Life in Debt. Clara Han
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 worked in piecemeal sewing at home. She led me to their room, saying, “You know, their mom 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