retain it. “Yes . . . seeing this situation is one more force keeping me from plunging deeper into a well, till there is no return. Thank God, I found this place. I feel good just being able to help, to still have the health. When I look around, I see people who don’t have this health, disabled—this helps me a lot.” He then asked Lucas to speak: “Show him that you can talk.” In that most disturbing encounter, the man became a spectacle, not meant to be heard or addressed. His worth as a human socially and medically devalued, Vaquinha/Lucas remained the animal form through which the salvageable human constituted himself.32
The new pedagogical role of these abandoned men and women stems precisely from their alleged inability to produce anything more than bodily infections, parasites, and silent suffering. Their social death is the negative image of the future. In the end, the negative ones are object lessons for potential citizens—or, better, they provide a ground for the appearance of a distinct concept of citizenship. I say “concept of citizenship” because local governments do not provide the means needed for this regenerated citizenship to become a structural possibility. Philanthropic sites like Vita make the personal regeneration of a marginal individual possible and livable either for a limited period or in the form of fiction. This concept of citizenship enlivens the image of the state as universal and life-enhancing. Yet, empirically, citizenship remains a matter of triage and, of course, money. As some are being healed in that simultaneously “militarized” and philanthropic setting, they wake up next to those who are socially dead, blind, without name, without origin, without ties. Like Cida, the nameless young woman with AIDS who, according to volunteers, “now and then asks us to tie her to her bed. She does that when she feels like killing herself. . . . Then, a few hours later, she mumbles to be untied. How do you understand such a person?”
In Vita one sees how life is achieved through death—the ambiguity and violence involved in this process. The negotiation over the human and nonhuman forms part of a complex set of relations through which individuals are linked to each other and to the political body. The Other’s dying makes it possible for one to belong to a family-like institution, to a new population and subjective economy. The ethnographic challenge is to find these empirical relations and linkages—technical, political, conceptual, affective—and to bring them out of thoughtlessness. The random encounter with Catarina and the events it precipitated made it possible to retrieve a world deemed to be lost.
Catarina, Vita 2001
Part Two
CATARINA AND THE ALPHABET
Life of the Mind
As we passed through the gate of the infirmary, my eyes immediately turned to a woman seated in a wheelchair in the shade. She was writing. “It’s Catarina,” I told my wife, Adriana. This time, Catarina was no longer riding her bicycle. Death was coming upon her, I thought.
With her head down, Catarina held a pen and scribbled with much effort. We greeted her by name, and she looked up, recognizing us. “João and Adriana,” she said.
Catarina seemed dazed; she spoke slowly and with great difficulty, as if she had suffered a stroke. We asked how she was doing. “My legs don’t help anymore,” she replied, adding that this problem was a result of “rheumatism,” although she was not taking any medication for it. “Sometimes the volunteers give me pills, but I don’t know what they are.”
What are you writing?
“This is my dictionary,” she said. “I write so that I don’t forget the words. I write all the illnesses I have now, and the illnesses I had as a child.”
Catarina handed me her book. Her handwriting was uneven. The words were composed in block letters, with no cursive writing, and with few verbs or full sentences. I was amazed by the force of the words, by her ragged poetry:
Divorce
Dictionary
Discipline
Diagnostics
Marriage for free
Paid marriage
Operation
Reality
To give an injection
To get a spasm
In the body
A cerebral spasm
Why do you call it a dictionary?
“Because it does not require anything from me, nothing. If it were mathematics, I would have to find a solution, an answer. Here, there is only one subject matter, from beginning till the end. . . . I write it and read it.”
I perused the dictionary, as Adriana spoke with Catarina. “In the womb of pain,” she had written. “I offer you my life.” “The present meaning.” Amid recurring references to medical consultations, hospitals, and public notaries, she wrote of a working woman and wanderer, of sexual emotion and mental disturbance, of medication and food for a baby, of poverty and abundance, of officers and indebtedness, and of things being “out of justice.”
Blended with allusions to spasms, menstruation, paralysis, rheumatism, paranoia, and the listing of all possible diseases from measles to ulcers to AIDS were names such as Ademir, Nilson, Armando, Anderson, Alessandra, Ana. Here and there, she wrote of motherhood; of divorce; of a rustic life with sows and insects, veterinarians and a Rural Workers Association; and of desire. Striking statements from a world that was no more.
Question, answer, problem to solve, the head
Who contradicts is convicted
The division of bodies
Then there were expressions of longing:
Recovery of my lost movements
A cure that finds the soul
The needy moon guards me
With L I write Love
With R I write Remembrance
Catarina writes to remain alive, I told myself.33 These are the words that form her from within. What are the ways of these words? How to tell it all, and what are we to do with it?
Dictionary
Society of Bodies
I returned to Vita a week later, this time alone. With neighborly care, Catarina immediately asked, “Where is Adriana?” She remarked that she had enjoyed talking to both of us the other day. I sensed in her words an integrity that neither forgot bonds nor envied the bonds of others, the character of a time when one earned respect, if not from governmental institutions and employers, then at least from family members and neighbors. As simplistic as it may sound, this sociality was a life-giving force.
The left side of Catarina’s face was bruised. “I fell from the chair when I tried to reach the bathroom.” A volunteer overheard and
