“What could I do? Anderson said, ‘Mom, father has another woman. Aren’t you going to do something about it?’ What could I do? ‘Alessandra and I must have a destiny,’ he said. ‘If this woman wants my father, he should stay there, because it is impossible for a man to have two homes, two families. . . . He is making a cancer here.’ I kept wondering what to do. . . . He wanted to divide himself between both of us.”
I remembered the phrase “the separation of bodies” in Catarina’s dictionary, and it seemed to me that her pathology resided in that split and in the struggles to reestablish other social ties.36 In Vita, out of that lived fragmentation, the family was remembered. Her associations continued on the theme of the changing family, which was the cause of much pain and confusion.
“My mother was living with us. I had to take care of my mother. She couldn’t walk anymore; she had rheumatism and wanted treatment. I also have rheumatism. My father had had another family since we were kids; he stayed in the countryside. My father also wanted to heal, for he got poisoned planting tobacco. My ex-husband wanted to do the same as my father did, but I said ‘no’ to that kind of arrangement. So the marriage ended. During my last pregnancy, he left me alone in the hospital. He didn’t go there to see if the baby had been born or not. I had to be mother and father at the same time.”
According to Catarina, her husband repeated what her father had done. In marriage, she found herself once more in a fatherless family. Her father had been poisoned; he worked for a big company and for another family. Her mother lived with the young couple. The disease that paralyzed her was also emerging in Catarina’s body. When it was time for her to give birth to her last child, Catarina was left alone in the hospital, to be both mother and father to an unwanted child. All these references resonated with a fragment in the dictionary in which a breathless child was said to suffocate the mother:
Premature
Born out of the schedule
Out of time, out of reason
Time has passed
The baby’s color changes
It is breathless
And suffocates
The mother of the baby
Nothing could account for what was happening. “Out of time, out of reason,” she was feeling untimely. As our conversation continued, Catarina again emphasized her agonistic effort to adhere to what was “normal” and behave the way a woman was supposed to in that world. She alluded to the occlusion of her thinking as if it were daydreaming and to an urge to leave the home in which she was locked. The house and the hospital doubled as each other, and she was left childless:
“I behaved like a woman. Since I was a housewife, I did all my duties, like any other woman. I cooked, and I did the laundry. My ex-husband and his family got suspicious of me because sometimes I left the house to attend to other callings. They were not in agreement with what I thought. My ex-husband thought that I had a nightmare in my head. He wanted to take that out of me, to make me a normal person. They wanted to lock me in the hospital. I escaped so as not to go to the hospital. I hid myself; I went far. But the police and my ex-husband found me. They took my children.”
When was the first time you left home?
“It was in Novo Hamburgo. In Caiçara, I didn’t leave the home; it was in the countryside. One always has the desire to leave. I was young then. But pregnant and with a child, I wouldn’t leave. . . . When we first got to Novo Hamburgo, we rented a place at Polaco’s. I left home and ran because . . . who knows? Because . . . he was late in coming home from work. . . . And one day he left work earlier and rode the motorcycle with girls. I went to the bar and asked for a drink. I was pretty courageous and left. I was kind of suffocating inside the house. Sometimes he locked us in, my son and I, and went to work. I kept thinking, ‘How long will I remain locked?’ I felt suffocated. I also felt my legs burning, a pain, a pain in the knees, and under the feet.”
Did he find another woman because you left home? Or why did it happen?
“No.”
After a silence, Catarina answered a question I had not asked: “He didn’t leave me because of my illness either. . . . That didn’t bother him.” Yet it struck me that her statement affirmed the very thing she sought to deny: the key role played by her physiology within the household, of which she was both conscious and unconscious. She then added that jealousy was her husband’s basic state of consciousness.
“He was jealous of me. He used to say how ugly I was. He wanted me to stay in the wheelchair . . . so that he could do everything as he wished. He found another woman because he wanted to be a true macho. One day, he came back and said, ‘I don’t want you anymore.’ I said, ‘Better for me. I want a divorce.’ We separated from bed, bath, table, home, and city. I wanted a divorce. Divorce is mine, I asked for it first.”
This man’s virility was dependent on negating and replacing her. And the doctors, according to Catarina, helped to objectify the new family arrangement, making it impossible to truly reflect about what was going on.
“The doctors listened only to him. I think that this is wrong. They have to listen to the patient. They gave me pills. A doctor shouldn’t have contempt for the patient, because he is being unjust. He only writes prescriptions and doesn’t look at the person. The patient is then on a path without an exit. At home, people began to call me ‘mad woman’—‘Hey, mad woman, come here,’ that’s what they used to say.”
The psychiatric aura of reality.
You seem to be suggesting that your family, the doctors, and the medications played an active role in making you “mad,” I said.
“Instead of taking a step forward, my ex-husband took life backward. The doctors he took me to were all on his side. I will never live in Novo Hamburgo again. That’s his land; he rules that territory. Here in Vita, at least I can transmit something to people, that they are somebody. I try to treat everybody with simplicity. He first placed me in the Caridade Hospital, then in the São Paulo—seven times in all. When I returned home, he was amazed that I recalled what a plate was. He thought that I would be unconscious of plates, pans, and things and conscious only of medication. But I knew how to use the objects.”
This is how I was interpreting Catarina’s account: her condition was the outcome of a new family complex that was given agency within everyday economic pressures, governing medical and pharmaceutical practices, and the country’s discriminatory laws. These technical procedures and moral actions took hold of her: she experienced them as a machine with no exit in which mental life was taken backward.37
Through her increasing disability, all of the social roles Catarina had forcefully learned to play—daughter, sister, wife, mother, migrant, worker, patient—were being annulled, along with the precarious stability they had afforded her. To some degree, these cultural practices remained with her as the values that motivated her memory and her sharp critique of the marriage and extended family who had amputated her as if she had only a pharmaceutical consciousness. Yet this network of relatedness, betrayals, and institutional arrangements seemed to have affected Catarina profoundly, leaving her able to symbolize her condition only through the dilemmas and certainties of the world of infancy. As she put it: “When I was a child, I used to tell my brothers that I had a piece of strength that I kept to myself, only to myself.”
Catarina continued: “My ex-husband’s family got mad at me. I have a conscience, and theirs is a burden.” Interestingly, as she reconstructed the actions of her ex-family, she described something that, speaking as an amputated being, she could not perceive as a plot against her.
“One day, Nina—she is my ex-husband’s sister—and Delvani, her husband, came to my house, and I began to tell them what I thought. He said, ‘Catarina, we have put our shack for sale. If you want, we can simply trade places, and you can get out of here.’”
The goods that had been left to Catarina after the separation from her husband