Part One
VITA
A Zone of Social Abandonment
Vita sat on a hill of absolute misery. Gerson Winkler, a human rights activist, took me there in March 1995, along with Danish photographer Torben Eskerod. We were greeted by Zé das Drogas, Vita’s founder. “Vita is a work of love,” he told us. “Nobody wants these people, but it is our mission to care.”
The place was overcrowded and covered with tents. The few permanent buildings included a wooden chapel and a makeshift kitchen with no hot water. Some two hundred men lived in the recovery area, and two hundred additional people stayed in the infirmary. Each of these areas contained only one bathroom facility. The infirmary was separated from the recovery area by a gate, which was policed by volunteers, who made sure that those who were the most physically or mentally disabled would not move freely around the compound. These individuals wandered around in their dusty lots, rolled on the ground, crouched over or under their beds—when there were beds.
Each one was alone; most were silent. There was a stillness, a kind of relinquishment that comes with waiting, waiting for the nothingness, a nothingness that is stronger than death. Here, I thought, the only possible abstraction is to close one’s eyes. But even this does not create a distance, for one is invaded by the ceaseless smell of dying matter for which there is no language.
Like the woman the size of a child, completely curled up in a cradle and blind. Once she began to age and could no longer work for the family—“and worse,” explained Vanderlei, the volunteer who guided our visit, “she was still eating the family’s food”—relatives hid her in a dark basement for years, barely keeping her alive. “Now she is my baby,” said Angela, a former intravenous drug user, who most likely had AIDS. Angela had long ago lost custody of her two children and now spent her days caring for the old woman. “I found God in Vita. When I first came here, I wanted to kill myself. Now I feel useful. To this day, I have not discovered the grandma’s name. She screams things I don’t understand.” Yes, it was all horrific. Yet there seemed to be something ordinary and familiar in the ways these lives had been ruined. How to retrieve this history? And how to account for the unexpected relations and care emerging here? What is their potential, and how is it exhausted time and again?
A little later, words of salvation were everywhere. Loud, they emanated from the chapel that was now overcrowded with men undergoing rehabilitation, their heads bent as they quietly listened to several pastors of the Assembly of God. “You are fighting against God, but His words will give you victory over the world and the temptations of the flesh.” Improvised loudspeakers amplified these words of God and saturated the environment. In order to receive food, the men had to attend such sermons each day; they also had to give testimonies of conversion and memorize and recite Bible verses.
Seu Bruno spoke from the pulpit: “Brothers, faith in God will make you win over the world. I came here in bad shape. I did the worst things in the world. At sixteen, I left home, and I tried to be free. I was involved with alcohol and drugs. I was destroying myself. I am forty-eight years old. I lost my family. My three children want nothing to do with me. When I began to beg, my friends also left me. Vita was the only door open to me, and here the word of God opened my mind . . . and I began to see that I have value.”
Many of the men who had already passed through the recovery area took over a nearby spot of land, where they built shacks. A slum, known as the village (vila), formed on the outskirts, as if Vita were radiating outward. The economy of the streets persisted there. Although Vita was presented as a rehabilitation center, drugs moved freely between the facility and the village. I was told that criminals used the village as a hideout from the police. And there was a consensus among city officials and medical professionals that nobody actually recovered at Vita. How could they? Vita means life in a dead language. There were rumors that Zé das Drogas and his immediate assistants were embezzling donations, and even talk of a clandestine cemetery in the woods.
For Zé, Vita, despite all its disarray, was “a necessary thing. . . . Someone has to do something.” State and medical institutions as well as families were complicit in its existence, and they continued bringing bodies of all ages to die in Vita. Zé’s rhetoric was filled with outrage. He quoted the Old Testament and made a case for himself as a prophet: “While we are struggling, others are sleeping and not doing anything. One sees so much injustice that there are no words to express it.”
Stories about the tragedies of Vita were heard in millions of households. Much of the charity that kept Vita functioning was channeled through the work of Jandir Luchesi, a state representative and a famous radio talk-show host. With more than twenty local affiliated stations, his “Rádio Rio Grande” reached nearly 50 percent of the province’s population (some nine million people). During his morning show, Luchesi often put abandonados on the air, pleading with and scolding his radio audience: “Does anyone know this person? Who on earth could have done this to him?” Voicing moral indignation over the fate of the abandoned, Luchesi attracted donations of food and clothing while also carrying out his own political campaigns. Yet in spite of this impressive publicity, Vita was visited mostly by crentes (believers), poor volunteers from nearby Pentecostal churches who brought donations and tried to convert the abandoned. There were also sporadic visits by a few health professionals, such as Dr. Eriberto, who spent two hours a week administering donated medications and writing medical reports.
Only a few of the abandoned looked at us as we entered the infirmary. As they moved around or were moved, their bodies seemed passive, most likely an effect of drugs. Still, we thought, they must plan to leave this place. But we were told that when some manage to escape, they return, humiliated, begging to be allowed back. There is no other place for them to go. Who will hear their stories on the radio and “recognize that that is me”?
A middle-aged man was screaming, “Sou capado!” (I am castrated). As we approached, he stretched out his left arm and pretended to inject himself. “Who knows what has happened to him?” a volunteer shrugged. The man kept screaming, “Sou capado, sou capado!” They belong to Vita: simple people who still recollect being fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, grandparents—unclaimed lives in terminal desolation. If anthropologist Robert Hertz is right in arguing that the deceased is not only a biological entity but also a “social being grafted upon the physical individual” (1960:77), one wonders what kind of political, economic, medical, and social order could allow such a disposal of the Other, without indicting itself.
During the first day that Torben and I spent in Vita, we came upon a middle-aged woman sitting on the ground; she crouched over a stream of urine, her genitals matted with dust. As we approached, we could see that her head was full of small holes: worms burrowed in the wounds and under the scalp. “Millions of bichinhos [little animals], generated from her own flesh and dirt,” said Oscar, a former drug user, now being trained by Zé to become one of the infirmary’s coordinators. “We tried to clean it.” Torben could not bear to look. Momentarily paralyzed, he kept saying, “It is too much, it is too much.” The reality of Vita had overwhelmed picture-taking, too. This was a socially authorized dying, ordinary and unaccounted for, in which we participated by our gazing, both foreign and native, in our learned indifference and sense of what was intolerable. Yet rather than remaining paralyzed by moral indignation, we felt compelled to address life in Vita and the realpolitik that makes it possible. Not to represent it would equally be a failure.
Marcel Mauss, in his essay “The Physical Effect on the Individual of the Idea of Death Suggested by the Collectivity,” shows that in many supposedly “lower” civilizations, a death that was social in origin, without obvious biological or medical causes, could ravage a person’s mind and body. Once removed from society, people were left to think that they were inexorably headed for death, and many died primarily for this reason. Mauss argues that these fates are uncommon or nonexistent in “our own civilization,” for they depend on institutions and beliefs such as witchcraft and taboos that “have disappeared from the ranks of our society” (1979:38). As we saw in Vita, however, there continues to be a place for death in the contemporary city, which,