books represented a real revolution in Brazilian literature. This literature had been nationalistic, consumed with questions of Brazil and Brazilianness: “Whoever examines the Brazilian literature of the present day immediately recognizes its primary trait, a certain instinct of nationality,” Brazil’s classic novelist Machado de Assis wrote in 1873. “Poetry, novels, all … dress themselves in the colors of the country.” The result was that Brazilian literature was mostly a literature about Brazil, and only to a much lesser degree a literature written by Brazilians. It was local, regional, and patriotic, written by self-conscious Brazilians dedicated to creating, or opposing, a certain image of Brazil. They celebrated the country’s particularities—its natural beauty, its history, its popular culture, the heritage of the Indian and the African—and they denounced its social problems, its poverty, its injustice, its failure to live up to its apparently limitless potential. Most often they did both.
This literature, above all, was materialistic, rather than spiritual, which is why Mário de Andrade, despite his reservations about the book’s artistic and social qualities, welcomed Lúcio Cardoso’s The Light in the Basement. God had, indeed, returned to stir the waters. Lúcio was not the first godly writer to appear in those years: there was the “introspective school,” whose concerns were less social and national than internal and spiritual. Many of these writers were Catholic, and many, like Mário de Andrade himself, were gay. In that time and place, the alliance with religion made more sense than it would later seem. The Church was a logical home, and not only because it had always been full of gay men, offering redemption to those weighed down by the awareness of sin. Such people did not see art as a way of addressing social issues, or of refining the national language, or of asserting the preeminence of one political party over another. Their mission was much more urgent: they sought to be saved through art. Writing was for them a spiritual exercise, not an intellectual one.
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Fellow writer Clarice Lispector was not the only one to fall in love with Lúcio. He was strikingly handsome, brilliantly witty, and endlessly creative. “It just poured out of him!” said a friend. He would sit in cafés, writing one page after another, tearing one sheet out of the typewriter and immediately beginning another. He completed his novel Inácio in a mere four days. “What a verbal talent he had, my God, Lúcio Cardoso,” another friend recalled. “And what an ability to work, even though he stayed out all night drinking. He got up early and wrote, wrote, wrote. What he published isn’t half of what he wrote.”
Lúcio was a natural writer, a natural talker, and a natural seducer. On his first meeting with Luiz Carlos Lacerda, a teenager who later became a well-known film director, he scribbled off a poem for him and then took him back to his apartment. Lacerda, young and naïve, assumed they would live happily ever after. A few days later he was devastated when he went to Lúcio’s apartment in Ipanema, saw the light on, rang the doorbell, and got no answer. After waiting a while he saw another boy emerge and understood that he had been just another notch on the bedpost.
But Lúcio never had a lasting relationship. As anguished and tormented as the characters in his books, he apparently never wanted one either, though he was constantly falling in love with different men. When he died, Clarice wrote, “In so many things, we were so fantastic that, if it hadn’t been for the impossibility, we might have gotten married.” Clarice’s friend Rosa Cass disagrees, seeing a different impossibility. “It wasn’t just that he was gay,” she emphasizes. “They were too much alike. He needed his solitude, he was a ‘star,’ unearthly. The two of them would have been an impossible couple.” This was probably just as well, because anecdotes suggest that Lúcio would have made a difficult spouse.
“Lúcio went crazy, Helena,” a coworker told his sister when she arrived at his office in downtown Rio. “He sold me a suit because he needed money and now he’s amusing himself by throwing bills and coins out of the window, half of what I just paid him.” “I went to the window,” Maria Helena writes, “laughing myself. Below, the Rua Álvaro Alvim was full of people, and more were streaming in every minute, attracted by the noise of the crowd chasing after the money that was ceaselessly falling from that miraculous window.”
The prankishness also had a dark side. Once he told people that he had hired someone to kill him, the better to comprehend the feeling of being persecuted. He did not need to resort to such theatrics. The tenants’ union in his building tried to kick him out in a letter that made reference to Oscar Wilde. He himself repeatedly tried to correct his homosexuality, sometimes even punishing himself like a medieval penitent. “This perpetual tendency to self-destruction,” he wrote. “Yes, it has long been inside me, and I know it as a sick man comes to understand his own illness.” He began to drink.
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Lúcio features in Clarice Lispector’s longest and most ambitious piece of early writing, an enigmatic novella from October 1941 called “Obsession.” It introduces a dark character, Daniel, who will reappear at length in her second novel, The Chandelier, published in 1946: Lúcio Cardoso, the seductive guide through occult realms. He had a direct hand in her first novel. “Groping in the darkness,” she pieced the book together by jotting down ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. Lúcio assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves, and suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph. The title, Near to the Wild Heart, became famous, it stands out in Clarice’s work, perhaps because it sounds so mannered, so much like the title of a teen romance, so much like—one might say—the title of a book by Lúcio Cardoso. Clarice left Rio soon after its publication, living abroad for the best part of the next two decades.
Lúcio, however, remained in Rio, writing one book after another, trying, almost singlehandedly, to remake Brazilian culture. The boy who had dreamed of film stars in his small backwater in Minas Gerais set up his own Chamber Theater. “Lúcio Cardoso—I remember well—attributed great importance to his work in the theater,” said his friend the novelist Otávio de Faria. “It was inevitable, since he himself was essentially more a ‘tragedian’ than a novelist.” His theatrical work was artistically avant-garde and politically far ahead of his time, nowhere more than in racial questions. Though slavery had not been outlawed until 1888, within the living memory of many Brazilians, the country’s elite held as a doctrine of faith that the country did not suffer racial divisions. He participated in the Black Experimental Theater of Abdias do Nascimento, an early Afro-Brazilian activist, writing a biblical drama called The Prodigal Son, performed with an all-black cast. If such productions were radical in the United States, they were unheard-of in Brazil.
Despite all the group’s efforts, the play flopped. His sister recalled her “anguish seeing Pascola, the most renowned theater critic of the day, snoozing in the front row.” Undaunted, convinced that theater was a weak area in Brazilian culture, Lúcio produced his own The Silver String in 1947. “I cannot recall a more carefully prepared, better worked-out, more impressive spectacle for our little group around Lúcio,” Otávio de Faria recalled. “Ester Leão was the director and Lúcio Cardoso submitted (though, it is true, sometimes almost screaming) to all her demands. Sometimes I saw him on the verge of tears. It doesn’t matter. The play opened, and the actress Alma Flora got almost all the applause.” Enthusiasm ran high, as always with Lúcio’s undertakings. “I remember it like it was today,” de Faria continued, adding:
Lúcio Cardoso, wild about the new “diva” (he never got over his “passion” for Italian film divas), ordered up a huge “banquet,” at Lapa 49, to commemorate Alma Flora’s breakthrough. No end to the beer and the fresh crabs—except that there wasn’t any money to pay for it . . . and there, in the middle of the table, a magnificent centerpiece of red roses (red, of course! . . .) dedicated to the diva being honored. It was a great party, one of the few happy, successful
