Month: May 2025

Colasanti, Marina. Always Roses for Clarice. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2025. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2025/05/29/always-roses-for-clarice/. Acesso em: 13 July 2025.

The day I met Clarice was not the same day she met me. I was all adoration, observing her. She had no reason to even lay eyes on me. ¹

Leaving the Jornal do Brasil newsroom together, the journalist Yllen Kerr, a great friend of mine, said he was going to visit Clarice and asked if I wanted to go. Did I ever! Ever since the first issue of Senhor magazine, I’d been reading her short stories voraciously. I’d already been left spellbound by Family Ties, and that same year I’d gone to one of her book signings. Yes, I wanted to go. And off we went, to Leme neighborhood.

She didn’t come to greet us at the door. Either she was still getting ready or she was keeping her diplomatic habits. The room was dark, with only a lamp lit next to the sofa. It was in this darkness that she made her entrance.

I found her stunning. She seemed even taller than she really was. Her face was exotic and made up – in the following years I’d never see her without make-up –, her high cheekbones outlining the Slavic shape of her eyes. She was dressed in dark clothes, with warm tones, wearing a long-sleeved dress or sweater. I remember the long sleeves because they made her supple hands stand out, so light in the semi-darkness, and the twin, cuff bracelets of hammered copper she wore on both wrists.

With me in respectful silence, the conversation between Clarice and Yllen began. It didn’t seem comfortable, it wasn’t flowing, there were gaps, as if the two were dancing an unrehearsed choreography. Clarice interrupted herself mid-sentence as her interlocutor remained in suspense, without knowing whether to give her time to continue or whether it was up to him to think of something else to say.

We didn’t stay long. The time of a normal visit, not the time of two friends indulging in a carefree conversation. We drank something or we drank nothing, and left. But the encounter marked me deeply. I held on to the image of her on that afternoon like someone who holds on to a photograph, without knowing that this image was close, so close to changing.

In September 1966, a fire broke out in her apartment, started by Clarice when she fell asleep smoking in bed. Not wanting to put her children at risk, she tried to put it out with her hands, which would have disastrous effects on her health.

As soon as I heard, I sent two dozen roses to the hospital, aware that even if she received them, she wouldn’t know who was sending them. I suffered for her as we learned of the threat that her right hand would be amputated. I recalled her pale hands over her dark clothes, framed by the copper bracelets, and it seemed to me impossible that this would happen. Fortunately, it didn’t.


A year later, when she had already undergone several operations on her hand and leg, from where tissue was removed for the grafts, Clarice was invited by Alberto Dines, then editor-in-chief of the Jornal do Brasil, to write weekly chronicles for the Caderno B. Dines had already invited Clarice earlier, when he was the director of the Diário da Noite, to write the column that Ilka Soares would sign. ² This time, however, she would sign under her own name and manage the space as she saw fit, in the same way that she had done in Children’s Corner, in Senhor magazine. It was a change that, over the course of seven years, would greatly boost the recognition of her writing and her name.

When she finally came to the JB newsroom, where I was a sub-editor, I was surprised to see that she had taken advantage of so many interventions to have a facelift, a way to keep her beauty intact and counter the deformity in her hand. Whether because of the respect she inspired, or because of her undeniably foreign air, although she so wanted to be Brazilian, or because of her femininity, it was understood that, from that day on, I would attend to her, I would make the necessary communications, I would take care of her texts. That’s when our relationship began to take shape.

Countless times Clarice would ask me not to lose her texts. She would say she didn’t have a copy because the carbon paper wrrrrinkled, and she would roll her Rs due to her tongue-tie – a phenomenon denied by the speech therapist and writer Pedro Bloch, who attributed it to childhood imitation of her parents’ speech. Clarice was quite right about her difficulty with the carbon paper. Her burned right hand didn’t allow her to fit it properly between the two sheets, which was the only way to obtain copies in the pre-computer era. But the phrase ended up becoming her nickname. Whenever she called the newsroom, whoever answered would say: Marina, it’s for you, the carbon wrrrrinkled! and I would answer, delighted to take care of her.

The phone calls were merely professional, or not. Several times she asked me to instruct the reviewers not to change her punctuation: My punctuation is my breathing, she would say. And once she called to ask if I knew where to buy nice loafers.

