was buying things for the children,” she said. “He paid for the light and water too. You can't throw all the blame on Kevin. You make him more aggressive with your stories.” Florcita left the room. Turning to me, Sra. Flora said, “See? She doesn't want to listen. She is in love with Kevin.”
As each confronted the other, the question of what place, if any, Kevin had in the home bubbled angrily to the surface. But like many times before, it was not a question that would be, or perhaps could be, resolved. Indeed, for many families with whom I worked, confrontations and arguments over relations or one's place in the home were not aimed at resolution—as if the place of another were spatially and temporally discrete, and as if each argument could be read in terms of intention. Rather, through their force, they tacitly acknowledged the uncertainty and vulnerability of that place and staked a claim to it.
In the midst of these tensions, Sra. Flora still sought ways to address Kevin's aggressiveness that invited him back into relations in the home. Having maxed out her own credit cards, she borrowed her neighbor's card the next day to purchase Kevin a new stereo. We rode the yellow-and-white city bus to Santiago's center, getting off near the doors of the Almacenes París department store. As we pressed stereo buttons and twisted knobs, opened and closed CD racks, Sra. Flora told me, “Music helps calm his nerves. It tranquilizes him and distracts him.” This purchase was also an enactment of care for Florcita. Listening to music might diffuse Kevin's aggression, holding his attention in a way that pills did not, while providing a time for change to occur.
Outside of Sra. Flora's view, Florcita too found modalities to care for Kevin. Alcohol and pills. Later that night, I was at a friend's home in La Pincoya when Florcita knocked on her patio gate. “Luz! Luz!” she called out. I recognized the voice and went out to greet Florcita while Luz put her infant son to bed. Florcita's two young sons accompanied her. She was carrying a backpack. As the children ran inside to play with Luz's older children, I asked Florcita how she was holding up with Kevin. Dark rings wrinkled under her eyes as she spoke. Kevin had run out of medication for his nerves. “So, I buy pills from Sra. Maria [owner of a corner store] to make him sleep. He's desperate and aggressive.”
She unzipped the backpack. Florcita explained that she was selling foodstuffs to make some money. It was full of packs of spaghetti, marmalade, and a bag of rice. These were the same goods that Sra. Flora had bought in the local market earlier in the day. I asked her what she intended to buy with the money earned from selling these goods. “Pisco,” she said. “If we share a bottle of pisco, and I give him a pill, I know he will sleep.” Luz joined us. Florcita sold her a pack of marmalade. We each gave her a tight hug and watched her walk up the street with her children. Luz looked silently at the marmalade pack in her hand, as if considering the possibility that it had been stolen. “Well,” she remarked, “we don't really need marmalade; we already have two packs. But I see Florcita, and I know she needs the money. So I do what I can to help.”
Exploring the moral texture of these acts of borrowing and buying allows us to appreciate subtle transactions of care between neighbors and kin that take place every day. Could these actions be interpreted as gestures of care that demonstrate how domestic relations are actualized in the home? We may think of domestic relations in the home as being present in their potentiality. When intimate kin take up domestic relations by borrowing, selling, buying, listening, or visiting, these relations are realized, made actual, within the home in specific ways. In this case, borrowing a credit card from a neighbor to purchase a distraction, or buying redundant goods so a neighbor can tranquilize her partner, makes the time to set a different tone in family relations or at least provides a time of respite in order to face them anew.
Uncertainty infused these diverse gestures of care. How much time would a distraction last? Would a family member reveal a different aspect of herself if the tone of family relations shifted? Would she, as many said, “show the other face of the coin”? As families waited to see loved ones show a different side, this “made time” rubbed against the temporality of monthly debt payments and the uncertainty of unstable wages that impinged on the home.
LIFE LOANED
Over the next three months, Florcita and Kevin were not at home when I came to visit. Rumors spread that Florcita was engaging in prostitution to buy drugs. Kevin was said to be spending time with friends on “the other side” of the población, a way of saying that he was consorting with pasta basteros (addicts to pasta base). On one occasion, I saw Kevin driving an old sports car with three men whom I did not recognize. He called out to me, “Clarita!” I waved to him, but his tone of voice made me fear approaching the car. Stopped in front of the house, he revved the engine repeatedly, laughed, and drove off. A dust cloud lingered at the door. Several evenings, I spotted Florcita from afar with her children, returning from her work as a teacher's aide. By the time I arrived at their home, she had already gone to other friends' houses, leaving her children in the care of Sra. Flora.
Sra. Flora developed a growing reticence about Florcita and Kevin. In contrast to her earlier attempts to talk about the state of relations as a way to address and diffuse their tensions, her silence suggested that the neighborhood rumors and Florcita and Kevin's friendships with pasta basteros had overrun her, leaving her little to say that would be listened to. When I inquired about them, she remarked, “What can I say. They don't listen. For now, I just eat it.” Indeed, Sra. Flora was literally embodying the effects of this failure to listen. She had gained several kilos in the previous three months. Her ankles were constantly sore. She went to the general practitioner in the local primary care clinic, who suggested a diagnosis of hypothyroidism, but her thyroid tests were within normal limits.
Meanwhile, the house faced mounting difficulties in keeping up with monthly debt payments. Rodrigo found a minimum-wage, temporary job in construction, building chalets in Chicoreo. The hours were long, and the bus fare took up one-third of his income. As a result of his unemployment, the family got behind on their payments to department stores and the electric and water companies. They had to resort to cash advances from the Líder Supermarket to buy groceries. Debt collectors from the department stores had arrived at the home, threatening to take an inventory of household possessions of value that they could sell to pay off the debts.
Just over the northern hills bordering La Pincoya, Chicoreo was quickly becoming a location for “green,” “natural,” and “alternative” living for young professionals, hip actors, and TV personalities. As we sat outside in the evening chill, Rodrigo compared his lifeworld to those in Chicoreo: “There, they pay for the houses in cash. And here, I'm still paying quotas on this chair. So, this chair—the Hites [department store] still are the owners of it. Credit is for the poor.” Rodrigo voiced a shared sentiment in La Pincoya. As long as one continued to make monthly payments on commodities, they were not one's own. Other neighbors linked the uncertainty of ownership to the uncertainty of life itself: “Tenemos una vida prestada” (We have a loaned life).
The “loaned life” was tied into the historical conditions of the credit system itself. As many adults who lived through the dictatorship told me, the Pinochet regime gave credit to the poor. Credit gave the poor access to material resources for a “dignified life.” In reflecting on her family's history of debt, Sra. Flora elaborated on these historical conditions.
It started when Pinocho [Pinochet] came to power, because before, credit was for the rich, those same rich who worked in the government, in the same commercial houses. And I remember when Pinocho was elected [salió], he gave credit to the poor. Hites was the first store that offered credit to the working class. And you could arrive with your income statement and your identification card and the light and water bills, and you could take whatever you needed. And with this, the poor began to get themselves into debt. Pppffff. And now you will not go to any house, Clarita, where there is not a family in debt, because to have your things of value, you need to be indebted. I remember when tío Ricardo asked for a loan from Atlas [bank] for 100,000 pesos [USD 160], and was paying for three years, but gave back 300,000 [USD
