice versa?” In fact, in the first scene, the man arrives home and his wife isn’t there, while in the second, the man goes out and his wife stays at home (we are set in a context where he works outside the home and she is a housewife). Palmer begins by describing the man who, in his obstinacy, wanders through the house between the kitchen—opening, inspecting and closing the fridge—and the bedroom—where he removes and looks through one of the chest’s drawers, comes across three tennis balls which he then returns to the drawer that goes back into the chest. Meanwhile, he grabs the first magazine he comes across, and tries to smoke his pipe. In trying to hunt out the pipe-cleaner, he drops all the things which are kept in the kitchen sideboard, haphazardly piling them together afterwards.

He also repeatedly goes to the window and looks out. This sequence seems to go on forever. And the wife? Clarice’s words invite quotation: “in the first half an hour after the husband has left the home, she does her hair in front of the mirror, goes to the kitchen and puts the pans on the hob, unblocks the gas burner using a hairpin, goes back to the bedroom and tries on her new dress again, to see how it looks. / Then she chats to a friend over the phone, puts away the newspapers which are spread throughout the house, but not before reading through every fashion advert, and pieces on similar such things. She opens the door which leads out into the street, to see who rang the bell, reads the mail, tidies the bedroom, tries the dress on again, followed by every other one in the wardrobe, / As you can see, there’s not all that much difference between the two…” Unlike the man, the woman doesn’t wonder around like a stranger in her own home, but starts by taking care of her appearance, brushing her hair in front of the mirror. Soon after, she heads to the kitchen to prepare food and effectively uses her imagination in order to unblock the gas burner with a pin she pulls from her hair. She then returns to the bedroom to try on her new dress, again. She socializes without leaving the home, for the outside world comes to her in the form of a phone call to a friend, of the doorbell ringing, bringing with it news in mail-form; she restores order to the newspapers which had been spread about the house, but not without first reading every fashion (or fashion adjacent) advert; she goes back to the bedroom, tidies it and feels appearance’s pull anew, trying on her new dress again, followed by every other in the wardrobe.

And here, as in Alain’s words (in Propos sur la nature), the mirror is elevated, a thing that is whole in its dependence of all others. Indeed, as he also suggests, a reflexion is no small thing.

Let us compare Venus at her Mirror by Velasquez and Lovis Corinth’s Last Self-Portrait. The woman reclines at her mirror and uses it as an instrument for morphological, physiognomic examination, tracing the signs of the passage of time, in order to celebrate, prevent and dissuade them—metaphysics and the abyss being seen to be bedfellows.[25] These are the movements of a curious, analytical exploration, mixed with the odd drop of careless headiness—the inspection invites the mind to wonder, which can well lead one to ponder on the enigmas of life. There lies feminine frivolity, in its tall keep.

Conversely, when man looks in the mirror, he discovers himself to be another, becomes disoriented and succumbs. It is here that we see the difference between man, bound to his cadaverous form, and woman lying before her mirror. The difference between the damned one and she who is appearance’s friend is that the latter does not look beyond the mirror for answers, for she knows that it is upon its surface that magic takes place. An art in which discipline and gift battle for supremacy, producing neither winner nor loser. In a kind of floating immobility, the thing that is whole in its lack of identity is as a weaponless hunter, capturing its prey in its own reflexion. The woman accepts this destiny, disciplining it through gestures and formulas, transforming it into a weapon against tedium. In other words, the woman knows that, beyond simply reflecting it, the mirror celebrates appearance. Yet, this assent to appearance is so excessive that it causes her to waver in her natural adherence to it, it is an uneasy assent.

It is not by chance that the first chronicle of Só para mulheres was published on the 10th of February 1961, one of the last to be published in Ilka Soares’s column in Diário da Noite. It displays an unequivocal maturity, in which ease and confidence are called upon each other in equal measure. Here is the title: “Aparência: tudo tem jeito” [Appearance: everything has its way] and the key-question: “Are you so ‘morally’ antiquated as to consider feminine vanity to be a frivolity?” Feminine vanity is not only a means for survival, in the sense that it is a variation on the Cartesian “larvatus prodeo,” but also a mask that protects the woman and pleases men. It is also a secret, deviate means of dealing with identity.