Soon she began sending the chronicles through an employee, who was responsible for asking me each time not to lose the texts, because Clarice didn’t have a copy. In order to convince her they were completely safe, I had to take her behind the editor’s desk and show her the box where the revised texts were received – even though there was so little to revise –, ready to go down to the pressroom.

They were, in fact, precious. Clarice was right about that, too. Reading her next books, how often I recognized texts that I knew so well, that felt so familiar. Everything she wrote, whether scribbled on lined newsroom paper, a napkin, or a movie ticket, sprung from the same source and would eventually find its place.

We never met outside the newsroom.

Until a new factor came to strengthen our ties and gave a different character to our relationship.

In 1971, Affonso and I got married. Affonso had known Clarice since 1963, when, due to an essay on The Apple in the Dark written when he was still a student, he had been invited to introduce her at her book signing in Belo Horizonte.


We started visiting her home, the same room where I had gone for our first encounter, now well-lit. Our conversations flowed easily, in complete intimacy, unlike the one I kept in my memory. We talked about everything and nothing, about what she was doing, friends, life in the city, even food. The conversations were carefree and not at all intellectual, which often made us laugh. I remember that there was always a book or two left on an armchair or table, although in interviews she avoided giving her literary opinions, saying that she wasn’t reading anything.

There was a new addition: Ulisses, the dog. On several occasions, Clarice declared that his name did not refer either to Homer or to Joyce, and in her statement for the MIS [Museum of Image and Sound], she said that she had named him after a philosophy student who had fallen in love with her when she was still married, in Switzerland. Although he became a statue, ³ Ulisses was neither nice nor beautiful. He was antisocial, he didn’t let visitors pet him, and he growled. But his loyalty to his owner must be acknowledged.

In 1973, right after Alberto Dines was fired from the Jornal do Brasil, Clarice was also fired. Nascimento Brito had never liked her chronicles. That’s maybe why there was no scheduled meeting, no phone call, no gesture at all. She was dismissed with a note, which was extremely rude, above all considering her prestige as a writer.

Faithful to Alberto Dines, I was also fired.

And in the same year, upon publishing Laura’s Intimate Life, Clarice dedicated it, among other children, to our daughter Fabiana.

It must have been around this time that the dinner episode happened. Affonso and I liked to entertain friends and did so often. One day, to my great surprise, Nélida brought me a message. Clarice was upset because we’d never invited her. I replied that it was only because we imagined that Clarice, who was averse to this type of event, wouldn’t wish to be invited. I immediately asked her over for dinner.

“She eats dinner very early, added Nélida, as if it were a problem.”

“No worries, we can have dinner whenever she wants.”

I told our mutual friends that the time was set for 6:30 p.m. Too early for the Rio crowd, really. Don’t be late, please, I asked. No one was late. Clarice was the last to arrive. And how beautiful she looked! It must have been winter, because over her clothes she was wearing a kind of black and white, zebra-print overcoat, which I remember complimenting. And she was all smiles! She exuded happiness, for feeling beautiful, for having allowed herself to be there.

Busy, because at these dinners I was the head cook, going up and down the stairs, I didn’t catch the moment when her smile disappeared. I went upstairs between appetizers, ready to also have a sip of wine, and she came to meet me, already without the spark she’d shown on arrival, to say she had a bad headache and wanted to leave.

Dinner would be served soon, but I realized in a flash that some spell had been broken and she wouldn’t wait. I discreetly called Affonso and asked him to take Clarice home, since she had a headache. Without understanding, he offered her aspirin and said the pain would soon go away. I gave a meaningful look, and the two of them left. Clarice didn’t say goodbye to anyone. Our friends, all of them close, waited for Affonso to return and for dinner.

She had come seeking lightness, to have a drink and laugh like everyone else, to be carefree for a few hours. But at some point, a disconnect had formed — she was not like everyone else, and for that night at least, lightness was forbidden to her. Better, then, to go home, where she didn’t have to be like anyone else, where she could be herself.


A little before or a little after that, we told Clarice we had gone to a fortune teller and were spellbound by her predictions – which would come true later. It was like plugging her in! She immediately got very excited, she really wanted us to take her. The sooner, the better.

