But, as another top city administrator admitted, the pressure to produce quick results for this progressive administration too often led to the creation of commissions and the writing of reports: “In truth, problems are identified, but things are not solved.” The poorest urban inhabitants, by and large, remained in a “vacuum of response.” And, in this vacuum, new social units and economic activities emerged to care for the invisible. This was tragically apparent in the so-called geriatric houses that mushroomed throughout the city to shelter the elderly, the mentally ill, and the disabled—the “unproductive and useless,” as Mariane Gross described them. “We used to say that in each street of Porto Alegre there was a clandestine hospice, operating without legal authorization.”
In 1998, Gross began a campaign to publicize the tragic conditions in these institutions. “People are confined and have no adequate care. Some of these businesses are surrounded by barbed wire, like camps.” On July 2, 1999, for example, a fifty-eight-year-old man was bitten to death by dogs in a geriatric house in Porto Alegre. “Bits of skin were all over the ground,” Gross and her colleagues wrote in the annual report of the state’s Human Rights Commission (Comissão de Direitos Humanos 2000:108).
But human rights rhetoric was not strong enough to close down Vita and similar institutions. The city’s public health inspection service had also begun to investigate these businesses but was having difficulty finding judges who would support shutting them down, according to health professional Jaci Oliveira. “The judges tell us that these houses are doing good. After all, where would these people go if they were freed?”
Even if Vita had been shut down, it would most certainly have reemerged elsewhere in the city. For Vita is indeed symbiotic with various levels of government, and people like Catarina now have their destinies forged by a set of forces and a logic of exceptions that operate, in her words, “out of justice.”
Ex-Human
“I finished writing the book you gave me,” Catarina reported when we met again in early August 2000. “I left the book in the pharmacy with Clóvis, the nurse, but he threw it away. I was sad. I kept thinking that one day João and Adriana will come back, and they will want to read the book, and I don’t have it anymore.” I told Catarina I trusted that her writing would resume. She then confided: “Clóvis and I are dating.”
She quickly changed the subject: “My little suitcase was also thrown away. The volunteers said that it was getting moistened.”
I handed Catarina another empty notebook. She smiled, with a seemingly sedated face: “I have been at a standstill. . . . My head was full, full of nonsense. . . . So I stopped writing.”
“My gums are inflamed. It aches a lot. Clóvis told me that they would take me to the dentist.” Catarina added that he was giving her vitamins and pills, a white and a blue one, for pain. “Clóvis gives medication to each one of us. He puts the pills in the little cups with our names and the dose, the right dose . . . and distributes it to all of us.” Catarina looked very tired.
How did you sleep?
“I woke up in the middle of the night because of Lili, my bedmate. She talks in her sleep. It took me a long time to fall asleep again.”
Do you recall any dreams you had?
“I dreamed that I was . . . no . . . suddenly a man came and hit me and pulled my hair. I don’t know. I felt bad and began to scream, asking for help. Then Lili was there. I don’t recall more. It was a nightmare.”
It sounded like it had really happened, I thought. I asked whether she had recognized the man in the dream, but she said she had not.
I mentioned that sometimes, after waking from a dream, I would scribble down the things I recalled.
“Yes,” she replied, “dreams help us to understand the fears we have. A nightmare can also be a desire. If one doesn’t study what one has dreamed, then the dreams stay in the life that was dreamed. And, as one returns to life, one keeps thinking that everything is normal.”
I was confused. Are you saying, I asked, that if we don’t interpret a dream, then the dream stays present during the day, as if we lived in a dream-state?
“No, that’s not what I am saying. A little remnant of the dream is transmitted to us . . . the rest is up to us to channel and decipher. If we don’t decipher, we will not be able to remember what actually happened, what was and what wasn’t.”
What was and what wasn’t. In Catarina’s conception, the workings of the unconscious did not simply substitute for reality.34 Rather, the unconscious seemed to be a storehouse of ciphers that one must assemble and decode in order to understand what actually happened—the truth of losing one’s way of being in the world.
A cipher is an arithmetic symbol—zero—of no value by itself, used to occupy a vacant place in decimal numeration. A cipher is a person or thing that fills a place but is of no importance, a nonentity. A cipher is also a secret or disguised system of writing, a code used in writing; or a message written in this manner; or a key to such a system.
According to Catarina, that which truly happened continues to exist in the lost and valueless, in nonentities such as herself. Our grammars, George Steiner writes, make it difficult, even unnatural, to phrase a radical existential negativity, “but the failure of the human enterprise makes the doubt inescapable” (2001:39).
How did you learn to decipher your dreams?
“By myself,” answered Catarina, “when I was little. As I woke up, I kept thinking about what I had seen in the dream. I kept it to myself. I learned that it is good to dream, to think, the mind . . .”
But the time came when the borderline between the I and the Other had to be drawn more clearly. The fragile and forceful birth of writing and of the social person was what she described next.
“My father, he taught me the alphabet. We sat at the kitchen table, and he wrote ‘a,’ ‘b,’ ‘c’ in my notebook. I had to memorize the letters. But at first they didn’t stay in my mind. My father kept saying, ‘Catarina, you must keep this in your mind. If not, you will know nothing, and you won’t be a person.’ It was difficult. I wept a lot, but I learned the a, the b, and the c.”
That is what her dead father, she said, had left her with. A vital supplement, I thought.
Without knowing why, I changed the subject. Reminding Catarina that she had once told me that the doctors could not understand her pain, I asked her when she had first visited a doctor. She took my question literally, not letting me divert the conversation from where her thinking was taking it: “I think I was five years old. . . . I came down with something on my body that itched a lot. So my father took me to the pharmacist, and I healed. As a child, I only went to pharmacies. Real doctors who wrote prescriptions, that was later, the psychiatrists.”
She was telling me more than I could comprehend at the time about a painfully learned symbolic order and a personhood, both of which were no longer of any value (like her discarded book). As she alluded to them, the pharmaceutical identifications were another kind of writing that seemed to stand for her estrangement from the world.
“My ex-husband first took me to the psychiatrist, Dr. Gilson, in Novo Hamburgo, for him to help me, to discover the illness. But he lied to the doctor, saying that I was aggressive, that I beat the children. I got so mad that I actually hit him in front of the doctor. The doctor only prescribed. The nurse gave me an injection. I always had some medication to take. They said that they wanted to heal me, but how could they if they did not know the illness?