Book XV
Book XVI
Book XVII
Book XVIII
Book XIX
Conclusion: “A way to the words”
Postscript: “I am part of the origins, not just of language, but of people”
AFTERWORD
Return to Vita
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Backyard, Vita 2001
Introduction
“Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside”
“In my thinking, I see that people forgot me.”
Catarina said this to me as she sat pedaling an old exercise bicycle and holding a doll. This woman of kind manners, with a piercing gaze, was in her early thirties; her speech was lightly slurred. I first met Catarina in March 1997, in southern Brazil at a place called Vita. I remember asking myself: where on earth does she think she is going on this bicycle? Vita is the endpoint. Like many others, Catarina had been left there to die.
Vita, which means “life” in Latin, is an asylum in Porto Alegre, a comparatively well-off city of some two million people. Vita was founded in 1987 by Zé das Drogas, a former street kid and drug dealer. After his conversion to Pentecostalism, Zé had a vision in which the Spirit told him to open an institution where people like him could find God and regenerate their lives. Zé and his religious friends squatted on private property near downtown, where they began a makeshift rehabilitation center for drug addicts and alcoholics. Soon, however, the scope of Vita’s mission began to widen. An increasing number of people who had been cut off from family life—the mentally ill and the sick, the unemployed and the homeless—were left there by relatives, neighbors, hospitals, and the police. Vita’s team then opened an infirmary, where the abandoned waited with death.
I began working with people in Vita in March 1995. At that time, I was traveling throughout several regions of Brazil documenting how marginalized and poor people were dealing with AIDS and how they were being integrated into programs based on new control measures. In Porto Alegre, I interviewed human rights activist Gerson Winkler, then coordinator of the city’s AIDS program. He insisted that I visit Vita: “It’s a dump site of human beings. You must go there. You will see what people do to people, what it means to be human these days.”
I had grown up in an area outside Porto Alegre. I had traveled through and worked in several poor neighborhoods in the north and south of the country. I thought I knew Brazil. But nothing I had seen before prepared me for the desolation of Vita.
Vita did not appear on any city map. Even though the existence of the place was acknowledged by officials and the public at large, it was not the concern of any remedial program or policy.
Winkler was right. Vita is the end-station on the road of poverty; it is the place where living beings go when they are no longer considered people. Excluded from family life and medical care, most of the two hundred people in Vita’s infirmary at that time had no formal identification and lived in a state of abject abandonment. For the most part, Vita’s staff consisted of residents who had improved their mental well-being enough to administer care to newcomers and to those considered absolutely hopeless. Lacking funds, training, and the proper equipment and medication, these volunteers were as ill prepared as the institution itself to deal with Vita’s residents.
Some fifty million Brazilians (more than a quarter of the population) live far below the poverty line; twenty-five million people are considered indigent.1 While in many ways a microcosm of such misery, Vita was distinctive in some respects. A number of its residents came from working- and middle-class families and once had been workers with families of their own. Others had previously lived in medical or state institutions, from which they were at some point evicted and thrown onto the streets or sent directly to Vita.
Despite appearing to be a no-man’s-land cut adrift, Vita was in fact entangled with several public institutions in terms of its history and maintenance. On many levels, then, Vita was not exceptional. Materially speaking, Porto Alegre contained more than two hundred such institutions, most of which were euphemistically called “geriatric houses.” These precarious places housed the abandoned in exchange for their welfare pensions; a good number of the institutions also received state funds or philanthropic donations.
I began to think of Vita and the like as zones of social abandonment.2
Catarina stood out from the others in Vita, many of whom lay on the ground or were crouched in corners, simply because she was in motion. She wanted to communicate. Adriana, my wife, was there with me. This is the story Catarina told us:
“I have a daughter called Ana; she is eight years old. My ex-husband gave her to Urbano, his boss. I am here because I have problems in my legs. To be able to return home, I must go to a hospital first. It is very complicated for me to get to a hospital, and if I were to go, I would worsen. I will not like it because I am already used to being here. My legs don’t work well. Since I got here, I have not seen my children.
“My brothers and my brother-in-law brought me here. Ademar, Armando. . . . I exercise . . . so that I might walk. No. Now I can no longer leave. I must wait for some time. I consulted a private doctor, two or three times. When it is needed, they also give us medication here. So one is always dependent. One becomes dependent. Then, many times, one does not want to return home. It is not that one does not want to. . . . In my thinking, I see that people forgot me.”
Later, I asked the volunteers whether they knew anything about Catarina. They knew nothing about her life outside Vita. I repeated some of the names and events Catarina had mentioned, but they said that she spoke nonsense, that she was mad (louca). She was a person apparently lacking common sense; her voice was annulled by psychiatric diagnosis. Without an origin, she had no destiny other than Vita.
I was left with Catarina’s seemingly disjointed account, her story of what had happened. As she saw it, she had not lost her mind. Catarina was trying to improve her condition, to be able to stand on her own feet. She insisted that she had a physiological problem and that her being in Vita was the outcome of various relations and circumstances that she could not control.
Catarina evoked these circumstances in the figures of the ex-husband, the boss, the hospitals, the private doctor, the brothers, and the daughter who had been given away. “To be able to return home, I must go to a hospital first,” she reasoned. The only way back to her child, now living with another family, was through a clinic. The hospital was on the way to a home that was no more.
But adequate health care, Catarina suggested, was impossible to access. While seeking treatment, she had learned about the need for medication. She also implied that medicine had worsened her condition. This form of care operated in Vita as well: “When it is needed, they also give us medication here.” She was referring to a pharmaceuticalization of disarray that made persons in Vita “always dependent.”