The deepest secret, that which can’t be proven and which the most sensible suspect, was definitely her territory.

The fortune teller, named Nadir, lived in Méier. A few days later, with an appointment booked, there went the three of us in Affonso’s Beetle, following the railroad tracks and watching the train pass by. We talked a lot on the way there, and a certain excitement about diving into the unexpected came with us.

The house had a porch with pots of anthuriums, and the floor was made of those old-fashioned patterned tiles. There was a brief pause for introductions, minimal conversation, and the coffee was already waiting in the thermos. And the two of them went in. They took the time needed to scrutinize the future dictated by the cards. Finally, the door opened. Clarice had a thoughtful expression.


And so she remained on the return trip. The atmosphere in the Beetle had changed, and now the mystery was riding with us. Clarice didn’t say a single word about what Nadir had predicted. But she certainly liked it, because she continued to consult the cards until the end of her life, and made Nadir into her character in The Hour of the Star.


In 1973, Affonso became director of the Department of Letters at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). And in 1975, he invited Clarice to the 2nd National Meeting of Literature Professors at PUC-Rio. There are photos of the auditorium at this meeting: Clarice in the center, Nélida [Piñon] and I on each side, the three of us focused. What is not in the photo is her reaction, reported later by Nélida, and by herself in a phone call with Affonso.

The panel discussions were eminently theoretical, a duel of knowledge and quotations was underway between two scholars in literature. In the interval that followed the crossing of swords, Clarice got up and left. According to what Nélida told me, and what Clarice repeated in almost the same words to Affonso, the panel presentations were incomprehensible to her and had made her terribly hungry. She would go home to eat roast chicken. That’s what she did. ⁴


Two years passed, and in April we were together again, this time in Brasília. She had gone to receive the lifetime achievement award from the Cultural Foundation of the Federal District, and Affonso would receive another award. ⁵ I remember that she seemed to me very different from the still steadfast woman who had killed her theoretical incomprehension by eating chicken. Sitting next to me in the hotel’s garden area was a fragile lady, needing support and asking her companion for her white shawl to protect herself from the non-existent cold. I was impressed by her physical delicacy, as if any breath could knock her down or hurt her.

When she received the award, she said the famous phrase: I don’t deserve this award. This is an award for professionals and I’m not a professional. Professionals write every day, because they need to. I write when I want to, because it gives me pleasure. Modest and proud at the same time, the phrase did not correspond to the truth. Clarice needed writing more than many professionals, she needed it to find herself, she needed it like the air she breathed, she needed it to live. And when she thought she had lost it, she’d call her friends in despair.


In October 1976, invited to give a statement by João Salgueiro, who was then director of the MIS, she agreed. But she asked for Affonso and I, along with João, to be her interviewers. She was terrified of pompous situations, of pretentiously intelligent questions, and she knew that with us she would be free from both.

For some reason that I can’t remember now, we didn’t pick her up at home but arranged to meet downtown at Praça XV, in front of the MIS. I saw her arrive, happy and recovered. And elegant. She was wearing what appeared to be a suede coat. We chatted for a couple of minutes without her giving us any recommendations about what to ask or not to ask, and we walked to the Museum.

The statement lasted around two hours. ⁶ We began with her biography, her remembering Recife and speaking about her family’s poverty, her mother’s illness, and her childhood. Then we jumped from one topic to another. Clarice, much at ease, spoke about her novels, her writing process, and loneliness. She claimed to be a bold shy person, spoke about her intimacy with chickens, agreed when I compared her to felines, retold the story about the white doves, asked for a cigarette and a Coca-Cola, and lost her train of thought more than once, not because she had forgotten, but because she was relaxed and confident.

When we left the MIS, the three of us felt refreshed. It had been a memorable afternoon.

A year later, we had our final encounter. As had been the case the first time, only I saw her, because her eyes were closed. She was sedated, dying slowly at the Lagoa Hospital. To me, she looked like a little bird under the sheet, despite the swelling. We stayed only a few minutes, time to ask the nurses a few questions. And to say goodbye, which she could no longer do.

Rio de Janeiro, August 2020.