Joaquín Aguirre. She had an acutely inflamed gallbladder and underwent surgery. When she returned home, Rodrigo had momentarily put aside his demands. “It seems that Rodrigo got more enthusiastic about the house [after I got sick]. He took pity on me, seeing me in this condition,” she said. “He can't leave me now.” Sra. Flora's surgery and recovery not only affected Rodrigo but also seemed to dampen family tensions. Kevin and Florcita, for their part, had turned down the music.
The damage Sra. Flora embodies through this waiting raises questions as to the limits of this mode of care. In circumstances of precarious employment, targeted state programs for those who do the work to qualify as “extremely poor” (see chapter 3), and a fragile and underfunded public health system, the sense of responsibility for kin can feel infinite.5 Such a sense of responsibility is heard in women's differentiation of la casa (house) and la calle (street), in which the “street” is spoken of as unpredictable, faceless violence and scarcity—“He might be killed or stabbed; how would she survive?”—while in the “house,” moments of scarcity and interpersonal violence are engendered in flesh-and-blood relations and can be mitigated, assuaged, and endured as part of life itself. Waiting, then, can be understood as a manifestation of the desire to be infinitely responsive (see Das 2010b).6 Realized through domestic relations and credit, this desire orients subjects toward “the possible,” the lived sense of indeterminacy in the present that provides hope for relational futures. But this sense of responsibility can become unbearable with, for example, the threat of deadly violence in the home. Indeed, when such a threat arose, Sra. Flora had to face the fact of her finite responsibility even as she held on to this desire for infinite responsiveness, a desire to continue waiting.
GIFT OF BREAD
December 28, 2004. Two months had passed since I had last seen Sra. Flora. When I entered the house, she was standing in Florcita and Kevin's room, cleaning up what she called “the disorder.” She greeted me with a warm hug, telling me that she had “good news.” Kevin and Florcita had left the house three weeks earlier, she said, and “ahora estamos tirándonos pa' arriba” (literally, “we are throwing ourselves upward,” or “moving up in the world”). She seemed exuberant. We walked across Florcita and Kevin's room, where mounds of clothes lay strewn across the floor.
Leading me to a new interior patio, she said, “Look, I enclosed all of this. I put a little garden, and the grass is growing well.” A cement walkway separated a patch of grass on one side from a small fruit tree and plants on the other. She led me back through the house. “We are repairing the house. We are moving the kitchen over there, and putting the bathroom here [pointing to where the kitchen was], because the kitchen and bathroom had rats. After thirty-four years, the wood bathroom had a terrible stench.” The new kitchen would replace the passageway to Florcita's former room. As we returned to the patio, she said, “I am going to put floor tiles in all the bedrooms, and new ceramic tiles in the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. We have all this projected for this year 2005. It will be a good year.”
Sra. Flora walked with more energy in her step. She projected her voice instead of guarding it closely in hushed whispers. She recounted to me the events that led up to Florcita and Kevin's leaving. Shortly before they left, Kevin got high on pasta base. “He was walking around aggressive,” Sra. Flora said. “All of a sudden, he took an iron bar and hit her and hit her. Florcita was underneath the covers [of the bed]. If she had not been, he would have killed her. With blood coming out on all sides. We had to take her to the emergency room. I told them to leave after that. ‘If you can't leave Kevin, I won't have you die here like this. Please. Just leave.’ And finally, they did. They just got up and left.”
Sra. Flora's narrative was not one of abandonment or social death. Rather, by telling Florcita to leave the home, Sra. Flora reaffirmed her life within it. At the same time, however, by marking out the home as nonviolent, she established a boundary around this spectacular violence and the everyday, unaccounted-for violences through which the home was being produced (Price 2002). As we talked further about Florcita, Sra. Flora justified to me why she told Florcita to leave the home: “It gives me pain and rage [rabia], but now I leave her, I leave her, because I did everything and more than I could do. It's like, how do I say this to you? Like a woman—” She called out to her daughter Sonia in the other room. “Sonia! How do you call this [kind of] woman that likes to be beaten?” “Submissive?” Sonia replied. “No, that's not the word. It starts with an m,” Sra. Flora answered. “Masochist?” “That's it!” Sra. Flora replied. “Masochist! Masochist is she! It gives me pain because I never hit her. I only hit her three times when she was eighteen years old and was going out with this desgraciado [referring to Kevin]. And I thought she would change, but it all went worse.”
Then, in a seemingly hyperbolic fashion, she told me how they would now pay their debts ahead of time. Rodrigo had just secured construction work with a fixed contract, and with Florcita and Kevin gone, they had fewer costs. “Rodrigo earns 180,000 liquid [disposable income] and Ricardo 140,000. I have planned it that I will pay the monthly payments ahead of time. I want to finish paying in August. I know that I can do it, because the children [Florcita, Kevin, and their two children] are not living here. Imagine it. I am saving so much because I am not using so much light, water, and now I don't have to make so much for lunch.”
Sra. Flora's search for the word masochism and her new accounting of their debts seemed to reveal her painful awakening to her relation to Florcita. By searching for the word masochism—and not submissive—she articulates the complex weave of intimacy and violence that Florcita embodies, a weave in which Sra. Flora finds her own limit. She cannot will Florcita to separate from Kevin. Then, in her new accounting of debts, she finds a way to voice that limit: that she is finite and separate from Florcita. She suffers finite responsibility. Notice how a discourse of cost-effectiveness is taken up in a moment of retrospection on events in which a relational future is at stake.7 Rather than conclude that a calculus of cost-effectiveness is mechanically shaping decision making within the home, we may consider how this discourse might voice the difficulty in caring for others. Through such discourses, separateness is voiced. At the same time, they deflect the difficulty of recognizing the denial of another while furthering the grip of such discourses within the home. Such a move is what Stanley Cavell has called the scandal of skepticism: “With the everyday ways in which denial occurs in my life with the other[,]…the problem is to recognize myself as denying another, to understand that I carry chaos in myself. Here is the scandal of skepticism with respect to the existence of others; I am the scandal” (Cavell 2005, 151).
In the next moment, Flora's voice changed tone. Waving her finger, she said, “But, I still do not let the little children [Florcita's two sons] go hungry. They come here for food, and I also still pass them coins.” She continued: “I got into debt, 300,000 pesos for Christmas, buying gifts for them. Sonia also got into debt. It's just that the children don't understand, and ask [piden]. You need to buy gifts for children. But, that's OK.”
As our conversation drew to a close, Sra. Flora asked me where I was heading. I told her I was interested in finding Florcita and would look for her in the Plaza Pablo Neruda (a frequent meeting ground for drug deals) and then visit the houses of Florcita's friends. As I gathered my things, she told me to wait a moment. Walking into the kitchen, she returned with two warm canvas bags. Each held a homemade loaf of bread. “Here, take one for yourself, and give one to Florcita.” Connecting mother, daughter, and anthropologist, this gift did not constitute an act of reciprocity. Rather, it was a thread of sustenance between Florcita and life within the house. A labor of Sra. Flora's own hands, it delicately materialized a gesture of care, inviting her back home.8
Later that afternoon, I found Florcita. She and Kevin were renting a one-room shack attached to a friend's house. Estrella, their friend, lived with her mother in a run-down wooden house on the opposite side of the población. She and her mother both