Some years later, in 1968, Clarice writes in the opening section (entitled, et pour cause, “Ritual”) of a chronicle in Jornal do Brasil: “Adorning oneself is so serious a ritual.”[26]

No, feminine vanity is not a frivolity. If the mirror be her operator, it knows not what it is to be a woman: “Pretty? Not even a little, but a woman still. My secret, ignored by all, even the mirror itself: womanhood.”[27] It’s worth quoting this section in its entirety, dedicated to the act of embellishment by women, where Clarice, in a scintillating abbreviation, recalls and transfigures the columns for them alone:

Adorning oneself is so serious a ritual. A given fabric is not mere cloth, it is material for something. It is the upholstery which my body embodies. Ah, how is it that a simple cloth can be imbued with so much life. My hair, washed and dried today by the sun in the patio, is made of finespun, antique silk. Pretty? Not even a little, but a woman still. My secret, ignored by all, even the mirror itself: womanhood. Earrings? I hesitate. No. I want the ear to remain delicate and simple—something of a nude modesty. I hesitate again: a greater modesty would come from hiding the ears under hair. But I cannot resist: I uncover them, pulling my hair back. What results is a hieratic ugliness, like that of an Egyptian queen, with her neck outstretched and her incongruous ears. Egyptian queen? No, it is I, I who am adorned in the manner of biblical women.[28] 

Being a woman is her secret, Clarice’s, and that of all women, with no pretension of universality. A secret that is ignored, but not unknown, for every gesture, hesitation and decision, feeds the intelligibility of she who gives life to fabrics, earrings, hair washing. In in this case, it is the earrings—around which all the gestures through which women furnish these materials with life congregate, making them irradiate—that are the source of so many moments of hesitation, from which there emerges a sovereign, staunch choice. This intelligibility encompasses a community—in an ever-nascent state—born out of comparison: with Egyptian queens, with biblical women. It is that which the mirror, with all its reflective powers, does not know. That is to say that it is not the mirror alone which gives one a reflexion, it is always marred by one’s gaze: “Egyptian queen? No…” And so, Clarice Lispector’s Hebrew roots come to the fore: “it is I, I who am done up in the manner of biblical women.” Eve, crowned.

[1] Escritos Corsários, translation by Maria Betânia Amoroso, Editora 34, São Paulo, 2020, 140 (apud João Oliveira Duarte, Não sou da família, bcf, Lisbon, 2022). Completed Quote. My thanks go to João Oliveira Duarte, who loaned me Pasolini's book.

[2] A nod to Kant.

[3] A contemporary of Pasolini’s, though they did not know each other.

[4] This title was taken from Giorgio Colli (Dopo Nietzsche, Piccola Biblioteca Adelphi, Adelphi Edizioni, Milano, 1988) and is used in irony. For him, in Western philosophy, and against all assumptions upon which modern thought was founded, the great thought―taking rationality to be a revelation of animality―was launched by Schopenhauer and reinstated by Nietzsche.

[5] The last of Agustina Bessa-Luís’s novels, published in 2006 (Guimarães Editores, Lisboa). The text guides this apologue from the start.

[6] This is what Martinho, her grandson, would tell her several pages later―on page 210, to be exact. Perhaps he was the “someone” to which she referred, in a mix of times and anticipations, both literary and stylistic. We’ll get there.

[7] Here, we go back further than Buddhism, to Hinduism, whose belief in transmigration leaves its traces in Buddhism. We reencounter this in the archaic Greeks, and with particular acuity in the Orphic doctrines, which Plato knew so well. If being born is an evil, being reborn is a curse.

[8] Let us set aside any thoughts on the “banality of evil”, for the concept doesn’t enter this particular debate.

[9] Let it be accepted that this is almost a pathway to Eve crowning herself with the serpent, cf. Apologue 5.

[10] Looking good, or the taste for good appearance and the importance of appearances will gain greater relevance in the closing “Appendix.”

