quality of education and also guarantees access to health care, employment, leisure, sanitation, and housing.” The secretary concluded by explaining that this project, called “totalities of knowledge,” took its central inspiration from Paulo Freire’s argument that reading the world precedes reading the word: “Our literacy program develops critical citizens who have a choice, with the capacity to transform their own lives and the realities of the world.”
Catarina’s use of this discarded educational material to compose her dictionary ironically exposes the imaginary and selective quality of what is described here as social change. The truth is that Catarina and the residents of Vita remain excluded from this particular popular project as well as most others.
“Citizens are those who search for services,” explained Mariane Gross, a journalist and human rights activist working in the city’s security office, who was critical of what the policies of social inclusion have meant in practice. She argued that the Workers’ Party administration had been highly effective in creating novel “service counters,” which address various medical and social needs, within a limited capacity. This in turn generated a new culture of citizenship and “democratic experts,” as she put it. “Those who want access have to get registered, wait in line, and participate. But what if you don’t read the folder, if you don’t have friends who tell you about these possibilities? Individuals have also learned to use this structure to accumulate power in their communities.” Meanwhile, “on the way to the counter, others, particularly the young and unemployed, are recruited by parallel forms of commerce and government—that is, organized crime.”
In 1997, I presented some of my initial ethnographic findings from Vita at an AIDS workshop organized by Porto Alegre’s municipal government. I suggested that there were signs of a hidden and untreated AIDS epidemic in Vita, which could well be an indication of what was happening in Porto Alegre’s streets and ghettos (Biehl 1999b). At the time, a representative of the Ministry of Health voiced indignation about “such a degree of dehumanization” and asked the local officials present to consider “closing Vita in the name of public health.” The city’s health secretary promised that her office would definitely investigate.
But, as another top city administrator admitted, the pressure to produce quick results for this progressive administration too often led to the creation of commissions and the writing of reports: “In truth, problems are identified, but things are not solved.” The poorest urban inhabitants, by and large, remained in a “vacuum of response.” And, in this vacuum, new social units and economic activities emerged to care for the invisible. This was tragically apparent in the so-called geriatric houses that mushroomed throughout the city to shelter the elderly, the mentally ill, and the disabled—the “unproductive and useless,” as Mariane Gross described them. “We used to say that in each street of Porto Alegre there was a clandestine hospice, operating without legal authorization.”
In 1998, Gross began a campaign to publicize the tragic conditions in these institutions. “People are confined and have no adequate care. Some of these businesses are surrounded by barbed wire, like camps.” On July 2, 1999, for example, a fifty-eight-year-old man was bitten to death by dogs in a geriatric house in Porto Alegre. “Bits of skin were all over the ground,” Gross and her colleagues wrote in the annual report of the state’s Human Rights Commission (Comissão de Direitos Humanos 2000:108).
But human rights rhetoric was not strong enough to close down Vita and similar institutions. The city’s public health inspection service had also begun to investigate these businesses but was having difficulty finding judges who would support shutting them down, according to health professional Jaci Oliveira. “The judges tell us that these houses are doing good. After all, where would these people go if they were freed?”
Even if Vita had been shut down, it would most certainly have reemerged elsewhere in the city. For Vita is indeed symbiotic with various levels of government, and people like Catarina now have their destinies forged by a set of forces and a logic of exceptions that operate, in her words, “out of justice.”
Ex-Human
“I finished writing the book you gave me,” Catarina reported when we met again in early August 2000. “I left the book in the pharmacy with Clóvis, the nurse, but he threw it away. I was sad. I kept thinking that one day João and Adriana will come back, and they will want to read the book, and I don’t have it anymore.” I told Catarina I trusted that her writing would resume. She then confided: “Clóvis and I are dating.”
She quickly changed the subject: “My little suitcase was also thrown away. The volunteers said that it was getting moistened.”
I handed Catarina another empty notebook. She smiled, with a seemingly sedated face: “I have been at a standstill. . . . My head was full, full of nonsense. . . . So I stopped writing.”
“My gums are inflamed. It aches a lot. Clóvis told me that they would take me to the dentist.” Catarina added that he was giving her vitamins and pills, a white and a blue one, for pain. “Clóvis gives medication to each one of us. He puts the pills in the little cups with our names and the dose, the right dose . . . and distributes it to all of us.” Catarina looked very tired.
How did you sleep?
“I woke up in the middle of the night because of Lili, my bedmate. She talks in her sleep. It took me a long time to fall asleep again.”
Do you recall any dreams you had?
“I dreamed that I was . . . no . . . suddenly a man came and hit me and pulled my hair. I don’t know. I felt bad and began to scream, asking for help. Then Lili was there. I don’t recall more. It was a nightmare.”
It sounded like it had really happened, I thought. I asked whether she had recognized the man in the dream, but she said she had not.
I mentioned that sometimes, after waking from a dream, I would scribble down the things I recalled.
“Yes,” she replied, “dreams help us to understand the fears we have. A nightmare can also be a desire. If one doesn’t study what one has dreamed, then the dreams stay in the life that was dreamed. And, as one returns to life, one keeps thinking that everything is normal.”
I was confused. Are you saying, I asked, that if we don’t interpret a dream, then the dream stays present during the day, as if we lived in a dream-state?
“No, that’s not what I am saying. A little remnant of the dream is transmitted to us . . . the rest is up to us to channel and decipher. If we don’t decipher, we will not be able to remember what actually happened, what was and what wasn’t.”
What was and what wasn’t. In Catarina’s conception, the workings of the unconscious did not simply substitute for reality.34 Rather, the unconscious seemed to be a storehouse of ciphers that one must assemble and decode in order to understand what actually happened—the truth of losing one’s way of being in the world.
A cipher is an arithmetic symbol—zero—of no value by itself, used to occupy a vacant place in decimal numeration. A cipher is a person or thing that fills a place but is of no importance, a nonentity. A cipher is also a secret or disguised system of writing, a code used in writing; or a message written in this manner; or a key to such a system.
According to Catarina, that which truly happened continues to exist in the lost and valueless, in nonentities such as herself. Our grammars, George Steiner writes, make it difficult, even unnatural, to phrase a radical existential negativity, “but the failure of the human enterprise makes the doubt inescapable” (2001:39).
How
