The next page, after references to religion, medicine, money, and the body, contained an acknowledgment of sexual enjoyment. She wrote of the discovery of love in sexual tension:
Sexual tension, pleasure, fuck
I discovered that I love you
In every kiss, in every hug
I feel that I want you ever more
In searching for love in the Other’s body, she is left with incompleteness and a surplus of desire.
In the next fragment, Catarina wants sperm and confounds the substance with the man:
I desire sperm
Viscous mucus
Now I know you
Love, sex, and the fantasy of both are not distinguishable in Catarina’s writing:
Love, fuck, masturbation
Making love with the fingers
Love among two is potency
For then man and woman
Don’t feel despised and abandoned
Without social ties, I thought, Catarina was left with sex as if it were love in Vita. Or perhaps she was knowingly writing that one is alone in love, in sex. One can also read this fragment as suggesting that a sexual relationship writes itself. The spirit of two lone sufferers and sexual tension meet in the discovery of love: an energy or potency, as she put it, to fight abandonment. “We don’t know what it means to be alive except for the following fact, that a body is something that enjoys itself” (Lacan 1998:23). In love, in sex, in writing, Catarina approached the reality of being a thing left to die:
To live masturbating and things
Things in life
To alleviate the penis
To be a thing of resurrection
How to be a thing of resurrection? Catarina knows the hatred of which the despised man is made and what he does to the Other as he eases the penis that he is.
Man without God, man without family. The despised man hurts.
Love for Catarina was a vital enjoyment. The dramatic effect of love, she wrote, was a point of suspension in her “nonexistence” in Vita, a path both out of and back into abandonment.
To feel love
Lonely love
To follow desire in lonesomeness
Love is the illusion of the abandoned
Social Psychosis
“Shut up. I am ordering you to shut up.” A volunteer wearing a white coat approached the cursing man and threatened to lock him up.
The man on the ground was undeterred: “O devil, eat shit! O devil, stick this bread in your ass!”
As the volunteer turned, he saw me talking to Catarina and walked toward us. It was Clóvis, the nurse. He said he had heard a lot about me, and he apologized for all the noise. “Only medication makes this poor thing shut up. We have to sedate him. But he spits it out. What to do?” Clóvis also apologized for being unshaven. “I really don’t have time. Work here begins at 5 A.M. and continues nonstop till 9 P.M.”
“Clóvis gives me the vitamins,” interjected Catarina.
“Yes, I am the one who medicates . . . when there is medication to be dispensed,” added the fifty-four-year-old man. “I give injections, take care of wounds, bathe the grandmas—everything here happens with me.” Clóvis said he had been doing this work for almost a year “out of charity. I don’t get paid.”
He explained that he had learned all these nursing skills while working as a volunteer in Porto Alegre’s major psychiatric hospitals. In an association that sounded strange to me and that linked his work to Catarina’s, Clóvis alluded to a “pharmaceutical dictionary” he used to read at the São Paulo Hospital, which gave him “the knowledge to now manage Vita’s pharmacy.” Clóvis was also the man who had thrown away the second volume of the dictionary that Catarina had entrusted to him.
“But let me tell you the truth,” stated Clóvis. “I have been an alcoholic for almost my entire life.” He began drinking as a teenager. At the age of fifteen, he left his mother’s home in Porto Alegre, becoming a vagabond and a migrant worker. He made brief references to having lived in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela. For a while, he said, he had a family of his own in Rio de Janeiro, but his only son had died in a car accident.
As we talked, Clóvis disclosed that he had in fact been an inmate in the psychiatric institutions where he had learned about medications and that in the early nineties he had also lived in Vita. “This time, I came back by myself. São Paulo’s social worker is my friend; she wanted to rent a place for me, but I decided to come here. My treatment there had ended, and I was afraid that I would go back to drinking and living in the streets. It’s tough—alcoholism is a bad disease.” This man’s history held much more than his words were ready to tell, I thought.
Like many of the other volunteers and inhabitants of Vita’s recovery area, Clóvis saw the dying creatures in the infirmary as important material for shaping the citizen he wanted to become: “I can see the inhuman conditions here. So I can tune in, find myself again, and forget drinking. Working with the abandoned is a therapy one does with oneself. I still want to get some more years of work outside here so that I can retire and get my social security benefits. We don’t get paid anything here.”
As the man on the ground continued to call out to the devil, Clóvis insisted that we move to the pharmacy. He tried to joke with Catarina, saying, “She fights with me. If I don’t give her attention, she cries like a cat.” Catarina nodded and mentioned something I could not understand.
The infirmary’s small pharmacy was indeed well organized now. More medications were on the shelves, mostly donations (many of them expired, as I later verified), and labels were everywhere. On the table, little plastic cups marked with patients’ names or nicknames contained the various doses to be consumed throughout the day. Clóvis’s services were in high demand. Many men from the recovery area, as well as mothers and children from the village surrounding Vita, knocked at the pharmacy’s door, asking him to fill prescriptions or provide medical advice.
“Before I ran the pharmacy, many more people died in here,” Clóvis asserted.
How so?
“Wrong medication. I guess that some twenty people died here in one month about three years ago. The police even investigated. It was during the time Vita’s administration changed.” According to Clóvis, many of his predecessors in the pharmacy “couldn’t even read and simply put pills in the cups and distributed them to the dirt poor. Many had heart failure.”
Things in Vita changed under the new administration, Clóvis observed. “There are fewer abandonados in the infirmary. I shouldn’t say this, but I will: Vita now works more like a business. There are still some people from the time of Zé das Drogas, but they are dying out. They accept fewer people into the infirmary now, and the new inmates are mostly elderly women who have pensions. Some of them even get three minimum monthly salaries.”
Vita had an organized triage system these days, coordinated by social worker Dalva. “Before,” explained Oscar, the infirmary coordinator, “people who came in here had no identity. We didn’t know whose children they were or whether they were parents.