“This is my friend Lili,” said Catarina. “She speaks at night.”
“Yes, I am her friend,” replied Lili, looking straight into my eyes, with a wide-open smile and a copy of the New Testament in her hands.
Before I could ask Lili anything, she asked me: “Do you know what ‘not to live by the desire of the flesh any longer’ means?”
Stunned by her question, I failed to answer. I stayed on the surface of her words and mentioned that, as far as I knew, this was a statement by the Apostle Paul and that I would look into it further. I asked Lili where she was from, a question I grew up learning to ask in that world where mobility, both geographic and social, was all too rare.
“I am from Canoas, but now I am living here. I used to be Catholic, but then I converted to the Assembly of God. I used to leave home and run to the church. My husband hit me. I lived in the streets for some time, but then I went to live with my son. My son brought me here. My daughter-in-law wanted to kill me. I did nothing wrong. She called him ‘daddy,’ and I told her that I did not like that. She then tried to kill me with a kitchen knife.”
I was again faced with a condensed account of what the “mad person” thought had happened to her in life. I had heard similar accounts from Catarina when I first met her in 1997 and from Iraci during my previous visit. In their initial statements, all three had described being banned from the family and suffering the rupture of relations as well as the dangerous and now impossible desire for homecoming. These were not illness narratives channeling a search for meaning (Kleinman 1988; Good 1994; Mattingly 1998). Nor were they the “schizophrenic recording codes” that Deleuze and Guattari saw as opposing or simply parodying social codes, “never giving the same explanation from one day to the next” (1983:15). Neither were they the “diffuse and external rain of distractions” that marked the being-in-the-world of the homeless in the Boston shelter chronicled by Robert Desjarlais (1994:897).
As I came to realize over time, the accounts of many of the so-called mad in Vita were not ever-shifting. Rather, these narratives maintained an impressive steadiness and contextuality (as I would learn by tracking Catarina’s history), in spite of caretakers’ repeated insistence that they were “nonsense.” Instead of seeing these condensed accounts as proof of “a retreat from the world” (Desjarlais 1994:897), I began to think of them as pieces of truth—let me call them life codes—through which the abandoned person attempted to hold onto the real. As I listened, I was challenged to treat the accounts as evidence of the reality from which the abandoned had been barred and their failed attempts to reenter it. In this sense, these pieces ultimately gave language to the exclusion that was now embodied. Moreover, for the abandoned themselves, these accounts were spaces in which destinies were rethought and desires reframed.35
Consider the old black man standing barefoot against a wall and how he transformed social dying into speech. As I passed by, again and again he called me senhor (master) and, with downcast eyes, begged: “Senhor, can you, please, loan me your wife so that I can take her with me to see God, who has descended there in Porto Alegre?” I knew that he had seen me with Adriana, but I did not have a clue as to what he meant.
One day, I asked him about this epiphany.
“God is near the bus station,” the old man replied.
How do you know?
Osmar, Vita 2001
“I don’t know. People tell me. I also heard it on the radio. I have heard it for some time. Yes, senhor, I just want to go there and see God—and if you were to loan me your wife, I could go and see God.”
Why do you want to see God?
“It’s good to see God, to see and to get to know God.”
After a silence, I asked where he had come from.
“I am here now.”
How long have you been here?
“My family does not want me to see God, who has descended there at the bus station.”
Did your family leave you here?
“My family does not want me to see God. They say that I am not worthy of anyone. That I am worth nothing, that I am a very bad nigger. Truly, that’s what they say.”
Why did they leave you here?
“I don’t know; I didn’t wrong anyone.”
What did you do before getting to Vita?
“I always worked in a plantation . . . to sell for the market.”
How old are you?
“I don’t know. I have no birth certificate.”
He did recall his name: “Osmar de Moura Miranda.” Osmar said that he had always been a single man, that since he was a child he had known “nothing” of his parents. Later, a volunteer told me that Negão—“Big Nigger,” that is what they call him in Vita—had actually been brought there by “his boss.”
Now Osmar is a useless servant, so to speak; his family is that which never existed; and God (as I interpret it) is the dignity and liberty he never knew as a man of African descent in Brazil. “They brought me here where there is no work to do, and they never let me free. . . . Senhor, could you arrange things for me to leave?”
I explained that I could not, but I asked him where he would go if he left.
“To the streets, for I don’t have a place to live.”
Why is living in the streets better than here?
“In the streets, there is nobody to order me around.”
The accounts of Catarina, Osmar, and their neighbors represent agency. As these bits and pieces give language to a lived ex-humanness, they also work as the resources and means through which the abandoned articulate their experience. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective “ex” means “former, outdated”; the preposition “ex” is used to mean “out of” in reference to goods; and the noun “ex” refers to “one who formerly occupied the position or office denoted by the context,” such as a former husband or wife. “Ex” also means “to cross out, to delete with an x,” and stands for the unknown.
I spent the months of August and December of 2000 working with Catarina in Vita. We talked for hours and hours, and I continued interviewing her neighbors and caretakers. During and between these visits, Catarina finished two more volumes of the dictionary, and I was increasingly amazed by her capacity to give form to her interior life, despite the crumbling of all hope. “I desire to be present”—that is what I heard her saying, time and again.
How to methodologically address her agonistic struggle over belonging? In the simplest of terms, for me it meant first to halt diagnosis, to find time to listen, to let Catarina take her story back and forth, to take her voice as evidence of a relatedness to a now-vanished lifeworld, and, throughout, to respect and to trust.
The House and the Animal
“Even if it is a tragedy? A tragedy generated in life?”
Those were Catarina’s words when I asked her for the details of her story the next day.
“I remember it all. My ex-husband and I lived together, and we had the children. We lived as a man and a woman. Everything was as it should be; we got along with the neighbors. I worked in the shoe factory, but he said that I didn’t need to work. He worked in the city hall. He used to drink a bit after work when he played billiards in a bar. I had nothing against that.
“One day, however, we had a silly fight because he thought that I should be complaining about his habits and I wasn’t. That