“which household a given individual belongs to a meaningless question” (Stack 1974, 90). Such a tenuous relation to the house contrasts sharply with relatedness in La Pincoya, where domestic relations beyond the house can be thought of in terms of their pull toward house relations, in which women may be engaged in helping one another across houses, but with the hope of affirming a relation within the house itself.
It is in the positioning between these house relations and the wider field of domestic relations that care for the mentally ill and addicted within the home takes shape. I want to return to Sra. Flora and her family to trace out how struggles over this care pull women between kinship relations within the house, and how women draw on domestic relations and institutional credit to affirm a child's place in the house.
MAKING TIME
I met Sra. Flora in June 2000 on my second three-month stay in La Pincoya. Over eight years, I saw how constant economic precariousness often cast her affective stakes as mother and pareja (partner) against each other. The loss of Rodrigo's job in March 2004, however, sent the family into economic difficulties they had not experienced since the Pinochet era. Now, only one adult, Rodrigo's cousin, tío Ricardo, who continued to work in the same textile factory, had stable employment. With his lost wages and his difficulty finding temporary work, Rodrigo pressured Sra. Flora to address Florcita and Kevin's drug and alcohol use. Daughters Sonia and Carmen had also heard rumors about them: Florcita was going door to door asking for money from neighbors. Kevin had been seen in a drug dealer's car. In this context, Sra. Flora invited me to meet with her, Florcita, and Kevin together.
With her blue-gray eyes and long, curly brown hair, Florcita inherited the youthful Sra. Flora's looks. Indeed, Sra. Flora invoked this likeness, especially when reflecting on Florcita's drug use. “She looks like me when I was young. But I say now that she was really beautiful. Now, she is getting destroyed by drinking and drugs.” Florcita sat in the corner, hand on her chin, sullenly looking at the floor. Sra. Flora pressed them to speak. “Go ahead, tell her about your illness, about the drugs,” she said, pointing to Kevin and then to both of them. Neither immediately spoke. But just as Florcita raised her head, Kevin cut her gesture off abruptly, pulling his chair toward me.
Since suffering a stroke in 2001, Kevin had experienced multiple panic attacks, fear, and waves of anger. He hurriedly spoke of his first “attack”:
I had a stroke on the 22nd of December 2001. I was working late, going to bed late, getting up early. I was working as a bus driver [a city bus driver], arriving [home] at 2 A.M. and leaving at 4 or 5 in the morning. I was at the bus stop [in La Pincoya on the main street, Recoleta], and I felt a thing like brrrrbrrrrbrrrbrrr, brrrbrrrbrrr [he makes a twisting movement around his ear]. I was stuck there, and: “Ay, my God, what is happening to me?” I was taken to the emergency room [in the local primary care clinic] by my compañeros. They gave me an injection to calm me, and they said that I had depression, anxiety, and all of that stuff. Then from there they took me to the Psychiatric Hospital. They asked me lots of questions, and then they took me to a cardiologist. And then told me, Ya, you have a problem with your heart. This same cardiologist sent me to a neurologist, and they did a scanner on me, an electroencephalogram, a really complicated thing. And they found that my heart was bad.
After the stroke, Kevin acceded to a state pension for disability, which he called “retirement.”2 The slowness of life at home, however, made him nervous and agitated.
I would like to return to working, but I have a bad [unfunctional] hand, a neurological damage that stays forever. They give me pills, but I walked around high, yellow [skin]—pure pills. You know, I will take pills for my nerves and nothing more. I am nervous. I feel like, how to put it, with what name…It's like when a ball is bouncing like this, like papapapapapapa! all this year. My aggression, my violence, augmented. More than anything it's made me more aggressive. As a human being, I don't accept it. Until today, I do not accept that this happens. I don't accept it because I am thirty-two years old. I have half of my life in front of me, so…
He paused. Bouncing his knee up and down, Kevin changed course. He recounted the circumstances that led up to his current state of illness.
All of a sudden, I had many goals. When I was mixed up in drugs, I said to myself, “I will jump out of this [doing pasta base]. I will buy all this stuff for myself [comprarme de todo], I will buy myself [things] from here and there.” And I had the desire [tenía ganas de comparme un auto] to buy myself a car also. Yes, I would buy a car. [He said this with a sense of wonder.] I would work for a car. So, I put myself to work, working, working, and working, and working, and working, and working, and working. I drove myself crazy working, but until even today I still have the desire to get up and go to work. But now, the rhythm that I have is very slow. Because I don't work, I can get up from bed at the hour that I want, and I don't have anything to do. Last night, I felt so alone, but I have the fear of being alone. And then, all of a sudden I got an attack [a panic attack]…But, I opted to retire.
For Kevin, the desire and the wonder for the car could not be dissociated from a desire to work and to have a working body. Sra. Flora interjected, “He is very aggressive. He will break a cup for whatever reason. There is no control. It's like…pap!” (She snaps her fingers).
“Does the illness affect your family?” I asked tentatively. “Not much,” Kevin responded, leaning back in his chair. “Florcita is very tranquil. My woman, tranquil. She knows I am sick.” Florcita shrugged her shoulders. Sra. Flora questioned him, contesting his seeming indifference. “Why were you working so hard? To reach the goals that you had?” Kevin responded, “Yes, because we lost everything when we were mixed up in drugs.” Sra. Flora nodded. “And, this is when I began to gain weight,” she said. She began to recount the damage that their previous addiction to pasta base had caused, as if to warn and remind them of what it could lead to in the present.
When Florcita and Kevin were involved in pasta base (metido en la pasta) in the late 1990s, the family's debts to department stores began to soar. Kevin and Florcita sold household possessions to buy pasta base. Cocaine base paste is similar to crack cocaine. Base paste is composed of the intermediary products in the purification of cocaine. Those products are cut with a host of available agents, such as neoprene and kerosene, and then can be smoked or snorted. Available national statistics report that the prevalence of base paste addiction comprises 0.6 percent of the total population (CONACE 2006). Yet such figures must be taken critically, given that the survey relies on self-reported use of an illegal substance. In La Pincoya, pasta base addiction has become a pervasive concern, provoked by a general sense that the number of neighborhood youth addicted to base is increasing.
“They sold everything,” Sra. Flora said of Florcita and Kevin. “The TV, the stereo, a bed. They would steal when we were not in the house. They would steal if we did not have everything in the house under lock and key.” During this period, they also fought with each other in the home. Kevin flew into rages, resulting in broken walls, doors, and windows. These cycles of theft, destruction, and debt in households struggling with addiction to pasta base were familiar themes in La Pincoya. During this time, Flora said, monthly debt payments took up half of Rodrigo's income. In an act of desperation, she separated Kevin from Florcita by locking Florcita in her bedroom to “rehabilitate.” “I locked her in the room for thirty-one days, bringing her lunch, tea. But, I did not let her out until she was rehabilitated.” The separation, Sra. Flora emphasized, is what ultimately allowed Florcita to rehabilitate. “You've never considered that you have a toxic relation?” she asked them.
While we listened, Kevin had grown noticeably restless. Finally, he stood up and left, knocking the chair to the floor. “See?” Sra. Flora looked at me as I winced, while directing her words to Florcita. “Even when he was making money as a bus driver, he didn't help pay off the debts. He never bought a car either, so what did he do with the money?”
