We could open a zoo with all the animals that appear throughout Clarice Lispector’s works. A magnificent parade of creatures would fill the space, from luminous jellyfish to ancient tortoises. Not only would grand beasts that appeal to our desire for the exotic be there. Cats and cockroaches would also reside in the zoo, but free from cages. They are too common for the spectacle established through the fence that separates beasts from humans. The zoo would also have a strict visiting policy. Tickets would only be accessible for the tortured artists, the mothers with empty nests, the poor migrants, the drivers of luxury yellow cars who run over them, and those who submerge themselves into their narratives. While holding a popcorn bag, I would watch as the cats and cockroaches interacted with them. Based on two of her narratives, “Love” and The Passion According to G.H., that contact would prove both disastrous and informative. The zoo would flood. Visitors would enter the sea of the self and swim until they reached the seafloor. There, they would find a treasure chest containing the most repressed parts of their identity. Some would drown. Others would return to the surface.

 A Siamese cat sitting on a large tree would stare at Ana, a middle-class housewife. She is the protagonist of the short story “Love.” In it, she begins to question her life after seeing a blind man on a streetcar. As is typical in Lispector’s literature, the ordinary triggers greater reflections about our humanity. What matters most is not the brief moment in which she sees the blind man, but how the visual encounter, similar to those we have when riding a crowded train home, contributed towards Ana’s encounter with herself. A sincere inner look at who we are and what we do is rarely pleasant, as it demolishes the delusions we construct for ourselves and that are often a strategy of survival. She is just busy, thinks the young man being ghosted by his romantic interest. I believe in the power of investment banking to solve inequality, says the banker who attempts to find a greater meaning within the endless spreadsheets with endless numbers. Or, in the case of Ana, I feel fulfilled by dedicating my entire life to taking care of the home. Still impacted by the encounter with the blind man, she enters a garden, where she sees a cat. The reference to the animal is brief. Lispector only says: “A cat was in the central path. Its fur was soft. In a new silent walk, it disappeared.” The cat’s movement mirrors its independent nature, entering and leaving the garden of its own volition. The behaviour is the opposite of Ana’s, where every minute is directed towards the construction of order within a domestic space composed of screaming kids and perpetual kitchen noises. The cat represents everything she does not have, and, as a result, it further exacerbates the crisis she is in. The feline figure compels her to stare at an animalistic freedom she lacked, but that she nevertheless longed for. While Ana continues to drown, the Siamese cat jumps to the top of a wall.

The zoo’s cockroaches swim around a woman whose hands were once covered in clay. They were born in The Passion According to G.H. This Lispector novel introduces us to G.H., a sculptor who desired to dedicate her day to cleaning a room in her house that once belonged to a maid. The control Ana attempted to have in the domestic space reappears in this narrative. G.H. longs for the cleaning. She wants water to remove the thin dust that covers the room’s furniture and the stains that mark its walls. All the evidence that reminds her that the room was once occupied. The afternoon could have been comforting, composed of an endless scrubbing that would have produced in the protagonist a cathartic effect similar to that of Sophocles’ tragedies. However, the presence of a cockroach interrupts the cleaning. The animal is repulsive to most, as it offends our aesthetic sense, with its hair-covered antennae, pungent odor, and greasy skin. As a result, encounters with cockroaches are usually interrupted by a high-pitched scream, an expression of the terror in the face of what is incomprehensible. Lispector breaks this pattern through her protagonist. The vision of the animal, with its Spartan brown shield, forces G.H. to enter the depths of her being, subverting the “harmonious coherence” she longed for. By being transported into a plane of nature, the repressed elements of her being are released, and she is finally able to recognize “this unknown and happy and unconscious matter that was finally: me! me, whatever that might be.” Through the encounter with the cockroach, she recognizes the nauseating pleasure of the encounter with a self freed from social constraints. G.H.’s nature is dissected and explodes into fragments in front of our eyes, similarly to how a cockroach exposes its entrails to us after we strike it with a sandal.

Although ordinary, cats and cockroaches are central to Lispector’s literature. They serve as symbols that prompt a defiance of the established order that existed in the characters’ lives, forcing them to explore what exists beyond the label of a housewife or an upper-middle-class sculptor. The movement becomes almost recursive. The readers see the animals in the zoo. The protagonists see the animals in their story. As a result, the characters are finally able to see themselves, as if they were now the attractions of the zoo, which we, as readers, also observe. Depending on how open we are when reading the narrative, we can also become trapped in a cage, where we analyze ourselves while what we once called reality is disintegrated. As the zoo closes after its flood, using the evening to return to a similar version of its original shape, we all leave a bit more animalized. Meanwhile, the cockroaches reproduce, and the cats stretch.

Louise Sanches Barbosa is a contributing writer and junior editor for the Nassau Weekly.