Life in Debt. Clara Han
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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?” She intimated that he used the money to buy drugs. Florcita then stood up with a scoff. “Look, he 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