had made it impossible for Catarina to return home. But the desire was still there: “It is not that one does not want to.”
The reality of Vita and this initial encounter with Catarina left a strong impression on me. As I wrote my dissertation on the control of AIDS in Brazil (1999b), I was constantly reminded of the place of death in family and city life, and of this person who was thinking through her abandonment. Over the years, Vita and Catarina became key figures for me, informing my own thinking about the changing political and medical institutions and new regimes of personhood in Brazil’s urban spaces. The AIDS work I was chronicling included heroic governmental and nongovernmental attempts to contain the epidemic’s spread through daring prevention programs focused on safe sex and efforts to halt mortality by making AIDS therapies universally available. Along with this formidable work and the establishment of new institutions to care for vulnerable and poor populations not routinely slated for intervention, I also saw zones of social abandonment emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, which housed, in inhuman conditions, the mentally ill and homeless, AIDS patients, the unproductive young, and old bodies.
Neither legal authorities nor welfare and medical institutions directly intervene in these zones. Yet these very authorities and institutions direct the unwanted to the zones, where these individuals are sure to become unknowables, with no human rights and with no one accountable for their condition. I was interested in how the creation of these zones of abandonment was intertwined with the realities of changing households and with local forms of the state, medicine, and the economy. I wondered how life-enhancing mobilizations for preventing and treating AIDS could take place at the same time that the public act of allowing death proliferated.
Zones of abandonment make visible realities that exist through and beyond formal governance and that determine the life course of an increasing number of poor people who are not part of mapped populations. I was struggling to make sense of the paradoxical existence of places like Vita and the fundamentally ambiguous being of people in these zones, caught as they are between encompassment and abandonment, memory and nonmemory, life and death.
Catarina’s exercise and her recollections, in the context of Vita’s stillness, stayed in the back of my mind. I was intrigued by the way her story commingled elements of a life that had been, her current abandonment in Vita, and the desire for homecoming. I tried to think of her not in terms of mental illness but as an abandoned person who, against all odds, was claiming experience on her own terms. She knew what had made her so—but how to verify her account?
As Catarina reflected on what had foreclosed her life, the degree to which her thinking and voice were unintelligible was not determined solely by her own expression—we, the volunteers and the anthropologist, lacked the means to understand them. Catarina’s puzzling language and desires required analytic forms capable of addressing the individual person, who, after all, is not totally subsumed in the workings of institutions and groups.
Two years passed. I had begun to do postdoctoral work in a program on culture and mental health. At the end of December 1999, I returned to southern Brazil to further observe life in Vita, fieldwork that was to result in the text for a book of photographs that Torben Eskerod and I were planning on life in such zones of abandonment.
With the recent availability of some government funds, Vita’s infrastructure had improved, particularly in the recovery area (as the rehabilitation center was called). The condition of the infirmary was largely unchanged, although it now housed fewer people.
Catarina was still there. Now, however, she was seated in a wheelchair. Her health had deteriorated considerably; she insisted that she was suffering from rheumatism. Like most of the other residents, Catarina was being given antidepressants at the whim of the volunteers.
Catarina told me that she had begun to write what she called her “dictionary.” She was doing this “to not forget the words.” Her handwriting conveyed minimal literacy, and the notebook was filled with strings of words containing references to persons, places, institutions, diseases, things, and dispositions that seemed so imaginatively connected that at times I thought this was poetry. These were some of the first excerpts I read:
Computer
Desk
Maimed
Writer
Labor justice
Student’s law
Seated in the office
Law of love-makers
Public notary
Law, relation
Ademar
Ipiranga district
Municipality of Caiçara
Rio Grande do Sul
. . .
Hospital
Operation
Defects
Recovery
Prejudice
. . .
Frightened heart
Emotional spasm
I returned to talk with her several times during that visit. Catarina engaged in long recollections of life outside Vita, always adding more details to what she had told me during our first meeting in 1997. The story thickened as she elaborated on her origin in a rural area and her migration to Novo Hamburgo to work in the city’s shoe factories. She mentioned having more children, fighting with her ex-husband, names of psychiatrists, experience in mental wards, all told in bits and pieces. “We separated. Life among two persons is almost never bad. But one must know how to live it.”
Again and again, I heard Catarina conveying subjectivity both as a battleground in which separation and exclusion had been authorized and as the means through which she hoped to reenter the social world. “My exhusband rules the city. . . . I had to distance myself. . . . But I know that when he makes love to other women, he still thinks of me. . . . I will never again step in his house. I will go to Novo Hamburgo only to visit my children.” She spoke elusively about giving and getting pleasure. At times, she began a train of associations that I could not follow—but at the end, she always brought her point home. Catarina was also writing nonstop.
I had not planned to work specifically with Catarina, nor had I intended to focus on the anthropology of a single person.3 But by our second meeting in 1999, I was already drawn in, emotionally and intellectually. And so was Catarina. She told me that she was happy to talk to me and that she liked the way I asked questions. At the end of a visit, she always asked, “When will you return?”
I was fascinated by what she said and by the proliferation of writing. Her words did not seem otherworldly to me, nor were they a direct reflection of Vita’s power over her or a reaction against it, I thought. They spoke of real struggles, of an ordinary world from which Catarina had been banished and that became the life of her mind.
Dentist
Health
