threw them out of the house.” Kevin and Florcita were in a deep sleep. I wrote a small note to Florcita about my visit and her mother's gift and left it with both bags at their feet.
“IT'S LIKE MY SISTER”
I have visited Sra. Flora's family every year that I return to La Pincoya. Even with monthly debt payments, they fixed the house incrementally. Ceramic tiles on the floor, one by one. A new sliding screen door for the patio. A fresh coat of paint on the walls. Three months after Florcita and Kevin left, their two children asked Sra. Flora if they could live with her. She took them in. Kevin attempted to take the children back, but both Sra. Flora and Rodrigo stood their ground. In late 2005, however, Sra. Flora found Florcita unconscious in the neighborhood playground just a few houses down from their home. She had been raped by a group of bus drivers as she sought to sell sex for pasta base. Rodrigo carried her back to their home. Upon hearing about the rape, Kevin was enraged. High and angry, he yelled at Florcita and blamed her. Sra. Flora called the police. Kevin was interned again at the Psychiatric Institute. Florcita joined a community treatment program run by one of the many Pentecostal groups in La Pincoya.
After his internment, Kevin came back to live with Florcita in Sra. Flora's home. I spoke to Florcita in January 2006. She had gained some weight, but her face bore the strains of addiction and physical abuse. “I'm getting better,” she said.
My mom keeps telling me to leave Kevin. She doesn't trust me now, because of Kevin. But I tell her. “He's been with me all the time. He'll be with me.” My mom doesn't understand how I can be in love with him. She never understood, since I was young. But, we've changed now. She has to accept that, acknowledge it. There's a before and an after. I go to the meetings, and they make me feel better. I'm going to look for work. I want to move up. I want to live in our own house, get a municipal subsidy [for a house], have our things.
Over time, however, more things went missing in the home. The TV went one day. A few weeks later, the stereo. In the following months, a couple of dining table chairs. Sra. Flora bought a new TV, a new stereo, on credit. Rather than demanding that Florcita and Kevin leave as he did before, Rodrigo resorted to drinking beer in the local canteen. He spent less and less time in the home, arriving drunk late at night. Meanwhile, Florcita would leave the house for days.
In July 2007, I returned to La Pincoya, this time with my husband. We had just gotten married a few months before, and I was making rounds, introducing him to friends and neighbors. It had been a year and a half since I had seen Sra. Flora. We walked to her house for a visit. The house was stripped bare. The floor, where there was once ceramic, now was concrete, blackened with dirt. Where once was a sofa, there were two wooden stools. The new stereo, broken, after Kevin had thrown it across the room. Tío Ricardo had lost his job in the textile factory. He was now looking for temporary construction work but, at his advanced age, finding work was difficult. Sra. Flora's brother Diego, who lived one street up, had died of a heart attack in his home. A quiet and dark stillness filled the entire home.
Daughters Sonia, Valentina, and Margarita came to greet us. But the air seemed burdened and pained. Sra. Flora invited us to sit on the wooden stools. She said, “All this, they broke everything. And I am still paying the quotas on the things they broke. See. Look, look, I don't have anything for us to take tea in, see. I can't even invite you and your husband to tea. I'm sorry. See, this is how it is now. And it pains me. It pains me so much.” She repeatedly apologized for not having anything in which to serve us tea. “No, no, it's OK, it's OK,” I said, trying to reassure her.
Sra. Flora recounted to me the events leading up to the present: about Florcita and Kevin's drug use, Florcita's selling of sex for drugs, their parties that now overran and destroyed the home, the debts that she could not pay, Rodrigo's resignation. “It's like my sister,” she suddenly said. Her sister, she continued, had been a militant for the democratic movements. “She was tortured. She was in Villa Gremaldi.9 They burnt her up into her uterus. She was burned from the inside. Then, they dumped her on the street. We found her unconscious and took her home. We tried to take care of her. But six months later, she died of cancer of the uterus, from all of the burns. The burns kept eating her uterus.” She stopped. “I had not told you this before.” It was true. In the eight years that I had known her, never once did she tell me about her sister's death. “So, you see, I am not well. I spend a lot of time now, thinking about my sister, how she died. I don't know why I took out the theme now. Just now. Look, you with your new husband. He seems quite tierno [sweet]. These times, they've been very difficult, much worse than before.”
Three months earlier, Sra. Flora had had a stroke. “Look at my eye, it's desviado [off-track]. The doctor said that it would not come back, and that there is nothing I can do now.” Her right eye was deviated laterally. She was short of breath as she spoke. It seemed that she experienced a pressure to find words, as well as a difficulty breathing. The doctor, she said, also told her that her heart was not working well. But she had sensed this herself. “I'm broken. My body is broken. The house, everything is broken.”
My husband does not speak Spanish. He attempted to understand through my translations and through bodily gestures and tones. But when Sra. Flora began to tell me about her sister, I stopped translating. Receiving this pain took its own time. Sra. Flora's evocation of her sister at this juncture in her life might help us attend to the feelings of violence she may be embodying as she tries to respond to her kin but is faced with the limits of their responsiveness. As such, Sra. Flora's memory of her sister and the political conditions that produced her pain affectively resonates with conditions in which she experiences her own body as “broken,” Florcita's body as violated, and “the house, everything is broken”: fractured between the multiple relational ties that produced the home itself.
A LOAN FOR ANOTHER LIFE
To leave you with this scene of destruction would obscure how the use of the credit system can also provide different relational futures. In August 2008, I returned again to La Pincoya. On a bright, chilly afternoon, I stopped by Sra. Flora's home. The blue-painted patio gate was wide open, and the sound of hammers rang out into the street. The facade of the house had been completely renovated. An oval front step covered with salmon-colored tile introduced a carved wooden antique door. This new front door was framed by new rectangular, mottled-glass windows. Rodrigo emerged from inside the house and greeted me with a big hug, sweating from the renovation work that he was completing. Sra. Flora then appeared and also gave me a tight hug. “Look, we are renovating the house. Beautiful, you see,” she said. Surprised, I asked her to give me a tour. We walked through the house. It was almost unrecognizable. The kitchen was enlarged and decoratively tiled in black and white. A long wire was strung across the kitchen with hanging bunches of onions, peppers, and garlic. There were now two sparkly bathrooms on the first floor with deep tubs and shiny shower heads. Florcita's former room was transformed by a large sliding glass door that opened onto the interior patio of the house, where a few white chickens and a large black-and-green rooster pecked the grass. “See,” Sra. Flora said, pointing out the details of the renovation to me.
As we stood in Florcita's former room, I told Sra. Flora how struck I was by the changes. “How did…?” She interrupted me, answering, “I took another loan on the house.” She refinanced the house in order to afford the renovations. “But, how…?” My voice trailed off. Sra. Flora responded, “Well, Rodrigo was drinking, drinking all the time. And I said one day, ‘Ja, ja, no more. No more. Never.’ I confronted him: ‘Look. You are going to change or you leave this house. I can't bear you like this.' I took out the loan, and I said, ‘We are going to renovate the house. We will have a new life.' He got enthusiastic, and went out with the money and bought all the materials. So now, he is working in construction, and we save a little at a time to be able to renovate the house just the way we want. With a different style than everyone else.” This time, the loan provided the materials to hold Rodrigo's attention and allowed time to work on relations.
I asked her about Florcita. Florcita,
