What happened in the new house?
“I went to live alone. Anderson and Alessandra stayed with their grandmother. She took care of them; she could walk. At first, Ana was with me, but then Tamara kept her for longer and longer. She liked to prepare her birthday party. They are well-off people. She took my little daughter, adorned her, and took photographs. And I stayed in the house.”
And next? I kept pushing the recollection.
“My shack burned down. The fire began in my neighbor’s shack—her TV set exploded. There was a short-circuit, and it was all on fire. Divorce is fire. It all burned down. I stayed a few weeks with my brothers. A week in the house of one and a week in the house of the other. Ademar looked at me and said, ‘We progressed on our own . . . and now this woman lying here.’ My brother wants to see production, he wants one to produce. . . . He then said, ‘I will sell you.’”
I had to stop her for a moment. I don’t understand, Catarina.
From that point, her account became more and more elliptical, oscillating between what I understood as a fantasy that equated production with the brothers’ demand that she procreate and the account of a pharmaceutically mediated form of fraternal cruelty. Catarina, however, insisted that the siblings respected her and that they were not ex-brothers: “They liked me and wanted me to stay in the house. They didn’t demonstrate it, but they wanted us to remain together.” This image of the brothers, I thought at the time, was what remained of the house of infancy. What happened in that space that was left? What in life made that space remain?
“I fell sick while I was in my other brother’s house. It was such a bad flu—it was a cold winter. They gave me such strong medication that I couldn’t do anything but sleep. Day and night were the same for me. My brother told me that I had to go. He said that he already had four children, that I only had three, that I was obligated to have five or six kids, like my mother. He didn’t realize that he demanded from me what he asked from himself. He married twice. The first woman died giving birth to a son. To do what? So he got another woman and now has three children with her.
“Like Altamir, he also has an auto repair shop. He always has money . . . but, here, I don’t have money. Here, we live from donations. The important thing is not to have money and things but one’s life. That is very important—life and to give opportunity to whoever wants to be born. . . . My brother used to say that we, my husband and I, had too few children, too little sexual relation.”
The demands for economic progress made by the brothers and the changing value of kinship ties became entangled in a battle over the discarding of Catarina’s body. In order to endure being left to die in Vita, Catarina has recomposed the ruined fraternal tie, I thought. Desire finds lost objects. Yet the men in Catarina’s account—the brothers, the ex-husband, and the brother-in-law—seemed beyond the tragic mode. Their actions were guided by other interests: getting rid of Catarina before she became an invalid like her mother, taking her house, having another woman. In reality, Catarina could not be the human that these men wanted.
“After my ex-husband left me, he came back to the house and told me he needed me. He threw me onto the bed, saying, ‘I will eat you now.’ I told him that that was the last time. . . . I did not feel pleasure, though. I only felt desire. Desire to be talked to, to be gently talked to.”
In abandonment, Catarina recalled sex. There was no love, simply a male body enjoying itself. No more social links, no more speaking beings. Out of the world of the living, her desire was for language, the desire to be talked to. I reminded Catarina that she had once told me that the worst part of Vita was the nighttime, when she was left alone with her desire.
She kept silent for a while and then made it clear that seduction was not at stake in our conversation:
“I am not asking a finger from you.”
She was not asking me for sex, she meant.
Catarina looked exhausted, though she claimed not to be tired. At any rate, it seemed that she had brought the conversation to a fecund point, and I also felt that I could no longer listen. No countertransference, no sexual attraction, I thought, but enough of all these things. The anthropologist is not immune. I promised to return the next day to continue and suggested that she begin to write again.
But my resistance did not deter her from recalling her earliest memory, and I marveled at the power of what I heard—an image that in its simplicity appeared to concentrate the entire psyche.
“I remember something that happened when I was three years old. I was at home with my brother Altamir. We were very poor. We were living in a little house on the plantation. Then a big animal came into the house—it was a black lion. The animal rubbed itself against my body. I ran and hugged my brother. Mother had gone to get water from the well. That’s when I became afraid. Fear of the animal. When mother came back, I told her what had happened. But she said that there was no fear, that there was no animal. Mother said nothing.”
This could have been incest, sexual abuse, a first psychotic episode, the memory of maternal and paternal abandonment, or a simple play of shadows and imagination—we will never know.
The image of the house, wrote Gaston Bachelard, “would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being. A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (1994:xxxvi).
In this earliest of Catarina’s recollections, nothing is protecting the I. It is in Vita that she recalled the animal so close to the I. This story speaks to her abandonment as an animal as well as to the work the animal performs in human life. In this last sense, the animal is not a negation of the human, I thought—it is a form of life through which Catarina learned to produce affect and which marks her singularity.
When I told her it was time for me to leave, Catarina replied, “You are the one who marks time.”
”Love is the illusion of the abandoned”
Crawling on the cement ground, a man was shouting: “O devil, eat shit! O devil, stick this bread in your ass!”
Most of the people in the infirmary sat quietly against a wall, absorbing the weak warmth of the winter sun on that late morning, August 5, 2000. Some moved around the body of the cursing man and, holding their sole possessions, wandered through the courtyard undisturbed. Inside of me, the man’s voice named the place: Inferno. He kept shouting the same thing.
Does he shout all day?
“It’s the spirit of the sufferers,” replied Catarina.
Do you believe in spirits?
“Yes,” she said, “in spirits, in a person passing desire to the other. . . . Like in the church, the priest transmits sexual tension.” Catarina added that she had been calm for the past three days, that her tooth was aching less, and that she had been writing “nonstop.” Her new volume began: “My dictionary, my name.”
On the next page, Catarina wrote: “Clóvis Gama, Catarina Gomes, Catarina Gama.”
She again told me that she and Clóvis, the nurse I had not yet met, were “together.” After Clóvis’s name, she first wrote her maiden name (her husband’s family name was Moraes) and then took up Clóvis’s last name, Gama—gamado means “very attracted to” and “sexually aggressive.” Catarina wrote the divorce into her name, I thought. She first identifies with the dead father’s name, as if she did not need to belong to another man, but then imagines that she belongs to the nurse who medicates her.
There was now an openness to her name as well. In the dictionary, the “R” in CATARINA was often replaced by an invented character similar to the letter “K”