Alessandra, my second child, I already had difficulty walking. . . . My ex-husband sent me to the psychiatric hospital. They gave me so many injections. I don’t want to go back to his house. He rules the city of Novo Hamburgo.”
Did the doctors ever tell you what you had?
“No, they said nothing.”
Denial or resistance to the verdict “psychotic,” I thought. But what was the heaviness in her body that she repeatedly described? Just as they had the first time we met, in March 1997, Catarina’s words suggested that something physiological had preceded or was related to her exclusion as mentally ill, and that her condition worsened in medical exchanges. “I am allergic to doctors. Doctors want to be knowledgeable, but they don’t know what suffering is. They only medicate.”
Oscar, the infirmary’s coordinator, stopped by. Every time the good man saw me, he called me “O vivente”—“O living creature”—an expression I found eerie in that context. As we moved aside, Oscar explained that, as far as he knew, a hospital had sent Catarina to Vita because her family did not want to care for her. But he had no specific information to back this up.
“She is very depressed. Like the others, she feels rejected and imprisoned here. They are placed here, and nobody visits them.” He linked Catarina’s paralysis to a complicated labor, “a woman’s problem. She lost the child, it seems. We don’t know which hospital it happened in; we have no reports. These are things people say, but nobody truly knows. The fact is that people make pacts to get rid of the person, and that’s why we have institutions like Vita. That’s how things work these days.”
Oscar emphasized that probably 80 of the 110 people now in the infirmary (the population had significantly decreased since the time of Zé das Drogas’s administration) were “psychiatric cases.” But he agreed that Catarina was “a lucid person.” A person that no one listens to any longer, I added.
“When my thoughts agreed with my ex-husband and his family, everything was fine,” Catarina recalled, as we resumed the conversation. “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. My legs weren’t working well. The doctors prescribe and prescribe. They don’t touch you there where it hurts. . . . My sister-in-law went to the health post to get the medication for me.”
According to Catarina, her physiological deterioration and expulsion from reality had been mediated by a shift in the meaning of words, in the light of novel family dynamics, economic pressures, and her own pharmaceutical treatment. Her affections seemed intimately connected to new domestic arrangements. “My brothers brought me here. For some time, I lived with my brothers . . . but I didn’t want to take medication when I was there. I asked: why is it only me who has to be medicated? My brothers want to see production, progress. They said that I would feel better in the midst of other people like me.”
But Catarina resisted this closure, and, in ways that I could not fully grasp at first, she voiced an intricate ontology in which inner and outer state were laced together, along with the wish to untie it all: “Science is our consciousness, heavy at times, burdened by a knot that you cannot untie. If we don’t study it, the illness in the body worsens. . . . Science . . . If you have a guilty conscience, you will not be able to discern things.”
Catarina said that she wrote in order “to know afterward,” as if she could not have been present in the circumstances that determined the course of her existence. Her spoken accounts and her writing contain the confused sense of something strange happening in the body—“cerebral spasm, corporal spasm, emotional spasm, scared heart.” Along with all those people coming in and out of her house, and her moving from house to hospital to other houses, it seemed there was a danger of becoming too many, strange to herself. “One needs to preserve oneself. I also know that pleasure in one’s life is very important, the body of the Other. I think that people fear their bodies.”
Writing helped her to endure the days in Vita, Catarina added. “Now and then, we also talk to each other. But the toughest are the nights, for then we are all alone, and one desire pushes the other. I have desire, I have desire.”
When I approached Iraci to say good-bye, he repeated that he and India were dating. “We take care of each other. Last night, I dreamed it was our wedding, and we were eating the cake. Then I woke up . . . and I was so hungry.” But the story is much more complicated. I learned that volunteers sometimes actually tied India to her bed to prevent her from masturbating in public. I also heard rumors that volunteers from the recovery area whose task it was to bathe the women had forced themselves sexually on India.
As I bade Catarina farewell, I asked to borrow the dictionary, for I wanted to study it. She consented. I told her that I would bring it back in August, and we would continue the conversation. She smiled and said that she had run out of ink. “I need another pen.”
I read the word she was trying to finish writing: CONTACT.
Iraci and India, Vita 2001
Inequality
“A maimed statue.” Estátua entrevada. That is how Catarina described her condition in her dictionary. Entrevada means to be paralyzed; it also means to become dark or obscure, to grow clouded. The associations that follow this description are striking—in the eyes of the maimed statue, there is Catarina, along with her son, confronting officers and looking into the eyes of a machine:
Birth certificate
Catarina and Anderson
To be present in person
Policeman
Electoral officer
Eye to eye
Machine
To make meaning
On the next page of the dictionary, Catarina repeats the word “statue” and, writing in the imperative, demands to be addressed: “Call my address: Brasil, Brancil, Brecha, Brasa.”
Vita is Brazil’s address or destination. Brancil is a word Catarina made up; to me, it sounds like the name of a prescription drug. Brecha is a fissure, a wound, as well as the void that Catarina became. Brasa is a burning coal. It also suggests anxiety, wrath, and sexual tension.
The notebook in which Catarina wrote her dictionary had been distributed a few years earlier by the municipal government of Porto Alegre, considered a model of popular administration both domestically and internationally (Pont and Barcelos 2000; Abers 2000). The site of the World Social Forum, the city has become famous for its policies of social inclusion, most notably its “participatory budget-making.” The inside covers of the notebook outlined the consciousness-raising philosophy of the Workers’ Party under the title “Writing (Dis)Organizes Life”: “You, the people, are the main actors in the work we carry out. . . . Information invades our lives without asking for permission. All forms of the written word are a daily part of the city, but citizens are increasingly excluded from the content. This reality is in constant flux, blurring the conceptual lines between literacy and illiteracy. How much time is needed before we learn to critically engage with the written word?”
In this official text, the city’s secretary of education observed that at least twenty million people in the country were illiterate (some 15 percent of the population) and added that access to literacy and education was “a political project that questions