[11] Miguel Patrício is a film researcher, with a particular interest in Japanese films that fall out of the mainstream film distribution circuit. He curated the series “Unknown Japanese Masters—Part II” (November of 2022)—in the context of which The Girl I Abandoned was screened—and was also responsible for the film’s Portuguese subtitling, alongside the translator André Pinto Teixeira.

[12] The italicised verses come from Charles Cros’s poem, a source for Ernest Chausson’s musical composition.

[13] It should be noted that, from this stanza onward, Charles Cros’s poem heads toward a poetic solution which approaches that of Hamlet’s Ophelia. Despite Mitsu’s near-suicide, the contrast between her and the woman who sings us the perpetual song is clear. Aside from that, Tsutomu is a lover tortured by the abandonment of the one who loved him – for reasons which touch upon greed, social well-being, and the normalisation of his emotional and financial life. And yet, Mitsu’s lament never ceases to be heard.

[14] It is far from insignificant that Mitsu’s name, etymologically, means “someone from the inner circle of relationships”. I am once again grateful to Miguel Patrício and André Pinto Teixeira.

[15] “Obsession”, Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father. Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, 1998 (first published, in April of 1992, in the magazine, Artforum, vol. 30, nº8, pp. 85-7).

[16] Though she appreciated them—“He was one of those rare artists who are occasionally capable of simultaneously achieving similitude and psychological depth, a talent that I greatly respect”—Louise Bourgeois considers that these sculpted portraits cannot stand alongside the portraits in Roman sculpture, those by Messerschmidt, Houdon, and, contemporarily to Lachaise, Henri Matisse’s astonishing portraits from his Jeanette series.

[17] To Gaston Lachaise, Isabel Dutaud Nagle also personified the “American dream”. This aspect, suggested by Bourgeois, is far from insignificant.

[18] Here, Louise Bourgeois inserts the following note: “It is a pity that many of the last works had not been exhibited prior to Lachaise’s death, in 1935, so that the versions we have, produced at a later date from the molds, may not take on the definitive forms that he had intended for them.”

[19] In fact, a comparative analysis between the two has already been undertaken. Cf. Gaston Lachaise and Louise Bourgeois: A Juxtaposition. Essay by Louise Bourgeois, published by Cheim & Read, 2014.

[20] However, that is not the impression one gets upon looking at some, few photographs of this woman (readily available online). She is tall, elegant, and full of vitality. One of the photographs, taken in Paris, shows a close-up of her striking face, full of secrets, at once dominating and sweet, the face of seduction itself.

[21] The statement which sits between quotation marks, as we know already, is his.

[22] On the 3rd of September of 1952, Clarice Lispector sets off for the United States (more precisely to Washington), accompanying her husband, the ambassador Gurgel Valente. She returns to Rio de Janeiro, with her two children, in January of 1959.

[23] Both the organisation of and the afterword to the volumes (though not credited) are by Aparecida Maria Nunes, Editora Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 2006.

[24] Women would not subscribe to that leopardine relationship between fashion and death, espoused by Benjamin in his Arcades Project notes.

[25] Perhaps that is also another, more benevolent, less defensive and apprehensive meaning for Guido Ceronetti’s words, “Woman is an image.”

[26] A descoberta do mundo [Discovering the world], Nova Fronteira, Rio de Janeiro, 1984, p.225 (chronicle from the 23rd of November of 1968, published in Jornal do Brasil).

[27] This passage is part of the chronicle referred to in the previous note. It is quoted by Aparecida Maria Nunes in her afterword for Só para mulheres, titled “Sempre mulher através dos tempos” [Woman forever, throughout time].

[28] Elena Losada Solar recalls, in “Três imagens (com espelhos) na obra de Clarice Lispector: Lori, Gloria e Macabéa” [Three images (with mirrors) in the works of Clarice Lispector: Lori, Gloria and Macabéa] (Olho d’água, São José de Rio Preto, 7(2): p. 1-278, Jul.-Dec./2015. ISSN 2177-3807, translation: Roxana Guadalupe Herrera Alvarez) the migration of this text into Lori’s territory, Lori being a character from Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1998. This move is part of Clarice Lispector’s stylistic history.