As Catarina reflected on what had foreclosed her life, the degree to which her thinking and voice were unintelligible was not determined solely by her own expression—we, the volunteers and the anthropologist, lacked the means to understand them. Catarina’s puzzling language and desires required analytic forms capable of addressing the individual person, who, after all, is not totally subsumed in the workings of institutions and groups.
Two years passed. I had begun to do postdoctoral work in a program on culture and mental health. At the end of December 1999, I returned to southern Brazil to further observe life in Vita, fieldwork that was to result in the text for a book of photographs that Torben Eskerod and I were planning on life in such zones of abandonment.
With the recent availability of some government funds, Vita’s infrastructure had improved, particularly in the recovery area (as the rehabilitation center was called). The condition of the infirmary was largely unchanged, although it now housed fewer people.
Catarina was still there. Now, however, she was seated in a wheelchair. Her health had deteriorated considerably; she insisted that she was suffering from rheumatism. Like most of the other residents, Catarina was being given antidepressants at the whim of the volunteers.
Catarina told me that she had begun to write what she called her “dictionary.” She was doing this “to not forget the words.” Her handwriting conveyed minimal literacy, and the notebook was filled with strings of words containing references to persons, places, institutions, diseases, things, and dispositions that seemed so imaginatively connected that at times I thought this was poetry. These were some of the first excerpts I read:
Computer
Desk
Maimed
Writer
Labor justice
Student’s law
Seated in the office
Law of love-makers
Public notary
Law, relation
Ademar
Ipiranga district
Municipality of Caiçara
Rio Grande do Sul
. . .
Hospital
Operation
Defects
Recovery
Prejudice
. . .
Frightened heart
Emotional spasm
I returned to talk with her several times during that visit. Catarina engaged in long recollections of life outside Vita, always adding more details to what she had told me during our first meeting in 1997. The story thickened as she elaborated on her origin in a rural area and her migration to Novo Hamburgo to work in the city’s shoe factories. She mentioned having more children, fighting with her ex-husband, names of psychiatrists, experience in mental wards, all told in bits and pieces. “We separated. Life among two persons is almost never bad. But one must know how to live it.”
Again and again, I heard Catarina conveying subjectivity both as a battleground in which separation and exclusion had been authorized and as the means through which she hoped to reenter the social world. “My exhusband rules the city. . . . I had to distance myself. . . . But I know that when he makes love to other women, he still thinks of me. . . . I will never again step in his house. I will go to Novo Hamburgo only to visit my children.” She spoke elusively about giving and getting pleasure. At times, she began a train of associations that I could not follow—but at the end, she always brought her point home. Catarina was also writing nonstop.
I had not planned to work specifically with Catarina, nor had I intended to focus on the anthropology of a single person.3 But by our second meeting in 1999, I was already drawn in, emotionally and intellectually. And so was Catarina. She told me that she was happy to talk to me and that she liked the way I asked questions. At the end of a visit, she always asked, “When will you return?”
I was fascinated by what she said and by the proliferation of writing. Her words did not seem otherworldly to me, nor were they a direct reflection of Vita’s power over her or a reaction against it, I thought. They spoke of real struggles, of an ordinary world from which Catarina had been banished and that became the life of her mind.
Dentist
Health post
Rural workers’ labor union
Environmental association
Cooking art
Kitchen and dining table
I took a course
Recipe
Photograph
Sperm
. . .
To identify
Identification
To present identity in person
Health
Catholyric religion
Help
Understanding
Rheumatic
Where had she come from? What had truly happened to her? Catarina was constantly reflecting on her abandonment and physiological deterioration. It was not simply a matter of transfiguring or enduring that unbearable reality; rather, it allowed her to keep the possibility of an exit in view. “If I could walk, I would be out of here.”
The world Catarina recalled was familiar to me. I had grown up in Novo Hamburgo. My family had also migrated from a rural area to that city to look for a new and better life. Most of my fifty classmates in first grade at the Rincão dos Ilhéus public school had dropped out by the fifth grade to work in local shoe factories. I dreaded that destiny and was one of the few remaining who continued to sixth grade. My parents insisted that their children study, and I found a way out in books. Catarina made me return to the world of my beginnings, made me puzzle over what had determined her destiny, so different from mine.
This book examines how Catarina’s destiny was composed, the matter of her dying, and the thinking and hope that exist in Vita. It is grounded in my longitudinal study of life in Vita and in Catarina’s personal struggles to articulate desire, pain, and knowledge. “Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside,” she wrote. In my journey to know Catarina and to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the dictionary she was compiling, I also traced the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. Throughout, Catarina’s life tells a larger story about the integral role places like Vita play in poor households and city life and about the ways social processes affect the course of biology and of dying.
Those early conversations with Catarina crystallized three problems I wanted to specifically address in our work together: how inner worlds are remade under the impress of economic pressures; the domestic role of pharmaceuticals as moral technologies; and the common sense that creates a category of unsound and unproductive individuals who are allowed to die. As Catarina elliptically wrote: “To want my body as a medication, my body.” Or, as she repeatedly stated: “When my thoughts agreed with my exhusband and his family, everything was fine. But when I disagreed with them, I was mad. It was like a side of me had to be forgotten. The side of wisdom. They wouldn’t dialogue, and the science of the illness was forgotten.”
According to Catarina, her expulsion from reality was