to get to a hospital or to be dropped here.”
What sustains them?
“Some have the expectation that a family member will come and take them out of here. They make the family into their ideal, which in fact it never was.” I was told that families showed up only when they needed the abandoned person’s signature to settle inheritance issues or to keep his or her welfare benefits flowing into the household. Vó Brenda’s son visits her to guarantee that he will receive her shack when she dies, Dalva reported. Working amid a “lack of legal documentation and lack of memory,” the social worker was mapping the population and trying to build partnerships with psychiatric and general hospitals as well as to mediate welfare claims. The immediate goal, however, was to get beds for those in the infirmary and to keep the place sanitized.
Oscar was now the infirmary’s coordinator. He was a rare person, I thought, because he was always there, and he cared. Other volunteers appeared only irregularly, and, as I learned, there was much abuse of the abandoned. Oscar had come to Vita in the early 1990s from the state of Santa Catarina, leaving behind his wife and two teenage daughters. He had recovered from his intravenous drug addiction, converted to Pentecostalism, and found a new wife in the village surrounding Vita. He adopted his wife’s two sons, and they had a daughter of their own. They made Vita their home.
Although Oscar was not paid to coordinate the infirmary’s work, he was happy to have shelter, free food, and access to a car—“I even have a cell phone.” He was also euphoric about the changes under way. “The new coordinators have many projects. They have very good ideas and are trying to solve things in the quickest way. But it takes time. Things are developing.” This altruistic and hard-working man was always there to welcome me in the following years as I charted Vita’s development and, particularly, Catarina’s history. Over time, I became very fond of him. “We are friends,” we both said.
Vó Brenda, Vita 2001
Oscar had taken his father, sick with advanced cirrhosis, to a special room in Vita. “I am feeding him. He is not here because of family abandonment, but because I can take better care of him. My siblings are helping out with the food.” Oscar was the institution. He had a vision of care that he had no power to implement, although he spoke of it openly: “People need better and more varied kinds of food, also some kind of therapy, like you offer when you listen to them. . . . If families came at least once a month and left some special food, I would prepare it for the grandpas and grandmas with much joy.”
But instead, he continued, “they just stay here, and when something bad happens to them, we take them to the hospital, and they are immediately sent back. We do the back-and-forth, and in one of these back-and-forths, they will die.” Oscar was specifically thinking of the AIDS cases. “I don’t think they have much time.” The captain’s rationality and the social worker’s commitment both collapsed in the face of the truth that, as Oscar saw it, “there is no return.”
As I learned at the city’s epidemiological surveillance service, there was no means of tracking deaths in places like Vita, although the deaths of Vita’s residents were now at least registered at local hospitals. In the end, the deaths of these individuals could not be traced back to their abandonment. And the clinic and the state were symbolically acknowledged as having cared.
The dilemmas voiced by the captain—particularly his emphasis on Vita the place, rather than the people—were revealing for what they suggested about the complex politics of death at work here: “We ask ourselves, if we know the problem, why don’t we solve it? This is a paternalistic view of things. Even if the institutions that are supposed to do the work of caring don’t do it, we still cannot let these creatures rot in the streets. . . . So, should we be paternalistic or let these creatures die?”
That said, the captain became pragmatic in pondering the future of Vita. “We shall not turn this place into a hospital. At most, the infirmary can be a place where people who leave the hospital and have nowhere to go can recuperate for a while.” In this view, people in the infirmary would eventually die out, except for those few whose families might rescue them after being pressured by the social worker.
I began to realize the strategic value of not framing Vita as a health-enhancing site. By officially registering Vita as an “entity of public utility” at a time when the Workers’ Party administration in Porto Alegre was redefining the system of public health inspection, the coordinators were preventing the city administration from interfering in their management of the institution. Defining Vita as a clinic or hospital might have invited city interference in the form of enforcing sanitary regulations or conducting legally required visits by city health professionals. In other words, the coordinators were keeping Vita to themselves. Here, we understand the function of conceiving the destiny of the abandoned as self-generated, irreversible death. The few who recover set the limits of who is considered worthy of having a biological existence—and this measure informs the public health institutions and pastoral extensions of a local triage state (Biehl 1999b; 2004).
After many visits, I also saw that the abandonados—with their daily rations of bread and bean soup and hot water—were not being kept alive in vain. While dying in Vita, they still had a final social function. Under the new regime, everyone admitted for rehabilitation had to spend a few days in the infirmary as part of their initiation into Vita. Additionally, throughout their stay, men in rehabilitation had to come up to the infirmary and take care of some of the abandoned, dispose of their wastes, and move their bodies back and forth. As one of Vita’s new coordinators explained, the infirmary served as “a platform of information for the ones down here. It is useful for getting the addicts to fall back into reality, for if they don’t change, that’s their end.” The captain was more straightforward. He described the abandoned as “cobaias [experimental guinea pigs]. Their life is over. They show the young ones what will happen to them.”
Oscar and Luciano had once told me that medical and familial circumstances had made the abandonados in the infirmary inappropriate for living. It was now evident that the negotiation over the human/animal boundary that had produced them had become a subjective technique. Lauro had been in Vita for three weeks when I met him. The thirty-year-old man sat next to Lucas, formerly known as Vaquinha (Little Cow), about whom nothing was known. Lauro said that he had adopted and baptized “the poor thing” as Lucas. “Now he has a name. He talks little. He is mentally retarded. I am responsible for him. He is like my child now—we play.” Lucas looked the same age as his new caretaker, and there was a warmth to their relationship.
Lauro said that he had been a factory worker, but he had been fired. “I became dependent on alcohol and drugs and descended to hell. I was even sleeping in the streets.” He lost contact with his wife and daughter. “I finally realized that either I stopped or I would end up dying. . . . So I asked God to give me the chance to change my life, and He partly fulfilled this. The first step has been taken, which is to be here . . . to be far away from drugs and alcohol.” As part of his initial rehabilitation therapy, he has to take care of Lucas, bathe him, change his clothes, watch him as he crawls around, sit silently next to him. This human relation has filled a void in him. “I help him, so automatically he helps me too.”
How so?
“By helping him, I am helping myself.” Lauro then spoke of Lucas and himself in the plural, as belonging to two distinct collectives: “They give force to us. Only to look at them already helps us to walk forward, to not stay in the same condition they are in.” He voiced an impersonal feeling: “One develops a tenderness toward him. He is a well-behaved guy, right?”
Lauro claimed that as he followed these people’s
