aren’t you writing today?
“I already filled the dictionary.”
I asked if I could take another look at it. Catarina called India, a silent, twenty-something woman of Indian descent who was sitting on a bench nearby, and asked her to fetch the notebook, which was wrapped in a plastic bag inside a suitcase under her bed. She assured India: “It’s not locked.” As the story goes, India is “mentally retarded.” Her brother, they say, is a Pentecostal pastor who speaks about her on a radio program but never comes to see her.
I asked Catarina if she wanted to keep writing. When she responded, “Yes,” I ripped out several pages of scribbled field notes from my own notebook and gave the empty book to her. “Write your name and address here,” she asked.
“I want to leave, I want to leave,” a young black man named Marcelo broke into the conversation. Like the majority of those in Vita, his true name and origins were either unknown or did not matter. He kept looking straight into my eyes, his hands grasping a small suitcase: “Take me, take me with you.”
Many abandonados, like crippled Iraci, have no formal identification but recall a home, a family, a childhood, or simply freedom in the streets. “I also want to leave,” he told me. “I came from Lages, state of Santa Catarina. I was raised in the interior and like it better than the city. I lost my father and my mother. We had cows and pigs and planted corn and beans. I have ten siblings, all scattered. My sister put me on a bus to Porto Alegre. Nobody wanted to take care of me. I was already paralyzed. I got paralyzed when I was one-and-a-half years old. I lived in the streets for five years. Now I am forty-one years old and have been here for more than five years. Better to live in the streets than in a place like this for the rest of life.”
Vita “makes me nervous.” Iraci said. “Here one dies.” He has seen too many pass away. “During winter, it is pretty bad. I lost count of how many died this past year. It’s serious. This place is a sadness. I want to get out of here. This is not life. It’s the end of life. The one who is ill gets even more ill, and one gets nervous. I am a nervous man.”
What happens to the dead?
“When someone dies, the administration calls the morgue. They pick up the body and put it in the machine.”
What do you mean?
“They throw oil over the body and set the body on fire. Then it becomes ashes, and the ashes are thrown into the Guaíba River. If one is buried, it is only for a few days, for they need the grave for other people. That’s what I heard.”
During the long days in Vita in which nothing happens, Iraci and his friends, including India, whom he says he is dating, “keep track of time. . . . We tell each other which day of the month and which year it is, the year that passed and the year that will begin. One reminds the other. Today is December 30, 1999; tomorrow is December 31, 1999, right? See how smart I am? Thank God, my head works very well. I am not ill.”
I asked Iraci what was inside the plastic bag over his lap.
“The words of God.”
So you know how to read?
“No, but I understand them.”
What do the words of God say?
“They say, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, and I will lack nothing.’”
What else do you carry in here?
“Bread. I keep the crumbs I find so that I can eat during the day. Sir, I enjoyed talking to you very much. Do you have a pen?”
Yes.
“So, I want you to write my name in your book. It’s Iraci Pereira de Moraes. My name comes from my deceased mother. Her name was Dormíria Pereira de Moraes. The name of my deceased father was Laudino Pereira de Oliveira.”
Why didn’t you get your father’s name?
“I don’t know why. I was pushed to the side of the deceased mother. I think it’s good like this.”
Were you registered at birth?
“Yes, but I lost my documents in the streets. I must do them all over again.”
Iraci then again summed up his fate: “I tell you the truth, I have no father or mother. I have ten siblings. We were eleven; one died. We are scattered in the world. So I wanted to see if I could return to the interior. I have an acquaintance, a good friend of the family. He lives near the town of Arvelino Carvão.”
Catarina was listening. We resumed our conversation. Why, I asked her, do you think families, neighbors, and hospitals send people to Vita?
“They say that it is better to place us here so that we don’t have to be left alone at home, in solitude . . . that there are more people like us here. And all of us together, we form a society, a society of bodies.” And she added: “Maybe my family still remembers me, but they don’t miss me.”
Catarina had condensed the social reasoning of which she was the human leftover. I wondered about her chronology and about how she had been cut off from family life and placed in Vita. How had she become the object of a logic and sociality in which people were no longer worthy of affection, though they were remembered? And how was I to make sense of these intimate dynamics if not by trusting her and working through her language and experience?
India could not find the dictionary, so she brought the whole suitcase. A strong smell of urine, moisture, and also a kind of sweetness wafted out as I opened it. The contents of the suitcase were all that Catarina had in life: a few pieces of old clothing, some carefully assembled candy wrappers, fake jewelry, a bottle of cheap powder, a toothbrush, and a comb as well as several plastic bags containing magazines, books, and notebooks. “My worker’s identity card was kept by the hospital,” she noted.
I picked up the dictionary and read aloud some of her free-associative inscriptions.
Documents, reality
Tiresomeness, truth, saliva
Voracious, consumer, saving, economics
Catarina, spirit, pills
Marriage, cancer, Catholic church
Separation of bodies, division of the estate
The couple’s children
The words indexed the ground of Catarina’s existence; her body had been separated from those exchanges and made part of a new society.
What do you mean by the “separation of bodies”?
“My ex-husband kept the children.”
When did you separate?
“Many years ago.”
What happened?
“He had another woman.”
She shifted back to her pain: “I have these spasms, and my legs feel so heavy.”
When
