Free With My Dog Eyes: A Novel by Hilda Hilst

Translator’s Introduction
    For many years toward the end of her life, Hilda Hilst spent every evening getting drunk on cheap whiskey, drunk to the point of not remembering the things she said or the fights she provoked. “I drink because it’s the only way I can tolerate reality,” she told a close friend and longtime resident of the Casa do Sol (The House of the Sun), the secluded estate where she lived and wrote for nearly forty years. There, surrounded by a rotating cast of friends, bohemian artists and poets, and a pack of dogs sometimes numbering more than one hundred, Hilda Hilst produced one of the most ambitious and original bodies of work in Latin American literary history.
    Hilst had been born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Brazil, an heiress to the lands, if not the fortunes, of a São Paulo coffee dynasty. Her father, Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst, was a writer as well as a coffee baron. Hilst revered her father, and throughout her life attributed her prodigious literary talent to him. Unfortunately, mental illness also ran in the family for generations,and Hilst’s father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia shortly after her parents separated, when she was only two years old. Her mother also later suffered from dementia, and ended up confined in the same sanatorium to which her father had been committed years before. The specter of madness would loom over Hilst’s entire career as a writer, inflecting her work with themes of insanity and contributing to her formidable reputation as an eccentric recluse.
    After primary schooling in São Paulo province and secondary education in the city, Hilst studied law at the distinguished University of São Paulo. Class privileges allowed her to circulate among the elite, where she was acknowledged as one of the most beautiful women of her generation in 1950s Paulista high society. Though her suitors courted her with jewels and furs, Hilst chafed at the constraints of bourgeois values, choosing instead to smoke and drink in the company of writers and artists at a time when such behavior was considered worthy of prostitutes. Hilst had little patience for the sexual mores of her caste, and her sexual freedom became as well-known as her glamour and irreverent intellect.
    By her early thirties, Hilst had abandoned a prestigious law career and promising marriage prospects, published a few books of poetry to critical praise, and traveledEurope. While in Paris, she stalked the filming of a Marlon Brando movie, determined to seduce the American actor. Though the affair was ultimately frustrated, she went so far as to bribe Brando’s doorman and date his friend Dean Martin in an effort to get closer to the star. Upon her return, Hilst settled in São Paulo’s bohemian district, having decided to be a writer. It was only after reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s
Report to Greco
that she resolved to devote the rest of her life—every hour of it—to literature, and that to do so meant renouncing even the salons of bohemia. She constructed the Casa do Sol on inherited coffee fields near the regional city of Campinas as a home for her literary work. Once established on the estate in 1965, Hilst seldom left it, detesting even short journeys into Campinas. The coiffed and manicured former debutante let her hair grow long and cast aside couture and jewelry in favor of simple robes. She had gone to the Casa do Sol, she said, “to make myself ugly.”
    The tenacity with which Hilst maintained this retreat earned her a reputation as a hermit madwoman in the São Paulo circles she had forsaken, but she was seldom alone. Though methodic about her work and defensive of the solitude in which she wrote, Hilst also took pride in her role as matriarch of what she called the “elective family” of artists and writers that came to live in the Casa do Sol:it was her lifelong repudiation of traditional family values. Even Hilst’s marriage, to the sculptor Dante Casarini,