“nothing” of his parents. Later, a volunteer told me that Negão—“Big Nigger,” that is what they call him in Vita—had actually been brought there by “his boss.”
Now Osmar is a useless servant, so to speak; his family is that which never existed; and God (as I interpret it) is the dignity and liberty he never knew as a man of African descent in Brazil. “They brought me here where there is no work to do, and they never let me free. . . . Senhor, could you arrange things for me to leave?”
I explained that I could not, but I asked him where he would go if he left.
“To the streets, for I don’t have a place to live.”
Why is living in the streets better than here?
“In the streets, there is nobody to order me around.”
The accounts of Catarina, Osmar, and their neighbors represent agency. As these bits and pieces give language to a lived ex-humanness, they also work as the resources and means through which the abandoned articulate their experience. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective “ex” means “former, outdated”; the preposition “ex” is used to mean “out of” in reference to goods; and the noun “ex” refers to “one who formerly occupied the position or office denoted by the context,” such as a former husband or wife. “Ex” also means “to cross out, to delete with an x,” and stands for the unknown.
I spent the months of August and December of 2000 working with Catarina in Vita. We talked for hours and hours, and I continued interviewing her neighbors and caretakers. During and between these visits, Catarina finished two more volumes of the dictionary, and I was increasingly amazed by her capacity to give form to her interior life, despite the crumbling of all hope. “I desire to be present”—that is what I heard her saying, time and again.
How to methodologically address her agonistic struggle over belonging? In the simplest of terms, for me it meant first to halt diagnosis, to find time to listen, to let Catarina take her story back and forth, to take her voice as evidence of a relatedness to a now-vanished lifeworld, and, throughout, to respect and to trust.
The House and the Animal
“Even if it is a tragedy? A tragedy generated in life?”
Those were Catarina’s words when I asked her for the details of her story the next day.
“I remember it all. My ex-husband and I lived together, and we had the children. We lived as a man and a woman. Everything was as it should be; we got along with the neighbors. I worked in the shoe factory, but he said that I didn’t need to work. He worked in the city hall. He used to drink a bit after work when he played billiards in a bar. I had nothing against that.
“One day, however, we had a silly fight because he thought that I should be complaining about his habits and I wasn’t. That fight led to nothing. Afterward, he picked another topic to fight about. Finally, one day he said that he had gotten another woman and moved in with her. Her name was Rosa.
“What could I do? Anderson said, ‘Mom, father has another woman. Aren’t you going to do something about it?’ What could I do? ‘Alessandra and I must have a destiny,’ he said. ‘If this woman wants my father, he should stay there, because it is impossible for a man to have two homes, two families. . . . He is making a cancer here.’ I kept wondering what to do. . . . He wanted to divide himself between both of us.”
I remembered the phrase “the separation of bodies” in Catarina’s dictionary, and it seemed to me that her pathology resided in that split and in the struggles to reestablish other social ties.36 In Vita, out of that lived fragmentation, the family was remembered. Her associations continued on the theme of the changing family, which was the cause of much pain and confusion.
“My mother was living with us. I had to take care of my mother. She couldn’t walk anymore; she had rheumatism and wanted treatment. I also have rheumatism. My father had had another family since we were kids; he stayed in the countryside. My father also wanted to heal, for he got poisoned planting tobacco. My ex-husband wanted to do the same as my father did, but I said ‘no’ to that kind of arrangement. So the marriage ended. During my last pregnancy, he left me alone in the hospital. He didn’t go there to see if the baby had been born or not. I had to be mother and father at the same time.”
According to Catarina, her husband repeated what her father had done. In marriage, she found herself once more in a fatherless family. Her father had been poisoned; he worked for a big company and for another family. Her mother lived with the young couple. The disease that paralyzed her was also emerging in Catarina’s body. When it was time for her to give birth to her last child, Catarina was left alone in the hospital, to be both mother and father to an unwanted child. All these references resonated with a fragment in the dictionary in which a breathless child was said to suffocate the mother:
Premature
Born out of the schedule
Out of time, out of reason
Time has passed
The baby’s color changes
It is breathless
And suffocates
The mother of the baby
Nothing could account for what was happening. “Out of time, out of reason,” she was feeling untimely. As our conversation continued, Catarina again emphasized her agonistic effort to adhere to what was “normal” and behave the way a woman was supposed to in that world. She alluded to the occlusion of her thinking as if it were daydreaming and to an urge to leave the home in which she was locked. The house and the hospital doubled as each other, and she was left childless:
“I behaved like a woman. Since I was a housewife, I did all my duties, like any other woman. I cooked, and I did the laundry. My ex-husband and his family got suspicious of me because sometimes I left the house to attend to other callings. They were not in agreement with what I thought. My ex-husband thought that I had a nightmare in my head. He wanted to take that out of me, to make me a normal person. They wanted to lock me in the hospital. I escaped so as not to go to the hospital. I hid myself; I went far. But the police and my ex-husband found me. They took my children.”
When was the first time you left home?
“It was in Novo Hamburgo. In Caiçara, I didn’t leave the home; it was in the countryside. One always has the desire to leave. I was young then. But pregnant and with a child, I wouldn’t leave. . . . When we first got to Novo Hamburgo, we rented a place at Polaco’s. I left home and ran because . . . who knows? Because . . . he was late in coming home from work. . . . And one day he left work earlier and rode the motorcycle with girls. I went to the bar and asked for a drink. I was pretty courageous and left. I was kind of suffocating inside the house. Sometimes he locked us in, my son and I, and went to work. I kept thinking, ‘How long will I remain locked?’ I felt suffocated. I also felt my legs burning, a pain, a pain in the knees, and under the feet.”
Did he find another woman because you left home? Or why did it happen?
“No.”
After a silence, Catarina answered a question I had not asked: “He didn’t leave me because of my illness either. . . . That didn’t bother him.” Yet it struck me that her statement affirmed the very thing she sought to deny: the key role played by her physiology within the household, of which she was both conscious and unconscious. She then added that
